Well, string theory always sounded to me like an avalanche caused by a rounding error but once straightened out it seems likely enough that materiality's relationship to immateriality will reduce to random emergence and/or predictable transitions. Questions like what is the reason for the world or from where does the world come beg things like 1. causal chains implicating the containing world on the model of relationships among its contents, 2. the world's having resulted from a decision, hence decider, and/or 3. that there is another place from which places emerge.
3. may have some intuitive truth to it. The Krauss moment, when it comes if it hasn't yet, will just explain what about stuff is continuous with unstuff - not Godstuff, not anystuff, just unstuff. That intuitition can't claim it hasn't been addressed anymore, at that point. That's all that will happen then, but it's a lot, so if Krauss is overclaiming then shame on him. Didn't see any of his own words damning him in the article, though.
1 and 2 may be somehow intuitive also (not to me or the billions of non or pretheological humans, though) but make no claims resolvable from observations made within stuff. No headway can ever be made against them, just like no headway can ever be made against the proposition that your hairs are the droppings of an interdimensional bird who has bent time and space and existence as we know it as a hygienic receptacle. Not mine though - mine are where the happy thoughts of puppies settle after particularly frolicsome picnics. Positing a second variety of nonstuff as somehow constitutive of the stuff-nonstuff observed reality gets you straight into anystuff, where anything goes hence all thingness does.
The Nagel/Alberts point is that we can't disprove the second nonstuff: meta-nonstuff, nonstuff with potential content, darkness that's not just lights-off but brooding. We totally can't, it's true, but this totally doesn't matter in the religion v. irreligion debate. Kill off observable nonstuff and you'll never catch God in the act unless the act changes, at which point...the act changes. Observe that and you'll have reason to believe in it, assuming reason will still exist. Philosophy likes to put science in its place, and that's fine, but it should be a bit clearer about the vacuity of all the other places. When Nagel doesn't make clear everything his argument entails, he isn't making it. This is pretty much the problem with the term agnostic - even in philosophy departments it's too often used to trojan-horse in other stuff to be thrown around safely.
As for the part where Alberts goes ad hominem on a strawman of Krauss going ad hominem: wow that's weird. Coddling the majority viewpoint is nothing new in print media, but verges on bullying here, guven his choice of terms.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-03-28 08:19 pm (UTC)Well, string theory always sounded to me like an avalanche caused by a rounding error but once straightened out it seems likely enough that materiality's relationship to immateriality will reduce to random emergence and/or predictable transitions. Questions like what is the reason for the world or from where does the world come beg things like 1. causal chains implicating the containing world on the model of relationships among its contents, 2. the world's having resulted from a decision, hence decider, and/or 3. that there is another place from which places emerge.
3. may have some intuitive truth to it. The Krauss moment, when it comes if it hasn't yet, will just explain what about stuff is continuous with unstuff - not Godstuff, not anystuff, just unstuff. That intuitition can't claim it hasn't been addressed anymore, at that point. That's all that will happen then, but it's a lot, so if Krauss is overclaiming then shame on him. Didn't see any of his own words damning him in the article, though.
1 and 2 may be somehow intuitive also (not to me or the billions of non or pretheological humans, though) but make no claims resolvable from observations made within stuff. No headway can ever be made against them, just like no headway can ever be made against the proposition that your hairs are the droppings of an interdimensional bird who has bent time and space and existence as we know it as a hygienic receptacle. Not mine though - mine are where the happy thoughts of puppies settle after particularly frolicsome picnics. Positing a second variety of nonstuff as somehow constitutive of the stuff-nonstuff observed reality gets you straight into anystuff, where anything goes hence all thingness does.
The Nagel/Alberts point is that we can't disprove the second nonstuff: meta-nonstuff, nonstuff with potential content, darkness that's not just lights-off but brooding. We totally can't, it's true, but this totally doesn't matter in the religion v. irreligion debate. Kill off observable nonstuff and you'll never catch God in the act unless the act changes, at which point...the act changes. Observe that and you'll have reason to believe in it, assuming reason will still exist. Philosophy likes to put science in its place, and that's fine, but it should be a bit clearer about the vacuity of all the other places. When Nagel doesn't make clear everything his argument entails, he isn't making it. This is pretty much the problem with the term agnostic - even in philosophy departments it's too often used to trojan-horse in other stuff to be thrown around safely.
As for the part where Alberts goes ad hominem on a strawman of Krauss going ad hominem: wow that's weird. Coddling the majority viewpoint is nothing new in print media, but verges on bullying here, guven his choice of terms.