Quantum Quackery
A surprise-hit film has renewed interest in applying quantum mechanics to
consciousness, spirituality and human potential
By Michael Shermer
In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV's AM Northwest in Portland, Ore., with
the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully
edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer
trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film's central
tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum
mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed
millions.
The film's avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites
amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist
and Nobel laureate
Murray Gell-Mann
once described as "quantum flapdoodle." University of Oregon quantum
physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: "The material world
around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing
moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only
tendencies." Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building
and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground's
tendencies.
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What the #$*! is going on here?
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The work of Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto, author of The Hidden
Messages in Water, is featured to show how thoughts change the structure
of ice crystals--beautiful crystals form in a glass of water with the word
"love" taped to it, whereas playing Elvis's "Heartbreak Hotel" causes other
crystals to split in two. Would his "Burnin' Love" boil water?
The film's nadir is an interview with "Ramtha," a 35,000-year-old spirit
channeled by a woman named JZ Knight. I wondered where humans spoke English
with an Indian accent 35,000 years ago. Many of the films' participants are
members of Ramtha's "School of Enlightenment," where New Age pabulum is dispensed
in costly weekend retreats.
The attempt to link the weirdness of the quantum world to mysteries of the
macro world (such as consciousness) is not new. The best candidate to connect
the two comes from University of Oxford physicist Roger
Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff of the Arizona Health Sciences
Center, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but
little light. Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like
structural scaffolding. Their conjecture (and that's all it is) is that something
inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that results
in the quantum coherence of atoms. The quantum coherence causes neurotransmitters
to be released into the synapses between neurons, thus triggering them to
fire in a uniform pattern that creates thought and consciousness. Because
a wave-function collapse can come about only when an atom is "observed" (that
is, affected in any way by something else), the late neuroscientist Sir John
Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggested that "mind" may be
the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought
to consciousness to mind to atoms....
In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro
systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum
(Prometheus Books, 1995), University of Colorado physicist Victor Stenger
demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its
typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck's
constant (h). "If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can
be treated classically." Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter
molecules and their speed across the distance of the synapse are about two
orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There
is no micro-macro connection. Then what the #$*! is going on here?
Physics envy. The lure of reducing complex problems to basic physical principles
has dominated the philosophy of science since Descartes's failed attempt
some four centuries ago to explain cognition by the actions of swirling vortices
of atoms dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide
a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities
of biology. We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and
higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles
as emergence and self-organization. Biology envy.
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Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic (www.skeptic.com) and author of
The Science of Good and Evil.
MORE SKEPTIC:
Turn Me On, Dead Man
The Feynman-Tufte Principle
The Fossil Fallacy
Abducted!
Quantum Quackery
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