Scientism vs Science Fiction

Or how education is now a total farce

The TV series Constellation was just a mess of stars to me. No recognizable galaxies at all. It wanted us to believe that quantum superposition could result in the ‘observer effect’ working perfectly. That would then generate a multitude of probable realities that could even meet each other in physical dress in real space and time. You see what you want to see and I see what I want to see, you see? Though I have yet to see the promised ending and resolution of the enormous amount of confused crap this show exuded I remain deeply suspicious of its program. I am not an electron baby!

You could have two daughters that are identical (as the same essential being) but only one talks Swedish. You could walk from an existing cabin in the woods to its later incarnation as a burnt-out wreck all within an hour. Time travel too! By now many of you will have seen any one of a plethora of jumping around in time scenarios. There goes the now, now. And yet we all time travel all the time every day. It’s called memory. As far as you are concerned you are there! Beats science fiction every time, hands down. I will never forget that moment when….

I doubt any viewer of this TV show would have seriously questioned their own reality even after learning a wee bit about the quirky poodle called Quantum Physics. Einstein was close to shitting a brick over the absurdity of an implied ‘observer effect’. The wooly haired scientist famously said to quantum genius Neils Bohr, “Do you really believe that the moon does not exist if nobody is looking at it?” Yet it is absolutely true that quantum entanglement makes a total mockery of just about all of physics. How can a particle that once only had a brief fling with another electron be forever in its spooky action orbit no matter how many light years they may drift apart? Imagine that on a human scale. Mmm..

In a forest where no one can hear,

A tree falls, and it's perfectly clear,

In superposition it lays,

Until observed in some ways,

Entangled, its fate draws near.

With particles A and B in a twirl,

Superposed they do whirl,

Entangled they are, be they near or far,

Behaving as one, how utterly bizarre,

In quantum dance do their secrets unfurl.

Classical physics seems to be fast losing ground to its quantum relative, at least in popular culture. It appears to me that this current extrapolation of SF has to involve the viewer in some kind of existential quagmire: maybe we do live in a simulation after all! That is what the producers of Devs want us to believe for sure. The only way to release ourselves from a deterministic universe of cause and effect is jump ship and board a quantum probability vessel! Aboard that all your dreams can come true albeit in a parallel version of your current self, whatever in God’s name that is supposed to be by now.

None of this is new by the way. Medieval philosophers like Bishop Berkeley were the original quantum-thought-experiment scientists. They just happened to be religious. He famously asked the million-dollar question: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to witness (observe) its fall is there a sound? By the way try to prove your answer to that, at least in your own mind. Do not assume anything. Science is never about assumptions. Scientism absolutely depends on them. It commands us, “Follow the science you dorks!”

We have simply gotten ourselves better extensions of our senses i.e. technology, to make the question more salient to the everyday man and woman and everything else in between. Yet it is a serious question to pose, even for ordinary folks like us with no classical training in obtuse theories. Science fiction has in many ways never been this stimulating. And yet it almost always constellates its ideas around the belief that has still never been absolutely proven: at the very base of everything something is real.

In Devs (later we find out the V is a Roman letter so actually it means Deus=God, to add insult to injury) behold a magnetically levitated quantum computer whose program can show us EVERYTHING that has ever happened. There on the screen! The Akashik records in technicolour! Not only that, we can insert ourselves inside the program to live happily ever after with our deceased loved ones. After all everything is computationally possible right? Ones and zeros. There is NO difference between a simulation of an experience and the very same experience in a real world, right? But a simple lucid dream already demonstrates that. Obviously, clearly as clear can be. Reality, as famously described by ontological guerrilla Robert Anton Wilson is what you can get away with.

The Devs show was like a recruitment film for Transhumanism. You too can live forever in our latest simulation, indistinguishable from reality in every way! No need for God or a creator of course. All you need is a super-duper quantum computer! I think somebody else needs to be sent to a labour camp in Mongolia as the next show I will introduce portends. During the cultural revolution in China if you taught quantum theory or evolutionary biology off you went to the labour camp.

