Does Philosophy Help Science? | Episode 1612 | Closer To Truth

I love truth, real truth. I loathe feel-good truth. That's why I love science, because science has real truth. Of course, scientific truth is not perfect, not permanent, not immediate, and not necessarily Big Truth with a capital T. Science does not deliver meaning-of-life truth, but science is always getting, well, closer to truth. While science is humanity's transcending achievement, science as a way of thinking is an evolving enterprise. What makes science work? What constitutes good science? What are the boundaries of science? How deep can science dig into the foundations of the world? These are the kinds of questions that philosophy of science asks. But why do some scientists dismiss philosophy as archaic, a hindrance to science, a nuisance? Can philosophy help science? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and Closer to Truth is my journey to find out. If philosophy can help science, by what capacities could it do so? Improve the scientific method? Facilitate scientific interpretation, implications, meaning? A philosophy of something seeks to uncover conceptual bedrock, reveal deepest reality. But can philosophy of science do this? What do scientists think of philosophy? There are different opinions, of course. I begin with one of the world's most esteemed scientists, a Nobel laureate in physics whom I've come to respect for his deep understanding of how the world works, Steven Weinberg. Steve, what do you think of philosophy? Well, I used to be very enthusiastic about studying philosophy. I had a minor in philosophy as an undergraduate. But, you know, science, particularly physics, for me, is so much more predictive and capable of having real success and real failure. In physics, you can often have the healthy experience of being found to be simply wrong about something. And I don't know how often philosophers have that healthy experience. How often has a philosopher published an article in which he said, I've decided I've been wrong about the nature of truth, or something like that. So, there's a crispness to physics which I find lacking in philosophy. On the other hand, philosophers, I think, understand this, and they would argue that that's not their job, to calculate things, or to predict things, or to answer questions. Their job is to ask deep questions, and I have to agree with that. But the questions they ask don't really seem to me to be helpful in physics. For instance, there's a tremendous philosophical concern about the nature of truth, the nature of reality. People in everyday life use concepts like truth and reality in a useful way. I mean, they deal with those concepts. They say, well, it's true the newspaper wasn't delivered today, and the cause of it was the newspaper deliverer was overslept, and I really hope it'll be delivered tomorrow. The use of truth and reality and cause and so on in science seems to me not different in any philosophically relevant way from their use in everyday life. And since we're comfortable with these concepts in everyday life, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be comfortable with them in science. To Steve, science operates by common sense concepts, and philosophy's only meaningful contribution to science is to refute other, more obstructionist, time-wasting philosophies. The counterclaim, of course, is that this argument by itself is a philosophical argument, and hence, self-refuting. I'm conflicted. On the one hand, Steve makes sense, and the counterclaim seems a bit glib. On the other hand, I remain unsatisfied. The world is wondrous with ever deeper levels of reality, and I am just not sure that science, at least as we know it, can get at the deep and most general features of the world. I ask a polymath scientist, an expert in physics, cosmology, biology, and astrobiology, and who doesn't fear disruptive ideas, Paul Davies. Paul, philosophy came before science, and today, some scientists would say that the only purpose of good philosophy is to keep all the rest of philosophy away from science. How do you see the relationship between science and philosophy? Well, it's an uneasy relationship, and you're quite right that philosophers have had something of a bad press in the scientific community. They're regarded as sort of meddlers and also as people who nitpick about minor points of detail or meaning, and that science is a sort of rough-and-ready enterprise in which we sort of charge ahead based on a mixture of intuition and luck and a whole lot of other things. And sure, the philosophers can come through afterwards and clean up the mess and maybe write the textbooks and present it to the public, but they have no business at the cutting edge of science. So I think that's a bit unfair. You're quite right, if you look back historically, that most of the things that now occupy scientists were once part of philosophy. The nature of space and time is a good one. It's now part of the theory of relativity. The nature of matter, well, that's now particle physics and so on. And the question is, is there still something in the realm of philosophy that they're preparing the ground for the next generation of scientists to look at? And there certainly are such things. For example, the mind-body problem, the nature of mind, its relationship to matter. It's a total mess in science. Of course, we've got the neuroscientists. They're doing heroic work in figuring out what's going on in the brain, but that's really not getting to the heart of the matter of the nature of consciousness. And philosophers have had 3,000 years to ponder that, and