Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Hawaii
The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquilizing philosophy--or religion?--is so delicately contrived that, for the time being,
it provides a gentle pillow for the true believer
from which he cannot very easily be aroused.
So let him lie there.
Albert Einstein
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Intelligent remarks pro or con on any relevant idea from readers will be posted below if you use the mail form supplied below. My web pages are meant to be a Forum in the Virtual Athens of Cyberspace. Vic Stenger is my straight man here. He is Dean Martin to my Jerry Lewis, Abbott to my Costello, George Burns to my Gracie Allen, Hardy to my Laurel, Elmer Fudd to my Bugs Bunny. These are all different frames of reference, or homomorphic images, or irreducible representations of the same invariant mythic archetype or Platonic Idea of Nietzsche's Apollo and Dionysus.
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The Bohr-inspired variations on the Copenhagen interpretation promote idealistic mystical thinking because it says that matter is an illusion at the quantum level, and that the fundamentally epistemological quantum wave function is the complete description of individual quantum systems. In contrast, in Bohm's pilot wave theory particles do follow definite paths in spacetime.A new mysticism has appeared that claims twentieth century physics as its authority. Quantum mechanics is said to place human consciousness in control of reality. However, this radical claim is not required by scientific observations, which remain consistent with conventional reductionist quantum physics, interpreted in terms of particles following definite paths in spacetime. Abstract
Vic (May 10, 1996): I agree that Copenhagen promoted mystical thinking but that was not intended by Bohr or his followers. Bohm's interpretation makes the wave function "real" but holistic (superluminal) and so is less economical or common sensical than the view that the wave function is simply a mathematical tool.Bohr was muddled and mumbled sort of like the late Bill Casey, Reagan's CIA chief. I'm not so sure Bohr did not intend mystical thinking since he put a mystical Yin-Yang symbol in his Coat of Arms. Some grad student should do a thesis on this question.
Yes, Bohm's wave function is "real" (i.e., ontological) and holistic (i.e. superluminal) I agree. But I disagree with your opinion that it is "less economical" and less "common sensical". The fact that one can visualize individual processes in detail in principle, that there is no more mystical collapse and no problem with an "apriori classical limit" that Gell-Mann and Hartle make so much of, and other advantages discussed in detail in Bohm's and Hiley's The Undivided Universe, not to mention how it solves the mind-matter problem in my extension, shows it is superior to Bohr's version.
You would think that no two activities could be so disparate as physics and mysticism. Yet today we find modern physics being used to legitimize the ancient belief that human consciousness is at the controls of a universe in which all events in space and time are part of one inseparable reality. Certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, the revolutionary theory developed early in the century to account for the anomalous behavior of light and atoms, have been misconstrued to imply that only thoughts are real and that the physical universe is simply the imaginary product of cosmic mind.I object to Vic's use of "misconstrued". Bohr's theory does imply that consciousness is fundamental. See Henry Stapp's numerous papers on this available on my web pages.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Stapp has said that we have to go beyond conventional quantum mechanics, as I believe you do.This is a tricky issue. Yes, I do think we need to go beyond conventional quantum mechanics. In Stapp's case he seems to believe that on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and the opposite on the other days. This may be a case of Bohr's remark that "the opposite of a truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a great truth is another great truth". I don't think so in this case. I spent a lot of time with Stapp at Tucson II trying to figure out his actual position here. Like Bohr he is not very clear much of the time. Stapp definitely said, in Tucson II, that ordinary consciousness is a fundamental part of orthodox quantum mechanics. He definitely opposes what you say. Stapp seems to think that "intent" and "choice" in ordinary consciousness are part of orthodox quantum mechanics. I doubt that is true. He is not clear why he thinks this. The best I can make of it is that somehow, in his view, the Hamiltonian of the brain is not fixed but is continually adapting so that we can by choice make a given eigenfunction more probable.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Ditto for Bohm. Bohm needs a new subquantum theory to give pilot waves.No, that's wrong. Take the simplest case of the Schrodinger equation for a particle in a classical potential V with no subquantum level. The Schrodinger equation splits into a Hamilton-Jacobi equation with a new quantum potential Q and a current conservation equation. This is already a pilot wave because of the "guidance condition" that the particle momentum p is the gradient of the phase S of the wave function familiar in the theory of quantum superfluids. This is essentially the same guidance condition that leads to the Josephson effect for tunneling of electron pairs through a small non-superconducting barrier, when we use minimal coupling to the electromagnetic field to make a gauge-invariant theory for a giant quantum wave function of the Bose-Einstein condensate of electron pairs (which are glued together by sound wave quanta). Introducing Newton's second law, with the guidance equation and the Hamilton-Jacobi equation for the partial time derivative of S, then gives
where we also need to use the classical formula for the hydrodynamic flow total time derivative of the gradient of S. The d/dt in the above equation represents the time rate of change with respect to an instantaneous local frame of reference attached to the particle.
The negative gradient - gradQ of the quantum potential made from the Laplacian of R divided by R (the modulus of the wave function), is a new quantum force that is nonlocal (i.e., superluminal) and context-dependent (i.e., changes when the wave function changes). There is no need to invoke a dissipative sub-quantum level here. That is done for a different reason. The quantum gravity foam of spacetime metric fluctuations provides such a sub-quantum level. This is the essence of the Nanopoulos "brains with superstrings" theory. That foam has observable consequences if the usually much larger thermal fluctuations are quieted down in a small nanoscale region. Now if Q is "mental" (a postulate) we see how the mental quantum state moves matter via the quantum force. What is not possible in this simple quantum theory is for the wave function (i.e. the pilot wave) to depend directly on the actual hidden variable position of the particle. This is back-action of particle on pilot wave, or of brain on mind in my theory. Back-action is a Bohmian way to talk about Roger Penrose's "orchestrated objective self-collapse". The bottom-up GRW and Nanopoulos theories of objective reduction are particular forms of back-action theories beyond orthodox quantum mechanics. The top-down irreversible thermodynamics of self-organizing systems of Prigogine have exactly the same mathematical form as do these back-action theories. Nanopoulos explains back-action as a low-energy consequence of ultra-high energy super-string states which do act as new kinds of global or nonlocal hidden variables at the sub-quantum level that Vic mentions. These new kinds of hidden variables are in addition to the original ones (i.e., simply the particle positions) of Bohm in 1952 which did not need a sub-quantum level to define the pilot wave.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Stapp needs nonlinear qm. Both are thus uneconomical since no data supports any extension beyond normal qm. Stapp told me in Tucson that he only needs nonlinear qm to model anomalous mental information transfers like May and Spottiswoode's claims of "precognition". I think he is wrong there. I think ordinary consciousness and ESP are the same mechanism beyond orthodox quantum mechanics. Again you are wrong that there is no data. It is now a fact that ESP is a large reproducible effect of order 1 in 3 under conditions when chance predicts 1 in 4 according to Brian Josephson and Jessica Utts. I heard a formerly skeptical Cornell experimental psychology professor expert in statistics and stage magic agree with this on the basis of his independent study of all the studies including controls for cheating etc. As I am not competent to debate these statistical details, I call on them to contribute to this discussion for the people of the planet here on the World Wide Web in Cyberspace.