The already acclaimed series, The three body problem takes our fascination with alien contact and neatly wraps it into a highly advanced computer game that can hack into an individual’s neural network. The result is to teleport him to another, actually existing star system. There we have an advanced civilization that warps and weaves its culture through periods of stability and chaos. Just like our world, right? Except the scale of their chaos tends towards the more apocalyptic.

But even a cursory reading of Worlds in Collision by the iconoclastic Immanuel Velikovsky would show you the idea is in itself not at all unstable. For some reason the Earth is fairly regularly transformed into a disaster movie. A freezing one at that. But not because of three suns a la TV show title, but more probably because of the very variable one, the electric one we already have. More on that wild theory can be read here.

So, to synopsize the one body problem, here you are now in a very real world where the carbon tax is going to be increased here in Canada very soon by over 20%. You are slowly but surely being influenced by mass media outlets to consider the following:

You can choose your own future because you have free will. And by the way countless other versions of yourself also have free will. It is a crowded place it seems, freedom that is. Quantum physics implies many things but its most important mental effect is that nothing is fixed until we fix it into place. We here means the action of consciousness in observing a single event. The wave of infinite probability collapses into my dog rolling in bear shit. Et voila! Self-actualization up the yin yang! Man, I can do anything, be anybody I choose!

Time is a virtual illusion and yet time travel is possible? The grass is always greener in another time. The most important theme of all though, obviously, is that we can and will (or maybe already have) make contact with non-human intelligence sometimes called extraterrestrials. God help them if they do ever beam down here. Judging by the way we treat minorities here on this planet the aliens would not be happy campers. Unless of course they were to convince us through direct neural uplinks of fake news that it was all a conspiracy theory, their arrival you know.

Scientism will tell you they know and you do not. How could you possibly understand the complexities of quantum mechanics, fractal time or multiple worlds. Science fiction will titillate your interest in what lies beyond the mundane round of old white men telling us all about the reality to come thanks to them.

Soon we may well have a convicted criminal bamboozle his way into the most powerful position on Earth simply because we are so damned stupid as to continue a belief that simply does beggar belief itself. It is the belief that one geriatric Caucasian can make us great, again! If that is the result of our watching too many science fiction shows rather than paying attention to this world, then we fully deserve the invasion of an advanced species. But the sad fact is that the vast majority of the good human race is now so dreadfully bound to the rigours of just getting through another month that we fully deserve a complete idiot as our leader.

The observer effect is real. Every effort to educate ourselves about this world, including all the scenarios of science fiction that may hint otherwise, is doomed as long as we look outside for answers. Whether in another space or in another time there are no answers. But for just one brief moment it seemed as if there were. Since we created all the scientism and the science fiction and all the well thought and misguided notions abounding it could be a good time to stop the world.

How you do that, as the ultimate experiencer of your world and mine, is simply up to you. As one very famous Buddhist put it…

"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito."

The place and time we now find ourselves may be the last opportunity we have to liberate ourselves from an educational system that so loudly claims to know the truth but in fact has literally no clue about reality. Scientism, the religion of science as the ultimate arbiter of reality, has gained enormous power through sleight of hand and outright lies. “This shot will protect you from Covid.” Yeah, right doc. My grandson even knows that is absurd since his ten-year-old friend got Covid twice, right after the shots. Science meanwhile attempts the impossible feat of reconciling classical physics with quantum mechanics. Both have equally valid and equally provable ‘maps’ of reality that are chalk and cheese different.

Any science fiction that helps us to ask better questions is thus an important cultural artifact. So, I will leave you with my own question, one that I hope inspires you to ask more yourselves: “If a simulation requires a pre-existing and very material quantum computer to generate a reality that you may well now inhabit, and a human is necessary to build such a system, whose simulation are you currently residing within?”

I did most certainly did not create my reality. I can barely create two fried eggs even on a good day. I am clearly inside some kind of reality but I did not make it. Atheists will tell me nobody made reality. That is a powerful nobody boys and girls! Ok. So, I can be in a reality nobody created. Or I can take heed of the great Sufi philosopher Ibn El Arabi

"My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, and a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Ka'ba and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith."

My camel is real and is currently waiting for its breakfast outside. Let me end with my favourite explorer, linguist and all-round swashbuckler Sir Richard Burton. He too was a Sufi and this is what he said about his camel:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell.

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