godnotgod
Thou art That
You do realize, do you not, that when you are observing external objects, you are not really seeing them as they actually exist, but only as your brain reconstructs them.
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Demystifying Quantum Physics
- Thread starter Mr Spinkles
- Start date
You do realize, do you not, that when you are observing external objects, you are not really seeing them as they actually exist, but only as your brain reconstructs them.
Sculelos
Active Member
Just think, everything has at least 6 sides but yet our brain compiles the sides into 1 object.
We essentially are only ever seeing 16% of our surroundings at any given time. But yet if we actually look around us we can get a pretty good feel for what is out there.
99.9% of the matter in our universe is invisible. we only see less then .01% of the total amount... so really if your only focusing on what you can see your only focusing on .1% or less of life.
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Well said. If only more of us would look around us and accept what we are seeing, instead of pretending to know that there is more. We would then get familiar with The Magic of Reality and How We Know What's Really True.
Why not give reason a chance to find the truth?
We don't see or hear things as they really are? Yet visuals and audios correlate to measuring the frequencies, so how is that not "as they actually exist"? Going a bit further I think we see more with color than if we were literally seeing atoms, all the same color, just vibrating at different frequencies.
godnotgod
Thou art That
It's had hundreds of years to 'find the truth', and we are as far from it as ever, perhaps even further away than before. It just leads to more unknowns.
It's not that 'there is more'; it's that there is less. Everything comes out of No-thing.
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godnotgod
Thou art That
Perceptual awareness deceives us all the time. We perceive, via our sensory apparatus, things that are not what they actually turn out to be. The classic example is that of seeing a rope moving in the wind at dusk as a snake. On top of that, we mis-interpret messages from others through the filter of our own opinions, beliefs, concepts, etc.
As was pointed out, the 'material' world is over 99% space. So what we see is actually illusion manifested as 'solid' form. If what we see is illusory, then what is behind the illusion? To see things as they actually are would mean that we see into the nature of the illusion that is the world. What you see that, you are seeing it via the true nature of Reality itself.
"When you give a red rose to your beloved on Valentine’s Day, you have every right to say, “I made this for you.” All the qualities that a rose possesses – its velvety texture, lush red color, even its thorns – are real to us because our perception makes them real. Photons of light have no color, only frequencies and wavelengths. The point of a thorn has no sharpness. The scent of a rose isn’t sweet when seen merely as airborne molecules. The reality of these specific qualities is tied to us. The brain processes electrochemical signals sent from photoreceptors in the eye to “create” the color red. Skin encapsulated mechanosensory receptors send electrochemical signals that reassure us of a solid “material” world, but the prick of a thorn is created by our brain. Indeed we now know that the brain takes into account a number of factors to choose how much pain to create; varying any one of these factors can affect how prickly the same thorn is.
There is no provable link between “This is what I see” and “This is real.”
Deepak Chopra,
http://intentblog.com/time-to-get-real-the-riddle-of-perception/
The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels* and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.
Tao te Ching, Ch. 12
Color and Perception | THE RABBIT HOLE with Deepak Chopra - YouTube
*by his intuitive mind, rather than his perceptual awareness.
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godnotgod
Thou art That
We are all engaged in the process of reality-making, but it’s a mistake to believe that we do this through the brain. Here is where materialists (the vast majority of scientists) draw a line in the sand. For them, the brain, as the processor of sense information, must be the place where reality is created out of raw data. Such a position is naïve, because it begs the question of how the brain acquired its reality-making ability. Claiming that the brain is the source of everything we perceive (sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts) is like claiming that a radio composes music or a TV writes the script for a show A processor looks a lot like a creator. The brain is doing lots and lots of things at the atomic and even quantum level, as is a radio. But none of these activities turns the inconceivable into the conceivable. A rose has no color until the visual cortex processes the information from photons striking the retina. That is indisputable. But nobody can spot how a neuron in the visual cortex suddenly “sees” red. All one can measure is chemical activity and tiny bursts of electricity. There’s no seeing in that. Likewise, a neuron can’t “feel” the hardness of a desk or “smell” a rose, yet we can. .
The transformation of the inconceivable into the conceivable can be mapped; it isn’t entirely opaque. There is a chain of events to follow, Sherlock Holmes-like, from the red rose you gave your beloved, beginning with everyday reality and reducing it step by step to get to the source:
1. The sight, smell, and texture of a rose (i.e., the experience).
Reduces to
2. The brain assembling the picture of a rose from various regions dedicated to sight, smell, and touch.
Reduces to
3. Neurons in each region specifically processing raw data into the qualities of a rose (known technically as qualia).
Reduces to
4. The supporting molecular structure that keeps a neuron alive.
Reduces to
5. The atoms that compose those molecules, which in turn are composed of atoms.
Reduces to
6. The subatomic particles (quanta) that structure atoms.
Reduces to
7. The quantum field that gives rise to quanta.
But then
DEAD END
Nobody really can object to this cascade of events, which obeys the reductionist method of science, and nobody seriously questions the dead end that we reach when we try to discover where the quantum field comes from. But this dead end, as it turns out, demolishes materialism and its faith in reality “out there.” It’s bad enough that the quantum field is invisible, without location, and only measured through probabilities. Not knowing where this field comes from is fatal to the rest of the story.