Although mysticism is said to exist in the writings of many of the early century's prominent physicists,[1] the current fad of mystical physics began with the publication in 1975 of Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics.[2] There Capra asserts that quantum theory has confirmed the traditional teaching of Eastern mystics that human consciousness and the universe form an interconnected whole. He sums up his view by quoting Lama Anagarika Govinda:Fritjof was able to finish his book because of a $1500 grant I arranged for him with Werner Erhard when I directed the Physics/Consciousness Research Group in 1974 in San Francisco and at Esalen in Big Sur, California. Fritjof was part of that initial group."To the enlightened man ... whose consciousness embraces the universe, to him the universe becomes his 'body', while the physical body becomes a manifestation of the Universal Mind, his inner vision an expression of the highest reality, and his speech an expression of eternal truth and mantric power."
Lama Anagarika Govinda
Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism[3]
Capra's book was an inspiration for the New Age movement, and "quantum" quickly became a buzz-word for buttressing a trendy "scientific" spirituality.[4]
Vic (May 10, 1996): OK, Jack. So we have you to blame for all this nonsense. :-)Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa! First we did Space-Time and Beyond. That came out a bit before Tao of Physics. Fritjof no doubt would have finished it even without my $1500 (I mean Werner Erhard's ), but Gary Zukav would never have written The Dancing Wu Li Masters without me. He never would have even gotten through the door at Esalen. Also I did much of the initial technical writing of the book.
The most successful exploiter of quantum mysticism, judging by the fortune he has mined from it, has been physician/mystician Deepak Chopra. Chopra has been associated with the Transcendental Meditation movement led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. His best-selling books include at least two that claim quantum physics as his authority: Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine[5] and Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old. [6]Both Capra and Chopra were featured speakers at a recent celebration of the Gorbachev Foundation at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Capra and Chopra shared the stage with former President George Bush and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, Capra is a personal friend of the Gorbachevs who take his social ideas very seriously. A fact not missed by the paranoid far right of the militia who still consider Gorbachev as the Anti-Christ Spy Master leading a Trojan Horse operation of "One World Government to enslave the United States using the UN". The Skeptics were conspicuous by their absence at this august meeting of the rich, the powerful, the influential, and the beautiful which included Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. Chopra was also featured by Bill Gates on his Microsoft Network. He has a team of writers who take down his words and churn out the books.
Vic (May 10, 1996): I guess Dan Quayle couldn't make it, huh?No, but Danny Sheehan made it. Danny formerly of the Christic Institute that tried to blow the whistle on Iran-Contra and got hit with a multi-million dollar fine, is now real heavy into UFOs. My more paranoid friends claim that Danny has been imprinted with false memories by the CIA. Danny is a very charming Irishman with a lot of charisma like the younger Tim Leary.
To achieve ageless body, timeless mind, Chopra says we must replace ten "bedrock assumptions" from our current, materialist world view. These are (slightly) paraphrased as follows, with Chopra's proposed replacement assumptions indicated in italics:
1. There is an objective world independent of the observer.I defend 1 in my theory.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Please note that the numbered statements are not mine but my paraphrase of what Chopra says in "Ageless Body Timeless Mind." which I will refer to below as ABTM. I do not always agree with his categorization of the materialist viewpoint.The physical world is a creation of the observer.Blame Niels Bohr for this not Chopra. Chopra is making a reasonable extrapolation from orthodox quantum mechanics. What if Bohr turns out to be essentially correct in the end?
2. The body is composed of clumps of matter separated from one another in time and space.I defend 2 in my theory.
The body is information and energy spanning the universe.Vic, please quote precise verse where Chopra allegedly says that the "body" spans the entire universe. Did you mean to say "mind" rather than "body"? In my theory, mind is the Bohm pilot wave which, indeed, does extend beyond the body to which it is attached.
Vic (May 10, 1996): ABTM page 5. Note he is a spiritual monist, so body=mind.OK, well Deepak is dead wrong there in terms of my theory, but he is right with respect to Bohr's. The Copenhagen interpretation is spiritual monism at least the way Stapp explains it.By a strange coincidence, Deepak Chopra personally contacted me by email in the middle of all this on an unrelated matter. So I am forwarding all of this to him for his comments. He is in La Jolla right now and so am I.
3. Mind and body are separate and independent from one another.3. is obviously a wrong remark. I know of no one who believes it. The correct statement is that mind and body are distinct ontologically, but they are attached to one another by the quantum force and by back-action. Therefore, they co-influence one another. In orthodox quantum theory the pilot wave exerts a new kind of nonlocal and context-dependent force on its particle or classical gauge field with no direct back-action of the particle or classical gauge field on their respective pilot waves. It is the absence of back-action for simple quantum systems which explains the usual "uncontrollable randomness" of these systems as expressed by the von-Neumann projection postulate.My hypothesis is that "mind" in the sense of "qualia" consists of changing patterns in the Bohm pilot wave inextricably attached to a brain substrate (probably the microtubules).
Vic (May 10, 1996): I don't, as I explain below. I'm a material monist. Chopra, as I said above, is a spiritual monist. This is his mis-statement of the materialist view.OK he is wrong on that one. But so are you for a different reason. Neither a material nor a spiritual monist be! It ain't kosher. Rebbi Sarfatti has spoken! Physical dualism is the One Objective Nonlocal Way of the World. :-)
Vic (May 10, 1996): You yourself Jack, on these very web pages, admit that your back-reaction theory is "unabashedly dualistic." Weezel out of this one!Veezel, shmeezel. Read my lips -- I mean read what I wrote above again more carefully. There is no contradiction here. Physical dualism means, in The Undivided Universe, that quantum pilot wave on the one hand, and classical source particles plus classical gauge force fields, on the other hand, have equal ontological status. In this context, spiritual monism means only the quantum pilot wave is ontological and particles and gauge fields are some kind of emergent delusion of the classical limit. This is a silly position to take, but it is the inevitable consequence of Stapp's presentation of the Copenhagen interpretation. Chopra has a leg to stand on and it is parallel to Eastern Mysticism. On the other hand, materialistic monism here is Marxism. It says that only the classical source and force fields are ontological. The quantum wave function is epistemological, merely a pragmatic device to make statistical predictions with. But, if I read Stapp right this is not what Bohr actually had in mind. It is often confused with Bohr. Sort of the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. Now play my game that quantum wave = mental or spirit what have you. To summarize, you confuse the pragmatic interpretation with Bohr's interpretation. On the other hand, Bohr was so muddled that he might have said both transcending logical inconsistency with "complementarity" in which both spiritual and material monisms are "great truths". This boggles my mind. I much prefer the simpler visualizable physical dualism of Bohm's pilot wave paradigm which does more with less.
Vic (May 10, 1996): I will admit, though, that you and your fellow dualists (Stapp, Squires, Kafatos et al) agree with the great unwashed masses on this one.The material brain substrate processes nerve signals and chemical messengers and imprints the information back-on the fundamentally mental guiding Bohm pilot wave. This mental pilot wave is thermally shielded from environmental decoherence because of the second law of thermodynamics and the quantum principle which allows a negative temperature. The negative temperature of population-inverted electric dipoles on the surface of the microtubules damps out the thermal fluctuations in a narrow boundary layer of water of a few nanometers thickness. This is a new phase of "ordered water" observed experimentally.
