Physics not a substitute for Philosophy

by Damien F. Mackey “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy,” Hawking … writes, “but philosophy is dead”. The Grand Design In my opinion, the most perceptive writer on the philosophy of the modern sciences was the Australian philosopher-scientist, Dr. Gavin Ardley: Dr. Gavin Ardley skilfully explained the modern sciences (3) Dr. Gavin Ardley skilfully explained the modern sciences | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu The true situation was also well summed up e.g. by Christopher Dawson (d. 1970): “If the laws of mathematics are simply the creation of the human mind, they are no infallible guide to the ultimate nature of things. They are a conventional technique which is no more based on the eternal laws of the universe than is the number of degrees in a circle or the number of yards in a mile”. See also my Gavin Ardley-inspired, but also somewhat different, approach to the same general subject: Hawking and Dawkins - science fiction cosmology (1) Hawking and Dawkins - science fiction cosmology | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu Ideally, critiques of books such as that of Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design (2011) should be taken up by those who combine both philosophical and scientific expertise. Dr. Gavin Ardley (RIP) would have been one of those well fitted to the task. So is Dr. Wolfgang Smith, a Catholic mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, and metaphysician, who has weighed in on the subject: “We need also to remind ourselves that following the demise of Albert Einstein, it is Stephen Hawking who has become, in the public eye, the premiere physicist: the lone figure that personifies the wizardry of mathematical physics as such". Wolfgang Smith Below I shall be following some of Dr. Wolfgang Smith’s writings on the subject to find out if he, too, has Dr. Gavin Ardley’s clear perception of the distinct bifurcation between perennial philosophy and the modern theoretical sciences (“sciences of the categorial” below). Or, is his method of approach somewhat different? As I set out in some detail in my first article above: “It is commonly stated that St. Thomas [Aquinas] showed that there is no contradiction between faith and profane science. This is true of sciences of the real. But for sciences of the categorial we must look also to Kant. It is St. Thomas and Kant between them who have shown that there is no contradiction possible between faith and any profane science”. Dr. Gavin Ardley Aquinas and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950) is available on-line (for example at: https://archive.org/details/aquinasandkant032149mbp) Chapter XVIII is the crucial one, for it is there that Gavin Ardley, following an insight from Immanuel Kant, puts his finger right on the nature of the sciences, or what the modern scientist is actually doing. Whilst the precise realisation of this had escaped some of the most brilliant philosophers of science, it had not escaped Kant – who, however, then managed to bury this gem of insight under a mountain of pseudo metaphysics. Other minds went close to discovering the secret, but failed to recognize the Procrustean nature of modern science, that is, the active imposition of laws upon nature, rather than, as is generally imagined, the reading of laws in nature. Ardley will finally sum up his findings in this splendid piece (but one will definitely need to read his chapter XVIII): Chapter XXI THE END OF THE ROAD The solution to the problem is now before us. The quest of the modern cosmologist for a satisfactory harmony of Thomism with post-Galilean physical science is nearing its goal. The bifurcation made by the Procrustean interpretation of physics rescues the dualist theory from the impasse in which it has been struggling. With our discussion of voluntary active phenomenalism in Ch. XVIII in view, we can see precisely how there come to be two orders, each autonomous. The Scholastic metaphysician functions in one order, the modern physicist in the other, and there is no immediate link whatever between them. There is a clean divorce between the ontological reality, and the physical laws and properties which belong to the categorial order. The link between the physical laws and the underlying causes is no longer of the first remove but of the second. The fundamental dictum of Wittgenstein is our guide here. [See his p. 98.]: that a law of physics tells us nothing about the world, but only that it applies in the way in which in fact it does apply, tells us something about the world. This all-important consequence of the Procrustean character of modern physics provides the solution to Phillips’ difficulty. [See his p. 224. The difficulty of course arises from the failure to distinguish the physicists’ data from phenomena. We are careful to distinguish them.] It furnishes the essential supplement to the otherwise admirable doctrines of O’Rahilly and Maritain. This doctrine of the two orders, soundly based, is very much more satisfactory than such a palliative as hylosystemism. Now we can retain the Thomist doctrine in all its purity, but we have added to it another chapter, so that the post-Renaissance physical science may at last find a home in the ample structure of the philosophia perennis. It is from Immanuel Kant that this doctrine of the nature of modern physics ultimately derives. Scholastics thus owe to Kant the recognition that he, albeit unwittingly, has made one of the greatest contributions to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. It is commonly stated that St. Thomas showed that there is no contradiction between faith and profane science. This is true of sciences of the real. But for sciences of the categorial we must look