MeaningofLife.tv
00:47 Why Alex shifted from international relations to quantum physics
05:44 Alex: “We are walking wave functions”
15:51 Do the origins of consciousness and free will lie in the wave collapse?
26:19 Quantum decision theory and human irrationality
39:03 The advantage of viewing humanity as quantum rather than classical
49:25 How a nation-state is like a quantum state
55:21 Alex: Language is best understood quantumly
1:05:23 The possibility of collective consciousness
Robert Wright (Bloggingheads.tv, The Evolution of God, Nonzero, Why Buddhism Is True) and Alexander Wendt (Ohio State University, alexanderwendt.org)
Recorded August 19, 2019
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"International Security" hmm, a function of capability and intentions per the expert in the Navy UFO disclosures,,, the ones that science is largely ignoring outside of military branches.
Great interview. I went and bought Wendt's book.
So fun! An hour of baseless assertions! So nourishing, kudos.
Or "not even wrong".
The example with the nukes: it seems to me that it's not that 5 DPRK nukes are scarier than 100 UK nukes, it's that North Korean leaders with nukes are scarier (to us) than UK leaders with nukes.
Sounds kinda like deepak chopra.
I have a masters degree in Electrical Engineering. I have studied QM (but I'm no expert). IMO, saying consciousness is caused by the collapse of the wave function is BS. Certainly, QM is involved in individual neurons firing, but at the macro level I do not think QM effects come into play. It's just not the scale at which QM effects act. Consciousness seems relatively straight forward to me. It's beneficial for the brain of social animals to have an awareness of itself, so natural selection preserved that trait. We have internal models of other agents (like deer and lions) so that we can predict their behavior. We have internal models of other humans. Why is it so hard to understand that we have internal models of ourselves? I think many animals have a form of consciousness, it's just very difficult to show that in experiments. We humans are not as special as we would like to believe.
Some of the discussion about conscious agents and organisms reminds me of Whitehead’s process philosophy. I must say this is interesting but not nearly as well founded as that much earlier brilliant work.
It sounds like half the time he is just using quantum mechanics vocabulary to draw analogies between different aspects of language, politics, etc. while being vague about whether or not he is claiming that it is consciousness– which is 'collapsing the wave function' as per the more narrowly constrained theory in physics–that is causally affecting/creating things in the world
I'm a philosophical zombie, and even I find this amazingly fascinating!
Amazing talk!! Thank you. I think this is the best interview I've seen on this channel yet!
I am THAT, you are THAT, and THAT is all there is.
Quantum entanglement of the conscious energy field.