Physics or Metaphysics?
Author(s): Sam Vaknin & Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/05/28
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would define a comprehensive physics?
Prof. Sam Vaknin: Ostensibly, physics is the science of studying reality. But, in reality, physics is a form of mysticism, it is where alchemy used to be a few centuries ago.
In alchemy, there was a preoccupation with language and a belief in a universal, invariant truth which would endow the practitioner with godlike powers. All alchemists believed that it was only a question of time before we attain this truth.
Similarly, physics is a self-contained, self-referential language. There are debates on how to use this language and on how to interpret its elements. But there is a broad agreement on its grammar and syntax.
Jacobsen: What would define a complete metaphysics?
Vaknin: Metaphysics deals with concepts that underlie reality.
Jacobsen: What would relate these two universes of discourse in the aforementioned definitions?
Vaknin: Physicists still believe that physics is asymptotic to the truth, that we are making progress towards an objective, invariant, immutable, indisputable verity. This is, of course, mysticism, not science.
Scientific theories are not about reality but about other scientific theories and about themselves, a discourse that spans generations and contrasts with previous ways of thinking even as it generates falsifiable testable hypotheses.
Theories are allegories, metaphors, analogies, glorified literature using a highly structured language known as mathematics. Scientific theories are descriptive, predictive, and wrong: after all, all past theories have been falsified.
Physics is an extension of metaphysics. We must revert to philosophy and metaphysics, our roots.
All scientific theories are fundamentally metaphysical. Examples: evolution is founded on teleology (the accepted truth that organisms wish to survive) and SRT (special relativity theory) emanates from the separateness of observers from the observed (which was proven wrong on the micro level).
The philosophy of science is a fancy rebranding of metaphysics. Its main tenet, falsifiability, is tautological (we can falsify only scientific theories which are the only theories that are falsifiable).
There is an age-old confusion between language and truth. For example: the solutions to an equation (language elements) are considered to be true and real. The very reliance on language is metaphysical because it assumes that language correlates with reality or can be perfectly mapped onto it.
But how many of our assumptions about language (such as axioms in mathematics) are real or true? We can study language only with a meta-language and this results in an infinite regression. So, there is no way to prove or to ascertain the validity or the relevance of a language. It takes a leap of faith.
Science is, therefore, a faith-based system that is helpful to survival (akin to religion). The core percepts are metaphysical, non-provable, they require a leap of faith. Physicists arbitrarily assume the validity and power of mathematics and the existence of reality – both are metaphysical assumptions which are unprovable, axiomatic, and not derivable.
I am a believer in physics, but I am not a naïve believer: it works, so I believe in it, but I am aware of my own irrationality. Reason is not primary, faith is.
Jacobsen: What was metaphysics in the past?
Vaknin: What we today call science. The study of both the essence of the world and of what makes it tick.
Jacobsen: What has been the origin and evolution of physics into the present?
Vaknin: There were two major revolutions in the history of physics and its divorce from metaphysics: Descartes’ and Bohr’s.
At some point in time, we started to believe that observer and observed are two separate, unrelated systems. In the twentieth century, we gave up on any pretension and attempt to capture the quiddity of the world or even to merely describe it. Instead, we settled on an instrumental version of physics: if it works, it is futile to inquire why and how it works. Quantum mechanics is a prime example of this blindfolded approach.
Jacobsen: How is physics beginning to turn into, or make a circumlocution back to, metaphysics, and into an evolution of “uber-metaphysics” – even mysticism? What are the dangers – let’s say – to clarity of concepts and thought in turns, some of them, to mysticism now?
Vaknin: The minute you let language dictate your view of reality (because it is “self-efficacious”), you abandon the latter. The formalism rules and the procedures for manipulating its symbols become the laws of physics or of nature.
The problem with this kind of detour is that, as Godel has observed, formal-logical systems are incomplete or inconsistent and give rise to “hallucinations” (witness the recent debacle with artificial intelligence).
So, we end up further away from a true understanding of reality as we descend into arcane solipsistic sophistry.
Jacobsen: How is physics, in some sense, like a highly formalized structure of literature?
Vaknin: I don’t think that it is like literature. Physics is not merely descriptive. It doesn’t confine itself to taxonomy of the codification of experience. It aspires to decipher reality even as it translates into technology: tools to alter our environments, near and far.
Jacobsen: All scientific theories in the past have been proven wrong via experiment or come to inconsistent findings with Nature and the predictions of the theory. What will happen to the current set of theories, most likely?
Vaknin: The same fate awaits the current crop of dominant theories.
Jacobsen: If physics, currently, is rootless or physicists – as a category – have ‘forgotten’ their foundations in metaphysics as physics being a derivation from metaphysics, what is a necessary bridge to bring the roots back to soil for physicists – and for the structured narrative knowledge pool called physics to become crisp again?
Vaknin: Philosophy and logic. These should become mandatory studies. These disciplines are indispensable in the evolution of critical thinking and the generation of testable hypotheses.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Prof. Vaknin.
Vaknin: Pleasure, as always.
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