Waking Life is this movie, kinda weird, very cool. If you havent seen it watch it right now. They say a lot of cool, true, inspiring things. What are your favorite waking life quotes or philosophies or whatever you wanna call it. heres a couple of mine. "The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything. " "Dream is destiny. " "The worst mistake that you can make is to think you're alive when really you're asleep in life's waiting room." "The ongoing WOW is happening right NOW. " "The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving." Inputs/discussions welcome
Waking Life was okay. Personally, when it comes to mindfuck movies I've been more impressed/blown away by films like Synecdoche, NY and The Holy Mountain but Waking Life did offer some food for thought. The sections on neo-evolution and on how quantum mechanics allows for free will in a universe that was previously thought to be deterministic were definitely my favorites. I didn't care much for the kinda hokey shit about waking dreams. + I liked most of the graphic work
I didn't see all of the movie, but I do remember a part where they are talking about quantum mechanics and free will. What I got from it was that quantum mechanics is random as oppsed to the deterministic classical world view. However, the point about whether or not this implies free will was brought up and the conclusion was that a random universe is no better than a deterministic one when it comes to free will. Either way, whoever is doing the willing is not free. I'm hoping you can tell me if I misunderstood this Mursault or maybe I am talking about a different part.
Yeah that's the same part. I believe his speech goes even further, explaining how quantum mechanics is more complex than random chance, due to the observer paradox. I might be wrong though, and I might be thinking of What the Bleep do we Know, or any one of the books I've read on the subject. In any case, whether the movie says so or not, there's a lot of research being done into how the conscious control of various quantum states (via the observer paradox) is thought to propagate up to the free will that we experience. It's really groundbreaking shit that's finally making huge strides towards merging philosophy and physics. And these are the world's smartest academians from both of those fields that we're talking about, not just some fringe crackpots.
I love that movie! that's how I first got introduced to lucid dreaming. It's truly an inspiring movie, and especially how it's like partially animated. I actually borrowed a monologue from that movie for my speech class. I downloaded them too and put them on my iTunes. Great movie. I definitely reccommend it.
My favorite part... [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saxX-Z6w3p4]YouTube - Telescopic Evolution - Waking Life excerpt[/ame]
I agree, I would love to see that, it sounds fascinating. I tried to look up the observer's paradox but all I got was something related to sociology which I don't think is what you were talking about.
I'm on too much speed to try to tackle such a beast without wasting the entire day(s) and not writing my term papers, but maybe I will in the future. I might be behind the times or not sciencey enough in using "observer paradox" to describe what I'm talking about. Waveform collapse would be a better search phrase. You needn't go any further in the history of quantum physics than the double-slit experiment to understand what I'm getting at though. I assume you're familiar with how the experiment proves the wave/particle duality of matter, but it also showed that the collapse from a wave function back into a particle depends on measurement. If you measure it, it's a particle. If you don't, it's a wave. All those Henry Stapp articles explain how such a small discovery makes a very good case for free will.
Are you talking about the uncertainty principle here? I also feel Schrodinger's Cat could have something to do with what you are saying. The whole not knowing if the cat is dead or alive until you look. In fact, it is BOTH dead and alive until you look.
"Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest." - Mr. Debord on why people need to work
Yeah, it all boils down to the Uncertainty Principle. Schrodinger's cat was kinda schrodinger showing that he thinks the copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics can't be correct. And indeed, it is a supermindfuck (not that the other interpretations of quantum physics are any less ridiculous.) But since then, people (like Henry Stapp, while corresponding with Bohr, Rosenfeld, and Heisenberg himself) have put a lot more pieces into that puzzle. The field as a whole is still very young though and no one knows just what to believe yet, but I definitely think there's something to Stapp's interpretation. When a calcium ion is shoved through a nerve terminal, it is "measured." In other words, the terminal is so small that when the ion goes through it. we know exactly where the ion is. Since we have an exact position on the ion, any prediction about it's velocity becomes a quantum smear of probabilities (due to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.) This means that whether or not that ion actually hits its receptor site should be completely probabilistic. Your brain should not be able to accurately predict whether or not an electrical signal will make it through any particular neural pathway, even after only passing through one neuron. Your brain should not work. BUT, there's another aspect to quantum theory. If a quantum system is being continuously "measured" and is not allowed to revert back into a wave function, the outcome will not change, and will therefore be predictable. More or less, the basic idea is that somehow your brain recognizes when a neuron has successfully fired and then holds that particular quantum state in place through continuous measurement. Being able to do so at every nerve terminal in a specific pathway allows the brain to perform incredibly complex physics in a fashion that is predictable to it, and therefore, to you. There are still holes in the argument definitely, but it is much more coherent to me than the many-worlds interpretation or any of the other quantum bullshit being tossed around, with the possible exception of the relational interpretation, which definitely does interest me and perhaps seems more intuitively correct even. However, it's one of those things that can't really be argued scientifically (yet at least) and so I tend to shy away from it in conversation.