Vic (May 10, 1996): As you say, "bull twaddle."I said "tweedle" not "twaddle". But you are not being objective here. I have math for the above remark. It may be wrong but you have not shown that. It seems likely that you have not stopped to think clearly on this specific issue as yet. Mend your ways Oh Doubting Thomas. :-)
Mind and body are one, resulting from a single creative source.Roger Penrose says this as well. So did Bohm in his "implicate order" idea. Vic, are you saying that Penrose and Bohm are crackpots?Vic (May 10, 1996): Don't put words in my mouth. I disagree with them, but do not regard them as crackpots. All I am doing here is presenting Chopra's view.
Objection sustained. Duly noted.
4. We are physical machines that have learned to think.I defend 4 with a caveat. Most humans have not learned how to think very clearly. In fact none of us think very clearly most of the time. Some of us think clearly some of the time -- like I am doing now! :-)
Thoughts and emotions create physical processes.I also defend Chopra on this one. My argument is very simple. Given that thoughts and emotions are changing qualia patterns in the Bohm pilot wave of the material brain substrate, the quantum force in the Hamilton-Jacobi equation shows explicitly, in principle, how "thoughts and emotions create physical processes".
Vic (May 10, 1996): Bull twaddle again.I thought you were half-Vulcan, but you are certainly not making yourself look credible with purely emotive remarks with no supporting specific logical argument. Remember hundreds, if not thousands, of students from all over the world are and will be reading this. More people will read this than have ever sat in all of your classes during your entire teaching career. This is the Power of The Web in shaping the Hearts and Minds of Future Leaders. Remember, Manfred Eigen says the planetary population growth is hyperbolic heading toward a catastrophic singularity by about 2040. You must struggle to be the best you can be here and now. Let's hope Hal Puthoff is on the right track with his zero-point research for Star Ship propulsion. From your earlier mistaken descriptions of what Bohm's pilot wave theory really says, it is clear that you have not done your homework here and are spouting off half-cocked. If you think about it objectively for a long enough time, you will eventually understand what I am proposing and how beautiful and elegant it really is, especially in contrast to the rest of the vague hogwash on the physics of the mind-matter problem now in fashion.
5. Human awareness can be completely explained by biochemistry.Replace "biochemistry" by "nonorthodox quantum mechanics" which includes the self-organizing back-action term, and it is then a correct statement.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Leave it out and you have a more economical theory that works just fine in explaining all the data.It is clear that you are not up on the most recent relevant data given at Tucson II. This data is on line. Study it. Then give some specifics to justify your hardened ideological bias. There are new online experiments coming.
The world, including the experience of your body, is completely determined by how you learn to perceive it.Your version of Chopra has exaggerated the true situation, but it is a reasonable extrapolation from Bohr's metaphysics. Replace "completely" by "significantly" and it is true. For example, look at how we are changing the Earth's ecosystem. Our self-image determines how we eat and, therefore, how our body is etc.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Again, no evidence supports this contention.6. As individuals, we are disconnected entities.This is obviously a wrong statement. Mass media, and now the World Wide Web, connects into a "Global Village". In addition we are, if my theory is correct, telepathically linked to a higher-level "collective mode" or world-mind because our mental quantum pilot waves entangle with each other according to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) effect. Orthodox quantum mechanics permits information to be stored nonlocally in these correlations as shown in the laboratory in "two-particle interferometry" and in "quantum cryptography" and "quantum teleportation". However, the lack of back-action at lower levels of organization of matter means that this information cannot be locally decoded without a correlation analysis. In contrast, the emergence of back-action in collective modes of matter far from thermal equilibrium enables such local decoding. "Precognition" evidence for this was reported by May and Spottiswoode and others, including former skeptics, at Tucson II. Eberhard's theorem is by-passed because this is a new phenomenon that violates the statistical predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics which are presupposed in that theorem.
Vic (May 10, 1996):Yeah, yeah. People have "reported" psi evidence for 150 years that has always been effectively debunked. Why am I supposed to believe that this all changed around at some meeting in Tuscon? Remember how excited you got about Uri Geller in the 70s? :-)You are showing a closed mind not an open one. The second law of thermodyamics then demands that your level of confusion increase. There were a thousand people at this Tucson meeting. Many were respectable academics who reported astounding results that contradict your position. Besides as a registered PSI COPPER who publishes debunking books in the official Skeptical Press (Prometheus, home to Martin Gardner, James Randi et-al), it is your duty to scrutinize in detail what went on at Tucson.With regard to Geller and me in the 70's reported in the PSI COPPER press as "Magic and Paraphysics" in Martin Gardner's, Science Good Bad and Bogus. I was then simply a young inexperienced naive "useful idiot" in a very very sophisticated and successful covert psychological warfare operation run by the late Brendan O Regan of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the late Harold Chipman who was the CIA station chief responsible for all mind-control research in the Bay Area in the 70's. Chipman (aka "Orwell") funded me openly for awhile in 1985 when he was allegedly no longer in the CIA, and covertly before that, and told me much of the story. In fact, he even introduced me to a beautiful woman adventurer-agent who was one of his RV subjects who later became my live-in "significant other".
CIA-sponsored psychic research projects were a significant factor in "turning" Gorbachev, Yeltsin and their policy planners led by Gyorgi Arbatov, thus ending the Cold War as I have written about elsewhere. For example, Yeltsin's epiphany that Communism was a fraud which, accoridng to Michael Murphy, caused him to sit down and cry in a Texas supermarket in his trip to the US before he was President of Russia. Yeltsin's trip, which was paid for by Esalen, was orchestrated by Esalen exec, James Garrison, who now runs the Gorbachev Foundation at the San Francisco Presidio near my office. Garrison also ran the Christic Institute with Danny Sheehan. If the Soviets get back into power again this coming June, 1996, we are in serious trouble. It is no coincidence that Fritjof Capra has, to this day, a warm personal relationship with the Gorbachevs. It is also no coincidence that top advisors of Gorbachev from the Moscow Institute of US and Canada spent significant time at Esalen in Big Sur with US Intelligence agents, and that the Gorbachev Foundation still has important links to Esalen owner, Michael Murphy who co-founded the Physics/Consciousness Research Group. Murphy's book, The End To Ordinary History describes all this as thinly disguised "fiction". I actually lived in the Telegraph Hill apartment (2 Whiting Place) that Michael describes in his book as the home of "Jacob Atabet". The recent CIA revelations confirm the role of psychic research in the Cold War. Other "useful idiots" in this "Looking Glass" PSI WAR, besides me, included Arthur Koestler, Arthur C. Clarke, David Bohm, John Taylor, Brian Josephson, John Hasted and others. That does not prove that ESP is not real. It is ironic that it was Scientific American editor Martin Gardner himself who propelled me to prominence in the 1970s with his "Magic and Paraphysics" article which describes my Geller press release from Birkbeck College as a kind of shot heard round the world. Remember I did graduate from an Ivy League school (Cornell, Class of 60) where CIA finds many of its "academics" especially back in the 1950s. Couple that with the fact that my former professors at Cornell are the guys who built the bomb in the Manhattan project and that I was a National Defense Fellow. Just put two and two together and read between the lines and the remark of British agent, Dennis Bardens, to me in 1974 at the Blue Boar Inn in Cambridge, England (before the Geller tests in London) "Doctor Sarfatti, it is my duty to inform you of a psychic war raging across the continents between the Soviet Union and your country -- and you are to be in the thick of it." in hindsight makes perfect sense!
