when distinguishing between truth and lies is a lost choice among too many people

or  When An Articulate Particle Physicist Inaptly Simplifies "The Hard Problem"

AFTER READING MORE of the reaction to Sabine Hossenfelder's debunking of "free will" and, in the second indictment of Trump, thinking about the events in the United States over the past decade, I'm going to bend my resolution about the once a week hate mail post.  I'm also going to get personal about it.

After going through an undetailed and extremely short description of the elementary particles that she believes - that is BELIEVES, DOESN'T KNOW - that everything is made of, Sabine Hossenfelder claims that everything we do is described in the enormously complex series of equations that physicists use to partially describe the actions of the particles in the standard model of physics.  Then she, truthfully, declares that for any of us or our actions those equations couldn't possibly be solved because of the impossibility of doing that for all of the particles contained in our bodies or, I'd guess, as she might think of it, "our brains."  But she skips over that problem for making a scientific evaluation of that claim that those would explain our actions, including, I guess, the choices we make or  conclusions we come to would be of unknowable truth because it is untestable.
 
Ok, so humans are one big collection of particles [and, according to her ideology, noting else].  What the particles do is described by the mathematics of the standard model. It's a lot of math and you need math if you want to answer difficult questions like what's going on in nhc [I'm not sure I heard her] collisions.  For simple questions like whether free will exists we don't need to know much about the math, relevant is just that ultimately what you and I do is also described by the standard model, and that means, yes, we know the equations for human behavior, we can write them down.  In practice that's a completely useless statement because we can't solve the equations for these 10 to the 30 or so particles that humans are made of.

That is a violation of so much of what she has said in her critique of things like string theory, that there is no way to test the claims made by it and so it isn't a legitimate scientific theory.  I am also struck at her doing in a shockingly obvious way exactly what her critique of so much of the recent detour into the cul de sac of string theory and its related fields as nothing but  mathematical speculations .  It is a basic inconsistency in her critiques of physics and cosmology that have made her, rightly, somewhat famous.

Of course what she is claiming is unproved, it is an ideological claim made on the basis of her chosen materialist ideology which cannot only not be verified mathematically and matched with observation of what she is claiming it explains but which, if you want to claim it as a scientific finding, is inherently self-impeaching.  If she wants to limit the products of human thought into mere results of physical and chemical reactions that can be fixed into mathematical equations relevant for a partial understanding of subatomic particles then she would very soon run into the fact that in the movements and interactions of organic chemistry, the efficacy of mathematics for even that quickly fade in their effectiveness.  

She later in the video brushes off the idea that minds are not material entities because that idea can't be used to make testable predictions of the kind that are supposed to be the legitimate substance of science, very simple observable material objects.  In other words, minds would escape the confined field of her professional competence and SHE CHOOSES TO REJECT THAT IDEA because she doesn't fancy it. Of course, there's no reason to suspect that anything outside of the things science was designed to study would make predictable predictions about those very limited things which science has successfully studied.  

Then there are those  who just insist insist that free will just exists but it is non-physical, the latter is a well trodden road for example Rene Descartes and Emanuel Kant were both in that camp. I say the idea is not wrong but I never understood the point because if free will is not physical it doesn't explain anything in the physical world so why bother inventing it.

SHE HERSELF ADMITS THAT THE CALCULATIONS SHE CLAIMS WOULD WORK THE WAY SHE CLAIMS THEY WOULD IN REGARD TO HUMAN THOUGHT CAN'T DO THAT SO THEY CAN'T BE USED TO DO WHAT SHE CLAIMS THEY COULD DO. So her very chosen framing can't do that, either. So why bother inventing that model of minds?  In this regard, she does exactly what the proponents of string theory, etc. do.  As to explaining anything in the physical world, any explanation of the physical world depends on consciousness which, under her very terms, cannot be demonstrated by the equations she bases her argument on.

I'd start by saying that her dependence on the current scheme of the standard model in support of her ideological materialism doesn't explain anything about the human experience of consciousness, not only the experience of us making choices and coming to conclusions as to what we will believe but also our ability to conclude that something is explained, including everything she presents as settled explanation.  The very framing of her entire public presentation is not explained by her claim that the equations that partially explain the evident motions of and even existence of the particles of particle physics could explain how that is related because of her truthful statement that the calculation of that couldn't possibly be done and so there is no actual evidence that her claim is true.

As I started, this is a continuation based on my reading of the indictment of Trump, the man who forced even the complicit American media -the much self-vaunted "free press"- to, briefly, notice that there is a problem when distinguishing between truth and lies is a lost choice among too many people.

I'd go so far as to say that Hossenfelder's claim impeaches the human belief that there is truth and there is untruth and what we call those is insignificant because under her framing truth would have to be, as well, a deterministic result of the merely local chemical reactions within human bodies based on the motions of subatomic particles within atoms and it would have no more truth value than any other chemical reaction.  Iron rusting, an acid and base reacting, salt dissolving in water is as significant as anything any physicist ever said. That would be as meaningful as whatever next comes out of the mouth of a Trump or a Franklin Graham or Alex Jones.  

As I've said in those who deny the existence or significance of consciousness, it is the ultimate statement of academic decadence because such a belief leaves no one any reason, whatsoever, to believe anything anyone else says has any significance.  No matter how skillfully expressed that ultimate decadence of materialist ideology is stated, it has the same result that it means truth, itself, is insignificant and likely of no more consequence than if the next digit in the operation of a random number generator is a zero or a one. If she wants to reduce everything to the particles of the standard model and the random chance of humanly invented quantum physics, her very specialty is no more a product of that chance than what she would consider to comprise the question of free will or determinacy.  

Having expressed my respect for her thinking about her professional specialty in the past, it is clear that as soon as Sabine Hossenfelder leaves it she is a case of someone who is so invested in her specialty that she doesn't much take the wider world seriously enough to think things through. I've made that critique of others such as Carl Sagan in the past. I'm going to go directly to the very real effects of her ideology in the wider world and I'm going to make it personal, in these days of waning American democracy, the consequences for me as an American facing Republican-fascism and the Trump cult and I think it's well past time to be nice and polite about it. Materialism kicks the legs out from under democracy, whether it's the vulgar materialism of a Trump or that which you'll find on university faculties and in the high overhead media.

Given her gender and her nationality I'm, frankly, shocked that she would be so unconcerned with a question so important in real life, one which in just barely living memory was a major issue of not only the Second World War but also the division of Germany into a somewhat democratic West and a totalitarian East, as well as the present  struggle between anything like a decent democracy and Neo-fascism and Neo-Nazism.  And, as I have never stopped pointing out, those systems of totalitarian ideology are derived from the claims of scientists. Marxists claim that Marxism is a materialistic scientific system and Rudolf Hess and Hitler claimed that Nazism was nothing but applied science, in that case a direct application of biological determinism as found in the theory of natural selection.  

Determinism would have pretty much guaranteed that, also within living memory and I'm confident in any places today, even an accomplished woman would be shunted off into the background of a male dominated profession.  I'm not that much older than her that I remember a physics teacher encouraging female students to drop his course because he didn't think females were biologically capable of doing the math necessary for even his preliminary course.  I don't know if he got into musing about subatomic particles in his thinking about it, I do know that among the two women he told that to, was the only one in that class who went on to have a career in science.  She was an actual research scientist, not a low-level physics teacher.