Marsha, Krimel, DMB, and all --
We should be indebted to Marsha for coming up with statements by seven
investigative physicists which suggest that experience, and our intellectual
ordering of it, proceeds FROM the observing self, and not the other way
around. Biophysicist Robert Lanza also maintains that "Today's
preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from
the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern
physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an
island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath."
Because this Lanza statement complements the others, I should like to add it
to Marsha's quotes:
"The urgent and primary questions of the universe have been
undertaken by those physicists who are trying to explain the
origins of everything with grand unified theories. But as
exciting and glamorous as these theories are, they are an
evasion, if not a reversal, of the central mystery of knowledge:
that the laws of the world were somehow created to produce
the observer. And more important than this, that the observer
in a significant sense creates reality and not the other way around.
Recognition of this insight leads to a single theory that unifies our
understanding of the world."
--Robert Lanza: A New Theory of the Universe
Also, I'm curious as to what Krimel means by his latest [8/30] assertion:
Experience as I have tried to insist is not a unity at all,
it is the illusion of unity.
I have never directly experienced a "unity" or anything like it, have you?
The unifying of experience is something done by the intellect in retrospect.
This statement makes no sense to me. Indeed, the unity which Krimel insists
is an "illusion" is the reality we all seek.
Thanks and regards,
Ham
Thomas Stapp:
"The physical world is "Not a structure built out of independently
existing non-analysable entities, but rather a web of relationships
between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationship to
the whole" " An elementary particle is not an independently existing
non-analysable entity. It is in essence, a set of relationships that reach
outwards to other things."
"In conclusion there is definitely not a substantial physical world."
John Wheeler:
"May the universe in some strange sense be "brought into being" by the
participation of those who participate?... The vital act is the act of
participation. "Participator" is the incontrovertible new concept given by
quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term "ob server" of classical
theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches
what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics
says."
Werner Heisenberg:
"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of
questioning".
"...we never can know what actually goes on in the invisible subatomic
realm, and that, therefore, we should "abandon all attempts to construct
perceptual models of atomic processes".
Niels Bohr:
".. an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can be ascribed
neither to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation."
"Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties definable
and observable only through their interaction with other systems."
"Quantum mechanics entails the necessity of a final renunciation of
classical ideas of causality and a radical revision of our attitude
towards the problem of physical reality."
David Bohm:
"Parts are seen to be in immediate connection in which their dynamical
relationships depend in an irreducible way on the state of the whole
system and the entire universe. Thus one is lead to a new notion of
unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of an analyzability of
the world into separate and independently existent parts."
Robert Oppenheimer:
"If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the
same, we must say 'No'; if we ask whether the electron's position changes
with time, we must say 'No'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must
say 'No'. The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the
conditions of a man's self after death; but they are not familiar answers
for the tradition of 17th and 18th century science."
Fritjof Capra (The turning point) sums up the current situation:
"In atomic physics the observed phenomena can be under stood only as as
correlations between various processes of obser vation and measurement,
and the end of this chain of processes lies always in the consciousness of
the human observer. the crucial feature of quantum theory is that the
observer is not only necessary to observe the properties of an atomic
phenomenon, but is necessary even to bring about these properties. .. The
electron does not have objective properties independent of my mind. In
atomic physics the sharp Cartesian division between mind and matter,
between the observer and the observed, can no longer be maintained. We can
never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about
ourselves."
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