Michael Prescott's Blog

Help!

Dear Abby,

Lately I have been obsessed with quantum physics. I've been reading books and Web articles on the subject, trying to understand paradoxes like the two-slit experiment and the delayed choice experiment, in the hope that I can find some theory of the universe that will tie it all together. But it's not working! Nothing makes sense.

The key question is how the quantum wave function collapses - how a quantum object like a photon can make the transition from a wave to a particle. As a wave, it exists as a set of possibilities. As a particle, it exists as a distinct entity. When it makes the transition from wave to article, it becomes "real." If everything existed only as quantum waves, there would be no reality, only infinite possibilities. Reality enters the picture only when the wave collapses. But how does it collapse? How does reality become real?

Most physicists seem to think that the observer is the key ingredient in the puzzle. When no one is watching the photon, it is a wave function. When someone does watch, it is a particle. The observer somehow brings reality into existence. The simple act of observation converts possibility into actuality. But by what means?

At first I thought some form of interactionist dualism would work. Mind works directly on matter - say, by affecting the flow of electrochemical impulses in the brain. This idea is popular in some circles right now. But while this might explain the collapse of the wave function with regard to thoughts - with various possible thoughts collapsing into one actual thought - it doesn't explain the collapse of the wave function with regard to outside events. It doesn't get us very far.

Unless we assume that there are no outside events. Maybe everything that happens is purely mental. Make the universe subjective; say it's all an idea in the mind of God or a consensus in the collective consciousness of humanity. That's called monistic idealism, and it's popular, too.

But (sigh) there are problems. If the transcendent mind (God or Cosmic Consciousness or what have you) collapses the wave function, then the wave function should collapse instantly at every moment, because there's never a moment when God isn't looking. So we have to say that only the mind mediated by the physical brain can cause the collapse. But the brain is a material object. If no material objects can exist until the brain actualizes them, and if the brain itself is a material object, then how did the whole process get started? It's possible to talk about "tangled hierarchies," but this doesn't seem very clear.

Also there's the problem of cosmogenesis. If a physical brain is necessary to create the material world, and if for the first 15 billion years of the history of the universe there were no creatures with brains, then how did all of that history happen? We have to say that the universe didn't actually exist until the possibility of a brain became immanent, and then the whole 15 billion year past just snapped into existence. This stretches credibility, don't you think?

And what about near death experiences? Some people may not take them seriously, but I do. If someone can still perceive physical reality while having an NDE, then reality can be perceived without the mediation of the brain. But in this case the brain isn't necessary to collapse the wave function, right?

So then I heard about decoherence theory, which says that the observer isn't really necessary to collapse the wave function, after all. The photon simply becomes "entangled" with its environment, and as a result of this entanglement, the wave function collapses automatically. No one has to be watching. This interested me because it seemed to be a way out of my difficulties. I was so excited that I got up in the middle if the night and started Googling "quantum decoherence." I was reading about this stuff on my computer at 4:30 in the morning!

But the more I read, the more depressed I became. Because it turns out that quantum decoherence theory doesn't really explain how the wave function collapses. It can't explain how a set of possibilities (the wave function) becomes an actuality (the particle). It doesn't explain reality at all!

It sure seems as if the mind of an observer is necessary to create reality as we know it. But how? Is reality subjective, or is it independent of the mind but influenced by it? Or is there some other explanation? I'm at the end of my string, Abby. Please help!

Desperately,

Freaked Out By Physics

*  *  *

Dear Freaked,

The effort you've made to understand ultimate reality is honorable, but it is doomed to fail. Essentially you are trying to reduce reality to an explanation that can be grasped and communicated in words. This means reducing it to terms that the left hemisphere of your brain can handle. But reality is too big and complex and mysterious to be reducible to the dimensions of the limited mind-brain.

Even quantum physicists don't understand reality - they only know how to do the math and carry out the experiments. They leave the philosophizing to others, or they come up with the philosophical approaches you mentioned, all of which are deficient in some respect.

The only people who can make some claim to understand reality are very advanced mystics who have transcended the mind-brain and grasped the nature of existence directly. But even they can't reduce their discoveries to words in any satisfactory way.

