A reader emailed me and asked whether I had seen What the Bleep Do We Know? and if so, what did I think of it? At the time, I had read several reviews and several more articles on it, but hadn't seen it because it hadn't been widely shown in my area. However, it is available at Blockbuster and other rental outlets, so I took the plunge. The result is, not unusually, pro and con.
The reason the reader called the movie to my attention is quite simple: The movie deals with challenging the reality consensus.
At the outset, it is important to parse this statement with some degree of care. Challenging the consensus, which is what I do, is not the same as challenging the reality consensus. However, if we don't parse the words carefully, we might think the movie is about challenging people's consensus on reality, which is precisely what I do.
In the case of Bleep, reality means just what is says it means, reality, the material substance of our existence and our material existence in that material substance. Let me see if I can make this clearer by going back to my creative writing course in college. At the time, in the late fifties, the Beat Generation was briefly flashing on the scene with poets like Ginsberg and writers like Kerouack rattling on (and on and on and on and on). Their, shall I say attitude, pretty much prevailed among the members of the class and it led to an awful lot of discussion about the objective nature of reality.
The general consensus of the class was that reality was a mental construct, something generally proposed by Bleep although Bleep creates the mental construct out of the stuff (or absence of stuff) of Quantum Physics, something that never entered the discussion in writing class.
My answer to arguments positing reality as a mental construct was to suggest that any proponent of that point of view should bend over with his (I wouldn't have even considered proposing this to a female writer) head about three inches from the chalk tray and I would demonstrate the actual nature of reality with a swift kick to the posterior.
I had undertaken the search into the nature of gravity in grade school and I had long since concluded that reality was real because if reality isn't real, then we can never know anything. If reality doesn't in fact exist, then not knowing the mechanical nature of gravity is of no concern to us, the accuracy of our technology is not important and our continued survival is not in question. If reality isn't real, then neither are we and there is nothing we can do about our human condition.
I think, and I haven't yet entered into a discussion of Bleep which I think makes many important points, that questioning the existence of reality is a direct result of prosperity, of living in a bubble in which all of our needs are basically met. We don't have to get up at the crack of dawn to scratch a living out of soil that might be fecund today, but was parched last year and might be flooded next year. We don't have to work sun-up to sun down just to get the food that will keep us alive.
No one who works their fingers to the bone just to survive questions the nature of reality because reality is a daily enemy that has to be overcome. When we are prosperous, when we live in the bubble, we treat our necessities, the food that keeps us alive, as luxuries, seeking out new taste treats, and we feel bad about those outside the bubble who are still pushing against reality to exist (and who want to either break into the bubble or burst it).
Proposing that reality doesn't exist, that the material world is a product of our minds, our mental process, is simply an indication that our minds have too much time to think.
However, that's the basic premise of Bleep. Here is how it resolves the reality question, the put your head about three inches from the chalk tray of my college days. One of the voiceovers points out that we know reality is there because we can physically interact with it. If our toe hits up against a rock, it's going to hurt.
However, our toe hitting the rock is an experience!
That's it. Reality doesn't exist because when we interact with reality, we are not really interacting with reality, we are experiencing something.
The reason Bleep takes this approach is quite simple. Its basic message is that we can shape our own lives. We don't have to sit back and be passive observers as life tosses us around. We can fashion our life, make it what we will.
Once this message is understood, the way the movie arrives at its proof is what makes up the movie. Basically, our actions are what produce our reality. Our emotions are what produce our actions. Our thoughts control our emotions. Chemicals in our brains control our thoughts (hmmm, thought there was no reality). These chemicals are just like drugs or alcohol. We become addicted to them. Thus, our reality is dictated by our addiction &endash; addiction controls thoughts control emotions control actions produces reality.
If we want to change our reality, we simply have to change our thoughts, cease to be addicted to our reality and our reality will change to the reality we dictate.
