The quantum world v. reductive materialism

Quantum Physics Axed Materialism. Many Hope the World Won’t Know 

Denyse O'Leary 

Quantum mechanics, which developed in the early 20th century, has been a serious blow to materialism. 

There is no way to make sense of it if immaterial entities like information, observation, or the mind are not real. Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder struggles against the effects of this fact.

In a recent video, she asks, “Does Consciousness Influence Quantum Effects?” (November 19, 2022). 

She asks, why did some physicists like von Neumann and Wigner think that consciousness is necessary to make sense of quantum mechanics, and can consciousness influence the outcome of a quantum experiment? (0:33)

Well, they had good reason. Any effort to exclude consciousness from reality fails. 

A Hostile Witness 

Hossenfelder, a hostile witness, kindly offers an example from the work of Irish physicist John Bell (1928–1990): 

John Bell used the following example: “When the Queen dies in London, the Prince of Wales becomes instantaneously king.” No matter where he is. So why wasn’t the speed of light limit broken when the queen died? Because we can update our *knowledge about what happened elsewhere without causing any event elsewhere. And this is how Bohr thought about the collapse of the wave-function. You can update it instantaneously because it just describes what we know. Einstein wasn’t convinced, but Bohr won the argument. (2:14 

But isn’t it reasonable to ask, what does it mean to say that “the Queen” “dies”? On September 8 of this year, Elizabeth II, head of state for the Commonwealth, which includes many countries, including Canada, Jamaica, and Nigeria, died, as is the fate of all mortals. 

The Nature of Consciousness 

Now, here is a question that more directly concerns the nature of consciousness, a topic that has rattled the pioneer quantum physicists, if not Hossenfelder: Did goats or termites in any of those environments notice or care?

The big question is, could those entities have cared? No. They could not. It is not a question of their opinion. They can’t grasp the matter. Something is happening in human consciousness that is not happening in theirs.

Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.

Apparently monogamy makes dollars as well as sense.

Moving In Together Doesn’t Match the Financial Benefits of Marriage, but Why? 

Married couples are four times as wealthy as unmarried couples who live together 

By Julia Carpenter 

A walk down the aisle can be a route to greater wealth and prosperity for couples in the U.S. Married people have higher net worths and are more likely to be homeowners than their unmarried counterparts their age are.  

The mystery, though, is why cohabitating but unmarried couples struggle to build wealth in the same way. As of 2019, the median net worth for cohabiting couples age 25 to 34 was $17,372, a quarter that of the $68,210 for married couples of that same age range, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. For singles it is $7,341.

“If you build an arch, the cornerstone is the first piece you put in and the capstone is the last,” he said. “What this means is people see an economic bar they need to clear before they get married. Couples wait until they have good jobs, a car that won’t break down, maybe even a house. Then, they get married.”

Melissa Mowery, a 30-year-old communications manager in Asheville, N.C., has been with her boyfriend for five years and living together for nearly four. The two don’t share a joint bank account, but they split the cost of rent and other bills. Even so, Ms. Mowery said she can’t make sense of the financial gap between her relationship and that of married couples. 

“We’re already saving a lot of money and splitting the cost on most things,” she said. “I don’t understand how married couples are accumulating wealth in a way we’re not doing.” 

While there are legal and tax benefits to marriage, research suggests the financial security and long-term mind-set of those who tie the knot may also be a powerful driver of wealth. More married couples pool their money—such as sharing savings accounts and investing together—to achieve certain goals, Ms. Kent said. Cohabiting couples are less likely to combine finances and investments.

Working with two incomes and combining their investments to maximize compound interest can significantly increase a couple’s financial prospects, said Emily Garbinsky, associate professor of marketing at Cornell University, who has studied couples’ financial behavior. Simply put, married people may be more likely to be on the same page financially, she said. 

“Married people may be much more likely to have these conversations around what goals they have for their financial future,” she said. “There seems to be something very special and unique about deciding to share finances.” 

Unmarried couples may be less willing to commingle their money, said Prof. Garbinsky.

“Our money, our income, represents a huge part of who we are,” she said. “[Sharing] that can be scary for people, so they tend to be very protective.”  

Both married and unmarried couples who do pool finances also experience greater relationship satisfaction and may even stay together for longer, Prof. Garbinsky said. 

Housing is one of the biggest factors in establishing a couple’s wealth. Compared with single people and cohabiting couples, married couples hold a larger concentration of housing wealth, according to data from the St. Louis Fed. 