Time to Get Real
The transformation of the inconceivable into the conceivable can be mapped; it isn’t entirely opaque. There is a chain of events to follow, Sherlock Holmes-like, from the red rose you gave your beloved, beginning with everyday reality and reducing it step by step to get to the source:
1. The sight, smell, and texture of a rose (i.e., the experience).
Reduces to
2. The brain assembling the picture of a rose from various regions dedicated to sight, smell, and touch.
Reduces to
3. Neurons in each region specifically processing raw data into the qualities of a rose (known technically as qualia).
Reduces to
4. The supporting molecular structure that keeps a neuron alive.
Reduces to
5. The atoms that compose those molecules, which in turn are composed of atoms.
Reduces to
6. The subatomic particles (quanta) that structure atoms.
Reduces to
7. The quantum field that gives rise to quanta.
But then
DEAD END
Nobody really can object to this cascade of events, which obeys the reductionist method of science, and nobody seriously questions the dead end that we reach when we try to discover where the quantum field comes from. But this dead end, as it turns out, demolishes materialism and its faith in reality “out there.” It’s bad enough that the quantum field is invisible, without location, and only measured through probabilities. Not knowing where this field comes from is fatal to the rest of the story.
Time to Get Real
What we are seeing are true aspects of reality. Granted it isn't the full picture but reality isn't lying to us, what we see and hear are true measurements of various frequencies. For instance, it would be nice if we could see infrared or ultraviolet, since we can't that aspect of the reality is completely missing, invisible even. Once we can detect those frequencies we are no longer missing that truth aspect, it is no longer invisible.
godnotgod
Thou art That
You are 'seeing' phenomena, and the characteristics of phenomena. But even if you were correct, that mere detection and measurement are, in fact, reality, what does that tell us about the nature of reality? All you have come up with are descriptions of what reality is manifesting. Why do I say that? Because everything in the phenomenal world is changing, coming into existence, and going out of existence against a background that is unchanging, unborn, undying. The forever changing behavior of the phenomenal world is what we usually call an illusion. Only that against which we perceive the illusion of change is real, but because we are indoctrinated to focus on the foreground of existence, ie; that which is always changing or manifest, we lose sight of the all important background. Think about it: how can you have what is in the foreground without a background against which it is seen, heard, smelled, felt, or otherwise detected via instruments beyond the reach of human sensory apparatus? You are, for example, hearing sound against the necessary background of silence, without which there is no sound. You are perceiving the temporal phenomenal world of 'things' against a background of No-thing, out of which Every-thing emerges, just as sound emerges from Silence.
1st observer: 'The flag is moving"
2nd observer: "Wrong! The wind is moving!"
3rd observer: "Both wrong! Both wind and flag are moving!"
Passerby: "All wrong! Your minds are moving!"
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Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
In another thread, many connections were claimed between mysticism and quantum mechanics. My purpose here is not to denigrate, disprove, or criticize mysticism itself in any way. My limited purpose here is only to caution against making over-enthusiastic and hasty connections between QM and mysticism--in short, when it comes to quantum physics, beware of Deepak Chopra.
First example: the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. What it basically says is that physical objects are never perfectly localized. That's why in chemistry, depictions of atoms often don't draw electrons as particles with definite positions, but rather as clouds or orbitals "smeared out" in various shapes around the nucleus:
As you can see, tiny things like electrons can be pretty well "smeared out". That's weird, and cool. Keep in mind, however, that they are not infinitely smeared out. It's not like an electron in an orbital around a hydrogen atom is likely to end up on the other side of the universe. Smeared out though they may be, even electrons still stick to relatively small areas according to the rules of physics they must obey. They aren't magical.
Now, what about large objects familiar to us in ordinary experience, like baseballs? It would be cool if they could be smeared out just like electrons. As it turns out, if you use the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to calculate the uncertainty in the position of a typical baseball, the answer is ~10^-30 mm, or 0.000000000000000000000000000001 mm. That's about one billion billion millionth the width of a single atom! In other words, ordinary objects like baseballs have an extremely well-defined position. They are hardly smeared out at all. The same is true of other classical objects such as people, brains, the Earth, your coffee, etc.
And this is a very important aspect of quantum physics: when you start going up in the mass/size scale, weird quantum effects all but go away (there are always interesting exceptions, of course). That is why classical physics describes observations of things like baseballs extremely accurately, and why a quantum description is often only necessary when considering tiny things (like individual electrons--although you can sometimes get a reasonably accurate picture without quantum physics even then). If quantum physics made predictions which go against our everyday observations of baseballs, it wouldn't be a very good theory!
