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> The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker’s What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achie
by ogennadi 8y ago
> The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker’s What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason.
The author claims we're currently in an age which doesn't accept an objective reality outside our own desires, and ties this to fights in physics (and earlier in philosophy) whose echoes are still being felt.
- mannykannot 8y agoQuantum mechanics may have defeated the notion that reason applied to intuition is not the way to enlightenment, but it appears to be a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when reason is applied instead strictly to observables. Unfortunately, if Adam Becker is correct, this may have led more to a rejection of reason than to a critical examination of intuitions.
- humanrebar 8y agoBut the uncertainty principle says there's a limit to what observables we have access to.
- mannykannot 8y agoThat might not be the universe of your intuitions, but it is apparently the one we have.