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Leemour t1_iriw5g9 wrote

Yikes... I'd rather recommend Sabine Hossenfelder's youtube videos (she also has a book!) even though she doesn't care much for explicit philosophy than talk about this blogpost.

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paxxx17 t1_irj8di0 wrote

She's cool, but she seems a bit arrogant at times and has some really iffy takes on panpsychism

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htbav t1_irjrror wrote

She's not cool, she's a professional physics shit poster. No one in the field takes her seriously but she lands all kind of media interviews so she's happy.

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paxxx17 t1_irjvg87 wrote

I'm not in that field so I wouldn't know. I do see she's got an h-index of 31, which is not bad, to say the least. Do you have some more info?

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newyne t1_irjsqhe wrote

What do you mean, "iffy takes on panpsychism?"

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paxxx17 t1_irjvxct wrote

I don't remember details nor where I watched it anymore, but as far I remember, she was "debunking" panpsychism with some arguments which were showing that she doesn't understand what panpsychism is claiming in the first place. Something along the lines of, electrons cannot make conscious decisions therefore they cannot be conscious

EDIT: ok, here is her post. A load of bullcrap:

backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-think.html

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newyne t1_irlr33u wrote

Oooh, ok. Now that you mention it, I may have seen her talk before. I'm always surprised when I see serious philosophers making hard statements about philosophy they're clearly not familiar with. Like, I felt foolish in undergrad when I realized that people meant something more like "personality" by self, and not "sentience" like I thought... I get that a lot of layperson wouldn't know that panpsychism is about sentience and not sapience, but if you're out there writing papers and giving talks about the topic... Good Lord, how can you be out there publishing about it when you don't have even the most basic grasp of what the theory says?! How do you even get away with it??? And I see that particular error a lot. Makes me feel like maybe I'm not doing so bad after all, lol.

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commonsearchterm t1_irqbh1p wrote

That was bad, that comment section was something else too. Lol she seems like a redditor

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Devout--Atheist t1_irjipwn wrote

What parts of the article did you have problems with? None of it seemed very controversial from our current understanding of physics.

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paxxx17 t1_irmtpmv wrote

If it's me whom you're asking:

Yesterday, while trying to find her article about panpsychism, I stumbled upon this podcast. It explains the problems I had with her article a lot more concisely than I ever could (after all, the guy's a philosopher and I'm a physicist), so check it out if you're curious (fully recommend, it's an amazing video). https://youtu.be/BUIWW_2afBU

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