Hawking - philosophy is dead

[chaz wyman]

Dialectical progress is always a recourse as well, to that which fell victim to the progressing concept; the concept’s progressive concretion is its self-correction. And yet of the while we have the certainty of the analytic philosophy that taunts us, with the inevitability of Euclid. We might try to cast our triangles on the curves surfaces of eggs to prove his axioms wrong but we all know that He is still applicable, and the casting of the non-euclidian form of maths asserts the value of Euclid by negation. And what then is the progress in the understanding is not by the precision of logic and the passage of time. The transition of logic to time would like, as far as consciousness is able, to make up to time for the wrongs done to it by logic—by the logic without which, on the other hand, time would not be. You might say that this is the realm of dominion to which men progressively submit. With the strength of these means science proclaims the death of philosophy by assuming its own ontological security. Some initiates of science expect it to be decisively supplemented by ontology without their having to touch the scientific procedures. The scientist produces the 'just so' story without the need to consult his preconceptions; preconceptions based upon an assumed objectivity - a place from which his standing may permit no recognition of the ultimate subjection of EVERY position. And thus with a hubristic sweep he denies all before him and declares the death of philosophy, with less irony than Nietzsche declared the death of god. Yet is it not true that all scientists have done this since the beginning of time? Since the sciences’ irrevocable farewell to idealistic philosophy, the successful sciences are no longer seeking to legitimize themselves otherwise than by a statement of their method, and thus by this new method the negation of the need for philosophy is re-born. The question is when will the machinations of philosophy once again render the surety of science void, so that the subsequent death of philosophy will one day have to be re-cast. The dialectic between philosophy and science must continue ad nauseum.

This has got to be the best thing Ive heard from you so far. Though I do not agree with some of it, as it spells out some of the reasons behind your past assertions, indeed, it has a 'meditative' tambre to it.
And, it reminds me of a thesis I wrote that proposes that science speaks of and describes "the way itself (science) speaks", and not of any 'objective' universe -- similar (but not easily seen) to the point you (I think) are making here[/quote]

If this has interested you then why not step onto the hermeneutic circle and build upon it? Is it because you continue to think that I "do not understand the dialectic", or is it because you don't understand the dialectic?
As for your comments on 'objective universe' - that would foretell what presuppositions that you bring to the meaning of objective. It seem to me that, as science stakes a claim in the realm of the meaning of this word, it is up to you to either challenge the definition or to challenge their finding in science and compare them to this definition. Either they use the wrong word or their claim if false. This problematisation has fallen to you to explain. As I said below - Since the sciences’ irrevocable farewell to idealistic philosophy, the successful sciences are no longer seeking to legitimize themselves otherwise than by a statement of their method. This seems parallel with your statement above. Given this tendency as a temporal process it might be worth bringing to the table what Foucault says about discursive formations which are "retrospective re-grouping by which the contemporary sciences deceive themselves as the their own past." (Foucault 1972, 31) It is easy to dismiss the production of the archaeological layers of knowledge, yet they are talking; about something, and to the subject. And their utility is moderated and defined by the language games that they inevitably play or interplay between the subjects of the discourse and the objects of their study. This gameplay both defines the object but also investigates it. You might say that the discourse invents and re-invents it own object and the justification for its existence. AND YET, these discursive formations have utility, they are not so easily dismissed by the simple fact that their creation and recreation is is self justifying and idealistically formed, because in investigating the object so is it defined. This ought not be a damning criticism.
When science tells you that the (might be objective) bullet, containing (might be objective) lead, that is traveling towards you at a relative velocity of 300 (objective) miles an hour - and that it will hurt - you had better believe it. (and duck)

[Daniel1974]

Hawking didn't say that "Philosophy was dead". He said that "it wasn't necessary to explain the universe" and that the discussions philosophers engage in seem increasingly outdated. At first glance of the discussions on this board, I'd say that he is right on the money. Naturally, I wouldn't be here if I didn't have some interest in philosophy but lets face it - a lot of the discussions about free will/kant etc now seem like "the discussion of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin" that the folks in the middle ages engaged in.

Kant was demonstrably wrong about pretty much everything and if string theory is correct, science will eventually have a theory that explains everything. The only useful function I see left for philosophers is to challenge perceptions and direct awareness of people to issues that might not otherwise get attention. But, you'd hardly call this knowledge. A good author can do the same thing.