I refer you to Hal Puthoff's recent paper "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing Program at Stanford Research Institute" in Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol 10 No 1 '' 63 - 76, 1996 and to my psiwars.html . Puthoff who directed this CIA program writes:
the integrated results appear to provide unequivocal evidence of a human capacity to access events remote in space and time, however falteringly, by some cognitive process not yet understoodMy theory explains qualitatively how this is possible in terms of fundamental new physics. No other theory can make that claim correctly.
Impulses of intelligence continually re-create your body every second.I suppose Chopra is alluding to second-quantized creation and destruction operators. So I defend him on that one. It is a reasonable thing to say if the quantum wavefunction is an intelligent mind-field as I assert it is.
Vic (May 10, 1996): And more economical to say it is a mathematical fiction.For the record, Vic is, I believe, an experimental physicist not a theoretician. I can only comment "So like an experimentalist!" Indeed, Vic's obvious disdain for the mind-set of a theoretician is identical to that of Ed May's whose claims of precognition put them on opposite sides. This is clearly the mystical "identity of opposites" in action! :-)
7. Our perception of the world gives an accurate picture of how things really are.Vic (May 10, 1996): How accurate? We perceive the world is flat. I would say we do the best we can by using scientific instruments and avoid subjective perceptions. Chopra again mis-characterizes the materialist view here.I defend 7. It is a theorem in my theory.
All of us are connected to patterns of intelligence that govern the cosmos.I obviously defend Chopra on this one!
Vic (May 10, 1996): Let's see you demonstrate this. Make Jupiter explode by just thinking about it.Making Jupiter explode psychokinetically is not a logical consequence of Chopra's remark. However, I can imagine a very advanced future life form able to manipulate the quantum foam that could do just that. But to see what I mean about what Chopra is alluding to see Fred Hoyle's book, The Intelligent Universe, Holt Rinehart & Winston 1986 I think.
8. Time is absolute. No one escapes its ravages.Sloppy Vic, time is relative in special relativity. But you mean the arrow of time in the sense of the second law of thermodynamics. Well, we do have the possibility of immortality as shown by Dyson and Tipler in different ways.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Don't blame me. Chopra's statement. I have written separately about the time-reversibility in fundamental processes, but also that time's arrow emerges on the macroscopic (many-body) scale so that we many-body systems are stuck with it (stuck with the arrow, get it?). See my web page.Nanopoulos derives time's arrow microscopically from superstring theory. This micro-arrow from the quantum gravity level does get more powerful on the many-body scale. Nanopoulos is able to derive Avogadro's number as the threshold using the standard model of elementary particles and quantum gravity.
By perceiving changelessness, time ceases to exist.Chopra means the experience of "cosmic consciousness" which is a well-defined reproducible altered state of consciousness.
Vic (May 10, 1996): More bull twaddle.I think it was Charley Tart who gave an interesting talk in Tucson on cosmic consciousness as not being identical with LSD induced states.
9. Our true nature is totally defined by the body.9. is a stupid remark.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Again, Chopra's characterization of materialist view. But only a dualist would say it was stupid. Gotcha again!Huh? Got me? How? I have consistently said I am a physical dualist and proud of it.
Inside us is a field of non-change that creates who we really are.Chopra is alluding to "archetypes" or Plato's "Ideas". This is part of modern physics and cognitive psychology in the form of "invariants" of groups of frame transformations. "Frames" can have many different operational definitions at different levels of knowledge.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Are you referring to frames of reference and Lorentz transformations? They have nothing to do with psychology.Yes, and that idea is increasingly used as an organizing metaphor in phenomenological top-down "cognitive science". I think it started with Chomsky. Are you aware of the fact that a basis of eigenfunctions of a set of compatible observables in Hilbert space form a frame of reference there quite parallel in structure to the local Lorentz frames in spacetime?
10. Suffering is a necessary part of reality.Who doubts that?
Vic (May 10, 1996): Chopra. That's the whole point of his books, and why they sell.Oh! I just channeled a message from Gracie Allen in Heaven and she says that they are reading Chopra up there also, but that now from your remark she understands that Chopra is a Christian Scientist. :-)
Our spirit is immune to suffering or any form of change.Oh! you say Chopra does. Remember that Socrates says that no harm can come to a good man. It's the same idea, but it is obviously false pragmatically for most human beings who are not Saints and Enlightened Beings. The story of Job in the Bible is also relevant here I think. Of course, you could say, as Fred Alan Wolf does say, that many of us have lost our souls. Some brilliant professors have made tenure by proving that the soul does not exist. In fact you appear to be one of them! :-)
Vic (May 10, 1996): Sure, because there is no such thing as spirit.Gotcha! Boy did you fall into that trap! Vic, it's a good thing you're not a trial lawyer or a physician. You deserve the Marcia Clark award for that one. You should always "gild the philosophic pill". A good bedside manner you ain't got. Oy vey! No wonder your books don't sell. Such a clutz like you makes me look diplomatic! You remind me of the guy in the Mel Brooks comedy, The Producers, in the German Helmet with bird droppings on it. You know the guy who wrote "Spring Time For Hitler in Germany"? In any case, on the axiom that spirit is the Bohm pilot wave, we got one. :-)
Thus Chopra proposes to turn the view of materialist, reductionist science on its head and replace it with a spiritualist, holistic conception of the universe and humanity's place in it.Again, this is a reasonable thing to do if one accepts Bohr's metaphysics. It is predictable from the Copenhagen interpretation. Wheeler calls this "It from Bit", This expresses the quantum force of mental quantum wave on material source particle and/or electro-weak gauge force field. My back-action addition to quantum theory is "Bit from It". The two together form the creative feedback loop of self-organization which violates the local conservation of quantum probability current. Got It? Good!
Vic (May 10, 1996): Prove it.I have already elsewhere on this web site. I will gather it all up for this page shortly. First step is that Bohm and Hiley show that the simplest form of a back-action theory is the GRW theory of objective reduction. This comes about by making the wavefunction depend on the actual locations Xi(t) of the N-particle system which are the "hidden variables" of Bohm's 1952 theory. This is really an unfortunate misnomer by Bohm as he later admitted. All detections are always local just like Xi(t). It is the quantum wave that builds up slowly after many detections in a low flux experiment. Therefore, it is really the quantum wave that is "hidden" until revealed statistically.The result of the new back-action idea is a fundamentally nonunitary dissipative density matrix equation with a new "friction" term that replaces the nondissipative Schrodinger equation. The equation of conservation of probability current in configruation space now has a new source term on the right-hand-side. The density matrix equation has exactly the same form as the Liouville equation of Prigogine. The new back-action term is the term responsible for "self-organization" in Prigogine's theory. This is a very beautiful result already, but it gets even better. GRW show that the objective reduction decoherence time is a fundamental constant T divided by N the number of interacting particles in the individual complex quantum system. T is very long which is why simple quantum systems obey the ordinary time-reversible Schrodinger equation. This new theory has the arrow of time built in from the beginning which is a position that Prigogine has long advocated. GRW need to introduce two fundamental constants ad hoc T, already defined, and L which is the size scale of the wave packet per particle after objective collapse. Nanopoulos, using superstring theory and quantum gravity, is able to deduce T from first principles. This is a great testable step forward. I am not sure if he can compute L. So in Nanopoulos's theory the new friction term is from the quantum gravity fluctuations of the spacetime metric which connects it to Penrose's theory. Nanopoulos also derives Avogadro's number, as I already mentioned, using high-energy physics data. Nanopoulos told me in Tucson that I did a good job describing his theory in a popular way on my web pages.
