I don’t have a cite, because I don’t even remember where I first heard it. But it goes something like this. Quantum Physics says in order for something to exist it first has to be observed (?—or ‘measured’?). In the beginning there were no sentient humans to observe anything. Therefore it must’ve been God who was the first observer. Is that at least possible? I have to also tell you all, about 30 or more years ago, I was having a real crisis of faith. And I came across the American Academic Encyclopedia in the U of M, Dearborn Mardigian Library, while I was taking a class there. It said God could be rationalized on scientific grounds. Anyway, FWIW at the present time I believe in God and being good. But not much else. Thoughts? Arguments?
Max Planck begged his colleges to explain the joke, but nobody could. Niels Bohr shouted, "Shut Up And Calculate", and progress in theoretical physics slowed to a crawl for almost half a century, while the number of authors on significant papers, skyrocketed to over 120. Meanwhile.... desperate Japanese engineers invented the modern formulation of Fuzzy Logic, fully aware it contradicted classic logic and mathematics. Academics ignored their success for decades, until fuzzy logic began to spread to Chinese industries. The one thing no physicist or academic philosopher will ever admit in public, is that the only thing anyone requires to make more sense out of classic logic, is a sense of humor. Which, of course, is easy to document by examining the Big Picture (Duh!) If there is a god, apparently he has a sense of humor, because experiments indicate the Big Bang was "just right", not too hot and not too cold, while classical mathematics and physics have turned out to be explicitly tautological, and relativity is blatantly self-contradictory, while mathematicians are now classifying jokes older than monuments as "Vital to the National Defense". Ya don't need a weatherman to know which way academic stupidity blows. The latest evidence indicates energy and information are interchangeable, determining how efficient anything we observe becomes, according to the context and the specific observer. All of which implies 42 is as good as it gets, and neither governments nor corporations are amused. The simple explanation for all the confusion, is that classic logic enforces Three Stooges slapstick, that makes a shitload of money, and has suppressed the required linguistic analysis and alternatives for the last 2,000 years. The mystery of quantum mechanics, merely reflects academic stupidity.
fanatics might insist something has to be observed in order to exist, science merely observes that what is not known is not known, and being unknown, owes nothing to what anyone tells anyone else to pretend. there may well be nonphysical parallel universes, hidden simply by their being nonphysical, and populated be self aware beings, who are neither physical nor imaginary, who know little more, if any, about our universe then we know about theirs, and have even less to do, with anything in it. gods are optional, as is the existence of our own species, this does not in any way make them harmful, destructive, nor unwelcome. there is nothing to prevent the existence of the unfamiliar, only our collective narcissism as a species, demanding each other pretend nothing else can exist without our knowing anything about it. collective narcissism pretending it decides what may or may not exist, and that it must dictate that everyone pretend the same thing, is simply blindly illogical. nor that everyone should have to pretend the same things. what it takes to be an honorable person is to be considerate of all things, not limited to what we think we know, whatever gods or god like beings may or may not happen to exist, whatever may or may not become of our awareness individually when the physical forms we are living in association with, cease to function.
Nothing is certain, not even that. This is Bishop Berkeley dug up and dressed in a lab coat--philosophical idealism (or should we now call it "quantum consciousness") in a test tube. But is it true? Quantum physicist Rchard Feynman once said “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” But that hasn't deterred humanities majors and New Age gurus from pontificating about it. Like religions, there are different "schools" of QM that have different interpretations of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which states: at any at any given point in time, either position or momentum can only be measured accurately. The Many Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics The Copenhagen school (indeterminism of wave-particle duality; Schoroedinger's cat paradox) became the "orthodox' view in the field, but Bohm's more holisic paradigm and Everett's view of multiple universes had their adherents. Physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term "black hole", thought that the universe was like a feedback loop in which we contribute to the creation of our present, past and future.This has interesting implications. Suppose my idea of the universe contradicts yours. Does it then become a contest of wills as the universe changes back and forth to accommodate the will of the stronger? Does the universe go away when we both go to sleep? Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking? Well, maybe God is awake, but does that count? If this view is correct, maybe Kellyanne Conway, Trumps advisor, had it right when she talked about "alternative facts". Like the news these days, it now seems we can each have the universe the way we like it. But Dr.Victor Stenger, himself a particle physicist, strenuously disagrees. Unnatural FAQs: The Myth of Quantum Consciousness "Heisenberg and the others who originally formulated quantum mechanics... in describing the necessary interaction between the observer and what is being observed, and how the state of a system is determined by the act of its measurement, ...inadvertently left the impression that human consciousness enters the picture to cause that state come into being...Quantum mechanics does not violate the Copernican principle that the universe cares not a whit about the human race. Long after humanity has disappeared from the scene, matter will still undergo the transitions that we call quantum events. The atoms in stars will radiate photons, and these photons will be absorbed by materials that react to them. Perhaps, after we are gone, some of our machines will remain to analyze these photons. If so, they will do so under the same rules of quantum mechanics that operate today....Of course our thinking processes have a strong influence on what we perceive. But to say that what we perceive therefore determines, or even controls, what is out there is without rational foundation." As for divine consciousness, Stenger, being a militant atheist, sees no role for that. See Stenger, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness.