[chaz wyman]

Hawking didn't say that "Philosophy was dead". He said that "it wasn't necessary to explain the universe" and that the discussions philosophers engage in seem increasingly outdated. At first glance of the discussions on this board, I'd say that he is right on the money. Naturally, I wouldn't be here if I didn't have some interest in philosophy but lets face it - a lot of the discussions about free will/kant etc now seem like "the discussion of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin" that the folks in the middle ages engaged in.

Kant was demonstrably wrong about pretty much everything and if string theory is correct, science will eventually have a theory that explains everything. The only useful function I see left for philosophers is to challenge perceptions and direct awareness of people to issues that might not otherwise get attention. But, you'd hardly call this knowledge. A good author can do the same thing.

It's a shame he said that as science does not begin to explain the universe only describe it.
It's also a shame that he thinks philosophy is out of date as he has basically no understanding of it. To criticise a thing you must first try to understand it.
Please indicate why you think that the (ahem!) "free will/kant" argument is remotely like angels on the head of a pin?
Kant was not demonstrably wrong most of what he said. Please indicate the areas you think he has failed in!
I am willing to bet that you are making the same mistake that Hawkin has made, and that you haven't got the slightest idea what Kant said about anything.
I also think you have very little understanding of what philosophy is from the phrase "you'd hardly call this knowledge", as if that were the point.
But since you bring up 'knowledge', you have set your own trap. Most of historical scientific knowledge has proved to be false, and we have every reason to assume that in 200 years 90% of what we think is secure knowledge now will have been superseded by new science - hopefully. Without philosophy science is completely incapable of making the judgement as to what knowledge is worth keeping and what ought to be rejected. It was science that gave us the geocentric hypothesis, and philosophy that enabled us to question its value. Newton, a man never once called a scientist and never once using the word provided us with a mathematical model that finally rejected it in favour of a heliocentric one. Philosophy has always provided the underlying justification for all science, and a rigid distinction between the two is false.

[ZEDONG]

The only useful function I see left for philosophers is to challenge perceptions and direct awareness of people to issues that might not otherwise get attention.

Why do you derive the function of "a philosopher" from "philosophy"? To say that there is no use for a philosopher in science, is like saying the same thing about a mathematician. With their respective fields let alone, neither of them will be of much use.

[Daniel1974]

Hawking didn't say that "Philosophy was dead". He said that "it wasn't necessary to explain the universe" and that the discussions philosophers engage in seem increasingly outdated. At first glance of the discussions on this board, I'd say that he is right on the money. Naturally, I wouldn't be here if I didn't have some interest in philosophy but lets face it - a lot of the discussions about free will/kant etc now seem like "the discussion of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin" that the folks in the middle ages engaged in.

Kant was demonstrably wrong about pretty much everything and if string theory is correct, science will eventually have a theory that explains everything. The only useful function I see left for philosophers is to challenge perceptions and direct awareness of people to issues that might not otherwise get attention. But, you'd hardly call this knowledge. A good author can do the same thing.

It's a shame he said that as science does not begin to explain the universe only describe it.
It's also a shame that he thinks philosophy is out of date as he has basically no understanding of it. To criticise a thing you must first try to understand it.
Please indicate why you think that the (ahem!) "free will/kant" argument is remotely like angels on the head of a pin?
Kant was not demonstrably wrong most of what he said. Please indicate the areas you think he has failed in!
I am willing to bet that you are making the same mistake that Hawkin has made, and that you haven't got the slightest idea what Kant said about anything.
I also think you have very little understanding of what philosophy is from the phrase "you'd hardly call this knowledge", as if that were the point.
But since you bring up 'knowledge', you have set your own trap. Most of historical scientific knowledge has proved to be false, and we have every reason to assume that in 200 years 90% of what we think is secure knowledge now will have been superseded by new science - hopefully. Without philosophy science is completely incapable of making the judgement as to what knowledge is worth keeping and what ought to be rejected. It was science that gave us the geocentric hypothesis, and philosophy that enabled us to question its value. Newton, a man never once called a scientist and never once using the word provided us with a mathematical model that finally rejected it in favour of a heliocentric one. Philosophy has always provided the underlying justification for all science, and a rigid distinction between the two is false.

A description of the laws of the universe is an explanation. And due to symmetry, we know that the laws we discover apply not only to our little corner of the galaxy but also to galaxies millions of light years away and probably to the whole universe.

