Why Quantum Physicists Love Schopenhauer 

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"Your pathetic fear of my writings is the fear of the truth." - Arthur Schopenhauer

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote to his poet friend Afanassi Fet (1820-1892) in a letter dated September 30, 1869, when he was 42 years old: 'Do you know what the past summer was for me? An uninterrupted enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and a series of intellectual pleasures that I had never experienced before. I ordered and read and read all his works (I also read Kant), and probably no student has ever learned and realized so much in his course as I did this summer. I don't know if I will change my mind, but now I am convinced that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant man. The whole external world is formed by us, by our senses. We know nothing and can know nothing about it. [...] [The so-called scholars] are naively convinced that the external world is the real reality, just as the peasants are convinced that the sun and the stars revolve around the earth. Just as the peasants know nothing of what Galileo, Copernicus and Newton have done, or, if they have heard it, do not believe it, so the materialist scholars have heard nothing of it or do not believe it ... - Leo Tolstoy (1896)

Schoppenheuer is just so relatable without being pedantic.

Another point that Schopenhauer was prescient on is his insistence that matter has no static being and is through and through just action. This was reflected in the famous unification of mass and energy which undermined the static view of substance, along with it's technological consequences: nuclear energy and the atom bomb.

"Until 1818, when my work appeared, only very few, highly imperfect and scanty reports on Buddhaism were to be found in Europe, which were almost entirely confined to a few essays in the earlier volumes of the 'Asiatic researches' and mainly concerned the Buddhaism of the Burmese." Arthur Schopenhauer probably contributed more than any other important Western philosopher to opening the gates of the West to the Upanishads: It is the most rewarding and sublime reading possible in the world: it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Physics and philosophy go hand in hand

It would be interesting to see you cover Carl Jung, seeing as how he was heavily influenced by Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and can perhaps be seen as continuing their work.

Schopenhauer is also the key to depth psychology and arguably more central to Jungian thought than Nietzsche. Schopenhauer is really slept on as a figure in philosophy.

I suspected this quotation from Schopenhauer was what impressed Einstein. It suggests both special and general relativity "the essential nature of matter consists in the complete union of space and time, a union that is possible only by means of the representation of causality, and consequently only for the understanding, that is nothing but the subjective correlate of causality"

Not only did he influence physicists, but also, to a much greater extent, early psychology, through Hartmann, Freud and ultimately Jung. The concept of the unconscious is the Will in its evolved form.

I was out of the loop from this link between Schopenhauer and Quantum Physics. The concept of Unity is amazing. In my layman's terms, we are just a pale mirror of something literally unimaginable. Something I'd never expect for today.

An excellent video, Weltgeist, the metaphysics of Schopenhauer and his influences are a profound and intriguing topic.

I would personally love a deep dive video on Schrödinger's Mind and Matter!

Thank you for sharing the thought of Schopenhauer. This is a gift for humanity.

Finding you for me is like when I found Thomas Sowell last fall. Thank you for sharing. Look forward to all your posts.

You always find a way to make a video that interests me! I started quantum physics this semester and this up coming one is where we will have a deeper dive. It is interesting to hear how the greats of physics also took interest in Schopenhauer

This might seem minor, but the music choice at the beginning adds to the aesthetic of the video. It makes it more engaging, so I thought it was a great addition.

What a great content, thank you for the video. Will check your channel regularly.

He who experiences the unity of life sees all beings in his own self and his own self in all beings in the universe.

Your videos are always substantive, insightful and thought-provoking. I download them and listen on walks with my dog, Maggie says hello. Thanks! 👏

Synchronicity central - great content as always!

it had been a while since you dropped a banger like this!

we swim in a sea of speculative theories about reality - maybe we are looking and perceiving phenomena across a single moment of the now - time present - there is nothing else no before and after - the unity of which Schopenhauer speaks is simply this

Great talk, you have a gift for this work. I would also like to see an episode on Schrodinger. Thanks as always.

