Superdeterminism: Quantum Mechanics Demystified Or The End Of Science?

by Jochen Szangolies The quantum world, according to the latest science, is, like, really weird. Cats that are both dead and alive, particles tunnel through impenetrable walls, Heisenberg can’t both tell you where he is and how fast he’s going, and spooky influences connect systems instantaneously across vast distances. So it seems that anything that…

The How Of Why: Not Quite A Review (Part II)

by Jochen Szangolies In the previous column, I took Philip Goff’s latest offering Why? The Purpose of the Universe as a jumping-off point to present some of my own rumination on life, the universe, and what it all means. While that prior installment was mainly concerned with looking outward, into the wider cosmos, here, I’ll…

The How Of Why: Not Quite A Review (Part I)

by Jochen Szangolies I’m inherently suspicious of overt declarations of having arrived at a certain position only through the strength of the arguments in its favor, even against one’s own prior commitments. If that were typically how things happen, then either there ought to be much more agreement than there is, or the vast majority…

Wrestling With Existence: Social Reality And Modalities Of Untruth

by Jochen Szangolies A proposition, like “it’s raining outside”, can either be true or false—it might be the case that it actually rains, or not. It is then seductive to think that somebody uttering such a proposition is doing nothing but making a factual claim, and in doing so, either tells the truth, or not.…

Münchhausen And The Quantum: Dragging Ourselves Out Of The Swamp

by Jochen Szangolies There seems no obvious link between tall war-tales, shared among a circle of German aristocrats in the 1760s, and quantum mechanics. The former would eventually come to form the basis of the exploits of Baron Münchhausen, the partly fictionalized avatar of Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen, famous for his extravagant narratives,…

Wigner’s Many Friends: Quantum Mechanics And Reality

by Jochen Szangolies Whenever I use words like ‘reality’, ‘truth’, or ‘existence’, I feel an almost irresistible urge to mark my vague sense of unease by liberal application of scare quotes. After all, what could such words even mean? They seem to denote concepts too vast and simultaneously slippery to be pinned down by a…

Gödel’s Proof and Einstein’s Dice: Undecidability in Mathematics and Physics – Part III

by Jochen Szangolies The simulation argument, most notably associated with the philosopher Nick Bostrom, asserts that given reasonable premises, the world we see around us is very likely not, in fact, the real world, but a simulation run on unfathomably powerful supercomputers. In a nutshell, the argument is that if humanity lives long enough to…

Gödel’s Proof and Einstein’s Dice: Undecidability in Mathematics and Physics – Part II

by Jochen Szangolies The previous column left us with the tantalizing possibility of connecting Gödelian undecidability to quantum mechanical indeterminacy. At this point, however, we need to step back a little. Gödel’s result inhabits the rarefied realm of mathematical logic, with its crisply stated axioms and crystalline, immutable truths. It is not at all clear…

Gödel’s Proof and Einstein’s Dice: Undecidability in Mathematics and Physics – Part I

by Jochen Szangolies TWA Flight 702 left New York at 7 AM on Monday, Feb. 4 1974, to arrive in London at 7 PM—some 40 minutes early. We know this thanks to the meticulous note-taking habits of visionary physicist John Archibald Wheeler, coiner of such colorful terms as ‘quantum foam’, ‘wormhole’, ‘superspace’ and ‘black hole’.…

Dinner For Nietzsche: Rhythms, Rituals, And Eternal Return

by Jochen Szangolies Time presents itself, depending on the context, under two different modalities: cyclical and linear. Linear time moves always forward, carrying us from past to present, ever towards an uncertain future; while circular time, the time of clock hands, sunrise and sunset, and recurring seasons, sees us back again at our origin. These…

Truth Or Consequences: A Flaw In Human Reason

by Jochen Szangolies Picture the internet circa late 2000s, during the heyday of New Atheism: virtually everywhere, it seemed, people were embroiled in a grand crusade for truth, a final showdown of faith versus reason, religion versus science, revelation versus empiricism. On both sides, fallacy was the weapon of choice: demonstrate the logical error at…

Hyperintelligence: Art, AI, and the Limits of Cognition

by Jochen Szangolies On May 11, 1997, chess computer Deep Blue dealt then-world chess champion Garry Kasparov a decisive defeat, marking the first time a computer system was able to defeat the top human chess player in a tournament setting. Shortly afterwards, AI chess superiority firmly established, humanity abandoned the game of chess as having…

Bell’s Theorem: A Nobel Prize For Metaphysics

by Jochen Szangolies There has been no shortage of articles on this year’s physics Nobel, which, just in case you’ve been living under a rock, was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. Why, then, add more…

Never Mind: Straw Arguments Against Panpsychism

by Jochen Szangolies The only thing worse than a good argument contrary to a conviction you hold is a bad argument in its favor. Overcoming a good argument can strengthen your position, while failing to may prompt you to reevaluate it. In either case, you’ve learned something—if perhaps at the expense of a cherished belief.…

Natural Magic: On Weird Beliefs As Overfitting

by Jochen Szangolies The world is a noisy place. No, I don’t mean the racket the neighbor’s kids are making in the back yard. Rather, I mean that, whatever you encounter in the world, probably isn’t exactly what’s actually there. Let me explain. Suppose you’re fixing yourself a nice cocktail to enjoy on the porch…