And it wasn't science that gave us the geocentric hypothesis. It was the Church mostly and people being afraid to offer a different explanation for fear of being burned at the stake e.g Gallileo etc.

Science and philosophy were originally the same subject and then science grew out of philosophy and became a different discipline altogether but that was a few centuries ago. The fact that we are having this discussion is further proof that Hawkins was right if you are in fact a philosopher.

Regarding Kant, he held that space and time were "a priori" and that our mind supplied these aspects of reality. That seems to fly in the face of Einstein's relativity in which it is demonstrably true that space and time are dependent on our physical circumstances (i.e how fast we are going). The faster you go, the slower time goes for you relative to others and vice versa. Space and time are also affected by Mass. How is this possible if space and time are filters for experience that our mind supplies? Why would they change in a precisely measurable way dependent upon our frame of reference?

I don't blame Kant for being wrong. He was undoubtedly a brillant thinker for his time. He didn't have any modern scientific tools to inform his judgments and I bet that if he were alive today, he would reject/revise his conclusions in "Critique of pure reason".

Regarding free will, the fact that philosophers can't even agree upon a definition of what it is says all I need to know about their musings. If you can't define something, then you can't have an intelligible discussion about it.

[thalarch]

Hopefully this will either somewhat remove a repeat post here or make it worse. Apparently some glitch.

[thalarch]

Regarding Kant, he held that space and time were "a priori" and that our mind supplied these aspects of reality. That seems to fly in the face of Einstein's relativity

Scientists and clinical researchers like Oliver Sacks have pretty much wrapped-up that the brain produces its own sense of time, not the experience of any objective one that you're apparently ascribing to a non-conscious and non-judgment making world at large. As for commonsense time existing in the relativity scheme, from one of the "superstring" gurus (using the same word of "time" for new or different conceptions doesn't rescue the original):

Brian Green: In day to day life, physicists view time in the same way that everyone else does. And that makes it all the more surprising when we examine how time appears in our current theoretical frameworks, because nowhere in our theories do we see the intuitive notion of time that we all embrace. Nowhere, for example, can we find the theoretical underpinnings for our sense that time flows from one second to the next. Instead, our theories seem to indicate that time doesn't flow --rather, past, present, and future are all there, always, forever frozen in place. --A Conversation With Brian Greene

And a potential subjective contribution to this:

Brian Green: And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization. --The Time We Thought We Knew

As for space: The phenomenal, commonsense space that one experiences is part of the brain's representational processing, not that of an "external" realm (surely only some philosophers are daft enough to believe in non-mediated perception). http://sharp.bu.edu/~slehar/Representationalism.html Considering some of interpretations of QM and theories like the holographic principle sprouting out there, Kant was correct not to dogmatically project naive conceptions of "space" and "time" in his day to a mind-independent existence. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-hol ... ogram.html

Even the current theoretical contenders and technical descriptions will be revised or discarded in the future of physics. There are few if any perpetual "truths" in science, which would be confusing it with dogmatic metaphysics prior to the epistemological pessimism of Hume and Kant.

[thalarch]

Kant was demonstrably wrong about pretty much everything and if string theory is correct, science will eventually have a theory that explains everything.

Like metaphysics, theoretical physics and cosmology will continue to have multiple abstract schemes that both contend with and supplement each other according to their particular weaknesses and strengths, as they arise and topple in the history of science tradition. A situation that Hawking himself seems to have surrendered to in this latest publicity venture with his "model-dependent realism". When it comes to appreciating this [another] problem for lofty dreams of acquiring ultimate knowledge, the situation of multiple theories spit out by mathematical excursions and inferences about experiments surely doesn't require a Kant to be around to additionally arrange various rival schemes into mutually cancelling antinomies.

Ernst Tugendhat: The desire to be on sure ground is the relict of an authoritarian frame of mind. It's a relict of those times when people believed they would receive all that is essential through revelation from the Gods. --Die Tageszeitung, July 28, 2007

Substitute "scientists" for infallible gods, in the public's scientism-spawned misconceptions of science today, their lingering craving for an absolute Authority.

[chaz wyman]

Hawking didn't say that "Philosophy was dead". He said that "it wasn't necessary to explain the universe" and that the discussions philosophers engage in seem increasingly outdated. At first glance of the discussions on this board, I'd say that he is right on the money. Naturally, I wouldn't be here if I didn't have some interest in philosophy but lets face it - a lot of the discussions about free will/kant etc now seem like "the discussion of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin" that the folks in the middle ages engaged in.