This is all well and good. Any life-affirming message is acceptable. It doesn't, however, have anything to do with an analysis of actual reality. Bleep insists on creating the appearance that its life-affirming message is based on science. It starts off claiming that we are all operating on hidden assumptions and then continues to build hidden assumption after hidden assumption, bon motes like our brains process billions of bits of information at any one time but we are only aware of a couple of thousand, native Americans couldn't see Columbus' ships until a trusted medicine man pointed them out (like to see the proof of that statement), my old favorite bugaboo, because atoms have orbiting electrons, we don't fall through the earth because the atoms of earth are repelling the leather in the soles of our shoes (in Bleep, we never touch anything so nothing exists), the bald comment, the way the brain is wired (did I miss that diagram?), we create reality all the time (we may change it, but I doubt we are creating it), there's no out there independent of us, and so forth. In addition, evidence is presented that we have to take as evidence without independent proof, we alter snowflakes with our thoughts in a way they can be photographed, two photographic points of light are the same particle in two different places.
Again, all this sort-a-science is fine. I've read reviews which point out that many people get an interest in the fields involved as a result of watching Bleep, which again is all good and fine. It still doesn't have anything to do with figuring out the nature of the forces that dictate the motions in our existence. In fact, there is a very good reason why Bleep's life-affirming message can take on the coloration of science, the definition of which strangely enough is the examination of the reality around us. Science has abandoned the two areas Bleep uses as support to the field of fantasy. First, by making the assumption there is no mind, and therefore no mind/body connection, science has opened the door to all sorts of, well, as Bleep prefers to say, folderol from deep within the rabbit hole. Next, because science, and I'm talking about empirical science which is not science at all, empirical science, by making the assumption that the universe operates by immutable laws that only need to be discovered, has made the timing of the discovery of its so-called laws dictate our reality because once a law is discovered, it becomes a fact that dictates all subsequent facts.
In short, the quantum physics Bleep premises its argument on is the result of a botched attempt by empirical science to come up with an explanation for light. The slide down the empirical slope of ignorance dealing with light began with William Gilbert's publication in the year 1600 of a book describing his experiments with magnets. This pretty much established that magnets have two poles, one pointing north, and that once the like pointing poles are identified, like poles repel and opposite poles attract.
Early the next century, Newton's capture of the Royal Society ensured that his theory of light as a particle would be enshrined for the remainder of the century. However, as that century changed into the next, the 1800s, Young's so-called two-slit experiment proved that light was a wave phenomenon (see column 09-04). If light was a wave, then like water waves, light did not exist independent of a medium. When the surface of water is calm, there are no waves. When the surface of water is disturbed, the water erupts in waves. No water, no disturbance, no waves.
Because empiricists now knew for a fact that light was a wave phenomenon, it did what it does best, made up the medium through which light passes and gave it a name, aether (adopted from the discredited Aristotle). Light therefore was a nonexistent phenomenon that resulted from a disturbance of the aether. I remember as a kid hearing that radio waves were propagated through this nonexistent aether, a sort of hangover from the maelstrom of scientific babble that took over the 20th Century.
So by the beginning of the 19th Century, the nature of light had been firmly established in the empirical mindlessness of the time. About the same time Young was creating knowledge, Volta was creating a battery using knowledge uncovered by Benjamin Franklin and Luigi Galvani. Volta gave researchers their first source of steady electric current. Oersted used this source several decades later to discover that by switching on an electric current, he could deflect the magnetic needle of a compass so it stood at right angles to the current. Ampere carried this research further, discovering that placing wires carrying current in the same direction next to each other caused the wires to be attracted and placing wires carrying currents in opposing directions caused the wires to repel.
To the empirical mind of monkey see, monkey say, the likes attracting and the opposites repelling were identical to Gilbert's likes repelling and opposites attracting and all of a sudden, electricity was explained. The wire had a positive and negative pole (they were, after all, using Volta's batteries which had two poles) and the electrons, the particle that made up the electricity, was a negative particle traveling to a positive pole (this after some disagreement whether the electricity in a perfectly circular circuit was traveling to the positive or negative pole).
