Reddit mentions of Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized

Being an atheist doesn't come close to answering metaphysical questions? How do you explain work like https://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199573093 which posit natural metaphysics?

Dennett's "Real Patterns" is a great place to start, and one of the cleanest presentations of the position I've come across. Lots of the literature on ontic structural realism (e.g. Every Thing Must Go) consists largely in a development of that idea, too.

Very briefly, the position is that there's no meaningful distinction between a "thing" and "the information content of a thing." Everything that we take to be a concrete particular can be equally well understood as a pattern in the time-evolution of some other stuff (which in turn can also be understood as patterns in other stuff). There are no fundamental objects: it's patterns all the way down.

In addition to the historical perspective provided by /u/Luolang, there are antimetaphysical trends in more recent literature as well. (I've heard tell that the authors of the former misinterpret the latter, but it's anti-(analytic) metaphysics either way so I include it here).

e: Additionally, of course, there are also the sceptical philosophers of history, people like Pyrrho, Arcesilaus, Carneades, Sextus Empiricus, who to varying degrees made arguments against the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever (sometimes even the knowledge that one cannot have any genuine knowledge), not just metaphysics.

Thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger are also anti-metaphysics, at least ostensibly, but not really in the way you mean, so I won't go into detail here without prompting.

Its bad reputation amongst scientists is probably due to ignorance more than anything else (I don't say that to diss scientists. Lots of philosophers, likewise, don't know much about science beyond the basics.)

As for the science-heavy philosophers (that is, philosophers who try to engage heavily with empirical science in their work), its bad reputation is due to a variety of factors. You can get a taste by reading a few pages of the first chapter of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199573093#reader_0199573093

I think it's important to keep in mind order of explanation: it's not clear to me that, say, having greater knowledge of science leads to having a lower opinion of analytic metaphysics. Rather, I suspect that the reason "science-heavy philosophers" become science-heavy philosophers is because they are antecedently skeptical of the value of metaphysical inquiries that don't engage heavily with the sciences.

I mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_field_theory

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/#Field

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/#OntStrReaOSR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics

http://www.amazon.com/Every-Thing-Must-Metaphysics-Naturalized/dp/0199573093/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456405155&sr=1-2&keywords=everything+must+go+science

https://www.amazon.com/Bit-Physics-Information-Frontiers-Collection/dp/3319129457/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1465986246&sr=1-1&keywords=it+from+bit

Not that wikipedia is a good source, but it actually explains modern quantum field theory pretty well in the first few sentences. Which is good for context before moving into sep articles. In short, particles aren't tiny balls like people thought 150 years ago. Fundamental particles don't have size at all, but are points. Their only properties are effectively describable as something like data or information. The basic thing in existence is "fields" which are universe wide systems of interaction, and energy is basically just something a field is doing in a specific place. Fundamental particles are just a special excited energy state. Whats more, you can't really think of the information in the place as a distinct "thing" since it only exists in relation as a system.

Of curse the fact that they have no size is no problem for us. Because they can still be distances apart form each-other and relate in ways that add up to structure. And the field and energy is more structure itself rather than a "thing" because its all just a system of relations. Energy is just "capacity to do work." Yet is also the fundamental thing that exists in fields. Which sounds abstract until you begin thinking of it as information or data. And so this "capacity" is an abstraction that can be in a specific place. Since things change based on what is around them (gravity, etc) its even hypothesized that every point in space theoretically has information about everything else in the universe in it.

Physicalism is the generic modern term to replace the term materialism, but the more important term is ontic structural realism. Which is basically the position of taking physics as it is and saying that what it tells us is true. Which at this point means that all that exists is "structure" instead of matter. The term matter is only used now to refer to things that structurally add up to molecules and so then act like what classical matter was thought to. So it is a construct we use to make sense of the world, rather than anything real. Since to the chemist these abstract differences about molecular physics don't matter much to a to of macro scale practice.

Note of course that there's ambiguity here. The only properties fundamental things have are something like data or information. But is this information the same thing as what we normally use the word information to refer to in physics? Is it something else? Are these properties literally nothing but mathematical properties, or are they only isomorphic to them in some way? Is what we see something that exhausts existence, or is it an unfolded version of a more fundamental existence as in the physicist bohm's idea of implicate and explicate order? The truth is that there's more or less an absolute limit on our ability to answer some of these questions with pure science, because past a certain level, we can only get information about things indirectly. We don't even know why chemical structure is able to exist despite violating some of the principles of quantum physics. Since electrons shouldn't really be acting in the ways they seem to in electron bonds, and we can only see what's happening indirectly due to inability to directly see things on that scale. All of reality emerges from things we can only see indirectly, and so there's a limit to what we can say about it. After all, how can you "see" something that has no size?

---

Also, this is unrelated but there's many metaphysical questions that still exist despite science. Metaphysics isn't an alternate way to find things out from science. Its trying to answer slightly different questions, but with overlap in the middle on ones that both contribute to. For instance, philosophy of identity is something that science can help, but which also needs more work beyond just describing science.

Everything must go by Ian Ladyman and Don Ross might also interest you.

Wow, that's a pretty good explanation of my reasoning. Do you have any modern and accessible philosophy of science you'd recommend? Pretty much the only stuff I've come across is /r/atheism-style naive Popper. I'd also be curious to see what you have to say about this book. I haven't read it, but I watched a talk based on it, and it looked pretty interesting.

Well, the truth of the matter is the question of the limitations of human reason to grasp knowledge of what is real is a very old one going back as far as the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1781 and has gone through a lot of radical development since then. In NDT's defense, this is a hard question of contemporary philosophers working in epistemology today, let alone an astrophysicist working on other matters.

In my opinion, I think Tyson comes from a generation of scientists who have, for understandable reasons, become exhausted with talk of the philosophical foundations of science. About a century ago, which is not long ago as for philosophical progress, the dominant view in what would come to be called philosophy of science was to rid science of any sort of metaphysical propositions. By metaphysical propositions, I don't mean the kind of pop-metaphysics of energy crystals and auras but claims about reality itself, such as "everything which exists reduces to particles," which they believed weren't wrong, just lacking any cognitive meaning.

When this view, called logical positivism, failed to achieve its goals for various reasons as well as a number of crippling critiques from the following generation of philosophers, I'd surmise that this generation of scientists, beginning in the 1960's, had become exhausted with all the philosophy talk and settled for some kind of "shut up and do science" mentality with elements of positivism, Karl Popper's falsification, and such like we find in Richard Feynman. This is the generation I think Tyson sympathizes with.

That said, I'm hopeful that the latest generation of scientists are more open to philosophical investigation of the epistemological and metaphysical commitments or foundations of science. A great book to pick up toward this end, though of course difficult philosophy, is Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.


(note that these are broad strokes and speculation of a philosophy graduate which may not be 100% historically accurate but I figured interesting enough to share)

Eliminative materialism is, to be frank, just insane.

Much more consistent application of the Razor is the view that Every Thing Must Go.

I'd like to add to the list of sweeping assumptions also the credo of existential quantification that "There exists a thing (empty set or sumfink)".