FromPhysicsworld.com

Apr 20, 2007

Quantum physics says goodbye to reality

“Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra “hidden variables”. Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism — giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).”

What is it about mind that appears to be central to the constitution of reality? This is the question raised by modern findings of physicists in repeatable experiments (provided you have atom smashers). Measurement, which is an act of consciousness, collapses superposed states (simultaneously dead and alive) into definite states. Open the box and Schroedinger’s cat is either dead or alive. Before you made the observation, it was both. Observation collapses the possibilities. What was a philosphical debate between Einstein (realist) and Niels Bohr (there is only measurement) in the 1920s and 1930s has now been put to the test in increasingly clever experiments which prove that realism is not a sustainable position.

Physicists have come to the conclusion that the assumption of realism, that there is an objective reality independent of measurement, is not sustainable. Einstein was wrong, and Niels Bohr was right. There is only measurement. Physicists have been testing this proposition in many subtle ways for decades. One by one the assumptions of locality (that apparently separate things cannot actually be united in simultaneous faster-than-light ways) and realism (that there is an objective reality behind the measurements) have had to be abandoned. 

The second implication of this weirdness is for the biologists, and the materialists, such as Dawkins, constantly railing against the possibility of God. I keep wondering whether these fellows have actually read a book about the philosophical implications of quantum physics. I am not saying that modern findings in quantum physics prove the existence of God. Not at all. I am saying that modern findings in physics disprove the existence of matter as independent of mind. One can only wish that, before we are all hauled into the materialist Star Chambers to confess our thought-crimes against Dawkins Thought, we shall at least be granted the right to point out to them that they have an exceedingly compromized view of material reality. Indeed, matter is just not what it used to be.

The vast deserts of our ignorance!

Are we in the Matrix?

I know how I feel about Dr. Henry Morgentaler getting the Order of Canada. I do not know whether I am justified in my feeling.

Morgentaler is a hideous man. His doctrines are appalling. His view that the the primacy of the woman over her fetus is so absolute, it cannot be right. There is no balance in his view. Freedom to choose is the freedom under all circumstances to be able to abort a future child, no matter at what stage of pregnancy. And if you object to that view, you will be accused of believing that women are not and should not be absolutely sovereign over all decisions of reproduction. I am guilty as charged.

Society, in some form, in some way, has an interest in its own survival, and consequently in the reproductivity of its women. This has always been the foundation of our laws controlling access to abortion. Consequently I do not consider that women are absolutely sovereign in their reproductivity. They have the preponderant interest, to be sure, but not absolute freeedom of choice. Call me a compromizing weasel on this issue, and I will agree with you. Most of us are all compromizing weasels on the subject of killing the unborn. I do not think even the freedom-to-choose crowd contemplate killing the unborn with equanimity, they just want to shut off their consciences. We would be very convinced of our own rectitude if we were not compromizers, or persuaded of absolute doctrines on the matter, as many are.

I can understanding killing the guilty for capital crimes, but not for parking tickets. Likewise killing the unborn for our convenience, that is a harsh doctrine. Yet we live by it. We put into practice our beliefs in this matter all the time. And the same people who uphold the euphemistic “freedom to choose” are most often the people who are repelled by capital punishment. Go figure.

But back to Morgentaler. There is something deeply wrong about the man which defies my powers of description, and possibly my understanding. I see him as the Nazis’ last poisoned gift to mankind. Somehow the Nazi vision of evil was so pure and absolute (kill all the Jews, because they are the source of evil) that its doctrines have perversely, weirdly infected the doctor, who did time in Auschwitz. I cannot imagine the stress of being in a hell created by a political ideology that declares that you are the emanation of Satan, but Auschwitz would come close. I hope never to undergo a similar process of degradation, enslavement, starvation and hideous, unremembered death at the hands of demons who hate you and wish to see you and your kind exterminated, as one would a wasps’ nest under the cottage deck which has just stung your baby. His absorption of some of the absolutism of their doctrines, and its weird refraction as an evangelist of aborting human fetuses, is an imaginative stretch on my part, but I prefer to situate the cause of evil outside of Morgentaler himself. In this I may be too generous towards him. He may be authentically and originally evil, without assistance from the Nazis.

Whatever he thought he was doing for the cause of women, he has so far exceeded that goal that he has become a menace to our survival. He is not the right sort of person to be honoured in this way by the Order of Canada. The selection committee has lost its moral bearings if they could not see that they have honoured the exponent of quite evil and disgusting doctrines, which are far in excess of the immediate cause, questionable as it is, of access to abortions.