The point to all this, of course, is, why didn't anyone stop and ask the obvious question, is there any relationship of electricity to light? The reason no one did is quite obvious. Empirical science is the search for the underlying laws of the universe and once those laws are found, they are immutable. The timing of the discovery of the laws dictates how all subsequent reality will be viewed because reality can't oppose established scientific laws.
Because it had already been determined that light was a wave phenomenon and therefore nonexistent in and of itself, it couldn't possibly have any relationship to electricity which was clearly something, you could put your hand on it and feel it, and therefore needed a particle to explain its existence.
So now we had two empirical truths, one dealing with light, the other dealing with electricity. About the turn of the next century, and it seems this history is defined by the turning of each century, Gilbert the 17th, Newton the 18th, Young and Volta the 19th, and now Rutherford the 20th, Rutherford took Roentgen's discovery of X-rays a step further and demonstrated that matter was made up of atoms with nuclei by shooting what he considered positively charged particles into thin gold foil and watching some of the particles being scattered.
From little acorns giant oaks grow, and from this little experiment the atom was created. It was, according to Rutherford's model, a neat little package made up of neutrons to account for weight, protons to account for charge, the protons keeping the orbiting electrons in orbit around the atom (see columns 18, 19-05).
There were several little problems with this picture of the atom, however. First, it failed to explain why protons with their like charges could bunch together in the nucleus. This was solved simply by making up the strong force, a force stronger than the force repelling the protons, thereby demonstrating the theory couldn't be falsified and therefore wasn't scientific to start with. In addition, there was still no explanation for what was making the electron orbit the nucleus. What the hey, science says even today, we don't have to explain what makes objects fall, what makes planets rotate and orbit, so why bother explaining this little bit of missing motion.
Finally, and germane to Bleep and Quantum Physics, Rutherford's atom didn't bother to address the most important question any atom needs to answer.
That question is, how does matter produce light?
But then, light doesn't exist, does it?
Until Einstein demonstrated the photoelectric effect!
Now here's a neat little word: Photoelectric.
It might even lead someone to believe there might be a connection between light and electricity. What Einstein demonstrated, a demonstration for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, was that when the surface of matter is bombarded with light, the bombardment produces electrons. This is sort of like the field replacement described in column 08-05, only to empirical science it simply presented an opportunity to make up a new particle, the photon. Totally puzzled at how light, a wave phenomenon, could evidence itself as a particle, empirical science, never one to abandon an empirically verified law, decided that light was both, a wave phenomenon and a particle.
Out of this incomprehensible inanity was born Quantum Mechanics, now Quantum Physics because there is nothing mechanical about it, for once a connection between the electron and light was made, the source of the light became more than apparent. When matter absorbed light, the orbiting electrons moved further from the nuclei of the atoms making up the matter. The further an orbit is, the higher its energy is considered to be. When the electron moves to a lower energy orbit, which, if I can keep this stupidity straight, is an orbit closer to the nucleus, then the atom emits light. And to top it all off, the frequency of the light determines how far the electron will move in its orbit and how far the electron moves in its orbit determines the frequency of the light emitted (and the number of electrons moving determines the intensity of the light emitted).
Oh well.
The first thing anyone should have asked about light is how matter produces it. However, when it was determined that light was a wave, no one even had hypothesized an atom, let alone one with electrons. Empirical science likes to say its theories grow with new discoveries, and in one sense they are right. Because they think their theories are laws and thus their theories dictate reality, their theories grow more absurd with new discoveries, in the words of Bleep, empirical science plunges deeper into the rabbit hole, and in the process opens the door to projects such as Bleep, which seeks to lay scientific claim to a philosophical message of self-actualization.
Next up, the empirical nonsense assuming that because empirical science can't find the mind by cutting up the brain, there is no there in there, no mind, and thus no mind body connection, Bleep's assertion that we can create our own reality as opposed to my view that we, to a great degree, can control our own destiny.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com