Metaphysical manifesto

Physicists, mostly, are realistic reductionist Copernicist mathematicists.

   Realism is the prejudice that there is a universe out there, distinct from, but in communication with the physicist(1), and that understanding of this universe ought to be obtained by careful observation(2).

   Reductionism is the prejudice that in order to understand complicated thingsit helps to understand its simpler parts(3).

   Copernicism is the prejudice that the universe doesn’t care about the physicist’s tastes and preferences(4): the universe will keep going its own way as physicists fall for fads and fashions. In short, you are neither the center, nor at the center, of the universe.

   Mathematicism is the prejudice that we can describe and, with luck, predict phenomena using the rules of the mathematical game(5); and that the universe deigns to conform to the rules of human mathematics(6).

   All these prejudices may be wrong(7), but I will stick to them until they are clearly wrong.

By: Prof. Dr. R.H.P. Kleiss

From: 'The physics of Spacetime' - R.H.P. Kleiss - 12-04-2006

Footnotes at text:

1: Denying this is solipsism: the solipsist cannot be proven wrong by logical argument, but is, perhaps for that very reason, not a nice person to be with.

2: Denying this disqualifies one from doing physics (but not from doing mathematics); in extreme forms it can lead to revelationism and religious fundamentalism.

3: Do not be misled by fashionable slogans like ‘holism’, ‘complexity’, or ‘self-organization’. In the language we are using here, holims just states that the simplest part of a thing may happen to be the thing itself; complexity just states that simple things obeying simple rules may actually result in something pretty complicated-looking; and self-organization just states that the complicatedlooking result may actually be pretty robust. The Pseudo-Scientific New Ager will sit back and be impressed by the complicated-looking result; the scientist will be impressed by the simplicity of the parts and rules. The science of complexity is not the antithesis of reductionism, but an extreme case of it.

4: Do not be misled by fashionable slogans like ’observer effect’,’collapse of the wavefunction’, or ’the measurement problem’. Observer effect just states that the physicist, after all, is unavoidably part of the universe, and a separation between self and the universe is an idealization; collapse of the wavefunction just states that as the status of the self changes because of information gained
from the universe, it should not come as a surprise that the status of the universe also changes; the measurement problem just states that at present it is not yet completely clear how these status changes are to be explained reductionistically.

5: After centuries of brainwashing by physics’ successes, it is extremely hard for us even to conceive of any other way of doing it.

6: An undeserved but very fortunate condescension! This behaviour cannot be proven, but so far we have been succesful. On the other hand, it may mean that our mathematics has hit upon some fundamental actual properties of the world—in that case, an alien thechnology-based civilization on a distant planet would probably do mathematics the same way.