It just pushes the question further. The essential issue with inference is “why should the universe be so nicely well-behaved and have regular properties?”. Bayesian probability theory assumes it makes sense to e.g. assign a fixed probability to the belief that swans are white based on a certain amount of swans that we’ve seen being white, which already bakes in assumptions like e.g. that the swans don’t suddenly change colour, or that there is a finite amount of them and you’re sampling them in a reasonably random manner. Basically, “the universe does not fuck with us”. If the universe did fuck with us, empirical inquiry would be a hopeless endeavour. And you can’t really prove for sure that it doesn’t.
The strongest argument in favour of the universe really being so nice IMO is an anthropic/evolutionary one. Intelligence is the ability to pattern-match and perform inference. This ability only confers a survival advantage in a world that is reasonably well-behaved (e.g. constant rules in space and time). Hence the existence of intelligent beings at all in a world is in itself an update towards that world having sane rules. If the rules did not exist or were too chaotic to be understood and exploited, intelligence would only be a burden.
I might have an unusual preference here, but I find the “why” question uninteresting.
It’s fundamentally non-exploitable, in a sense that I do not see any advantage to be gained from knowing the answer (not a straightforward /empirical way of finding which one out of the variants I should pay attention to).
Oh, I mean, I agree. I’m not asking “why” really. I think in the end “I will assume empiricism works because if it doesn’t then the fuck am I gonna do about it” is as respectable a reason to just shrug off the induction problem as they come. It is in fact the reason why I get so annoyed when certain philosophers faff about how ignorant scientists are for not asking the questions in the first place. We asked the questions, we found as useful an answer as you can hope for, now we’re asking more interesting questions. Thinking harder won’t make answers to unsolvable questions pop out of nowhere, and in practice, every human being lives accordingly to an implicit belief in empiricism anyway. You couldn’t do anything if you couldn’t rely on some basic constant functionality of the universe. So there’s only people who accept this condition and move on and people who believe they can somehow think it away and have failed one way or another for the last 2500 years at least. At some point, you gotta admit you likely won’t do much better than the previous fellows.
Do you have any examples of the “certain philosophers” that you mentioned? I’ve often heard of such people described that way, but I can’t think of anyone who’s insulted scientists for assuming e.g. causality is real.
For example there’s recently been a controversy adjacent to this topic on Twitter involving one Philip Goff (philosopher) who started feuding over it with Sabine Hossenfelder (physicist, albeit with some controversial opinions). Basically Hossenfelder took up an instrumentalist position of “I don’t need to assume that things described in the models we use are real in whatever sense you care to give to the word, I only need to know that those models’ predictions fit reality” and Goff took issue with how she was brushing away the ontological aspects. Several days of extremely silly arguments about whether electrons exist followed. To me Hossenfelder’s position seemed entirely reasonable, and yes, a philosophical one, but she never claimed otherwise. But Goff and other philosophers’ position seemed to be “the scientists are ignorant of philosophy of science, if only they knew more about it, they would be far less certain about their intuitions on this stuff!” and I can’t understand how they can be so confident about that or in what way would that precisely impact the scientists’ actual work. Whether electrons “exist” in some sense or they are just a convenient mathematical fiction doesn’t really matter a lot to a physicist’s work (after all, electrons are nothing but quantized fluctuations of a quantum field, just like phonons are quantized fluctuations of an elastic deformation field; yet people probably feel intuitively that electrons “exist” a lot more than phonons, despite them being essentially the same sort of mathematical object. So maybe our intuitions about existence are just crude and don’t well describe the stuff that goes on at the very edge of matter).
I see. Yes, “philosophy” often refers to particular academic subcultures, with people who do their philosophy for a living as “philosophers” (Plato had a better name for these people). I misread your comment at first and thought it was the “philosopher” who was arguing for the instrumentalist view, since that seems like their more stereotypical way of thinking and deconstructing things (whereas the more grounded physicist would just say “yes, you moron, electrons exist. next question.”).
From the discussion it seemed that most physicists do take the realist view on electrons, but in general the agreement was that either view works and there’s not a lot to say about it past acknowledging what everyone’s favorite interpretation is. A question that can have no definite answer isn’t terribly interesting.
