Tag Archives: philosophy

The Dream Universe – David Lindley

by Myrna Posted on March 19, 2020

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The Dream Universe

How Fundamental Physics Lost Its Way

David Lindley

Genre: History

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: March 17, 2020

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


A vivid and captivating narrative about how modern science broke free of ancient philosophy, and how theoretical physics is returning to its unscientific roots In the early seventeenth century Galileo broke free from the hold of ancient Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. He drastically changed the framework through which we view the natural world when he asserted that we should base our theory of reality on what we can observe rather than pure thought. In the process, he invented what we would come to call science. This set the stage for all the breakthroughs that followed–from Kepler to Newton to Einstein. But in the early twentieth century when quantum physics, with its deeply complex mathematics, entered into the picture, something began to change. Many physicists began looking to the equations first and physical reality second. As we investigate realms further and further from what we can see and what we can test, we must look to elegant, aesthetically pleasing equations to develop our conception of what reality is. As a result, much of theoretical physics today is something more akin to the philosophy of Plato than the science to which the physicists are heirs. In The Dream Universe , Lindley asks what is science when it becomes completely untethered from measurable phenomena?

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The Dream Universe – David Lindley

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Here’s Why No One Cares About Modern Philosophy

by KerrieMcCabe Posted on August 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via someone on the right (I don’t remember who, sorry) I learned of a minor tempest over at Vox.com. One of their editors asked a Swedish philosopher, Torbjorn Tannsjo, to write a piece defending the “repugnant conclusion,” which Tannsjo describes thusly:

My argument is simple. Most people live lives that are, on net, happy. For them to never exist, then, would be to deny them that happiness. And because I think we have a moral duty to maximize the amount of happiness in the world, that means that we all have an obligation to make the world as populated as can be.

There are a number of caveats in the piece, but that’s basically it. Vox ended up rejecting it, partly because they decided not to launch a planned new section for “unusual, provocative arguments,” and partly because they were squeamish about the implications of a piece which argued that “birth control and abortion are, under most circumstances, immoral.”

Brian Leiter, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago, was appalled:

If you solicit a piece from a philosopher, knowing what their work is about (as was clearly the case here), you have an obligation to publish it, subject to reasonable editing. What you can’t do, if you are an even remotely serious operation (and not an echo chamber), is reject it because someone not paying attention might think the argument supports a conclusion they find icky.

I’ll confess to some puzzlement about this affair. Leiter is right that Vox editors must have known exactly what Tannsjo was going to write. That was clear from the start. So why did they get cold feet after seeing the finished product? On the other hand, Leiter is dead wrong that any publication has an obligation to publish every piece it solicits.1 That doesn’t pass the laugh test, whether the writer is a philosopher or not. Stuff gets rejected all the time for a million different reasons, potential offensiveness among them.

But here’s the part I really don’t get: Why on earth would anyone take Tannsjo’s argument seriously in the first place? The entire thing hinges on the premise that we all have a moral duty to maximize the absolute amount of felt happiness in the universe. If you don’t believe that, there’s nothing left of his essay.

But virtually no one does believe that. And since Tannsjo never even tries to justify his premise, that makes his entire piece kind of pointless. It would have taken me about five minutes to reject it.

I dunno. Too many modern philosophers seem to revel in taking broadly uncontroversial sentiments—in this case, that we have an obligation to future generations—and then spinning out supposedly shocking conclusions that might hold if (a) you literally care only about this one thing, and (b) you take it to its absurd, ultimate limit.2 But aside from dorm room bull sessions, why bother? That just isn’t the human condition. We care about lots of things; they often conflict; and we always have to end up balancing them in some acceptable way. Nothing in the real world ever gets taken to its ultimate logical conclusion all by itself.

I suppose this kind of thing might be interesting in the same way that any abstract logic puzzle is interesting, but it’s not hard to see why most people would just consider it tedious blather. If this is at all representative of what Vox got when it started looking around for unusual, provocative arguments, I don’t blame them for deep sixing the whole idea.

1Depending on the publication and the type of article, they might owe you a kill fee for the work you put into it. But that’s all.

2Well, that and ever more baroque versions of the trolley problem.

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Here’s Why No One Cares About Modern Philosophy

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Secular Ethics Are Doing Just Fine, Thank You Very Much

by um2rnxc Posted on December 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Ross Douthat writes hat there are three spiritual worldviews in America today. You might call them hard-core biblical, soft-core spiritual, and secular. Unsurprisingly, he’s bearish on the secular worldview:

The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher….So there are two interesting religious questions….The second is whether the intelligentsia’s fusion of scientific materialism and liberal egalitarianism — the crèche without the star, the shepherds’ importance without the angels’ blessing — will eventually crack up and give way to something new.

The cracks are visible, in philosophy and science alike. But the alternative is not. One can imagine possibilities: a deist revival or a pantheist turn, a new respect for biblical religion, a rebirth of the 20th century’s utopianism and will-to-power cruelty.

I’m willing to concede Douthat’s main point: the secular scientific worldview doesn’t provide much of a philosophical basis for a moral system. I don’t think it’s quite as barren of metaphysical guidance as he suggests, but still, he has a point.

But here’s what I’ve never understood about the kind of argument Douthat is making: it’s not as if secular ethics is a modern invention. Aristotle’s ethics were fundamentally secular, and were appropriated by the Church only long after his death. More recently, we have the example of plenty of modern, secular states in Europe and elsewhere, which appear to effortlessly practice an ethics every bit as praiseworthy as that of more religious states. On a personal level, there’s never been the slightest evidence that religious believers behave any better on average than the nonreligious.