also to Kant. It is St. Thomas and Kant between them who have shown that there is no contradiction possible between faith and any profane science. Let us now summarise the contents of these chapters. The Bellarmine dichotomy between what actually is the case, and what gives the most satisfactory empirical explanation, has all along been the basic contention of the dualist philosophers. But the absence hitherto of an adequate explanation of how there can be these two separate orders has been the great stumbling block. It has driven other Scholastic philosophers virtually to abandon the dichotomy and try to work out a unitary theory. This has led to such a scheme as hylosystemism with its fundamental distortions of Thomism. We have shown how illusory such unitary schemes must be, founded as they are on the shifting sands of current physical theories. On the other hand we have supplied the missing explanation in the dualist theory. By pointing out the Procrustean categorial nature of modern physics, we have established its autonomy on a satisfactory basis. We have shown how the two orders can exist side by side without clashing. Hence the Thomist structure needs no alterations but only the extension of a wing to the house. We have traced in outline the slow recognition by Scholastic philosophers of the part played by artifacts, or entia rationis, call them what we will, in the new physical learning which has been developing since the 17th century. The time has now come for this recognition to be extended to a wider field than merely that of modern physics. We have seen in this work how systems of artifacts are to be found in a great variety of human pursuits. In nearly all our activities we avail ourselves of their assistance; we find at almost every turn a fabric woven of myths. Such a fabric is necessary to facilitate our passage through the world. But we must never lose sight of the fact that it is only myths and phantoms. We should never allow ourselves to be enslaved by our own creations: there are no bonds more insidious than those we impose on ourselves. Behind the shadowy world we have created to be our servant, there lies the real world. A phantom is but a sorry companion to any man. It is the real world, the world which ever is, to which we must turn our eyes, and from which comes our strength. [End of quote] Let us make our way through some of what Dr. Wolfgang Smith has to say when writing for the journal, Sophia, “Response to Stephen Hawking’s Physics-as-Philosophy” (Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Volume 16, No 2, 2011, pp. 5-48). Dr. Wolfgang Smith commences by summarising Stephen Hawking’s book: https://traditionalhikma.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Response-to-Stephen-Hawking%E2%80%99s-Physics-as-Philosophy-by-Wolfgang-Smith.pdf The Grand Design … to be sure, is not simply another “Physics for the Millions” production, nor is Stephen Hawking, its primary author, just another scientist addressing the public at large. What stands at issue is rather to be seen as the crossing of a threshold, an event comparable, in a way, to the publication of Charles Darwin’s magnum opus a century and a half ago. There have always been physicists who make it a point, in the name of science, to dispatch the “God-hypothesis”; what confronts us, however, in The Grand Design is something more. It is the spectacle of a physics, no less, presuming to explain how the universe itself came to be: “why there is something rather than nothing” as Hawking declares. The answer to this supreme conundrum, we are told, can now be given on rigorous mathematical grounds by physics itself: such is the “breakthrough” the treatise proposes to expound in terms simple enough to fall within the purview of the non-specialist. We need also to remind ourselves that following the demise of Albert Einstein, it is Stephen Hawking who has become, in the public eye, the premiere physicist: the lone figure that personifies the wizardry of mathematical physics as such. Add this fact to the brilliance of the book itself, and one begins to sense the magnitude of its likely impact, the effect upon millions of the claim that a mathematical physics has trashed the sacred wisdom of mankind! This contention must not go unanswered. It calls for a definitive response, a rigorous refutation; and such I propose to present in the sequel with the help of Almighty God: the very God whose existence has supposedly been disproved. …. We begin with Chapter 1, entitled “The Mystery of Being,” which does in fact deal with basic ontological issues. “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy,” Hawking … writes, “but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modem developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” …. Following this opening salvo, Hawking begins to delineate the radical change in the conception of “being”- he means of course physical being - implied by the transition from classical to quantum physics. “According to the traditional conception of the universe, objects move on well-defined paths and have definite histories.” …. Not so in quantum theory. Availing himself of the fact that quantum mechanics can be formulated in a number of different ways which tum out to be mathematically equivalent, Hawking chooses the approach pioneered by the American physicist Richard Feynman as best suited to convey his thought. And whereas he postpones his presentation of quantum theory a la Feynman till Chapter 4, he forthwith makes a central point: “According to Feynman, a system has not just one history, but every possible history.” …. One sees that Hawking has started to make his case: it begins to appear that the new ontology has indeed left traditional conceptions of “being” far behind. Noting that things