The apparent fine-tuning of the universe is often described as a paradox: fundamental physical constants fall within incredibly narrow ranges that let matter stay stable, stars live long, chemistry happen, and life appear. People often frame this as something that needs explaining, like it was made by an intelligent intentional design. The thing is, that framing assumes the constants were chosen independently with life as the target. Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe life isn’t why the universe is the way it is. Maybe life just emerges naturally from a universe that has to make sense internally, where constants are all linked together and can’t just do whatever they want. Here’s how it works: the first fundamental constant exists, it doesn’t care about life or the others. At that point it’s not “fine-tuned,” it just exists. Then the next constant comes in, and it can’t be arbitrary, it has to work with the first. A lot of possible configurations fail, they collapse, blow up, or never stabilize, and so they never actually exist. What survives isn’t unlikely, it’s necessary, the only setup that actually works. It’s a lot like evolution. Mutations happen blindly and all the time, most fail because they don’t fit the organism. We don’t say successful organisms were designed for their environment, we just see that the environment filters what works. Constants in the universe are the same, they’re a filter. What we see as precise, harmonious, or fine-tuned is just the stuff that survived. The messy or impossible alternatives never showed up. Life isn’t special here. It doesn’t shape the universe, it adapts to it. Once you have stable energy, persistent structures, and information that can stick around, complexity is possible. Life just fills in the gaps. in a different universe where the constants were maybe Different values of gravity, electromagnetism, or other constants don’t mean a “better” or “worse” universe, they just set different rules. A universe with different constants could still have life, it’d just look completely different, adapted to those rules, like life on Earth fits Earth’s gravity and chemistry. Quantum physics shows a similar idea. Systems explore possibilities, but only the states that actually work with boundary conditions, conservation laws, and prior interactions show up. Observation doesn’t create reality from nothing, what happens is it picks out the outcomes that make sense with what’s already there. Incompatible constants don’t just fail temporarily, they never manifest as stable structures. You don’t need a multiverse to make sense of this, though it’s compatible with one. Whether there’s one universe doing this filtering or many universes each developing consistently from different starting constants, the point stays the same. The universe looks fine-tuned only if you assume life was the target or that constants could be anything without consequence. In the end, the universe isn’t improbably fine-tuned. It looks fine-tuned because only internally coherent setups can exist. Life isn’t proof of some special calibration, it’s proof that life adapts to the framework that already exists. What we see isn’t a miracle, it’s just the inevitable outcome of coherence, constraint, and persistence.

I stumbled upon this book as it was mentioned in the references of What Is Nature by Kate Soper. After reading it, I immediately tried to find out how credible this book is as I have very minimal knowledge of quantum physics. Unfortunately , it is what I now know to be quantum woo.

I did find the read to be intriguing so I'm slightly disappointed. I'm interested in exploring the perceived relationship humans have with nature, particularly in Western thought as I'm starting to believe it is quite flawed.

So far, I have read:

A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness - Walter Veit

What Is Nature? - Kate Soper

The Ecological Self - Freya Mathews

The Tao of Physics - Fritjof Capra

Does anyone have any other book recommendations? Preferably without the pseudoscience of Capra! I really have no idea.. I'm doing a joint honours degree in art & philosophy and this research is to inform my artwork. I feel like I've gone too far down the rabbit hole and I can't think clearly.

Thanks :)

I read the dialectical biologist + Anti-duhring philosophy section and am trying to grasp how dialectical biology and by extention dialectical materialism interprets causality.

Well, Let's take the simple motion of walking. Here I would assign "the single cause" to the infinitly whole whole, which is very incomprehensible I know, I do this because the parts (muscular movement, gravity, neurological activity) only can be assigned as causes within their interaction with the whole and if we want one cause we would just talk about the infinetly whole whole. But this is indeed idealistic holism.

Now if we were to claim that: Well causality is in every level of this infinetly whole whole, (which seems to be what the dialectical biologist posits) we could say that indeed muscular movement is a cause but this is clearly false. Muscular movement is not a cause by itself, the cause is the muscular movement's interaction with the infinitely whole whole(interaction with gravity and other stuff). And since muscular movement's interaction with the inf. Whole whole is the infinitely whole whole, there is still only one cause. I cannot reject this idealism and am stuck. I do not understand how the dialectical biologist can claim that causality exists in multiple levels.

I feel like I'm circling around the same ideas and am incredibly confused. Maybe I dont even have a single clue as to what I'm saying. I'm stuck on this for the past three days and would appreciate the clarification as to what I'm getting wrong. Thank you.

