Thanks LibWhacker.
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Posted on 04/27/2018 12:52:16 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Every generation tends to believe that its views on the nature of reality are either true or quite close to the truth. We are no exception to this: although we know that the ideas of earlier generations were each time supplanted by those of a later one, we still believe that this time we got it right. Our ancestors were naïve and superstitious, but we are objective—or so we tell ourselves. We know that matter/energy, outside and independent of mind, is the fundamental stuff of nature, everything else being derived from it—or do we?
In fact, studies have shown that there is an intimate relationship between the world we perceive and the conceptual categories encoded in the language we speak. We don’t perceive a purely objective world out there, but one subliminally pre-partitioned and pre-interpreted according to culture-bound categories. For instance, “color words in a given language shape human perception of color.” A brain imaging study suggests that language processing areas are directly involved even in the simplest discriminations of basic colors. Moreover, this kind of “categorical perception is a phenomenon that has been reported not only for color, but for other perceptual continua, such as phonemes, musical tones and facial expressions.” In an important sense, we see what our unexamined cultural categories teach us to see, which may help explain why every generation is so confident in their own worldview. Allow me to elaborate.
The conceptual-ladenness of perception isn’t a new insight. Back in 1957, philosopher Owen Barfield wrote:
“I do not perceive any thing with my sense-organs alone.… Thus, I may say, loosely, that I ‘hear a thrush singing.’ But in strict truth all that I ever merely ‘hear’—all that I ever hear simply by virtue of having ears—is sound. When I ‘hear a thrush singing,’ I am hearing … with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling and … will.” (Saving the Appearances)
As argued by philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science itself falls prey to this inherent subjectivity of perception. Defining a “paradigm” as an “implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief,” he wrote:
“something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’”
Hence, because we perceive and experiment on things and events partly defined by an implicit paradigm, these things and events tend to confirm, by construction, the paradigm. No wonder then that we are so confident today that nature consists of arrangements of matter/energy outside and independent of mind.
Yet, as Kuhn pointed out, when enough “anomalies”—empirically undeniable observations that cannot be accommodated by the reigning belief system—accumulate over time and reach critical mass, paradigms change. We may be close to one such a defining moment today, as an increasing body of evidence from quantum mechanics (QM) renders the current paradigm untenable.
Indeed, according to the current paradigm, the properties of an object should exist and have definite values even when the object is not being observed: the moon should exist and have whatever weight, shape, size and color it has even when nobody is looking at it. Moreover, a mere act of observation should not change the values of these properties. Operationally, all this is captured in the notion of “non-contextuality”: the outcome of an observation should not depend on the way other, separate but simultaneous observations are performed. After all, what I perceive when I look at the night sky should not depend on the way other people look at the night sky along with me, for the properties of the night sky uncovered by my observation should not depend on theirs.
The problem is that, according to QM, the outcome of an observation can depend on the way another, separate but simultaneous, observation is performed. This happens with so-called “quantum entanglement” and it contradicts the current paradigm in an important sense, as discussed above. Although Einstein argued in 1935 that the contradiction arose merely because QM is incomplete, John Bell proved mathematically, in 1964, that the predictions of QM regarding entanglement cannot be accounted for by Einstein’s alleged incompleteness.
So to salvage the current paradigm there is an important sense in which one has to reject the predictions of QM regarding entanglement. Yet, since Alain Aspect’s seminal experiments in 1981–82, these predictions have been repeatedly confirmed, with potential experimental loopholes closed one by one. 1998 was a particularly fruitful year, with two remarkable experiments performed in Switzerland and Austria. In 2011 and 2015, new experiments again challenged non-contextuality. Commenting on this, physicist Anton Zeilinger has been quoted as saying that “there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure [that is, observe] about a system has [an independent] reality.” Finally, Dutch researchers successfully performed a test closing all remaining potential loopholes, which was considered by Nature the “toughest test yet.”
