While jogging along the Hudson River recently, a few lonely snowflakes fell, and I composed a haiku in my head:
every snowflake is
special. so what?they melt
too fast doesn’t matter
I’ve been feeling down lately and I’m not sure why. My melancholy is too firmwhich means they could stem from a number of things: less daylight, or unfavorable comparisons this holiday season the past. The COVID plague and climate change may be factors, plus rejection by many americans Identify these threats.
My futile efforts to understand quantum mechanics are of no avail.I start my quantum experiment What did I achieve as a pandemic project 18 months ago? I have read books and articles, interview with expertsAudited a course at my school: PEP553: Quantum Mechanics and Engineering Applications. I have filled five notebooks with musings.
but i want to be clear has been shattered. My goal is to open the black box at the heart of physics and make the world a less weird place. instead, the opposite happened. The black box of quantum mechanics has been expanded to encompass the entire world. Everything, including myself, confuses me more than ever.
Like every sentient being, I am an engineering marvel of immense complexity.I often perform the most exotic tasks artificial intelligence Can’t, like make fun of my girlfriend for her miserly disdain for Christmas without annoying her. Yet I only have a vague, hand-waving sense of why I do what I do or feel what I feel. I’m a black box to myself.
I want to believe that I can open the black box to know myself, because self-knowledge is the premise of self-control, that is, free will, free will is a prerequisite for a meaningful lifeBut I reluctantly began to agree with philosopher Daniel Dennett that we are far less self-aware than we think. We perform the chores on our to-do list like automatons, displaying what Dennett calls “no ability to comprehend“
Mind scientists try to explain usThe theory ranges from Freudian psychoanalysis Neuroevolutionary Psychological Cognition any. They blame our dysfunction on repressed childhood trauma; on the ebb and flow of neurotransmitters; on The instinct that helped our ancestors reproduce But maladaptive today; About the Wayward Gene.
Psychiatrists and psychologists talk to us, shocked us with Most importantly, give us medicine Let’s get rid of fear.But a large body of psychological theory and therapy suggests that none of them worked that wellThe same goes for religious persistence, the panacea for our prescient understanding of the human condition.
Buddhism is not a religion but a science that uses meditation as a tool for achievement, zealots claim Self-awareness and self-control. meditation Soothe my frantic mindbut I think it’s a form of self-brainwashinga method of repressing rather than understanding unpleasant aspects of the self.
Some scientists are so eager to understand the brain that they have turned to quantum mechanics for answers. I too crave self-knowledge, but given the conundrums posed by quantum mechanics, it seems likely that it will add to our confusion. An electron, when we are not observing it, is suspended in a “superposition” of many possible paths; only when we are observing the electron, it takes a seemingly random path.
some theorists, especially david bohm, insisting that hidden variables determine the apparently random behavior of particles. Bohm hypothesizes that particles are guided by “guided waves” that pervade the universe and instantly connect all the parts through a quantum mechanism called entanglement. According to Bohm, guided waves belong to an “implicit order” that underpins our reality and gives rise to matter and thought.
Physicist Wolfgang Pauli also believed that matter and mind emerge from a deeper quantum realityThere are interesting parallels between Pauli and Bohm.Both suffer from depression and are influenced by intellectuals mystical tendenciesBohm was closely associated with the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti and Pauli with the psychiatrist Carl Jung.
Other quantum theorists, notably Eugene Wigner and john wheeler, proposes that our conscious observation of the world determines its properties and even in some sense makes it exist.These conjectures suggest We are an essential part of reality; if we weren’t here to observe the universe, it wouldn’t exist.
Unfortunately, theories linking mind to quantum effects lack empirical evidence. They belong more to metaphysics than to physics. They don’t say a word about human emotions like love, anger, fear, sadness. Nor do they offer insights into mental illness.
Proponents of “quantum psychiatry” claim to provide such insights. If quantum theory of mind is fringe, then quantum psychiatry is fringe among fringes. For the most part, quantum psychiatry repackages the power of positive thinking bromide in quantum terms, such as superposition and entanglement.
But one advocate of quantum psychiatry offers an interesting concrete theory of mental illness. sultan tarachia professor of medicine at Uskudar University in Turkey, takes seriously many worlds hypothesiswhich argues that all possibilities described by the quantum equations are realized in our other universes.
in a 2019 Papers Journal of Psychopathology, Tarlaci speculates that the hallucinations that plague schizophrenics stem from other worlds invading ours. This effect could also explain experiences in healthy people, such as “words, images or music that pop into our consciousness and seem to come out of nowhere.”
Parallel universes explaining our mood swings and thought shifts? Talk about hidden variable theory!I don’t take the idea of Tarlaci seriously; it’s akin to a Stephen Hawking satire Lost sock disappears into mini black hole. It’s hard to imagine Tarlaci’s hypothesis helping those struggling with psychotic delusions.
Will we discover a true mind-body theory, one that brings all of our hidden variables to light? This explains our thoughts, emotions and behavior?Mind-body theory may be based on quantum computing?
I doubt it. If quantum mechanics can’t explain why individual electrons veer this way instead of that, how can it explain the quirks of our thinking?I doubt even if we become super intelligent robotwhose brains are enhanced with quantum chips, we will Still our own black box.
I started this column wondering why I feel glum all the time. I omitted the most likely source of my frustration. Two old friends just died of cancer. Melancholy seems a reasonable response to death, the inevitability of death, lose everything we love.
The question should be, why don’t we always Sullen?Why, sometimes, when my daughter and I buy a Christmas tree, or watch a sad movie jingle (in which there is a robot with a quantum mechanical heart) and my girlfriend, am I overwhelmed with joy and gratitude? Another haiku comes to mind:
everything must pass
Heat death awaits us.i am so
Glad to be alive!
further reading:
Death, Physics, and Wishful Thinking
Quantum Mechanics, Mind-Body Problems, and Negative Theology
Is the Schrödinger equation real?
David Bohm, Quantum Mechanics and the Enlightenment
For more thoughts on the mind-body problem and quantum mechanics, see Attention: Sex, Death and Science with Mind-Body Matters: Science, Subjectivity, and Who We Really Are.
