Wigner's Friend, the existence of the immaterial soul and death of materialism

Faith & Science Conversation
101

I too own Phillip Balls book and am halfway through it-- It is great. I want to talk about consensus, so I will tell ONE of the many stories I have of it:

How consensus destroyed a subsidiary and impoverished 400 people

I must say that when people sing the praises of consensus to me, they are talking to the wrong person. After a discontinuous 8 year stint as Geophysical Manager for the Gulf of Mexico,(discontinuous because I made a VP mad and he demoted me for 1.5 years before I came back to the job) I was sent to Scotland for 3 years to be the Mgr of Subsurface technology/geophysical mgr for the North Sea. They sent me cause I was a no -nonsense guy when it came to data and bad things had happened at Gryphon field the bosses didn’t want to have happen again. And they lectured me about it.

When I arrived, the place was very busy developing Leadon field an 8 mile long 3 mile wide structure (big underground hill) in Quad 9 of the North Sea. The consensus was that the sands held 120-170 million bbl of oil. They were busy ordering steel, drilling wells on the field, and building a billion dollar floating production facility. And the company was releasing press release after press release about this field.

So here I was two weeks after my arrival in a strange country, sitting in my office, knowing very little about North Sea geology when 2 men and a woman entered my office asking to show me some stuff on Leadon. They laid out their case that the sands were not horizontally layered as is quite normal everywhere in the world, but were, in fact, injectites, to describe the geometry as near as I can, they were saying the sands were in the shape of trees, with branches of sand at the top and all. That if you hold your forearm upright and spread your fingers, that is something like what they were saying Leadon sands were.

55 million years ago, the Balder sand was a massive sand that was laid down prior to North America splitting from Europe. As the continents separated there were loads of volcanoes with ash falls and the Frigg shale, made of 10’s of thousands of ash falls, covered the Balder sand, trapping the water the Balder contained so it could not escape and the sand compact as is normal. So, when the water became overpressured due to its inability to escape through the Frigg shale, and when an earthquake happened, the sand was erupted up into the Frigg shale in the shape of trees that were not connected to each other. This is important because the 120-170 million bbl estimate for reserves was based on the idea that the sand was one connected sand across the structure.

These three geoscientists told me to take their message to management that Leadon didn’t have the oil they thought it did. You can imagine my response–What the heck? So I told them to give me their data and let me look at it and after 3 weeks of studying quickly on their data and North Sea geology I had an epiphany–we are going to have a train wreck.

I told my boss–he threw me out of his office telling me to go sit in my office and think about why we weren’t going to say anything. So, frontal approach won’t work, I did 3 things, I processed the seismic data in 42 different ways looking to find a way to detect how much sand we had. But our seismic wasn’t good enough. So for a year I lobbied everyone above my level to acquire new seismic data, high frequency seismic data so we could detect sands. Except the country manager kept himself isolated from guys at my level, I never could get to him. No one listened to me. They politely smiled and said, “we are going to do ok” And I kept records of what I did, which came in handy when the witch hunt took place and I was deemed not to be a witch.

2 years later, when the field came on line and some wells started producing water within a month of opening the field, I was at a party for management and walked by the country manager and another fellow discussing Leadon. I took my opportunity and outlined why we were having problems and that we needed new seismic data. His response was "Why in the H havent I heard this before?" I was flabbergasted. I had told every director in the company what we needed and NONE of them including my boss had mentioned my views to the country manager two levels above me.

Next day, I told my boss what had happened and he threw me out of his office again. (he did it a couple more times over the next few days.} The country manager accepted my idea and was going to go to the US and outline the proposal and my boss was going with him. So they get to the meeting and first thing, before they could present the proposal, the country manager is demoted and my boss called me from the US, gleeful that my proposal was never presented to upper management. I was sick.

But, I knew the replacement for the country manager–he was the guy who gave me the worst chewing out of anyone in my entire career. Wonderful! But I knew he was data oriented, having known he refused to sign a document that was factually untrue and took the demotion that came with that refusal. He had overcome his demotions and was now doing good again. Anyway, I wrote him an email that started like this: Sir, this is a career ending email but I am 52 so I don’t care." (52 was when the retirement vested. but at that age, it would have bought me a big mac a month) I outlined my proposal and eventually he accepted, and we got my new seismic which conclusively showed we didn’t have anywhere near the sand we thought we did and they stopped spending good money after bad.

