Hi Keith
Thanks for sharing your ideas concerning quantum physics. I am aware of the
material you describe having read various popular interpretations of the field.
Unfortunately I cannot offer any insights of my own!
However, your observation, that "the world that we see and touch is actually
subject to some sort of record that is being kept at a deep level and in
terms that we cannot comprehend because our sense organs are limited in
scope", did remind of me of something in David Gelernter's book "Mirror Worlds".
A review of Gelernter includes this statement:
In Mirror Worlds Gelernter envisioned us mustering the resources and
implementation efficiencies to allow us to build grand software simulations of
government, economic and social systems. Then, by cleverly instrumenting the
simulations to be real-time reflections of the system being modeled... you get
a BIG
BANG!
The simulation becomes something qualitatively different. It is a Mirror World.
As
more and more of our value exchanges and communication take place purely in
cyberspace, the model is the system... we don't have to build the simulation
and
instrument it... the model and the system are one and the same!
(Source: http://sohodojo.com/ribs/mirror.html )
Bob
Keith Hudson wrote:
> Hi Bob,
>
> I've been on FW from its earliest months and this subject has never turned
> up before. Sheldrake's ideas about morphic fields are very close to a
> metaphorical interpretion of quantum physics which I call a 'deep
> information field' in what I write below. This doesn't make me any sort of
> expert but it's something I dwell on frequently and really underpins my own
> personal philosophy.
>
> (However, it's likely that some FWers will not be interested in quantum
> physics or in philosophical interpretations of it so, as this is likely to
> be longish, please read no further if that's the case!)
>
> No-one understands quantum physics. At least this is what at least two of
> the greatest contemporary minds on the subject, Richard Feynman and John
> Wheeler, have said about it. Nevertheless, both of them have speculated
> enormously about its implications, sometimes to verifiable effect, and they
> both seem to give the go-ahead to the worthwhileness of lesser mortals such
> as ourselves dwelling on the subject, even if only with awe.
>
> To my mind the principal wonder of the universe as partially revealed by
> quantum physics is that there is a deep field, and this is mainly
> characterised by information content rather than by mechanical things or
> qualities that we are normally able to measure or conceive of. For
> example, if previously paired electrons with opposite spins (and thus a
> relationship with each other) are separated and fired off in opposite
> directions then a change of spin on one electron will be detected by the
> other electron instantly -- or at least, with a reaction time that is
> faster than the speed of light or any other transmission method -- no
> matter how far distant it is from its former companion. This effect has
> been demonstrated in a well-known series of experiments that were initiated
> by Michael Aspect. So some sort of telepathy, morphic resonance or
> information field seems to be involved here.
>
> Another way of glimpsing this information field is given by Richard
> Feynman. Imagine, he says, an electron moving in a particular direction.
> Its progress cannot be measured in any way (say, by a photon) without
> greatly disturbing it and the path of the electron is best conceived of as
> appearing at a definite place at one instance, disappearing, and instantly
> reappearing at another specific place. What we conceive of as a smoothly
> unfolding reality, as previously described by classical physics, can only
> exist as a huge stack of discontinuous "stationary states" -- of electrons,
> photons, protons or what have you -- that is produced, or directed, by a
> deep field of information. This is the fundamental postulate of quantum
> physics as laid down by Bohr in 1913. In anthropomorphic terms, this deep
> field obviously 'knows' what has been going on previously in the
> superficial world in which we live.
>
> Looking at reality in this way, the world that we see and touch is actually
> subject to some sort of record that is being kept at a deep level and in
> terms that we cannot comprehend because our sense organs are limited in
> scope (and all scientific apparatus has to translate their performance into
> sensual terms). And this applies to everything, even to the whole world,
> the solar system, whole galaxies containing hundreds of thousands of suns,
> and concatenations of galaxies that stretch to the furthest edge of the
> universe -- far beyond the conceptions of most of us unless we happen to be
> astronomers. And the reason why the projection of all this can be
> 'comfortably' held in total detail in a deep field of information is that
> the 'inner layers' of reality (from mankind's position as somehow half way
> between) is far deeper than the extent of the 'outer layers' as mentioned
> above. (For example, the proportionate extent of space between an electron
> and a nucleus within an atom is billions of time greater than the space
> between the sun and the earth. And deeper still at the layers of smaller
> particles, proportionate space is larger still.)
