Chapter XV: Mechanical Philosophy | The Philosophy Of Science by Steven Gussman [1st Edition]

        “For Descartes, the mind or soul inhabited the body rather like a “ghost in the machine,” as one 

         twentieth-century philosopher memorably put it.  Critics of this idea, which is often known as

        'dualism,' tend nowadays to be sceptical of the ghost, but in Descartes's time they were more

        puzzled by the machine.”

        – Anthony Gottlieb^I

        "And you'll do the dance

        that was choreographed

        at the very dawn of time"

        – Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes)^II

        Mechanical philosophy is the most important and undervalued innovation from the enlightenment (or the scientific revolution).  Mechanical philosophy is is the realization that natural philosophy's precluding supernature, magic, or otherworldly realms isn't enough: this realm has to be understood as a clockwork machine of cause and effect.^III  When one comes up with new hypotheses, they are obeying mechanical philosophy in looking for a mechanism which gives rise to (and therefore explains) some effect (the re-statement, or mere labeled-description, of the phenomena is not itself enough).  That is, speculation as to the machinations that explain the empirical data (machinations which also make new predictions that one may falsify or verify with empirical observations).  This is again where the empirical extremists get confused, because just as our understanding of ontology is only as good as the epistemology that discovers it, so too, theories and laws of nature are far more important than the facts they give rise to.^IV  This can be confusing to people because dollars-to-donuts, they want that body of knowledge so that they can get smart phones and medical interventions—but the secret is that one must value the epistemology over the ontology to get an ontology worth having.  So it is within the body of knowledge: the difference between the facts of the world and understanding the world; merely describing the disconnected facts of the world as they are is tantamount to viewing everything as initial conditions (at most rigid, physical constants)—more-or-less arbitrary values that simply are what they are.^V  For starters, such a project could only ever describe a dynamic world in one instant, with nothing to say about the past or future, every change a blind-siding by nature.  That's not a very deep understanding of the world—it's actually a trivial understanding of the world (and even such a trivial understanding by the way it is difficult to come by, accurately).  Theory allows us to understand the dynamics at play in the cosmos, in this sense, science is about how the world changes and reacts to itself—not just a description of any given state of a world that is often in flux.  Rather than just accept something as a as a fact, the scientist wants an explanation, a mechanical process by which effects are caused. Iteration over this kind of problem solving often leads to the generalization of a special argument, and is further explanatory (the understanding of gravity progresses from Aristotle's view of Earth as the centrally attractive “unmoved mover” and has so far ended up with Einstein's discovery that all matter-energy curves spacetime and in-turn follows such curves).^VI  Aristotle's hypothesis (which incidentally, makes the long-ago falsified prediction^VII that all objects in the universe should be attracted to Earth) is not much of an explanation—it is more of a restatement and generalization of common sense: things (at least things near Earth's surface!) seem to fall towards Earth.  Einstein's by contrast, explains that gravitational attraction is the consequence of the matter-energy content of an object curving spacetime (and other matter-energy following such curves).  Proper scientific theories are mechanical in nature, stochastic mathematical models are weaker, less explanatory, and arguably not technically theories (due to their lack of an ontological correlate).  One can even see mechanical philosophy operating on the epistemology side, implied by a time-dynamic view of deduction: propositions as causes, and their consequences as effects.  Ontologically, one can also see mechanical philosophy in the computational view of the world: arguments are initial conditions and functions are the laws that take time to transform them into an effect (computers are intended to flatten time to calculate predictions as fast as possible).  Part of the importance of mechanical philosophy is tantamount to the importance of pictures when it comes to scientific theory: a proper understanding of the universe is accompanied by an ability (provided by the theory) to picture a toy model of it operating like a simple machine.^VIII  After all, if one cannot picture their hypothesis or theory, what suggests to them that they have actually discovered something about the ontology we so readily visualize?