Kant was demonstrably wrong about pretty much everything and if string theory is correct, science will eventually have a theory that explains everything. The only useful function I see left for philosophers is to challenge perceptions and direct awareness of people to issues that might not otherwise get attention. But, you'd hardly call this knowledge. A good author can do the same thing.

It's a shame he said that as science does not begin to explain the universe only describe it.
It's also a shame that he thinks philosophy is out of date as he has basically no understanding of it. To criticise a thing you must first try to understand it.
Please indicate why you think that the (ahem!) "free will/kant" argument is remotely like angels on the head of a pin?
Kant was not demonstrably wrong most of what he said. Please indicate the areas you think he has failed in!
I am willing to bet that you are making the same mistake that Hawkin has made, and that you haven't got the slightest idea what Kant said about anything.
I also think you have very little understanding of what philosophy is from the phrase "you'd hardly call this knowledge", as if that were the point.
But since you bring up 'knowledge', you have set your own trap. Most of historical scientific knowledge has proved to be false, and we have every reason to assume that in 200 years 90% of what we think is secure knowledge now will have been superseded by new science - hopefully. Without philosophy science is completely incapable of making the judgement as to what knowledge is worth keeping and what ought to be rejected. It was science that gave us the geocentric hypothesis, and philosophy that enabled us to question its value. Newton, a man never once called a scientist and never once using the word provided us with a mathematical model that finally rejected it in favour of a heliocentric one. Philosophy has always provided the underlying justification for all science, and a rigid distinction between the two is false.

A description of the laws of the universe is an explanation.

If it makes you happy then it is enough.

And due to symmetry, we know that the laws we discover apply not only to our little corner of the galaxy but also to galaxies millions of light years away and probably to the whole universe.

The world is as it is. Laws are human conceits that are imposed on our understanding deducted from observations. There is no such thing as gravity. Gravity is what we call a set of phenomena. Laws are invented, not discovered. ALl good scientists know the difference.

And it wasn't science that gave us the geocentric hypothesis. It was the Church mostly and people being afraid to offer a different explanation for fear of being burned at the stake e.g Gallileo etc.


Wrong. The geocentric hypothesis was with us long before Christianity. It's most accurate expression was provided by Ptolemy in the 1stC AD, nothing whatever to do with the church but everything to do with mathematics and observation; science.
Copernicus - a canon of the Catholic church first provided a heliocentric system to the modern world. Simply, it was not as good a scientific system as Ptolemy's as the it involved using several more epicycles which made prediction more difficult to make. Despite this is served the needs of navigation and astrology for over 1000 years.
Galileo has little to do with this, but was such a braggard and self publicist that the church was felt under attack.
Kepler sorted out the problem by rejecting the scientifically established "truth" of perfect circles which had been borrowed from Aristotle, by using ellipses to describe the motion of the planets. Newton modelled it mathematically , but even he was proved wrong by Einstein.

Science and philosophy were originally the same subject and then science grew out of philosophy and became a different discipline altogether but that was a few centuries ago. The fact that we are having this discussion is further proof that Hawkins was right if you are in fact a philosopher.

Wrong again. The word scientist was only coined as late as the mid 19thC. The separation of philosophy from science is a dangerous flaw in knowledge. Most good scientists have a grounding in philosophy and for good reason. Scientists with no understanding of the philosophical basis of their discipline are doomed to fail. Hawkin is a second rate scientist and has not contributed as much as people think he has. Without philosophy science has no means by which to assess its value and utility. You have only to look at the margins of science to see where it fails. Where does science get its justification; Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell. These are philosophers.



Regarding Kant, he held that space and time were "a priori" and that our mind supplied these aspects of reality. That seems to fly in the face of Einstein's relativity in which it is demonstrably true that space and time are dependent on our physical circumstances (i.e how fast we are going).

Kant was talking about the means by which we are able to understand the world of perception. He was talking about how we can able to transcend what is basically a subjective experience to seek objective knowledge. But warned that all knowledge so gained can never be complete - the noumenal world can never be known as it is in itself - he was right then and he is still right.
Further - much of science is now confirming the implication of his work - the role of the observer in changing the state of reality.

The faster you go, the slower time goes for you relative to others and vice versa. Space and time are also affected by Mass. How is this possible if space and time are filters for experience that our mind supplies? Why would they change in a precisely measurable way dependent upon our frame of reference?

See above!

