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I noticed something similar in popsci articles and a lot of (soft) sci-fi: They are often enamoured by a particular set of subfields in physics, namely particle
by xg15 4y ago
I noticed something similar in popsci articles and a lot of (soft) sci-fi: They are often enamoured by a particular set of subfields in physics, namely particle physics, relativity and quantum theory. But they rarely make an attempt to make those fields accessible to a casual reader or clear up apparent contradictions - on the contrary, they usually highlight the counterintuitive or paradox aspects and maintain an air of arcane knowledge and mysticism: Only Einstein could understand relativity because he was imbued with the spirit of genius, us normal mortals can only marvel at the beauty of knowledge made for minds greater than us!
This always seems to me more like "anti-science journalism" because while it superficially celebrates "science", it also strongly discourages the reader from trying to make sense of it.
My pet conspiracy theory is that some groups (i.e. religious groups and panpsychism folks) are very invested in the idea that human consciousness exists separate from the physical universe - or at the very least is a fundamental force that cannot be explained by any other physical phenomenon.
Connected with this is the religious notion that humans are sort of the "main characters" of the universe and the rest of it is made specifically for them.
Quantum theory introduced some technical terms which were very unfortunately named and gave the impression that the theory would support that view - when in reality it was just a misunderstanding. Those groups took this apparent backing of "science" and ran with it - and have little interest in the general public understanding enough of physics to realise the mistake.
- ted_bunny 4y agoIf I have to define "observer" for these types one more damn time...
- agentgumshoe 4y agoOr they're just nerds that like writing stories about it because they think it's cool...
- xg15 4y agoNothing against sci-fi writers, true. But I'm annoyed at science journalism which has the ambition to make actual science accessible to the public and still falls into the same traps.
- agentgumshoe 4y agoYeah definitely. I have a feeling it's just because most of them don't actually have the experience/knowledge to do it properly, mustn't pay enough :(
- tokai 4y ago>My pet conspiracy theory is that some groups (i.e. religious groups and panpsychism folks) are very invested in the idea that human consciousness exists separate from the physical universe That's what the Templeton Foundation is doing.
- jiggawatts 4y agoThe Many World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was rejected out of hand by scientists that were also religious. They could not accept a theory that doesn't make "this" Earth (where Jesus preached) special and unique in the eyes of God. Similarly, Block Universe ideas are rejected by many people on the grounds of "but what about free will?". Here's an idea: Go ask ChatGPT to decide something, to use its free will, and then weep that it can do it despite being an entirely static array of numbers.
- xg15 4y ago> Similarly, Block Universe ideas are rejected by many people on the grounds of "but what about free will?". Didn't know about block universes so far, but as for the general idea of a deterministic universe, I never quite got why people see it so much as a contradiction to free will. When we experience free will in our lives, I think what that mostly entails is that we have thoughts and make decisions based on our experience of the world - plus our own knowledge, memories, attitudes, feelings etc. Our thoughts and actions are influenced by a great deal of what happened in the past, but we don't access the past directly: All we have is our memory of past events. And memories, knowledge, attitudes etc are all part of the brain - and therefore part of the current world state. So as long as the entirety of your thinking and decision-making is only based on your memories, this seems perfectly compatible with a deterministic universe to me. It also doesn't restrict free will in any practically meaningful way: All it says is that if given the exact same "brain state", you'd decide in the same way - but it's practically impossible to have the same brain state twice. If you can remember having made a choice in the past, then your brain is already in a different state than it was back then, so it's perfectly possible to choose differently the second time without violating determinism. On the other hand, if you could somehow reset your brain exactly back to a previous state, this would imply forgetting everything that had happened since that time - and then it's not a big surprise that you'd choose the same way as you did the first time. (And I think if you use that definition of "free will" then in principle even LLMs could have it: They have their own "brain state" with "memories" encoded as the model weights, the prompt and all the tokens emitted previously in the conversation.) There is a second, orthogonal discussion about free will, which asks how much influence biological and subconscious factors have on thinking. I think the famous "your neurons triggered long before you 'decided' to push the button" experiment belongs to that category. I found that discussion always much more reasonable, but also a lot less clear-cut: There is a much larger spectrum of possible outcomes than the binary "full free will/no free will" of the "deterministic universe" discussion.
- waiquoo 4y agoI'm going to drop a link to this blog: https://profmattstrassler.com/about/about-this-site-and-how-to-use-it/ https://profmattstrassler.com/about/about-this-site-and-how-... I am not a particle physicist, but the explanations of quantum mechanics and particle physics here have been sufficiently detailed to let me get past the hand-wavy, paradox laden pop-sci descriptions you see elsewhere.
- HardlyCurious 4y agoSo are there no secular pop sci authors to clear things up or is your pet theory just you trying to blame an issue on your out group?