The only alternative left for those holding on to the current paradigm is to postulate some form of non-locality: nature must have—or so they speculate—observation-independent hidden properties, entirely missed by QM, which are “smeared out” across spacetime. It is this allegedly omnipresent, invisible but objective background that supposedly orchestrates entanglement from “behind the scenes.”
It turns out, however, that some predictions of QM are incompatible with non-contextuality even for a large and important class of non-local theories. Experimental results reported in 2007 and 2010 have confirmed these predictions. To reconcile these results with the current paradigm would require a profoundly counterintuitive redefinition of what we call “objectivity.” And since contemporary culture has come to associate objectivity with reality itself, the science press felt compelled to report on this by pronouncing, “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality.”
The tension between the anomalies and the current paradigm can only be tolerated by ignoring the anomalies. This has been possible so far because the anomalies are only observed in laboratories. Yet we know that they are there, for their existence has been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt. Therefore, when we believe that we see objects and events outside and independent of mind, we are wrong in at least some essential sense. A new paradigm is needed to accommodate and make sense of the anomalies; one wherein mind itself is understood to be the essence—cognitively but also physically—of what we perceive when we look at the world around ourselves.
And think about this: according to Big Bang/Expanding Universe the star of origin of the photon that lands on my retina got “permission” to leave billions of years ago when they were actually in much closer approximation. So how did that photon somehow “know” where the atom in my retina would be when it finally finished the journey. It is almost like the analogy of “Breaking” the racked balls in billiards. At the origin of “The Big Bang” every subsequent interaction between atoms was already known and programmed when they were all in actual direct contact.
I can’t say that my Faith doesn’t cloud my judgement with bias. But the more I ponder it sure does seem like “I knew you before you were born...” rings true. Which is still unsettling because if a photon leaving a star billions of years ago knew where my retina wold be billions of years later it sort of destroys my concept of free will. I guess the answer would be “all that photon knew was it had an ‘address’ of another atom that was it’s destination” and it is just randomness that atom ended up incorporated into my retina. This is all starting to give me a headache.
Ponder your comments for just a moment. I think the actual energy transferred is considered to be carried in the photon itself. Otherwise the photon would be more like a wire that was in contact at both ends.
Tell that to those who fought against British rule.
I think i have it. Go back to our space station trying to radiate heat. Cosmologists tell us that the space available to the Universe may be infinite but the Universe itself is not. How do we know? If there were an infinite number of stars the night time sky would be a fairly uniform “glow” and it obviously is not. So if there was an infinite amount of mass out there to dump heat to our space station would have no problem. It could boil off heat in all directions instantaneously. It would be interesting to have a freeper come along here who actually new what he was talking about and comment. Actually now that i think about it I may have figured it out. The problem our space station has is not that the IR photons it needs to radiate need to have “permission” to leave but rather it is limited in the available targets because space is mostly empty and the Universe is not infinite. Sorry. This entire thing was just my silly mind fooling itself into thinking there was something here and there really is not. Never mind.
Yes.
Consciousness works the same as the electron orbitals around the nucleus, Just as Neils Bohr described the photon or light is given off when the electron moves inward.
The higher level of consciousness is always seen as Light when viewed from a lower level.
Thanks LibWhacker.
I quote myself from long ago: “The Scientific Method requires objectivity, but does not provide it.”
Good post. I agree. Philosopyical materialism is a self-limiting problem. Everything else is thus either defined solely in material terms or ignored entirely.
You might find a bit of reading on the zero point field useful. This field is building up energy, the latent energy of expansion, for the entire Universe is expanding. Think of a rubber band being stretched, for an analogy.
The photon from that distant star has something in common with the atom which it impacts ... they are both in a present temporal state. Photons cross the Universe (near or far) always in the present of their emission. There are four known variable expressions of dimension Time: moment, past, present, and future ... as far as we know so far. There are four known variable expressions of dimension space, as far as we know so far: point, linear, planar, and volume. The photon is a moment of time and a point of space, encoding energy. It crosses the Universe in linear space always in the present of its creation.
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