Thu, 30 Nov 2006
Quantum Reality
I smacked around the New Agers in my earlier science post. Now it's time to to set my sights on the atheists. Deepak Chopra wrote a post defending the reality of consciousness. PZ Meyers snorts that it's just more "New Age babble." Deepak Chopra's post is rather muddled, but he makes some solid points. He starts off with argument that consciousness can be shown through the existence of qualia. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a clearer argument in their entry on qualia. I tried to make a similar argument in my post Red Head two years ago.
When you see something red, where or what is the color red? First let's distinguish between the experience of the color red and the scientific understanding of the physical process that gives rise to it. Everyone knows that we experience red when light of a certain wavelength falls on our open eyes, but this understanding is different from the actual experience of red. Someone completely color blind, so that they only see black and white never experiences the color red, no matter how well they understand physics and biology. But if there were some operation that restored their color vision, then they would experience it, even if they were completely ignorant of the physics of color. So the intellectual understanding of color and the actual experience of color are distinct.
So where is the color red? Is the light red? No, light is an electromagnetic wave and is completely described by Maxwell's equations. If an electromagnetic wave had color, there would be a qualitative difference between radio waves and light waves, and there is not. So is the color red in the eye? No, the light waves falling on the receptors causes them to fire. This is an electrochemical process and there's no experience of red in any of this. Similarly you can trace the nerve impulses through the brain and not find the color red in any of this biological process. So where exactly is the color red?
The second part of Deepak Chopra's argument invokes quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is much misunderstood by persons of all philosophical persuasions. But it is difficult to reconcile quantum mechanics with materialism, the belief that the objects postulated by physics are real. I can't give an exhaustive definition of what "real" means, but to say that an object is real implies that it exists (there are no non-existent real objects) and that it is not a relation between two or more other objects. Is the wave equation which describes a quantum systems real? No, because the wave equation describes the probability that a quantum exists in a given state. Something which describes the probability of existence cannot itself exist. And since it doesn't exist, it can't be real. Does the quantum particle whose existence is determined by the wave equation real? No, because it is a relation between the quantum system being measured and the measurement being made.
So materialism has a hard time of it. If the physics of quantum mechanics tells us what matter is, then there's no reality in the quantum world, only a web of potential relations described by equations. Quantum mechanics doesn't yield the "consciousness equals God" that Deepak Chopra is looking for, but it's equally unkind to the materialist.
