IV-12 Reflections in mainstream science.

 

(Permalien) This 12th chapter was started in December 2024,
but more content may be added, as in a blog.

 

I added this chapter here, to gather reflections going on in the science milieu. The original ideas I defend in this book are slowly emerging in «official» science, even if we are still far from breaking the terrible taboo on consciousness. But it is noteworthy that science has successfully started attacking the fortress of materialism, at least in physics.

So that this chapter is not «my» chapter, it essentially quotes other researchers in «official science». Although I comment them and compare with my own findings.

 

(«Alternative sciences» are not quoted here: in 50 years they produced nothing useful, so that I totally dropped such an approach, not even taking the effort to debunk them as I did early in the writing of this book)

 

Several of the researchers I quote in this chapter got their usual share of hazing and rebuff. This retarded and ridiculous aspect of things is still around unfortunately, and since 1999 I started to write, I am still «not a celebrity» (Newspeak for «shunned by the search engines»). So that, do not wait that some scientist or committee «recognises» me: check my stuff yourself. That is, examine yourself if my thesis are valid, and if yes make them known, use them.

The unravelling of space and time (Dec 2024)

(Permalien) Added in December 2024: Quanta Magazine always provide us with insightful articles in various domains of science. But this one beats them all: Unreaveling of space time. In short, the classical presentations of the physical world, Relativity and Quantum mechanics, would have a more fundamental explanation. The laws of physics would emerge from this more fundamental «theory of reality», without we have to introduce them in.

This is pretty much what I did, with my logical self-generation theory, right? Indeed it leads effortlessly to Quantum Mechanics, and it needs only a very reasonable hypothesis to lead to Relativity. The article contains other leads, like a «nib» of space-time, as I speculate above, instead of the particles only defining the space-time.

Eric Cavalcanti and experimental metaphysics (Dec 2024)

(Permalien) Another wow article in Quanta is about the physicist Eric Cavalcanti, the first to speak of «experimental metaphysics». His point is that, even the most modern science like Relativity and Quantum physics makes unconscious metaphysical assumptions about reality. For instance, a long held assumption was that space had to be Euclidean. Thus any experimental demonstration was unconsciously biased in this direction, thus «demonstrating» this metaphysical tenet! Only in 1919 the mass of the Sun was observed to deflect the light, telling that space is not Euclidean, after all.

We could fear that those hidden, implicit or unconscious metaphysical assumptions may make an absolute science impossible. However Eric Cavalcanti reasons in the other way around: they make metaphysics testable (in the sense of Popper). Not one assumption individually, but the whole system.

The first large unconscious metaphysical tenet to fall was the principle of locality, saying that things happening in one place do not affect things in other places. The theoretical refutation was the Bell theorem, and the experimental refutation was the Aspect experiment. Both led to the confirmation of the hard Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics (and to some Nobel prizes): quantum phenomenon are non-local, allowing for a lot of applications, like tunnel effect (in computer memories), quantum teleportation (secure Internet) and others.

Today, Cavalcanti and his peers are working on a set of three metaphysical assumptions, which, after Quantum Mechanics, cannot be all three simultaneously true. I quote the article: «-locality (no spooky action at a distance), -freedom of choice (no cosmic conspiracy tricking you into setting your detectors so that the outcomes seem to violate Bell’s inequality even though they don’t), and -absoluteness of observed events (an electron with spin up for Wigner’s friend is an electron with spin up for everyone)» (Yes Wigner also is in the gang).

 

They even question what is an «observer», the famous local observer of Einsteinian Relativity, also hired by Quantum Mechanics: can it be a simple physical process, or is it necessarily a consciousness?

The limit I see in their work is about this «observer» precisely: they do not consider consciousness as an immaterial entity, as I do myself (part V). So that of course they cannot get the difference between an observing physical process, and an observing human consciousness (still they ask the question, so that they are guessing something). This does not impair the study of Quantum Physics,  but an immaterial consciousness necessarily involves deeper metaphysics, with questions such as the relationship between consciousness and the physical world (chapter V-2), or even if the very existence of a physical universe depends on consciousnesses to observe it (chapter IV-6).

Of course when I did this label in 2000, nobody heed me. Now I laugh, ha ha ha ha!