Albert Einstein's relativity theory has been tested to all sorts of limits and has never yet failed. It shows beyond reasonable doubt that what one observer may see as simultaneous events in his/her 'present' can appear to another observer as separated in time. Similarly, the usual interpretation of the Zeno effect is to suppose that the measurer is stationary and the wave function is flowing past its observational 'window', but maybe what's actually going on is that the measurer is the mover and the wave stationary. This chapter describes a couple of oddities about human relationship to time. The first oddity is highlighted by the moving coloured dot illusion. People's brains do a whole lot of work on the momentary physical happenings before a person gets to experience them consciously. The second oddity goes by 'pre-sponse', 'presentiment', 'feeling the future' and, though undramatic in itself, is totally at odds with the current world view of 'man a machine' aficionados.
Albert Einstein's relativity theory has been tested to all sorts of limits and has never yet failed. It shows beyond reasonable doubt that what one observer may see as simultaneous events in his/her 'present' can appear to another observer as separated in time. Similarly, the usual interpretation of the Zeno effect is to suppose that the measurer is stationary and the wave function is flowing past its observational 'window', but maybe what's actually going on is that the measurer is the mover and the wave stationary. This chapter describes a couple of oddities about human relationship to time. The first oddity is highlighted by the moving coloured dot illusion. People's brains do a whole lot of work on the momentary physical happenings before a person gets to experience them consciously. The second oddity goes by 'pre-sponse', 'presentiment', 'feeling the future' and, though undramatic in itself, is totally at odds with the current world view of 'man a machine' aficionados.
The difficulties of the old quantum theory were largely dispelled by the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. First Heisenberg (1925) developed the rather abstract matrix mechanics and soon after Schro¨dinger (1926; see also Eckart, 1926) developed the physically more appealing wave mechanics. Subsequently he showed them to be mathematically equivalent. The physicists were greatly relieved; now they had once again a mathematical formalism that enabled the results of experiments to be calculated. It was possible to move forward. It is certainly a very elegant and indeed beautiful formalism, and does enable the results of many physical measurements to be calculated with great accuracy. It is used daily by atomic and nuclear physicists; there is no other way to make calculations. From the earliest days there has been intense debate about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it shows no signs of being settled; if anything it is becoming more intense over the years. As Penrose has remarked, no one understands quantum mechanics. Feynman (1967; see also Sykes, 1994) also admitted that ‘nobody understands quantum mechanics’, and Einstein once remarked: ‘I have thought a hundred times as much about the quantum problems as I have about general relativity theory’ (Pais, 1994, p. 57). It should therefore be evident that the most that can be done here is to try to show where the real difficulties lie, and how the failure to recognize that quantum mechanics is an essentially statistical theory has led to a series of confusing quantum paradoxes. It is just these paradoxes that have often been used to support theological speculations. It is useful to ask what ‘understanding quantum mechanics’ actually means. Certainly it means being able to calculate the results of many measurements. The same applies to Newton’s theory of gravitation, which we understand in the sense that we can use it as a basis of calculation, although we do not really understand the gravitational force itself. Very often, especially in modern physics, the mathematical formalism does not give us the sort of intuitive physical feeling for what is going on that we often obtain from classical mechanics. Perhaps we can never achieve more than this for quantum mechanics. In classical mechanics we can assume that a property that is measured objectively exists prior to the interaction of the measuring apparatus with the observed system. Quantum mechanics, however, ‘is incompatible with the proposition that measurement discovers some unknown but pre-existing property’ (Peres, 1997, p. 14). There is an important distinction between mysteries and absurdities. We may be forced to live with mysteries, but there is no reason why we should put up with absurdities such as the wave-particle duality, tunnelling through potential barriers, acausal events and the collapse of the wave function. These are the quantum paradoxes that will be discussed later on. They arise within the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and are solved by other interpretations. These alternative interpretations enable us to make conjectures about what is going on, even though we cannot understand it in detail. This is acceptable and a stimulus to further research. It is certainly difficult enough to understand quantum mechanics, but there is no need to try to visualize logical absurdities in the effort to do so. Quantum mechanics is a mathematical formalism that makes it possible to calculate the results of some experiments. Anything more than this, such as questions about the interpretation of what is measured and whether it tells us what is actually going on in the system being studied, belongs to philosophy. Thus we are concerned here with what is essentially a philosophical debate; if it were just a matter of physics the debate would have been settled long ago. One of the difficulties is that it invokes the results of experiments and uses the language of quantum mechanics. Inevitably this language uses philosophical terms and then it is easy to give the impression that the philosophical propositions are in some way entailed by the physical results. These in turn can influence theological thinking. In order to be quite clear which arguments are justified and which are not, it is essential to separate the three levels of discourse: physical, philosophical and theological. Our task is to relate these together, and this immediately raises the traditional problems of the philosophy of science, including the relation of experiment to theory, and of theory to explanation. We begin by discussing experiments, distinguishing between those that are real and those that are imaginary.
A variant of the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation is proposed. Problems arising from the quantum Zeno effect are addressed as we have described previously. We do, however, offer some new, and perhaps unexpected observations. We are accustomed to thinking of wave function collapse as occurring consequent to laboratory measurements. We speculate that, whatever physical correlate of consciousness exists within the brain, it is quantum mechanical in the sense that a brain, left to itself, would eventually decohere into a state no longer compatible with its conscious functioning. Wave function collapse returns it to a state compatible with consciousness. Indeed, this may be its important reason for occurring. A universe without it simply could not play host to conscious brains. The fact that it also prevents us from encountering "absurd" situations in the laboratory is merely a fortunate dividend. Whenever a quantum measurement is made the universe's future history splits into a number of possibilities. This number may be very large or infinite. And we believe consciousness plays a vital role in this happening. A "conscious" universe where quantum measurements are being made allows for an enormous number of equally acceptable world-histories. An "unconscious" one, always evolving in a unitary fashion, allows for only one. If we assume that the decision as to which worldhistory is the real one (i.e. this one) is made at random we see that the universe is overwhelmingly more likely to be "conscious" than not.