None of this is new. Sure, in some abstract way, it’s not possible for me to justify my own sense of ethics all the way down to its ultimate core, but in real life that’s something I never even think about. In a practical, human sense, my sense of morality is every bit as strong as Douthat’s. He might attribute this to God and I might attribute it to the evolution of the human brain and human society, but either way there’s no inherent tension in the secular view simply because it lacks an ultimate metaphysical justification. It’s just not something that affects most of us even slightly. Douthat is imagining cracks that aren’t there.

At a broader level, you might still wonder whether religious underpinnings for morality are more effective at producing an ethical society. Again, though, where’s the evidence? You can enforce morality by threatening people with hellfire, or you can enforce it by threatening them with jail time. Both work pretty well—though I’d note that religious societies tend to partake liberally of secular punishments too. Hellfire apparently has its limits.

Secular ethics isn’t some newfangled 20th-century experiment that’s falling apart at the seams and must inevitably be replaced with a deist revival or the return of Pol Pot. It’s millennia old, and doing just fine. It’s true that sex and gender roles have changed dramatically over the past century, and that’s certainly produced plenty of tension and discomfort along the way. And for all too many devout Christians, that seems to be the real wellspring of their discontent: not secularism per se, but changes in sexual mores in particular, which produces a foreboding sense that society is inevitably sinking into moral degeneracy. Christian apologists would do well to keep the two subjects separate.

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Secular Ethics Are Doing Just Fine, Thank You Very Much

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The Secrets of Consciousness – Scientific American Editors

by Myrna Posted on November 23, 2013

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The Secrets of Consciousness

Scientific American Editors

Genre: Psychology

Price: $3.99

Publish Date: November 18, 2013

Publisher: Scientific American

Seller: Macmillan / Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC


Consciousness is an enigmatic beast. It’s more than mere awareness – it’s how we experience the world, how our subjective experience relates to the objective universe around us. And therein lies the rub, in that tiny little word “how.” These kinds of questions were once the province of philosophy, religion or perhaps fantasy, but within the last few decades, neuroscientists have added a scientific voice to the discussion, using available medical technology to explore just what separates so-called “mind” from brain. How do the neural and chemical workings of our brains create our minds, our total experience of the world, our thoughts and feelings, and that sense of self that distinguishes the individual from everyone else? In this eBook, The Secrets of Consciousness, we look at what science has to say about one of humankind’s most fundamental, existential mysteries. We begin at the beginning, as they say, with Section 1 on the very nature of consciousness and move on to discuss theories of neural development. In one article, author David Chalmers calls this the “hard problem,” requiring an entirely new theory that places consciousness itself as a fundamental component akin to the forces of physics. In another, leading neuroscientists Christof Koch and Susan Greenfield debate exactly how the neurons and circuits in the brain create conscious awareness. Later sections go deeper into the rabbit hole and examine what we can learn from altered states such as hypnosis or anesthesia as well as the use of formerly blacklisted hallucinogens such as LSD as healing drugs. Gary Stix discusses one study on the possible therapeutic effects of LSD on the intense anxiety experienced by patients with life-threatening disease, such as cancer. Finally, Section 6 explores “The Enigma of Spirituality.” David Biello takes on the search in his article, “God in the Brain,” highlighting studies searching for specific neurological centers of spirituality. It’s been said before, but the brain is the final frontier. Just how that brain creates not only awareness, but also integrates that awareness into creating experiences, memories, and an enduring sense of self—well, it might take overhauling not only how we study ourselves, but how we define our reality in the process of looking.

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The Secrets of Consciousness – Scientific American Editors

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Solar-powered sedan hits Dutch streets

by Adan Baird Posted on July 5, 2013

Solar-powered sedan hits Dutch streets

By John Upton

Bart van OverbeekeThis solar-powered car, Stella, was unveiled Thursday.

Plug-in electric car? That’s so 2013.

The electric sedans of the future will also generate their own photovoltaic power.

That’s the philosophy behind a new class of competition in this year’s World Solar Challenge.

Since 1987, the challenge has had solar-powered cars racing across the parched Australian outback every couple years. But the solar-powered vehicles that have competed in the challenge, while exciting and innovative, have been anything but consumer-friendly. They have typically carried only an uncomfortable driver in a craft shaped like a sheet of aluminum foil precariously perched over three wheels.

This year’s challenge, scheduled for October, will push teams to go even further. The new Michelin cruiser class has been created for vehicles that could conceivably be marketed as family sedans. Ten teams have entered, and they will compete against each other for points awarded based on such criteria as practicality, attractiveness, and energy consumption.

On Thursday, one of the those teams unveiled its entry, taking a car it dubbed Stella to cordoned-off Dutch streets to strut its photovoltaic stuff. And it’s pretty as a pug. Watch:

The team of 22 Eindhoven University of Technology students behind Stella has vowed to register the car for on-road use, helping to demonstrate its potential commercial viability. From a press release:

‘Stella’ is the first ‘energy-positive car’ with room for four people, a trunk, intuitive steering and a range of 600 kilometers.

By combining aerodynamic design with lightweight materials like carbon and aluminum, a very fuel-efficient car has been designed, which also has ingenious applications like a LED strip and touchscreen that make all the buttons and knobs we know today superfluous. Intuitive driving is enabled by a steering wheel that expands or contracts when you are driving too fast or too slowly. STE will have the car officially certified for road use to prove that this really is a fully-fledged car.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Solar-powered sedan hits Dutch streets

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