Physics IS philosophy. — Joshs

Yes indeed. It’s the fundamental branch of natural philosophy. (Perhaps astronomy is older — but physics is still central.)

I think this too often gets forgotten. People want to make sharp distinctions, as if the sciences have no need for philosophy and long ago “detached” from it. I think hidden in that view is dogmatism — namely, scientism — which arises out of a justifiable disdain for organized religion… and one I used to share.

But we throw the baby out with the bathwater if we make these rigid compartmentalizations. Better to break free of it. Life is messy.

Physics IS philosophy.
However, philosophy IS NOT physics (i.e. not theoretical, or does not explain any aspect of nature). — 180 Proof

If the job of explanation is to reveal interconnections, correlations and coherences among what had formerly been taken to be disparate phenomena, then both physics and philosophy explain. I think it’s a matter of how conventional and generic the explanation is. If empiricism takes as its role the explanation of what can be objectively measured , this is because it takes as its starting point the already conventionalized idea of the object. A philosophical explanation can burrow
deep within the unexamined pre suppositions forming the condition of possibility for the conventionalized notion of the physical object. Physicists explain objective nature, while philosophy explains the nature of the construction of the idealization physicists call objective nature.

But we throw the baby out with the bathwater if we make these rigid compartmentalizations. Better to break free of it. Life is messy — Xtrix

Yes, I don’t think there is any categorical way to distinguish the philosophical, the scientific-empirical , the technological, and the literary or artistic for that matter. They interpenetrate each other in complex
ways.

I'm with Witty: philosophy describes discursive features and usages while leaving "everything as it is". On the hand, physics endeavors to explain how transformations of states-of-affairs into other states-of-affairs are possible with high-precision models that are experimentally testable. Philosophical elucidations are used in constructing physical models the way grammars are used in novels and histories; they do not explain anything but rather make explicit, or describe, as you say "interconnections, correlations and coherences" implicit in concepts or discourses such as physics. To the degree physicists find 'philosophical contributions' add to the efficacy of their theoretical and research practices, they deliberately use philosophy; otherwise it – speculation for speculation's sake – is mostly (again, efficaciously) ignored.

The OP's question points to the plain and simple fact that our intution about time is such that it involves $-\infty$ (beginninglessness) and yet we don't possess a term for this idea. No, infinity ($\infty$) isn't it because it's endlessness and not beginninglessness. So $-\infty$ is only, how shall I put it?, an approximation of the concept we need to make sense of the OP's question.

yet we don't possess a term for this idea — Agent Smith

I think it is eternity - without beginning and without end.

Wittgenstein in a lecture once asked his audience to imagine coming across a man who is saying, ‘…5, 1, 4, 1, 3—finished!’, and, when asked what he has been doing, replies that he has just finished reciting the complete decimal expansion of pi backwards—something that he has been doing at a steady rate for all of past eternity. — Moore, A. W. 1990.The Infinite.

I think it is eternity - without beginning and without end.

Wittgenstein in a lecture once asked his audience to imagine coming across a man who is saying, ‘…5, 1, 4, 1, 3—finished!’, and, when asked what he has been doing, replies that he has just finished reciting the complete decimal expansion of pi backwards—something that he has been doing at a steady rate for all of past eternity.
— Moore, A. W. 1990.The Infinite. — Cuthbert

:lol:

Most interesting! — Ms. Marple

Eternity = Both beginningless + Endless.

What about just beginninglessness?

As for Wittgenstein's quaint gedanken experiment, in what context did it appear? What was the point he was trying to make?

Unbounded. For instance, the Hartle-Hawking No Boundary conjecture (that there wasn't a "big bang" just as there isn't an edge to the Earth (i.e. sphere / torus)).

What was the point he was trying to make? — Agent Smith

Maybe that "eternity" is the dimensionless point (nunc stans).

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Unbounded — 180 Proof

Close, but still leaves much to be desired.

Beginning present, ending present: :yawn:

Beginning present, ending absent: $\infty$

Neither beginning nor ending present i.e. both absent: Eternity [no symbol] (k/c/o Cuthbert)

Beginning absent, ending present: No concept so far. $-\infty$???

What about just beginninglessness?

As for Wittgenstein's quaint gedanken experiment, in what context did it appear? What was the point he was trying to make? — Agent Smith

It was reported by A W Moore from a lecture by W and I don't know more than that.

Like a lot of Wittgenstein's remarks it is suggestive of an argument without being explicit. Personally I think that it is about the question you raise: does it make sense to talk about a process that has an end point in time (the time 'now') whilst having no beginning (there is no 'first term' of pi written backwards).? The comparison could be this:

I announce that I am going to recite the whole of pi. I begin "3.141....." I have begun an impossible task. I will never complete it. But it's a coherent story. We know when I started and we know I will never finish.

On the other hand, if I announce that I have just finished reciting pi backwards then my claim is worse that weirdly ambitious. It is logically incoherent. If I have been reciting pi backwards then I must never have begun at any particular time - and so I can never be finishing the recitation at any particular time.

I think the example is relevant to Kant's first antinomy:

The first antinomy concerns the finitude or infinitude of the spatio-temporal world. The thesis argument seeks to show that the world in space and time is finite, i.e., has a beginning in time and a limit in space. The antithesis counters that it is infinite with regard to both space and time. — Stanford

Perhaps the reason we don't have a term for 'without a beginning, but with an end' is that it is incoherent. If a process had no beginning then it would be already infinite. But if it's going on now then it might come to end at any moment - and it is therefore finite. So it would be both finite and infinite. That's the antinomy.

incoherent — Cuthbert

Excelente!

All I can say is that you're on the mark - it's a Morton's fork.