Modern Physics
What is the basis for Capra's and Chopra's amazing assertions? At the end of the nineteenth century, most scientists still thought in terms of the duality of mind and matter, handed down from antiquity and enunciated in the seventeenth century by Descartes. Even today, mind-matter dualism remains deeply imbedded in human thinking. The world observed by our senses is composed of matter; our bodies are matter. But, the common belief holds that a purer world of mind exists beyond matter that comprises the substance of our thoughts, from the rational to the emotional.Yes, I defend that view. But the mind is physical because it emerges from the quantum pilot wave which is the fundamental sentient field in the sense of David Chalmer's December 1995 Scientific American article.
Vic (May 10, 1996): And I say it emerges from the classical physics, with quantum mechanics playing little more of a role than it does in the chemistry of a rock.This is the crux of the issue. How is your above statement testable? If your statement is correct it should be possible to build a computer with today's technology that will be sentient capable of our subjective experience that the philosophers and psychologists call "qualia". In contrast, my theory says that is not possible. It is only possible with a quantum computer built at the nanotechnology level and below. This is the ultimate test. David Chalmers has some powerful philosophical arguments of why your above idea is illogical.The late great Richard Feynman told me "Jack, always try to prove yourself wrong." My back-action theory is testable. David Chalmers admitted that in Tucson. If Nanopoulos's theory is wrong, then my theory is also probably wrong since his theory is a numerical implementation of the coefficients in my theory. I use the word "probably", because my theory is more general than Nanopoulos's. My theory is a template that his fits neatly into. I did not realize this until after I made my theory. Also I did not realize the beautiful connection to Prigogine's "self-organizing" term until Nanopoulos mentioned it in Tucson. I had independently, however, realized that back-action had to be responsible for the self-organization of living systems because it completed the feedback control loop between wave and particle that is the missing link in orthodox quantum mechanics.
The religious link the mind to "spirit" or "soul" and what they perceive as the greater reality of God.It follows that the "soul" is the quantum pilot wave of the brain substrate. Quantum teleportation, as studied at IBM, explains "out of body experiences" (OBE) and the possibility of mind surviving the death of its attached body.God is the quantum pilot wave of the evolving 3-geometry of our material universe. Quite literally, "God is my co-pilot" (title of a popular book in WWII that I remember vividly). We influence God through back-action in addition to God influencing us through the Wheeler-DeWitt equation in superspace when combined with the guidance equation for the evolution of the actual 3-geometry of our universe.
Superspace is outside of time both in real or imaginary forms. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation generalization of Schrodinger's equation for the wavefunction of the universe has no time in it. In contrast, the guidance equation, which generalizes the particle condition that the momentum is the gradient of the phase, has real time in it in the form of the partial time derivative of the actual 3-geometry 3G(t). This three-dimensional space geometry plays the same role that X(t) does in the simplest version of Bohm's pilot-wave theory. The guidance equation for the influence of the transcendent on the immanent involves the lapse and shift functions of Deser's canonical version of Einstein's field equations in addition to a functional derivative of the action phase of the wavefunction of the universe with respect to the 3-geometry.
The wave function of the universe is the Mind of God in my new theory of fundamental sentience in the deep structure of ultimate quantum reality. This is an unabashedly organic wholistic animistic theory of the Intelligent Universe. A super-Gaia hypothesis if you like. Or, to use Nick Herbert's term "mind is elemental" in the same sense that David Chalmers means. Therefore, Hawking's "Mind of God" is alive and well in the Hilbert space attached to Wheeler's superspace. Unlike my friend Timothy Leary, God is not dead.
The Mind of God projects down into the three-geometry of our actual universe, via the guidance equation, as the "Finger of Fate" or "The Breath of God" or "The Holy Spirit" or "The Muse" or "Divine Inspiration" or what Gregory Corso called "The Messenger Spirit". Back-action adds a new term to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. This new term allows our pilot wave minds in time to reach into the Mind of God outside of time, entangling with it, forming a globally self-consistent pattern that Fred Alan Wolf calls "The Big Dreamer" or "The Great Spirit" or "Cosmic Consciousness". Indeed, back-action brings God outside of time into time. My use of "entangling" with the Mind of God is the modern meaning of Jacob wrestling with the Angel as depicted by a Marc Chagall painting, for example. This is also the deep meaning of "Abraham's Covenant" that John Archibald Wheeler has mentioned symbolized in Michelangelo's "The Creation" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This same idea is found in Carlo Suares's "Qabala" or "Cipher of Genesis" that will be explained in more detail by Fred Alan Wolf.
President Ronald Reagan was indeed correct, when he said "Physicists have found evidence for the existence of God in their equations" in his 1986 State of the Union speech.
There are a few technical details and obscurities in the above description that I will eventually get right in demystifying the "Final Secret of The Super-Illuminati". Meantime, it's back to the drawing board - I mean keyboard. I will add pictures and sounds here soon. :-)
Vic (May 10, 1996): God is my quantum co-pilot?Indeed, yours too. She loves you even if you deny Her! :-) I use the term "co-pilot" because it is the back-action that permits Man (i.e. all life) to participate in the evolution of the universe. We have the Mind of God in the Hilbert space of all possible wavefunctions of the universe that fibers the Wheeler superspace of 3-geometries. This Mind of God is the solution of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation which has no time in it in the absence of back-action. I suspect that the new back-action term introduces a historical evolution in this Mind of God.We also have a set of semiclassical discarnate collective minds at different complexity levels defined as the entangled Bohm pilot waves of living matter all over the universe. This assumes that the nonlocal connectivity of entanglement is protected against thermal decoherence. This is the only possible way to make sense of Ingo Swann's extraordinary claims in the CIA-funded "Project Scanate". We have to do further basic research in the Bohm pilot wave approach to quantum gravity to get more answers here.
But even in the secular world, the term "spiritual" is commonly applied to those human experiences associated with the inner world of emotion, consciousness, and self-awareness, a world separate and distinct from the outer world of space, time, and matter. This is despite that fact that all these mental phenomena have been shown to be totally dependent on physical processes within the brain and other parts of the body.Vic's use of "totally dependent" is an over-statement of the facts as bad as any over-statement Chopra makes. I'm afraid, it is Pot calling Kettle "black". :-)
Vic (May 10, 1996): By this I mean that physical and chemical processes (drugs, disease, blows to the head, etc.) can "totally" affect thinking. Do you deny that?Of course not. I am not, contrary to popular rumor, crazy! Let me qualify that. I am "crazy enough to be right" paraphrasing Pauli I think? But you are weazeling here. Your original remark means that mental phenomena are totally dependent on material processes in normal situations. That is, it appears you are saying that sentience is only an epiphenomenon. Also, I do say that sentience, qualia etc are totally non-classical physical phenomena described by the equations of post-modern physics that replace the Schrodinger equation by the GRW-Nanopoulos-Prigogine equation.In the dualist view, spirit is associated with "pure energy" and matter with inertial mass.This is wrong. "Spirit" should be associated with the occupied branch of the total quantum pilot wave of the brain substrate which Bohm calls "active information". Replace "pure energy" by "nonlocal context-dependent quantum bits" and I will defend it.
