metaphysical?

[Moontanman]

Can someone explain metaphysical to me? How can anything that can be measured be beyond the physical? If it can not be measured how can it be said to exist? This is connected with my question of what "first principal" means in this thread.

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/69026-theory-of-everything/

[ydoaPs]

Can someone explain metaphysical to me?

 

Metaphysics has two branches: Epistemology and Ontology

 

Epistemology deals with human knowledge and what we can know. Ontology deals with what things "are". Epistemology shows us that our knowledge of the universe is at best incomplete. Natural language is inconsistent (things like "This statement is false" leading to a contradiction by merely assessing the truth value of the statement shows this). Good thing we have logic and math, right? Well, yes and no. Math and logic are extremely powerful tools. However, all branches of mathematics are incomplete. That means that they cannot prove all things which are true within themselves. As if that wasn't bad enough, it turns out that to show whether or not a branch of mathematics is consistent (all things provable are true), we need to use a logic that itself cannot be both consistent and complete. The second big constraint on Epistemology lead to what we call Empiricism (Empirical Science, anyone?). This constraint is that we are necessarily limited in information to how the information gets to us. That is, we can only know things by how they interact; if there is some intrinsic substance, we can never know it.

 

This is what made modern Ontology. Since we can't know anything more than how things interact, that's all we can say about what things are. Object x is what interacts in x, y, and z ways with object Y. Remember how I said mathematics was extremely powerful? That's because it was designed to be. The language extremely precise way to describe the universe, and the systems we create with it are unimaginably more accurate and precise than just English. Our best Ontology is physics.

 

People typically have a low opinion of Philosophy for a few common reasons. They may have only had exposure to Philosophy via a 101 class (or worse, from someone else whose only exposure was a 101 class). They may have only had contact with people who claim to do Philosophy when what they're actually doing is making stuff up while under the influence of drugs and they just don't know the difference. Or, they may have (like A Tripolation) had substantial interaction with the minority of Philosophy who disregard all accumulated knowledge in favor or thousand year old views so that they can justify their belief in magic to themselves. Good philosophers use far more math and science than most people realize. In fact, on my walk to this computer lab from a German exam, I saw an Einstein Field Equation written on the chalkboard of a philosophy class.

 

 

 

How can anything that can be measured be beyond the physical?

 

It can't. Those of us who are honest have known this for hundreds of years. The only ones left who deny this are the few who are trying to justify their belief in magic rather than do actual philosophy. Again, physics is our best Ontology.

 

 

If it can not be measured how can it be said to exist?

 

It effectively does not exist. This is why we can just ignore Solipsism. It makes for good sci-fi, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter.

 

The OP is a very good question, btw.

[md65536]

A paper by N. David Mermin --- "What's bad about this habit" http://www.ehu.es/aitor/irakas/mes/Reference/mermin.pdf --- mentioned previously on this site, is a good read on this topic.

If it can not be measured how can it be said to exist?

A lot of that comes down to interpretations, including what the measurements imply or what they mean. Another part of it has to do with assumptions, including about things like "what happens to stuff in between when it is measured?" Per the above article, it is a good habit to not confuse a model with reality. Another good habit would be to not have an inappropriate certainty about what exists, especially beyond what is measured.

 

With a useful definition of existence, all of our knowledge of existence can be considered uncertain to varying degrees.

 

 

[A Tripolation]

Our best Ontology is physics.

 

If I understood your post correctly, the only philosophy that matters is epistemology and ontology (of which physics is the best).

 

This sounds an awful lot like the scientific method to me. Correct me if I'm wrong. (And a mod can nudge me if I'm off-topic. I always have a hard time discerning what on-topic means in the philosophy forum.)

[ydoaPs]

If I understood your post correctly, the only philosophy that matters is epistemology and ontology (of which physics is the best).

 

There's more to philosophy than metaphysics and more to epistemology than science.

[PeterJ]

I can agree with much of what you say, ydoaPs, but physics is definitely not ontology. Physics is not about what exists, as you say in your comments, and studies the behaviour of what it assumes to exist. Metaphysics asks whether it really does exist and what it is. .

 

The OP asks " How can anything that can be measured be beyond the physical?"

I would say it cannot be. A measurement is a physical thing, the face of a dial or meter, the length of a ruler or elapsed time etc. .

 

"If it can not be measured how can it be said to exist?

Can anger be measured? We know whether we are more or less angry than we were five minutes ago, so it does seem to be measurable. But if a phenomenon is in principle immeasurable then it is not in spacetime and we would have to think of it it as unmanifest, not as existing or not-existing.

 

I prefer to define metaphyscis as the study of the world as a whole. It takes the results of the natural sciences and of personal experience and uses logic to extrapolate from these to a fundamental theory or set of first principles. A metaphysical statement is therefore one that makes a claim about the world as a whole, i.e what is true or false non-relatively, non-contingently and absolutely. As all such statements are undecidable metaphysics produces a very different world-view to physics, which does not ask such questions or make such statements.

 

I suppose you could say that metaphyscis is an attempt to make sense of physics, or to find an interpretation.

[swansont]

I can agree with much of what you say, ydoaPs, but physics is definitely not ontology. Physics is not about what exists, as you say in your comments, and studies the behaviour of what it assumes to exist. Metaphysics asks whether it really does exist and what it is. .

 

I took that "best" to mean "the best we can do", since the conclusion was that we can't actually determine what things are, beyond how they behave. And that's what physics studies.