Does the Higgs-boson exist?

In this post she sums up beautifully what I and many physicists believe, and is vehemently opposed by the prevailing realist crowd here on LW.

She seems to vacillate between "realism is a philosophical idea" and "realism is false".

This is about realism being a philosophical idea:

And this is all well and fine, but realism is a philosophy. It’s a belief system, and science does not tell you whether it is correct.

And this is simply asserting nonrealism:

If you want to claim that the Higgs-boson does not exist, you have to demonstrate that the theory which contains the mathematical structure called “Higgs-boson” does not fit the data. Whether or not Higgs-bosons ever arrive in a detector is totally irrelevant.

So, she isn't making a coherent argument against realism, she says "it's philosophical" as if it's a counterargument (wat?).

The issue is, when she says something like "That is what we mean when we say 'quarks exist': We mean that the predictions obtained with the hypothesis agrees with observations," that is itself a philosophical idea, subject to philosophical analysis. (What does it mean for a statement to mean something? What's a prediction? What's an observation? How does this idea behave in unusual cases such as the person claiming there's an invisible pink dragon in their garage?) But she's trying to exclude philosophy from the domain of the conversation... which is inextricably philosophical.

This seems like another instance of "people who say they're not doing philosophy are in fact doing bad philosophy."

For what it's worth I think there is a way to rescue Sabine's bad philosophy. She says:

Look, I am a scientist. Scientists don’t deal with beliefs. They deal with data and hypotheses. Science is about knowledge and facts, not about beliefs.

And from a certain point of view this is right, science is pragmatic and about ignoring large parts of problem space in order to act as if we did have the ability to know facts directly. And it works pretty well as far as it goes, as the modern world makes clear with all it has enabled us to do and have that did not happen without science.

There are still some technical problems here. Claiming that "scientists don't deal with belief" is sort of like trying to say "scientists are not embedded agents [LW · GW]" which is just nonsensical given what we observe about the world. But if we squint we can see this as more saying science is not about the folk notion of belief, i.e. it's not about all your thoughts, regardless of how well they predict future experiences. I also think when she says that science is about "knowledge and facts" she doesn't necessarily mean what a philosopher would mean by knowledge (a kind of belief that is believed to be correlated with "reality" or at least predictions of future experiences) or facts (universally, eternally true statements), but instead a folk version of these where knowledge some set of accessible facts that can be called up when needed and worked with and facts are statements that accurately predict the world up to the limit of our predictive abilities (and if she lacks a subjective, probabilistic model of knowledge, maybe just statements that predict future experiences 100% of the time).

And in this way it's not at all at odds with philosophy, although it is antagonistic. Speculating, it seems Sabine is hoping that philosophy can remain a separate magisterium she doesn't have to deal with by carving out hard lines between it and science, and although she's clearly not a strong philosopher or else she would have chosen her words more carefully (although I am reading them out of full context, so it's possible I am the one being insufficiently careful!), this is a stance a large part of Western philosophy took for most of the 20th century before it was proven unworkable since no such hard line can be made to exist.

As I like to think of it, we are all philosophers whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, and whether we're good at it or not. We can wish it were otherwise, but the world we are embedded in is not shaped such that it could be, so even if we want to be pragmatists and avoid dealing with many deeper issues in philosophy, we should at least be honest and upfront about that, rather than what Sabine seems to be trying to do, which is slyly dismiss the need for philosophy rather than simple admitting to her pragmatism so she can get on with being a scientist.

Hm - would the prevailing realist crowd disagree with this way of using the word?

For example, it sure seems like Eliezer takes more or less the same position here [LW · GW]. I take a slightly more unusual position mathematical truth here [? · GW].

I still think that things exist, and are true, and are real, and so on. The difference between me and me ten years ago is just that I have an explanation for why I use those words, rather than just repeating them more slowly and louder.

That is what we mean when we say “quarks exist”: We mean that the predictions obtained with the hypothesis agrees with observations.

That's not literally what we mean. I can easily imagine a universe where quarks don't exist where Omega intervenes to make observations agree with quark-based predictions in response to predictions being made (but not, say, in parts of the universe causally inaccessible to humans). Maybe this is a strawman interpretation, but if so, it's not obvious to me what the charitable interpretation is.

edit: by "quark-based predictions" I mean predictions based on the hypothesis that quarks exist outside of the mind of Omega, including in causally inaccessible parts of the universe

I'm confused:

In this post she sums up beautifully what I and many physicists believe, and is vehemently opposed by the prevailing realist crowd here on LW. A few excerpts:

Look, I am a scientist. Scientists don’t deal with beliefs.

Can you point out a specific an example of "the prevailing realist crowd here on LW" or, if you don't want to unfairly single out a specific example, concoct a charitable facsimile? (The fragment "is vehemently opposed by the prevailing realist crowd here on LW" seems hostile, I'd guess due to frustration, but I'm uncertain so I'm curious as to the relevant motivations for you to use it.)

Obviously scientists deal with beliefs. You're claiming (and I believe you) that both you and "many physicists" don't believe that philosophical realism is true (or 'true') or useful (or that it's a 'wrong question'). And, presumably, you and Sabine both believe that the theory that predicts that Higgs-bosons 'exist' is the best available theory for predicting anticipated experiences.

