Daniel · 8 answers · 2y

Do you care about the experiments at the LHC or about particle physics in general?

I care a little bit, not enough to go out of my way to find out what's been going on. I care because it's possible that they could discover things that enable more sophisticated technologies later down the line. But I think our knowledge of particle physics is way ahead of what we could actually do anything with, and I'm not sure buildings like the LHC are worth the billions in cost. I mean, there are people sleeping in the streets, and we're spending billions on essentially satisfying the curiosity of some scientists.

And, even if we did find a way to use this information technologically, I think my interest in furthering our technology is feeding the wrong wolf. Technology has only created emptiness and suffering in our lives and decimated the biosphere. The only reason we're so enamored with the prospect of future technologies is that we're not happy or content now, and we think technology must be the answer. And the reason we're not happy or content now is that we're immersed in technology, separated from nature, God, ourselves.

As for our desire to understand the universe and our ideas of doing that through particle physics, the LHC and other experiments, I think the approach is too physicalist and reductionist to really be satisfying. No answer we can possibly arrive at through this methodology will be deeply satisfying or spiritually fulfilling. And nor can any of the answers be absolute or final, because for any discovery that X is like X because of Y, we can always ask why Y is like Y. I wrote more about this here https://philosophy.inhahe.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Reductionism and I think one other essay too but I'm too lazy to find it.

Retrospring uses Markdown for formatting

*italic text* for italic text

**bold text** for bold text

[link](https://example.com) for link