        This austere view of the clockwork universe has fallen out of favor with many modern scientists.  Though this is largely due to the advent of quantum physics, I don't think this is the lone cause.  Other cultural forces appear to me to be at play, such as the rise of postmodern anti-science in the universities.^IX  There is a premature and misguided eschewal of mechanical philosophy as somehow naive or disproven, among the current intelligentsia, yet this isn't the case at all: in fact, we still require mechanical philosophy of every single scientific theory we've ever had (outside of those which we admit are a different, incomplete kind of theory, only making statistical predictions).  Quantum physics is the only theory we have allowed to claim it is actually, fundamentally random, and that there is no more information in the universe that could explain such “quantum weirdness” away.  Usually, such physicists are making the hard claim that this isn't an epistemological limit; it's not that we and our tools, as physical objects, cannot measure and get at the hidden variables without altering the system (sometimes known as the relational interpretation of quantum physics).^X  The claim is that the ontology itself is actually at its most fundamental level, a chaos after all, despite all of the cosmos that somehow arises out of it at higher-levels.  This is a stunning about-face on what science is.  And it is one whose proponents have not bothered to properly philosophically establish, mostly because they simply think that philosophy of science (a term most would probably not even recognize) is nonsense even though it undergirds everything else they do; in fact, it is the only thing that can justify what they do.^XI  Instead, they know only pure methodology, not the epistemology that such methodologies implement.^XII

        The fact is that when evolutionary biologists do their work, they know what naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace did to tame biodiversity was to explain the underlying mechanical philosophy—what gave rise to all life; they know that he did not simply provide some statistical prediction model.^XIII  In fact, this theory was largely verbally philosophical at the time (though some work has surely been done towards its mathematization since, it largely remains a conceptual mechanism).  The appeal Darwin and Wallace made was to elegant natural philosophy.^XIV  I want to emphasize here that evolution by natural selection is an example of mechanical philosophy; evolution is a machine of cause and effect.  Biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky even said that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”^XV  These are not just “pretty stories” that help us understand the natural world; we do actually presume that there were physical manifestations back in time, which actually occurred: all of these animals and intermediates actually walked around, fought, died, survived, and reproduced—in fact, all empirical evidence for the other predictions of evolution by natural selection are also evidence for this natural pre-history actually occurring.^XVI  This process really occurred in the world over time, much like a more basic science, traditionally the most associated with determinism, Newton's kinematic equations describe many real processes, past, present, and future.  These are deterministic equations of motion—given initial conditions and the laws of kinematic motion, one can not only predict where an object in motion will end up, but every step along the way; one can watch such a process take place over that period of time.  Brownian motion (the fact that small objects such as pollen will move around pseudo-randomly when in water) began as merely a descriptive phenomenon: I suppose botanist Robert Brown^XVII described it mathematically, showing that the pollen grains followed what mathematicians call a random-walk.  It is hard to imagine anyone at that time assumed these particles were actually moving around in a fundamentally random way.  It was Einstein who came in and realized that it is actually the pseudo-random motion of the water molecules colliding with the pollen which is causing the pollen to appear to move randomly (the significance of which was taken to be that this settled the debate about the ontological reality of particulate atoms).^XVIII  This moves the randomness to the water molecules, but no one believes these motions to be truly random, either: they are known to have pseudo-random initial conditions (with no conspiracy as to why any given molecule would begin in any particular place with any particular momentum, each molecule being independent of the others and therefore largely random with respect to each other); and with every bit of motion from the outside environment pushing at the molecules by happenstance, they themselves bouncing backward when hitting a side of their container.  That the positions and motions of the molecules are random with respect to each other doesn't mean they're random with respect to the universe, that you could not in-principle find some cause-and-effect history they followed to show every single reason why one of them was in a particular position, and subsequently got knocked in another direction.  This simply doesn't matter physically in reference to the system of water because effectively, due to what we know from physicist Ludwig Boltzmann's entropy, effectively all of these chaotic pseudo-random systems' micro-states are equivalent as their overall internal motion tends to cancel out simplify to a macro-state which appears like a normal cup of rippling water.^XIX  Not so, goes the claim of most quantum physicists, who expect us to believe quantum physics really is fundamentally random, and that all of the determinism of the rest of physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth—all of those regularities in the world, arise on top of these very shaky foundations.  This has seldom been attempted to be shown to be possible let alone demonstrated and made evident in the case of quantum physics.  It is not obvious that it can be made evident, and I take the position that it remains provisionally the case that it's philosophically incoherent (the kind of empirical evidence they use is very narrow and unconvincing given what we know about the rest of our theories of ontology: one may have effective, in-practice randomness on top of deterministic systems, but it is simply not established how one could have effectively deterministic systems riding on top of fundamentally random ones).^XX  This is a case much harder to make, and it has heretofore only been stated, not explained.  I want to now digress from my hobby horse beyond pointing out that the quantum foundations issue illustrates the importance of a book about the philosophy of science.  If even our physicists, our lowest-level, hardest scientists, don't have a good understanding of the philosophy that underlies what they do (to the point where they may contradict it for nearly a century without realizing it), the entire scholarly enterprise is in trouble.  Confused physicists will protest that they only care about physics, not philosophy, yet they unknowingly use philosophy of science to discover and understand their physics^XXI—and when one misuses philosophy in this endeavor, one will misunderstand their physics!  I am open to the idea that somehow I will be shown that fundamental randomness is a coherent possibility, that it happens to be true in the case of quantum physics, and that all the determinism of the world is pseudo-determinism riding a top of that fundamental chaos.  But the work has not been done to establish such an extraordinary claim in philosophy of science, and, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”^XXII  All of science before quantum physics, and all of science to this day outside of the most fundamental physics, operates on the grounds of deterministic mechanical philosophy.  This fact is not given its due respect, today: mechanical philosophy is the very goal of science.  If I had to choose only one concept from philosophy of science to define the field, I would choose mechanical philosophy (though, properly understood, I think that natural philosophy and determinism come along for the ride).  Mechanical philosophy is what it means to explain and understand the world in terms of the cause and effect that give rise to its features, rather than to just describe it.

