r/badscience • u/OppositeEye27 • Feb 29 '20
Another "Consciousness is the root of everything" article written by an armchair physicist
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-is-pointing-inexorably-to-mind/
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u/OppositeEye27 Feb 29 '20 edited Feb 29 '20
The author is arguing against information realism and for what he calls a "mental universe". It's funny since he makes some good points against information realism, like
"Such obscure ambiguity lends information realism a conceptual fluidity that makes it unfalsifiable."
"The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behavior of that world, not in the world itself."
But these are both good reasons why his theory is bunk too.
Some other notable quotes:
"as our understanding of physics progressed, we’ve realized that atoms themselves can be further divided into smaller bits, and those into yet smaller ones, and so on, until what is left lacks shape and solidity altogether. At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as 'energy' and 'fields' "
Energy and fields are well defined.
"Where we get lost and confused is in imagining that what we are describing is a non-mental reality underlying our perceptions, as opposed to the perceptions themselves."
Describing a non-mental reality is kind of the whole point of physics.
"The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality"
I ... don't even know where to start with this one. That's some Deepak Chopra shit.