In the section, A Matter of Taste, we see that de Broglie did local hidden variables. Von Neumann propagated the notion that hidden variables theories are false, and the notion stuck for decades. Bell got the Nobel for showing that Von Neumann was wrong: Local hidden variables theories may not be able to account for phenomena but non-local hidden variables theories are viable. Bohm’s mechanics is not only a non-local hidden variables theory, it makes exactly the same (correct) predictions as wave/matrix mechanics. One interpretation is as good as another when it gives the right answers and when nobody understands physically what’s going on inside the black box. So we are free to pick the weirdness that we prefer, popular or not - a matter of taste.

Again, my only point was that Pas is seriously short-changing Bohm’s contributions. I don’t mean to disrupt the flow so I’ll bow out.

Yes, the Bohm interpretation doesn’t require wave-particle duality. It makes the quantum world causal. For people who don’t like the weirdness of the collapsing wave function (or multi-worlds) it’s an empirically-supportable alternative.

It appears to me that Pas is seriously underrepresenting the work of David Bohm in the Aeon piece.

Bohm, a quantum theorist, had interests in philosophy and Eastern thought. He believed that the whole is fundamental, the pieces are fragments. Anti-reductionism. He wrote about it in a book “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”. It seems to me that Bohm had it worked out far more completely than Pas. You can get a sense of Bohm’s thinking by checking out “Implicate and Explicate Order” in Wikipedia.

Bohm used the notion of holographic film, which has the characteristic that each fragment of film contains the image of the entire hologram. Mysteries such as entanglement become less mysterious with some of Bohm’s ideas.

Bohmian mechanics is an unpopular understanding of quantum behavior, but it makes the exact same experimental predictions as wave mechanics and matrix mechanics. And it is essentially deterministic. It’s probably unpopular because physicists not named Einstein seem to not prefer hidden variables theories. Physicists seem to forget that John Bell studied Bohm’s work which was in part the inspiration for Bell’s Inequality, which indeed demonstrated the viability of Bohm’s non-local hidden variables theory.

Seems to me that Pas is standing on Bohm’s shoulders to a fair extent and should more fully acknowledge such in places such as the Aeon piece.

“If anything can go wrong it will” is embedded in engineering culture and seems to have originated with an engineer named Murphy (Wiki).

“Depressing”? No. Cautionary. Ignore Murphy at great peril. Fail to take into account all possible failure modes and/or exogenous situations and the bridge collapses, the airplane falls from the sky.

What seasoned engineers know: “Murphy was an optimist”. So many things can go wrong with a complex design that has to work in all possible real world conditions that Murphy’s Law sometimes can seem to understate the situation.

Never thought of Murphy as a topic of philosophy.

The story of Phineas Gage is in all likelihood a popular delusion, repeated endlessly, including within the neuroscience community, which should know better. But it supports their narrative, which could be why they keep peddling it. The facts, to the extent that there are any reliable ones, strongly suggest that Gage suffered a temporary disruption and that there was not a permanent change. Wikipedia has a summary, as a starting point for further investigation.

I think that this is pretty good, and it lines up with my experience. I am an engineer who never had a hint of what philosophy was about until I had time - meaning retirement - to think about the big picture.

The way that I got exposed to philosophical notions was by listening to a history of philosophy via a set of audio lectures, which surveyed philosophical thought beginning with the pre-Socratics and going up to the present. From there I had a lot of questions I wanted to further study. I was not systematic, which means I was not efficient in my use of time. I just poked at this and that. And that’s all I still do, really. So it has taken a long time - years - for me to sort out a personal view of the world. Strong curiosity is a real asset to self-study success.

A point about the learning process: What I find similar about philosophy to science and engineering is the confusion of terminology/language. Every discipline has its own priesthood, which revels in obscurity. Fine, I get that. And I get the fact that there are deep and difficult thoughts going down any intellectual avenue. What is different is that in science and engineering there is the constraint of such things as experimental results and keeping the airplane in the air - exceedingly strong empirical underpinnings.

OTOH, a lot of philosophy is nothing more than sophistry wrapped up in big words that have obscure and personalized definitions. This makes it harder for the unwashed to wade through the nonsense and focus on the insights. Anybody who spends time with philosophy and really wants to get to the bottom of things, to achieve some clarity of thought, has to understand this and not be frustrated and give up. There are plenty of sources that make the important notions of philosophy reasonably clear, but it takes effort to find them.

Yeah.

It’s a terribly confusing topic, but this book is well written. The author tries hard to make the key ideas clear, as well as to give a detailed sense of the history, which is as interesting as the science. I was shocked to learn how much twisting and spinning the Copenhagen crowd did to protect their baby, including stunting the careers of some top physicists who didn’t want to go along.

I wouldn’t necessarily give full credence to some of the stated history in this book, because it is unflattering to some big names, except for the fact that I had just finished reading Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (trying to read, is more like it), and it made me wonder if Heisenberg actually understood what he, Bohr and friends were selling - his language was so convoluted that it made me wonder if he really had any clear sense of the measurement problem.

I’m not done with the What is Real, but it is likely going to tell me that Bell was the central figure in foundational thinking re. Copenhagen. Bell concluded that Einstein was right, that the moon is there when nobody is looking, but that Einstein was also wrong, because the world is inherently non-local. It’s an interesting read. I have read a number of your ideas, and I’m pretty sure you would enjoy it. And it bears directly on the present conversation.

Wayfarer, you might enjoy "What is Real" by Adam Becker.