X-Message-Number: 13036 Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 14:15:41 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: *The Self-Aware Universe* George Smith, #13029, asks for comment about *The Self-Aware Universe* by physicist (and mystic) Amit Goswami. I obtained the book as background for my own book some years ago, and still haven't read most of it, but I more-or-less dismissed it as one more misguided attempt to inject paranormal ideas into materialistic physics. The starting mistake that I think Dr. Goswami and so many others make is to assume that scientific materialism is *necessarily* cold, unfeeling, unable to address what is really most important in life, implies that life is fundamentally meaningless, etc. Materialism instead is only supposed to offer us things like nuclear war, environmental depletion and destruction, other miseries without number or measure, or superficial enjoyments that make us question the value of life. My own book is an attempt to argue that this whole position is utterly wrongheaded, and that solid, materialistic science, technology, and reason-based approaches in general offer the best hope we have of realizing an ancient dream--becoming immortal and more than human. (And all this fits very well with cryonics too, which is highly materialistic and assumes that people are machines made of atoms.) Looking at Goswami's book in more detail (though I'm not in the best position to comment yet--but will give it a try), I notice that one of the major points seems to be that quantum nonlocality is well-established in physics and is important because it could account for such paranormal effects as telepathy (instantaneous communication between subjects). As it happens, the many-worlds theory explains the apparent non-locality without invoking any instantaneous influences whatever. Goswami considers many-worlds but like some others makes a fundamental error that glosses over its refutation of non-locality. On p. 139: "A measurement here of a correlated electron still splits the world of its partner over there at a distance and yet instantly." Not so. There is no reason to assume instantaneous splitting. Instead, the split in worlds, like other effects, travels no faster than light. (Note that verification of the correlations of particles cannot be done faster than light.) There is no reason to assume any nonlocality. This is something I discuss at length in my book (others having noted it too). Another respected authority who makes the mistake of assuming that many-worlds implies instantaneous splitting is Nick Herbert, in the mostly excellent but not perfect book *Quantum Reality*. Herbert has another book, *Elemental Mind*, which seems very much along the lines of Goswami's book, i.e. that there is some kind of "cosmic consciousness" and also seems to depend rather a bit on the supposition of quantum nonlocality. (Unfortunately I haven't read very far into this book either--I had to pick and choose due to time constraints and my finite reading speed.) All that said, I am not opposed to the idea that different worldviews could have validity. As with the wave-particle duality, we sometimes find that seemingly contradictory views turn out to be complementary, and actually equivalent. A consciousness-based view of reality as a whole might well be a possibility, but I think it would ultimately be found equivalent to a materialistic view. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=13036