Can you help me argue with professional physicists?

[DavidSchuy]

Hello to all! I am from Germany and to those who speak German - maybe you can discuss it in English, too - please go to "www.physikerboard.de" to this link: https://www.physikerboard.de/lhtopic,63 ... ,asc,.html

There I asked a question to the professional physicsts in this forum and their point of view regarding idealism and the metaphysics of Bernardo and his philosophy with respect to consciousness.

I can say - jh8979 - don't want to understand at all! He laughs about Bernardo and says that he not not convinced at all; he says null, zero, zilch.

And TomS tries to work out the errors in Bernardo's work. But they do not see the value and truth of Kastrup's work.

Can you help?

https://www.physikerboard.de/ptopic,352097.html#352097

Thanks!!

[Simon Adams]

I don’t speak German and I’m not a professional physicist, but it’s worth mentioning that there are many in physics with a religious-like physicalist worldview. It’s strange in many ways because most of the people who started the quantum revolution (not to mention many other areas) considered that it provided clues to the essentially spiritual nature of reality.

However since then, we have had a long period where QM moved into a phase of “shut up and calculate”, where to ask the question of what it’s telling us about reality was seen as being unscientific.

At the same time, the US saw a general polarisation between science and religion, which has to some extent spread through the world in the last decade or two. Some people trace this back to (protestant) literalist interpretations of scripture used in the civil war, but I think the Scopes trial etc also played a big role. Then you had young earth creationism that was bad science and bad theology...

One way or another, many in science retreated into scientism, where the only things that are real are those things that can be proven with experiments using physical instruments. Which in many ways is hilarious given that the majority of theoretical physicists are now working on dark matter, the multiverse, supersymmetry, string theory and the Many Worlds quantum interpretation etc, none of which have a single piece of evidence to support them

So now back to what modern physics does tell us, and the old cartesian materialist view of of the universe (the one the average person on the street who is not religious/spiritual has), and this was blown apart a century ago by special relativity and the basic formalism of quantum mechanics. But physicalists have found ways to keep their materialism, in fact by definition this is what science itself must do, as part of the process to “keep it honest” is to always be grounded in physical evidence, even though most of the properties of the physical world have been shown to be relative to the observer (including time, size and arguably even it’s very existence!). At the same time, they also have to deny the reality of free will, or come up with absurd magic where it appears out of deterministic electrical and chemical reactions in the brain.

The people that should be helping them keep their feet on the ground - the philosophers - have themselves to a large extent gone and metaphorically hidden in the cupboard. Some of them have built a philosophy which is just a fudged version of materialism, such as the positivists. Others have decided that as matter seems to be relative, then reality must be relative. This is faulty reasoning, but it had a ready made foundation in the atheistic philosophies of the 19th century. Nietzsche himself had pointed out that once “god is dead”, all you have left is a kind of relativism where nothing is real.

So you ended up with what we have now. In philosophy there is a large postmodernism contingent focussed on things like the limits of language (as if our descriptions of reality could ever be more than vague pointers), as well as marxist derivatives focused on power and deconstructing hierarchies (with no coherent end goal). Then there is the other major contingent which is so enamoured with the success of science that it’s essentially just the philosophy of materialism.

Interestingly spiritual views have followed a similar path, often as a reaction. So the post modernist equivalent is the new age movement, where all traditions are jumbled together and people create their own ‘truths’ like mini gods, rather than the priority of uncovering truth itself. At the other extreme we have some religious people that have done the equivalent of the materialist philosophers, and lost trust in any form of understanding other than scripture.

So this is a long and rambling way of saying that a large portion of physicists would never accept idealism. It’s fundamentally opposite to their metaphysical axioms, the things they chose to ground their being in. This is exactly why we have absurd quantum interpretations like “Many Worlds” and Superdeterminism.

[SanteriSatama]

The fundamental and critical presupposition of physics and physicalism/scientism is Subject-Object metaphysics (SOM). Without that, the paradigm collapses. Heidegger makes this point very clearly.

Kastrup's analytical idealism does not argue against SOM very efficiently, and it's not clear that it even tries, despite being generally friendly towards advaita. However, advaita non-dualism is not at all same as subject-monism, whether alter solipsism or cosmic solipsism of absolute idealism.

[Soul_of_Shu]

David ... Most physicists who've been indoctrinated into hardcore physicalism within academia, and who are now deeply invested in the paradigm, depending upon it for careers, tenure, funding, peer reviews, etc, have no interest in thinking outside that box. Indeed, they have a vested interest in perpetuating the box, and keeping it closed. Conversely, Bernardo is a free agent, who can challenge that paradigm with impunity. Mind you, there are exceptions, like Markus Müller, now on the advisory board of Essentia Foundation, so you may want to check him out, if you haven't already, and see how his ideas go over in the physics forum. ...

[Eugene I]

The majority of physicists are very narrow-field specialists and are usually philosophically illiterate.

[Starbuck]

Bottom line seems to be character types. Some of us get energised by being popular and accepted, some get energised by being a contrarian and outlier.

If you removed the emotional aspect and it just came down to sober rationality, I suspect some form of idealism would prevail.

[Ben Iscatus]

David, you should read the article on the Essentia website by Claus Metzner entitled "Can a physicist embrace idealism"?
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/read ... -idealism/

[Brad Walker]

Physicalism is the safest bet in history. It's easy to get caught in the physicalist Chinese finger-trap.

[AshvinP]

Bottom line seems to be character types. Some of us get energised by being popular and accepted, some get energised by being a contrarian and outlier.

If you removed the emotional aspect and it just came down to sober rationality, I suspect some form of idealism would prevail.

Jung generally agreed and identified the fundamental types as extroversion/introversion (Erich Neumann called striking the proper balance "centroversion"):

"Each person seems to be energized more by either the external world (extraversion) or the internal world (introversion)."

[Martin_]

I think you need to go very slowly.

Perhaps starting to point out
1. Physics is only about relations, not absolutes. Such as : this thing is twice as heavy than the other one. , or it takes half as long for that thing to happen compared to the other thing to happen.
2. Point out the cirlularity of the SI unit definitions:

• Time is defined in relation to how fast caesium oscillates

• Distance is defined in terms of Time, and the speed of light

• Mass is defined on terms of Time, Distance, and the planck constant

• And so on

Also, maybe Kant's Transcedental Idealism/ Epostemology may open up a bit; "The thing in itself" cannot be known according to Kant. Once you dwell on that fact a bit and let it sink in, you'll (hopefully) come to see that science has nothing to say about what "breathes fire into the equations". I suggest Kant, because he's a respected western philosopher. You shouldn't get tagged as new-agey by referring to Kant.

Notice that i'm not suggesting that you argue for Idealism directly. I'm suggesting that you argue for the fact that Science knows nothing about ontology. (Apart from the relational aspects).