I don't blame Kant for being wrong. He was undoubtedly a brillant thinker for his time. He didn't have any modern scientific tools to inform his judgments and I bet that if he were alive today, he would reject/revise his conclusions in "Critique of pure reason".

Do you blame Newton for being wrong? Or Copernicus, or Ptolemy? DO you even recognise that science becomes out of date?

Regarding free will, the fact that philosophers can't even agree upon a definition of what it is says all I need to know about their musings. If you can't define something, then you can't have an intelligible discussion about it.

And what does science have to say about it? Nothing!
Philosophy tells us that language is not capable of hard and fast definitions. Words are approximations by which we are forced to assess phenomena. What makes you think that the experienced world can be so easily mapped onto the strictures of language?
Not defining a thing is how we understand what we are talking about.

[Daniel1974]

A description of the laws of the universe is an explanation.

If it makes you happy then it is enough.

And due to symmetry, we know that the laws we discover apply not only to our little corner of the galaxy but also to galaxies millions of light years away and probably to the whole universe.

The world is as it is. Laws are human conceits that are imposed on our understanding deducted from observations. There is no such thing as gravity. Gravity is what we call a set of phenomena. Laws are invented, not discovered. ALl good scientists know the difference.

And it wasn't science that gave us the geocentric hypothesis. It was the Church mostly and people being afraid to offer a different explanation for fear of being burned at the stake e.g Gallileo etc.


Wrong. The geocentric hypothesis was with us long before Christianity. It's most accurate expression was provided by Ptolemy in the 1stC AD, nothing whatever to do with the church but everything to do with mathematics and observation; science.
Copernicus - a canon of the Catholic church first provided a heliocentric system to the modern world. Simply, it was not as good a scientific system as Ptolemy's as the it involved using several more epicycles which made prediction more difficult to make. Despite this is served the needs of navigation and astrology for over 1000 years.
Galileo has little to do with this, but was such a braggard and self publicist that the church was felt under attack.
Kepler sorted out the problem by rejecting the scientifically established "truth" of perfect circles which had been borrowed from Aristotle, by using ellipses to describe the motion of the planets. Newton modelled it mathematically , but even he was proved wrong by Einstein.

Science and philosophy were originally the same subject and then science grew out of philosophy and became a different discipline altogether but that was a few centuries ago. The fact that we are having this discussion is further proof that Hawkins was right if you are in fact a philosopher.

Wrong again. The word scientist was only coined as late as the mid 19thC. The separation of philosophy from science is a dangerous flaw in knowledge. Most good scientists have a grounding in philosophy and for good reason. Scientists with no understanding of the philosophical basis of their discipline are doomed to fail. Hawkin is a second rate scientist and has not contributed as much as people think he has. Without philosophy science has no means by which to assess its value and utility. You have only to look at the margins of science to see where it fails. Where does science get its justification; Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Bertrand Russell. These are philosophers.



Regarding Kant, he held that space and time were "a priori" and that our mind supplied these aspects of reality. That seems to fly in the face of Einstein's relativity in which it is demonstrably true that space and time are dependent on our physical circumstances (i.e how fast we are going).

Kant was talking about the means by which we are able to understand the world of perception. He was talking about how we can able to transcend what is basically a subjective experience to seek objective knowledge. But warned that all knowledge so gained can never be complete - the noumenal world can never be known as it is in itself - he was right then and he is still right.
Further - much of science is now confirming the implication of his work - the role of the observer in changing the state of reality.

The faster you go, the slower time goes for you relative to others and vice versa. Space and time are also affected by Mass. How is this possible if space and time are filters for experience that our mind supplies? Why would they change in a precisely measurable way dependent upon our frame of reference?

See above!

I don't blame Kant for being wrong. He was undoubtedly a brillant thinker for his time. He didn't have any modern scientific tools to inform his judgments and I bet that if he were alive today, he would reject/revise his conclusions in "Critique of pure reason".

Do you blame Newton for being wrong? Or Copernicus, or Ptolemy? DO you even recognise that science becomes out of date?

Regarding free will, the fact that philosophers can't even agree upon a definition of what it is says all I need to know about their musings. If you can't define something, then you can't have an intelligible discussion about it.

And what does science have to say about it? Nothing!
Philosophy tells us that language is not capable of hard and fast definitions. Words are approximations by which we are forced to assess phenomena. What makes you think that the experienced world can be so easily mapped onto the strictures of language?
Not defining a thing is how we understand what we are talking about.

