FQXi

The intentions behind FQXi and their essay competition on the nature time are great, but disappointingly, the essays submitted so far mostly seem to be, erm, bizarre. Of course, I’m judging only by the abstracts, but I’m highly disinclined to bother reading any paper with an abstract that mentions ‘free will’ or ‘consciousness’.

The forums in FQXi have been inching in the crackpot-tish direction since their inception, which is sad.

What not to put in your graduate prospectus

A dead person in your staff list (scroll down to “Other senior members of the University with philosophical interests”).

Taking physics seriously, again

Came across the following, from a book that sounds similar to Maudlin’s The Metaphysics Within Physics:

Consider also Lewis’s discussion of the distinction between internal and external relations in his (1986). He asks us at one point to ‘consider a (classical) hydrogen atom, which consists of an electron orbiting a proton at a certain distance’ (62). There are not, nor were there ever, any ‘classical hydrogen atoms’. At the same time that physicists came to believe in protons, they also became aware that the laws of classical mechanics could not apply to electrons orbiting them. Indeed the notion of an electronic orbit has about as much relation to the common-sense notion of an orbit as the mathematical notion of compactness has to the everyday notion of compactness, which is to say hardly any. Lewis thus encourages his readers to think that his metaphysics is addressed to the scientific image rather than the manifest one, but he gives the game away because ‘classical’ here means nothing other than ‘commonsensical’. Note that we are not arguing that what Lewis goes on to do with his account of internal and external relations is affected one way or the other by how he chooses to introduce the distinction; he could of course have used another example. Our point is that the rhetorical effect of his fictitious example is to suggest that his metaphysics has something to do with science when it does not.

When it comes to debates about the nature of matter in contemporary metaphysics it tends to be assumed that there are two possibilities: either there are atoms in the sense of partless particles, or there is ‘gunk’ in the sense of matter whose every part has proper parts (infinitely divisible matter). This debate is essentially being conducted in the same terms as it was by the pre-Socratic philosophers among whom the atomists were represented by Democritus and the gunkists by Anaxagoras. In early modern philosophy Boyle, Locke and Gassendi lined up for atomism against gunkists Descartes and Leibniz. It is preposterous that in spite of the developments in the scientific understanding of matter that have occurred since then, contemporary metaphysicians blithely continue to suppose that the dichotomy between atoms and gunk remains relevant, and that it can be addressed a priori. Precisely what physics has taught us is that matter in the sense of extended stuff is an emergent phenomenon that has no counterpart in fundamental ontology. Both the atoms in the void and the plenum conceptions of the world are attempts to engage in metaphysical theorizing on the basis of extending the manifest image. That metaphysicians continue to regard the world as a spatial manifold comprising material objects that must either have smallest spatial parts or be made of infinitely divisible matter is symptomatic of their failure to escape the confines of the domestic realm.

Browsing the book through Amazon reveals many other similarly juicy passages, but I have not the patience to type out more excerpts.

(I have been reading too much contemporary metaphysics lately and was getting somewhat frustrated with it.)