Amazingly, I was the only person who was associated with that project who benefitted from it. When I came back to the States to become Dir. of Technology, I got the biggest (and most coveted) promotion, and the biggest raise and bonus I ever got–from the guy who years ago, gave me my worst rear end chewing out of my career. lol

A couple of years after this, they shut the field and docked that expensive ship paying $$$ to keep it there and then about that time they sold the subsidiary for a fraction of what it had once been valued at. I was living in Beijing at that time, working for our China subsidiary, so I wasn’t sold off with the North Sea subsidiary.

Two years after the sale, the parent company was sold to another oil company for a lot of money and everyone, even secretaries and janitors, benefitted greatly from the sale. Unfortunately the 400 people in the North Sea subsidiary were no longer employees and they missed the opportunity to have a very comfortable retirement–the company they were sold to didn’t do very well all in all.

I have many more stories like this from my 47 year career of how consensus is nothing but group think and suppresses an honest discussion of facts on what ever issue consensus has spread its evil shadow over. So, people are trying to impress the wrong guy with the benefits of consensus. Go tell those 400 people who missed out on a big payday about the benefits of consensus!

edited to add, the company took a $400 million dollar write down as a direct result of this groupthink/consensus led disaster.

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102

Well suddenly I can’t let it go. Just because we use instruments to measure stuff when conscious scientists are not in the room–thus only making observation possible–that does not necessarily qualify as removing the conscious observer from the equation. If we said that it removes the conscious observer, then, by the same logic, when I call my wife on the phone, I’m not actually talking to her. Instead, I’m talking to my phone.

103

I agree. If conscious scientists are not in the room when a quantum measurement is made, the standard interpretation applies, though it can’t be directly verified, namely, that the recording device has gone into superposition with the quanta in question. And as soon as a conscious scientists examine the recorded contents, the superposition collapses, and an unique outcome is observed – the same outcome for all obverving scientists.

104

It is quite possible that we have different views of truth, but since we haven’t even discussed this topic there is no way of knowing. But here we go… these are survey of the different theories of truth
Coherence - Truth consists of logical coherence.
Correspondence theory - Truth consists of a correspondence between a statement and reality.
Deflationism - A definition of truth must be devoid of metaphysical claims.
Tarsky - A recursive theory of truth attempting to remove self-reference paradoxes.
Pramatism - Asserts that the effect of believing something is part of its truth value.

So what about me? My approach is to give each of these a percent rating:
Coherence: 1% logical coherence is a requirement to be meaningful but hardly sufficient for truth.
Correspondence: 50% correspondence is the most instinctive theory of truth but it has flaws.
Deflationism: 75% without this check ideologies will define themselves into truth which is dishonest.
Tarsky: 40%? Not too familiar with this but I am skeptical of this attempt to fix the paradoxes.
Pragmatism: 75% Absolutely however this is only a partial theory of truth.

So as it stands I take correspondence theory and modify this with Pragmatism and Deflationism… call me a Deflationary Pragmatist if you like.

And notice none of this has anything whatsoever to do with consensus. You seem to be confusing science with truth like the naturalists do, only instead of conforming truth to science you conform science to your personal view of truth which puts you in the category of pseudoscience.

The importance of consensus in science is to insure that the ideals of science are adhered to. These ideals are…

  1. Honesty – meaning a great deal more than the common English usage which only requires you to believe what you say. This is embodied in the scientific method which tests an hypothesis to see whether it is true or false instead of trying to prove a thesis any way you can in the manner of lawyers, politicians, preachers, and car salesmen.
  2. Objectivity – again this means a great deal more than the common English usage of a balanced or fair point of view. This means that you provide a procedure which anyone can follow to get the same result no matter what they believe.

Notice that these ideals are procedural and the role of consensus in the scientific community is simply to insure that these procedural ideals are upheld. If a scientific claim provides a procedure and others get the same result then it WILL get the backing of the consensus of the scientific community. Otherwise, it is simply either mistaken or without any such procedure it is better described as philosophy or religion than science.

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105

I’d be curious to know what flaws you think correspondence theory is subject to. To me, truth is first and foremost about language. Language which matches up with the state of affairs it describes is true. Reality in itself is not true, it is the claims made about it which are either true or false.

