Why Talk to Philosophers? Part I. by philosopher of science Wayne Myrvold.
See also Sean Carroll's own blog entry, Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy.
Sean classifies the disparaging comments physicists make about philosophy as follows: "Roughly speaking, physicists tend to have three different kinds of lazy critiques of philosophy: one that is totally dopey, one that is frustratingly annoying, and one that is deeply depressing". Specifically:
- “Philosophy tries to understand the universe by pure thought, without collecting experimental data.”
- “Philosophy is completely useless to the everyday job of a working physicist.”
- “Philosophers care too much about deep-sounding meta-questions, instead of sticking to what can be observed and calculated.”
He counters each argument presented.
Personally, I am underwhelmed, since he does not address the point of view that philosophy is great at asking interesting questions but lousy at answering them. Typically, an interesting answer to a philosophical question requires first recasting it in a falsifiable form, so that is becomes a natural science question, be it physics, cognitive sciences, AI research or something else. This is locally known as hacking away at the edges. Philosophical questions don't have philosophical answers.
That seemed not the case earlier, but I'm happy to conclude that was a misinterpretation on my part. So, are you going to respond to the other issues raised?
"Abandoned?" Really? What evidence do you have for that? Also how is that relevant to the issue at hand?
I presume that this is in response to my last question (again, actually indicating what you are responding to would be helpful). Giving citations that aren't popular articles would also be helpful, but if you can explain in useful way how that research backs up a notion of free will I'd appreciate it. Because as far as I can tell from that summary that's talking about determinism- that some choices are made from noise and very small inputs doesn't give us any choice about them.
What other issues?
I can't see I've seen many defences of soul theory lately, The most recent seems to John C Eccles.
I can't see what your objection is. Thermalnoise is random. As explained here
Or maybe you want an essential homuncular self that has a final say on everything.
All naturalistic theories can offer you is self that is distributed over a complex system, freedom that comes f... (read more)