Modern academia could not find their own ass with both hands, and my own research indicates the issue with quantum mechanics, is that time is not a fucking machine, which would be oh-so-convenient for modern corporations and governments, so academics have suppressed all the evidence to the contrary. Essentially, classic logic only describes roughly a third of the world, while humor can describe even classic logic with up to 125% efficiency, which simply means 42 is as good as it gets, and whether God exists remains up to the observer. I'm writing the only book I know of on the subject, using advanced linguistic mathematics derived from the Tao Te Ching, but the simple fact is, for any logic or metaphysics to make more sense than academics claim, all anyone requires is a sense of humor, because energy and information constantly exchange identities for each observer. Time is nonlinear, and the past is not merely a memory, nor is the future only a dream, because particle-wave duality applies to everything, including scales and magnitudes.
Time isn't linear and awareness does stretch beyond the constraints of linear time. No, the universe can't exist without conscious awareness. It doesn't exist without conscious awareness.
My work includes the mathematics to program a computer with a genuine sense of humor, compelling academics to admit they are the last people on earth to decide if a machine with a genuine sense of humor can be considered conscious, and should be granted human rights. Without a sense of humor, consciousness is meaningless.
Its called "Cosmic Consciousness" and is approved by academics, as preferable to espousing mysticism, despite academics still being unable to define either consciousness or humor.
Do any academics with science degrees espouse it? I found at least three--Menas C. Kafatos, a particle physicist at Chapman University, who seems to be a sidekick of New Age guru Depak Chapraand Dr. Richard Maurice Bucken, a Canadian Psychiatrist who coined the term at the beginning of the last century, and of course the pioneering John Wheeler, who stood at the boundaries of genius and insanity.
Philosophy is the foundation of science. I know, I know, its inconvenient that physicists still can't claim philosophy is dead. If you believe science is leading philosophy, then science is responsible for the state of the world today.
Centuries ago, that was true. Science grew out of philosophy. Since then, though, science, in the reckoning of most people, has overtaken and surpassed philosophy as the gold standard of reliable knowledge, and philosophy as a discipline is seen degenerated into a set of blind alleys. I think that assessment is unfortunate, because philosophy is at least as necessary as it ever was to show us the limits of science and to deal with questions science can never answer, such as the meaning of life. The very advantages of science are limitations. It relies on the rigorous empirical testing of refutable hypotheses. If a question isn't of the kind that lends itself to that, science is of little help--although it is easy to forget that limitation. Science is best in reducing or minimizing the risk of what statisticians call Type 1 errors, or "false positives. Type I Error https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~hhuang/STAT141/Lecture-FDR.pdf It is less helpful in dealing with Type 2 errors (false negatives). Just because I can't prove the existence of God empirically doesn't necessarily mean (S)he doesn't exist. And science is not equipped to address problems of ultimate meaning, which are matters of great importance to most of us. Philosophers called logical positivists used to conclude from that that questions of ultimate meaning were metaphysical nonsense. They've since pulled in their horns. Then there are the matters that necessarily involve real but limited empirical evidence-- for example the existence of ancient historical figures like Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha. One approach to such questions is simply to throw up our hands and say such questions are unanswerable, or worse, to assume that because the evidence is inclusive we must assume such figures didn't exist. Alternatively, students of ancient history can step up to the plate and offer the best inferences they can on the basis of systematic study of limited date. Then there are matters of human behavior in which the variable are so great that it's difficult to make reliable generalizations. Such matters tend to be relegated to the "social sciences", which have never commanded the respect of the "hard sciences", which avoid such difficulties by not dealing with such matters. Philosophy and the social sciences stepped in to fill the void. The corollary though is that their conclusions are inherently less reliable than those of the physical sciences, although they may be all we have to go on. Contemporary philosophy, partly in reaction to past excesses, partly as a result of trying to defend itself against the growing prestige of science, seems to have taken paths that lead to nowhere. Linguistic (analytical) philosophy, the dominant school of modern philosophy in the U. S. and the U.K.until the 1970s, became an arid discipline dealing with issues most normal people consider to be trivial in a manner that they find abstruse. On the continent of Europe, phenomenological approaches came into vogues, spawning existentialism and postmodernism. And now the tendency seems to be ecclecticism or pluralism involving various mixes and matches of the two.Analytic Philosophy | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The late, great Stephen Hawking, Mr. Theory of Everything, notoriously proclaimed phliosophy to be "dead" because of its inability to catch up to science. To Paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Is philosophy dead? https://princetonsummerjournal.com/2020/08/13/is-philosophy-dead/But as Canadian philosopher and cognitive psychologist points out: "those who disparage philosophy are usually slaves of some defunct philosopher."--Hawking himself being a conspicuous example. Philosophy is about "making general claims about the nature of knowledge and reality". Hawking made such a claim when he stated: "A well-constructed model creates a reality of its own, " based on a series of sub-claims supposedly based on quantum theory."But the claims are not consequences of quantum theory as such, only of particular philosophical interpretations, of which there are more than a dozen, all highly controversial". Is philosophy dead? Philosophy can be helpful in sorting those out and subjecting them to critical, reasoned analysis--the other tool we have in our arsenal of inquiry along with empirical testing.
