[MD] What is SOM?

[Platt Holden]

Hi Marsha:

Let me add my thanks to others for these quotes. Interesting indeed! I 
would like to add:

Erwin Schrodinger

"The external world and consciousness are one and the same thing."

Platt


> 
> Some interesting quotes:
> 
> 
> 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."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> .
> .
> 
> Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss, you'll land among the
> stars.........
> .
> . 
> 
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