I'm taking a break from feeling despair about the US budget bill giving billions of dollars to ICE and building of prisons in Florida and beyond that are essentially being advertised as concentration camps, and enjoying this interview of physicist Jacob Barandes by Curt Jaimungal:
I've been interested in this question about how consciousness and experience can be fit into a common framework with materialism and what we know from physics. I'm in a reading group with two philosophy professors from CU, reading Henri Bergson's "Matter and Memory". I've also been interested in Eugene Gendlin's books such as "A Process Model" and "Experience and the Creation of Meaning". Gendlin's philosophy isn't well known and it's incredibly hard to read, but it's quite profound and may provide a language for integrating experience and physics. Bergson frames the problem as finding a middle ground between idealism and materialism and he locates the solution in terms of having a more sophisticated concept of time, together with taking memory into account. I'm interested in how this may connect to Barandes' formulation of quantum mechanics based around "indivisible processes" that break the Markov condition and include non-trivial memory.
Bergson is also difficult to read, though he was actually super famous during his life. His lecture in New York caused the first traffic jam! Another exciting connection to Bergson for me, personally, is that my great grandfather, Herman Bernstein corresponded with Bergson and an interview is presented in "With Master Minds".
I'm also interested to read Alfred North Whitehead who might be seen as a bridge between Bergson and Gendlin in this "process philosophy" direction.
At the same time, I've been trying to figure out what my next job will be. I'm still thinking of Europe as a possibility, but I'm focusing on Colorado right now. I wanted to stay in the synchrotron light sources, but don't see how I can do that without moving. I've recently been looking into options to work in the field of quantum computation. There's a company nearby called Atom Computing as well as Oxford Ionics, Quantinuum and a few others. I talked with someone from Atom Computing who told me they currently have machines they sell with ~1000 qubits. They are made of Ytterbium atoms moved around by optical tweezers and arbitrary states of entanglement can be created by bringing two atoms close to each other and hitting the two with a laser that excites an electron to a high energy level.
It might be fun to work in quantum computing and continue to read this stuff about consciousness and physics.
Anyway, I have a few contacts, but still no job. I'm trying to take it slowly and find something meaningful that will also pay the bills. But the state of the US continues to be extremely worrisome.
