u/MeoWHamsteR7

I've been watching Dr. K's content for a year or two now, on and off, and it has greatly helped me in various things in life- as it probably did for many of you here. However, there's something that has been troubling me the last few weeks and I just can't seem to shake it off.

From what I understand, one of the core teachings of Buddhism is that desire is the source of suffering. Our desire to be rich causes us pain when the economy tanks. Our desire to be more attractive is only temporarily satisfied when we gain muscle in the gym- causing us to crave an even more attractive physique, trapping us in a loop of unsatisfaction and shifting goalpoasts.

That is, of course, very wise- and has helped me gain a more positive, relaxed attitude towards many things in life, and taught me to let go of things.

The one thing that has come to bother me greatly, however, is that this applies to *all* desire. Including my desire for a loving family, my desire to create something useful for humanity. My desire to know more about the universe, about my friends, about myself. My desire to improve as a human, to be healthy, to give my future children a better world.

According to Buddhism, so long as I desire the things above, I will not be at peace. But I think that if I let go of these desires, nothing good will come of it. Inevitably, I will care less about all of the things above, and put less effort into realizing these things. If I truly let go of wanting to improve, I fear my life will take a turn for the worse. Is attaining peace truly worth forsaking all of the things above?

I understand that theoretically, a truly enlightened person will be able to do everything above while not desiring any of it. But practically speaking, I find it very very unlikely to happen to me- just like I started going a bit less to the gym when I let go of my obsession about my looks. I am only human, and I fear that if I let go of these things, then my already lacking motivation to self-improve will be snuffed out like a candle.

This leads me to the question- how can one truly claim to be self improving, while letting go of the desire to self improve at the same time? Can you truly seek to better yourself in the physical sense (wanting a family, wanting to contribute to society etc) while letting go of physical desire at the same time? I feel like getting out of the 21st century comfort zone of doomscrolling and weed is already hard enough even when I desire to get out of it, so trying to get out of it without wanting to is just simply impractical (for me).

I'm sorry, I meant this to be shorter but I guess I had to write this out. Thank you for reading if you got this far :)

Tl;dr - if Buddhism is (at least partly) about letting go of desire, must I let go of the desire to self-improve?

Hi everyone,

I recently had a discussion with a friend (we're both in our last year of undergrad) about the future of fundamental physics. During that conversation I said that I believe a lot more attention should be given to the area of quantum information, and/or interpretations of QM, the measurement problem, etc - I just believe that these areas have a lot of very old questions which have been pushed to the wayside in the wake of newer theories.

What I didn't expect was his answer. In his opinion, while these areas are of course very interesting, he does not count them as areas of fundamental physics. He said that fundamental physics is basically only physics that concerns the four fundamental forces and the properties of the elementary bosons and leptons (I'm simplifying his view but I hope you get the general idea). After I had pressed him, he had made the statement that "information is just a mathematical object which is useful for describing physical systems, but in the end it is just a mathematical object, and doesn't exist as deeply as the four forces, or quarks". Basically, to him, information is either only mathematical or emergent (like temperature).

This struck me as very odd, as I thought that information was a physical thing - and the study of it reveals fundamental truths about the function of our universe. To me, special relativity poses rules that are no less intrinsic to our world than the interactions of the strong force, or gravity. Bell's theorem also has similar far-reaching consequences about the ways any information can be theoretically transmitted in this universe. To him, however, these points were kind of moot as they weren't "truly fundamental".

Unfortunately we had to cut our conversation short because it was in a group setting and I may have been intoxicated lol. However, this left me very curious about which of us is right. Is information a fundamental property of the universe, or is it just an abstraction that we humans use? Are there any examples/counter-examples to his case or mine? Your opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time :)

So I took a solid-state/condensed matter physics (I always confuse those two fields and their correct translation from my native language) course last semester, and I just thought of some weird consequence of the semi classical model, the final topic in the course which we didn't really get to focus on.

According to the model, an electron can be treated as a half-quantum half-classical particle, so we get two nifty equations for its location and momentum. A surprising conclusion you can reach is that if you turn on a constant electric field, the electron won't just accelerate ad infinitum, but actually begin a steady oscillatory motion (because its momentum is cyclic in the Brillioun zones).

For some reason I remembered it last night, and it suddenly struck me as very odd - not because it's counterintuitive that it won't accelerate in a constant electric field, but because it seems to make the flow of current impossible!

I mean, one way to make a constant electric field on the material the electrons are in, is to put it in-between a potential difference (for example inside a capacitor). What I learned in physics 2 is that this will induce a flow of current between the plates - but according to the semi classical model, this is impossible - since the electrons will only move only in oscillations!

I'm wondering if anyone knows how to reconcile this.

Thanks for reading : )