Is there a moon when no one is looking? On Rovelli & Relational Quantum Mechanics

Hi %recipient_name%,

Carlos Rovelli is a renowned theoretical physicist and philosopher known for co-founding loop quantum gravity theory. Bernardo and Carlos both accept relational quantum mechanics (a minority view in a landscape crowded with many-worlds advocates) but they disagree on one of the deepest questions of philosophy.

Rovelli is a physicalist. And if you are a physicalist, RQM leaves you in what Bernardo describes as a metaphysical shitshow. If nothing physical has absolute existence — if it's all relational — then what, precisely, is doing the relating? Relations between relations between relations... you are off to the races, and you never reach the bottom. It is like saying there is only movement, but nothing that moves.

Analytic idealism, by contrast, escapes this infinite regress cleanly. If physical entities are representations, dashboard dials, then of course they are relational. Of course two airplanes flying in opposite directions will show different airspeed readings. That tells you nothing troubling about the sky itself. The sky is absolute. The representations are relational.

Which brought us to one of the most clarifying formulations I've heard in these sessions: Bernardo is a physical non-realist and an ontic realist. There is something real and absolute out there — he insists on it. It simply isn't physical. And there are, in a very precise sense, as many physical worlds as there are living beings.

We also discussed:

• The phenomenology of single celled organisms
• The wave function: epistemic or ontic? Why Bernardo sides with "betting strategy"
• Could the laws of physics be evolving? Conway's Game of Life and the levels of law
• Physicalism's internal inconsistency — the hard problem explained from first principles
• Archetypes as the fundamental properties implied by the beingness of a thing
• Spacetime as a cognitive construct — why the pilot born in the cockpit can't describe the sky
• Epistemology under analytic idealism: correspondence, coherence, internal consistency, parsimony

Before listening to the recording below, I also recommend Nour's introduction to the session, which you can read here. She shares her reflections below.

See you next week!

Amir

Speakers

Bernardo Kastrup

Analytic idealism

Bernardo Kastrup is the Executive Director of Essentia Foundation and Founder/CEO at AI systems company Euclyd BV. His work has set off the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence).

As a scientist, he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also been creatively active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years, having founded parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011) and worked as a technology strategist for the geopolitically significant company ASML. Most recently, he has founded AI company Euclyd BV.

Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured in Scientific American, the magazine of The Institute of Art and Ideas, the Blog of the American Philosophical Association and Big Think, among others. His most defining book is Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century’s only plausible metaphysics.

Explore Bernardo’s work →