The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality - William Egginton
Shared by:MojoYugen
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Read by David Glass
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world
Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system—that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps.
Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality “out there” and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself.
As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanity.
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| Creation Date: | Wed, 30 Aug 2023 18:43:53 +0200 |
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This post has 6 comments with rating of 5/5
August 30th, 2023
> Each in his own way resisted the urge to project essential aspects of how human beings experience reality onto reality itself, independent of how we know it.
In case of Heisenberg and Copenhagen this is precisely backwards, projecting probabilities, which only exist inside the context of some observer’s personal model, onto the world-out-there.
August 30th, 2023
Rationally objective, abstracted (mathematical) probabilities, as opposed to merely subjective projections?
This excerpt is from the text itself?
Thx, Mo.
August 31st, 2023
From the text, yes.
Bohr, Heisenberg, et al promoted the incoherent idea that probabilities were somehow a “physical aspect of the world out there” rather than a mathematical expression of their own, personal uncertainty about a viewed system. This introduced the problem of “wavefunction collapse”, the inherent incoherence of which (what happens when you have multiple observers with different vantage points?) was famously expressed by Schrödinger and his thought-experiment cat.
The Copenhagen error and others of its kind were later given a tidy name by Jaynes: the mind projection fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_projection_fallacy
August 31st, 2023
Thank you.
October 26th, 2023
I appreciate this upload, thank you so much!
March 18th, 2026
Found this a few years after the original upload. Just gotta say that I think Howlafist is committing the argument-from-ignorance fallacy (something Jaynes might be guilty of too?) because he is assuming that the world / universe operates according to predictable and certain rules. I actually might be giving him (I’m 99% sure Howlafist is a him) more slack than he deserves — because ignorance suggests a lack of expertise or knowledge, not a refusal to accept evidence & demonstrable facts. We know, for example, that evolutionary biological change happens from random, purely random, genetic mutations. So why wouldn’t the rest of the world also be “guided” by aleatory factors? I suspect science has now firmly established that it is. Just because it wasn’t firmly established in Heisenberg’s day, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been established in our era, a full 100 years later.
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