Maybe I've been drinking the Kool-Aid David Chapman's been giving away for too long, but obviously, being something inside { reality / the universe } I have no privileged access to whether any particular beliefs are ultimately or perfectly true or that the objects of those beliefs are likewise ultimately or perfectly real. But if sure seems like we've been able to get closer and closer to true beliefs about what's real. On the gripping hand, we also seem 'doomed' to run up against the inevitable nebulosity of our beliefs.

So, I'll try to answer the questions that both you and Sabine seem to find so frustrating:

• Does the Higgs-boson exist? – Yes, it seems to exist (i.e. to be a real particle). We have pretty strong evidence that it's been detected and the evidence strongly suggests that its properties match our predictions.
• Do black holes exist? – Yes, they seem to exist. We've even been able to recently generate an image of one (relatively) nearby!
• Do quarks exist? – The best theory of particle physics suggests that they do but currently we don't expect to be able to observe them 'freely', i.e. not bound within other less elementary particles, with our available tools, so the evidence of their existence is more indirect than we may otherwise hope to someday have.
• Does time exist? – Yes, in the sense that we don't have much of an ability to understand anything without, essentially, assuming it exists, tho we do know, and have strong evidence thereof, that it's weirder than our intuitions would otherwise lead us to believe (e.g. it can 'dilate', even in ways we can precisely measure, in certain circumstances). But there are somewhat plausible ideas by which time may not be 'ontologically primitive' relative to some deeper understanding of the (observable) universe, e.g. timeless physics.
• Do gravitational waves exist? Yes, they same to exist, and we have evidence that's consistent with their existence according to our best theories of physics.

Sabine wrote:

Look, I am a scientist. Scientists don’t deal with beliefs. They deal with data and hypotheses. Science is about knowledge and facts, not about beliefs.

That's just wrong. There is no knowledge, there are no facts, there is no data, nor hypotheses, divorced from or somehow separate from beliefs. It's a belief that facts, or knowledge about them, exist, that statements of or about them are true. Indeed, I don't know what a fact is or what knowledge could be if they were not also true. A statement of fact can be false, i.e. not true, i.e. a statement of something that is not a fact.

Sabine's last paragraph:

Here is a homework assignment: Do you think that I exist? And what do you even mean by that?

You seem to be arguing that the correct answer is no, Sabine Hossenfelder doesn't exist. I know of no theory, and definitely no mathematical framework, that predicts (specifically or even in general possibility) that she does. According to the best theories of physics there are only quantum fields and space-time. QED

Except, that's silly – of course she exists (and is real), at least as far as I can tell!

I think I may have demonstrated that I'm not in fact a philosophical realist. But I think that's wrong too. I strongly suspect that the universe (reality) is ontologically independent of my, or anyone else's, consciousness, or any ideas, beliefs, facts, or knowledge we may have with regard to it. I'm pretty sure we haven't measured or observed any such ontologically primitive elements, and I'm agnostic as to whether we (or anything else in the universe) will ever be able to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually impossible to do so. But I do believe they're real and that they exist.

As to everything else tho, e.g. the Higgs-boson, quarks, black holes, let alone planets, species, individual people – obviously those are not ontologically primitive and so the degree to which they are 'real' and 'exist' is nebulous. (Unless of course Platonic realism/idealism, or mathematicism, is true (or maybe even also true), in which case everything imaginable (and more) 'exists' and is 'real'.)

There is a weird kind of reply of "I agree but disagree on the conceptualization" which would correspond here that claims are not tied to the conceptualization used.

For example "Is blood an effective plogiston transfer medium?" The answer is clearly yes but I would still object to the concept of phlogiston being an appropriate concept to handle the phenomenon in question. Some people might refuse to handle malformed questions and for some questions the malformation of the concepts affects the answer to the degree that addressing it is unavoidable.

And guess what if someone insists on using plogiston terminology I might acknowledge that I understand what they are talking about but I am still going to actively direct them to use other kind of terminology. And the reason is not that plogiston is "false" or "doesn't exist". For things like Higgs-boson the defence why it's a productive way to address it's phenomenon is stronger. But the conceptualization isn't an entirely free dimension and the specific failures specific conceptualizations have can be very important. "The current active conceptualization" guides what expectations are on areas we have no data on and thus can't be pure reformulations of measurements. Insisting that concepts are merely reformulations of data would mean you should not expect anything on parts where you don't have data. Sure anywhere you expect something to happen you could plausibly see whether that expectation yields out. But it's not reasonable to declare everything outside of already seen data to be off-limits.

Realism is more than one thing, because everything is more than one thing. There is a general argument for a reality as the source of objectivity and possibility of error, and there are specific arguments about the posits of successful theories. Set the bar too low, and you end up believing in oxygen and phlogiston, set it too high and you have to defer belief in anything until the final theory. Points in the middle are hard to guess, which is why it's reasonable to ask physicists what they believe in.

I do not know what it means for something to be “real” or “true.” You will have to consult a philosopher on that.

I suggest Tarski.