Quantum Gods

[Ahanu]

While looking at reviews of the book Biocentrism on amazon.com, I read a negative review that called the idea nonsense. One should read Victor Stenger's book Quantum Gods to understand this nonsense. I decided to take a look.

Only halfway through, I have decided I don't even want to finish the rest of this book; it doesn't even sound like a debate. It's obvious the writer started off with this idea: "materialism is true, because materialism must be true." He doesn't take quantum spirituality seriously. David Scharf has hammered Stenger about this in Pseudoscience and Victor Stenger's Quantum Gods Mistaken, Misinformed and Misleading.

www.truthabouttm.org/truth/SocietalEffects/Critics-Rebuttals/StengerRebuttal/index.cfm

To sum up the book in Scharf's words:

"In order to properly evaluate Quantum Gods it is important to realize that Stenger is not trying to contribute to the debate--he is trying to shut off debate."

Why would I want to continue to read this book when Stenger diliberately misrepresents his intellectual opponents?

I do have something further to say that isn't included in Scharf's work. It is in regards to Stenger's comments about the observer in quantum physics.

Here is what Stenger says in discussing Copenhagen interpretation:

"Today, no consensus exists on the 'best' interpretation, although Copenhagen is generally regarded as outdated.​

Still, the quantum spiritualists take Copenhagen as a basis for their claim that the mind controls reality since it is the mind that decides what and when to measure and thus collapses the wave function. Since collapse happens throughout the universe and back in time, the mind must be tuned in to some holistic 'cosmic consciousness.'​

This was not Bohr's view. He never attributed an active role for consciousness in the measurement process. It was simply part of what he called the 'observer' that could just as well be a passive measuring instrument like a Geiger counter as a human investigator. Bohr's observer was treated as a separate, mascroscopic system outside the quantum system being observed. And when he said that the act of measurement gave an object the property being measured, he was not claiming some kind of mental control over reality. Those properties were simply defined by their measurement just as time is defined by what you read on a clock" (Stenger 196).
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Notice Stenger puts emphasis on misinterpretation. Stenger doesn't mention the problems when interpreting the observer in Bohr's way. As Stephen Barr has said, "one runs into logical difficulties if one imagines the observer to be something entirely physical, like a camera, or a Geiger counter." Barr goes on to say the following in Modern Physics and Ancient Faith:

"Who or what is this observer? Can the observer be something physical, like the system that he, she, or it is observing or making measurements on? For example, if the system is a radioactive nucleus, can the observer be a Geiger counter? Or if the system is a particle moving in space, can the observer be a camera that takes a picture of where that particle is? The surprising answer is no--at least according to von Neumann, London, Bauer, Wigner, Peierls, and those who accept their reasoning."

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I understand why Stenger won't confront their arguments headon. As Eugen Wigner would say, "[While a number of philosophical ideas] may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics, . . . materialism is not."

In Quantum Gods, Stenger simply isn't open to debate.​