SABINE HOSSENFELDER is someone whose youtubes I know I've recommended people watch. I do, though usually on a binge basis like I take in the even more entertaining Periodic Table of Videos videos. Generally I can only do that when the gardening season isn't really going here, as it isn't yet, the reason I binged on her videos a while back. I believe I said her music videos are the best scientist ones I know of other than those by the insect guy John Acorn. His are more fun and less edgy, though if you want edgy, hers are that.
Her recent interesting video on whether or not complex numbers are real or not is the one that kicked off my thinking about whether or not pi is real or the product of human imagination again. Though that's something I believe I've written about one annoying "pi day" getting hate mail for thinking that thought, asking that question aloud. As it were. Higher-middle-brow geeks don't like it when you ask questions, they want such things presented as unquestionable dogma or doctrine but I'm not a geek so I don't care about their comfort. As to whether or not the recent, as of the time she commented on it unreviewed paper about quantum theory is true or if it really proves that imaginary numbers are real, I'd have to really think about that before I bought it and if I can't understand their claims, I'm not sure if I'm ready to buy that anymore than I bought some of the god of geeks, Hawkings' claims that may have evaporated like he imagined black holes do.
Her relatively recent videos include several that impinge directly on issues I've dealt with many times here, the character of psychology which I think is an obvious pseudo-science, based not only on its scandalous history, its dangerous practice - especially in its guise as psychiatry* - and its as scandalous though perhaps somewhat less evil, totally shoddy, totally inadequate, entirely dishonest methodology and publications practices. How she could have held the conversation she did over the replication crisis and its implications without pointing out that the entire field is pseudo-scientific and complete bullshit if taken as anything higher than folk lore or the fringier reaches of literary commentary is, perhaps, due to the polite reticence that I've noticed cultured Germans can have too much of.
I think, though, that her reticence may be due to the faith of the materialist-athetist-scientist in their materialist monism which holds, either explicitly or as a background faith, that all of existence has a uniform character which will follow general rules and have a general nature which is determinative of all phenomena at all levels. That is the background faith in which the early salesmanship of psychology getting away with passing itself off as a science is based. And I don't buy that. It is the same faith that Steven Weinberg based his flip remark about the uniformity of electrons and, indeed, his entire view of the universe and all of reality on. That uniform set of "scientific laws" or, if you will "law" that "theory of everything" which may be an ideological fiction isn't apparent to me.
Consider those electrons which are known solely by their effects in relation to other objects, subatomic and in the atoms and molecules of which they are constituent parts. Consider them in relation to the atoms and molecules which they are known through, having been theorized to explain the character of atoms and molecules to start with.
Take a water molecule, two hydrogen atoms bonded with an oxygen atom. What is the relationship of the characteristics of the hydrogen atoms or the oxygen atom to the characteristics of the water molecule? Do the characteristics of the water molecule reside in each of the individual constituent atoms? Does the fact that there are two hydrogen atoms mean that the pair of them have internal characteristics that contribute to the character of the water molecule, is their being bonded to the oxygen molecule relate to the typical hydrogen molecule that is ubiquitious in nature where hydrogen is not bonded with a different atom or atoms in a different molecule? Is that possible unknown characteristic of the individual atoms and, possibly a hydrogen molecule impinged on by the single oxygen atom or are those characters different. And that's not to mention what may or must be different in that regard to the oxygen molecule in a water molecule, what are the implications of water molecules formed by the explosion of the gases of the constituent elements, breaking apart molecules of hydrogen and oxygen in an explosion or other physical reaction. Do all hydrogen and all oxygen atoms have that potential or are there different, perhaps very rare, examples of atoms of those elements that cannot or would not act that way?
Or do the characteristics of the things those are made of come into existence only as those larger, composite entities come into being? In which case, how can you explain that through materialist ideology? Especially in its typical, reductionist species?
I don't know any of that, I doubt anyone does, I would be surprised if anyone ever thought about some of those questions. I could ask the same questions about where the potentials for all of this resides and if there are different characteristics that allow different atoms of the different elements that impinge on their ability to bond with other atoms reside within those atoms. In their electrons? Where in their electrons are those characteristics and are they uniform? and if in even smaller units of the subatomic level of stuff, you could ask similar questions about all of those, the infintely non-ending onion model of materialist faith. I wonder if they'll come to theorize objects so small that they couldn't possibly contain all of the information needed to account for what they are alleged to do, I think they already have. I remember one of the first things I thought of when I read about the conventionally included and totally absurd "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics where the energy that was constantly creating universes whenever we so much as press a computer key was supposed to come from. The only time I did that in the presence of a physicist, they thought it was rude but they didn't give me an answer. I wonder if it was because I'm not a member of that priesthood and so was not supposed to have that thought.
One of the problems in her recent Hawking video mentioned above was in the impossibility of human technology probing much farther into the realm of the subatomic and, so, according to modern cosmological faith, the entire universe. Hawking's seeming yearning for a Nobel medal evaporated in tiny, ephemeral black holes not showing up in the jumbo-sized collider he hoped would show those. And the string theory that Brian Greene's career was staked on probably won't even get that far.
Of course, the possibility that the monistic nature of reality and the quest for that theory of everything is an illusion of human imagination and the arrogance of modernists, to start with and, in human affairs, it may be not only an illusion but even if it's there, entirely irrelevant to our purposes and why we are alive in this universe.
I'm tempted to tie in one of the most recent life-boats launched by materialists who have a sense that the "hard problem" of consciousness may sink the entire ship "Materialism", panpsychism, the claim that our consciousness is a characteristic of all matter at all levels and that our consciousness is like a giant molecule that is an expression of a composite of the consciousness of our constituent parts. If they want to go there, in order to get rid of God, the real background motive of all materialists - perhaps as big a one as their arrogant love of believing that all of reality is the nail that the hammer they own can hit - then I'm sorry to tell them that the Scriptures have already got priority for something like that, as in when Jesus said if the people people laying down palm fronds and singing his praise wouldn't, the rocks and stones would sing out or when he told the arrogant religious elite that God could raise offspring for Abraham out of the rocks, too. Though I doubt they will ever be able to wrest consciousness in any meaningful term from them. I'd say you've got to have God to do that.
Cheer up, atheist guy, I've got to start planing onions this week, I won't have so much time to listen to stuff, though planting by hand gives me a lot of time to think about stuff.
* If you want a good and typical example of how dangerous permitting psychiatry to pass itself off as science is (if the opioid crisis wasn't enough to prove that), watch this scandal of science as it really can be.
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