Never mind the mind, what's the matter?

Why do I do this to myself?  Perhaps just as pertinent, why do I inflict it on you?  Sorry and all that but I just can't help myself.  The fact is that I am utterly hooked on all this quantum physics stuff.  I barely understand 0.2% of it, and even that comes and goes!  Anyway, on this occasion you can blame Prof. Adam Frank writing on the subject at Aeon.

He sums up the headache-inducing problem thus:

When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality. Like almost every student over the past 100 years, I was shocked by quantum mechanics, the physics of the micro-world. In place of a clear vision of little bits of matter that explain all the big things around us, quantum physics gives us a powerful yet seemly paradoxical calculus. With its emphasis on probability waves, essential uncertainties and experimenters disturbing the reality they seek to measure, quantum mechanics made imagining the stuff of the world as classical bits of matter (or miniature billiard balls) all but impossible.

Well that's bad enough if your interest lies in the nature and behaviour of 'billiard balls' but when you turn this school of thought to, er, well, thought, actually, by which I mean, the mind, then you could quickly find yourself confined in a cell wearing a straight-jacket! 

It all comes back to this thing called 'The Hard Problem' which, put into simple - and I do mean really, really simple terms - attempts to explain consciousness, or how the mind, filled as it is with slippery thoughts, actually works.  Scientists, being on the whole materialists by nature, insist that the mind works entirely according to the laws of physics.  It's all just a matter of, well, matter, and of course, 'as any fule do no', matter behaves in mechanical ways which can be measured. 

Except, it doesn't!

At the sub-atomic level 'matter' dances to its own infinite variety of possibilities.  Any attempt to measure such particles, or quanta, actually interferes with their state of being.  A perfect example of 'now ya sees it, now ya don't'!  So what sort of a basis is that for determining reality?

Some neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as the nonscientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality. But this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or rather, what we don’t know.

Quite so because the real 'reality' is that 'real things' are made up of zillions of totally mad, unpredictable possibility of things each of which may be a 'thing', or merely, yet another zillion possibilities of things and if you so much as glance at them, let alone actually measure them, then you instantly lose about 99% of their 'reality' leaving you clutching at the equivalent of a grain of sand from the Sahara!

That graunching sound you just heard was my brain coming to an emergency halt so I will leave you to read Prof. Frank's excellent essay which, needless to say, explains things much more clearly than I can.

 

 

Comments

[TheBigHenry]

David,

"It will be difficult. But the difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, 'But how can it be like that?' which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar. I will not describe it in terms of an analogy with something familiar; I will simply describe it.

There was a time when the newspapers said that only twelve men understood the theory of relativity. I do not believe there ever was such a time. There might have been a time when only one man did, because he was the only guy who caught on, before he wrote his paper. But after people read the paper a lot of people understood the theory of relativity in some way or other, certainly more than twelve.

On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it. I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that."

-- Richard Feynman, in The Character of Physical Law (1965)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

[David Duff]

Thank you, Henry, and that damned Richard Feynman has much to answer for because he it was who, in his typically humorous, charming fashion, helped to entrance me on the subject. He might be right that my lack of understanding is 'psychological' but, equally, it could be that I'm just thick! Also, to be fair, it may be because I do not speak the language - mathematics!

[Whitewall]

Glad you gents tackled this subject as I am no match. I do not speak the language of mathematics either...just its redhead stepchild-Money.

[Peter Whale]

The materialists have a problem because all substance is subject to decay and must of necessity revert to its smallest component whereby at that quantum level is found to be affected by conscious observation which proves mind over matter and the observer of the mind within then controls and affects the universe and the world that each of us observes is completely unique to oneself and created by oneself in one's image proving that I am master of the universe. To date that is the longest sentence I have written.

[Bob]

QM is difficult, but no more mysterious than any other unknown thing, not that it's entirely unknown. We can make bombs, solid state electronics, lasers, and other devices that rely on quantum principles. As time goes on we'll learn more and develop practical applications.

One must be careful with the idea of materialism. Some of its detractors define it as a denial of "spirituality", never mind there is no evidence for non-corporeal spirits.

[David Duff]

"there is no evidence for non-corporeal spirits"

So what is a thought?

[AussieD]

Off topic but our news services tell us that Martin McGuiness has gone to his just deserts - pity it took so long.

[Whitewall]

AussieD, it seems you are correct. He has assumed room temperature at the age of 66..

[Michael F Adams]

Eek! Just mine own age!!!

[Bob]

David, a thought is the result of processes in a material brain. We now know the feeling you have that you exist behind your eyes somewhere separate from your body is an artifact of developing intelligence, such as it may be. Some go further and suggest there is no free will and the thought itself was inevitable. That's called determinism.

[David Duff]

Bob, can you measure a thought? Can you weigh a thought? Can you even predict a thought? Thought not!

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Bob, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy'!

[Bob]

David, the weight of a thought, if you mean mass, is meaningless. Neuroscientists can measure and predict thoughts within certain parameters. There will probably always be things we don't know, especially as individuals. Will's point, while poetically written, is both obvious and banal.

[David Duff]

"Neuroscientists can measure and predict thoughts within certain parameters."

You mean like if I miss the nail and hit my finger with the hammer vile thoughts will enter my head. Well, that's useful! Of course, as far as poor, old Will was concerned, he lacked neuroscientists to tell him what he was thinking!

[Peter Whale]

"all the worlds a stage" if that was in the plural maybe Wills worlds encompassed the universe whereby the stage got infinitely biggerer.