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Charles Rykken's avatar

One of the human conundrums is character. There does seem to be a P vs J divide in Jungian terms. As both James and Nietzsche pointed out, a person’s character influences their taste in metaphysics. Some want a bow tie and firm boundaries and feel comfortable living in a gated community. Others have a love for an eternal mystery. I recently read Stephen Hawking’s “Gödel and the End of Physics” https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/godel-and-the-end-of-physics where he ends with the endless mystery might not be so bad after all. In the beginning of that article he says

“Will we ever find a complete form of the laws of nature? By a complete form, I mean a set of rules that in principle at least enable us to predict the future to an arbitrary accuracy, knowing the state of the universe at one time. A qualitative understanding of the laws has been the aim of philosophers and scientists, from Aristotle onwards. But it was Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687, containing his theory of universal gravitation that made the laws quantitative and precise. This led to the idea of scientific determinism, which seems first to have been expressed by Laplace.”

He seems to have had a hard hanker after the hardening of his categories. All my life I have spoken with scientists and there are two holy of holies. One is reductionism and the other is some form of foundationalism to avoid turtles all the way down. I see panpsychism and supervenience to be more recent examples to avoid the horror of mysterianism not to mention the unmentionable, panentheism, which I find somewhat attractive. My main motivation is the desire for humans to survive without becoming cyborgs or whatever the creatures were in Steven Spielberg’s movie “AI”. I’m talking near (next one or two hundred years) future because of the incredible complexity of the “material” constraints on life itself. Maybe building our own evolutionary pathway is inevitable but we are too ignorant to be doing that now. Right now, finding a peaceful way or at least minimally destructive path forward seems much more important. There is a deep need for science that can actually help in that regard. More WMDs and poisons to kill the undesirables is literally a dead end.

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Ramya Fennell's avatar

I saw two videos on quantum gravity, few days back. On TOE Curt Jaimangal's channel he talked to Carlo Rovelli about loop quantum, and on Anton Petrov channel he descibed a now 'cubit' or popcorn theory of quantum theory. Visualsxwere great.

Both made quantum gravity so easy to understand that I just thought, well PREHENSION must start even at quantum level AS GRAVITY itself. The entanglement of loops or cubits rolling towards each other...isnt that a kind of prehension. The ideal-lure of ultimate consciousness, or the creative principle, do these show it begins at quantum level.?

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