What, then, is the solution? Forget theory, and experience reality directly. Shut off the stream of words in your mind and just be.

And practice patience. All will be clear eventually, but it may take many lifetimes and many stages of personal evolution. Everything is on schedule and cannot be rushed.

Now get some sleep.

Love,

Abby

Car chases for a Sunday afternoon

Blogger Les Jones has compiled a YouTube festival of classic Hollywood car chases.

I'd forgotten how good the car chase in Bullitt was.

HT: Ace of Spades.

Ego trap

Yesterday, Bill O'Reilly interviewed Richard Dawkins on The O'Reilly Factor. The interview frustrated me because O'Reilly had obviously done no preparation for the exchange, merely bringing up weak arguments that Dawkins could easily knock down. Furthermore, Dawkins was, I felt, somewhat dishonest in some of his answers. He casually included the origin of life among things that science understands, when in fact the origin of life remains a mystery. He also presented himself as a genial, tolerant moderate, giving no hint of his more extreme pronouncements -- for instance, that raising a child in a religious faith is a worse crime than sexually abusing that child. ("Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests," Dawkins has said, "deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.")

Frankly, I thought that even I could have done better against Dawkins than O'Reilly did, and as a result I found myself feeling irritated and contentious. In my head I marshaled the points I would have raised -- the cosmic "fine-tuning" that made a habitable universe possible; the general cultural decline that seems to be accompanying the rise of Dawkins's brand of militant secularism; the large number of scientific figures from Newton to Darwin who were raised in religious households without, apparently, forfeiting the ability to think critically -- such forfeiture being an inevitable consequence of a religious upbringing in Dawkins's view.

I was still rehearsing this multi-pronged plan of attack long after the interview (and the show) had ended. And then I realized I was being a dope.

None of my arguments would convince or even perplex Dawkins, who has heard them all and, no doubt, has ready answers available. I would not be satisfied with his answers, so I would not be convinced either. We would simply be talking past each other. I would be trying to score points, and so would he, and neither of us would accomplish anything substantive. Those audience members predisposed to agree with Dawkins would say he "won," while those predisposed to agree with me would say I "won." Everyone's prejudices would be reinforced, and nothing would be learned or gained.

When you look at it that way, the whole thing is just a game -- a silly, childish game of one-upmanship. To participate in this game is to waste one's time. I felt embarrassed to have been caught up in it, even in a fantasy. And I felt a little sad for Richard Dawkins, who has devoted so many years to the relentless pursuit of points scored in this ongoing, never-ending debate. I felt sad for him, not because I think his position is incorrect (although I do), but because single-minded proselytizing for any position is ultimately no more than an ego trip -- or maybe I should say, an ego trap.

I'm starting to think that one of the worst features of human nature is our tendency to want to be "right." In extreme form, this leads to the Right Man syndrome, which in Dawkins's case included his decision to sign a petition to make it illegal to teach religion to children. After much criticism, he withdrew his support for the petition, claiming he hadn't read it carefully enough. Even with the retraction, his true opinions on this issue remain somewhat elusive, and it is hard to escape the feeling that Dawkins really would like to make religion a thought-crime. The Right Man often feels the need to impose draconian measures on those who dissent from his worldview.   

Outlawing religion is an extreme position, but even in its more benign form, the Right Man syndrome encages the mind in a prison of dogma, rendering creative thought difficult, if not impossible. It feeds the ego and starves the soul. It makes us petty, vindictive, stubborn, narrowminded, and often dishonest (because we prefer to shade the truth rather than admit to any defect in our position). It encourages demagoguery, moral blindness, and abuse of power. It breeds stress, conflict, anger, self-righteousness, and endless, pointless feuds. The Hatfields and the McCoys were pikers compared to the militant atheists and the equally militant religionists, who have been quarreling for centuries with no end in sight.

Maybe we all need to be a little less sure of ourselves and less desperate to be right all the time. You know the saying, "Less attitude, more gratitude"? I'd like to propose a new one along similar lines: "Don't debate -- appreciate."