Extraordinary work, amazing channel

Loved this video ! Thanks .

What a synchronicity! I'm just reading "Synchronicity, through the eyes of science, myth and the trickster" and the first chapter deals with quantum physics...

These videos are some of the best stuff on RU-vid. Keep it up man.

Very nice and interesting linking of ideas. Very interested in the Schrödinger video!

The Schrödinger video idea sounds quite good.

Really important to understand that our understanding of Quantum Mechanics has advanced considerably since Schrodinger, Wigner, Oppenheimer, etc. Since the 70s the rigid mathematical models of entanglement and decoherence have been tested, proven, and applied in fields like quantum computing, and quantum communication. It is information, not consciousness that causes wave functions to APPEAR to collapse to a conscious observer. Participation of the conscious is an obsolete theory.

great vid! thanks!

See also Bernardo Kastrup's _Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics_

Big Schopenhauer fan here. Always was, always will be.

Without our capacity to apprehend reality, the ' reality outside us' doesn't exist. Kant's conclusion that we put order to the chaos of cosmos is the same with the idea that theoretical physicists who cannot admit of their finitude should stay quiet. . As the very first sentence of his Anti-Hegelian Philosophy: " THE WORLD IS MY IDEA."

Great video

Very right about this. As a practicing philosopher of physics, Schopenhauer is the thinker who has had the greatest influence on me.

Dude started his magnum opus with the phrase "The world is my idea. "

We can actully imagine something spaceless and timeless: thestate before Big Bang. And the singularity as Unity.

Excellent.... thanks 🙏❤

I feel better after I read Shoepenhauer. He relieved me of my illusory hope!! ! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

Excellent video!

Great video. Yes, please do one on Schroedinger"s book.

Another video that proves your channel to be a goldmine

interesting video. I must make some clarifications. An observer in quantum mechanics is the sensor or measuring instrument that makes the "observation". The phenomenon of observation in quantum mechanics implies that the state of a quantum system "collapses" to a defined state upon being observed or measured. Prior to observation, particles exist in a superposition of possible states. The best-known interpretation of this phenomenon is the Copenhagen interpretation, which maintains that a quantum particle has no defined properties until it is observed.

As a spiritual questor who found my satisfaction in Advaita Vedanta when I studied some quantum physics as part of my undergraduate science degree I was amazed to read that Neil's Bohr demonstrated that the perceiver and perceived arise together . That was about 35 years ago . This was pure Advaita . Since then I have followed developments in quantum physics which culminated in the 2022 Nobel prize for physics for the demonstration that there was no such thing as local Reality . Indian physicists with a background in Vedanta were thrilled by this ' Oh so science has caught up with our ancient philosophy at last ' .🙂. I sometimes watch the Atheist Experience on RU-vid and amazed how far behind the curve the Atheist community are . I think the case for Idealism has already been made and Bernardo Kastrup is particularly eloquent about this . Of course there are physicalists who can't handle recent developments in quantum physics - they even challenged the award of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics . E=🕉️

Very good. More

A very illuminating exposition of Schopenhauer’s signal ideas. I have always felt that Schopenhauer is one of the astute thinkers, and deserves to be carefully studied at universities.

I'm not a Quantum Physicist, but this is also why I love Schopenhauer.

Not just a letter exchange with Carl Jung, Pauli was his patient!

