Laypeople and Some Physicists Should Be Way More Modest About Philosophy

If you wouldn't confidently proclaim that string theory is false without having read about string theory, you should adopt the same attitude towards moral views

Most people don’t think they’re entitled to an opinion about lots of complicated topics. Virtually everyone would balk at the arrogance and stupidity of a layperson if they, without having read at all about string theory or the Copenhagen interpretation, confidently proclaimed that one of those views was correct. If a person, for example, declared, without providing an ounce of justification that, “clearly, the Copenhagen interpretation is right,” when they don’t have the slightest clue why people reject it, we’d take them to be monumentally overconfident. And yet when it comes to philosophy people bizarrely feel entitled to an opinion without knowing anything about the topic.

I’m in college currently. Very often, in my philosophy classes, people will express, with utter confidence, total certainty on some deeply contentious philosophical topic saying things like “well obviously morality is subjective and the mind is just the brain.” Philosophy, because of its reputation as being just an amorphous collection of musings, leads to people thinking that there aren’t rigorous standards for philosophical argument; that you can just brazenly assert some controversial view while providing no supporting reasons! In the rare event that such people do offer reasons, they’re almost always demonstrably fallacious!

Now okay, maybe I’m being unfair to the random stragglers who happened to take philosophy classes. It’s easy to think that your assumptions are universally shared. It was hard for me to realize that type-B physicalism existed for quite a while, because it denies something so obvious that I didn’t even think to deny—that ideal conceivability entails possibility. So one can’t blame the people too much. But the broader cultural idea that philosophy has no rigorous standards; that it’s just people saying what they think and offering no reasons is both deeply misguided and dangerous. It leads to people thinking that whatever half-cooked (pun intended) rationalization of eating meat they came up with in the 10 seconds they spent considering the issue is sufficient to vindicate their actions, because they don’t even realize that such arguments can be subject to rational scrutiny.

The most annoying manifestation of this, though, is the widespread reaction to Longtermism. Every single mention of Longtermism in the popular press follows roughly this pattern:

step 1: description that deeply inaccurate: for example “longtermism is the idea that we shouldn’t care much about current issues because the future is more important and could have trillions of people.”

step 2: sneer: for example “this dangerous ideology says that a billion deaths are less significant than a marginal reduction in existential risks.”

No one ever mentions the extremely convincing reasons to think that Longtermism is right that have left even its opponents scratching their heads. It’s just assumed that there couldn’t be any reason that people believe this doctrine that sounds implausible at first and that the correct response to a serious philosophical position put forth by perhaps the most influential ethicist of the last century, and probably the majority of people who have seriously investigated the topic is merely to sneer because it sounds weird. It would be as if people dismissed string theory by pointing out that it sounds odd, all the while acting like there are no reasons people support string theory other than some bizarre love of mathematics.

Some people—often scientists—are willing to explicitly describe their dim view of philosophy. Hossenfelder, for instance, declares:

If a philosopher starts speaking about elementary particles, run.

. . .

Now, look, I know that physicists have a reputation of being narrow-minded. But the reason we have this reputation is that we tried the crazy shit long ago and just found it doesn’t work. You call it “narrow-minded,” we call it “science.”

She seems to assume that philosophers are just morons and sophists who conjure up clever arguments for whatever they already believe. Ironically though, if she’d spent any time reading philosophy, she wouldn’t have made the basic errors that she did in the article in which she denigrates philosophy. Hossenfelder’s article is arguing against panpsychism, the idea that the fundamental physical constituents of the world are conscious. Right off the bat, she mischaracterizes panpsychism as:

That’s the idea that all matter—animate or inanimate—is conscious, we just happen to be somewhat more conscious than carrots.

Nope, false! Most panpsychists don’t think carrots are conscious. They think the fundamental physical building blocks of the world are conscious and that maybe their consciousness combines sometimes—e.g. in human brains. Carrots are made up of atoms but that doesn’t mean carrots are themselves atoms; similarly, the panpsychist declares that carrots are made up of conscious things but are not themselves conscious. A few like Luke Roeloffs think carrots are conscious, but that’s definitely the minority view. So Hossenfelder’s definition of panpsychism is something most panpsychists reject!

But even worse than that is the argument that Hossenfelder makes against panpsychism; it rests on a demonstrable error. Hossenfelder says that if particles were conscious, we’d pick up on that in our experiments. But the panpsychists say that we do! According to the panpsychist, what we observe in particular accelerators is what consciousness looks like from the outside. Atomic consciousness acting in various ways is what generates mass, spin, and charge! As Russell famously observed, what we get from physics is just an explanation of behavior—there’s nothing impossible about there being something deeper underlying nature behind the behavior. The panpsychist says there is, and the thing underlying behavior is consciousness.

Lots of very impressive scientifically minded people like Hossenfelder make it their business to criticize philosophy. Bill Nye, for instance, had a strange video dismissing philosophy that was just riddled with errors. Goldhill expresses the sentiment well:

Nye’s remarks, which conflate ideas from completely different areas of philosophy, are a caricature of the common misconception that philosophy is about asking pointlessly “deep” questions, plucking an answer out of thin air, and then drinking some pinot noir and writing a florid essay.