[/quote]

So, in response, your counter-arguments can be summed up"

1)Gravity isn't a law of physics. All good scientists know this!
2)The geocentric hypothesis existed before Christianity so the Church should not be blamed for promoting it and squashing anybody who put forward a different point of view.
3)The separation of Philosophy and Science occurred in the 19th century so we should not treat them as separate disciplines. Addendum to this point - Hawkings is a second rate scientist.
4)Kant was talking about what we can objectively know so we should discard the conclusions Einstein comes to about space and time (confirmed by countless OBJECTIVE experiments and NEVER contradicted when it comes to classical physics) that contradict Kant's musings about the nature of these two aspects of reality which he considered to be supplied ONLY by our minds.
5) Science becomes out of date. Am I aware that scientists come up with new theories that refine/refute previous work.
6) Language isn't precise enough to describe the world so we should accept that we can have an intelligible discussion about things we can't define. Oh and science has nothing to say about free will so this means that philosophers random musings about it have value.


When the esteemed physicists Richard Feynman was asked what he thought about philosophy, he answered "pure bullshit". I'm beginning to feel like I should have just accepted his point of view. Where are the real philosophers or do they frequent this board?

[Daniel1974]

Regarding Kant, he held that space and time were "a priori" and that our mind supplied these aspects of reality. That seems to fly in the face of Einstein's relativity

Scientists and clinical researchers like Oliver Sacks have pretty much wrapped-up that the brain produces its own sense of time, not the experience of any objective one that you're apparently ascribing to a non-conscious and non-judgment making world at large. As for commonsense time existing in the relativity scheme, from one of the "superstring" gurus (using the same word of "time" for new or different conceptions doesn't rescue the original):

Brian Green: In day to day life, physicists view time in the same way that everyone else does. And that makes it all the more surprising when we examine how time appears in our current theoretical frameworks, because nowhere in our theories do we see the intuitive notion of time that we all embrace. Nowhere, for example, can we find the theoretical underpinnings for our sense that time flows from one second to the next. Instead, our theories seem to indicate that time doesn't flow --rather, past, present, and future are all there, always, forever frozen in place. --A Conversation With Brian Greene

And a potential subjective contribution to this:

Brian Green: And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization. --The Time We Thought We Knew

As for space: The phenomenal, commonsense space that one experiences is part of the brain's representational processing, not that of an "external" realm (surely only some philosophers are daft enough to believe in non-mediated perception). http://sharp.bu.edu/~slehar/Representationalism.html Considering some of interpretations of QM and theories like the holographic principle sprouting out there, Kant was correct not to dogmatically project naive conceptions of "space" and "time" in his day to a mind-independent existence. http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-hol ... ogram.html

Even the current theoretical contenders and technical descriptions will be revised or discarded in the future of physics. There are few if any perpetual "truths" in science, which would be confusing it with dogmatic metaphysics prior to the epistemological pessimism of Hume and Kant.

I will just say that I think you are misinformed about Oliver Sacks contribution to the argument and leave it at that. If you want to try to expand on your previous statements and explain to me how he has proven that time is a brain dependent phenomen, go ahead.

Regarding, the quote from Brian Green about every moment existing frozen in time, that doesn't support Kant. It actually supports the oppositive view. If events exist externally in the expanse of space and time, that means that space and time are PHYSICAL aspects of the universe that have an objective external existence separate from our minds. Regarding time flowing, that is a separate issue that he was talking about. Later on in the book, he will give you an explanation as to why we feel time flows - entropy. If you keep reading, you will get to this.

Regarding the rest of the quotes you referred to, you seem not really to making an argument other than "We can't know anything for sure and everything keeps getting revised so one argument is as good as the next one". If you really believed this to be true, then you guys wouldn't be so sensitive when scientists try to demote philosophy to the level of literary criticism.

[Daniel1974]

Lets take an example from Brian Greene then since you appear to have read his books and see if we can advance the discussion. In one of the books (can't remember which one), he gives the following example of an experiment done to support the theory of relativity.

Two state of the art clocks were used in this experiment. One was flown around the world in a Concord while the other one remained stationery. When researchers compared the clocks, they found that they were off by precisely the amount of time expected by calculations using special relativity.

Here is direct evidence that time is dependent upon your frame of reference. In addition, it's direct evidence that time is not dependent upon perception and has a separate objectively independent existence since the clocks are not people and are not affected by perception. If time is not a physical aspect of reality and is perception dependent, how do you explain the outcome of this experiment?

