silly cult: documentaries are meant to horrify, not inspire!
If, like me, you've read about and been intrigued by the new documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know?", don't miss the article about it in today's issue of Salon.
On its surface, the movie is an inspiring spiel that repackages a number of Saganisms about the wonder of the subatomic universe and uses them to sketch a just-vague-enough picture of God and the Meaning of Life. It's a perfect pitch for wannabe pseudointellectuals like myself -- you get to keep your closely guarded "Fuck-You-Mom-And-Dad" secularism without having to face up to staring into that oh-so inconvenient void.
Unfortunately, it turns out that this uplifting tale of quarks is being spun by disciples of a woman who claims she can channel an ancient Atlantean philosopher named Ramtha. And who knows how this happened, but somehow the taped commentary of many of the experts in the film was horribly twisted from what they intended to say. Whoops!
In general, it's pretty tough to cut through appeals to quantum weirdness because, frankly, it's really weird, even by weirdness standards, and a lot of supposed experts only half-understand it. I don't mean to dismiss all subatomic accounts of the seemingly-supernatural. Some undeniably serious people have put forward metaphysical theories that lean heavily on quantum mechanics -- here I'm specifically thinking of Roger Penrose, who thinks that consciousness arises from quantum wave functions collapsing in your brain's microtubules. I'm not a big fan of that particular theory, but serious people have considered it and concluded that, at the very least, it doesn't rely on the existence of disembodied 30,000 year-old Atlantean philosophers.
Still, when someone starts talking about quantum physics and doesn't look either a) confused or b) exhausted, it might be a good idea to mentally substitute every mention of "quantum" with the word "aether".
Comments
?
Oh, come on. To assert that the physics exploring quantuum mechanics are equivalent to metaphysical concepts of pseudoscience denies the fundamental nature of science that requires independent verification of theory. The Atlantean channeler probably doesn't mind that many people find holes in her story; Penrose certainly does. Being poorly understood is vastly different from being spookily unknowable.
For what it's worth, since Penrose's early involvement with this sort of consciousness theory, it has been demonstrated that quite a few anesthetics demonstrably interfere with electron arrangement (rather than electrochemical flow) in those aforementioned protein microtubules, strong suggestions that conscious processes are at least fundamentally connected to the movement and position of electrons described in quantum mechanics.
I need beer after all this. See you at Reef?
Alright! I was really hoping someone would pick up the neuroscience gauntlet on this one. Applying to grad school has put me into kind of a weird mood.
Certainly I don't mean to imply that Penrose isn't a thoughtful and rigorous scientist. Obviously the man's no kook. My point is that these days quantum physics is frequently invoked to explain the inexplicable. This is done because there are still some obvious gaps in our knowledge of physics, whereas we have pretty complete reductionist models in most of the other sciences. There is at least the appearance of there being much less undiscovered territory in say, chemistry or biology, so when someone has something that's very difficult to explain, they tend to say "quantum physics will sort it out eventually".
And although he has a better claim to this gambit than most others, Penrose in fact is explicitly doing the same thing, as far as I can tell (I'm certainly no expert on his theories, so correct me if I'm wrong). He identifies an impossibility (humans violating Godel's incompleteness theorem), then concludes that this must be explainable via quantum weirdness. Rhetorically, the main difference between this and Ramtha et al is that Penrose is polite enough to point out that something impossible really is happening (although a lot of folks, myself included, think this is where he goes wrong). And, of course, there's the fact that there really are good reasons for thinking quantum weirdness can be harnessed to solve intractable mathematical problems.
So of course I think he's more credible. But it's still an appeal to the unknown, using quantum physics as an excuse for not having an answer within any of our more complete explanatory frameworks.
also, yes: beer. see you there.
i agree!
I know very little about the details, but a postdoc in my lab once told me that for quantum effects to manifest themselves in any meaningful way on the level of a multicellular organism, that organism would have to live somewhere around 10 degrees kelvin. But as I said, I can't vouch for the details.
That's interesting. I guess quantum effects' inability to influence chemical behavior at room temperature eliminates it as a possible mechanism of -- let's say "voluntary" consciousness. But that doesn't necessarily eliminate it as a mechanism for consciousness, if you accept that consciousness is epiphenomenal -- a side effect of your brain, rather than something involved in its causal chain. I'm sympathetic to that position, mostly because of Libet's experiments -- I might write something about that later on. If you're not familiar with them, suffice it to say that they're a fairly disconcerting indictment of the concept of free will.
Anyway, if you remove consciousness from the causal loop, which the 10 kelvin argument seems to require, then it isn't the thing that's solving any problems, and it's therefore not the thing violating Godel's incompleteness theorem, and there's no particular reason to make appeals to quantum physics to explain it, epiphenomenon or not.
Post A Comment