Pragmatism tells us more about ourselves than it does empirical truth. Beliefs which make us more happy or effective are useful but not as indicators of what is true. As biological organisms we have not evolved to recognize the truth. We have evolved to recognize that which gives us what we need or think we want. The truth may not even be as important to our quality of life as the beliefs which promote our satisfaction. But I see no reason to mischaracterize the useful as the true.

106

It is the principle criticism of deflationism. Correspondence theory assumes that there is a reality, particularly a singular reality to correspond to. More than that I think there tends to be a presumption of a particular understanding of reality which you are making a measure of truth.

It reminds me of the classic definition of knowledge as justified true belief as if ANYBODY ever believes in something which they think is not true or not justified. So the net effect of such a definition of knowledge is to sneak in under the table a presumption about what is true and justified.

So what is the alternative? With knowledge it is to look more at the functional role in human life. That which we call knowledge are the beliefs that we live by – those we stake our lives and the lives of those we love on. We know a bridge is safe when we trust the lives of our children to it.

I don’t know that we can come up with an alternative like that for truth, but at least we can be cautious about assumptions built into what we mean by the word.

107

But why would anyone disagree with that? Don’t we assume that all creatures, whatever their perceptual/cognitive allotment, are interacting with the same underlying reality? Even if reality is complex and multi-faceted there is still the same underlying reality.

But the concept of truth is much simpler than knowledge. The person who has successfully guessed the truth still has something of value, they just don’t have knowledge properly speaking. Between the two, only knowledge requires possession of the truth for justified reasons. Lucky ‘knowledge’ is not knowledge.

108

Requiring some constraint on truth, like no metaphysical claims is itself an ideological view that has inserted itself into deflation theory. When we are born, we have no preconceptions about anything–metaphysics or not metaphysics, but to a priori claim that we must rule out anything outside of materialism is a bias. So deflationism is just an aposteriori rule thought up by someone to justify why they don’t believe in immaterial Gods.

I believe in correspondence. MarkD is correct that reality is what it is. It is statements about reality that are true or false. What is reality? It is what exists. IF metaphysical objects exist, then they too are part of reality and need to be dealt with. The assertion that there are no metaphysical objects has zero evidence in favor of it and is itself a metaphysical assertion.

I view a metaphysical assertion as being an assertion about some metaphysical object. So, if you use deflation, and use it to its logical conclusion, that truth must not make metaphysical assertions, then all religion is ruled out as untruth, including what any religious view you hold to because it can’t be considered true because of its metaphysical assertions. Under deflation, why would anyone be religious or make religious assertions? Deflation has the atheist world view as a hidden assumption and so begs the question about whether or not there are metaphysical objects.

109

Agreed, even though I often wonder at what is meant by “metaphysical” objects. Are metaphysical objects assumed to transcend the laws of nature, or is that just a place holder for something not really imaginable for us? It seems to me that when we wonder about the nature of that which underlies reality, that is a metaphysical query. But I wonder when a Christian speaks of such things whether they have in mind something miraculous - where reality itself is seen as being as fluid as a thought in God’s mind. If

110

The aphorism “You are entitled to your opinions, but not your facts,” comes to mind when one is addressing “reality.” And this is still true when the facts are not clear, such as with “dark matter.”

Life is so much easier for a mathematician: for instance, Euclid could choose to work with his first four of five postulates, and ask whether the fifth could be proven to be a theorem. No so, as it turned out, but he controlled the playing field. With reality, materialist are attempting to restrict the playing field, and this is not a genuinely valid option.

111

You raise some interesting questions. Metaphysics do not have to transcend nature, in my opinion but often they do and that is what they are most famous for doing. Some of what I will go into gets close to the Vienna circle kinda view–logical positivism, meaning the existence of things is gradational… Let’s start with the existence of the electron–clearly we can produce these in abundance and they exist in the material world. Until a few weeks ago, the existence of the radioactive properties of xenon-124 were unknown. They measured the half life at 18 billion years and it took years to measure that. But now we know that part of reality.