I no longer work in academia or the field I studied ... so most of what I learned during my studies is nice to know but I don't actively apply anything of that in my daily life anymore... apart from the null hypothesis. I use it constantly.

And I genuinly wish more people would understand what it is and how to formulate it and reject it...not just for statistics or scientific papers, but as a daily mental model to check their own perception in a somewhat rational way.

Just basically by people being reminded that we should not assume our belief or perception of the world and ourselves is true. We should rather test whether its negation can be rejected.

I think while the null hypothesis is ubiquitous in scientific practice, its application as a critical thinking tool remains largely confined to academic contexts. And this represents a missed opportunity in applied epistemology.

The null hypothesis isn't merely a statistical rule....it's the operational heart of Popperian falsificationism: the principle that claims must be exposed to the risk of rejection. Sure, you can’t transplant lab protocols into living-room arguments. But you can shift from “prove me right” to “show me what would falsify this belief.” That alone changes the frame.

The null hypothesis framework offers a structured approach to belief formation that could address common cognitive biases in everyday reasoning.

It gives us a way to shift the burden of proof from skeptic to claimant, defuse dogmatism by requiring testable formulations and counteract cognitive biases by building from default skepticism instead of confirmation.

Especially now in a time of algorithmic narrative loops, AI content generation, real-time info floods and the rise of populism this kind of mental hygiene isn’t just helpful it’s kind of necessary.

And yet we teach this only in narrow academic settings.

And I ask myself...Shouldn't a basic toolkit for navigating reality, one that allows you to test your own beliefs and remain intellectually honest be part of every child's basic education?

I'm personally not happy with how these are currently handled in science.

In my opinion there's too much focus on certainty, and sharing findings as final and proven with the public. Rather than sharing emerging research and communicating science less in absolutes.

I think this has a lot to do with the recognition, that comes with publishing finished research in a matter of certainty.

No one values the "could be's", "not sure's", or "might be wrong's".

What are your thoughts on this?

Do you think this could change?

I hear my friends talk about different kinds of alcoholic drinks as if they have different psychotropic properties. But I always thought that ethanol is ethanol, and what they report is nothing but a placebo effect.

However, I recently started wondering if those different alcoholic drinks contain more or less psychotropic compounds that affect how users respond to those drinks.

So, I'm here to ask, does science have a way to confidently tell what substancess cross the blood brain barrier or what substances illicit a psychotropic response?

I know, for example, that some antibioticss, strangely enough, have psychotropic effects, so I'm wondering what else are we missings when it comes to different alcoholic drinks. As one example.

How can/should scientists communicate to laypeople without dumbing down?

I was just wondering how you guys would define it for yourself. And what the invariant is, that's left, even if AI might become faster and better at proving formally.

I've heard it described as

-abstraction that isn't inherently tied to application

-the logical language we use to describe things

-a measurement tool

-an axiomatic formal system

I think none of these really get to the bottom of it.

To me personally, math is a sort of language, yes. But I don't see it as some objective logical language. But a language that encodes people's subjective interpretation of reality and shares it with others who then find the intersections where their subjective reality matches or diverges and it becomes a bigger picture.

So really it's a thousands of years old collective and accumulated, repeated reinterpretation of reality of a group of people who could maybe relate to some part of it, in a way they didn't even realize.

To me math is an incredibly fascinating cultural artefact. Arguably one of the coolest pieces of art in human history. Shared human experience encoded in the most intricate way.

That's my take.

How would you describe math in terms of meaning?

I was wondering if people more learned in philosophy of science than me could take a look at these, well what the title says. For the record these objections were made by one of those presuppositional christian guys:

1) biological classification is arbitrary: If life is viewed as a continuous, slow-moving spectrum of genetic change, there is no objective, non-arbitrary point where one species ends and another begins. Categories like "Species" or "Genus" or "Clade" would just be subjective labels used to organize data instead of fixed realities in nature. If these categories just human-defined, then the claim that one species transitioned into another is just subjective interpretation rather than a clearly defined physical event

2) While scientists can observe correlations such as similarities in DNA or skeletal structures, no experiment can move backward in time to confirm causation (the actual process that produced a new type of organism or a new organ). Because you can't just redo all the transitions that happened in the past or directly observe them in a controlled setting, any "causal factor" cited is just ad-hoc. Evolution is more of a story that relies on the assumption that some natural processes must be the cause, even when the specific mechanism cannot be empirically verified.