Mozart Was a Red

In the past, I've written some essays critical of Ayn Rand and her movement, Objectivism - a movement I was involved in for a while during the 1980s.

If anyone wants to get a sense of what it was sometimes like among the more stiff-necked Objectivists, there's a fifteen-minute video online of Murray Rothbard's one-act play Mozart Was a Red. It's not the greatest play in the world, and the actors aren't pros, but it does give you a pretty good idea of the intellectual pretentiousness and cultishness that typified the movement.

In case you're wondering, the characters (only slightly caricatured) are based on Ayn Rand, her husband Frank O'Conner, and her sycophantic admirers Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden. The bewildered guest is presumably based on Murray Rothbard himself.

I can't spare a square

You know life in America has officially gone insane when a Seinfeld routine becomes a public policy proposal.

Pop singer Sheryl Crow has had a brainstorm:

I have spent the better part of this tour [the "Stop Global Warming College Tour"] trying to come up with easy ways for us all to become a part of the solution to global warming. Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating. One of my favorites is in the area of forest conservation which we heavily rely on for oxygen. I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Now, I don't want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required.

Celebrities - God bless 'em. First they provide us with entertainment, now they save the world.

Super-psi me!

One of the most important mediums in history was Mrs. Leonora Piper of Boston, who was studied for twenty years by William James, Richard Hodgson, and other luminaries in the field of psychic research. Her mediumship raised important questions about her "controls," the guiding spirits who served as intermediaries between the living and the deceased - gatekeepers to the Beyond.

Mrs. Piper's most famous control was a Frenchman named Dr. Phinuit. The good doctor presented himself as a departed spirit eager to assist in Mrs. Piper's work. But troubles quickly arose. Phinuit was able to give little evidence of his authenticity. Although supposedly French, he could speak only in a few words of that language. Although he claimed to be a physician, he didn't know much about medicine. When pressed on his personal history, he was notoriously vague and inaccurate about the details. Laborious research failed to turn up any evidence of a French physician by that name living in the appropriate place and time.

Most researchers concluded that the Phinuit was a product of Mrs. Piper's unconscious mind, a co-personality split off from the mainstream of her personality in order to facilitate her mediumistic work. Not a few researchers went further, saying that if Phinuit was only a co-personality, an aspect of the medium's hidden mind, then so were the spirits who allegedly communicated through her. The idea was that, just as the mind is able to create a personality that calls itself Phinuit and has a distinctive voice and personal background, so the mind can create or re-create the personality of a departed loved one. Therefore, according to this theory, Mrs. Piper was not communicating with the deceased at all; she was manufacturing simulacra of the deceased in her own unconscious mind.

Naturally, for this to work, the unconscious mind must have very robust psychic powers. It must be able to look into the mind of the sitter and pull out whatever memories are necessary to reconstruct the sitter's departed loved one. In some cases, it has to do more. The unconscious mind must range beyond the séance room to find information held in the minds of other people perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles away, or information preserved in documents unknown to any living person. Perhaps the unconscious mind must even be able to link up with some source of infinite knowledge -- Cosmic Consciousness, the Collective Unconscious, the Akashic Records, or whatever we might call it. In other words, the medium's unconscious mind must be equipped with super-ESP, a.ka. super-psi.

So here we have the million-dollar question. If, as seems likely, Phinuit was a creation of Mrs. Piper's own mind, can we conclude that the spirits Phinuit helped bring through were equally illusory?

I don't think so. There's a very basic point here that is sometimes not sufficiently acknowledged. If Phinuit were manufactured in exactly the same way as all the other spirits that Mrs. Piper brought through, then we should expect no particular differences between Phinuit and the other spirits. But in fact, we see tremendous differences. The other spirits, in contrast to Phinuit, were able to give convincing accounts of themselves, including details of their earthly lives that could be checked and verified. The fact that Phinuit was unable to do this indicates, to me, that he was a fundamentally different type of entity from the departed loved ones who came through at the séances.

