The question is: whether the statement “the total energy of Universe is zero” is a true statement. He says that if the statement is true, then “any cosmological theory in which such a statement has no clear meaning is, at best, incomplete.”
And of course, the statement can have no clear meaning, since “matter” and “energy” have not yet been defined — after a couple millennia of scientific inquiry, I might add. When we do encounter definitions of such terms, we find — as Alamo-Girl has recently pointed out here and elsewhere — that they are defined in terms of each other. E.g., “E = MC2”; and conversely, “M = E/C2.” This is sort of a solipsism; but it seems to be the most/best we’ve got.
It seems we know a good deal about how matter/energy behaves — that is to say, how it acts. But what we still do not know is what matter/energy is. In itself, as itself, for itself so to speak. But this really is an ontological question, and science claims not to be in the ontology business. Still, since one’s epistemology is inevitably rooted in one’s ontology, it seems to me that modern-day science is not entitled to ditch the question. And in fact, it seems few scientists these days have the epistemological discipline of a Niels Bohr; and so they just bury “the ontological issue” in an undisclosed initial premise, and then go on merrily from there.
Note just to get everybody on the same page here: Ontology addresses problems of being and existence; epistemology addresses problems of human knowledge. On a good day, we hope that the two modes of inquiry actually correspond with each other.
So apparently “Barry” wants to dispense with empiricism — which requires us to engage the world “outside ourselves” — altogether and run straight to logicism. (I’m not even sure if that’s a word; but if it’s not, let’s coin a word here.)
That’s just what Hegel, the great 19th-century German Transcendental Idealist philosopher, did in Phaenomenologie, which gave us a “system to end all systems” — dialectical science. In order to make to make this system work, you have to do two things: (1) end history (which requires expunging all human memory of the past, personal and cultural); and (2) refuse to engage the world external to the mind.
But the world is the very thing of which one happens to be ineluctably part and participant — whether one likes it or not. You cannot stop paying attention to it without sacrificing one’s own sense of reality, and thus the basis of one’s own sanity.
Now evidently Marx really resonated to Hegel’s “intuitions”/intimations. I gather he thought, as apparently Hegel did, that he was not “part and participant” of any reality greater than what could be specified within the (limited) confines of his own mind and personal passions. In Marx’s theory, it is actually, really Marx who is the measure of all things, you see. On Marx’s theory at least (we won’t even speak of his bloody-minded epigones here — people like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, et al.).
Our clever friend “Barry” defends his “skepticism” on logical grounds, citing the following axiom (all of whose terms involve universals I might add):
{ P => Q} U {Q +> R} +> {P +> R}Well. Since there are “universal blanks to be filled in,” I propose to do it in the following way, with a hat-tip to Hegel and “Barry”:
{“A Head Without a World”} U [World here, to maintain consistency of terminology] {“Headless World”} => {“The World in My Head”}My thanks to Elias Canetti for suggesting these terms.
Plus “Barry’s” flat-earth example seems to be a bit of a put-up job. For no one today believes the world is flat. Why does he belabor this example?
If “logic is making him do it,” then his logic has lost its connection with reality. And this is unacceptable. At least with regard to sane people. Better to hold one’s tongue, than to speak of things that one cannot possibly know in terms of direct experience of the world “outside one’s head.”
In short, logic detached from the real state of the world is unproductive. Both for the world, and for the thinker using this sort of logic.
Well, them be my thoughts on these issues, FWIW.
Thanks so much for the link, js1138! It really gave me something to chew on.