Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
Hi Dominque and Rob,

It is a good point to remember that we can get locked into our mindsets .

Dominique, I assign the Sokal papers to my students as an example of this. As a note, the idea of combining "consciousness" with quantum mechanics has been fairly popular, at least in some crowds (e.g. Dennet, Penrose), since the early 1990's. On the plus side, they were attempting to define, as part of that debate, exactly how you would go about testing such a theory. The discovery of quantum gate structures in neuronal cells in 1995 (I think - can't remember the reference of the top of my head) does actually give a potential physical basis for it.

Marc
Marc,
I have been interested in quantum mechanics during close to a couple of years circa the early 90’s and I have to acknowledge, in the defense of those who lost ground at some point, that your landmarks may be seriously challenged when you comes at last to understand that the mass of a particle is expressed in energy units, and that mass, as the profane understands it at a macroscopic level, has no longer relevance in the realm of microcosm. You come to realize that everything around us, and us including, is all about energy. From this standpoint on I think that the leap toward irrationality is a small one and is easy to do.

As a matter of fact, and still talking about cognitive bias, I remember some interesting conversations I have had about the opportunities that could be found in the fairly rational mass/energy equivalence as a way of getting people into any imaginary world that would please to you (ex. spiritualism and ghosts, telekinesis, telepathy, nihilism, etc.)

I guess I won’t teach you anything in saying that, as science, quantum mechanics has the exceptional particularity to have regularly allowed accurate predictions of physical events without previous testing and with mere theory and calculations as sole information available--the prediction of the existence of the quark and of its exact number per particle, if I may describe things that way, is one among the best examples.
Although it is not relevant to quantum mechanics the theory of general relativity equally relates to this exceptional specificity and it is even a better example since it is more popularly known.

So, quantum mechanics constitutes both a nice example and a nice opportunity for whosoever is looking for a sound fulcrum in order to fool others’ mind.

There would be a thick book to write about the matter. Isn’t it?

Regards,