It's unfortunate how a simple error at the beginning of an argument can nullify all of the careful reasoning which comes after, but all too common in the modern age. The bolded assertion shows that Rovelli is operating under the illusion of the Cartesian-Kantian divides. For someone who holds to a unified realm of ideating activity, there is nothing "obvious" about the idea that Nagarjuna could not have known anything about the underlying Reality which the abstract concept "quanta" represents, along with all other abstractions used in QM. In fact, it would be obvious that many people throughout history could and would have known about that Reality, even if its through a different set of experiences and concepts. We are the ones who are a few layers abstracted from that Reality with QM concepts, not people living in the 2nd century.DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 7:56 pmHere's the excerpt from Helgoland:SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 5:21 pmIs there any internet source available, for a peek into Rovelli's relationalism and especially what he says about Nagarjuna?DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 4:40 am The difference seems to be precisely that -- while Kastrup maintains a relational existence for everything that is grounded by M@L, Rovelli removes M@L itself and only has the relationships left. His metaphysics might be closer to Whitehead, Deleuze, or some variations of Buddhist metaphysics (he himself pulls from Nagarjuna). Kastrup is closer to Schopenhauer or some flavors of Advaita Vedanta or the cosmopsychists like Goff or Mathews.
I was very disappointed in BK calling master logician Nagarjuna - the Gödel of his time and place - just a "mystic".
Rovelli wrote: Nāgārjuna lived in the second century ce. There have been countless commentaries on his text, which has been overlaid with interpretations and exegesis. The interest of such ancient texts lies partly in the stratification of readings that gives them to us enriched by levels of meaning. What really interests us about ancient texts is not what the author initially intended to say: it is how the work can speak to us now, and what it can suggest today.
The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself independently from something else. The resonance with quantum mechanics is immediate. Obviously, Nāgārjuna knew nothing, and could not have imagined anything, about quanta—that is not the point. The point is that philosophers offer original ways of rethinking the world, and we can employ them if they turn out to be useful. The perspective offered by Nāgārjuna may perhaps make it a little easier to think about the quantum world.
That is why it is so important to start with phenomenology of experience now and carefully trace backwards to identify where these flawed assumptions entered the streams of philosophical thought. Then Rovelli would never suggest every concept including the sense of "I" doesn't exist or is nothing more than "emptiness" (I understand Buddhism does not necessarily say "emptiness" doesn't "exist", but in the sense Rovelli is using it here), rather he would see the shared meaning behind these concepts, to the extent that someone in the 2nd century could experience the exact same meaning we can experience today, is what assures us of their existence at the deepest level we can imagine and intuit. So by fixing that one error, he eventually would arrive at the diametrically opposite conclusion of the one he actually arrived at.