18- The pandora's box SUBJECTIVISM
When I was a physics student at the University of Karlsruhe Germany ( between 1975 and 1982), one day there was an open air art exhibition in the city. I saw the following construction made by an artist. A bowl is on the floor. A very big planar glass is on the bowl and a hammer is on the floor. The artist named his work "frameless nonsense" . He explained to me that At first look the rim of the bowl may appear to be a frame for the glass also. So you may think if you hit the part of the glass inside the rim of the bowl you may think the consequences of your action would be limited to shattered pieces that fall in the bowl. In fact the whole glass would be shattered into pieces and most pieces would fall outside the bowl on the floor. He made this to demonstrate how our actions may affect areas outside of their intended scope. How falling trees in Amazon forests may steal my oxygen Or how CFC gas in your sprays may damage the polar ozone layer, causing skin cancer on an eskimo.
If the artist reads this book I send my greetings to him.
The Copenhagen formulation is a "frameless nonsense" in the sense that it affected areas of human thought outside physics, outside science almost in an irreparable way. Its implications on philosophical thinking and general human culture are enormous. You may hardly find a writing in any area of human culture from art to mysticism from sociology to study of paranormal where the “mysteries of new physics” is not mentioned and mostly misused .
What that made the formulation to a frameless nonsense is as we said the use of the word measurement. The following pseudo-logical argumentation that was triggered by the use of the word measurement:
Physics, the most objective and most fundamental of all sciences cannot formulate its basic principles without referring to the concept measurement .
But wait a moment!
For a measurement there must be two things:
What kind of being can be an observer? Of course a being with consciousness that can interpret the results of the measurement.
See! most fundamental physical lows cannot be formulated without accepting the fact that there is something we may call consciousness that itself is indescribable by materialistic lows . It is This consciousness that creates the real world from one of the potential probabilities hidden in the wave function that itself is nothing physically real .
It is the observers consciousness that makes the Schrodingers cat dead or alive merely by observing it.
Take the nonsense one step further and it goes like this:
The world is there at all since we as conscious beings observe it.
Let me remember here again: The problem of Quantum mechanics is only the apparent indeterminism and nonlocality in some type of physical interactions. There is not any evidence why we should feel obliged to an assumtion that the mere witnessing of a physical event by an observer would effect the event
Unfortunately people like fables, fairy tales. Schrodingers cat became probabily the most famous fable much more famous then the fables of La Fontaine. Discussions are still going on here and there and books are written discussing the role of consciousness in new physics. People like or need the idea that there is some immaterial mysterious entity called consciousness. Partly because this feeds the hope that this entity may survive the death of the body namely the dissolution of the purely material automaton. The mechanistic viewpoint of the world without a place for soul was and is depressing for many people. 1
Another reasoning goes like this:
Since physics had "proved(! ) " that measurers consciousness determines the outcome of the measurement, mind/ consciousness is not only a basic entity unexplainable in terms of physical interactions it also must be somehow higher valued then matter influencing material processes. The "mind over matter" "soul over matter" discussions in circles researching the paranormal phenomena were the consequence. People saw in Quantum mechanics the possibility of explaining the paranormal (Telekinesis telepathy etc.). The so called "observational theories" of the paranormal came into being
. 4
Another ‘reasoning’ goes like this:
if science admits that reality is something so subjective depending on the observer , it also admits that knowledge obtained by scientific methods is in no way superior to other sources of `knowledge`.
The previous statement is the so called "postmodern approach" to reality and knowledge
One of the most famous postmodern philosophers K.P.Feyerabend said in an interview with Scientific American remembering the time when he was lecturing in Berkeley growing number of mexican african-american and indian students 5:
"Who was I to tell the people what and how to think. Their ancestors have developed cultures of their own colorful languages harmonious views of the relations between man and man and man and nature whose remnants are a living criticism of the tendencies of seperation analysis self-centeredness inherent in western thought”
There his a hidden arrogance in this apparent humbleness. The arrogance is hidden in the implicit claim that today’s scientific culture is exclusively a property of western world.
The scientific knowledge is intellectual property of humanity. Many cultures have contributed to it. Judeo Christian Hellenistic Chinese Islamic and others. The development of science is like any other process with a dynamic that contains self positive feedback like for example transitions from vapor to liquid phase or from normal conducting to superconducting phase when the temperature is lowered . First it starts slowly and locally. Here and there appear some small drops . They grow up to a certain size and disappear because of thermal motions. But there is a critical drop-size. If the size of a drop exceeds this size the process of condensation proceeds without halt and the micro droplet suddenly grows to a macroscopical drop. If the conditions differ slightly the condensation can happen somewhere else. The historical fact is that the size of some of the drops of scientific knowledge and the social conditions favoring further growth of this drop had reached the critical value sometime in 16 century in Europe.
Science is not only the part of the common culture of the whole humanity in that sense but it is also power. The best way to tell people "stay powerless" Is to say "your culture has your own values That are equally good or even better. So why bother with science". Don’t get me wrong I honestly believe that this was not Feyerabends aim and that I don’t think he had this even in mind when he said this. But I know people in my country referring to philosophers like Feyerabend in order to convince me that scientific knowledge is not as superior and as important as it was believed to be. What I answer to them is that Feyerabends knowledge of science and of the dynamics of scientific progress is insufficient for making such far reaching claims.
The Copenhagen formulation is also one of the hidden reasons behind the religious fanaticism. Because if the postmodern argument for relativism of knowledge is followed up to the end we end up with the following.
If science resigns from its claims to be the only reliable way towards the ultimate answers of fundamental questions, we don’t need to consider what science has to say about this and that `Our sources of knowledge are sufficient to us` .
Up to this point there is nothing against the sprit of postmodern relativism or postmodern democracy of viewpoints.
But the next argument goes like this:
Since our knowledge is the ultimate knowledge, it is the only truth.
Thus removing scientific knowledge from its superior position through postmodern relativism didn't create a democracy of alternative viewpoints as Paul Feyerabend may had wished but on the contrary it created large number of rivals each claiming to be the ultimate truth. And most of these rivals are less democratic then scientific knowledge itself. Science has a built in mechanism detecting the conflicts between theories and observations so that better theories can come into being (although this mechanism of deciding between competing theories doesn’t function always impartially since scientists are also humans). Many other sources of knowledge lack a sufficient built in repair, renewing mechanism.
And all these developments were triggered by the use of the seemingly harmless word of “measurement” in Copenhagen interpretation. Of course there were other reasons too for the rising of the anti-scientific climax like the atom bomb, the environmental pollution, increase of unemployment rates because of increasing automation of jobs etc. But these are not the subjects of this book.
Next chapter
1 There are serious reports of cases of reincarnation type 2, 3 . I don’t want to claim that these are all wrong. Some of the collected data seem to be very careful analyzed and quite convincing. I don’t know to what kind of conclusions we will be led in future by investigation of such cases. What I claim in this book merely is that the assumption of a separate immaterial entity like consciousness is not inevitable to understand the so called the reduction of the wave function
2 Stevenson, Ian 1980
3 Stevenson, Ian 1988
4 I am not against investigation of paranormal. On the contrary . But I am against cheap explanations. It may be true that Quantum mechanics is somehow related to paranormal (if it exists) but such a claim to be taken more seriously there must be a well defined experimental environment where the interaction of quantum mechanical effects and paranormal effects can observed under controlled conditions. If there is for example a relation between telekinesis and quantum nature of matter at all, the best condition it could be observed I guess would be telekinesis experiments using macroscopic quantum phenomena like superliquid helium or superconductuvity. I haven’t heard anything like that
5 John Horgan 1993