Timeline for What is information?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 8, 2021 at 16:11 | comment | added | Hypnosifl | @CriglCragl - I don't take Feynman to be attacking all philosophy in those quotes, just a type of philosophy which seeks to find some "intrinsic nature" to physical entities independent of their mathematical relations given by the laws of physics. Structural realism is a philosophical view which rejects any such notion of intrinsic non-relational essences, and Sean Carroll seems favorably inclined to it, see his discussion with James Ladyman who advocates this view. | |
| Jun 8, 2021 at 11:13 | comment | added | Bell App Lab | It seems to me that science has stumbled upon - more than once - this large blob of stuff and called it information. It’s very opaque and we have no clue what it does. If philosophy is a toolbox, than we might as well pull it out and start probing. We mess around with it, conjecture, poke it with a philosophical stick to see what it does. Maybe we never arrive at what exactly it is (most of science and philosophy never seem to “arrive” anywhere), but we learn something and make some progress. | |
| Jun 8, 2021 at 7:49 | comment | added | nir | @CriglCragl, I am allergic to philosophers or lovers of philosophy (lovers of love of wisdom) who utter such statements as "Feynman seems disingenuous..." - though he did not pull punches at philosophy either. In my opinion he was far more thoughtful and philosophical than most philosophers out there. What he says about Energy and electrical forces is quite deep and definitely not merely in the spirit of "shut up and calculate". Acknowledging the limits of what we know and the difference between our mathematical theories of nature and nature itself is too often overlooked by philosophers. | |
| Jun 7, 2021 at 23:34 | comment | added | CriglCragl | @BellAppLab: It's no good to frame philosophy as just entertaining speculation. It's a toolbox, not a set of answers. And we need it wherever we have to check things fit into our wider picture, check definitions & assumptions, or hunt for leads when a field has a dead end - QM is a great example, renormalisation is an embarrassment, an obvious hack, and integrating gravity will clearly require a total rethink. Foundations of QM is cool again, rather than a career-killer. Philosophy as 'Why ask why?': philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/79366/… | |
| Jun 7, 2021 at 23:22 | comment | added | CriglCragl | I like Sean Carroll's defence of philosophy in physics. Feynman seems disingenuous in these examples. Energy is about continuous symmetry relations that give locally conserved quantities, surely. We have a more general paradigm to set it in. And sure that explanation of Newton's law of gravity didn't work, but the dissatisfaction with action-at-a-distance proved well-founded. The Dirac Sea isn't considered real now, but it got us antiparticles - and pseudoparticles like holes in semiconductors or phonons are treated as real. 'Why?' is like a compression algorithm, digesting knowledge. | |
| Jun 7, 2021 at 20:52 | comment | added | hide_in_plain_sight | @cmaster-reinstatemonica. I don't need more information than someone else to answer questions they don't. I just need to have the same information, and a different set of standards. As much of the information scientists have is avaialbe to philophers, as philosophers choose to make use of. | |
| Jun 7, 2021 at 20:44 | comment | added | Bell App Lab | I read somewhere (most likely on this very PSE) that there’s only a handful of things that philosophy can really attest, and one of them is that we exist. And that’s it. The rest is pretty much conjecture and still up for debate. I found that very insightful and beautiful. But conjecturing is still fun though, isn’t it? | |
| Jun 7, 2021 at 20:18 | comment | added | cmaster - reinstate monica | @BellAppLab If philosophy ventures to explain the "whys" that physicists can't answer, it fully enters the domain of many meaningless, though possibly beautiful words, imho. A philosopher has no more information than scientists have, and if they enter the realm of the untestable (which every good scientist is strict to avoid), the result is invariably hot air at best, and about as valuable as Donald Trump claiming something to be a fact. What they say might be wrong, or it might even be right, but the fact that they say it is not correlated with whether it's true or not. | |
| Jun 6, 2021 at 16:08 | comment | added | Hypnosifl | Feynman argues against the general idea that physicists should try to figure out what any physics concept "really is" in non-mathematical terms, or that we need a conceptualizable "mechanism" to explain a mathematical law, see ch. 2 of The Character of Physical Law, "The Relation of Mathematics to Physics." He gives an example of a failed attempt to "explain" Newton's law in terms of little particles filling space which are at lower pressure between massive bodies, shows why it doesn't work, and then says that the more we investigate nature the more we fail to get anything but abstract math. | |
| Jun 6, 2021 at 9:33 | comment | added | Bell App Lab | Thank you for transcribing that excerpt from the video. That is a very powerful anecdote - I didn't expect any less from Feynman. It is said that science deals with the "hows" but not the "whys" and I understand that. However, isn't it the job of philosophy to delve in the "whys"? In other words, can it be the case that we are lacking a Philosophy of Information as a field of enquiry? | |
| Jun 6, 2021 at 8:50 | history | answered | nir | CC BY-SA 4.0 |