NOTE: after this, Nye changed his mind and now thinks philosophy is valuable! Yay!

Even the late, great, Stephen Hawking criticized philosophy, calling it dead. Hawking didn’t follow his criticism of philosophy with any philosophical digressions, but if he had, they would have likely been wrong—when people do, they usually are. Krauss, for example, declares:

Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact on physics what so ever, and I doubt that other philosophers read it because it's fairly technical. And so it's really hard to understand what justifies it. And so I'd say that this tension occurs because people in philosophy feel threatened, and they have every right to feel threatened, because science progresses and philosophy doesn't.

But maybe Krauss should have spent more time paying attention to philosophy of science. Because if he had, he wouldn’t have written an entire book that rests on a basic philosophical error. Krauss wrote a book called A Universe From Nothing, in which he argues that the universe came from nothing. But, as David Albert reveals in a brutal takedown in the New York Times, by nothing, Kraus means quantum fields. Thus, he merely notes that from initial quantum fields, one can get the whole world. But this is not what people wonder when they ask why there is something rather than nothing—they want to know why the quantum fields exist in the first place. Krauss’s entire book rested on basic equivocation—equating nothing with the existence of quantum fields. In fact, Krauss even admitted in an interview that the nothing that he endorsed is “full of stuff.” Those of us familiar with English know that this is not, in fact, what nothing means, and is certainly not the kind of nothing that people are thinking of when they wonder why there is something instead of it. No one wonders “why is there something from an initial starting point that is ‘full of stuff’” when they ask why there is something rather than nothing.

In fact, in that very paragraph where Krauss is railing against philosophy, he makes a basic error, falsely claiming that philosophy never progresses. As Michael Huemer notes in Knowledge, Reality, and Value:

Myth #2: Philosophy never makes progress. Philosophers are still debating the same things they were debating 2000 years ago.

Comment: No, that’s completely false.

a. On “debating the same questions”: Here are some things that philosophers were not debating 2000 years ago: Criteria of ontological commitment. Modal realism. Reliabilism. Semantic externalism. Paraconsistent logic. Functionalism. Expressivist metaethics.

You probably don’t know what any of those things are. But those are all well-known and important topics of contemporary debate which any philosophy professor will recognize, and none of them was discussed by Plato, or Aristotle, or any other ancient philosopher. Though Western philosophy has been around for 2000 years, none of those issues, to the best of my knowledge, was ever discussed by anyone more than 100 years ago. And having seen that list, any professional philosopher could now extend it with many more examples.

b. On progress: Here are some questions on which we’ve made progress:

i.Is slavery just? No joke! Aristotle, often considered history’s greatest philosopher, thought slavery was just. No one thinks that anymore

ii.Which is better: dictatorship or democracy? Seriously, Plato (also considered one of history’s greatest philosophers) thought the answer was “dictatorship” (as long as the dictator is a philosopher!). No one thinks that anymore.

iii.Is homosexuality wrong? Historically, philosophers and nonphilosophers alike have held different views on this question, with many thinking homosexuality was morally wrong, including such great philosophers as Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. Today, almost everyone agrees that homosexuality is obviously fine.

iv.Is nature teleological? Historically, many philosophers, following Aristotle, thought that inanimate objects and insentient life forms had natural goals built into them. Conscious beings had such goals too, and they didn’t necessarily correspond to what those beings wanted. Today, hardly anyone thinks that. (The small number whodo are almost all Catholic philosophers, because that was what Catholicism’s greatest philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, thought.)

v.What is knowledge? The orthodoxy in epistemology used to be that “knowledge” could be defined as “justified, true belief”. Today, basically everyone agrees that that’s wrong.

The thing that’s most disappointing is that, after dismissing philosophy, these philosophical skeptics go on to do philosophy. Arguments against panpsychism are, by their nature, philosophical! Panpsychism makes the same empirical predictions as physicalism, so any argument for physicalism over panpsychism will be philosophical. But the critics of philosophy generally are making philosophical arguments; they’re just not making very good ones.

It would be one thing if someone was a general skeptic about philosophy and thought that we couldn’t reach philosophical conclusions. But people like Krauss and Hossenfelder start by declaring philosophy bogus, and then go on to support deeply controversial philosophical conclusions with extremely tenuous philosophical arguments.

Philosophy is difficult. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time thinking about it and reading other people talking about it. When I read my earliest thoughts about philosophical matters, they were almost always egregiously wrong! It isn’t possible to just blunder in from a scientific field and do philosophy better than the philosophers. If you think you are doing that, just as if you think that most physicists are dumb rubes who are too stupid to get why your interpretation of quantum physics is correc—an interpretation formed while reading none of the standard literature and knowing very few of the arguments that physicists have—you should take a step back and be humble.

Each of these people—Hawking, Hossenfelder, and Krauss—is extremely impressive when it comes to physics. They all know hundreds of times more about physics than I ever will and probably more than most philosophers will. But generally, when philosophers venture into other disciplines like physics, they are cautious and tentative; only drawing conclusions after becoming familiar with the relevant evidence. Impressive scientists should pay philosophers the same favor. In other words, they should stay in their lane and stick to writing very good things about physics rather than very bad things about philosophy. Either that or learn some philosophy!