Exactly. Physics has all the moral characters imbedded in it. Call an atom an atom. Tell you the earth is spinning around the sun.
While in ethics and morality, at its extreme, you got Bushism.
If physics within the bounds of the measurable ever becomes complete, then a person of a materialist mindset could simply define all conceivable unmeasurable things as nonexistent. From that perspective, physics would then be able to explain everything. However, even if we do someday have a complete theory of physics, we will never know for certain that we do. No matter how many measurements we make that perfectly verify a theory, we can never know that it is impossible to make a measurement that falsifies it.
If so, then there’s no point in talking about the way “things should be.” There would be no validity to claims of morality, since these claims would be dictated solely by the way things are.
Consider a large rock which falls on a car. A rational person does not curse and blame the rock; after all, the rock had no choice but to fall onto the car. Moral judgments, by their very nature, assume that an action did not have to be, and could have been avoided.
Quite. If we have no free will, as some people argue, what is the point of morality?
Obviously we have to proceed as if we do have free will, and as if morality is not due to the laws of physics, otherwise everything becomes morally neutral.
Theoretically, yes. In practice, no. At least not yet.
But that kind of reasoning is really a false dichotomy, i.e. either physics proves everything, or my particular supernatural belief is valid. They are excluding the possibility that both are true: Physics can’t prove everything AND their supernatural belief is not valid.
It’s similar to the fallacious creationist argument that “if evolution is wrong, then God exists”.
I don’t think that question is currently answerable. Wouldn’t we have to know everything in order to know whether it’s possible to know everything? If you catch my drift.
I suspect that you misunderstood Apos. (If not, then I apologize for stepping on his claim.) Moral claims are not dictated by the way things are; they are themselves a subset of the way things are. By this I mean that “Person A makes moral claim X” is an objective physical fact that can potentially be explained in physical terms.
You feel, I suspect, that a physical explanation leaves out the fundamental nature of morality; of why certain moral beliefs are “true.” The notion of moral truth is meaningless in physical terms only because it does not correspond to anything physical. In this narrow sense the explanatory power of physics is limited. However, physics can potentially do one better.
If we are capable of explaining, based perhaps on a perfect physical understanding of the neurological basis of psychology, exactly why people have the beliefs they do, then we will have transcended the debate about which moral claims are true. We will then understand the reason for the debate and the psychological factors that drive people to change their minds as a result of debate. We will even understand precisely why such perfect understanding leaves some people with the feeling that there is something left unexplained.
No, I understood Apos fully. The problem is that physics can’t explain whether Person A is correct or not in his claim. “Person A makes moral claim X” may be an objective physical fact, but the correctness of his claim lies outside the realm of physics.
No, you would not have “transcended” the validity of moral claims. At best, you would have merely sidestepped it.
There is a fundamental difference between the correctness of a moral claim, and the factors (neurological or otherwise) which lead a person to adopt or reject that claim. Physics might explain why someone adopts a moral claim (and only if the fully mechanistic view of the universe is correct) but it can not explain whether that claim is correct or not. It can not even begin to do so.
Now, at this point someone might say “But morality doesn’t exist! It’s all in your minds!” Even if we grant that claim though (and I do not), its validity is still something which can not be tested by physics. The statement “there is no morality” is itself a claim which can not be tested through physical experimentation.
—If so, then there’s no point in talking about the way “things should be.” There would be no validity to claims of morality, since these claims would be dictated solely by the way things are.—
I don’t follow the logic you’re using here. If there’s an explicable reason why we feel that the world should be a certain way, then it doesn’t make sense to ever talk about why we think it should be?
And, of course, you seem to deny this claim later on when you say that it wouldn’t actually matter anyway.
Maybe you are confusing “explaining” with “justifying.” If you really meant that it can’t “explain” morality… then could you please state what it is that you think still needs to be explained about morality?
Physics itself answers this with a resounding NO! via, amongst other things, the Uncertainty Principle.
No, you cannot prove a negative of this nature. You cannot prove that nobody has ever seen a ghost. You cannot prove that the Tooth Fairy does not exist. You cannot prove that God has never manifested Itself to anyone, ever. All you can do is offer a convincing alternative explanation for a phenomenon (or, indeed, a noumenon. And incidentally, mathematical proofs only work in [surprise!] mathematics).
I think the question you are asking is:
At some point in future, will physics provide a satisfactory explanation for every observable phenomena?