“Most of my married friends have bought a house,” Ms. Mowery said, noting high housing costs in her area. “I just don’t know how they did it. Everyone talks about how when you get married, you accumulate wealth but I don’t know what that means.” 

In the current hypercompetitive housing market, as smaller, more affordable starter homes vanish and housing affordability declines, single people and cohabiting couples are often at a disadvantage. 

My problem with NDEs.

 Leviticus19:31ASV"Turn ye not unto them that have familiar spirits, nor unto the wizards; seek them not out, to be defiled by them: I am Jehovah your God." 

As then there are now some who claim to have the gift of being able to communicate with the departed spirits of our loved ones. If as some suggest death is merely an illusion in the case of humans, and that the real us is merely freed from captivity to a superfluous physical form by what we mistake for death. Why would God object to communication between those still trapped in their physical forms and those freed. Surely such communication would provide comfort for his people. 

1Corinthians10:20NIV"No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons." 

The occult and mystical practices of those worshiping any other God than JEHOVAH put said practitioners in contact with demons, malignant superhuman intelligences who promote false religious ideas. 

Speaking of their overlord our Lord declares 

John8:44KJV"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and standeth not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof. " 

The prince of demons/unclean spirits is the speaker of the first lie. What was that first lie? 

Genesis3:4ASV"And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: "  

Well it sure seems like they died, but typical of their modus operandi the prince of darkness and his lieutenants have been working assiduously to muddy the waters re: the truth of death. Note please it is only if death is real that a resurrection is necessary. 

1Corinthians15:36,37NIV"How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37When you sow, you do NOT plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. " 

If we do not die there is no need for a resurrection. Note also that it is not the body that is to be raised up but the soul/self. 

The demons use the occult to keep the marvelous hope of resurrection from the people. Promoting the false notion that death is not real and as a necessary corollary that the resurrection as described in the bible is not real. 

A key tell that deception (either self-deception or something more sinister) is afoot with these "NDEs" is the physical nature of this alleged spirit world. See the article dated 13/11/2022 . We are being ask to believe that the spirit world is just a stylized mirror image of the physical complete with all the plants ,animals physical materials like gold that we are familiar with. That spirit forms are humanoid possessing human orientation like up or down front or back. Just a modicum of thought will expose all this as very unlikely. 

The design is real though the amber is fake.

Fossil Friday: Fake Amber and the Piltdown Fly  

Günter Bechly 

This Fossil Friday features an apparent fossil wasp in Mexican amber. What it actually shows is a crude forgery, where a modern wasp has been embedded in artificial resin. Such simple forgeries are commonly sold to tourists in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Eastern Europe, and Eastern Asia. They can be easily recognised and hardly any real expert would fall for them (Poinar 1982, Ross 1998, Gröhn 2013). However, there exist much more sophisticated forgeries of amber inclusions that even fooled famous scientists (Grimaldi et al. 1994, Eriksson & Poinar 2015). They are crafted by using real pieces of amber.

Fossiliferous amber pieces usually were formed by several successive flows of tree resin and therefore have a layered composition that is called “Schlauben.” Cunning forgers split a piece of amber along these natural surfaces, carve a cavity in which they place a dead recent insect, fill the cavity with resin or Canada balsam, glue the two halves together again, and polish the piece to hide the fissure. Such sophisticated forgeries are hard to detect, because any test of the amber substance only confirms its authenticity. The considerable effort of course only makes sense to a forger in case of very rare inclusions that achieve a high market price among collectors, unless somebody only wants to play a trick on a scientist. Here is an interesting example (McAlister 2012). 

The Modern Latrine Fly 

Professor Willi Hennig was one of the most famous entomologists and biologists of the 20th century: founder of modern phylogenetic systematics (cladistics), one of the world’s leading experts on Dipteran systematics of his time, and a predecessor of mine as curator for the amber collection of the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart (Germany). In 1966 he described an inclusion of the modern latrine fly species Fannia scalaris in Baltic amber (Hennig 1966). The specimen had already been briefly mentioned by the German collector and dipteran researcher Herrmann Loew in 1850, but was now studied for the first time in detail by Hennig. His discovery seemed quite important because it featured one of the very few fossil representatives of the dipteran family Muscidae, with large implications for the phylogenetic and biogeographic history of flies. It also contributed to the textbook wisdom (e.g., Carpenter 1992) that some species apparently survived unchanged since the Oligocene.