Vic (May 10, 1996): So, you are again willing to defend the dualist view?Jeez Vic, wake up and smell the coffee! Where are you coming from? Of course I am a physical dualist. I have been totally consistent about this. Whatever made you think otherwise? Do you mean the stuff in Space-Time and Beyond? That was over 20 years ago when like all the physicists I was mesmerized into spiritual monism by Bohr. That's why I am so pissed off that it took me so long to figure out the mind-matter problem. I am also pissed off at the lack of courage and intellectual honesty in the physics establishment. They are a bunch of tired old men protecting their shrinking turf. For example, an editor of Physics Today, Bernie Schwarzschild, who is an old friend of the Chairman of the Board of my corporation, together with a high official in the National Science Foundation Theoretical Physics Division, recently told a female physics student that I was the new "Rasputin". I guess they mean't Reagan as the Tzar? Look at Murray Gell-Mann's "The Story Distorted" in his book The Quark and the Jaguar and compare it to all the information coming out of Tucson II which is the Solvay Conference of 21st Century Post-Modern Physics. What's that line from the film Network "I'm not going to take it anymore." :-)
Particles of mass are located at specific points in space, and so obviously are matter. However, other phenomena, such as the gravitational and electromagnetic fields, seem to have a holistic character, existing simultaneously at all points in space.This remains true at the quantum level in Bohm's theory, but not in Bohr's!
Vic (May 10, 1996): I agree. But it also remains true in the time-reversible view, without the need for superluminality as in Bohm's theory.I refute you on this below. You can't explain quantum jumps of more than an electron Compton length using virtual positrons. You can use the Costa-De Beauregard "Feynman Zig Zag" version of the Wheeler-Feynman advanced wave theory which is used by Hoyle and Narlikar and by John Cramer (transactional interpretation) to replace superluminality by retroactivity. The two are equivalent and equally mind-boggling ideas. But you can't do it the way you do it. Also with back-action you can use superluminality and retroactivity to communicate messages which is how I explain the CIA et-al data.
They appear to be capable of invisible action-at-a-distance; that is, they produce effects that do not require physical contact between localized bodies. In this scheme, the mind is imagined as some magical aura that surrounds our bodies, interacting with the auras of others and the great cosmic mind of God.This picture is essentially the correct one with the significant difference that the mind is not some "magical aura", but is, rather, the quantum pilot wave which is distinct from the charges and electromagnetic gauge fields to which it might be attached.
Vic (May 10, 1996): I would think so, because the gauge field can be explained by photons, that is, by particles.First of all photons are not tiny localized particles. Take a single mode of the radiation field. A photon is a spatially delocalized excitation of that spread out mode. Bohm and Hiley go into a lot of detail on this on how the "super quantum potential" acting superluminally explains why single photons are always detected as tiny localized spots on a photo-emulsion. What do you mean by "the gauge field can be explained by photons". The gauge field is a classical idea. If you quantize it, the gauge field is then an operator on Fock space creating and destroying quanta. In Feynman's diagramatic path integral formulation there is no formal second quantization although you can make a dictionary to go from one picture to the other. It is also not in in Bohm's pilot wave theory. There you visualize the gauge field as it is in classical physics with the new nonlocal super quantum potential guiding the spread-out field configuration over an entire 3-geometry or point in Wheeler superspace. So, in terms of intuitive scientific visualization, that, unlike Bohr's Copenhagen can be implemented on supercomputers in simple cases, we picture source particles (i.e. quarks and leptons as tiny classical objects and their local gauge force fields as spread-out classical fields each attached to their guiding quantum pilot waves which are potentially sentient. I use the words "potentially sentient" because under most conditions the back-action term is negligible. The pilot waves are like spritely Genies trapped in the bottle. It is back-action that opens the bottle. The dormant pilot waves wake up into sentience because data from the external world of matter and gauge field imprints upon them. This is the "second transduction" that Dan Dennett wrongly claimed did not exist in his Tucson talk. This really new theory of mine suggests a prevalence of non-carbon based extra-terrestrial life along the lines described in Bernal's "The World, The Flesh and The Devil", in Stapeldon's "Star Maker", in John Lilly's "The Scientist", and finally in P.K. Dick's "Valis". Did I leave anyone out?
In the nineteenth century, electromagnetic waves were thought to arise from vibrations in an invisible, frictionless medium pervading all of space called the aether. The aether was likened to Aristotle's quintessence, the breath of the gods, and had been offered by Descartes and Newton as the mechanism by which forces such as magnetism and gravity operated across space. It seemed like a good candidate for the spiritual aura, the field of mind.Yes, but it has gone the way of "caloric" and the "aether". We now have the Bohm pilot wave. It's a new ball game Vic. It's time for you and the other PSI Coppers to stop dredging up dead horses and straw scarecrows and confront the real issues rather than your fantasy.
Vic (May 10, 1996): I am explaining the history here, showing how these New Age ideas are really nineteenth century and indeed much older, at least "in spirit." Using modern buzz-words does not change the fact that the ideas are ancient.Yes, but you take the goofiest incompetent stuff as the representation of "New Age". I am the leading theorist of the "New Age". Martin Gardner has said this in print explicitly. Your remarks that form the substance of your book do not apply to my theory at all. It is as if you wrote a book on quantum theory in 1996 and never got past the Bohr model. Remember I took the same sort of courses you did from world-famous professors like Ed Salpeter, Hans Bethe, Phil Morrison etc, so I know the strengths and weaknesses of how quantum mechanics is taught. I was at the Max Planck Institute in Munich (1966) and drank beer with Heisenberg and Wheeler and heard them talk etc. I also heard Wheeler extensively at UCSD.
If wireless telegraphy with electromagnetic waves was possible, why not wireless telepathy?Oh yeah, why not?
Vic (May 10, 1996): Because it's not, that is, not observed.But it is observed. Your knowledge of the facts is wrong. You are in denial. It is your duty, and the duty of all the others at Skeptical Inquirer to go through all the paranormal observations reported at Tucson II with a fine tooth comb and in detail in an honest way try to shoot them (and me) down. You will not be able to do so honestly. You stand challenged. Look at all the pages of Skeptical Inquirer wasted on goofy "New Age" stuff which is not worth the effort to refute, or if it is, you guys keep hacking and grinding out the same old tired stuff year after year. You guys are so boring even I fall asleep trying to read Skeptical Inquirer. You are like the diehard Stalinists in the streets of San Francisco's North Beach, outside of Ferlinghetti's City Lights Book Store, or in Vesuvios and Spec's Bohemian Bars still trying to hawk The Daily Worker. Wake up to the 21st Century! That's why Marcello Truzzi quit you guys. He is the only honest scholar in the whole bunch of crochety fuddy duddies. You PSI Coppers are like the Keystone Cops from the silent movies with Elmer Fudd as the Sergeant of Police. :-)
Perhaps human thoughts comprise vibrations of the universal aether.Yes, if you replace "vibrations" by "patterns in Hilbert space" and "universal aether" by "Hilbert space" which is a fiber bundle space with spacetime as a base space in second-quantization. If we do not use second quantization we need to use a configuration space of 4N dimensions including N local times.