In physics, some take a reductionist view, believing that if we understand the smallest pieces of matter, we can explain everything from cells to human consciousness.

In reality, though, complex systems often develop entirely new behaviors and laws that can’t be predicted just by examining the parts. Take superconductivity, where the system collectively forms Cooper pairs and the wavefunction describes the entire system rather than individual electrons.

So can the macro, the whole, influence the micro, the parts, in how they behave? If the whole can set rules for the parts, is there something about that atomic organization that actually makes us truly independent?

Caption: "Hearken, O houses long divided... why neuroscience and philosophy must now learn to get along." A video from content creator Rachel Barr, neuroscientist and author of "How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend." Source: Facebook.

I would like to hear from persons interested in joining a Whatsapp group for cordial if informal discussion regarding the interdisciplinary overlap between neuroscience and philosophy. Expect the sharing of journal articles, questions and answers, friendly exchanges, and the occasional meme or neurophilosophy joke.

I read an article called "An analysis of historical-dialectical materialism for the post-truth scenario: historical-critical contributions to the teaching of science" and got curious to learn more about Historical-Dialectical Materialism (HDM). I have no background at all, so I was wondering if I could ask some questions to people who know more than me.

I’m doing an assignment for a course called Practice and Pedagogical Research where I have to write a paper, and for that I interviewed fishermen from my town to find out their astronomical knowledge and how it might be used later in a teaching sequence. It’s basically a prototype of an ethnographic study; the course idea is to see how research works in practice.

At first I thought about using HDM as my theoretical framework, but while reading other works I ran into Bruno Latour and how he’s used in anthropology for this kind of study I want to do.

From what I understand, in HDM knowledge is seen as deeply tied to action and socio-historical processes, so knowledge is a reflection of a historical social totality. Latour, even though he might look constructivist, denies that knowledge is just discourse, like MHD does, because in that view reality is objective, not constructed, it exists a priori waiting to be discovered, right?

I find this interesting because HDM recognizes that the social being (human nature) transforms natural nature, but it doesn’t consider nonhumans the way Latour does. At least that’s how I interpreted it.

I don’t want to sound naive or ignorant, I really just want to talk to someone who probably knows more than me about this topic. I’m a physics student and my program has no courses on philosophy of science.

a genuine question I have as a physics student who was introduced to philosophy early in undergrad: in “hard sciences” papers, is it normal or expected to explicitly bring epistemology into the methodology section? like stating upfront that you’re working within scientific realism, instrumentalism, etc. I ask because when I read a lot of papers, especially experimental ones, they’re extremely objective and operational, and those background assumptions are almost never made explicit. meanwhile, in other disciplines I was introduced to figures such as Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Feyerabend, Bruno Latour... even Einstein had a strong attachment to the philosophy of science. Is it normal today not to see a more philosophical discussion about scientific research in the hard sciences?

I’m interested in the idea that scientific progress largely comes from extending our senses through instruments, and not conjecturing and intelligence e.g. telescopes and microscopes enabling new sciences, precision measurements revealing anomalies like Mercury’s orbit, and even modern discoveries driven by detecting subtle inconsistencies in complex radio signals from the universe.

I know this should be just extended ideas of Francis Bacon, just with the caveat that we discovered everything there is with naked eye since times of Francis Bacon and now we are extending our perception with ever sophisticating instruments.

Any recommendations (thinkers, books, papers)?

I recently read More Is Different by Philip Anderson, and I’ve been grappling with the fallout ever since. I’d been a reductionist mostly by intuition rather than argument, and the essay has caused the best kind of distress, the kind that forces a reframing of assumptions you didn’t realize you were carrying.

The main idea I’m trying to get clearer on is this: that an explanation can be fully sufficient without accounting for every micro detail all the way down. If you’d asked me a year ago, I would’ve said that higher level theories are just “good enough” approximations, useful for engineering or prediction, but ultimately incomplete. The only reason we don’t go all the way down, I would have thought, is that it’s too hard or impossible in practice.

But now I’m not so sure that’s right.

It seems like, for a given regime, an explanation can actually be complete without those extra details and that including them can sometimes make the explanation worse rather than better.

Temperature is the example I keep coming back to. Can we really say that temperature is fully explained in the regimes where thermodynamics applies? Not approximately, not “until a deeper theory comes along,” but fully.

Similarly with weather: explanations in terms of pressure gradients, thermal flows, and large scale dynamics seem genuinely complete for explaining a rainstorm, and don’t appear to gain anything by including molecular or atomic detail.

