Now, you may complain that this is not what you mean by “existence”. You may insist that you want to know whether it is “real” or “true”. I do not know what it means for something to be “real” or “true.” You will have to consult a philosopher on that. They will offer you a variety of options, that you may or may not find plausible.
A lot of scientists, for example, subscribe knowingly or unknowingly to a philosophy called “realism” which means that they believe a successful theory is not merely a tool to obtain predictions, but that its elements have an additional property that you can call “true” or “real”. I am loosely speaking here, because there several variants of realism. But they have in common that the elements of the theory are more than just tools.
And this is all well and fine, but realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.
Sabine Hossenfelder: Does The Higgs Boson Exist
Back to the Eddington, Section IV
The mathematical theory of structure is the answer of modern physics to a question which has profoundly vexed philosophers.
"But if I never know directly events in the external world, but only their alleged effects on my brain, and if I never know my brain except in terms of its alleged effects on my brain, I can only reiterate in bewilderment my original questions: "What sort of thing is it that I know" and "Where is it?"
C.E.M. Joad, Aristotelian Society, Supp. vol IX, p 137
What sort of thing is it that I know? The answer is structure. To be quite precise, it is structure of the kind defined and investigated in the mathematical theory of groups.
It is right that the importance and difficulty of the question should be emphasized. But I think that many prominent philosophers, under the impression that they have set the physicists an insoluble conundrum, make it an excuse to turn their backs on the external world of physics and welter in a barren realism which is a negation of all that physical science has accomplished in unraveling the complexity of sensory experience. The mathematical physicist, however, welcomes the question as one falling especially within his province, in which his specialized knowledge may be of service to the general advancement of philosophy.
The phrase "if I never know my brain except in terms of its alleged effects on my brain" vividly, if not altogether accurately,* describes the conditions under which we labour. But it is not very alarming to the physicist, whose subject abounds with this kind of cyclic dependence. We only know an electric force by its effects on an electric charge; and we only know electric charges in terms of the electric forces they produce. It has long been evident that this is no bar to knowledge; but it is only recently that the systematic method of formulating such knowledge in terms of group-structure has become a recognized procedure in physical theory.
* A more accurate form would be: if I never know any brain except in terms of its alleged effects on a brain." [N. B. Eddington's footnote, not mine.]
The bewilderment of the philosophers evidently arises from a belief that, if we start from zero, any knowledge of the external world must begin with the assumption that a sensation makes us aware of something in the external world - something differing from the sensation itself because it is non-mental. But knowledge of the physical universe does not begin in that way. One sensation (divorced from knowledge already obtained by other sensations) tells us nothing; it does not even hint at anything outside of the consciousness in which it occurs. The starting point* of physical science is knowledge of the group-structure of a set of sensations in a consciousness. When these fragments of structure, contributed at various times and by various individuals, have been collated and represented according to the forms of thought that we have discussed, and when the gaps have been filled by an inferred structure depending on the regularities discovered i the directly known portions, we obtain the structure known as the physical universe.
* I mean the logical starting point, not the historical starting point, of a subject which has grown out of crude beginnings. [Again, Eddington's footnote, not mine.]
I would never bring myself to question the description of a mathematical physicist of the accomplishment and clarity of thought like Eddington when they describe their experience of how their understanding of the physical universe developed in their lives, so I won't. I doubt that other eminent members of his profession would put it the same way, especially those under the influence of more recent claims from neuro-biology and its even more baldly ideologically influenced fields of study (alas, watch out whenever you see "neuro-" put on something these days). But I would note that as Sabine Hossenfelder points out, physics, even particle physics, these days, is not immune from indulging in the realism that Eddington warned of as a temptation to the philosophers of his day. It's rampant in all areas of culture, science no less so than any other general area of life. I would note that she was right, that when you consult philosophers on such things, you will still find they still produce "a variety of options, that you may or may not find plausible". The problem is that philosophers are not the only ones who do that, scientists do, physicists do, theoretical physicists more so than those who deal with observable things (at least that's my impression) cosmologists are positively addicted to the practice (with a very, very few exceptions, in my experience) and even more so when they venture outside of the formal, mathematical form of discourse into commenting on things their professional expertise gives them no more expertise in than anyone else.
I would note that theoretical physics has turned round Eddington's criticism of philosophers "turning their back on the external world of physics" and demands that their own unadmitted philosophical speculations, ideologically motivated assertions and writing science fiction in equations are the proper study of physical science, though there is no demonstrable physical something to be there at all.
People who are long term readers of this blog will know that in 2015 I went through the exercise of asking "brain only" materialists, the kind that just about all materialist-atheists are, how the brain would know how to construct whatever physical structure that would, then give rise to the epiphenomenon of an idea of something in the world external to the brain.
How would a brain know:
-it needed to make a structure to represent a new idea before the structure to "be" that idea existed in the brain,
-what that structure needed to be to produce that idea in the brain,
-how it was to make that precise structure so as to BE that idea in physical form in the brain which had not previously contained such a structure,
-how it would judge that it had made the right structure to do that BEFORE THE STURCTURE TO "BE" THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF THAT IDEA and not some other idea
And, to add to that problem, how it would do that continually, with the speed in which we learn new things, from the most complex such as Eddington seems to only consider right down to the seemingly most everyday like that car that just appeared in an intersection you just came to or the wrinkle in the rug you stepped on when you woke up this morning.
I asked that for more than a year and the most the idiots could come up with were the magic formulas that were no answer at all "natural selection" and "DNA" the latter being the stupidest of all because "DNA" couldn't do it fast enough to account for the phenomenon of the speed of ideas arising in the mind and which would have had to give that molecule the power of an all-knowing god capable of producing all of the varied knowledge human beings (and animals) came up with, the structure and means of producing those, as well.
I haven't thought it out entirely what Eddington said in this passage but I think any model, formal or as informal as the one described here, that depends on "the brain" as the locus of all of that activity we probably more reasonably consider as happening in the mind than in an organ of our body is not going to get you far.
I'll go on with this tomorrow, ignoring the howls of Darwin's Defenders during the duration of this series.
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