Moreover, the super-psi hypothesis suffers from an obvious defect. If Mrs. Piper's unconscious mind was in touch with a source of infinite knowledge, as required by super-psi, then why did she not use this source of infinite knowledge to flesh out her portrait of Phinuit? Why did she not make Phinuit speak fluent French? Surely the knowledge of how to speak French is part of any infinite store of wisdom that the unconscious mind can allegedly tap into. Why did she not provide Phinuit with a working knowledge of medical science? Why did she not simply take some real person right out of the historical record to serve as the template for her control - someone whose identity could be verified? If her unconscious mind was in touch with unlimited information, then it should have been easy for her to find an appropriate real-life person from some past era and re-create that person.

But this is not, apparently, what was done. Instead her subconscious mind created a fictional persona that could not speak French, did not know much about medicine, and could not provide verifiable details about his earthly existence. The very deficiencies of Phinuit that led researchers to believe he was only a co-personality, split off from the main branch of Mrs. Piper's mind, should also have led them to conclude that Mrs. Piper had no capacity for super-psi. After all, if she did have such a capacity, why fail to use it in the creation of her control spirit, the most important of all the spiritual entities she brought through?

A similar argument, of course, can be made with regard to Mrs. Piper's other spirit controls, such as Rector and Imperator - but not her control George Pellew, who convinced many researchers that he was a genuine departed spirit.

The argument can also be extended to the famous case of Patience Worth, a personality that spoke through an ordinary housewife named Pearl Curran. While in touch with the Patience Worth personality, Pearl Curran was able to produce an impressive quantity of literature, including lengthy novels that were critically praised in her day. Yet when efforts were made to track down the real-life Patience Worth, no conclusive evidence that she had existed could be found. And Patience, like Phinuit, was not very convincing when speaking of her personal background.

For these reasons, many investigators have speculated that Patience Worth was a co-personality generated by Pearl Curran's subconscious and that the resulting literary output was made possible by super-psi - in this case, the ability of the unconscious mind to tap into a database of literary and historical information and use it creatively.

But as with Phinuit, we encounter an obvious problem: if Pearl Curran's super-psi was prodigious enough to generate book-length works of fiction containing accurate historical facts and obscure vocabulary from past eras, why did it fail her in the creation of Patience Worth herself? Surely a faculty capable of reconstructing the life of Jesus in minute detail, something Patience Worth accomplishes in her book The Sorry Tale, would be capable of reconstructing Patience's own life.

As I look at it, there are two hypotheses that are more plausible than the super-psi hypothesis in regard to Patience Worth. The first is that Patience was a real spirit, a departed human being, who left no traceable record of her earthly life, or who used a symbolic name for some unknown reason. The second hypothesis is that Patience was a co-personality generated by Pearl Curran's unconscious mind, and that once this co-personality existed, it served as a doorway through which one or more actual spirits could communicate pseudonymously.

The bottom line is that the inability of both Dr. Phinuit and Patience Worth to produce evidence proving their own identities is not a point in favor of the super-psi hypothesis. Rather, it is a point against the super-psi hypothesis. If super-psi were a real phenomenon, and if it had been used to produce Phinuit and Patience, then those two personalities should have been far better able to speak up for themselves than they were.

Update, April 23: I've been informed that I was too hard on Phinuit, who was able to speak French in some sittings, though not in others, and who did display medical knowledge consistent with the training of a physician at the time. (See the comments thread.) Even so, I think most of the investigators at the time concluded that Phinuit was a co-personality of Mrs. Piper, rather than an independent entity. Whether or not this conclusion was justified or merely reflects their own bias is an open question. I'll try to read up on Phinuit and return to this subject when I know more.

Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering, the name Phinuit was pronounced Fin-wee or, sometimes, Fin-nee.

This morning hour

Mika Waltari was an internationally popular author in his day, but has been undeservedly forgotten since then. Best known for his historical novels, he often explored the theme of man's search for spiritual meaning.

In The Dark Angel (1953), he tells the story of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 through the diary of his hero, John Angelos. One scene in this book struck me as particularly memorable. It occurs after a hard night spent repelling the Turkish host besieging the city walls.

This morning hour was engraved unforgettably in my heart. Heaven and earth and all their colors, the soot and the blood -- all was unutterably beautiful in my sight just then, while the blank eyes of the dead around me stared into vacancy.