[chaz wyman]

Lets take an example from Brian Greene then since you appear to have read his books and see if we can advance the discussion. In one of the books (can't remember which one), he gives the following example of an experiment done to support the theory of relativity.

Two state of the art clocks were used in this experiment. One was flown around the world in a Concord while the other one remained stationery. When researchers compared the clocks, they found that they were off by precisely the amount of time expected by calculations using special relativity.

Here is direct evidence that time is dependent upon your frame of reference. In addition, it's direct evidence that time is not dependent upon perception and has a separate objectively independent existence since the clocks are not people and are not affected by perception. If time is not a physical aspect of reality and is perception dependent, how do you explain the outcome of this experiment?

This is utterly irrelevant. Like I said below, Kant was talking about the means by which we understand and perceive the world. He was not talking about what time depends on, whatever that means.
Your experiment demonstrates that clocks move at different speeds when they travel in different directions.

I've never heard of Brian Greene.

[thalarch]

I will just say

But first, it's "time" to render this sub-topic moot by my not straying into or further accomodating its error. In Kant's critical philosophy, science studies and researches the phenomenal world, not the noumenal world that speculative and dogmatic metaphysics projected doctrines upon (which is the one Kant leaves a blank, neutral placeholder deprived of the Aristotlean categories, time and space, etc.). Alfred Nordmann of the
Darmstadt Technical University expresses this neatly:

"If you want to know what noumena or things-in-themselves are, consider things like atoms or molecules. After all, we cannot directly experience them and yet our phenomenal world of experience is composed of them. This interpretation is obviously incorrect because we formulate and test scientific theories about atoms and molecules. These are therefore objects of knowledge and it was precisely for all objects of knowledge that Kant showed how we constitute them as phenomena in time and space, as subject to causality, etc. As far as science is concerned, atoms and molecules are definitely no things-in-themselves that are unstructured by our minds. As objects of knowledge they come with, they are part and parcel of our theoretical representations."

that I think you are misinformed about Oliver Sacks contribution to the argument and leave it at that. If you want to try to expand on your previous statements and explain to me how he has proven that time is a brain dependent phenomen, go ahead

Among many other sources out there, see Christof Koch's article "The Movie In Our Head" in Scientific American, an issue appearing during 2003 or 2004. Like those of us in everyday life, you seem to be naively projecting the commonsense experience of time associated with the mind/brain upon a materialist model of the external world. That external environment isn't a mind/brain or any Berkeley and post-Kantian god-mind substituting for such. Conscious experiences of objects in space do not manifest for that overall environment; and memory-based judgements of one circumstance being slightly different from another (i.e., the intellectual discerning of changes) is not an ability that environment has which in us leads to a concept of time-flow or a time organization (past, present, future).

Which is to say, surely you don't really believe that in the 18th century Kant was referring to "time" as abstractly conceived or defined in whatever contemporary theory you want to select and rattle like a saber. In the course of such, you would also seem to be granting an ontological status of "certainty" to such a scheme, which is an issue for the continuing realism versus antirealism debate about theories in philosophy of science. If it is not certainty you endorse, then your complaints are groundless, as Kant didn't prohibit either tentative science models about the phenomenal world or metaphysical speculations about the noumenal world --but chiefly the classic dogmatism of metaphysicians proclaiming "I have proved this or that beyond all doubt and revision. Via reason I have achieved ultimate knowledge about ultimate reality! Ho, ho, ho, watch me dance a jig of triumph!".

This aside, or returning briefly to the pretense that physicists are trying to assert some unrevisable truth about the noumenal world, how you then (supposing this is the case) derive the notion that time is therefore a perpetually "done deal" in connection with such territory is unfathomable to me. To wit:

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? 'The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,' says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. 'The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.'

[...] That Rovelli's approach yields the correct probabilities in quantum mechanics seems to justify his intuition that the dynamics of the universe can be described as a network of correlations, rather than as an evolution in time. "Rovelli's work makes the timeless view more believable and more in line with standard physics," says Dean Rickles, a philosopher of physics at the University of Sydney in Australia. With quantum mechanics rewritten in time-free form, combining it with general seems less daunting, and a universe in which time is fundamental seems less likely. --19 January 2008, *New Scientist*;Is time an illusion?