Vic (May 10, 1996): And, is this Hilbert space "real" or just a mathematical tool?Like Penrose I am a Platonist. Yes Hilbert space is "real" i.e., ontological in Bohm's pilot wave theory. It is as "real" as the electromagnetic field. Is that "real" for you. If it's not real, then you are forced into Chopra's spiritual monism and for you to claim to be a material monist is totally "illogical". I say this as a Vulcan would although my delivery is more like Whorf's. Chopra's position may be wrong, but it is consistent. Your's is "not even wrong" because it is not consistent.We also have Wigner's relevant point of "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physical science". It is only "unreasonable" in Bohr's Copenhagen deluded way of looking at quantum reality. It is a non-problem in Bohm's Platonic ontological theory.
Some nineteenth century scientists thought so and looked for evidence in so-called psychic phenomena. Others looked for the aether by more conventional laboratory means. None found it.So what? This proves nothing. Your mode of argument is pure sophistry. The nineteenth century guys were precognitively remote-viewing 21st Century "post-modern physics". They were ahead of the curve. Their ideas are only now coming to roost.
Vic (May 10, 1996): How is it sophistry to argue from the evidence?That's not what I said. Of course it is not sophistry to argue from real evidence. You are not arguing from the real evidence, that is why you are using sophistry. You refuse to confront the real evidence presented at Tucson II as if no progress using the latest accepted experimental protocols from medical research has been made. You are not acting as an objective scientist here. Since you publish books on this stuff you are not doing your duty. I invite you to do so now. You are not being the best you can be. But it is not too late. We all make mistakes. I guess I understand why those guys from Physics Today and National Science Foundation are so afraid of me. They stand on foundations of quick sand. They see themselves as the Three Little Pigs with me as the Big Bad Wolf huffing and puffing to blow their House of Cards down. :-)
The idea of an invisible electromagnetic medium encompassing all of space came crashing down in 1905. In that incredible year, Einstein published his theory of special relativity that eliminated the need for an aether. Furthermore, he showed that energy and matter were interchangeable, by E = mc2, and that light was composed of material bodies now called photons. Although gravity still seemed to possess etheric qualities within the general theory of relativity, published in 1916, everything else was matter.Correct, and my pilot wave theory of the mind-matter interaction is consistent with everything you have just said.Following on the heels of relativity, the even more revolutionary quantum theory showed that the wave behavior associated with light was a property of all forms of matter. Not only photons, but other particles such as electrons also exhibited wave properties. None of these waves were associated with the vibrations of any physical medium.
Modern physics continued to make huge strides as the twentieth century progressed. Today we have a set of theories of the elementary constituents of the universe and the forces by which they interact that is consistent with all observations. No anomalies currently exist; physicists are desperately searching for some--just so they can stay in business! None believe the current Standard Model is final, but empirical anomalies are needed to direct their efforts.
On the everyday scale, evidence has accumulated that the phenomena we associate with life and mind can be understood on a purely material basis, as "emergent" properties of matter that evolve as a result of the complex, nonlinear interactions of many particles.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Yes, but I am cutting out your theory with Occam's razor. We don't need it.When I am cut, do I not bleed? Actually I have a few more pounds of flesh than I need right now. You are welcome to them!Aside to audience- breaking character briefly: I can not resist a good line from a straight man. :-)
Getting back to business, as I wind up with invective like Satchel Page winding up for a strikeout pitch: your ignorance is your bliss. Demonstrate your remark. Correct me if I am wrong, but your classical view is that there is no spirit. Do you mean there is no qualia? When you say that the mind is what the brain does, you seem to be saying that consciousness is completely classically algorithmic - what Penrose calls "Strong AI". Tipler assumes as much in his resurrection idea in The Physics of Immortality. At this level you are also saying that the ideas of Josephson, Stapp and Penrose are also not needed. In any case, justify you remark by showing how to explain mind with a purely classical theory. Put up or shut up.
This essentially encompasses the view that was referred to above in Chopra's list of our "bedrock assumptions." However, it should be noted that assumption (3) about mind and body being separate is not part of the materialist consensus. That is Cartesian duality again.Yes, it is a red herring having no relevance to the real issues. No one of any significance defends it.
Vic (May 10, 1996): Are you saying you, Stapp, Squires, et al. are not of significance? You are all "unabashed" dualists.I obviously am not saying that. I am saying the opposite. What I am saying, however, is that we are not traditional Cartesian dualists because they see mind as non-physical. I, at least, am a physical dualist in which mind and matter have similar ontological status in the precise sense of Bohm's pilot wave theory. Remember in Bohr's view matter is not ontological at the quantum level. Therefore Bohr is a spiritual monist like Chopra. Bohr needs an apriori classical limit to get matter back on the scene. Bohr threw the baby out with the bath water. Matter is in Bohr's theory ultimately an illusion since quantum reality must be more fundamental than classical reality. If the wavefunction is epistemic and not ontic, then pure idealism is implied. However, Bohr, that Champion of Complementarity, which has become euphemism for irrational sloppy thinking by dilettantes, is schizoid and basically illogical on this. Gell-Mann is correct to try to eliminate the apriori classical limit in order to do quantum cosmology. But Gell-Mann is wrong trying to escape superluminality AND/OR retroactivity with the "many-worlds" denial of contrafactuality. Squires showed why this is so in Tucson. All of these problems are solved more simply and elegantly in Bohm's pilot wave theory.
The materialist view is decidedly monistic, with matter the only reality and mind simply the label we give to what the brain does.It is a wrong view inconsistent with modern physics. Bohr's theory is idealistic denying the existence of this sort of naive materialism at the quantum level. It relies on "collapse" of the purely epistemological and fundamentally statistical wave function, and the "classical limit" for "matter" to come into being as part of our experience. This is why Chopra et-al say what they say. In contrast, Bohm's pilot wave theory restores matter as ontological at the quantum level. The wave function is also ontological and fundamentally not statistical.
Vic (May 10, 1996): But it does not do so economically, requiring superluminality that is not observed.Hardly any physicist will agree with you on that. Eberhard, Stapp, Josephson, Hiley and Aspect will not agree, for example. Neither would John Bell if he were alive. Weak superluminality or what Abner Shimony calls "passion at a distance" is observed in Aspect's experiment violating Bell's locality inequality. This is standard physics these days. Your virtual positron result will not explain even electrons much less photons. Now I am perfectly willing to give up direct superluminality for indirect retroactivity in Costa de Beauregard's sense or in John Cramer's transactional sense. They are two sides of the same coin. I would like to see your explanation of Aspect's two photon experiment. If you invoke virtual pairs in the photon self-energy you will not be able to explain the results. Go ahead and try.In my theory, zero back action, an excellent approximation for simple systems like photon pairs, has Shimony's passion at a distance which is statistically compatible with Einstein locality. But complex systems with back-action held far from equilibrium (see Valentini's paper) have strong superluminality AND/OR strong retroactivity which strongly violate Einstein locality. This is the major testable prediction of my theory for which I claim the precognitive remote-viewing data of Puthoff et-al as correct evidence. As Brian Josephson and Jessica Utts have published: these effects are large being consistently (replicably) of order 1 in 3 in those situations where the experimental design demands a chance result of 1 in 4. Refute that if you can with more than an emotive remark of no scientific value. Puthoff and Targ are the Michelson and Morley of post-modern physics. We are playing the science game honestly here, you, on the contrary, so far at least, are not! Tucson II was the major breakthrough historical event launching 21st Century Post-Modern Physics. Twentieth Century Modern Physics is as dead as is Nineteenth Century Classical Physics as the organizing metaphor for World Vision. Of course we need both classical and modern physics for today's technology, but we need post-modern physics for future super-technology.