Great video! But let’s talk about Kant for a second. Kant was primarily a metaphysician, and his entire project in The Critique of Pure Reason was to save metaphysics because of Hume’s attack on it as a legitimate discipline. Hume showed that we cannot conclude by associations we form from seeing things occur together habitually in experience that such co-occurrence is attributable to anything other than pure chance. That is, we cannot establish causation, simply by observing that event B always follows event A, or to use Hume’s lingo, constant conjunction does not imply a necessary connection. For Kant, this was unacceptable, but he realized that Hume was right. Therefore, there must be something wrong with empiricism altogether-we might not be able to intuit such a thing with sensory perception purely through experience, but perhaps we have some other faculty which accomplishes this. Rather than appeal to innate knowledge and rationalism, Kant asked a deeper question: What if our faculty for reasoning itself, the thing which enables us to say things like “If A then B, A, therefore B,” was emptied of all of its contents, and we analyzed it to see how it does what it does? Pure reason is the subtracting away from our faculties-in our faculty of perception in the case of the Transendental Aesthetic, and in our analytical capacity in the Transendental Deduction. By this distinction and its analysis, Kant re-establishes our ability to know certain things about the world and our ability to practice metaphysics despite the problems of empiricism, because empiricism is only part of the equation. Kant says that we have access to necessary truths, and The Critique is meant to be akin to a formal proof establishing that some necessary truths are not purely analytic, but rather rely on contents of experience, though nonetheless provable: synthetic a priori propositions. Kant does not say that we cannot have knowledge of the world. He only claims that we cannot have direct knowledge of the world through perceptual experience. Knowledge of the world must be arrived through the application of the categories to the analysis of the contents of perception, which is why he is so careful to piece apart experience into distinct phases of analysis: forms of apperception, synthetic unity of the maniforld of intuition, transcendental unity of appercetion. When the contents of experience are analyzed at each level of Kant’s analysis in the Transcendental Aesthetic and they are considered with respect to the categories of pure reason, we get concepts of understanding. So even without direct knowledge of the world though sensory experience, which is impossible, we nevertheless are able to apply knowledge of necessary truths to the contents of sensory experience as sythetic a priori propositions, giving us knowledge of the world. This is the very thing that The Critique is about.

A “Mind and Matter” video would be greatly appreciated.

Excellent video, I'll recommend to others. Using the spectrum of light as a metaphor is a bit ironic, as Schopenhauer despised Newton's theory of light, preferring his and Goethe's. More on the quantum connections in Bernardo Kastrup's Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics. (There's also more on Pauli in his Decoding Jung's Metaphysics).

Good video. Could you make a video about Beethoven and philosophers? Please I'd like to see the relationship between him and Nietzsche, for example. Beethoven is loved for many intellectuals and I hope to see his influence kn philosophers or scientists. ❤

Please do cover Schrodinger's mind and matter when you get the chance! Fabulous video as usual:)

really an amazing video! After reading the 4th chapter of Will and Representatiom I thought it sounded very ”einstein”, later I found out that Einstein was a Schopenhauer fan 😂

Re 19:47--It is interesting that Schopenhauer likened the spectrum of colors to the world or representation and the light entering the prism to be the underlying "reality" of the Will (or the Noumenon, for Kant). The seems to be the reverse of the view of science since Newton (up to possibly Quantum Mechanics), i.e., whiteness is just the casual appearance of light, whereas the prism reveals whiteness to be an ensemble of the spectral colors, which are the actual colors.

Yay! Jung! Finally. When a complete video about his Psychology? About synchronicity? :o

Would love to see video about Mind and Matter

Amazing.

What separates one thing from another is space and time, but these two are objective, not merely SUBJECTIVE as Schopenhauer claims.

Just found this channel...truly amazing and absolute genius..keep up the good work 👏

Yes, please do a video on Schroedinger

definitely do a video on mind and matter

I'm in for everything related to Schopenhauer's influence and legacy in modern science. In the Mind and Matter video, please have a slot about Schopenhauer's influence in Schrödinger's 'What is Life?' too and how it lead to the discovery of the DNA.

I would be highly interested to see some Schrödinger and Schopenhauer related contend!

That sounds like a great idea regarding Schrodinger.

Einstein liked Schopenhauer because the latter claimed that "I can do what I want but not want what I want", a concept denying human free will and thus one's capacity to think.

I'm a second year physics student, it would be great to get your take on schrödinger's book. I read "what's life" from him and found it quite enlightening.

Thank you for explaining Schopenhauer in such a way that I could understand. Bottom Line: *the Unknowable Unknown*.

