[MD] What is SOM?

[Ham Priday]

Marsha, Krimel, DMB, and all --


We should be indebted to Marsha for coming up with statements by seven 
investigative physicists which suggest that experience, and our intellectual 
ordering of it, proceeds FROM the observing self, and not the other way 
around.  Biophysicist Robert Lanza also maintains that "Today's 
preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from 
the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly.  Modern 
physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an 
island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath."

Because this Lanza statement complements the others, I should like to add it 
to Marsha's quotes:

"The urgent and primary questions of the universe have been
  undertaken by those physicists who are trying to explain the
  origins of everything with grand unified theories.  But as
  exciting and glamorous as these theories are, they are an
  evasion, if not a reversal, of the central mystery of knowledge:
  that the laws of the world were somehow created to produce
  the observer.  And more important than this, that the observer
  in a significant sense creates reality and not the other way around.
  Recognition of this insight leads to a single theory that unifies our
  understanding of the world."
        --Robert Lanza: A New Theory of the Universe

Also, I'm curious as to what Krimel means by his latest [8/30] assertion:

> Experience as I have tried to insist is not a unity at all,
> it is the illusion of unity.

I have never directly experienced a "unity" or anything like it, have you? 
The unifying of experience is something done by the intellect in retrospect. 
This statement makes no sense to me.  Indeed, the unity which Krimel insists 
is an "illusion" is the reality we all seek.

Thanks and regards,
Ham



> Thomas Stapp:
>
> "The physical world is "Not a structure built out of independently 
> existing non-analysable entities, but rather a web of relationships 
> between elements whose meanings arise wholly from their relationship to 
> the whole" " An elementary particle is not an independently existing 
> non-analysable entity. It is in essence, a set of relationships that reach 
> outwards to other things."
> "In conclusion there is definitely not a substantial physical world."
>
>
>
> John Wheeler:
>
> "May the universe in some strange sense be "brought into being" by the 
> participation of those who participate?... The vital act is the act of 
> participation. "Participator" is the incontrovertible new concept given by 
> quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term "ob server" of classical 
> theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches 
> what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics 
> says."
>
>
>
> Werner Heisenberg:
>
> "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of 
> questioning".
> "...we never can know what actually goes on in the invisible subatomic 
> realm, and that, therefore, we should "abandon all attempts to construct 
> perceptual models of atomic processes".
>
>
>
> Niels Bohr:
>
> ".. an independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can be ascribed 
> neither to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation."
> "Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties definable 
> and observable only through their interaction with other systems."
> "Quantum mechanics entails the necessity of a final renunciation of 
> classical ideas of causality and a radical revision of our attitude 
> towards the problem of physical reality."
>
>
>
> David Bohm:
>
> "Parts are seen to be in immediate connection in which their dynamical 
> relationships depend in an irreducible way on the state of the whole 
> system and the entire universe. Thus one is lead to a new notion of 
> unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of an analyzability of 
> the world into separate and independently existent parts."
>
>
>
> Robert Oppenheimer:
>
> "If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the 
> same, we must say 'No'; if we ask whether the electron's position changes 
> with time, we must say 'No'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must 
> say 'No'. The Buddha has given such answers when interrogated as to the 
> conditions of a man's self after death; but they are not familiar answers 
> for the tradition of 17th and 18th century science."
>
>
>
> Fritjof Capra (The turning point) sums up the current situation:
>
> "In atomic physics the observed phenomena can be under stood only as as 
> correlations between various processes of obser vation and measurement, 
> and the end of this chain of processes lies always in the consciousness of 
> the human observer. the crucial feature of quantum theory is that the 
> observer is not only necessary to observe the properties of an atomic 
> phenomenon, but is necessary even to bring about these properties. .. The 
> electron does not have objective properties independent of my mind. In 
> atomic physics the sharp Cartesian division between mind and matter, 
> between the observer and the observed, can no longer be maintained. We can 
> never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about 
> ourselves."