        I see philosophy of science as a collection of the most important ideas in the world, a collection that, unfortunately, even most scientists are innocent of a deep, articulated understanding of.  The clever ones might glean some version of the philosophy implicitly from their methodology training, and just from thinking a little, but few have the deep understanding they ought to.

Footnotes:

0. The Philosophy Of Science table of contents can be found, here (footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2022/04/table-of-contents-philosophy-of-science.html).

I. See The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 20).

II. Hear “Arc Of Time (Time Code)” from Digital Ash In A Digital Urn by Bright Eyes (Saddle Creek Records) (2005) (https://open.spotify.com/track/3gtTsCbDYnVqfOoFf1IOjX?si=GE6ft4DYSQOFoyWCLjVpIg&utm_source=copy-link).

III. See The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 82-84, 94-95, 97, 216-217, 221, 300-301, 444-448); The Dream Of Enlightenment by Gottlieb (pp. 3-5, 9-10, 15-16, 26, 37, 52-53, 65, 90, 96, 146-147, 194); "Scientific Realism" by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27113) from This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 273-276); The Theoretical Minimun by Susskind and Hrabovsky (pp. 1-14); and The Elegant Universe by Greene (pp. 368-369, 385). For a book in large part about quantum physics' mechanical-philosophy-deficiency, see What Is Real? by Becker.

IV. See “Carl Sagan's Last Interview With Charlie Rose (Full Interview)” by Sagan and Rose (at least 3:55 – 4:08).

V. Though I had independently formed my views on the world-as-machine as early as senior year of high school in 2013, see “In Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science) by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/05/in-defense-of-philosophy-of-science.html#FN17B), which further cites To Explain The World by Weinberg (pp. x, 99, 373), which in-turn cites “Can Science Explain Everything? Anything?” by Steven Weinberg (New York Review Of Books) (2001) (though I have not read this work); “Bret And Heather 16th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Meaning, Notions, & Scientific Commotions” by B. Weinstein and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvljruLDhxY) (0:59 – 51:37); “Bret And Heather 61st DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: If Covid Policy Were Rational” by B. Weinstein and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfbBvvPVFdw) (1:36:09 – 1:37:27); and for a specific example with regards to examining texts, see Exploratory Programming For The Arts And Humanities by Montfort (pp. 200).

VI. See the “Knowledge As Provisional” chapter which further cites The Dream Of Reason by Gottlieb (pp. 39-40, 227, 251-258, 370, 399-400, 436-437); The Dream Of Enlightenment by Gottlieb (pp. 193-194, 210-212, 219); To Explain The World by Weinberg (pp. 59, 91, 93, 95, 99, 136, 161-173, 188, 190, 212, 215-255, 268); and Our Mathematical Universe by Tegmark (pp. 248-249).

