On Apr 24, 2016, [deleted] wrote:
Dear Professor Harnad
I would be very pleased to know your opinion about a type of reductionism coming from a scientific point of view as the book ‘Every Thing Must Go’ by J Ladyman and D Ross.
In a letter of condolence to the Besso family, Albert Einstein wrote: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” I’m a medical doctor and every day I see the time’s effect over human bodies. Is Einstein saying time is an illusion ? For who ‘believe in physics’ is the death an illusion? Don’t we lost our dears and will they continue to live in an ‘eternal world’?
I understand that no physical theory should have to accommodate common sense, but it there remains a great problem: if all our intuitions and experiences about the world and ourselves are ‘illusory’, then what is the mean of all, of the same scientific enterprise? All we have we get from the universe (is this same statement not our?): intuition, sensorial experience, mathematical ability, etc.; the universe does not have to follow anything of these abilities. Then why some scientists consider intuition and experiences human *illusion*. but abstract human theories *real*? The success of a physics’ theory doesn’t mean it is real: the Newton’s force of gravity at distance is not real in Einstein’s Relativity. Other than this, all human characteristics (qualia, thinking, feelings, social relations….) that are not measurable are secondary or illusory, when our lives (scientific enterprise included) are made essentially of these. It remains this paradox: our knowledge begin from intuitions and experiences, over these we build mathematical theories that say our intuitions and experiences are illusory, but theonly way to control them is by experiments, indeed experiments that are based on our intuitions and sensorial date. Is possible the scientific enterprise without conscious human beings? Some physicists say qualia -as colors- are not *real*, they are present only in human brains and not in the physical universe. Is not the same for the physical theories? In a now-famous passage from his justly acclaimed The First Three Minutes, physicist Steven Weinberg provides a rather dismal assessment of the human drama:
“It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning…. It is hard to realize that this all [i.e., life on Earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
I hope I’ve not abused of your kindness and your time, but I’ve always esteemed the scientific (physics in particular) knowledge a wonderful adventure, but in the last years I feel a growing gap (‘sadness’) between it and our human life.
Thank you very much for your attention and best wishes
[Deleted]
Dear [deleted],
I do not share Einstein’s view (if that was indeed his view, rather than just a verbal attempt to console someone for bereavement) that “time is an illusion.”
I am of course not speaking of physicists’ “real” (objective) time but of our sense of time (a subjective state) — which is of course also related to our sense of bereavement (also a subjective state).
The same observation, but this time made about bereavement, points out the absurdity of calling it an illusion: “The ‘loss’ of a loved one is an illusion, because we know from the conservation laws that matter is neither created nor destroyed.” That’s rather like saying “Your pain is an illusion because it is really just the jangling of C-fibres.”
In fact, we just have to go back to what Descartes pointed out to the skeptics with his Cogito: “You can be skeptical (uncertain) about the truth of anything (other than the formal mathematical truths that are proven true on pain of contradiction), even the regularities (laws) of science, the minds of other creatures, the existence of the palpable world, etc. That could all be mistaken. But you cannot be skeptical about the fact that whatever you are feeling while you are feeling it is indeed being felt. (In particular, whilst you are feeling that time is passing, or that a loved one has passed away, it is absurd to say that that feeling is an illusion.)
An illusion is a felt state. It may be wrong about the world — and in that sense an objective error, rather than an “illusion”. But it cannot be an illusion that that feeling is indeed being felt (now). That’s the gist of the Cogito.
And after all, is it not feeling rather than objective truth that matters to us? Isn’t that what “mattering” even means? (Someone may reply: “I am a scientist. The only thing that matters to me is objective truth.” That may be (partly) true of that scientist, as a matter of taste. But that too is just a feeling. (And even determined scientists — and mathematicians — have other feelings too, feelings that can get the better of them just as they can with everyone else. And, as you point out, even the objective truths of science have to make themselves palpably — i.e. empirically — felt so that we can come to know them.)
I might add, by way of reply to Stephen Weinberg or any other scientistic wag inclined to overstate his tastes: Anyone who tries to draw the conclusion that agony is a farce is speaking nonsense as surely as if he is saying “P is not P.” (And, yes, this “insight” has to be based on negative feelings; it does not have the same force when stated as “orgasm is a farce,” which is rather closer to the truth…)
Perhaps a milder way of saying what I’ve just said is that scientists are not really being serious when they discount feelings as illusions, even though they feel they are being their most serious when they are doing so. Even nonsense can feel serious (and true)…
Best wishes,
Stevan Harnad
P.S. This is not a defence of “analytic metaphysics.”
The exigencies (and nuances) of certitude (as opposed to mere truth)
“All this talk about time and subjectivity etc being an illusion is patent bullshit. If I am an illusion, then whose illusion am I? And if time is an illusion, then why am I getting unpleasantly older?”
I’d actually say that the (cartesian) “I” in all this is not at all as indubitable as the feeling itself.
Yes, the nature of feeling is that it is felt, and that feeling seems to call for a feeler of the feeling; at least that’s what it feels like.
But we know that there are problems with the notion of continuity of personal (or, for that matter, any) identity; and that the only infallible thing about feeling is what it feels-like right now (not an instant later).
So both time and I are moot. The only sure thing is that THIS feeling is being felt right NOW (and perhaps that what it feels likes that it is being felt by a persistent me)…