so we have a sort of prepared position, or at least a shopping list of possibilities against which to carry out our work in that area. I tend to get on very well with philosophers because I find them very useful people to talk to because they can often clarify my own arguments, even if I'm using them only as a sounding board. I'll give you a very good example of that, and I have derived great benefit from my early exposure to philosophers of the nature of time. And my scientific colleagues are awfully sloppy in the way they talk about time because they continually talk about time flowing, the passage of time, and so on. Philosophers will tell you that these are meaningless concepts and they just muddle the thinking, and so people confuse the asymmetry of the world in time, often called the arrow of time, with the psychological impression of the flow of time, which we have, and it belongs to neuroscience, not to physics. And I've known some very distinguished physicists get totally muddled because they are conflating these two completely distinct concepts. The philosophers cleaned that up 100 years ago. Another area that philosophers deal with in science is the nature of physical law. And some philosophers, the radical empiricists, would say there is no law, there are not even regularities, there are just observations that you can do on a continuing basis, and we can never really get down very far. What do you think of that? I'm pleased you've raised this subject because it's dear to my heart. So, most of my colleagues who work in fundamental physics and cosmology think of the laws of physics as eternal, immutable, transcendent, perfect mathematical relationships. They're sort of out there in some platonic realm and they're absolutely precise. If you say, well, maybe the laws are a bit sloppy, there's wiggle room, that's horror, shock horror, that they are perfect mathematical forms because we can never test that. They want these laws to be transcendent because they want the laws to explain the coming into being of the universe. If you say, well, the laws of physics came into being along with the universe but didn't somehow logically or in some temporal sense precede it, then the package of marvels, the laws and the universe just popping into being for no reason looks very alarming. So, there is this tendency among my colleagues to think of these laws as already existing, having, as a philosopher might say, ontological status, that they are the bedrock of reality, these laws, and that the actual universe that is described by those laws is contingent upon them. I've changed my point of view on that. You know, I think this dualism that was, goes back to Newton at least, of separating our description of the world into timeless, immutable laws and changing contingent states of the world, it's about time we abandoned that dualism. So, I'm exploring the idea that the laws and the states of the world could be coupled together, that the laws are not immutable. They, some people say maybe the laws change with time. I think that's a bad way of looking at it. They could change with the state of the world. And so, that opens up all sorts of new possibilities which we haven't explored yet. ♪ Paul raises the big questions, time, laws, consciousness, and shows how each depends on a philosophical analysis. I pursue one of them, consciousness, as a test case, to discern whether philosophy can enhance science. Is appreciating philosophy essential for doing science? No. Is appreciating philosophy helpful for comprehending science? Here I speak with a scientist who was appointed as Professor of Neuroscience and Philosophy at the University of London, Colin Blakemore. Colin is a neuroscientist, an expert on visual cognition and neuroplasticity. Why is he also a philosopher? I start with the nature of philosophy. What's the aim of philosophy? And it is, I think, to explore the nature of ideas, platonic notion, and the origin of those ideas and the distinction between truth and falsehood. So, it focuses on many different issues. First of all, on the clarity of argument, rational philosophy and logic, on how to discover facts through thinking and reasoning. And that, of course, is an area where science has very significantly extended the kinds of questions that can be asked, instead of sitting in an armchair reflecting on what might be the case. You can go out and, you know, look under a microscope or perform an experiment of some sort. There's a big overlap, of course, between physics and mathematics and philosophy, which is well established. I think what we're seeing now is the invasion of philosophical territory by many, many other areas of science, but most particularly by neuroscience. Some philosophers have found this very threatening and retreat, I think, to, as it were, philosophical diktats, claims of territory, areas that science will never invade, often resorting to sort of Wittgensteinian arguments about the significance of language, of words. Other philosophers are playing the game and see the potential for essentially creating a new form of philosophy and certainly adding to the richness of neuroscience by posing kinds of questions that perhaps people with a biological or medical background might not think of posing. What are some of those? Well, of course, consciousness and how it works is a very obvious one. The nature of knowledge, what it means to say that you've proven something by an experiment. Can we ever really prove ideas? Is there such a thing as truth and falsehood? Are ideas right and wrong? So I see a very rich possibility of interaction, which will certainly not just