Re: Original Sin

Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:

On personal experience discussing with some scientists, but also from
reading or listening to scientists. Richard Dawkins clearly believes
that the evolution of the species (indeed that the blind evolution of
the species) took place in objective reality.

Everyone (more or less), all the time (more or less), talks
as if the things we observe are indicative of a real external
world.

I think it's a plain
fact that many scientists are not aware of the difference between
phenomenal and objective reality,

Of course they are. Ask Dawkins or Wolpert or whoever whether
a person moving from one end of an Ames room to the other
really changes size.

They may not look at the distinction in the same way as you,
but disagreeing with you is not in itself an intellectual
deficiency.

Albert Einstein, thought that QM implies that the moon is not there
when nobody is looking, and therefore worked hard and long trying to
demonstrate that what quantum theory implied about reality couldn't be
right. Bell's test results proved him wrong.

I think you mean Aspect's. (Bell's inequalities; Aspect's experiments.)
Anyway, Aspect's results did not (of course) prove that the moon isn't
there when no one is looking, and actually I think it very unlikely
that Einstein really thought that QM implies that (rather than, say,
that the then-dominant way of understanding QM could insightfully
be caricatured as implying that).

Niehls Bohr made it clear that it is wrong to think of an objective
world producing quantum phenomena: "There is no quantum world. There
is only an abstract quantum description. It is wrong to think that the
task of physics is to find out how nature is."

It's possible that Bohr thought it wrong to think of an objective
world producing quantum phenomena, but the words you quote don't
say that. At least, the way I understand them is as saying that
the formalism of QM doesn't purport to be a direct description
of reality. That's an epistemological, not an ontological, claim.
It's not clear to me whether you were trying to present it as
something more.

The following are maybe less famous but still A-level physicists (by
which I mean physicists who have made important contributions to
science):

(In the UK, "A-levels" are examinations taken by school pupils
at about age 18. You might want to use a different term.)

Now is the above the majority understanding? Hard to say.

I'd bet a very substantial sum that if we were to conduct
a survey of first-rate theoretical physicists, asking whether
they believe "that QM implies that consciousness creates
physical reality", then your answer would be in a small
minority. I suspect that something like 90% would answer no.
But of course I haven't done such a survey.

But the conclusions of some
of the very best who were above all that or who were just too curious
is pretty unanimous I think.

Er, what? Of course your quotations, chosen to support your
point of view, are "unanimous". That's a fact about your
selection, not about the actual opinions of physicists.

And now that we have Bell's test results
even the non-specialist can understand why that should be so (Bell's
theorem is inspired by but is not dependent on Quantum Mechanics, so
can be understood without knowledge of Quantum Mechanics and will
remain true even if Quantum Mechanics is one day proven wrong.)

Yup, Bell's theorem just says "if everything's governed by
local hidden variables in the following sort of way then
we'll see X", and it turns out that we see Y instead. But
it's pretty disingenuous to suggest that Bell's theorem
enables everyone to "understand why" consciousness creates
physical reality. Bell's theorem doesn't say anything about
consciousness.

A very recent (2006) book that exhaustively
explains why the only possible implication of quantum mechanics is
that consciousness creates reality is "Quantum Enigma: Physics
Encounters Consciousness" written by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner,
two physics professors of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

If it really claims that "the only possible implication of
quantum mechanics is that consciousness creates reality"
then, sorry, it's obviously wrong.

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

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