In 1993 the young scientist Andrew Ross, who later became a well-known expert for amber fossils, studied the remarkable specimen at the Natural History Museum in London, where it had been deposited since 1922, after being acquired with other parts of the Loew amber collection. Ross was shocked when the amber piece overheated by the suboptimal microscope lighting and recognized a strange crack appearing above the fly. The supposed mishap turned out to be a lucky circumstance. A closer examination of the crack revealed to his big surprise that the apparent fossil fly was nothing but a clever forgery using a common recent latrine fly (Grimaldi et al. 1994, Ross 1998, Eriksson & Poinar 2015). Ross gave this forged fossil the fitting nickname “Piltdown fly” in his very first scientific publication (Ross 1993), alluding to the infamous Piltdown man hoax. The discovery of this forgery even made headlines in the tabloids (Anonymous 1993, Highfield 1993, Kellaway 1993) as well as popular science media (Palmer 1993). 

A Possibility of Forgery 

Was Hennig unaware of the possibility of a forgery? Or course not. He even quoted Crowson (1965), who had already suggested that in all cases of apparently recent species in amber the possibility of a forgery should be carefully evaluated and excluded. Hennig (1966)commented that there is zero evidence that any such case ever happened, and categorically dismissed this possibility as “totally unfounded” for his amber fly. That was not just a quite bold statement but actually pretty careless for such a distinguished expert.

Therefore, it was even speculated that Hennig might have been involved in a deliberate joke, because his paper was published on April Fools’ Day 1969, moreover in a non-peer-reviewed journal published by the Stuttgart museum, where he worked as curator. However, this possibility seems highly unlikely considering the serious style and far-reaching scientific conclusions of his manuscript, so that I rather think the publishing date is a mere coincidence, even though a very ironic one.

Unfortunately, forgeries still abound in the international fossil trade, and after some further scandals like the notorious Archaeoraptor case, scientists are nowadays very much aware of the risk. Therefore, important new finds from potentially dubious provenance are very carefully studied with highly sophisticated methods and the most modern technology to make sure the fossils are really authentic before any scientific studies are published on them. Hopefully, this will prevent further Piltdown fossils to make it into scientific literature. Nevertheless, some caution may still be advised. 

References 

Anonymous 1993. Student enttarnt Fossilien-Fälschung. Focus 47.

Carpenter FM 1992. Superclass Hexapoda. in: Moore RC & Kaesler RL (eds). Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology. Part R Arthropoda 4, Volume 4. Geological Society of America & University of Kansas, Boulder (CO) & Lawrence (KS), pp. 398–399, 443.

Crowson RA 1965. Some Thoughts concerning the Insects of the Baltic Amber. p. 133 in: Freeman P (ed.). Proceedings XIIth International Congress of Entomology, London, 8-16 July, 1964, 842 pp.

Eriksson ME & Poinar GO Jr 2015. Fake it till you make it—the uncanny art of forging amber. Geology Today 31(1), 21–27. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gto.12083

Grimaldi DA, Shedrinsky A, Ross A & Baer NS 1994. Forgeries of Fossils in “Amber”: History, Identification and Case Studies. Curator The Museum Journal 37(4), 251–274. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.1994.tb01023.x

Gröhn C 2013. Fälschungen — Wie erkenne ich eine Inklusenfälschung. pp. 106–109. in: Alles über Bernstein. Wachholtz, Neumünster (DE), 207 pp.

Hennig W 1966. Fannia scalaris Fabricius, eine rezente Art im Baltischen Bernstein? (Diptera: Muscidae). Stuttgarter Beiträge zur Naturkunde 150, 1–12. https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Stuttgarter-Beitraege-Naturkunde_150_0001-0012.pdf

Highfield R 1993. Fossil hoaxer puts fly in the ointment for insect history. Daily Telegraph. 

Kellaway R 1993. Jura-fix Park fly. The Sun November 12, 1993, p. 3.

Loew H 1850. Über den Bernstein und die Bernsteinfauna. Programm der Königlichen Realschule zu Meseritz, 44 pp.

McAlister E 2012. Piltdown Fly. NHM December 21, 2012. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/natureplus/blogs/diptera-blog/2012/12/21/piltdown-fly.html

Palmer D 1993. Fatal flaw fingers fake fossil fly. NewScientist November 13, 1993. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14018990-400-fatal-flaw-fingers-fake-fossil-fly/

Poinar GO Jr 1982. Amber-True or False? Gems and Minerals (April) 534, 80–84.

Ross AJ 1993. The ‘Piltdown Fly’ (abstract). Palaeontology Newsletter 20, p. 16.

Ross A 1998. Fake Amber. pp. 6–9 in: Amber — The Natural Time Capsule. The Natural History Museum, 73 pp.