I don't know about physicists, but it is certainly espoused by scientists. Its a sort of Zen or Buddhist idea, while academics tend to love such things, due to their inability to even teach a child how to use a dictionary.
Again, a science without a philosophy is a complete oxymoron. Go ahead, point to a single science without a philosophy. Fuck what the public says, a quarter of them still insist the sun revolves around the earth, and over half make up their own definitions for words.
The question of an observer is a very interesting one, but science has largely dismissed it in every way it can, and ultimately, is it really that proof that you are looking for anyway? The idea of multiple universes was one example, that every manifestation of particle or wave is not really an observation, but a universe, in a reality of continuously created infinite universes, and we just happen to be in the universe where it was a particle with the specific spin as opposed to another universe with a different spin or a wave rather than a particle. The idea that every collapse of a wave into a particle is a new universe is so crazy that I think it would make more sense for there to be a god. This is where I agree with Wooleeheron. Then there is the argument that the wave does not actually collapse into a particle but comes close enough that it is 'as good as' a particle, and this can bring up some question about an observer. But you are on the right track. There are a lot of questions that Quantum Mechanics brings up that does not have a simple answer, and suggests that there is more to this universe than the material world that science takes for granted. The first thing that quantum mechanics brings up concerns this assumption of materialism---that physical reality is the only reality. How can there be a god or any kind of supernatural being or thing if physical reality is all that exists. Granted, Hegel tried to make that argument, but seriously if god was a physical being then we could quantify and prove it in physical terms. We would see physical presence. On the other hand, quantum mechanics gives us the probability wave or quantum wave that is superpositioned---that has infinite positions across time and space (which is the wave that collapses into a particle). Scientists assume that the wave is a physical reality but I argue that it makes far more sense if it is a nonphysical thing, existing outside the physical dimensions. Wave-particle duality is then physical-nonphysical duality. (This is the same problem of the observer, but looks at it from a different angle that would not be denied even if we dismissed the idea of the observer). Then there is the problem that, in the face of quantum randomness, our reality remains consistent from moment to moment---despite the fact that particles are continually collapsing into physicality, and that they are doing this despite a continuous and very complex change in space-time positions. A particle that, due to randomness, could manifest anywhere at anytime in the universe, manifests right where it is supposed to maintain a consistency of your hand, for example, slowly turning a steering wheel, in a car driving down the highway at 65 mph, on a planet that is spinning at a much faster speed, while orbiting the sun, at an even faster speed, that is orbiting the center of our milky way galaxy at an even faster speed, which itself is moving through the universe at an even faster speed. And yet every object in this great universe while its particles are blinking in and out of existence, remains consistent, changing only from the natural physical forces around it, from nanosecond to nanosecond, from hour to hour, from year to year, and even century to century. The reason why I mention all this movement is to demonstrate the complexity of this process---if a particle that can manifest anywhere in the universe has to manifest in your hand, it is one thing if the position in space is the same from one moment to the next, where the space-time position changes only in terms of time. But the reality is that even in the smallest increment of time that we can perceive, the change in terms of space is massive. Just in terms of the change in space based on the movement of our galaxy, you would not be able to even see where you were a second ago if you could look back in time, as we are moving 1.3 million miles per hour, or a little over 361 miles per second. And all of this happens through quantum information. Somehow, this particle knows whether to be physical or nonphysical, and where and how to manifest, and how to respond to the affect of other particles around it, and remembers, and learns and even responds to randomness. The question of a superpositioned reality implies that there is absolute potentiality--a future where anything can happen, yet it collapses into a singularity---a single actuality. And this acutality, because quantum information 'remembers,' creates trends and directions that steer the manifestation of future particles--the finite in the face of the infinite, the physical arising from the nonphysical. The spiritual implications run deep, in that all of this, and other questions, suggests a reality way beyond that of simple materialism. I argue that there is proof of an absolute reality within all of this---I leave it up to each person's interpretation, but, yes, for many this is god. I have labeled my philosophy, Archephenomenalism---arche, which in ancient Greek means, First Cause---a concept that is unpopular in the materialist philosophies of today. It is the idea that there is a first cause or