Home
Creators
Search Recent Missing Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Episode #197 ... New Atheists and cosmic purpose without God. (Zizek, Goff, Nagel) (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-10 07:18:52
Imported:
2026-06
haven't archived this post yet. have a subscription? use the importer!

Downloads

  • zizek-goff_PATREON.mp3
  • Episode_197_..._New_Ath... - audiogram.mp4

Missing 1 full-res photo, 1 video, 1 file, as this post has not yet been imported.

Content

Hello! Hope you all enjoy this one. Also hope the tie ins this episode to Zizek help with the rest of the series on him. It's not going to be possible to do a full analysis of the innerworkings of every ideology he talks about. So hopefully this serves as a minor example. 

Could never do this without your help. Please send me a message if you have any questions. I enjoy answering them. The only time I don't is if I miss them somehow. 


Be well,


Stephen

Files

Previews only

Comments

Allan Angus

This episode was troubling because it insisted that science is inherently "material." I suppose that this epithet would contrast "spiritual" or "abstract" in some way, promulgating the old Descartian duality. This is such a high-school Newtonian mechanics view of science. Allow me to try to pull you up by the bootstraps into the 21st century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9ebUA-2SzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HlZb8U0K9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvGJ4kwLZGc Let me try to hammer this home further. Start with Newton's famous equation: F = m a Here, 'F,' force is a vector in 3-D space, 'm' mass is a number, and 'a' acceleration is also a vector in 3-D space. This is the essence of your material science, published in 1687. Everything in this equation reeks of materialism. We have the mass of some material object. We have absolute space and time. We have forces in absolute space acting instantaneously without any intervening cause, "action at a distance." Of course, everybody gets taught this ancient crap in high school so that they can grasp how a car crash or a gun works. But please, get with at least the science of 100 years ago. Take, for example, the Schroedinger equation in Dirac notation: H |x> = E |x> This is an eigenvector/eigenvalue equation in a, presumably, infinitely dimensional Hilbert space. 'H,' the Hamiltonian, is an operator. The '|x>' indicates a ray in the Hilbert space. That might indicate the wavefunction of an electron in an atom, for example. And 'E,' energy, is just some number. This equation says that in any quantum mechanical system, an electron in an atom, for example, can be described by an infinitely dimensional wave in Hilbert space that is the solution to the eigenvector/eigenvalue equation. The Hamiltonian will be some operator that defines the sum of potential and kinetic energy in the system. The equation says that there will be some "spectrum" of solutions, |x>, which have the same values on both sides of this equation for unique values of energy. For instance, put the Hamiltonian in for the hydrogen atom, and you find the solutions for all of those s, p, d, f shells you learned about in high school chem and underpin the Periodic Table at the front of every science class. But this equation is so different from F=ma. We are not even working in space and time. We are solving for a "spectrum" of solutions, perhaps the allowed energy levels of an electron bound to an atomic nucleus. The answers are given in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, not in the 3-D space of everyday experience. Let us kick this up a notch. Here is the Dirac equation, which applies to all matter particles (more of this later) in the universe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_equation Here, we see a new kind of object: a spinor. All material objects in common experience are based upon three spinor fields: the electron field, the up quark field, and the down quark field. The spins of these three fields are ±1/2 in units of h-bar, the reduced Planck constant. This equation predicts something previously unimagined: anti-particles. Hence, we have an anti-electron, an anti-up-quark and an anti-down-quark. This leads to considering quantum field theory (QFT), in which a photon of sufficient energy can spontaneously disappear and produce an electron-positron pair. Now, we see the electromagnetic field (photons) interact with the electron field to generate entangled pairs of electrons and anti-electrons. By virtue of Bell's Theorem (for which a recent Nobel Prize was awarded) [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem], we find that such entangled pairs violate spacial locality. In short, we might conclude that the 3-D space of everyday experience is not accurate at all, and instead, what is preserved is quantum information in Hilbert space. For these and other reasons, many theoretical physicists believe that our concepts of space and time are doomed. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvGJ4kwLZGc Back to F=ma: let's consider the m. We've found that every "material" object in our experience comprises just three particles or, rather, three quantum fields. These are the up quark field, down quark field and the electron field. Most of the measurable mass of everyday objects comes from the proton and neutrons made of quarks. But these are made of three quarks, and the masses of the quarks are only around 5-10 MeV, while the proton and neutron weigh in at about 1000 MeV. The up and down quarks and the electron get their small masses from an energy interaction with the Higgs field. The proton and neutron have much larger masses because of their internal binding energy due to the force that holds the three interior quarks together. Einstein said E=mc^2, and this is so true. We have never found any object in the universe that has its mass from anything other than binding energy. Oh, and that business about the solidity of material objects. This is due, once again, to quantum mechanics. Our three spin-1/2 particles that stuff is made of obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Such particles refuse to occupy the same quantum states per the Pauli exclusion principle. Hence, you do not fall through the floor because the electrons inside you refuse to get into the same states as the electrons in the floor. In contrast, force-carrying particles like photons (spin-1) love to occupy the same quantum state. This is why we can make light lasers with every photon of the same energy, direction, polarization, etc. In short, the public's common beliefs about science and the material world are so outdated, so mid-17th-century, that they are immediately destined for the trash heap of history. Forget all that nonsense.

Dasloops

Wow great episode, you really got on a roll there! 🫡 also would love for you to do an episode on Sam Harris, maybe even have him on for an interview

Allan Angus
>>133427585

Oh, silly me. I forgot a relatively important point about the delta between F=ma and the Schroedinger equation. In the Newtonian case, having F=0 and so a=0 is perfectly valid. Not so in the Schroedinger equation. Perhaps a simple example will show this. Say we have this system in linear algebra: {1 0} * |x> = E * |x> {0 2} And we want to find vectors |x> and numbers E that solve this system. The two solutions can be virtually read off directly because I used a diagonal matrix for the linear operator. They are {1 0} * {1} = 1 * {1} {0 2} (0) (0) and {1 0} * (0) = 2 * (0) {0 2} (1) (1) Please forgive my clumsy way of writing matrix algebra in text form. I sure hope the spaces come through correctly. The point is that trying a null (zero) vector will fail because, in that case, any possible value for the eigenvalue (E) will work. There is no null possibility for solving the Schroedinger equation. This has huge implications for any quantum system because a zero energy value is impossible. The minimum or ground state of anything, even an absolute vacuum, will have something like h-bar/2 in the answer. Twentieth-century physics has shown that, in many cases, nothing is much more interesting than anything. For example, this is the best explanation for the universe's accelerating expansion. Here, I am harping on the notion that science is materialistic. The energy-for-free hypothesis underpins theories of the Big Bang and argues that these quantum vacuum fluctuations, as impressed on the Cosmic Microwave Background, were the origins of all structures in the universe. And now, good night.