be one way, not just neuroscience invading more and more of philosophy. Well, I think many philosophers will accept the reality of neuroscience, but there are many scientists, not just neuroscientists, physicists too, who just think philosophy is an archaic burden. It may have been what gave rise to science, but it is now the old generation who will and should die. Well, it is interesting, but, you know, we have this subject called philosophy of science, a very respectable academic discipline. There are professorships and students take it and so on. There's very little interaction between the philosophy of science and active scientists. It's curious, really. I mean, it is telling and worrying. I mean, one problem is territoriality. Another is that, you know, it's just a whole lot of other stuff to get your head around. It's difficult enough to keep up with science if you're told that there are other disciplines that you're going to attend, how you do or understand science. That's tough going. So, a lot of the difficulty on both sides, the sort of jousting between science and philosophy has to do with them wanting to maintain some sort of territorial control and also not being willing to face the challenge of understanding the huge background of knowledge and literature and so on, on both sides, which need to be appreciated before there could be a real dialogue. But it's asymmetrical because I think most philosophers agree they need to understand science, but it's not clear that most scientists think they need to understand philosophy. I think you're right, yeah. And I would disagree with that profoundly. You would disagree. Absolutely. I think philosophy helps to sharpen the way in which questions are asked, enables scientists to do something they should really do, which is to rank the importance and the significance of the questions that they ask, to distinguish the big questions from the trivial ones. Philosophy helps a great deal with that, particularly in the area that I'm especially interested in, which is epistemology, theory of knowledge, how we actually gain our knowledge of the world, what matters. You know, if the great empirical philosophers, you know, Berkeley, Hume, and so on, had had microelectrodes, they would have been neuroscientists, no doubt about it, because the kinds of issues that they were thinking about, how do brains capture ideas and knowledge, are exactly the kinds of things that neuroscientists are interested in. So, tell me what kind of progress you would like to see in epistemology. Well, the one obvious question is how objects and things are recognized for their own integrity, their own value, how they're labeled and described. How does the neutral image falling on the retina become parsed and interpreted by the brain in terms of objects and significances attached to them? I mean, our knowledge of the world is largely that. What are things, what threats and opportunities do they pose for us? Those are big epistemological questions, and neuroscience can address those. They become computational questions rather than just philosophical questions. But then reflect back on the philosophy. And do you see an iterative process where that would help clarify that data coming in would enable the philosopher to ask more precise questions? Well, exactly. So, philosophers, for instance, have been very interested in, I mean, Descartes, for instance, was very interested in the figments of vision, the false interpretations, seeing faces in the flames of a fire or something like this, and thinking there might be something almost magical about that. Well, we can now give interpretive explanations of those sorts of phenomena in terms of brain processes, bringing together, you know, important philosophical problems with an understanding of how the brain works. Colin calls for science and philosophy to stop the territorial jousting so that each can learn from the other. That sounds sensible. So, why won't some scientists waste their time? And why do some philosophers feel unappreciated? Is neuroscience a new term in the philosophy-science equation? Can neuroscience mediate, catalyze harmony? Some scientists expect that neuroscience will reduce all philosophical issues to neural events in the brain. Some philosophers expect that when neuroscience fails to explain consciousness, the failure will reaffirm the relevance of philosophy. But in the end, do scientists need philosophers? I meet an MIT professor working on the frontiers of computational complexity in quantum computers, Scott Aaronson. One could be forgiven for calling Scott a kind of philosopher. The world needs good philosophers. If for no other reason than to refute the bad philosophers. Right, it's the same reason why we need soldiers, we need lawyers. Even in the age of science, you know, philosophy does play a very important role in helping to clarify concepts. I go every year or two to meetings where I talk to professional philosophers and I find that they're, you know, often they actually listen to you much more carefully than your fellow scientists do. They're really good at spotting imprecision in language or unstated assumptions, things of that kind. Now, at the same time, I also think it's true that the critique of philosophy is that, you know, it doesn't really make progress, right? It just goes around in circles. You know, and that does have some truth to it. But I think that there is a sort of philosophical progress which is possible and which is wonderful when it happens. And this is that we can often sort of identify some aspect of a philosophical question that can actually be addressed