I will say that the philosophical remarks are pretty obtuse and detract from the post. For example...
"Physics–and more broadly the pursuit of science–has been a remarkably successful methodology for understanding how the gears of reality turn. We really have no other methods–and based on humanity’s success so far we have no reason to believe we need any."
Physics, which is to say, physical methods have indeed been remarkably successful...for the types of things physical methods select for! To say it is exhaustive not only begs the question, but the claim itself is not even demonstrable by these methods.
The second claim contains the same error, but with more emphasis. This is just off-the-shelf scientism, and scientism, apart from what withering refutations demonstrate, should be obviously self-refuting. Is the claim that "we have no other methods but physics" (where physics is the paradigmatic empirical science; substitute accordingly) a scientific claim? Obviously not. It is a philosophical claim. That already refutes the claim.
Thus, philosophy has entered the chat, and this is no small concession.
Show us a real example of something that your putative non physics science can do that physics cannot, in a way that would be comprehensible to a sufficiently open minded science.
It seems unlikely you could suggest a concrete alternative to physics which explains observable phenomena as well and making generalizable predictions. Showing this would move your theoretical philosophy. In the meantime the rest of us will stick to physics because nobody has a coherent alternative which explains our observations.
> Show us a real example of something that your putative non physics science can do that physics cannot
I just did. Please reread my post. Physics cannot claim to be "all there is", as that is not a proposition that belongs to physics, but to philosophy. And philosophy cannot make this claim, because it would be self-refuting.
As far as observables are concerned, physics can only deal with what is quantifiable. So anything that isn't quantifiable is by definition beyond the grasp of physical methods. It is circular to say that all that exists is that which is quantifiable. It would be putting the cart before the horse. Some call this the "streetlight effect".
I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say. It’s not really questionable that science and math are the only things to come out of philosophy or any other academic pursuit that have actually shown us how to objectively understand reality.
Now physics vs other scientific disciplines sure. Physicists love to claim dominion just like mathematicians do. It is generally true however that physics = math + reality and that we don’t actually have any evidence of anything in this world existing outside a physical description (eg a lot of physics combined = chemistry, a lot of chemistry = biology, a lot of biology = sociology etc). Thus it’s reasonable to assume that the chemistry in this world is 100% governed by the laws of physics and transitively this is true for sociology too (indeed - game theory is one way we quantifiably explain the physical reality of why people behave the way they due). We also see this in math where different disciplines have different “bridges” between them. Does that mean they’re actually separate disciplines or just that we’ve chosen to name features on the topology as such.
Its just not that simple. The best way I can dovetail with the author is that you are thinking in terms of the abstraction but you have mistaken the abstraction for reality.
Physics, biological sciences, these are tools the mind uses to try and make guesses about the future based on past events. But the abstraction isn't perfect, and its questionable on whether or not it could or should one day be.
The clear example is that large breakthroughs in science often comes from rethinking this fundamental abstraction to explain problems that the old implementation had trouble with. Case in point being quantum physics which has warped how we original understood newtonian physics. Einstein fucking hated quantum because he felt it undermined the idea of objective reality.
The reality (pun intended) is that it is much more complex than our abstractions like science and we would do well to remember they are pragmatic tools and are ultimately unconcerned with the practice of metaphysics which is the underlying nature of reality.
This all seems like philosophy ramblings until we get to little lines like this. Scientism, or the belief that science is the primary and only necessary lens to understand the world falls for the same trap as religion of thinking that you have the answer to reality so anything else outside is either unnecessary or even dangerous to one who holds these views.
I’m not sure I really understand this point. I believe that the scientific method (hypothesis, repeated tests, reality check) is the only successful method we’ve developed to advance our understanding of how the world works. I never claimed it’s perfect but that’s shaky footing that’s being injected onto this position. A counterclaim has to show that there’s something better than the scientific method that humans have been engaging in for attaining a better understanding of reality.
Often such attempts try to just wholly put themselves outside the realm of science which I don’t think puts them on strong footing. Just like updates to standard models still have to explain our current understandings of quantum and relativity, alternate methodologies for observing reality have to hold up to scientific scrutiny.
But I claim ignorance here. What better mechanisms has humanity developed for observing and understanding reality?
> It’s not really questionable that science and math are the only things to come out of philosophy or any other academic pursuit that have actually shown us how to objectively understand reality.