are not “what they seem as perceived by the senses” … Hawking announces one of his foundational innovations: the concept of “model-dependent realism,” which is “based upon the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world.” One should add that the full force of what Hawking has in mind becomes apparent in Chapter 3 with the assertion that “There is no picture- or theory-free concept of reality” … where also we are told that model-based realism is “the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations.” …. Getting back to Chapter 1: Following the announcement of this crucial conception, Hawking goes on to consider the history of human knowing, “from Plato to the classical theory of Newton to modem quantum theories” … and proceeds to pose the following question: “Will this sequence eventually reach an end point, an ultimate theory of the universe, that will include all forces and predict every observation we can make, or will we continue forever finding better theories, but never one that cannot be improved upon?” Now, it is at this juncture that Hawking breaks with his predecessor, Albert Einstein: there is no “ultimate theory” as previously conceived which covers the entire ground, he maintains. What is called for is a radically new kind of theory, something he terms “M-theory,” a notion that dovetails with the conception of “model-dependent realism”; as Hawking explains: “M-theory is not a theory in the usual sense. It is a whole family of different theories, each of which is a good description of observations only in some range of physical situations.” …. The ultimate goal of physics-a science, namely, which in principle covers the entire ground an only be realized as an M-theory; and Hawking believes that physics today is closing in upon such a final and all-inclusive formulation. This brings us to the most amazing claim of all: the notion that such an M-theory constitutes the culmination not only of physics, but of philosophy as well: that it is in fact the only kind of theory that can enlighten us regarding “the mystery of being.” And what does it reveal? It informs us, first of all, that “ours is not the only universe,” that indeed “a great many universes were created out of nothing.” But-as if this were not enough!-there is more: the final M-theory, we are told, will in principle reveal all that can be known, not only regarding our universe, but indeed regarding everything. The task of the book has now come into view: it can evidently be none other than to lead the reader, step by step, through the formulation of the ultimate M-theory, as far as Hawking can take us at this time. …. …. The logic of Hawking’s argument is crystal clear: once the single universe of bygone days has been replaced by a veritable “multiverse,” the fine-tuning of natural laws and constants can be readily explained by the weak anthropic principle, which is to say that the “apparent miracle” has disappeared: “the multiverse concept can explain the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the universe for our benefit.” (165) Even this “debunking of the God-hypothesis,” however, is not yet the last word: in the final chapter (entitled “The Grand Design”) Hawking proposes to answer the “why? questions” posed at the start of the book: “Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?” (171) The substance of the chapter, to which we will confine our summary, is given in the concluding paragraphs; and as might be expected, the answer to the three “why? questions” derives from M-theory and the corresponding version of the anthropic principle. “Spontaneous creation [that is to say, creation conceived a la M-theory as a quantum event] is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” (180) This is Hawking’s answer to the first two questions; and his answer to the third is M-theoretic as well. It derives from the strong “multiverse” version of the anthropic principle, which explains why we encounter “this particular set of laws and not some other.” The answer to the ultimate questions may thus be supplied by the physics now in progress: “If the theory is confirmed by observation, it will be the successful conclusion of a search going back more than 3000 years. We will have found the grand design.” (181) …. The first point to be made by way of response refers to the nature of science as distinguished from philosophy. “Philosophy is dead,” Hawking asserts, and it is now science that carries “the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” (5) Yet granting that a good deal of what passes for philosophy these days may indeed be “dead,” the fact remains that science and philosophy as such are very different disciplines, to the point that neither can fill in for the other. There is in fact a complementarity, an opposition one can say, between philosophy, properly so called, and science when the latter is shorn of its mythology … and understood for what by right it is. To indicate, however summarily, the nature of this opposition, one needs to distinguish categorically between thought and language (a distinction, incidentally, which falls into the province of philosophy alone). Briefly stated, thought is an intentional act that seeks to apprehend an object by way of a concept, which may be defined in Scholastic terms as the form of the act. Language, on the other hand, is something subsidiary to thought: it is its vehicle, which serves to express and communicate thought. Now, it can be said that for philosophy, thought has primacy over language, whereas for science it is just the other way round. Let me explain. For the philosopher, the concept is ultimately no more than a means to a trans-conceptual end, which is finally the unmediated knowledge of the object itself; as the Chinese might put it, concepts serve