But what do we say of the existence of the graviton, which has never been observed? Is it part of reality or is it a metaphysical object. Here is the problem:

“Four years ago, Tony Rothman, a physicist at Princeton University was chatting with fellow physicist Freeman Dyson about the elusiveness of gravitons. In fact, gravitons are thought to be so elusive that Dyson wondered whether it was possible to detect one at all. And if gravitons are undetectable, do they really exist?”
Marcus Chown, “The Longest Stake-out,” New Scientist, March 18, 2006, p. 32

Here is the why its existence is questioned:
Tony Rothman and Stephen Broughn, addressed this question. In an earlier version of the paper they said you would have to monitor a Jupiter sized detector of cleaning fluid for 14 million years to expect to see one graviton!. The present version of the article says that for every graviton detected there would be 10^33 neutrino detections which are false alarms, for every graviton event. To shield the detector one would need to build shielding for the detector of a thickness equivalent to the mean free path of the neutrino—meaning lightyears of matter surrounding the detector, and that would collapse into a black hole.

“Although, as we stated at the outset, we have found not basic principle ruling out graviton detection, reasonable physics appears to do so.”
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.339.1404&rep=rep1&type=pdf

So, does it exist?

Then we go to dark matter, which is inferred to exist because of the deviations in the stellar velocities in the outer parts of galaxies. But not a single experiment has detected any candidate for detection, while some galaxies can be explained well with a theorizing of dark matter, others can’t be:

"But now another cluster spoils the party. At a distance of 2.4 billion light-years in the constellation of Orion, Abell 520 also consists of two colliding clusters. But according to a team led by Andisheh Mahdavi and Henk Hoekstra of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, the dark matter in Abell 520 does not appear to be tied to the galaxies. Instead the lensing observations-carried out with the 3.66meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii-indicate that enormous amounts of dark matter are concentrated in the core of the colliding pair, where most of the hot gas is found but few galaxies are seen. As the team writes in its October 20 Astrophysical Journal paper, this dissociation between dark matter and galaxies "cannot be easily explained within the current … dark matter paradigm." Govert Schilling, “Dark Riddles,” Scientific American, Nov. 2007, p. 32

So, are the graviton and dark matter metaphysical objects?

How about axions, which have never been observed? Do they exist or are they metaphysical?

What exactly is the epistemological difference between believing in the Everettian multiverse with an infinitude of other unobserved universes, and believing in an unobserved heaven? If one says the difference is mathematics, then I would say that that person is a modern Pythagorean. There is lots of math that matches no reality and physics journals are full of math theories that do not match reality, having been falsified. Mere math means nothing–observation means everything.

I will say this. We have more evidence for the existence of the soul via quantum presented above, than we do for the existence of the graviton, axion, sterile neutrino or dark matter. Which of these things is more metaphysical?

Edited to add: just read the new version of Rothman and Broughan’s article and they say that detections of the graviton per age of the universe is negligible for a Jupiter sized detector. Things have changed since the original version of the article and not for the better as far as the existence of the graviton is concerned.

112

You are misunderstanding!!! This is a constraint on the definition of the word “truth” only NOT a restriction on what can be called true. The point is that you should not be sneaking your beliefs into the very definition of truth itself and thus making what you believe true by definition.

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113

That seems to be a distinction without a difference to me. Sorry, as I see it truth is a statement about something true.

114

There can be a variety of reasons. The point is that you shouldn’t be making such an assumption a part of your definition of “truth” itself.

No I do not. And I don’t think a good psychologist makes that assumption either. I think there is excellent evidence that an objective aspect to reality exists but no evidence that reality is exclusively objective. Thus we can only assume that a there is some overlap and not that reality is precisely the same for everyone in every way. The fact of the matter is that our access to reality is primarily subjective and the objective aspect of reality is only obtainable by abstraction.

If reality is complex and multi-faceted in a way such that it is different for different people then what is even the point of saying that there is the same underlying reality. Sounds to me like nothing more than an excuse for one person to push their experience of reality on someone else.

Anyway I suppose this is a recommendation to read up on the deflationary theory of truth. As I read, I come to the conclusion that it is just as much a partial theory of truth as is pragmatism. It is an objection to how a definition of “truth” can act as a blinder and halter so we are led by reigns to someone else’s conclusion.

People don’t call random guesses knowledge.

People usually have reasons to justify even their opinions, and they definitely do for their beliefs. That is why I think this is really about people thinking they can set themselves up as judge over the reasons of others to say which really justify calling it knowledge.

