While jogging along the Hudson River recently, a few lonely snowflakes fell and made a haiku in my head.
all snowflakes
special. But so what?they melt
too fast to be a problem
I’ve been in a bad mood lately and I don’t know why. This could be due to a variety of things, such as shorter daylight hours or an unfavorable comparison of this holiday season to previous holiday seasons. The COVID plague and climate change may be a factor, plus many Americans may refuse to recognize these threats.
My futile efforts to understand quantum mechanics are of no avail. You started your quantum experiment as a pandemic project 18 months ago, what have you accomplished? I read books and articles, interviewed experts, and audited courses in schools. PEP553: Quantum Mechanics and its Applications to EngineeringI filled five notebooks with ruminations.
However, my hopes for clarity have been dashed. My goal was to open the black box at the heart of physics and make the world a little less strange. Instead, the opposite happened. The black box of quantum mechanics has expanded to encompass the world. Everything baffles me more than ever, myself included.
Like all sentient beings, I am a wonderfully complex engineering marvel. For example, teasing that he despises Christmas like Scrooge without bothering his girlfriend. Yet I have nothing but a vague, hand-rippling sense of why I do what I do and feel what I feel. I am a black box to myself.
I like to believe that I can open a black box and know myself, because self-awareness is a prerequisite for self-control, or free will, and free will is a prerequisite for a meaningful life. But I’m reluctantly starting to agree with philosopher Daniel Dennett that we’re far less self-aware than we think we are. perform chores along the way and display what Dennett calls “comprehensible abilities.”
Psychiatrists strive to make sense of us with a variety of theories ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to neuroevolutionary psychocognitive theory. They blame our dysfunctions on repressed childhood traumas. about the ebb and flow of neurotransmitters; about the instincts that helped our ancestors thrive but are maladaptive today. About selfish genes.
Psychiatrists and psychologists talk to us, shock us and, above all, prescribe drugs to get us out of our funk. But the abundance of theory of mind and treatments shows that none work so well. So is the permanence of religion, the prescient panacea for the human condition.
Buddhism enthusiasts claim that Buddhism is not a religion, but a science, employing meditation as a means to achieve self-awareness and self-control. However, I see it as a form of self-brainwashing, a way to repress rather than understand the unpleasant aspects of the self.
Some scientists, desperate to understand the mind, turn to quantum mechanics for answers. I crave self-awareness, too, but quantum mechanics seems likely to exacerbate our confusion, given the puzzles it poses. It floats in the “superposition” of many possible paths. Only when we observe an electron does it follow one seemingly random path.
Some theorists, notably David Bohm, have argued that hidden variables determine the apparently random behavior of particles. Bohm hypothesized that particles are guided by a “pilot wave” that permeates the universe and instantaneously links all its parts through a quantum mechanism called entanglement. The pilot wave suggested by Bohm belongs to the ‘internal order’ that sustains our reality and gives rise to matter and mind.
Physicist Wolfgang Pauli also entertained the idea that matter and spirit arise from a deeper quantum reality. There are interesting parallels between Pauli and Baum. Both suffered from depression and were influenced by intellectuals with mystical tendencies. Baum had a close relationship with the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Pauli with the psychiatrist Carl Jung.
Other quantum theorists, notably Eugene Wigner and John Wheeler, have proposed that our conscious observations of the world determine its properties, and in some ways even cause it to exist. flatter us by implying that we are important constituents of reality. If we weren’t here to observe the universe, it wouldn’t exist.
Unfortunately, there is no empirical evidence for theories that link the mind to quantum effects. They belong more to metaphysics than to physics. And they say nothing about human emotions such as love, anger, fear, and sadness. Nor does it provide insight into mental illness.
Proponents of “quantum psychiatry” claim to offer such insight. If quantum mind theory is a fringe, then quantum psychiatry is a fringe within a fringe. For the most part, quantum psychiatry repackages the power of positive thinking bromide in quantum terms such as superposition and entanglement.
However, one proponent of quantum psychiatry offers an interesting and specific theory of mental illness. Sultan Tallaci, a professor of medicine at the University of Uskudar in Turkey, takes seriously the many-worlds hypothesis that all possibilities described by quantum equations are realized in other universes branching from ours. .
In a 2019 paper Journal of Psychopathology, Tarlaci speculates that the hallucinations that plague people with schizophrenia result from other worlds invading ours. This effect may also explain the experience of healthy people, such as “words, images, or music that suddenly appear in our consciousness out of nowhere.”
Are parallel universes responsible for our mood swings and distorted thinking? Talk about hidden variable theory! I don’t take Tarlaci’s ideas seriously. It’s like Stephen Hawking’s irony about the missing sock disappearing into a tiny black hole. And it’s hard to imagine Tarurasi’s hypothesis helping people suffering from psychotic delusions.
Will we ever discover a true mind-body theory that reveals all our hidden variables? Does it explain our thoughts, moods and actions? Perhaps a mind-body theory based on quantum computation?
i doubt it. If quantum mechanics can’t explain why a single electron turns this way instead of this way, how can it explain the quirks of our mind? Even if it does, I think we will still be a black box for ourselves.
I started this column wondering why I feel depressed. I left out the most likely cause of my depression. Two old friends just died of cancer. Depression seems like a rational response to death, the inevitability of death, the loss of everything we love.
The question is why not everytime Bad mood?Why, sometimes, when I’m buying a Christmas tree with her daughter, or watching a schmalzi movie, etc. jingle jungle Overwhelmed with joy and gratitude with your girlfriend (featuring a robot with a quantum mechanical heart)? Another haiku comes to mind.
everything must pass
Heat death awaits us.I very
I’m glad to be alive!
References:
death, physics, wishful thinking
Quantum Mechanics, Mind-Body Problem, Negative Theology
Is the Schrödinger equation correct?
David Bohm, Quantum Mechanics and Enlightenment
For a more detailed discussion of the mind-body problem and quantum mechanics, see: CAUTION: Sex, Death, and Science When Mind-Body Issues: Science, Subjectivity, and Who We Really Are.