It just pushes the question further. The essential issue with inference is “why should the universe be so nicely well-behaved and have regular properties?”. Bayesian probability theory assumes it makes sense to e.g. assign a fixed probability to the belief that swans are white based on a certain amount of swans that we’ve seen being white, which already bakes in assumptions like e.g. that the swans don’t suddenly change colour, or that there is a finite amount of them and you’re sampling them in a reasonably random manner. Basically, “the universe does not fuck with us”. If the universe did fuck with us, empirical inquiry would be a hopeless endeavour. And you can’t really prove for sure that it doesn’t.
The strongest argument in favour of the universe really being so nice IMO is an anthropic/evolutionary one. Intelligence is the ability to pattern-match and perform inference. This ability only confers a survival advantage in a world that is reasonably well-behaved (e.g. constant rules in space and time). Hence the existence of intelligent beings at all in a world is in itself an update towards that world having sane rules. If the rules did not exist or were too chaotic to be understood and exploited, intelligence would only be a burden.
I might have an unusual preference here, but I find the “why” question uninteresting.
It’s fundamentally non-exploitable, in a sense that I do not see any advantage to be gained from knowing the answer (not a straightforward /empirical way of finding which one out of the variants I should pay attention to).
Oh, I mean, I agree. I’m not asking “why” really. I think in the end “I will assume empiricism works because if it doesn’t then the fuck am I gonna do about it” is as respectable a reason to just shrug off the induction problem as they come. It is in fact the reason why I get so annoyed when certain philosophers faff about how ignorant scientists are for not asking the questions in the first place. We asked the questions, we found as useful an answer as you can hope for, now we’re asking more interesting questions. Thinking harder won’t make answers to unsolvable questions pop out of nowhere, and in practice, every human being lives accordingly to an implicit belief in empiricism anyway. You couldn’t do anything if you couldn’t rely on some basic constant functionality of the universe. So there’s only people who accept this condition and move on and people who believe they can somehow think it away and have failed one way or another for the last 2500 years at least. At some point, you gotta admit you likely won’t do much better than the previous fellows.
Do you have any examples of the “certain philosophers” that you mentioned? I’ve often heard of such people described that way, but I can’t think of anyone who’s insulted scientists for assuming e.g. causality is real.
For example there’s recently been a controversy adjacent to this topic on Twitter involving one Philip Goff (philosopher) who started feuding over it with Sabine Hossenfelder (physicist, albeit with some controversial opinions). Basically Hossenfelder took up an instrumentalist position of “I don’t need to assume that things described in the models we use are real in whatever sense you care to give to the word, I only need to know that those models’ predictions fit reality” and Goff took issue with how she was brushing away the ontological aspects. Several days of extremely silly arguments about whether electrons exist followed. To me Hossenfelder’s position seemed entirely reasonable, and yes, a philosophical one, but she never claimed otherwise. But Goff and other philosophers’ position seemed to be “the scientists are ignorant of philosophy of science, if only they knew more about it, they would be far less certain about their intuitions on this stuff!” and I can’t understand how they can be so confident about that or in what way would that precisely impact the scientists’ actual work. Whether electrons “exist” in some sense or they are just a convenient mathematical fiction doesn’t really matter a lot to a physicist’s work (after all, electrons are nothing but quantized fluctuations of a quantum field, just like phonons are quantized fluctuations of an elastic deformation field; yet people probably feel intuitively that electrons “exist” a lot more than phonons, despite them being essentially the same sort of mathematical object. So maybe our intuitions about existence are just crude and don’t well describe the stuff that goes on at the very edge of matter).
I see. Yes, “philosophy” often refers to particular academic subcultures, with people who do their philosophy for a living as “philosophers” (Plato had a better name for these people). I misread your comment at first and thought it was the “philosopher” who was arguing for the instrumentalist view, since that seems like their more stereotypical way of thinking and deconstructing things (whereas the more grounded physicist would just say “yes, you moron, electrons exist. next question.”).
From the discussion it seemed that most physicists do take the realist view on electrons, but in general the agreement was that either view works and there’s not a lot to say about it past acknowledging what everyone’s favorite interpretation is. A question that can have no definite answer isn’t terribly interesting.