'The common man marvels at the uncommon, the wise man at the commonplace.' Ultimately, most of philosophy/metaphysics or ontology boils down to problem of the One and the Many. Schopenhauer= Plato + Kant ( and the Upanishads). Good vid and I try to encourage such content with a like and a comment (any) for the YT algo'. We need more young folk to embrace und promulgate our rich philosophical heritage.

few talk about this, its significant link.

This makes complete sense but im shocked these giants of physics indulged in the philosophy of schopenhauer because I do too. Im no genius of course but he is one of my favorite thinkers along with people like Thomas Sowell and Jordan Peterson. So now im convinced there is something intriguing about schopenhauer's work that attracts the same people that care for something like theoretical physics. Its likely a deep cruiosity for all things existential. A curiosity driven by negative emotions like fear and anger.

welltgeist, since you spoke about quantum physics, what about making some videos on Mainlander. he certantly fits the style of topics of this chanel and he is directly related to schopenhauer. his idea of the will and the suicede of god kinda remind of entropy and the chaos theory and is also very interesting. it would be wonderful to see

Maybe your best video!

Schopenhauer was a profound influence on all arts and sciences during that time.

Metaphysics is the byproduct of axiology. Physics is the byproduct of metaphysics. Our worldview tells as much about what we value as it tells about the nature of reality.

Although not in Europe, nor during Schopenhauer’s life time, Eastern philosophy took root and gave rise to a flourishing technological industry, to rival the renaissance in the state of California, USA.

If you ask where the flowers come from - even the god of spring does not know.

spending time on questions that can't be answered does not seem like a worthwhile pursuit.

Do a video about Schrödinger's mind and matter. That would be very interesting.

Observation in QM has nothing to do with consciousness or perception. When we "observe" the position of an electron before it reaches the two slits, the observation refers to the beam of photons forcing the electrons' wave function to collapse. It has nothing to do with a conscious human or animal looking at an electron.

I’m not sure he’s called Mikhaïl Faraday lmao. Good vid btw!

I'm glad this was about actual Quantum physicists. And not those wo wo type idiots.

Schopenhauer is the modern day Diogenes if you think abt it.

You should have quoted Bernardo Kastrup, who dedicated a whole part of his book "Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics" to quantum physics. For those who are interested, Weltgeist made a review of that book long ago : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-iyRhwbtdYWc.html

please do a video on Schroedinger's work

Mind and Matter. I want a video on it.

I noticed that you kept showing a picture of Claude Shannon which I think I have an idea of why but can you make a video? ❤😁😎😉

I think Alain Badiou is one the most important contemporary philosophers in these subjects.

Can you make a video on Wittgenstein?

Kants view of space and time as mere tools of perception reminds me of the Hindu idea of maya which is described to mean the physical world but also to mean illusion

I think you should make a video on panpsychism next...

Schrodinger is also worth exploring.

Schrödinger? Yes! Pleas 😊

Do the deep dive!

I see it more being applicable to relativity

The title could perhaps be more fundamentally rephrased: why are quantum physicists attracted to Vedic philosophy? Here is a sample list of physicists who came under its influence: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Oppenheimer, Capra, and probably many others. Einstein and the Nobel laureate Indian poet/philosopher Rabindranath Tagore discussed whether reality was subjective or objective in a famous meeting that reached no conclusion - you can guess what Einstein’s position was as he was then wrestling with the “Copenhagen mafia”. Tagore’s position was Upanishad inspired and favored “Subjective”. I have read that Bohr (or perhaps Heisenberg - I can’t recall exactly which one) told Tagore separately that the Vedic view of reality made the Eastern mind more receptive to the new physics.

It’s important to note however that Eastern thought has yet to truly influence the West, as they never had a duality of mind and body; their oneness was not simply external but whole and total. Nevertheless you can find lots of parallels between Eastern thought and quantum physics - I recommend reading The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.