Sounds like an empty comparison to me, unless you are talking about being right for the wrong reasons which is much more likely scenario. Quite often people know something and then go looking for the reasons and either get it wrong or articulate them badly. So it seems to me that knowledge can and often does come before there are any reasons. So I think the real difference has more to do with whether they live their life accordingly.

115

Neither of these are quite right. A nice illustration of this was done by Sean Carroll but it boils down to having two, two state systems. That is to say your particle can have one of two first states (ie a double slit) and then one of two second states (ie an interference pattern or not). Taking a measurement in the middle step obviously causes something ‘collapse-like’ and then we don’t see the interference anymore. There is no need to make the act of taking a measurement anything special. That can just be seen as the environment decohering or collapsing the wave function. This is something that happens completely independently of humans/human consciousness. In such experiments of course a computer or photodetector is the observer and the system does not act in a super position of states before we observe. You can have the entire experiment of observing done without humans as it really always is and then have the results printed. Our consciousness played no role in the evolution of the Schrodinger equation.

116

I have been thinking about Mitch’s kinda preferred definition of truth:

" Deflationism - A definition of truth must be devoid of metaphysical claims"

What does metaphysical mean? The second definition is:

of or relating to the transcendent (see transcendent sense 1) or to a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses

So, if we can’t perceive it with our senses, then it is metaphysical. Ok, we can not perceive any of the multiverse universes proposed by various physical theories and there are many kinds of multiverse.

  1. Hubble multiverse: We can only see out to the Hubble horizon and maybe infer a bit beyond it via graviational interaction (i.e., the Great Attractor beyond that horizon) But Tegmark, assuming the universe is infinite in extent says this (and he would be correct if the universe is infinite in size.):

" Is there a copy of you reading this article? A person who is not you but who lives on a planet called Earth, with misty mountains, fertile fields and sprawling cities, in a solar system with eight other planets? The life of this person has been identical to yours in every respect. But perhaps he or she now decides to put down this article without finishing it, while you read on.

"The idea of such an alter ego seems strange and implausible, but it looks as if we will just have to live with it, because it is supported by astronomical observations. The simplest and most popular cosmological model today predicts that you have a twin in a galaxy about 10 to the 10^28 meters from here. This distance is so large that it is beyond astronomical, but that does not make your doppelganger any less real ." Max Tegmark, "Parallel Universes" Scientific American May 2003, p. 41

There are only so many ways protons can be arranged inside a volume contained by the Hubble volume, after that the arrangements of matter begins to repeat, meaning we would have identical copies of us somewhere else if the physical universe is large enough.

  1. Temporal multiverses: Some people say the universe is cyclical, such a situation would make copies of us in the past and in the future, so long as those universes are as large as the one Tegmark assumes.

  2. Everett’s multiverse: There is Hugh Everett’s multiverse in which every quantum event splits the universe into multiple copies of itself, each of the copies contains a near copy of you.

There are a few other kinds of multiverse, but these will suffice. The one thing they all have in common is that they are unobservable–that is, they are metaphysical.

So what does this have to do with the existence of immaterial things, like the soul? Well, back in the 1990s physicists got into the anthropic principle, the idea that the constants of physics were so finely tuned for the existence of life that some hinted that this might be evidence for design in the universe. Indeed, the cosmological constant of general relativity is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than calculations say it should be. It is related to the density of empty vacuum. As Smolin says:

" The fact that there are galaxies puts very strong limits on how big the cosmological constant can be. Those limits are some 120 orders of magnitude smaller than the predictions given by quantum theory; it might just qualify as the worst prediction ever made by a scientific theory .” Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), p. 152-153

All of the physical constants of the universe are extremely finely tuned and if they varied slightly, the evolution of our universe would not have produced life.

Ok, I can already hear people saying "no one believes that they were fine tuned by a God because there are a near infinitude of universes out there and we just happen to be in the lucky area where the physical constants are just right for our kind of life. Quit bringing your religion into science!"

Except, here is the problem. Deflationism, as defined by Mitch is a self-defeating atheistic view of truth. If truth should lack any metaphysical assertions, then there should be no assertions of the existence of trillions of universes we can’t see. They can’t be considered ‘true’ in the deflationism definition of truth, and if that infinitude of unobservable universes doesn’t exist, then the fine tuning of the physical constants suddenly becomes evidence of design. But by who? Certainly not a person inside this universe we live in. Whoever did it has to be outside of this universe and exist prior to the Big Bang.