It's probably not healthy for secular people to continue yearning for a substitute god-teat to suckle upon, this historical infatuation with absolute and immutable Authority that lingers. Casting off the Abrahamic deity is only one step in the process of people in the western world growing up, especially if we're going to allow ourselves to be repeatedly yanked back to it in other guises, like a rubber cord strapped to our waists.

[chaz wyman]

I will just say

But first, it's "time" to render this sub-topic moot by my not straying into or further accomodating its error. In Kant's critical philosophy, science studies and researches the phenomenal world, not the noumenal world that speculative and dogmatic metaphysics projected doctrines upon (which is the one Kant leaves a blank, neutral placeholder deprived of the Aristotlean categories, time and space, etc.). Alfred Nordmann of the
Darmstadt Technical University expresses this neatly:

"If you want to know what noumena or things-in-themselves are, consider things like atoms or molecules. After all, we cannot directly experience them and yet our phenomenal world of experience is composed of them. This interpretation is obviously incorrect because we formulate and test scientific theories about atoms and molecules.

No this is exactly correct and very perceptive. Kant would have approved. Whatever way you look at it, atoms and sub atomic particles are just models, and all models are subject to change as we are continually seeing in atomic physics.
Such things are beyond our phenomenal understanding and are imperceptible; against common sense. We can never conceive of a atom which is supposedly empty space with virtually invisible particles. Kant meant exactly this.



These are therefore objects of knowledge and it was precisely for all objects of knowledge that Kant showed how we constitute them as phenomena in time and space, as subject to causality, etc. As far as science is concerned, atoms and molecules are definitely no things-in-themselves that are unstructured by our minds. As objects of knowledge they come with, they are part and parcel of our theoretical representations."

Atoms are exactly things in our minds. This does not mean that they are not part of the external real world, but it does mean that they are conceptualised reality; models by which our understanding of the world is enhanced.

that I think you are misinformed about Oliver Sacks contribution to the argument and leave it at that. If you want to try to expand on your previous statements and explain to me how he has proven that time is a brain dependent phenomen, go ahead

Among many other sources out there, see Christof Koch's article "The Movie In Our Head" in Scientific American, an issue appearing during 2003 or 2004. Like those of us in everyday life, you seem to be naively projecting the commonsense experience of time associated with the mind/brain upon a materialist model of the external world. That external environment isn't a mind/brain or any Berkeley and post-Kantian god-mind substituting for such. Conscious experiences of objects in space do not manifest for that overall environment; and memory-based judgements of one circumstance being slightly different from another (i.e., the intellectual discerning of changes) is not an ability that environment has which in us leads to a concept of time-flow or a time organization (past, present, future).

Which is to say, surely you don't really believe that in the 18th century Kant was referring to "time" as abstractly conceived or defined in whatever contemporary theory you want to select and rattle like a saber. In the course of such, you would also seem to be granting an ontological status of "certainty" to such a scheme, which is an issue for the continuing realism versus antirealism debate about theories in philosophy of science. If it is not certainty you endorse, then your complaints are groundless, as Kant didn't prohibit either tentative science models about the phenomenal world or metaphysical speculations about the noumenal world --but chiefly the classic dogmatism of metaphysicians proclaiming "I have proved this or that beyond all doubt and revision. Via reason I have achieved ultimate knowledge about ultimate reality! Ho, ho, ho, watch me dance a jig of triumph!".

This aside, or returning briefly to the pretense that physicists are trying to assert some unrevisable truth about the noumenal world, how you then (supposing this is the case) derive the notion that time is therefore a perpetually "done deal" in connection with such territory is unfathomable to me. To wit:

Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? 'The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,' says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. 'The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.'

[...] That Rovelli's approach yields the correct probabilities in quantum mechanics seems to justify his intuition that the dynamics of the universe can be described as a network of correlations, rather than as an evolution in time. "Rovelli's work makes the timeless view more believable and more in line with standard physics," says Dean Rickles, a philosopher of physics at the University of Sydney in Australia. With quantum mechanics rewritten in time-free form, combining it with general seems less daunting, and a universe in which time is fundamental seems less likely. --19 January 2008, *New Scientist*;Is time an illusion?

It's probably not healthy for secular people to continue yearning for a substitute god-teat to suckle upon, this historical infatuation with absolute and immutable Authority that lingers. Casting off the Abrahamic deity is only one step in the process of people in the western world growing up, especially if we're going to allow ourselves to be repeatedly yanked back to it in other guises, like a rubber cord strapped to our waists.