VII. It is important to note that, from a philosophy of science standpoint, it is not that people make predictions, it is that hypotheses (or theories) make predictions! These must be the unavoidable consequences of a particular mechanism. It is the case that sometimes it takes a different person than that who discovered the hypothesis to discover a particular prediction it makes, and that this person deserves scientific credit for such work, but the prediction is still shown to be unambiguously made by the hypothesis.

VIII. For more on this topic, see the “Approximation” chapter. See also physicist Leonard Susskind's explanation for the importance of pictures to fellow physicist Richard Feynman in "Dick’s Tricks - Leonard Susskind - 5/11/2018" by Leonard Susskind (Caltech) (2018) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldfUAzRMs_k); Consilience by E. O. Wilson (pp. 63); What Is Real? by Becker (pp. 1-8, 16-20, 45, 47); The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys To The Frontiers Of Science by Marcus du Sautoy (Penguin Books) (2016) (pp. 6, 66, 77, 88-92, 105-113, 126, 196, 312-316, 348, 367, 373-374); "Effective Theory" by Lisa Randall (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2017 / 2018) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27044) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 217-219); Why Does E = mc²? (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Da Capo Press) (2009) (pp. 195-198); Fashion, Faith, And Fantasy: In The New Physics Of The Universe by Roger Penrose (Princeton University Press) (2016) (pp. 183-184); and Convergence by Watson (pp. 226, 230, 268).

IX. See (and look forward to) the ongoing publication of my book on this topic, The Sophistructure by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2020/08/table-of-contents-sophistructure-0th.html). For more on this topic as regards science, see my June 9^th, 2021 Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1402679703950041089?s=20&t=bon_mr33MLu4nOSNPnih_w, as well as my October 4^th, 2021 thread: https://twitter.com/schwinn3/status/1445128539821461514?s=20&t=4GpElANa4sZIp0XJMv6lkA.

X. For a thought-experiment on the topic, see Modern Physics: Third Edition by Raymond Serway, Clement J. Moses, and Curt A. Moyer (Brooks/Cole CENGAGE Learning) (1989 / 1997 / 2005) (pp. 175-177).

XI. See the argument against the idea that "Science Makes Philosophy Obsolete" by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Edge / Harper Perennial) (2014 / 2015) (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25423) in This Idea Must Die edited by Brockman (pp. 129-131); "Scientific Realism" by Goldstein (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27113) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 273-276); and Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search For What Lies Beyond The Quantum by Lee Smolin (Penguin Press) (2019) (pp. xvi-xvii) (though I have only yet read through the first half of pp. xxii in this work).

XII. In computer programming, one will often code an interface which is contains only function and variable signatures—not the actual body-code that will cash-in on the promise. In this case, another file (which may be written by another programmer) will be written to implement that interface—that is, the actual body-code, the algorithmic mechanism, will be written so as to pull off the promise in-practice. By analogy, here, I am arguing that epistemology is like an interface: it is all of the philosophical laws and arguments for how to reliably discover knowledge about the world. Continuing with that analogy, methodology is then the implementation, as it is the actual method carried out in-practice (constrained by all of the obstacles of the real-world) to attempt to discover knowledge along the lines of the scientific method (while the epistemology remains constant across fields, the methodology will necessarily vary widely). See the “Computation” chapter.

