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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I think our confusion comes from the fact that from where I am standing there is not a lot of difference between philosophers and physicists because I'm mostly thinking about philosophers who are philosophers of physics or in adjacent fields.
I understand you're discussing philosophers engaged in epistemology, which are some of the philosophers closer to science.
I think epistemology is critical and necessary. It fascinates me. However, I wouldn't class them as physicists (unless they actually are, of course; you can wear more than one hat).
I admit I'm not familiar with Deacon, but Wikipedia states he's a "neuroanthropologist". I wonder how he would feel about a physicist making authoritative statements on neurobiology or anthropology!
This trap is not hypothetical. Remember when Michael Behe sided with Creationism and Intelligent Design, using his credentials as a scientist to try to discredit the theory of evolution? But he wasn't a scientist trained in that field, nor was he qualified to comment on it. He was a biochemist!
(I hope we've established labels do matter, insofar as they mean the person so labeled is immersed and has demonstrated high qualifications in the labeled field).
I guess what I am sort of getting at is that no amount of trusting labels to delineate intellectuals will protect you from having to actually look at something and decide whether the person has something useful or interesting to say or not.
In this particular discussion I don't particularly care whether some Joe Schmoe on the street trusts or doesn't trust Terrance Deacon on the basis of what his degree says. It doesn't matter.
And I actually think your example of Michael Behe works towards my point of view. Credentials are a very weak signal of expertise on any subject, as he demonstrates. I think at the basic level of philosophy of science or physics or whatever, the idea that we can break up disciplines into clear chunks is just silly. At some point a serious intellectual just has to do the work for themselves to digest the ideas. I'd be worse off if I had skipped Deacon's book (which, incidentally and again, I don't think really lands) if I had skipped it because he didn't have a PhD that matched mine.
> I guess what I am sort of getting at is that no amount of trusting labels to delineate intellectuals will protect you from having to actually look at something and decide whether the person has something useful or interesting to say or not.
I actually agree with this! I'm sure Deacon has interesting things to say. And yes, I can only find out about it by reading him, not by reading Wikipedia's summary -- or you.
Michael Behe didn't have the right kind of credentials: he was speaking outside his area of expertise, as was noted repeatedly during that debacle. He co-opted the mantle of capital-letter Science and misused it to maliciously confuse his audience.
> I think at the basic level of philosophy of science or physics or whatever, the idea that we can break up disciplines into clear chunks is just silly.
Of course all distinctions are man-made and therefore arbitrary. Yet you have a doctorate in Physics, and not in Neuroanthropology. At a fundamental level, you understood if Physics interested you, there was a path for you which was this path and not that other path. The border might be fuzzy, but at some level you understand not all regions are equivalent.
> At some point a serious intellectual just has to do the work for themselves to digest the ideas. I'd be worse off if I had skipped Deacon's book (which, incidentally and again, I don't think really lands) if I had skipped it because he didn't have a PhD that matched mine.
I fully agree and I'm not arguing anyone should skip Deacon (or anyone else) because they are not physicists. I just wouldn't pay the same attention to a Physics lecture by someone whose expertise doesn't lie in Physics (or to an anthropology lecture by a physicist who's not also an anthropologist). Doesn't mean I would necessarily skip it though!
I also understand you're not saying Deacon is right. Sufficiently interesting ideas are worth considering regardless of whether they are right. I don't think Julian Jaynes is right either, yet I consider "The Origin of Consciousness" an extremely interesting book!
I'm not sure how many times I have to explain I consider philosophy, epistemology and -- I'll say it -- the humanities essential? I'm not arguing about skipping anything!
I think we kind of agree. Obviously no one has enough time to personally vet every single claimant to expertise, so we use credentials to help. But I think in this particular context Deacon's specific credentials aren't really that relevant, at least to the extent that I'm vouching for him and that might (but I guess who am I, right) obviate the need to rely on his specific credentials.
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".
I think it's more that men's share of duties have not adapted to reflect the empowerment of women, combined with a system that continues to penalize women financially for having kids.
This suggests an optimum of 2 full-time working adults where after a long day at work they perfectly share the workload of chores.
This is morally fine and correct from a fairness principle but it misses the point entirely. Dual income workism is the least likely to produce family sizes large enough to not go extinct. The model may be fair but at the same time its suicidal.
Similarly, seeing a work break to take care of children as an "opportunity cost" suggest that the optimum life path is a 4-5 decades long maximalist devotion to some corporate.
Obviously, each individual and couple is free to pursuit whatever they want, but collectively these models and norms will end us.
Funny, not a single mention of the collapse of communities as a possible contributing factor. Strong communities provided support to young parents and also pressured them to have kids.
Your younger co-workers will have been educated in public schools you paid for. If you're an employer, the people you hire will have been educated with public schools you paid for. When you retire, the people paying your retirement and running the country you live in will have been educated by the public schools you paid for. When you're sick, loads of the research on how to cure you and keep you in good health will have been done by researchers who went through public schools you helped fund.
Everyone benefits from an educated populace, which is why it makes sense for it to be paid for by everyone.
Agree 100%. Not saying I don't benefit indirectly from public education. In fact, I actually feel good about contributing to the education of my fellow citizens. My comment was related to the insinuation that childfree choice is "too inexpensive". What's next, let's tax childfree people more than parents?
Brazil has an insane level of financial fraud and tax evasion. Pix mitigates some of that, but at the cost of privacy - something that Brazilians do not care too much about.
Pix does not substantially changes the tax evasion problem as that is mostly a problem with higher earners and small/medium business who evade tax using cash payment, convoluted setups of companies and "laranjas" (our slang for someone borrowing the name to do something for someone else, the scapegoat) as well as "non cash" transactions.
Pix mostly replaces and eats on credit card transactions that were done for the convenience aspect and no the credit aspect. As well as allow a whole new part of the country to accept electronic payments, and although that would increase tax revenue from business it also substantially increase their revenue since there is no x% from card processors and don't require special rented/bought equipment.
But is true. I am a Brazilian who lives in Sweden and there are multiple banks here that have blank bans on transfers from/to Brazilian banks due to the amount of fraud and money laundering and lax KYC controls. It is simply too much work for the banks here to vet those transactions and they decided just to refrain from doing it.
He's not wrong though. "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" is a popular saying here. People who lived under a military dictatorship not even half a century ago will actually utter those words.
Funny how we don't even fully understand what happens when we crack our joints but are certain about how the Universe "essentially" works.