using math or using science. And then we can just sort of break it off and then we can tackle that. Okay, and then of course, you know, people will say, but you've just replaced the real mystery by this other question that you can answer. You know, you say, okay, fine. We should admit that that's what we're doing. You know, we're using philosophy as an inspiration for science questions. But, you know, now we can keep returning to the philosophical question. We can find, okay, maybe, you know, we can find a new scientific question that captures some new aspect of the philosophical question that was, you know, that hadn't been touched before. And, you know, and in this way, we can actually make progress. So, you know, to give a few, there are many questions that people would once have called philosophical, like is nature determined or random, right? Now, you know, we have quantum mechanics that can say a lot about that. What is the nature of mathematical knowledge, right? You know, since the time of Gödel, Gödel's incompleteness theorem, we have learned that mathematics itself can say a tremendous amount about that question. You know, what are infinitesimals, right? Can you have something, you know, can you have something that's smaller than any positive number but greater than zero, right? Or, you know, when you drop a ball, you know, is it moving at the very instant when you drop it? Okay, today, at least if we've taken a calculus course, right, we hopefully no longer get confused about that sort of thing that was, you know, hugely confusing to the ancient Greek philosophers. This is the closest thing to philosophical progress that I can see, people taking the ancient mysteries of philosophy and not quite solving them but taking an aspect of them that, you know, captures part of what people want to know about and then addressing it using the tools of math and science. Scott sees the problems with philosophy, especially its lack of progress. But he also recognizes three benefits. Philosophers listen carefully, they spot imprecisions, they uncover hidden assumptions. I'd like there to be more. But whenever my likes begin to affect my reason, I remind myself to return to Steven Weinberg. I want to emphasize, I don't mean that the scientist has a deep understanding of truth and reality, which makes philosophy unnecessary. I don't feel that I understand what is meant by truth in any profound way. I'm principled Philistine. I understand truth in science the same way I understand it in everyday life, and I don't see that any more is needed. So that although philosophers may have a way of asking profound questions about truth or reality or cause, it just isn't helpful to the work of a scientist. And historically, I think it never has been helpful. With the one exception that every once in a while, scientists have been bedeviled by a philosophical doctrine of one kind or another. For example, when Newton's theories were, became known on the continent, it was felt that they were insufficiently mechanistic because they involved action at a distance. The sun attracts the earth over 93 million miles, and that was repellent to the scientists, particularly in France, who had become imbued with ideas due to Descartes, that things had to happen because of local pushings and pullings, a mechanical philosophy. Well, science played the role, but also with the help of British philosophy of dispelling what I regard as the counterproductive doctrines of continental philosophy. So, philosophy had its benefit by negating the negative effects of other philosophies. Right, exactly, exactly. I once used the analogy that just as nation states generally didn't have any particular value to their inhabitants until the invention of the post office, except protecting their inhabitants from other nation states. And philosophy seemed to me somewhat like that. But this has taken a long time to understand. Of course, the word scientist only dates back to the early 19th century. Before it was coined by William Hewell in the early 19th century, there was no word scientist. People spoke of philosophers or natural philosophers, distinguished them from other kinds of philosophers. You know, the great work of Newton is called the principles of mathematical philosophy. It took a while to understand that science is different from philosophy, that perhaps I should say philosophy is different from science. They both can proceed and perhaps both have legitimate functions, but they're not the same. Now, it may be that there's some deep philosophical truth which in the future will turn out to be the key to advance in physics, but I haven't seen it in my time and I'm skeptical. Skeptical is the right place to start. Does appreciating the meaning of science require philosophy of science? There are two applications here. The first applies philosophy to science, exploring the nature of science and the scientific process, including the careful examination of questions and methods. Science can discern regularities, making exquisitely accurate predictions, but can science reveal bedrock reality? The second application applies science to philosophy, addressing with science the big questions raised by philosophy. For example, what is time? Does it flow? What are laws of nature? Can they change? How can mind come from brain? Will philosophy continue to wither, becoming a handmaiden of science? Or can philosophy regain its high perch as a fundamental probe of reality? The ultimate arbiter, I suspect, may be consciousness, in getting closer to truth. For complete interviews and for further information, please visit closertotruth.com.