Equally unreal, equally incredible and of just such unearthly beauty had the world about me appeared once before. It was in Ferrara when I was sickening for the plague, though still unaware of it. The light of the cloudy November day pressed in through the painted windows of the chapel, censers exhaled their bitter scent of purifying herbs and the quill pens rasped as always; yet as I sat there everything slid far away and only a rushing sound filled my ears. I saw everything more clearly, more truly than before. I saw Emperor John's grudging face in shifting hues of sulphur-yellow and green as he sat with a black and white dog at his feet, on a throne which had been made exactly the same height as the throne of Pope Eugenius. I saw the Bessarion's big, beaming face alter and become insensitive and cold. And the Latin and Greek words ringing through the greenish light of the chapel receded and sounded as meaningless as the baying of distant hounds.

In that hour I experienced God for the first time -- as I was sickening for the plague.

In a lightning flash of truth I now sensed that that moment had contained this moment within itself, as bark contains the wood. Had I been more percipient I might even then have experienced and seen what I saw today. Both occurred within me and within eternity at one and the same instant. Thus are moments of clear vision contained in one another, and the sequence of time between them is but illusion. Weeks, months, years, are measures invented by man; they have nothing to do with true time, God's time.

In this hour I knew also that I should be born into the world again in accordance with God's inscrutable purpose. And when this happens I shall bear this hour in my heart still, contained in the visions of my new life. Again I shall behold the headless corpses on the ruined walls that tremble in the firing of the great gun. The little yellow flowers will gleam out amid soot and blood, and the Guacchardi brothers in bloody armor will play merrily at ball with the heads of the enemy.

But this experience awoke neither ecstasy nor even joy within me, only unspeakable woe that I am and shall be only a man -- a spark blown by the winds of God from one darkness into another. More keenly than my bodily pain and weariness I was aware of my heart's longing for the ineffable repose of oblivion. But there is no oblivion.

Cursive - foiled again

I recently learned that my school district no longer teaches kids how to read or write in cursive. The rationale is that these days, all the important work is done on computers, so no one needs to be able to write in longhand anymore.

Apparently it's a national trend. The Washington Post ran a story about it in March, 2006. Quoth the Post:

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters....

"I can't think of any other place you need cursive as an adult other than to sign your name," [a teacher] said. "Cursive -- that is so low on the priority list, we really could care less. We are much more concerned that these kids pass their SOLs [standardized tests], and that doesn't require a bit of cursive."

Yeah, that's what it's all about - passing "standardized tests."

Incidentally, I just finished Miki Waltari's fine novel The Dark Angel, about the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The great city was the last refuge of Greek civilization, and it outlasted the demise of the Western Roman Empire by a thousand years - but because of corruption, indolence, and apathy, it finally fell to savage hordes of Turks.

I don't know what made me think of that right now.

Modified dignified climbdown

In a couple of earlier posts, I speculated that the Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung Hui, might have been a paranoid schizophrenic in the acute phase of his illness. I based this idea on what I'd learned of Cho's bizarre behavior, as well as the two one-act plays he wrote for a creative writing, which have been posted online. It seemed to me, in my capacity as a layman, that Cho fit the diagnosis of schizophrenia pretty well.

But new information has come to light since then, and I'm now much less inclined to see Cho as an outright psychotic. I think it's more likely that he was a sociopath with perhaps some elements of paranoia and schizotypal thinking.

Why? For one thing, schizophrenia typically develops in the late teens or early to mid twenties. It appears, however, that Cho's behavior was seriously off-kilter for years, going back at least as far as his first year of high school. That's probably too young for the onset of schizophrenia.

For another thing, we now know that Cho had spent at least six days preparing an elaborate computer document including embedded videos and stills, and that he had sufficient presence of mind to mail this item to NBC before the rampage. This indicates that he was not totally detached from reality and was capable of thinking in an orderly fashion. A schizophrenic in the acute phase of the illness probably wouldn't be able to carry out that kind of detailed preparation.

