For example, I had lunch the other day with a physics professor from a good university who thought that, even if we could assemble an atom-for-atom duplicate of a person’s exact physical state, it might well not act like a person for want of a soul.
...a PHYSICS PROFESSOR??
That makes my head hurt.
And that makes me realize that, after all this time reading LW and OB, I must still be overestimating academia. Consider me updated.
The physics professors who taught me quantum mechanics seemed to believe there is something special making up the human mind that, unlike all other matter in the universe, cannot be put int a superposition, and thus causes the wave function to collapse to one of its component eigen states. I won’t say that it doesn’t bother me that some of them believe in souls, but I’ve gotten used to it.
The physics professor that taught me quantum mechanics not only thought ‘collapse’ was some wonderfully mysterious phenomenon, the fact that the most probable location to find an electron can be at r = 0, while the most probable radius is non zero was wonderfully mysterious to him.
It’s important to understand that there’s likely strong compartmentalization going on here. Having such beliefs is not mutually exclusive with being a strong scientific researcher. Such indications should not be read as overly strong indications of low levels of general competence.
...a PHYSICS PROFESSOR??
That makes my head hurt.
And that makes me realize that, after all this time reading LW and OB, I must still be overestimating academia. Consider me updated.
The physics professors who taught me quantum mechanics seemed to believe there is something special making up the human mind that, unlike all other matter in the universe, cannot be put int a superposition, and thus causes the wave function to collapse to one of its component eigen states. I won’t say that it doesn’t bother me that some of them believe in souls, but I’ve gotten used to it.
The physics professor that taught me quantum mechanics not only thought ‘collapse’ was some wonderfully mysterious phenomenon, the fact that the most probable location to find an electron can be at r = 0, while the most probable radius is non zero was wonderfully mysterious to him.
It’s important to understand that there’s likely strong compartmentalization going on here. Having such beliefs is not mutually exclusive with being a strong scientific researcher. Such indications should not be read as overly strong indications of low levels of general competence.