Dan Gardner sniffs at the Templeton Prize in today’s Ottawa Citizen for its effect on undermining “real” science.

One of the more amusing things about the state of modern science is the gap between what the physicists are finding, namely the incredible fine tuning which is required at every level to produce a universe in which there are intelligent observers, and the materialist doctrines of randomly self-assembling biobots that are the party line in the field of biology. The biologists rail against design, while the physicists record it in the incredible number and detail of laws that have to work out just so, sometimes to 20 orders of magnitude, to produce minds such as ours, which watch stars and listen to Mozart.

Read the rest…

In 2003 Dr Charles Krauthammer, a former speech writer to Vice President Walter Mondale, coined the term Bush Derangement Syndrome, which he defined as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.”

Now the psychiatrist at Royal Children’s Hospital in Australia have identified a “previously unreported phenomenon” which consists of a first case of “climate change delusion” in a 17-year-old. It notes that “The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.” Full article is available here.

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?