Yet I think of electrical engineering as the epitome of modern materialism, however mystical the jargon about imaginary current phasors and complex permittivity may seem to the uninitiated. Electrical engineers think of electrical fields as material things that exist in the universe and follow probabilistic but all-encompassing laws, not as supernatural spiritual entities. Could your professor be wrong?
He wasn't saying that the engineers believe that in ontological sense. Rather he was presenting the difference in how we usually think about complex systems (i.e. the thermostat "wants" to keep a stable temperature). We abstract away the materialism we believe in because it's not practical and in a way we come back to the causes that aristotle wrote about, just metodologically not ontologically.
With vibe coding, one could even say that you can believe in the computer's intent to write the code and the code working through that intent. You might not even know how the code looks after all.
Yet I think of electrical engineering as the epitome of modern materialism, however mystical the jargon about imaginary current phasors and complex permittivity may seem to the uninitiated. Electrical engineers think of electrical fields as material things that exist in the universe and follow probabilistic but all-encompassing laws, not as supernatural spiritual entities. Could your professor be wrong?