[Serious] Book reports

[GrandizerII]

@Grandizer

This might be relevant:

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati...-in-athens

Well, it's an interesting perspective. Whether this should be the right way to look at things, I can't say. Modern science seems to be doing ok explaining material things in terms of particles, and I'm not inclined at the moment to see objects and beings like us and like rocks and water to be fundamental in nature.

With regards to quantum mechanics, I don't see how different their proposed interpretation is to the Copenhagen interpretation exactly. And indeterminism does imply randomness of some sort. It's not the sort of randomness that is distributed equally among all possible quantum paths, but the fact that we have to speak of these outcomes in ontologically probabilistic ways (at least in the case of indeterministic interpretations like the Copenhagen interpretation) does suggest randomness.

I also get the feeling the author seems to think the proposals of the block universe and many worlds must deny the examination of the universe from alternate perspectives. That is not the way I personally see it. I'm provisionally all in for a block universe (and many worlds) even while still seeing the need for an account of how various parts of the universe logically connect to each other in a block universe and even while still seeing the need to continue to espouse a first-person perspective that attempts to explain the universe in terms of [apparent] changes and such.

And even if a block universe proposal that only involves a one-world universe is not so satisfactory, proposals of many worlds do provide a satisfactory answer (in my opinion) to the question of why this universe rather than some other. If the universe is just simply the super set of all [meta]physically possible worlds, then there is nothing more to ask about what else may be missing in this universe because the universe is basically all the things that could [meta]physically be.

All that said, I agree that nothing in quantum mechanics (or relativity) must necessitate that Aristotelianism be false on the whole, but in terms of descriptive/explanatory power, it's not clear if we need to resort to an Aristotelian type of explanation to account for what we "observe" at the quantum level. Modern notions of causality seem to be doing just fine in this regard.

Ultimately, it's all about what starting point we go with. Thomists are understandably going to stick to the Aristotelian way of thinking. Based on my own priors, I reason differently by default.