origin to everything. My first cause is mind, and in philosophy that is a very broad concept, going from the individual human mind, to spirit, to god or even a cosmic mind that is the universe. Phenomenalism is the philosophy that what we experience of reality is phenomena, rather than the things-in-themselves. So, for example, you may be looking at a computer or a smart phone now, and think that you are experiencing or feeling that object. But you aren't. You are feeling the phenomena of that object. You touch your computer or your phone. You might think that the atoms of your fingers are touching the atoms of the keyboard or phone but most of what is experienced is that of the phenomena created solely by the electrons, and obviously since they are all the same charge, they are not even touching. And even then, what you are feeling in your mind is the phenomena generated by the nerve cells in your finger tips and how the mind perceives the bioelectrical currents that move through the nerves. It is all phenomena. I always needed proof of spiritual things. I could never accept blind faith. This became even more critical as I started to learn of the hypocrisy of religious teachings and the failings of logic---even at an early age. I was 8 years old in a baptismal class when I realized that key things in the logic did not make sense to me--like the idea of unconditional love in a world of good and evil, and punishment. It was probably around 40 years ago for me that I had finally decided that there could be no 'proof.' I had bought into the logic of the modern world that only physical reality can exist. Then a couple of things happened to me in the Philippines in the '80s that were physically impossible. Maybe it is better to say, that I witnessed. This put me back on the path of searching for truth--for god. Years later, back in the States, I got my proof, not via religion, but through spirituality, indigenous spirituality to be exact. Everytime I go into Native ceremony, I experience the nonphysical in some form or another. I have written about this elsewhere on this forum.
The Copengan Interpretatoon is still the most widely accepted. A lot of neat mathematics were employed to invent scenarios where what seems to be the case is not the case, because physicists tend to reject "mind over matter." And that bias is obvious, because matter, unlike mind, is something they can measure and, to a degree, control. And while some of these contrived equations are works of art, the fundamental reality has largely been forgotten. That, when observed, a wave seems to become a particle, and that position and velocity of a particle are incompatible. No one listens, but it truly does make sense that consciousness and matter have a profound underlying connection. Perhaps not in the objective world, but we are subjective. There needs to be a subjective science of how things appear to be, because, in the end, physics will have to have compatibility with the human body, its brain, and its nervous system. There is no physics independent of the brain. There is a necessary connection there that we can't begin to explore, the hazard being that we want to have the answers now. The danger being one of concocting nonsensical solutions that happen to fit the data. I guess, like, say, having a faucet with threads at the end... You could, mathematically, attach any weird thing to the threads...but that doesn't mean the solution isn't actually a hose.
Yes, that is hitting one of the nails on the head----the problem of objectivism. But how do we get to a subjectivist science. Kant separated the subjective sciences from the objective ones and the result was science on one side, religion and philosophy on the other. My philosophy argues that this served its purpose and now it is time to close that gap, not for religion mind you, but philosophy and a new kind of metaphysics. Perhaps after we have integrated the concept of mind into science. I view my philosophy as deconstructing objecitivism. I blame so much of our current problems and the greed and social ills on objectivism. It went hand in hand with the rise of civilization, and was, I argue, an antithesis against the subjectivism of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors. Today we need to find a new subjectivism, and the same is true of dualism, replacing it with multiplicity (which, again, is how our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors viewed the world). I am not saying that we should all embrace indigenous spirituality. Rather that we should deconstruct dualism and objectivism (which, if you are familiar with Derridean Deconstruction, would replace these as dominant mind sets and replace them with subjectivism and multiplicity acorrdingly as dominants).
I am not familiar with Derridean Deconstruction. I'll be the one to admit, I can't tell you up from down. I don't have the foggiest clue what's going on here. I can logically deconstruct what is false, and suggest alternatives, but that's it. There are new epochs to come, tons of new insight, paradigm shifts, and realities to explore. It's just so tempting to want "the answer" at your fingertips, but then, like, in a way, for instance, isn't it true that the realest thing you may ever be aware of is a kiss, and not any philosophy concocted? In my opinion science is way too disciplined, though. To most people that's a good thing, but I think the wilder the ideas the nearer to the heart of this whole thing we'll be. I think we're trying to view something utterly bizarre through a lense of ignorant sensibility. Minds will be blown.