Here is the sleight of hand that was used by materialists to hijack science for materialism: When the evidence for the big bang arose, meaning our universe had a beginning as the Bible had claimed, materialistic metaphysics was inserted into science to kill off that conclusion. The interest in inflation (with another unobserved metaphysical particle, the inflaton) rose. Inflation claimed that pocket universes were being created in higher dimensional space forever into eternity, and that again there are an infinitude of other universes out there in ‘inflation space’. This is the lucky lottery view which says that there are so many universes out there that one universe by chance would have the values we see, and voila we are in that universe. It wasn’t due to design. Heaven forbid!\

But there is no evidence that inflation happened:

"The biggest ideas in cosmology have suffered a similar fate. Take the notion that in the split second after the big bang, the universe udnerwent a stupendous inflation. It would explain a lot, such as why the universe appears the same in all directions. Again, though, we have no real evidence for it." Daniel Cossins, The Idea Factory, New Scientist, Jan 19, 2019, p. 39

And when the anthropic principle began to show evidence of amazing coincidences with the physical constants of our universe, again the metaphysical concepts of the multiverse came to the rescue and killed off any idea of design, again, via the lucky lottery–step right up and get your lottery ticket, be the first and only universe to host living things.

Somehow, it is considered bad to believe that an unseen God created our universe and fiddled with the physical constants, but good to believe that unseen multiverses exist which explain away that God mythology, and the theological implications of both the big bang and the fine-tuning of the physical constants. Again, metaphysics was inserted into science in order to support the materialistic position.

If someone doesn’t believe that the Big Bang was viewed as support for religion, I chased down this quote and it was hard to get because of the source, but here it is:

" So beguiling is this argument that astronomer Geoffrey Burbridge has lamented that his fellow scientists are rushing off to join the "First Church of Christ of the Big Bang. " Stephen Strauss, "An Innocent’s Guide to the Big Bang Theory: Fingerprint in Space Left by the Universe as a Baby Still Has Doubters Hurling Stones," Globe and Mail (Toronto), April 25, 1992, p. 1.

Further:

“Hoyle, in particular, found the big bang abhorrent because he was vehemently antireligious and he thought the cosmological picture was disturbingly close to the biblical account.” Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe, (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 179

And still further:

“There seems some slight hope that within the next half-century the religion of the big-bang will die the death it deserves. It will I suspect come to be seen as the biggest impediment to the advance of science to have emerged unhappily in the whole of the twentieth century.” ~ Fred Hoyle, “The Anthropic and Perfect Cosmological Principles: Similarities and Differences,” in F. Bertola and U. Curi, editors, The Anthropic Principle, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 89.

So, if one thinks about deflationism one has to draw the conclusion that the only truth consists of what we can observe and all those metaphysical universes are outside of truth, outside of science. But if these metaphysical universes are outside of science, then we are left with a single universe in which we must explain both the Big Bang AND the fine tuning, without having a giant cosmic lottery to help us avoid seeing the hand of God.

While I can’t speak for Mitch, it seems to me that if he were to live consistently with his 75% deflationism view, that he should have jettisoned the belief in the multiverse and along with it the lucky lottery view of the origin of our life giving universe and its fine tunings. Afterall, as he says, without deflationism, ideologies will seep into science and that is wrong. What about the ideology of materialism?

Mitch, just suggesting that your standard of truth might have unintended consequences for what you can support and still be logically consistent.

117

Thanks for the clarification. Obviously decoherence happens all te time without humans observing it. But isn’t it still true that we can cause it to happen by observing it? As to a computer printing out the results, consider what that is actually testing: it really is testing whether the question/observation of a conscious human actually causes the collapse. If we were to conclude that the answer is yes, then we would also be concluding, as both Stapp and Ball said, that our consciousness is nonphysical, right? An immaterial consciousnesses? That’s what we’d call a soul.

In other words, can we admit that we really are testing for spirituality? Let’s just state that outright, up front, and put it on the table.

So are we, by implication, also testing for God? Well we may not want to go that far…except for the fact that, again as both Stapp and Ball separately concluded, we want to try to account for all the rest of the decoherence happening apart from humans.

