[pearlsontheroad]

"...when I say I am glad that I live in a century when the Universe is essentially understood, I think I am justified."

Funny how we don't even fully understand what happens when we crack our joints but are certain about how the Universe "essentially" works.

[andreareina]

The way that Sean Carroll says it is something along the lines of, the fundamental physics governing everyday life are understood. That is to say, we can solve for what an electron, proton, etc (or a collection of maybe a few dozen) are going to do in a particular experiment. The second and third generations of charged particles are excluded from the definition of everyday life, as are any other hypothesized particles because they require higher energy levels than are relevant. Explaining how the brain works is excluded as not being fundamental, though in principle a sufficiently advanced computer would be able to simulate it.

[glenstein]

Exactly, that's where my mind went too. I think people are tempted by a well-meaning skepticism to think that it's high minded to be skeptical of affirmative claims of knowledge, but it ends up throwing a very hard won model of everyday physics out the window.

I saw a very frustrating live "debate" between Dr Blitz (monikor of a really cool science communicator and irl PhD physicist) and a flat earther, where the flat earther essentially borrowed these arguments (eg observations aren't really predictive or generalizable or able to count in favor of specific theories, confirmed theories have no special status etc) to dismiss the evidentiary support of the earth being round. It's an intellectual car crash masquerading as a respectable position on scientific foundations.

[nathan_compton]

Well, let me ask you: when your joints crack do you think the process involves something other than physics at its most basic level?

You may take it from my posing the question that I think its obvious that joint cracking is determined by physics, and I do tend to think this, but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.

[MangoToupe]

We don't even know if the laws of physics are constant. In fact, it is literally unknowable.

> a compelling argument can at least be made

Absolutely! But it takes a good deal of hubris to call this knowledge.

[glenstein]

Apologies in advance if I'm missing your point (I might be!) but... If it turns out that the laws are not constant, our present understanding would be retained as a special case of a broader theory and the local predictive capabilities would still be real in their scope. And leveraging a "we don't know" to cash out as affirmative skepticism tries to make the absence of data do more than it can.

As you noted, the degree of uncertainty we're currently wrestling with is also what we would see if it was true that the laws were constant. Kind of like an anthropic principle but on behalf of the constancy of the universe's laws.

This may all be restating what you said in a different way, but for me the important upshot is that I don't come out of it with an attitude that our current physical understanding is a tenuous house of cards and that I need to watch my step because, who knows, the strong nuclear force could change at any moment.

[pixl97]

At minimum the are quasi-stable over long enough periods of time for life to firm. In some ways we know they are not 'constant', as in before the big bang there is a firewall that looks like entropy was zero.

Now if you think that's going to matter in the next few billion years is very probable you're mistaken.

[sophacles]

We don't even know if the gods are real... in fact it is literally unknowable.

An yet... you're claiming to know what the gods like and don't like. Strange.

[pixl97]

A better way I like to say it is.

Everything prove able by religion is not unique to religion.

Everything unique to religion is not proveable.

[jibal]

It takes a good deal of hubris to deny it.

[glenstein]

> but I think a compelling argument can at least be made that joint cracking might not actually be fundamentally determined by physics.

Wait, what? I was nodding along with you for making a great point about how this doesn't threaten our confidence in the venture of physicalist explanation of the natural world (sidebar, I think we actually do know quite a bit about what happens when joints crack), but I had a record scratch here. I think I agree with your upshot but I wouldn't agree that a compelling argument, tentative or otherwise, can be made for a non physical explanation.

[nathan_compton]

It roughly goes like this: if phenomena can be truly emergent, which is to say that the phenomena is causally independent of the underlying physical system, then its reasonable to say that the emergent behavior is not determined by the physical law of the underlying system.

Terrance Deacon makes this case in "Incomplete Nature." As I said, I think its wrong, but I think its worth considering whether it could be right.

[jstanley]

Another example: is Firefox explained by electronics?