Excuse me? According to whom? This is preposterously false. The claim you are making is a philosophical one, and an extremely naive one, and I invite you to study the philosophical analysis of that claim. A good, lucid, and synthetic introduction to the philosophy of science might be this book [0], but there are many others, and many less modest in scope. Thomas Nagel, for example, is known for his criticisms of physicalism. Bertrand Russell also had some things to say about the nature of physics that you might find interesting.
> It is generally true however that physics = math + reality
What does that mean? And how can math be so useful in physics if it has nothing to do with reality? [1]
> What does that mean? And how can math be so useful in physics if it has nothing to do with reality? [1]
I encourage you then to read mathematicians and physicists rather than philosophers. Math is basically a self-consistent formal language for describing ideas. With a language you can express all sorts of ideas that aren't actually physically possible. Physics is the exploration of which mathematical ideas can be used to describe observed reality. Math is useful precisely because it is formal and self-consistent. You can verify if the math is correct before you start building experiments to test if reality conforms to a given idea. For example, while we know black hole's exist, physicists generally acknowledge that our understanding of the interior are unlikely to be accurate because our current mathematical equations spit out infinities for the interior.
> Excuse me? According to whom? This is preposterously false. The claim you are making is a philosophical one, and an extremely naive one, and I invite you to study the philosophical analysis of that claim
Logic, math and the scientific method came out of philosophy. Philosophies contributions basically end there as far as I'm concerned. Philosophy continued to dick around with empirical approaches to logic and gave up in the 17th century until mathematicians revived it using formal methods and proofs. It poses hypothetical problems as if they're unanswerable only for science and mathematics to come by and render them obsolete (from Xeno's paradox which is answered by infinite sums to the trolly problem which is answered by "the answer is to avoid such artificial constructions at all costs rather than know how you behave in that scenario" which is also how we've trained AI to operate as well).
> Thomas Nagel, for example, is known for his criticisms of physicalism
Right. It's pretty expected for religious people to have a problem with physicalism because it's pretty atheistic in nature. The underlying philosophy of the scientific method is "everything that's physical follows the rules of physics and we can explore it, test it, observe it and understand it while everything else is not science". Religious people have a problem with this because it clearly separates God and science and they try to reinject God by trying to falsely equate physicalism and religion as the same thing.
> Bertrand Russell also had some things to say about the nature of physics that you might find interesting
I have no qualm with Bertrand Russell. He's a brilliant thinker and I agree with his critiques which aren't a refutation but a clarification that we can know the structure of the physical world (as expressed in equations and laws) but not necessarily the intrinsic nature of its entities.
I think a lot of scientists, physicists agree with this insofar as "intrinsic" by its definition is unknowable. There's an alternate branch of thought which says "reality is what the math says". The beauty of this is it's a metaphysical unknowable argument like religion and thus which side is right or wrong is completely unknowable and outside the real of science.
Russell saw physics and philosophy as mutually reinforcing. He believed that philosophy must take into account the best scientific knowledge, but also that science rests on philosophical foundations (like logic, mathematics, and epistemology). The problem I have is that while it does, the philosophical foundations are unchanging and not what people think of as "modern philosophy" which is just rehashing all the same old tired arguments and not actually coming up with ideas on how to solve them (which is what something like Xenox's paradox was). The "true" philosophy of "here's a problem we don't know how to solve" remains in the realm of physics (e.g. the open problems about gravity & quantum, the origin of the universe, etc)
"Physics–and more broadly the pursuit of science–has been a remarkably successful methodology for understanding how the gears of reality turn. We really have no other methods–and based on humanity’s success so far we have no reason to believe we need any."
Physics, which is to say, physical methods have indeed been remarkably successful...for the types of things physical methods select for! To say it is exhaustive not only begs the question, but the claim itself is not even demonstrable by these methods.
The second claim contains the same error, but with more emphasis. This is just off-the-shelf scientism, and scientism, apart from what withering refutations demonstrate, should be obviously self-refuting. Is the claim that "we have no other methods but physics" (where physics is the paradigmatic empirical science; substitute accordingly) a scientific claim? Obviously not. It is a philosophical claim. That already refutes the claim.
Thus, philosophy has entered the chat, and this is no small concession.