Birds Doing Ornithology: The Role of Beauty in Model Building

"Philosophy of Science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." - Richard Feynman For obvious reasons this provocative quote is not very popular among philosophers of science, but Feynman certainly didn't mean it in bad taste. The fact of the matter is that most science can be done with little to no …

The Frustrating Success of Our Best Theory of Physics

If you were to ask most physicists about the success of the standard model of particle physics, you would get a very strange answer: that it is frustratingly successful. Odd indeed, that's like calling a painting frustratingly beautiful. Further prodding would reveal that in fact most physicists not only find the model frustrating, but also …

Epistemic Idealism Through Physicalism

Suppose you're a good honest physicalist, you believe that all that exists is physical. This is in stark contrast to philosophies (ontologies) like Berkeley's idealism, where all things are ideas, reality itself is a form of thought, and therefore the universe is mental or spiritual. The latter idea as a metaphysics has largely fallen out …

Will Future Civilizations Believe in the Rest of Our Universe?

Science is often seen as the modern way to obtain truths. We know the earth orbits the sun, it is true. Those who work closely in the field know the process of actually doing science, both theoretical and experimental, can be painstakingly tedious, but if we’re careful we’ll always reach the truth, right? The answer …

Can we tell if we’re simulated, and why does it matter?

See part 1 here. So maybe we're living in a simulation, maybe we're not. Why does any of this matter? If we can't actually tell any way, we are just arguing over the likelihood one way or the other and why should any of us care? It doesn't change the taste of coffee; it doesn't …

Is Reality Really Real?

Two thousand years ago Zhuang Zhou fell asleep, and dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke he was faced with a conundrum: how could he tell with any certainty whether he had been a man dreaming of being a butterfly, instead of now being a butterfly dreaming of a man. This thought has haunted …