Sunday, February 4, 2018

Universal Consciousness - Destroyed Some More

One of the most prevalent arguments used to support the belief in a Universal Consciousness - a vaguely defined form of new-age religious deism - is the argument from Quantum Physics.  Frauds like Deepshit Choke-Ya are fond of making claims along the lines that quantum physics proves that the nature of reality is controlled by Consciousness or some shit.  Well, I am here to tell you that Quantum Physics has absolutely nothing to say on the subject of consciousness, and definitely does not support the nonsense notion of a universal consciousness.

Nobody knows what anyone really means by "universal consciousness" other than it is a kind of non-denominational substitute for gods or goddesses - universal magical powerful agencies that, like, do shit and stuff.  Allegedly.  But we do have a really good idea of what quantum physics is, which I will attempt to convey to you now.

Quantum physics (more properly Quantum Mechanics or QM) is a mathematical method of making very precise predictions about subatomic particles, their properties, their behavior, and their interactions.  The most important tool of QM is the Schroedinger Wave Equation (SWE), the solutions to which correspond to valid physical configurations of matter, energy, momentum, spin, and a number of other fundamental quantum numbers (i.e. quantitized physical values).  If you're not solving the Schroedinger Wave Equation, then you, my friend, are not "studying" Quantum Physics.

QM does make some astonishing predictions about the behavior of subatomic particles, however.  Less well known is the fact that QM makes some very boring predictions about every-day-sized objects.  QM predicts and requires that everyday objects like baseballs and people must behave exactly according to Newtonian mechanics.  That's right - QM says Newton was right!

Also, in QM an electron may go backwards in time as a positron.  But you, my friend, are not a single subatomic particle.  You are a thermodynamic Process involving large numbers of interacting particles, and as such YOU may only proceed forwards in time.  And you can also never enter a black hole either, except by having all your atoms ripped apart in the process.  So don't go getting any ideas.  This shit applies to individual subatomic particles only and to nothing else.

Among the more astonishing predictions made by QM is that a single particle can appear to be in several places at once.  This is not actually so, but it is a consequence of an interpretation of QM which insists on maintaining the fiction of particles as actual objects.  In reality, particles are merely conceptual collections of quantum numbers - energy, charge, momentum, spin etc - which must all follow rules of interactions that proceed from solutions to the SWE.  For example, energy may only enter or leave the electromagnetic field in whole quanta for a given wavelength of light.  Thus a photon (a quanta of light) is a very useful fiction, since it helps us keep track of energy and momentum being put into or removed from electromagnetism through interactions with matter.

When the object-permanence stumbling block is removed, then the prediction about propagating quanta being in more than one place at a time becomes less astonishing, and is actually what one would expect.   The famous two-slit experiment demonstrates that light actually does propagate in the form of waves, and also proves that electromagnetic energy is also quantitized.  The electromagnetic wave passes through both slits while a quanta of energy from the e/m field is deposited on a screen at a specific point on the other side.  No actual little ball of light called a "photon" magically passed through two places at once.  A photon does not exist in-transit.  It only "exists" at the point of production and again at the point of absorption (i.e. during any interaction) as an accounting fiction for keeping track of energy and other quantum numbers which must be conserved.

Another astonishing "prediction" of QM relates to the Observer Effect.  There is no Observer Effect.  Let me be clear on that.  The "Observer Effect" obtained its name from a mis-translation of a German research paper and is nothing more interesting than the fact that particles are affected by their interactions with other particles.  Duh!

The requirement that energy, momentum and other physical values must be quantitized has the effect that no measurement can ever be made without radically interfering with a particle, if not actually destroying the particle and turning is parts into something else.  Any measurement made on a particle requires that some form of particle interaction take place, and no interaction takes place without there being an effect on the particles involved.  Therefore the "Observer Effect" is really the interaction-measurement effect.

While philosophers wrongly argue that there can be no Observation without a Mind to do the observing, they missed the point that most interactions take place without any measurements being carried out; and most measurements are made without anyone even looking at or being aware of the data.  I guess they never heard of data acquisition electronics which operate just fine without human intervention.  The interaction-measurement effect therefore does not in any way imply or rely on the existence of a Mind.  Therefore the unsupported extension of this concept to the idea that Consciousness keeps the universe together is based on error and is completely wrong.  As Wolfgang Pauli would have said, "That's so far from being right, it's not even wrong!"  Meaning that there is no way to even fix the notion to make it a less wrong notion.

QM is only spooky and mysterious when one attempts to interpret it using overly-simplistic concepts like particles as little objects that bounce around like billiard balls.  A particle is not an object, but a collection of quantum numbers tied together by events and interactions.  They are mathematical, accounting objects, not little beads or pellets of matter.  When physicists properly think of them like this, then we do not have to invent outrageous and confusing analogies to the everyday world in order to understand or explain them, and fraudulent con-men cannot claim that modern physics empirically supports their new-age religion scams.



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