Pierz Newton-John
1 min readSep 18, 2024

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Gee Giorgios, you talk like I just picked up Rovelli and got brain washed! I haven't read Carroll specifically, but I have read many, many thinkers on QM (and philosophy of mind) over the decades, including Susskind's and Dirac's QM primers, the collection of my great grandfather Max Born's letters to and from Einstein, books and papers by Deutsch and De Witt on MWI etc etc. There are dozens of takes on the significance of QM of course. I read Rovelli because I came across a review in the NYT and realised that what he was saying was exactly what I had been writing about in extensive private notes for a book on the idea of relationalism - a philosophy which has since penetrated into more people's consciousness via Rovelli and others, but which I had found scant reference to anywhere prior to that.

You dismiss the entire thing with a hand wave as "sophism". I don't expect you to agree, but I think you are being far too cavalier.

On one point I agree with you: we are indeed far from understanding reality, and I am in fact with David Deutsch in believing that reality is infinite (that is implied by relationalism), so we never will. Nonetheless we don't necessarily need to be stuck on the hard problem forever, which in my view is an artefact of a faulty metaphysics.

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Pierz Newton-John
Pierz Newton-John

Written by Pierz Newton-John

Writer, coder, former psychotherapist, founding member of The School Of Life Melbourne. Essayist for Dumbo Feather magazine, author of Fault Lines (fiction).

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