the philosopher as “a finger pointing to the moon.” The scientist, on the other hand, has no interest in “the moon,” nor does he know that there is such an object. For him the concept plays a very different role; for what he seeks is not a transcendent object, but “phenomena” in the contemporary sense of that ancient term. …. How these so-called phenomena, moreover, stand in relation to the transcendent object is a question which concerns the philosopher alone, inasmuch as the very idea of “object” in the philosophic sense is foreign to the scientist. So too the scientist’s modus operandi is opposed to the philosophic: instead of “opening” the concept in quest of a transcendent object, he “closes” it to consolidate his grip upon phenomena. And that is where language enters in a foundational capacity: as Jean Borella makes clear, the epistemic closure of the concept by which a science is defined is effected through a criterion of scienticity specified on the level of linguistic or formal expression. …. One sees, in light of this analysis, that Hawking is right when he speaks of reality as “model-dependent”: it is precisely the epistemic closure of the concept that makes it so. This model-dependence derives in fact from the very criterion of scienticity by which a science is defined. But what is right and proper for science is fallacy and illusion for philosophy, which by its very nature is in quest, not of a model-dependent, but of a transcendent reality. What the scientist fails perforce to understand-unless he happens to be also a philosopher-is that a model-dependent reality is not absolutely real, which is to say that the phenomena at which he arrives by way of epistemic closure of the concept are defined or conditioned by that very process of closure. As I have shown elsewhere … the history of physics, from its Galilean beginnings right up to the latest “multiverse” theories, exhibits the various stages of this progressive closure, which manifests itself in a concomitant recession of the corresponding objects from actual human experience, culminating in the conception of entities pertaining to universes other than our own. What concerns us at the moment, however, is not the truth or validity of these theories, but simply the aforesaid opposition between science and philosophy. The upshot of these summary considerations is simply this: to suggest that science can, even in principle, replace philosophy “in our quest for knowledge” is to exhibit a fundamental lack of comprehension regarding the nature and scope of either discipline. My second point of contention pertains to an aspect of Hawking’s model-dependent realism which proves to be untenable. It is to be noted, first of all, that in its recognition of “model-dependency” in regard to cosmic realities, the notion is reminiscent of a basic metaphysical principle: what in fact I have termed “anthropic realism.” …. The latter affirms that the cosmos exists, not in splendid isolation as a Kantian Ding an sich, but indeed “for us,” that is to say, as an object of human intentionality. Man and cosmos, therefore, belong together: they form a complementarity. And this is essentially what “model-dependent realism” affirms as well: here too the human observer comes into play by virtue of the fact that it is he who forges the conceptions-the “models”-in terms of which reality is apprehended. Yet there is a difference between model-dependent and anthropic realism, which proves to be crucial: for whereas Hawking regards the human observer as a component or part of the universe … anthropic realism insists that man, the authentic anthropos, transcends the cosmos, that he is literally and necessarily “not of this world.” To be sure, his physical body does evidently pertain to the cosmos, the world in which we find ourselves; the point, however, is that man as such does not reduce to that physical body: the observer or witness, in other words, proves to be transcendent. Now, it happens that even from a strictly scientific point of view, the reductionist conception of the observer turns out finally to be untenable. Take the case of visual perception: in keeping with prevailing opinion, Hawking assumes that vision reduces to brain function. We are told, for example, that the human brain “reads a two-dimensional array of data from the retina and creates from it the impression of a three-dimensional space.” (47) This tenet, however, has been critically challenged by an empirical scientist, named James Gibson, on the basis of experimental findings gathered in what is perhaps to date the most exhaustive inquiry into the nature of visual perception. What Gibson’s experiments have brought to light is the decisive fact that perception is based, not upon a retinal image (as just about everyone had assumed), but on information given in the ambient optic array, which moreover specifies, among other things, the three-dimensional structure of the environment. It appears that our visual system is designed, not simply to receive a retinal image, but to sample that ambient optic array and extract from it what Gibson terms its invariants. It is these invariants that are actually perceived, which is to say that the percept is not constructed, but objectively real: it is not simply “inside the head,” but outside, as mankind had in fact always assumed. …. [End of quotes] See also my article: Common sense philosophy of Irish Bishop George Berkeley (4) Common sense philosophy of Irish Bishop George Berkeley | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu and, too, of relevance to our subject: Scientists are generally pitifully unqualified to pontificate upon matters metaphysical (4) Scientists are generally pitifully unqualified to pontificate upon matters metaphysical | Damien Mackey - Academia.edu