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by colechristensen
1421 days ago
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What? Lighten up on the philosophy of a topic before you understand it. Sure, the physical reality of the singularity is a bit of a mystery as it comes up against the nature of gravity at an extreme which requires a quantum theory which includes general relativity, but that is a known unknown and not what any of this black hole physics is about. Outside of the singularity, and definitely outside the event horizon, a black hole is a very real thing which has been seen and measured in "empirical reality" and theory has so far matched well with measurement. Nobody is going to Euclid and claiming a point or line is a real physical entity, anything but a useful abstraction. |
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But philosophy is an activity that must necessarily be done in order for there to even be a topic that can at all be understood in the first place! We had to have someone like Descartes before we could get someone like Newton, and Newton before the quantum theorists, etc.
The idea that you can just jump straight to (and always stay within the framework of) "hard science" and do away with the malleable philosophical bits that allow for the kind of connective tissue that binds civlizations is perhaps the biggest reason why we collectively face the existential crises that we currently do.
And the other idea that everyone (or at least everyone who has jumped through the hoops to get the necessary credentials) can simply sit fat and happy in their own arcane specialties as long as they are able to "prove" their worth to the rest of us by patting each other on the back with their circles of academic citations is... well... not very sustainable. All academic disciplines, to the extent that they cannot remain "rooted" within some larger framework of philosophical sensibility will necessarily get weeded in due time.