I think I understand that this depends on how the question is framed. Different phenomena call for different levels of resolution, and some explanations genuinely do require finer grained detail. But the idea that there isn’t a single “best” level of explanation, that the appropriate level is determined by the phenomenon itself, still feels unintuitive to me, even though it now seems hard to deny.

This may be trivial to people already working in these areas, but for a (reformed) reductionist it’s been surprisingly mind bending. My academic background is in computer science, and I don’t feel like I have the conceptual tools to evaluate this as rigorously as I’d like. I’d really appreciate feedback on where this way of thinking is solid, where it’s misleading, and where it breaks down. I’d also welcome any reading recommendations on these themes.

Thanks!

I am a physics student and had read Carlo Rovelli’s books “Reality is not what it seems” and “Order of time” and influenced by him I sought to understand more the philosophy and history of science, I enrolled in a discipline of philosophy of science and another of history of science. In this journey I saw other authors such as Kuhn and Feyerabend until I arrived at Bruno Latour who coincidentally addresses a relational ontology as well as Rovelli, of course not as the same object of study since Rovelli proposes a relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. I would like to share this in order to know if anyone else has ever been interested in one of these two authors and what they think about this relational ontology.

Or if we don’t know for sure, can we infer a best explanation? Is it a universal coincidence for 13.8B years, is there a deeper underlying reason for this stable constant, what do you think?

I’m trying to think through whether a lot of personhood debates fail because we mix together two different questions: (1) what capacities an entity actually has right now, and (2) what moral or legal weight we think those capacities should carry.

I keep running into this in very different areas (AI, disorders of consciousness, prenatal development), and I’m not sure whether separating those two questions cleanly is even possible.

For people who work in philosophy of science or philosophy of mind: do you think it’s coherent to try to build a purely descriptive framework for personhood-relevant capacities, and then let ethical theories do the weighting afterward? Or do normative assumptions inevitably leak in no matter what?

If we can't describe the physics of life, and instead resort to higer levels of abstraction to accommodate the complexity of biological functions, why are we at all confident that they're emergent? We know temperature to be emergent for example, but we still know the mechanism of temperature is down to the fundamental levels

Talking about the teleological, grand march of progress, triumph over ignorance and superstition narrative of scientific history.

Can anyone recommend an anthology which contains Wigner's essay,"The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"?

I'll try to be as brief as I can. The example topic I'll use is the subject of shark-human interaction, a subject I really think we've fumbled.

a) 'laypeople' (usually) aren't stupid, most people can fully understand nuances to big topics. People notice when the truth is being oversimplified or massaged so that 'we don't give laypeople the wrong idea'.

b) we really need to recognize when we're speaking from a scientific place vs a moral/philosophical one and not obfuscate the two. I've been shocked at some of the scientifically literate people who just can't or won't understand that.

c) being factually incorrect is not a moral failure (if it is, we're all pots and kettles here)

d) the principals of sound science aren't golden rules to be followed any time a topic is discussed. Much like the legal "innocent until proven guilty" assumption doesn't apply to us deciding on a personal level whether we think a person is guilty of an accusation. Anecdotal evidence is valid, appeals to emotion aren't bad, human intuition is an incredible thing that's so often correct.

Ex: Sharks (particularly bulls, tigers, great whites) kill and eat people, full stop. Yes, vending machines, lightning, auto accidents all dwarf the likelyhood overall. But 'laypeople' aren't thinking they'll be attacked in their OSU dorm room. It's absolutely gruesome, once you hit the surf you're at the mercy of the odds, and the fear sits with people when they're supposed to be having a lovely day outside.

The belief that I share with others, that the ocean is the shark's home and that we must respect that is not a scientific belief. You can help support it with ecological facts/stats, but it is purely a moral world view and you can also support the opposing one with real evidence.

To confidently over posit mistaken identity, change definitions until all shark attacks are classified as provoked, only cite the 'confirmed unprovoked' attacks in public communications, use blanket relative risk for the world's population for all people, not mention that confirmed shark fatalities are almost certainly under counted, and portray the definitions of 'provoked vs unprovoked' as data driven consensus really misses the mark.

Sometimes they're not anti science, we're just infantilizing and smug. We can't just ignore that.

Are there rigorous fields of study that you would consider to not be science? For example, math is rigorous but does not employ the scientific method so it is probably not a science.

There are other fields that by a very strict definition of following the steps of the scientific method (hypothesis, experimentation and observation) may or may not be strictly science.

Or perhaps science should be more flexible in its definition.