Malgrat Hawking, la filosofia encara no ha mort.
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| Stephen Hawking |
This view has significant support among philosophers
in the English-speaking world. Bristol philosopher James Ladyman, who
argues that metaphysics should be naturalised, and who describes the
accusation of "scientism" as "badge of honour", is by no means an isolated case.
But
there could not be a worse time for philosophers to surrender the baton
of metaphysical inquiry to physicists. Fundamental physics is in a
metaphysical mess and needs help. The attempt to reconcile its two big
theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for
nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory,
are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work
with them. This is well known. A better-kept secret is that at the
heart of quantum mechanics
is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising
ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently
demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and
confirmed quantum theory should be impossible. Oxford philosopher of
physics David Wallace has argued that this threatens to make quantum
mechanics incoherent which can be remedied only by vastly multiplying
worlds.
Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of
physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit
consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with
activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no
way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed
to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming
majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics
does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to
material objects (such as physicists).
And then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin's recent book, Time Reborn,
links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the
fundamental reality of time. Physics is predisposed to lose time because
its mathematical gaze freezes change. Tensed time, the difference
between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared
future, is particularly elusive. This worried Einstein: in a famous
conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, "now", lay
"just outside of the realm of science".
Recent attempts to explain
how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on questionable
notions such as spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, the notion
of gravity as negative energy, and the inexplicable free gift of the
laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal
conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They
demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the
invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are
conducted. We need to step back from the mathematics to see how we got
to where we are now. In short, to un-take much that is taken for
granted.
Perhaps even more important, we should reflect on how a
scientific image of the world that relies on up to 10 dimensions of
space and rests on ideas, such as fundamental particles, that have
neither identity nor location, connects with our everyday experience.
This should open up larger questions, such as the extent to which
mathematical portraits capture the reality of our world – and what we
mean by "reality". The dismissive "Just shut up and calculate!" to those
who are dissatisfied with the incomprehensibility of the physicists'
picture of the universe is simply inadequate. "It is time" physicist Neil Turok
has said, "to connect our science to our humanity, and in doing so to
raise the sights of both". This sounds like a job for a philosophy not
yet dead.
Raymond Tallis, Philosophy isn't dead yet, The Guardian, 27/05/2013
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