So in comes Carroll, a devout and passionate atheist, saying that we’ve got an admittedly incredibly sophisticated test. It’s taken us thousands of years to get to this point. And he wants to say, “We’ll glory be to Poetic Naturalism, we haven’t read the printout yet!” (Okay, he didn’t actually say that, of course, but he coined the term Poetic Naturalism.) It just sounds like very shaky ground, especially in light of rationality governing the universe and (as I’ve argued in above posts) immaterial phenomena saturating nature. If we really admit what exactly we’re testing for, that just…inevitably makes things intensely, non-negotiably personal.

118

Since we’re part of the environment then yeah definitely we can directly or indirectly cause it to occur. And in a cool way, we can intentionally change the environment to change the rate of decoherence (i.e. a protein in a vacuum at low temperature up to a week or so!).

No it’s not testing that. The collapse occurred without us doing anything. But even then, if the answer was ‘yes’ that is not that surprising and has nothing to do with consciousness (at least directly). Since we can’t actually use our senses to observe the typical quantum system, we have to do so through an instrument. Is it our ‘consciousness’ that can tell the instrument to take a measurement but since it can occur without our consciousness, it would be incorrect to claim that our consciousness is the main cause of this effect. However, our consciousness can be part of the environment of a quantum system which is about as far as I think one can go with QM.

No, we’re not.

No, we’re not.

Its not as if one can just say ‘environment’ and that means we are testing for anything non-physical or anythign that can possibly be part of that environment. Sure, from a Christian perspective, this is a great place to think about the ‘handiwork of God.’ Sy Garte wrote this essay reflecting upon identifying the handiwork of God in biology and suggested some part the quantum world might play:

Writing:

There have been other equally plausible and equally unapproachable hypotheses put forward for mechanisms of divine intervention in evolution. The stochastic nature of quantum events at the level of the electrons of atoms involved in nucleotide base pairing has been suggested to provide a target for divine action, as have the effects of highly focused cosmic radiation on mutational events. However, the chances of finding good scientific arguments for any kind of direct divine intervention in biology seem to be slim.

I’m not sure what you’re thinking. I was sharing Carroll’s basics of QM chapter which I think is done well from a science communication standpoint. But speaking of Carroll he raises an interesting question:

How is the spirit energy supposed to interact with us? Here is the equation that tells us how electrons behave in the everyday world:

iamma^u artial_u si_e - m si_e = ieamma^u A_u si_e - amma^umega_u si_e .

Dont’ worry about the details; it’s the fact that the equation exists that matters, not its particular form. It’s the Dirac equation — the two terms on the left are roughly the velocity of the electron and its inertia — coupled to electromagnetism and gravity, the two terms on the right.

As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, this equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. It’s not a complete description; we haven’t included the weak nuclear force, or couplings to hypothetical particles like the Higgs boson. But that’s okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain.

If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right , even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?)

Looking for spiritual truth in physics I think is a very challenging thing to do and I’m okay with that personally.

119

While I’m interested in this exchange I can’t help but feel it is a distraction here. If it can be split to its own thread that would be great.

Well I guess it comes down to definitions then. So I googled it and there doesn’t seem to be enough detail to settle our dispute. I’ve bolded the part which corresponds with what I have in mind.

truth

/tro͞oTH/

noun

  1. the quality or state of being true.

“he had to accept the truth of her accusation”

synonyms: veracity, truthfulness, verity, sincerity, candor, honesty, genuineness;

  • that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.

noun: the truth

“tell me the truth”

synonyms: the fact of the matter, what actually/really happened, the case, so;

  • a fact or belief that is accepted as true.

But I wonder at how you can work in science and not believe there is a fact of the matter when it comes to reality. I’ve made no claim to knowing any more than anyone else just what that singular reality consists in, but I’m content there is a fact of the matter … whatever it may turn out to be.

120

Not necessarily. I’d say that spirit energy is an oxymoron, because I’d want to define spirit as an immaterial phenomenon (just as immaterial as is the Dirac equation or any other sentence :grin:!).

So how does something nonphysical “push” something physical? With words. That is to say that it’s not mind-over-matter but rather mind-before-matter. Just as pizzas are preceded by recipes, and buildings are preceded by architectural plans, and chipmunks are preceded by DNA codes, so also every quanta in the universe is preceded by an (immaterial) equation/sentence.

Thus just as, theoretically, a single decision in the immaterial mind of Schrödinger can determine the fate of his cat, so also our immaterial thoughts could determine the physical actions in our bodies.