>
> This 'all-knowingness' of an information field is very close to the notion
> of the omniscient God at the heart of all mankind's religions. It's almost
> identical, except that the different religions have different cultural
> notions of God's other characteristics -- the Christian one being that of a
> very anthropomorphic God with whom an individual can have a preferential
> relationship, Allah being similar, though with a different personality, the
> Buddhist one being so impersonal that it's almost no God, and so on and so on.
>
> In my view, this cannot be taken further by science. Quantum physics has
> re-interpreted the idea of an omniscient God in perfectly acceptable
> scientific terms. It can only be taken further by faith. By this I mean
> that even a deep field of information (or one of the Gods of the different
> religions, if you like) doesn't totally determine what happens in all the
> 'higher' levels that we call reality. The universe can unfold in different
> ways (also called Chaos Theory). Even we, by a mysterious process that we
> rather crudely call 'freewill' and which is associated with that other
> equally mysterious essence that we call 'consciousness' also has some input
> into what actually unfolds. Even though our new inputs are infinitessimally
> small compared with everything that has gone on before, and thus laid down
> only as a sort of provisional overlay upon a template in the deep
> information field, they are still important. We still have a degree of
> significance. Not much! But some. No matter how small this is, it makes
> all the difference.
>
> I believe it is this feeling of significance which is the true source of
> the survival instinct of all lifeforms, ourselves included, deeper even
> than memes or genes and, at a conscious human level, the source of
> creativity. Without it we would have no possible feeling of significance,
> no curiosity, no art, no science, no religion, no speculation, no basis for
> morality -- indeed, no reason for living. We would be no more than
> automatic vehicles for chemical reactions with no responsibility for what
> we do.
>
> I am sure that quantum physics will come up with experiments in the future
> that will further refine what I have vaguely called the deep information
> field and make the notion more widely acceptable, but I am also sure that
> what we sense as our freewill or consciousness or creativity will never be
> explicable or demonstrated in scientific terms because it's an embedded
> part of a larger universe that can never take a truly objective view of
> itself, nor we of it.
>
> Keith H
>
>
> At 16:11 30/05/01 -0400, you wrote:
> <<<<
> Controversy follows Sheldrake at every turn, and little wonder. The
> existence of
> telepathy, a radical notion by itself, is just a subset of Sheldrake's
> larger premises-- that invisible, but onetheless pervasive "morphic fields"
> are responsible for both the shape and behavior of all hings, from atoms to
> zebras, organizing them much as a magnetic field lines up iron filings.
> Just as controversial is Sheldrake's hypothesis that these fields broadcast
> across time and space, a phenomenon he calls morphic resonance. Result: A
> carrot seed grows into the shape of a carrot because it is directed by the
> cumulative morphic resonance of all previous carrots. A million blind
> African termites build a 10-foot-tall nest, featuring top-to-bottom
> ventilation shafts and ther complex architectures, because they are guided
> by the morphic resonance of previous termite nests. A newspaper crossword
> puzzle is easier to solve late in the day, because the morphic resonance
> broadcast by thousands of successful solvers facilitates the task. A dog
> anticipates its owner's return because the bond they forge through close
> association is what Sheldrake terms a "social" morphic field, which
> stretches, but does not break, when they are apart. Sheldrake contends the
> same transcendental bonding explains how
> pigeons home, fish school, and dogs and cats find owners who have moved
> hundreds of miles away. Humans, Sheldrake says, retain only vestiges of
> morphic-resonance telepathy, possibly because telephones and mass media
> make the ability less necessary for survival. In animals, he contends, it
> remains robust.
> >>>>
>
> ___________________________________________________________________
>
> Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
> 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
> Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
> mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> ________________________________________________________________________
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