Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher attending a conference on quantum gravity features, reflects on his outsider perspective amid physicists debating concepts beyond his expertise, while arguing that quantum physics has profound ontological implications that demand philosophical engagement. He critiques the historical Copenhagen orthodoxy’s dismissal of deeper questions and the recent surge of mystical interpretations—linking quantum entanglement to ancient philosophies like Advaita Vedanta or even suggesting consciousness causes reality—insisting instead on a retooled materialism that abandons classical determinism and embraces quantum physics’ “Real” as a level of indeterminate yet precisely probabilistic existence, per Lacan’s insights.
Drawing Hegelian parallels, Žižek views quantum paradoxes like wave-particle duality not as epistemic limits but as ontological features, akin to dialectical tensions in society or subjectivity’s emergence from representational failures. He praises materialist physicists like Lee Smolin, Carlo Rovelli, and Sean Carroll for rethinking reality without idealism, yet poses two pointed questions to Smolin: whether a unified theory beyond quantum mechanics and general relativity would erase quantum physics’ miraculous shift from cognitive to being-limits, and if Smolin’s temporally open ontology, with its democratic principles co-authored with Roberto Unger, risks a complacent pragmatism ill-suited to our era’s existential crises, urging instead a mad politics to preserve quantum and revolutionary madness.
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