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Sorry but the ability of Hawkins as a philospher isn't really helping answer my question.

Although persisting in the more offensive name calling does at least illustrate the issue as the offending name is a noun describing a part of someone due to their "imperfect" physical condition.

The person is further dehumanised and objectified by the term, whereas in contrast Peter has described Hawking in terms of 'what he has done/acheived' This is to describe by use of events.

For the final time I shall politely ask members NOT to make abusive comments about a person who has virtually no motor capabilities. Thank you.

sebster wrote:

Peter Wiggin wrote:I find it mildly offensive to call a brilliant man "ain't gak". He's contributed enormously to the state of modern physics.

Then you will be offended by many philosophy debates in the years to come. "That guy who is internationally respected and has written multiple important books on the subject is actually a bit rubbish" is basically the start to every second philosophy discussion.

I don't generally spend that much time having philosophical discussions, but I'll keep it in mind!


I just think its impressive for a guy with his condition to have sired multiple kids. Its good that his genetic material didn't go the way of the dodo bird. <shrug>

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Would be grateful if some erudite Dakkite could point me in the direction of anything with regards to the concept that physical objects are actually or may be perceived to be, events

Do you want an event ontology that deletes objects, or one that considers objects to be a special sort of long-lasting event?

complete edit:
Not sure to be honest Dogma.
The problem is from a non philosophical and cultural point of view, my world and perception is dominated by distiguishing betweenobjects.
The laptop atop my lap, myself in a bed. So it is hard to get away from the notion of objects in our workaday experience.

So your question is actaully well put. The two positions sum up what I am trying to understand.
As has already been mentioned, as I understand it, a quantum world ceases to know of objects.
So from that point of view, would one say that there are ultimately no objects?

However the latter seems indicative of events at our levels of perception.

In short I dont know
But now I at least have a question which is an step forward, thanks.
At the risk of asking a niave question, what is the nature of reality?
For the sake of discussion I am going to assume that objects are events, but are they completely removed from reality or are they a type of long lasting event?

dogma wrote:

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:Would be grateful if some erudite Dakkite could point me in the direction of anything with regards to the concept that physical objects are actually or may be perceived to be, events

Do you want an event ontology that deletes objects, or one that considers objects to be a special sort of long-lasting event?

This please. Sounds fascinating.

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:
As has already been mentioned, as I understand it, a quantum world ceases to know of objects.
So from that point of view, would one say that there are ultimately no objects?

Its difficult to delete objects, but it does happen in some native cultures where the distinction between self and other is very weak, or thought of as self-evident.

Quantum mechanics doesn't really eliminate objects, it simply treats objects as event states of a large number of related constituents. So chair X is a time stable condition of all those quantum elements that constitute chair X. Its an event because the chair must decay according to entropy; meaning that chair X only exists for time T in the same way that my hand only moves over this keyboard for time T.

Chibi Bodge-Battle wrote:
At the risk of asking a niave question, what is the nature of reality?
For the sake of discussion I am going to assume that objects are events, but are they completely removed from reality or are they a type of long lasting event?

Well, if you want a coherent ontology you basically have to accept the latter. If you're going to process objects as events, anyway.

Chibi Bodge-Battle:

Nobody is making fun of his disease, or the horrible way he treats his partners. We're making fun of him being an over-rated physicist. Being an over-rated physicist is important, particularly if he's notably bad at philosophy, if you're going to turn to him for guidance about the notion of events understood as objects.

People do tend to parse the word as objects, reifying whatever might be relevant regardless of whether it actually exists or not. However you're barking up the wrong tree if you think that logical move is any way indicative of ontological status.

Put another way, in philosophy there's a distinction between things that are real, and things that are merely mental tools. This is where well-deserved scorn needs to be heaped on Hawking's exegesis of Kant and misdescribes Kant's doctrine of noumena (the real) with the phenomena (the perception resulting from the representation of the noumena by the synthesis of thought) as being a fundamental disconnect between reality and our theories about it (and thank god none of us chaps believe in that anymore!).

You see the thing is that in general relativity Einstein treats gravity as a dimension, which means that the shape of the field described by a set of dimensions can be represented using tensors. This means that events happening have some existence, where previously in Newton time and space were such that objects moving in space moved over time. To make things worse, at the other end of the scale scientists were reduced to talking about events thanks to the way quantum physics decoupled cause and effect, which happens over time.

