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Aug 17, 2023
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Thanks, Darran. What you say about a materialistically oriented self-help industry makes me think of what seems to be its counterpart (though it’s more of a confluence) — the “spiritually” oriented, New-Agey self-help industry, which Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker dissect (somewhat tangentially) in their book Conspirituality and (more directly) in numerous episodes of their eponymous podcast. It’s a confluence in that the former seems to elevate materialism into some kind of religion, while the latter helps itself to a great deal of materialistic neurophilosophy.

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What you had to say about QM, important as it was, you said it loud and clear twenty years ago. But then there is a certain economy of words and joining of dots standpoint, that no artífice can do without, and only a handful of people are given the privilege by either Nature or Time. I think of Kepler without Brahe, of Russell without Frege. We can only thank you for coming this far.

As for what is regularly practiced in the talking departments and editorial boards, paraphrasing von Neumann’s unfortunate dictum: “whatever can be said, it ought to be said”. This makes perfect sense in a world without limits. Sadly, that’s not the world we live in.

Just a side note, I presume you meant to say “objects” here: “and as subjects that exist in it”.

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Thanks, Adrian.

Yes, “object” agrees with Husserl who wrote about “the paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world.” I’ve made the change in the online text. I was thinking of David Carr’s book “The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition,” in which he speaks of two forms of self-consciousness: the transcendental subject (needed to construct the known world) and the subject associated with a body in the known world.

I don’t agree with your statement that what I now have to say about quantum mechanics is much the same as what I said 20 years ago. In fact, my understanding of quantum mechanics began to change drastically when I encountered Qbism [https://aurocafe.substack.com/p/qbism] at the 2014 Bergefest in Singapore [https://aurocafe.substack.com/p/berge-and-me]. At first I was appalled by Rüdiger Schack’s presentation of Qbism and shocked to learn that David Mermin was on board with it. It conjured up in my mind the nonsense perpetrated by von Neumann, London and Bauer, Wigner, Stapp and others about consciousness as a wavefunction-collapsing agent. The Qbists’ misrepresentation of Bohr’s views then made me look more closely at Bohr’s writings and the rest is, as they say, history.

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