Somebody is talking to me about either advanced physics or magic, and I can't tell which one.
He mentions electron tunneling, superstring theory and quantum mechanics, in explaining why positive thoughts attract positive things, he mentioned a book called The Physics Of Consciousness, something about a quantum level of the brain.
I know there's benefit to thinking positive, but isnt that explained by evolution? I didn't think that quantum mechanics or a universal attraction of things to other things was involved.
Quick heuristic : if someone is trying to relate quantum physics to a topic outside of physics, it's probably (99% ?) bullshit.
(Eliezer's series on QM would fall in the remaining 1%)
So unless you have other independent reasons to believe he isn't full of it, it's probably not worth investigating.
The underlying assertion of most of these goofy new-age claims is that consciousness is a quantum process. Of course, in a trivial sense it is quantum insofar that every process in the physical world seems to obey quantum mechanics. The exact claim is that something "essentially quantum" is behind the phenomenon of consciousness, that the computations of the brain actually exploit uninuitive quantum behaviours that cannot be explained by a classical physics picture -- the claim is that we're quantum computers.
I took a brief look at that book. The author seems to be saying "There just has to be quantum magic in the brain somewhere", and then he goes looking for places he could plausibly imagine some. He's trying to justify what he wants to believe.
5MBlume
Your friend is suffering from a confusion of levels. Electron tunneling occurs on a vastly different level of organization than do positive thoughts. Anyone speaking of the two in the same sentence should at least set off warning bells.
ETA: I think I can state that a bit more clearly. Positive thoughts are invisible to a tunneling electron in the same way that New York is invisible to an ant in Central Park. The pattern of the whole is simply not accessible from that lower level.
ETA2: It is sensible to say "the sky is blue because dipole radiation is frequency dependent," despite the fact that "blue sky" occurs at a larger scale than "dipole radiation". However, this is because the contributions from the lower level add in a simple way: a blue sky is built from a mole of deflected blue photons. A happy thought is not composed of a mole of "happy" electrons.
Requesting rationalist assistance:
Somebody is talking to me about either advanced physics or magic, and I can't tell which one.
He mentions electron tunneling, superstring theory and quantum mechanics, in explaining why positive thoughts attract positive things, he mentioned a book called The Physics Of Consciousness, something about a quantum level of the brain.
I know there's benefit to thinking positive, but isnt that explained by evolution? I didn't think that quantum mechanics or a universal attraction of things to other things was involved.
The underlying assertion of most of these goofy new-age claims is that consciousness is a quantum process. Of course, in a trivial sense it is quantum insofar that every process in the physical world seems to obey quantum mechanics. The exact claim is that something "essentially quantum" is behind the phenomenon of consciousness, that the computations of the brain actually exploit uninuitive quantum behaviours that cannot be explained by a classical physics picture -- the claim is that we're quantum computers.
You build a quantum computer by e... (read more)