Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Philosophically excited about quantum mechanics


From xkcd comic. These comics are sometimes obscure, so there is an explanation page.

For an example of how quantum mechanics gets academics philosophically excited, see this paper:
Assembled Bodies
Reconfiguring Quantum Identities
Whitney Stark

Abstract

In this semimanifesto, I approach how understandings of quantum physics and cyborgian bodies can (or always already do) ally with feminist anti-oppression practices long in use. The idea of the body (whether biological, social, or of work) is not stagnant, and new materialist feminisms help to recognize how multiple phenomena work together to behave in what can become legible at any given moment as a body. By utilizing the materiality of conceptions about connectivity often thought to be merely theoretical, by taking a critical look at the noncentralized and multiple movements of quantum physics, and by dehierarchizing the necessity of linear bodies through time, it becomes possible to reconfigure structures of value, longevity, and subjectivity in ways explicitly aligned with anti-oppression practices and identity politics. Combining intersectionality and quantum physics can provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for enabling apparatuses that allow for new possibilities of safer spaces, and for practices of accountability.
I cannot even tell if this is a joke or not.

Update: A comment says that it is not a joke, and neither is this:
Academics and scholars must be mindful about using research done by only straight, white men, according to two scientists who argued that it oppresses diverse voices and bolsters the status of already privileged and established white male scholars.

Geographers Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that doing so also perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)

Mott, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Cockayne, who teaches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, argued that scholars or researchers disproportionately cite the work of white men, thereby unfairly adding credence to the body of knowledge they offer while ignoring the voices of other groups, like women and black male academics.
Apparently academic geography has been lost to leftism.

4 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The comic is funny. The semimanifesto is disguisedly trite, and worse, boring.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I thought that the article was obviously a joke. Silly me.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448102/quantum-physics-oppressive-marginalized-people

    ReplyDelete
  4. Clearly you are not aware of some of the advances made in bleeding edge gender studies. This paper is a bold and exciting refutation of the presumptions of cyborgian quantum relativism with their impacts on the bodies of oppressed others. My only criticism of this paper is the unaccountable failure to supply the relevant equations as a necessary underpinning for such a bold hypothesis.

    ReplyDelete