Christopher Isham - Realism vs. Anti-realism

What are anti-realists and why do they deny objective reality? What we know of the world must come through our senses and be processed by our brains. Both can be unreliable; illusions can fool our senses and illness or injury can disrupt our brains. Therefore, can we ever be sure that anything outside ourselves is truly what it seems?


Christopher Isham is a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, where he is a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, in the Department of Physics.


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[SeanAnthony-jf]

What a very f*cking rare physicist to be both literate to other field like philosophy and psychology and even theology

[katherinestone]

It's a shame there are not more physicists who have an interest in also understanding the "inside" world.

[marron]

Thank you very much, but please set subtitles active.

[uremove]

Great to hear a scientist advocating for more people to study Jung! The schism between Science and Religion or natural vs. supernatural was resolved by Jung’s work on archetypes, but too few scientists are aware of him.

[lokeshparihar]

One of the best interview on closer to truth i saw in long time

[leonbrenner]

These men talked all this time and never got into the subject.

[bingading]

"Do not try and bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth...there is no spoon. Then you will see it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself".... Interview made me consider this quote from the Matrix.

[underthejaguarsun]

This is very interesting needs subtitles

[italogiardina]

Given there are more than one theory of the wave function collapse, one of which is the pilot wave theory that had numerous theoretical physicists draw on an ontology mind dependent realism where it is that C.G.Jung features as an alternative to advocating Eastern metaphysics (one of Jung's books is titled Psychology and the East).

[somethingyousaid]

How can anybody think that Reality (as we know Reality) isn't objective? Maybe I don't understand the definition of the term "objective"? But then wouldn't any definition of a term necessarily be a subjective definition? But then maybe I don't understand the definition of the term "subjective"? Okay, me trying to figure any of that out can only drive me crazy, so I think I'll just ignore all of it.

[jahsonmix]

Greetings mi nation. Welcome to my time you have a lot more to learn.have a blessed one

[owencampbell]

Reality for us is very real, problem is the same with quatum experiments when measured it changes its behaviour. Same is with humans, when confronted by the arguement we ourselves build our world through our mind, we also behave differently and accept what we dont understand instead of defending our position in reality.

[tarekazzam]

Hi Chris!

How's your "Comme si Comme ca" today? In a Ststionary Quantum State? In a Pure QM - State? Or in a QM - Mixed State?

How was your Performance
in your Undergraduate Phase in the Lab? I mean: was Chris Isham in
1- "interested"
and
2 - "able" -
- that is not merely interested - but also "performing well" - in Experiments & Measurement and/or in Observations, Error Analysis and Sources, Gauss - Error Multiplication-Reproduction- [German: Gauss'sche Fehler - Fortpflanzung?]

[watcher]

He's a bit hard to understand, acoustically. Case in point, 3:19 I think he says "scientists, especially physicists" or "scientists, particularly physicists", but you must really understand this from context.

[svantubic]

Interesting but CI is unclear phonetically - like some here suggest, subtitles would help a lot.

[dreyestud]

I wonder what he says that gets beeped out.

[zenanon]

I'm amazed by how little "smart" people know about Jung. Most people who disparage Jung are much less "smarter" than Jung was. Also these people don't realize that Jung based his theories on empirical observations.

[zenanon]

Jung's meaning of archetypes is instincts....it's the most basic form of human psychology and the collective consciousness is where the archetypes ...think instincts reside....this is the result of all of our human evolution.

[Therealskxlls]

You’re looking for truth but you haven’t yet read the German idealists? You’ve interviewed hundreds of scholars and you still aren’t any closer to the truth? what does that say about your interviewees?

[RuneRelic]

People have been programmed to believe many things through hypnosis.
From a mere rudimentary high level description of an event, the imagination will fill in the blanks to the limits of the low level detail of their sensory systems, as a false memory.

Reality is simply degrees of conviction.
Conviction is neither logical nor emotional but temporal and can over rule the other fragments of our mind or cause a panic and/or psychological break down.
To be more accurate, objective reality as oppose to imaginary subjective reality, is a collective or shared conviction of an observed event, that is granted a 100% certainty/probability.
But how can anything gain conviction unless someone else communicates with us that they shared the same sensory experience in a shared space and how do we know if their decription is accurate enough to match without hijacking their memory in every detail..if memory even exists ?
But such would be impossible to match, because each would have a unique viewpoint in 4D.

A colour blind person will not perceive the same experience as someone who is not.
Unless everyones sensory systems are accurately calibrated to an identical standard from the same position in spacetime, the experience will always be different.
In fact we use that difference to ascertain a previous position in 4d space and the concept of movement as a sequential series of quantum steps/energy jumps or synchronous independant time frames.



So to ensure that a common experience in shared space is genuinely objective and not subjective, we created artificial calibrated sensory equipment.
But that equipment never senses anything more than the vibration of atoms to 'infer' a physical reality.
When in fact, that equipment is simply a pyramid of assumptions and interpretations about what those vibrating atoms actually mean, in relation to a populated 4D space.
Even the sensors we created are only viable for human usage, calibrated to have meaning to humans via encoding, decoding and protocols, to create a symbol table of meaning/relevance.


Then there is the supposed laws of physics that apparently exist, no matter what the environmental conditions.
Yet every material has its very own unique phase transition table, where the rules are actually dependant on the phase of the material in question.
Along with that comes refractive index, which shoud be viewed in the context of gravitational lensing too.
In fact when we speak about covalent, ionic, polar bonds along with different structural types of elements themselves via electron shell configuration, are we simply not describing the gravitational properties of materials as a phase dependant density that is also inseperable from heat/pressure as gravitational or spacetime density.
Is this really no different to what happens when all materials become superconducting at absolute zero, thus confirming physical laws are phase dependant.
So how can you go back in time to the big bang for instance, if the rules changed with transition change ?
When atomic polar tumble stops at 0K at peak entropy, to allow quantum computers and such to work, would such dipolar magnets not synchronise align and collapse to a minimal configuration ?
Is relative polar tumble not the very nature of resonance that enable any identifiable object to be viewed as a harmonic cohesive synchronous body ?