Finally, in his statement to NBC, Cho referenced the Columbine killers, which indicates that he was consciously following in their footsteps and seeking the same media attention (which, needless to say, he obtained). This means he knew what he was doing. He wasn't just a psychotic on a mindless rampage; he was organized, he had a plan, and he implemented it in a coldblooded, efficient manner.

What difference does any of this make? If Cho was truly psychotic, he had no control over his actions and cannot be considered morally culpable. But if he was a sociopath who knew right from wrong but made a conscious decision to slaughter innocent people, then of course he is morally accountable.

Does this mean we should hate him? Personally I see no advantage in nursing hatred and anger against anyone. I think hatred only hurts and diminishes the hater. It's a festering sore of the soul. I think it's better to let it go. Of course, if I were a parent of one of the victims, I wouldn't be able to do that. But for most of us, who are just spectators following the story from a distance, it is probably best to make peace with what happened, put aside the outrage and recriminations, and move on.

It's all in the numbers

I was reading Mark Steyn's witty, depressing, fear-mongering new book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, and I found myself increasingly uneasy.

The crux of Steyn's thesis is that birth rates in Europe are below replacement rates for almost all segments of the population - except for Muslims, who continue to have large families. Therefore in an astonishingly short period of time, Steyn predicts, Muslims will be a majority or near-majority in Europe, and a new entity, Eurabia, will be born. Eurabia's culture and its foreign policy priorities will be decidedly anti-American, leaving "America alone" in a hostile world.

This idea is not new, but Steyn hammers away at it over the course of 200 pages of barbed, sometimes bad-tempered prose. What made me uneasy, besides the naked appeal to fear of the Other, were the demographic projections Steyn glibly tosses about. He provides no citations, and his extrapolations seemed questionable to me. It's been awhile since I was in Europe, but I found it hard to believe that Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa would become the dominant sector of the population in just another generation or so.

Perplexed, I went a-Googling in search of critical reviews of Steyn's ideas. I uncovered a couple of useful analyses. The first was a book review titled "Apocalypse Now?" by Johann Hari.

Noting that "to fulfil his headline predictions, Steyn needs to turn 20 million European Muslims (not including those in Turkey) into more than 200 million European Muslims in just 13 years," Hari reports that the the numbers don't add up. He cites another conservative author, Tony Blankley, to back up this assertion. In his own book, The West's Last Chance, Blankley wrote,

For almost every western European country, their populations do not even begin to decline until at least 2025 . . . In fact, for the next few decades, they continue to go up, even without any new immigration . . . The numbers only begin to move decidedly down about 50 years from now.

And of course, as Hari observes, it is a dangerous business to extrapolate population trends 50 years into the future, since the current Muslim birthrate may not "hold steady," and the birth rates of non-Muslim Europeans may go up.

But if Steyn's numbers aren't right, how did he come up with them? A post at The Crossed Pond may hold the answer:

Back in early 2005, Steyn wrote an article entitled "US can sit back and watch Europe implode." In it, he quotes 'some projections' that the EU will be 40% moslem by 2025 ...

There was an NIC report released in December 2004, a couple of months before the article was written, where four ‘fictional scenarios’ were considered; one of them ... is ‘A New Caliphate’ in which the moslem population of Europe is projected to go as high as between 22 and 37 million; that is not the same thing, of course, as heading towards 40 percent. Could he have made that mistake? It doesn’t seem reasonable that he could have, but maybe he did, and in company; there is a Scotsman article at about the same time ... where it is projected that the moslem population will climb to 22 to 37% instead of the 22-37 million in the report. So it seems that the Scotsman author, at least, did make the mistake of switching percent in for millions. ...

At the beginning of 2004, the population of the EU was 456 million. 40% of that figure is 182 million. Where are they going to come from in twenty years, assuming anything close to a constant EU population, from a 2005 muslim EU population of 15 million or so? Even if the population drops as the babyboomers do, there’s still going to be, ballpark, over a hundred million new moslems needed to make that figure true.

Bottom line: The 15 million Muslims presently in the European Union are not going to multiply into more than 200 million Muslims in only one generation, or even two. Population projections that extend any further into the future are dubious.

So maybe Steyn's apocalyptic predictions need to be taken with a considerable dash of salt.