Both time has a beginning and no it doesn't are incoherent, but the former is more coherent less incoherent than the latter. Scylla & Charybdis, choose the lesser of two evils.

The type of questions the OP is an example of pits our faculty of imagination against logic. Just because we can't conceive of time with/without a beginning we have no right to dismiss a sound argument that demonstrates which of the two cases obtains, oui?

I guess you don't understand my post.

I guess you don't understand my post. — 180 Proof

No one does.

Perhaps the reason we don't have a term for 'without a beginning, but with an end' is that it is incoherent. If a process had no beginning then it would be already infinite. But if it's going on now then it might come to end at any moment - and it is therefore finite. So it would be both finite and infinite. That's the antinomy. — Cuthbert

No, just that the universe need not have a beginning or end.

Yes, I don’t think there is any categorical way to distinguish the philosophical, the scientific-empirical , the technological, and the literary or artistic for that matter. They interpenetrate each other in complex
ways. — Joshs

Agre with that.

I think the example is relevant to Kant's first antinomy:

The first antinomy concerns the finitude or infinitude of the spatio-temporal world. The thesis argument seeks to show that the world in space and time is finite, i.e., has a beginning in time and a limit in space. The antithesis counters that it is infinite with regard to both space and time.
— Stanford — Cuthbert

Then, "infinite" and "finite" need to be defined. Because "infinite" could express the existence of an infinite time, which is what I would reject.

Unlike @Agent Smith, self-proclaimed "I'm not a beginner" types like you don't understand much that's not tediously spoon-fed.

Unlike Agent Smith, self-proclaimed "I'm not a beginner" types like you don't understand much that's not tediously spoon-fed. — 180 Proof

Constant personal attacks from you. You must be a moderator.

Nope. Just a dialectical rodeo clown tryiing corral (your) bulls*** :sweat:

You might find my thread on CCC (the Penrose bounce) interesting as a candidate for 'before the big bang'

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12828/the-penrose-bounce/p1

Nope. Just a dialectical rodeo clown tryiing corral (your) bulls***. :eyes: — 180 Proof

Nothing but constant personal attacks from you.

Nothing but nothing of substance from you and evasiveness like this :point: .

I guess you don't understand my post. — 180 Proof

Maybe, but I tried to. I should be awarded points for that, oui monsieur!

Nothing but nothing of substance from you and evasiveness like this :point: ↪180 Proof — 180 Proof

The fact you chase me around making personal attacks with impunity tells me everything I need to know about you and this forum.

:ok:

↪Joshs I'm with Witty: philosophy describes discursive features and usages while leaving "everything as it is". On the hand, physics endeavors to explain how transformations of states-of-affairs into other states-of-affairs are possible with high-precision models that are experimentally testable. Philosophical elucidations are used in constructing physical models the way grammars are used in novels and histories; they do not explain anything but rather make explicit, or describe, as you say "interconnections, correlations and coherences" implicit in concepts or discourses such as physics. To the degree physicists find 'philosophical contributions' add to the efficacy of their theoretical and research practices, they deliberately use philosophy; otherwise it – speculation for speculation's sake – is mostly (again, efficaciously) ignored. — 180 Proof

You make it sound like philosophy constructs grammars and clarifications after the fact , by looking at the explanations of physicists and then making explicit what the physicists have already created. But the leading edge of philosophy always beats physics to the punch. It is physics that ‘fills in the details’ years after a philosophical approach produces a new architecture of thought, and then has to reconfigure anew all those details when philosophy ( or a philosophically attuned physicist) subverts the old architecture.
Each era of philosophy, from Descartes to Leibnitz to Kant to Hegel to Wittgenstein, anticipates an era of physics. Newtonian physics is compatible with Descartes but not with Kant, Hegel or Wittgenstein. A 19th physicist who had read and understood Kant would likely recognize inadequacies in Newtonian physics that would be invisible to Newton. Similarly, a 21st century physicist who understands Hegelian and post-Hegelian concepts will find it necessary to reconfigure the axes around which central ideas in physics revolve. Lee Smolen is an example of such a physicist today. He writes:

Philosophers of the past “sometimes understood the problems we face more deeply than many of my colleagues today. For example, Leibniz was, to my understanding, the first to struggle with the main question that we face in trying to make a quantum theory of gravity-how to make a background independent description of a closed universe that contains both all its causes and all its observers. And Peirce was the first to articulate and try to solve the puzzle at the heart of the current debates in cosmology and string theory: what chose the laws that govern our universe? And what chose the initial conditions?”

“… in many cases philosophers are working on the same questions I work on-and developing ideas related to the ideas I hope to establish-but from a bracingly different perspective.”

“… fundamental physics has been in a crisis, due to the evident need for new revolutionary ideas-which becomes more evident with each failure of experiment to confirm fashionable theories, and the inability of those trained in a pragmatic, anti- philosophical style of research to free themselves from fashion and invent those new ideas. To aspire to be a revolutionary in physics, I would claim, it is helpful to make contact with the tradition of past revolutionaries. But the lessons of that tradition are maintained not in the communities of fashionable science, with their narrow education and outlook, but in the philosophical community and tradition.”

The fact is physics does not make significant progress without regularly going through revolutions in its basic assumptions. When speculation for speculation’s s sake is ignored by physicists there isnrelative stagnation in the field.

Leibniz was, to my understanding, the first to struggle with the main question that we face in trying to make a quantum theory of gravity-how to make a background independent description of a closed universe that contains both all its causes and all its observers. — Joshs

I believe Leibniz was the first to conceive the universe as a computing machine.

↪Jackson
You might find my thread on CCC (the Penrose bounce) interesting as a candidate for 'before the big bang — universeness

Quick correction, my thread was not ABOUT CCC but it describes the basic concept.