XIII. Actually, while possible in-principle, biologists have had some difficulty using evolutionary theory as a predictive theory compared in the same way other theories have been used, due to the inherent complexity of ecosystems. Evolutionary theory is powerful at postdiction of otherwise puzzling qualities of life, including novel predictions whose empirical verification lends credence to the adaptationist argument being put forward, but it is rare that, say, a species is predicted from first principles. Nevertheless, I know of two examples. One comes from Darwin himself, who, noticing that orchids and moths co-evolved, predicted a never-observed long-tongued moth must exist to participate in pollination with this plant; this species was later found, see "Bret Weinstein on 'The Portal' (w/ host Eric Weinstein), Ep. #019 - The Prediction and the DISC." by E. Weinstein and B. Weinstein (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s&t) (37:16 – 45:38) and Flights Of Fancy: Defying Gravity By Design & Evolution by Richard Dawkins (Head Of Zeus Ltd) (2021) (pp. 224-227). Perhaps even more impressive, entomologist Richard Alexander predicted a subterranean eusocial mammal (typically a sociobiological quality of ant and bee species) that eats tubers; lo and behold, the naked mole rat was discovered, and fit the bill, see "Bret Weinstein on 'The Portal' (w/ host Eric Weinstein), Ep. #019 - The Prediction and the DISC." by E. Weinstein and B. Weinstein (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLb5hZLw44s&t) (37:16 – 45:38). Though I had heard this episode of The Portal before, “Transcript: Bret Weinstein and Eric Weinstein on The Portal episode 19” by Matt Moses O'Brien (Moses) (2020) (https://moses.land/transcript-bret-weinstein-and-eric-weinstein-on-the-portal-episode-19/) helped direct me towards it as a source of the mole-rat discussion that I had remembered.

XIV. The ancient Greeks Anaximander, Empedocles, Democritus and actually tasted a hint of this theory in their time, see Cosmos by Sagan (pp. 185, 187).

XV. See “Hypothesizing Reciprocal Altruism Therapy For Cats” by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/06/hypothesizing-reciprocal-altruism.html#FN11A) which further cites “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” (PBS) (2001) (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/10/2/l_102_01.html) which in turn cites “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” by Theodosius Dobzhansky (The American Biology Teacher) (1973) (https://online.ucpress.edu/abt/article-abstract/35/3/125/9833/Nothing-in-Biology-Makes-Sense-except-in-the-Light?redirectedFrom=fulltext).

XVI. See “A Profusion Of Place | Part I: Of Unity And Philosophy” by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-profusion-of-place-part-i-of-unity.html#FN59A); “Bret and Heather 6th Live Stream: Death and Peer Review - DarkHorse Podcast” by B. Weinstein and H. Heying) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc6nOphi0yE) (30:40 – 59:56); "Bret And Heather 22nd DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Don't #ShutDownSTEM" by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (DarkHorse) (2020) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0n6Q0o-bVg) (32:00 – 40:57); and “Bret And Heather 61st DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: If Covid Policy Were Rational” by B. Weinstein and H. Heying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfbBvvPVFdw) (1:36:09 – 1:37:27);

XVII. See “Brownian Motion” by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (Encyclopaedia Britannica) (1998 / 2022) (https://www.britannica.com/science/Brownian-motion) (though I have not read this article other than to pull the man's profession and name).

XVIII. See To Explain The World by Weinberg (pp. 260).

XIX. Look forward to the “Physics” chapter in the “Ontology” volume.

XX. See “In Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science) by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/05/in-defense-of-philosophy-of-science.html#FN40A).

XXI. See In Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science) by Gussman (https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2021/05/in-defense-of-philosophy-of-science.html); the argument against the idea that "Science Makes Philosophy Obsolete" by Goldstein (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25423) in This Idea Must Die edited by Brockman (pp. 129-131) and "Scientific Realism" by Goldstein (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27113) in This Idea Is Brilliant edited by Brockman (pp. 273-276).

XXII. Sagan said this in an episode of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Sagan, Duyan, and Soter, though is was originally a quote by Laplace, “The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness,” see “Sagan standard” (Wikipedia) (retrieved 2022) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard) and “Pierre Simon Laplace” (Today In Science History) (1999 / 2010) (https://todayinsci.com/L/Laplace_PierreSimon/LaPlacePierreSimon-Quotations.htm) (though I have not read either article in their entirety). I was first made aware of Laplace's earlier version by my friend, Eric's Electrons, see his January 12^th, 2020 tweet: https://twitter.com/EricsElectrons/status/1216546205859184640?s=20&t=p2-B40u5G5KuzTtb30_Bvw. Incidentally, he has also tweeted Sagan's version, on June 3^rd, 2022: https://twitter.com/EricsElectrons/status/1532700879400456195?s=20&t=p2-B40u5G5KuzTtb30_Bvw.