It is a view that agrees with all the data and only fresh data can make it otherwise.No Vic, you are dead wrong when you write "matter the only reality and mind simply the label we give to what the brain does". You, Dan Dennett, Pat Churchland et-al, are misleading the public with a distorted simplistic model of what modern physics means. Your above statement is a really surprisingly naive thing for you to say. Furthermore, "fresh data" on precognitive remote viewing was presented at Tucson II!
Vic (May 10, 1996): Why? It agrees with all the data.No, Vic, it does not. It only agrees with the distorted inaccurate map of what the data is that is stored in your memory. It's time for you to take a fresh objective look at all the new data from Tucson II.
If wishful thinking could create reality, then unhappiness and death would have been wished away long ago.It is you, Vic who is doing the "wishful thinking" here.
Vic (May 10, 1996): What am I wishing? I want to be immortal as much as the next guy. I just am intellectually honest in saying that I have no rational basis, under current knowledge, to believe that this is the case. I obviously would make a lot more money from my books if I told people what they wanted to hear.I know that's what you think you are doing. But you are in classic denial of the relevant facts. Until you do a careful study of Tucson II you are deluding your self with wishful thinking about what consitutes "current knowledge". You can start by carefully reading the abstracts which are on line. There are some goofy ones there just like the goofy ones at American Physical Society Meetings. Don't focus on those to justify your bias. Look for the important ones. I am commenting on them myself but I am far from finished. It took God seven days, it will take us a bit more.
To the extent that the materialist assumptions are otherwise as listed, we must recognize that they correspond to a current scientific consensus that includes quantum mechanics.Nonsense. You have totally distorted the facts in a simplistic way. You remind me of Rush Limbaugh here. Now I see why many older New Agers, of a naturally conspiratorial inclination originating both from mind-altering drugs and the trauma of the Kennedy and King assasinations of the 60's, think that PSI Cops is a government disinformation covert operation because I can't believe you really believe what you have written here.
Vic (May 10, 1996): You forgot to tell me I am also the antichrist.I didn't say that I agree with the stuff above. It is a factual report however of what is believed by a subset of the New Agers. It is similar to the mind-set of the militias. It is, however, the same mind-set that leads an NSF bureaucrat and an editor of Physics Today to portray me as "Rasputin". :-)
The mechanistic view that Capra, Chopra and other New Age writers decry is not modern physics but classical, Newtonian physics that has now been superseded (although not totally discarded) by twentieth century physics.True, but you are propagating a similar disservice when you assert "matter the only reality and mind simply the label we give to what the brain does." At least Chopra, Capra, Wolf et-al are correctly interpreting the metaphysical implications of the Bohr Copenhagen interpretation which is, ironically, what most of the tenured academics in "respectable physics", such as yourself, hypocritically pay lip service to. :-)
Vic (May 10, 1996): The majority of physicists I know, and I know many after thirty years, take the view that all this discussion over quantum metaphysics is a waste of time. The theory works, so who cares what philosophers have to say about it? I have a battle convincing them that they have to take some responsibility to see that physics is not misused to pull a fast one on the public.You're not telling me what I don't already know from first-hand experience. You know, in 1960, at the age of 21, I read a Reviews of Modern Physics paper by David Inglis on the Tau-Theta Puzzle when doing graduate work as a National Defense Fellow at Brandeis. Inglis was writing about the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect and I instantly saw what appeared to be a conflict with special relativity. I very excitedly ran to all my professors about this. Sylvan Schweber and others all said I was imagining things and that I should essentially shut up and calculate. I got so pissed off that I soon quit and went to work for a defense contractor Technical Operations on Route 2 before returning to grad school at Cornell and finally at UCSD and UCR. My work at Tech/Ops resulted in a paper cited in Emil Wolf's Rev Mod Physics article on optical coherence. This was before Glauber's stuff and it was the precursor to the famous Susskind-Glogower paper on the quantum phase and time operator that appeared in the same issue tha Bell published his inequality paper in. I'm the guy who brought Glogower to Cornell and who got Lenny Susskind interested in the problem. Lenny is a big professor at Stanford now. He once told me that he is more known for that phase operator paper than for his technicolor stuff. In any case my main point is that had Sylvan Schweber et-al at Brandeis not discouraged me at the crucial point in 1960 I might have come up with the sort of stuff Bell was interested in at about the same time. So, what I am saying is that the kind of anti-philosophical "know-nothingism" of the majority of good technicians with tenure in the physics departments has retarded the progress of physics. My case is no doubt the tip of the iceberg. Ironically, Schweber was trying to get David Bohm to come to Brandeis at that time. Schweber, of course, had not the slightest idea of Bohm's pilot wave theory or he would have encouraged me. I had independently discovered an essential feature of Bohm's pilot wave theory back in 1960. I spent 1971 with Bohm at Birkbeck, but by that time it was too late, he was into his "implicate order" and Krishnamurti too much playing with silly ink so I did not learn his earlier pilot wave theory properly until recently. So there is even hope for you Vic! As an experimentalist you would love the "hands on" pilot wave theory in spite of Wichmann's nasty remarks about it. :-)I am in total agreement with your remark " I have a battle convincing them that they have to take some responsibility to see that physics is not misused to pull a fast one on the public." but we disagree as to both what the facts are and what Bohm's theory says. I am right and you are wrong on both counts. If you take the time to study both these things carefully and objectively you will eventually agree with me.
In practice, mystics selectively utilize much of the old physics, with its aether and deterministic forces, while ignoring many recent developments in the new physics that contradict their presumptions.Indeed, and your similar selectivity with regard to what is really the situation here and now shows that two wrongs do not a right make. :-)
Vic (May 10, 1996): I have selected all the available evidence as my data base. What more do you want?That is precisely what you have not done. It is what you need to do. Tucson II. Tucson II Vic -- it's a new ball game. Your current data base is old and out of date. For the record you should publish exactly what this data base of your actually is and compare it to Tucson II. There were some heavy hitters at Tucson II.
The new mystics are like flat-earthers who refuse to let facts or reason get in the way of their fantasies, producing a distorted map of reality while claiming it is supported by non-Euclidean geometry.Nonsense. You sound demagogic here. What you say is true of some crackpot New Agers, but it is also true of almost all of the PSI Coppers as well. You are both extremists on the lunatic fringe. I am actually in the middle. A curse on both your houses! :-)
Vic (May 10, 1996): You sound pretty lunatic to me. I bet you even howl at the moon, and the moon howls back.Get some new glasses Vic. There is a "smiley" :-) there.
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