A variant of the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation is proposed. Problems arising from the quantum Zeno effect are addressed as we have described previously. We do, however, offer some new, and perhaps unexpected observations. We are accustomed to thinking of wave function collapse as occurring consequent to laboratory measurements. We speculate that, whatever physical correlate of consciousness exists within the brain, it is quantum mechanical in the sense that a brain, left to itself, would eventually decohere into a state no longer compatible with its conscious functioning. Wave function collapse returns it to a state compatible with consciousness. Indeed, this may be its important reason for occurring. A universe without it simply could not play host to conscious brains. The fact that it also prevents us from encountering "absurd" situations in the laboratory is merely a fortunate dividend. Whenever a quantum measurement is made the universe's future history splits into a number of possibilities. This number may be very large or infinite. And we believe consciousness plays a vital role in this happening. A "conscious" universe where quantum measurements are being made allows for an enormous number of equally acceptable world-histories. An "unconscious" one, always evolving in a unitary fashion, allows for only one. If we assume that the decision as to which worldhistory is the real one (i.e. this one) is made at random we see that the universe is overwhelmingly more likely to be "conscious" than not.
Statement of the problem. CONSCIOUSNESS IS PRIMARY, MATTER IS SECONDARY. MATERIALISM HAS BEEN OVERTHROWED. It is time for the “architects” to look at everything with different eyes. MAN DOES NOT GENERATE THOUGHTS. They are not his. His brain only accepts them, not knowing who is their source. This has now been proven by scientists working in the field of quantum physics, in the field of neurobiology and in a number of other scientific fields. Consciousness is not in the human brain. It is outside of what we mistakenly took for the material world, which turned out to be an illusion. The material world does not exist. And man in it. What we feel as “our” life is a great self-deception. People are only an idea in the GREAT EMPTINESS = POTENTIAL OF EVERYTHING, which is CONSCIOUSNESS, HAVING NO BORDERS, HAVING NO BEGINNING OR END, NEVER BORN AND NEVER DIES. THERE IS NO TIME. There is only PURE PRESENCE HERE AND NOW. The so-called “CAUSE AND EFFECT RELATIONS” DO NOT EXIST IN CONSCIOUSNESS. THERE WAS NO EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD AND MAN. THE WHOLE WORLD ARISES AND REASSEMBLES EVERY MOMENT HERE AND NOW. AND EVERY PERSON, EVERY CITY too. Moreover, not everything is preserved during reassembly. Some things change. And are added. But the “person” knows nothing about this and does not remember. Because memory exists in linearity, and here it does not exist. Everything appears instantly from emptiness. No one has ever seen the real self and the world. Many other unexpected conclusions of researchers are already known to the scientific community. Thomas Young, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Wernner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Max Born, Tom Campbell, Frederico Pagio, and other great scientists, most of whom are Nobel Prize winners for their discoveries in quantum physics, have proven this. Quantum theory states: all religions, as well as all spiritual practices, psychological methods and other techniques were created in order to preserve, hold and control a NON-EXISTENT “HUMAN” in the illusion of a cause-and-effect (distant) world. That is, to close access to the TRUTH. The list of great scientists of the new paradigm of knowledge can be continued for a long time: Richard Feynman, Antonio Damasci, Donald Hoffman, Boris Podolsky, Nathan Rosan, John Bell, Robert Lansen, Bernardo Kastrup, Neville Goddard, Amisha Jha, Joe Spenza and many others. But quantum theory also promises fabulous possibilities for the world of illusions, including in technology. For example, quantum computers. The purpose of this article is to provide architects-practitioners, architect-theorists, architects-officials of architectural services and departments of regional administrations, as well as architect-teachers with the first step towards a fundamentally different understanding of the human world, the world of architecture and urban planning, based on modern achievements in the field of quantum physics, quantum neuroscience and other sciences. It is so different that the entire theory of architecture and urban planning must be revised.
Quantum paradoxes The next few chapters are devoted to resolving a number of quantum paradoxes in the sense of giving a reasonable explanation of a seemingly paradoxical result in terms of the principles of quantum theory discussed earlier in this book. None of these paradoxes indicates a defect in quantum theory. Instead, when they have been properly understood, they show us that the quantum world is rather different from the world of our everyday experience and of classical physics, in a way somewhat analogous to that in which relativity theory has shown us that the laws appropriate for describing the behavior of objects moving at high speed differ in significant ways from those of pre-relativistic physics. An inadequate theory of quantum measurements is at the root of several quantum paradoxes. In particular, the notion that wave function collapse is a physical effect produced by a measurement, rather than a method of calculation, see Sec. 18.2, has given rise to a certain amount of confusion. Smuggling rules for classical reasoning into the quantum domain where they do not belong and where they give rise to logical inconsistencies is another common source of confusion. In particular, many paradoxes involve mixing the results from incompatible quantum frameworks. Certain quantum paradoxes have given rise to the idea that the quantum world is permeated by mysterious influences that propagate faster than the speed of light, in conflict with the theory of relativity. They are mysterious in that they cannot be used to transmit signals, which means that they are, at least in any direct sense, experimentally unobservable.