The phrase “satisfactory explanation” is of course extremely subjective. For example, I am the only atheist I know who has had a full-on “Divine Experience” unfamiliar even to most religious people and remained an unbeliever, since I believe that one day my experience could be explained merely by understanding the human brain better. So, yes, I believe that one day all observable phenomena (including noumena) will have a convincing explanation based on theories which have stood the test of time and falsification. I also believe that no “supernatural” phenomena will ever be observed (although if it ever were, I would merely shift to believing that it had a physics-based explanation itself).
As to JThunder’s extremely valid point regarding offering “physics” as the sole source of enlightenment, one must ask whether eg. economic theories, evolution or even simple chemistry are really “explained by physics” (since, except perhaps in the case of the simplest chemistry, they will never be able to be predicted by physics). Again, I believe that there will one day be a convincing “link” between physics and chemistry, chemistry and molecular biology, molecular biology and neuroscience, neuroscience and psychology/logic/philosophy (big step!), psychology and ethics and finally ethics and morality. Whether the “convincing explanation” would be a “physics” explanation in this case is perhaps more of a semantic debate than anything else (my own II denarii.).
However, we must all remember that since such explanations clearly do not exist at present, this belief constitutes a faith under every worthwhile definition of the word.
Someone once asked Einstein that question. His answer was, yes, but it would be a description without meaning, as if you described a symphony in terms of variations in wave pressure. I think he had the right idea, (Hey, who are you going to believe–me or Einstein?) but that a better way of putting it is that meaning is part of a complete description, and a description of a symphony as variations in wave pressure, or you first kiss in terms of the electromagnetic interaction, so misses the essential part of the experience as to be incomplete.
The physical/neurological explanation of experience (or indeed “meaning”) is perhaps the most difficult part of the “Theory of Everything”. That is not to say there will never be such an explanation, and we have come some way (although not far!) since Einstein in attempting one.
First of all, physics will not ever explain everything. It won’t ever explain the workings of the stock market, for example, because its economics’s job to explain that.
If you ask wether it would be possible for human knowledge to be able to explain everything in a scientific manner, then that would depend on wether “everything” is deterministic. If everything is deterministic, then it is by definition possible to define a set of rules by which you could, given exact measurements of everything, predict ahead as far as necessary. If the universe is not deterministic, then we could theoretically hunt back to the source of uncertainty, and then say, if these 500 trillion quarks do that, then this will happen, or alternately, this happened because these 500 trillion quarks did that.
Supernatural phenomena are not excepted from this. If they follow predictable rules, then they can be incorporated into science. If they don’t, then they must have a point of uncertainty, up to which they can be modeled. But in the theoretical extreme, nondeterminism is the only limit.
(Aside: If morality could not be studied, then we wouldn’t be studying it. 
If morality is absolute, then it should certainly be measurable. We need merely improve our measurements until we can reliably tell what the absolute morality of a given case or decision is, and then, by taking lots of cases into account, construct scientific models of the rules of morality. If they’re not absolute, we could do the same with any given person’s variant of it, and even describe general trends in personal morality preference, and specific trends based on brain operation.)
To whose satisfaction?
er-
if morality is quantified, and becomes a calculable value like enthalpy…
will humans never get the opportunity to act in an immoral way again?
oh dear, the ability to be *ever so slightly *wicked is the best bit about the current arrangement…
Note: If something is truly uncertain: uncaused… then there’s nothing TO be explained in the first place.
Of course, how could we ever be certain that it was uncaused?
—However, we must all remember that since such explanations clearly do not exist at present, this belief constitutes a faith under every worthwhile definition of the word.—
So… why not chuck it until you have a good reason? The question is: is it theoretically possible. I see no reason why it wouldn’t be possible in theory, but I have no reason to expect that it will happen. For all we know, the universe will end before we get around to even trying to figure out everything.
Thats right…the brains inbedded in the space-time matrix at the end of the universe, watching the last black hole evaporate, say to each other-‘You know, we never did find out who killed Kennedy…’
“Certainly”? You make it sound as though this is a given, and utterly inarguable.
Why should anything that’s absolute necessarily be measurable?
Physics should be able to understand everything physical. It can’t explain God but for the sake of discussion assume there is no God and everything is the result of a physical process. Can we know everything? Depends on our ability to measure. I can fill a cannon with a quantity of gunpowder and knowing the acceleration of gravity and angle of the barrel have a good idea where the shot would land. If you want to pedict the weather which should be purely physical you’ll have to find a way to measure all energy and particles involved on a quantum level and so far physics says that’s not possible. Even if you did measure it where would you store it?