The computer is made out of electronics, and Firefox exists in the computer and is in a way part of the computer, but electronics is not the right level to understand Firefox, and in principle you could implement Firefox on a computer that wasn't made out of electronics.

[glenstein]

A great example, though it makes me want to head something off. You can be a brute literalist and insist it is the right level since its capable of embodying and instantiating Firefox, and so it's "just" a medium but the medium embodies the message, and knowing its configuration "in terms of electricity" does give you message, the structure, and the concepts.

Although we abstract away the electronics, it doesn't have the implication sometimes suggested by emergentism, that it exhibits a physical reality that is "independent of" its electronics. The abstracting away shouldn't be taken to mean that some new ontological thing was conjured into being that's physically real in the same sense as the electronics.

If that seems like it goes without saying or is beside the point, well, great! That's kind of what I want to hear. But in some emergentism debates it becomes important to insist there's a "more is different" thing happening that's necessary to explain physical properties.

[glenstein]

Thanks for elaborating (would not have expected cracking knuckles to be a place where emergentism gets invoked!).

I think I agree with you that this notion of emergentism is wrong although I'm inclined to say it's more super wrong than respectably wrong. If you're interested in another philosopher, I agree with Jaegwon Kim that physics operates on casual closure, which leaves no room for this form of emergence.

[the_af]

Is Terrance Deacon a physicist?

[nathan_compton]

He is a philosopher. I'm a physicist and I've read his book and I found it interesting. Don't know what to tell you.

Most physicists don't know all that much about the philosophical underpinnings of their discipline, so I'd rather see what philosophers have to say about it anyway. But that isn't the point. I'm saying I thought the book was well put together and thought provoking, though I don't think his argument goes through. If that interests you, read it. If you prefer to let an arbitrary label filter out whose ideas you might entertain, I guess go for it.

[the_af]

Oh, no, you got me wrong. I was curious about his credentials, but this doesn't mean I don't find philosophy intriguing and fascinating. I would say humanity cannot exist without philosophy. Thinking about ourselves, thinking about knowledge, thinking about what we believe about knowledge, thinking about what is and what is not, thinking about thinking -- all of these are essential.

It's just that it matters to me whether it's a philosopher who's arguing about the physical properties of the universe or a physicist.

I do think you care a bit about labels and what they stand for, after all your first post didn't fail to mention you're a physicist!

[jstanley]

Replace the word "physics" with "God" and see if it sounds substantially different.

See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/L22jhyY9ocXQNLqyE/science-as...

[petsfed]

The whole argument in your linked article rubs me the wrong way.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the two ways "because science" or "because God" might stop my curiosity is because 1) I'm looking for a good master's thesis topic (a problem well in my past, thank God) or 2) my immediate survival is dependent on much more immediate problems than the underlying physical phenomena that cause e.g. a lightbulb to work.

I think there's a certain set of people who, in the absence of more pressing concerns, drop everything upon experiencing a new phenomenon, in a quest to understand it. That certainly describes parts of my life. But the writer takes as axiomatic that most people don't drop everything to study whatever event because they were told that it had been explained, and not, you know, because their landlord doesn't accept white papers on the fundamental properties of reality in lieu of rent.

I think embedded in the statement "because science" is the connotation that ignorance of the underlying phenomenon is not itself dangerous to the people experiencing it. If I observed a bright light literally burning people, and I ask "how is that light burning people?", the person who knows more but simply says "its physics" shares some culpability with me if I just accept that answer incuriously and then get burnt by the light.

But if people aren't getting burnt, is it intellectual laziness to grunt "good enough" on my way to more pressing matters? Perhaps. This whole essay reads to me as a way to judge and find wanting the kind of person whose apparent curiosity stopped at how to do their job. The point of the essay (although it took a lot of curiosity on my part to tease it out) is apparently to say "don't let the fact that it is known stop you from finding out yourself", but it ended up sounding like "if you're taking anything as received knowledge, you're abdicating your responsibility as a thinking entity".