What is the take-home message here? Weird physics at the level of atoms is not a license to extrapolate any weird idea to the level of everyday experience. Deepak Chopra would like to say that quantum physics is about "fields of possibility", and therefore maybe anything is possible, and therefore you should buy his books so you can realize any possibility you want. The truth is that some things are far, far less possible than others. Just ask a baseball.
An excellent, and much needed thread. QM is probably the most widely misunderstood science, and it doesn't help that we barely touch it in most high school physics cirricula. Added to that its inherent "weirdness", and it easily lends itself to misappropriation by used-car salesmenesque New-Age writers and pseudo-philosophers.
QM simply does not have any of mystical or "out there" implications that many people, like Chopra, wish us to think. Their view is a composite of popular misconceptions of QM with very naive and shallow philosophical views- the result may be appealing to the layman, but its science will strike scientists as unscientific, and its philosophy will strike philosophers as pseudo-philosophy.
In other words, such nonsense stands in constant need of debunking- so hear, hear.
godnotgod
Thou art That
...even, or especially, by science itself!
I see. So 'Holy Science' set itself up as the Absolute Authority, and then turns around and uses it's self-appointed status to 'discredit' all other views. I would say it is exactly the other way around, with Holy Science hijacking QM and hoarding it to itself as the exclusive agent for QM. Too bad it's entangled in its own machinations of Logic, Reason, and Analysis wherein it has found itself 'out-scienced', stuck in the outmoded idea of a 'material' universe. What you're not getting is science is the study of facts, not reality. Facts are dead things; reality is a living, conscious experience.
Except that the mystical view is not philosophy; it is direct experience of Reality itself, a Reality that encompasses the entirety of QM. The only reason QM strikes scientists as unscientific is because science is still attached to the old materialist paradigm. The mystic has no problem with the seeming paradoxes that QM exhibits. Listen to Chopra and Goswami and you will find that both offer a completely seamless presentation of QM as it relates to consciousness and the universe. The method of science is to dissect, discriminate, isolate so that it fails to see the whole. It's methodology can only produce dead fragments that cannot possibly represent what Reality, let alone what QM, actually is. It's like saying that the notes or the piano keys are the music.
Hear what? You haven't 'debunked' anything, nor has the author of this thread 'demystified' QM. The reason you cannot debunk anything is because you want to apply the method of science to something you have zero understanding of, and which cannot be understood via Reason, Logic, or Analysis. The seeing of Reality lies beyond these limitations/restrictions/concepts.
Enai de a lukal
Well-Known Member
Buh-dum-chsh!
Self-appointed? How about "tried-and-true" when it comes to matters of inductive reasoning? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and science continually produces the best tasting pudding, as far as inductive reasoning is concerned.
Besides, QM is a scientific theory, with a limited and specific domain- trying to apply it outside of that domain categorically is like taking a wrench and trying to use it as a cellphone.
No, it isn't that "only science can use QM", its that spiritualist writers are not accurately describing what QM consists in... You cannot say "QM says X" if QM doesn't actually say X. And thats exactly what happens.
Lol... "Out-scienced"? Ok, I'll bite- how so?
Outmoded? Hardly... Hopefully this was intended as a joke.
Care to elaborate on that, particularly what the pertinence is to this topic?
In most cases you're exactly right, it is not philosophy- it is pseudo-philosophy, i.e. philosophy in the "hey man pass me the weed and I'll tell you my philosophy on life" sense...
Funny then, that mystics should be so misinformed about QM.
Um... What?
I don't see the problem.
godnotgod
Thou art That
I know you don't, which is that the description is not the described. It is a common mistake.
godnotgod
Thou art That
I am afraid you are just nibbling around the edges, while using stereotypes to describe that for which you have no real understanding.
As ong as its a true description it isnt a problem. There can be 100 true descriptions of one object and none would be any less valid than the other. Which is a heck of a lot more than the truths that we miss if we have no way to perceive it. Im not under the illusion that what we sense is all there is to it.
godnotgod
Thou art That
What I am saying is that perceptual awareness can never provide us the knowledge as to the true nature of Reality. That requires a different view. When I refer to 'seeing things as they are', I am referring to this other view. Perceptual awareness does not show us 'things as they are', but rather 'things as they appear'. QM has done much to demonstrate just that, overturning what classical physics assumed about the sub-atomic world.
godnotgod
Thou art That
But what shall we accept? What our perceptual awareness tells us is real? As it turns out, QM shows is that the 'material' world is quite different than how we thought it to be.
These New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as quantum flapdoodle.
University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.
Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the grounds tendencies.
:witch:
Michael Shermer » Quantum Quackery
godnotgod
Thou art That
Then he must know what QM actually is, must'nt he? But he does'nt, does he? Otherwise, the questions of QM would already have been solved by science.
Well, we know one thing, and that is that what we call the 'material world' is over 99% empty space, rendering the 'material world' almost inconsequential. It seems that it is this empty space where all the action is.
You like to think so, but you're fooling yourself into thinking there is a chooser and an experiencer of the experience. There is no such entity. There is only the experience itself.
Einstein and Planck had similar realizations.
It's all just One Big Act, you know!
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