Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness

360 Pages·2009·5.58 MB·English

by  Victor J. Stenger

QUANTUM
GODS
QJANTUM
GODS
Creation, Chaos, and the
Search for Cosmic Consciousness
VICTOR J, STENGER

CONTENTS
Quantum Flapdoodle and Other Flummery 7
Foreword by Michael Shermer
Preface 13
Acknowledgments 21
Chapter 1: Belief and Nonbelief in America 23
Chapter 2: What the Bleep Is the Secret? 35
Chapter 3: Pursuing the Tao 49
Chapter 4: The Guru of GUTs 55
Chapter 5: Space, Time, and Matter 63
Chapter 6: The Great Paradigm Shift 87
Chapter 7: Deism and Darwinism 97
Chapter 8: The Spooky Quantum 107
Chapter 9: The Elements of Matter 129
Chapter 10: Chaos, Complexity, and Emergence 147
Chapter 11: Return to Reduction 163
Chapter 12: Ghostbusting the Quantum 175
Chapter 13: Quantum Philosophy 193
Chapter 14: Where Can God Act? 209
Chapter 15: The God Who Plays Dice 227
Chapter 16: Nothingism 239
Bibliography 265
Index 277
About the Author 291
QUANTUM FLAPDOODLE
AND OTHER FLUMMERY
Foreword by Michael Shermer
n the spring of 2004, while on a book tour that took me to the square
block-sized Powell's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, I appeared on KATU TV's
AM Northwest. In the green room, where they mix authors with chefs, pet
trainers, and dating self-help gurus with a not-so-healthy dose of junk food and
coffee, I was introduced to the producers of a documentary film improbably
named What the Bleep Do WeKnow.l2They were pleasant enough fellows who
seemed pleased to meet an editor of Scientific American because, they said, their
film was about quantum physics. At the time I recall thinking, "A documentary
film on quantum physics screening in a large public theater in competition with
Hollywood films? This won't make it to the second weekend."
How wrong I was. What the Bleep Do We Know.!? went on to become one
of the highest grossing documentary films of all time. How can this be? Is the
public suddenly interested in quantum physics? No. The explanation is to be
found in the fact that the film is not really about quantum physics. The
documentary's central motif is that we create our own reality through will,
thought, and consciousness, which, according to the "experts" who appear as
talking heads throughout the film (most of whom are not scientists, let alone
quantum physicists), depends on quantum mechanics, that branch of physics so
befuddling even to those who do it for a living that it can be invoked whenever
something supernatural or paranormal is desired.
The Caltech Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described the misuse
and abuse of quantum physics as "quantum flapdoodle." Examples from the film
abound. The University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for
example, says: "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." In my monthly column
in ScientifacAmerican, I publicly challenged Dr. Goswami to leap out of a
twenty-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely
through the ground's tendencies. To my knowledge he has not taken me up on
this experimental protocol. (In such an experiment you would most definitely
want to be in the no-jump control group.)
Quantum flapdoodle infuses New Age gurus such as Deepak Chopra (whose
quantum theory that aging is all in the mind is belied by the fact that he appears
to be aging like everyone else), J. Z. Knight (masquerading as "Ramtha," the
35,000-year-old spirit warrior dishing out spiritual advice ... for a price, of
course), and Masura Emoto, the Japanese author of The Message of Water, who
believes that 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 a crystal to split into two. We are still awaiting
replication of this research, not to mention publication of it in a peer-reviewed
scientific journal. In the meantime, domo arigato, Mr. Emoto.
Moving beyond such New Age nuttiness, there have been serious attempts to
link the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle, which states that the more precisely you know a particle's position, the
less precisely you know its speed, and vice versa) to mysteries of the
macroworld (such as consciousness). A leading candidate to link the two comes
from physicist Roger Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of
quantum consciousness is also featured in What the Bleep Do We Know.!?
According to this highly speculative conjecture, inside our neurons are tiny
hollow microtubules that may initiate a wave function collapse that leads to the
quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the
synapses between neurons and thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern,
thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave function collapse can
only come about when an atom is "observed" (i.e., affected in any way by
something else), the idea is that the "mind" (either in your head or out there in
space-time somewhere) may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to
molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms.... Maybe the
entire universe is one giant mind that brings itself into existence by thought
alone. Or maybe not.
When I first looked into this idea for my column on What the Bleep Do We
Know? in Scientific American, I called on the one man who knows both the
science and the pseudoscience behind quantum physics, and that is Victor
Stenger, who has single-handedly taken it upon himself to address each and
every claim of the quantum flapdoodlists. For the Penrose-Hameroff conjecture,
for example, Stenger explained to me that the gap between subatomic quantum
effects and large-scale macrosystems is too large to bridge. Specifically, Stenger
noted that for something to be described quantum mechanically, the system's
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 three orders of
magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-
macro connection. QE.D.
With this level of scientific and semantic precision Victor Stenger has taken
on the God question in his book God. The Failed Hypothesis, addressing specific
claims made for the Judeo-Christian God Yahweh in a systematic deconstruction
that left them in tatters. As a result, Stenger's book rode the "New Atheist"
Dawkins-driven wave to New York Times best-sellerdom. But Stenger added
something new to this age-old debate, and that was a compelling argument for
why there almost certainly is no God because of the contradictions inherent in
the nature of God (or at least how God is portrayed in the Judeo-Christian
worldview), as well as positive evidence that the universe does not need a
creator-God.
But that was just a start for the polymathic Stenger. After all, Yahweh is just
one among a pantheon of gods that have been conceived of in Western history,
and in this, his latest masterpiece, Stenger picks up where he left off, addressing
claims made for other gods, including and especially the sorts of arguments
presented in What the Bleep Do We Know.!? to which he devotes an entire
chapter that also serves as a brilliant tutorial in quantum physics, of which the
great Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said that no one really understands.