To say that "Hawking's point is completely within the bounds of physics" and then to say that "What he is saying is that physics offers no room for such entities as the afterlife" seems to me a little contradictory.
I see no contradiction. The two statements seem complementary to me.
"There is no Lem-Sip in the house" is not the same thing as "There's no Lem-Sip in the kitchen, I know because I've looked, and the kitchen is the most important room in the house so that means there's none in the house."
That's a false analogy. Try: "I claim there is no Lem-Sip in the house because I have demonstrated that the stated chemical composition of the hypothetical Lem-Sip is impossible to achieve, and the described characteristics of Lem-Sip likewise."
Of course, some people claim there exists such a thing as faith-based Lem-Sip, which bypasses such restrictions as the way chemical bonds form, but . . .
metaphysics . . . is largely based on subjective experience
And that's its problem: it has no rational basis. Are subjective experiences useful in forming our descriptions of the world? Yes, of course -- think of music or art or literature. But are they any use as tools to define how the universe works? Not so much.
I could, perhaps, with some effort, show that, from a layman's point of view, current physics is to an extent "a set of beliefs which can never (by me unaided) be verified and which fly in the face of all experience and all rational deduction" and then ask why I should give special intellectual preference to it
That's a very good point. On the other hand, my computer works using lots of bits of physics that I don't understand, and those bits of physics are based on other bits that I've never even heard of, so I have at least some good evidence that the evidence which is physics is, at least to a large extent, not baloney. Further, when I make a big effort to try to understand bits of physics I've not hitherto known about, they hold water. So . . .
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-05-29 09:33 pm (UTC)To say that
"Hawking's point is completely within the bounds of physics"
and then to say that
"What he is saying is that physics offers no room for such entities as the afterlife"
seems to me a little contradictory.
I see no contradiction. The two statements seem complementary to me.
"There is no Lem-Sip in the house" is not the same thing as "There's no Lem-Sip in the kitchen, I know because I've looked, and the kitchen is the most important room in the house so that means there's none in the house."
That's a false analogy. Try: "I claim there is no Lem-Sip in the house because I have demonstrated that the stated chemical composition of the hypothetical Lem-Sip is impossible to achieve, and the described characteristics of Lem-Sip likewise."
Of course, some people claim there exists such a thing as faith-based Lem-Sip, which bypasses such restrictions as the way chemical bonds form, but . . .
metaphysics . . . is largely based on subjective experience
And that's its problem: it has no rational basis. Are subjective experiences useful in forming our descriptions of the world? Yes, of course -- think of music or art or literature. But are they any use as tools to define how the universe works? Not so much.
I could, perhaps, with some effort, show that, from a layman's point of view, current physics is to an extent "a set of beliefs which can never (by me unaided) be verified and which fly in the face of all experience and all rational deduction" and then ask why I should give special intellectual preference to it
That's a very good point. On the other hand, my computer works using lots of bits of physics that I don't understand, and those bits of physics are based on other bits that I've never even heard of, so I have at least some good evidence that the evidence which is physics is, at least to a large extent, not baloney. Further, when I make a big effort to try to understand bits of physics I've not hitherto known about, they hold water. So . . .