So we have two successful but incommensurate theories of physics which both hint at events having existence thanks to their creator's religious prejudices about what kind of universe God would make. There's a name to be made for the person that goes beyond both to a single theory.

So Hawking comes along and plugs quantum theory into the most obvious candidate in cosmological physics that coincides with quantum mechanical objects: the black hole or singularity. The result predicts Hawking Radiation. So, does the detection of something we're going to call Hawking radiation mean that the whole theoretical apparatus of black holes is true, and time actually is a dimension, and talking about events existing within a dimension of time is the same as talking about objects existing in 3 other dimensions.

Newton would feign no hypothesis when it came to gravity: the G just happened to make the equation work. It was instrumental. Einstein made it a property of the geometry of space-time. Adding extra dimensions worked for Einstein, think the String Theorists who know that the best science takes old ideas and add more extraneous entities (extra dimensions being the modern equivalent of ptolemeic epicycles). Having extra dimensions to stash all sorts of supernatural garbage appeals to the kind of philosopher like Whitehead and other Platonists.

Quantum Mechanics is the quintessential object-oriented theory, and it's kind of embarrassing that some physicists haven't noticed that breaking down reality into smaller chunks or objects is a great way of creating smaller and more abstractly theory-laden objects.

Quantum Gravity is the supposed solution to reconciling these theories, much like Einstein reconciled Newtonian physics and Maxwell's Equations, and Quantum Physics reconciled wave and particle theories of sub-atomic physics. Thus instrumentally speaking expanding our ontologies beyond the traditional 3D object like cubes and spheres and bodies to consider hypercubes and hyperspheres and people has been very successful.

The problem is the concept of existence takes a beating when something only exists in time or in fewer than four dimensions. A picture of a square persisting through time is a 3D object, but it doesn't exist beyond marks on a page or pixels on a screen, as a representation. We perceive two dimensional objects as lines, and one dimensional objects as points (despite them being 1 and 0 dimensional on a traditional Cartesian plane). In other words, there are cubes lying around that you can trip over, but you'll only trip over objects resembling or simulating squares from a certain perspective.

This can make you question whether events should have ontological status, or whether ontology is really necessary. I believe that doing the former repeats Hawking's mistake of reading too much into the models and the math he was using to reify events, to turn information into stuff, rather than coming up with a theory about the relation of information to stuff that can handle sub-atomic and cosmological physics without necessarily preserving traditional notions of ontology and cosmology.

All told Hawking will be remembered as a Ptolemy, not a Copernicus.

I don't understand why you are hating on Hawking as a scientist based on your views on him as a philosopher?


Yes I do agree he has a track record of treating some folks poorly, and also I agree he's "over rated" in the sense that there are scientists of equal intellect with equally fascinating theories. Celebrity is as celebrity does though.

Its primarily because cosmology and philosophy are very tightly connected. Sort of like the way philosophy and neuroscience are closely related.

dogma wrote:Its primarily because cosmology and philosophy are very tightly connected. Sort of like the way philosophy and neuroscience are closely related.

Hmm, I suppose. I view it more as the hard sciences provide meat for the philosophers to chew over. Both are important, both are wonderful, but they are not mutually exclusive. Just my layman's .02

Thanks chaps
going to sign off the thread now.

The merits or otherwise of Stephen Hawking as a philospher and scientist is not of interest to me and he is not necessary to the discussion.

Hopefully I have a few leads and my navel to contemplate.
It will be tough going but hey ho

The merits of Stephen Hawking are of interest to you if you're going to do research into process ontologies and follow the recommendation Peter Wiggin made in this thread to read A Brief History of Time.

Speaking of physicists, you should take Isaac Newton's words to heart when considering navel-gazing as any sort of productive thinking: "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

That means do research, take notes, and then do the math. If you're just going to navel-gaze, then you're wasting your own time.

i guess that was the intent of him as he asked where to start his research on his own. i think the comment was somewhat uncalled for...
as you quote newton, chibi asking you all for help made you the giants also on which he might have based his answers...

vik