Joseph Ramos11 said:Honestly, that question—"What the hell do we actually know?"—is becoming more relevant to me every single day, regardless of what movie we're talking about. Anyone who’s ever tried to wrap their head around self-discovery or how the world works has had to brush up on the basics of quantum mechanics eventually, even if they're just a layman like me... I actually found the film pretty likable, especially since it's clearly meant for a general audience. It features experts, sure, but it also includes regular people, like that lady you were pointing out. I think it's healthy to look at these problems from all sorts of different angles. There isn't much fluff or wild theorizing; it mostly sticks to the facts. As for her personal life and those cultish vibes, the movie doesn't touch on any of that, and if you ask me, it isn't even relevant to the story...
I think you might be looking at this from the wrong angle by prioritizing things in a way that doesn't quite add up. Look, if consciousness—or even just the observer—actually influences the system being observed and triggers measurable changes, then we have to be incredibly precise about what that observer actually is. We need to understand exactly how and why they're affecting the system in the first place. To me, that’s the core of the whole issue... I'm honestly a little surprised you can brush that part aside so easily...
We still haven't actually defined consciousness, and nobody really knows what it is. If consciousness is just some byproduct of electrical activity in the brain, how exactly does it manage to influence the system...
I think you've got it backwards. Before quantum mechanics came along, consciousness didn't have any impact on experimental results at all. That's only when we entered the quantum era that things changed. Back then, consciousness seemed totally irrelevant because it wasn't interacting with the objective reality being observed or measured. It made sense to assume consciousness was just a byproduct of electrical processes in the brain... But that theory doesn't hold water anymore. That’s one of the reasons why top-tier scientists and physicists like David Bohm don't look down on spirituality with such contempt anymore...
Sure, it might not matter for the interaction itself, but it matters a lot when you're trying to build a theory about how all this actually works.
See what I mean?
I kind of agree with you. I think math can be seen as a tool for understanding the world, but true perception only happens through experience. Math gives us the blueprint of a landscape, but we still need eyes to actually see it, right?
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There isn't really a legitimate expert in that movie. Just one, and even then, it feels incredibly thin. It’s more like they're just dragging things out instead of actually confirming anything.
I feel like you’ve completely missed the mark on where the actual priorities should lie here. Look, if consciousness—or even just the observer—is actually influencing the system being observed and triggering measurable changes, then we have to be incredibly precise about what that observer actually *is*. We need to nail down exactly how and why they’re exerting that influence in the first place. To me, that’s the whole damn point. It feels like a fundamental issue, and honestly, I don't really get how you can just gloss over a fact like that so easily.
Look, there’s a massive difference between claiming we don't know something and claiming that everything we *do* know is total garbage. I mean, maybe one is just ignorance, while the other is a fundamental critique of our entire framework. If you think about it, the only thing actually interacting with a system is the act of measurement itself. Take a car speeding down a highway, for instance. When you watch it fly by, all you're really doing is catching a massive influx of photons bouncing off the chassis and hitting your eyes to deliver data. But those photons? They’re too sluggish. They just don't have enough energy to actually nudge the car off its path. It’s all just information transfer, I guess. Or at least, that's how it seems.
Look, when you're trying to observe an electron, that damn photon hits it like a freight train. It’s just... I don't know, there's no way around it. You can't actually have a thing to look at without basically smashing it in the process. You get what I mean now? Or am I just talking to myself?
If we’re talking about those more subtle, fine-tuned interactions, then yeah, we really ought to be pushing the idea of telekinetic processes. But honestly? I don't have the energy to dive into that right now. I feel like I've already covered that ground somewhere else.
Consciousness... honestly, we still haven't actually defined what it is. It’s just sitting there, undefined, hovering in the middle of everything. If consciousness is supposedly just some byproduct of basic electrical firing in the brain—just some biological noise—then how on earth is it possible that it actually exerts any kind of influence on the system? I mean, I guess there's a massive gap there. Maybe it's more than just neurons firing, but right now, nobody really knows.
So, how does an electric field actually work here? I mean, how exactly does the brain manage to influence EEG electrodes? And what about magnetic resonance—you know, MRI? I guess there's a whole mechanism there, but I'm wondering about the actual physical interaction.
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| I mean, I think you're completely off base here. Before quantum mechanics actually entered the picture, consciousness didn't have any kind of influence on experimental results—that’s something that was only ever observed once we started dealing with quantum mechanics. |
It all comes down to scale. I mean, you aren't going to move some massive hog rooting around in a dive bar just by hitting it with a photon. That’s just not how it works. But an electron? You hit that, and you’ve bumped it straight up to a higher energy state instantly. It's wild. Once we shifted our perspective down to those smaller scales—diving headfirst into the realm of quantum mechanics—everything changed. Just look at Wolfgang Pauli and his fine-structure constant... it changes the whole game.
So, I was just looking into Wolfgang Pauli, and honestly? It’s a lot to wrap your head around. He was one of those heavy hitters in the physics world—someone who basically helped lay down the rules for how we understand subatomic particles. You know the type, the kind of brilliant, slightly eccentric minds that change everything while the rest of us are still trying to figure out basic algebra. He’s most famous for the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which is a fancy way of saying that two identical fermions can't occupy the same quantum state at the same time. Sounds like a bureaucratic rule for electrons, right? But it's actually what keeps matter from just collapsing in on itself. Without it, we wouldn't really exist as solid things. Everything would just be a mushy pile of nothingness. But what I find more interesting—and maybe a little bit wild—is his obsession with the connection between physics and psychology. He wasn't just some guy staring at chalkboards all day; he was deeply interested in how the physical world interacts with the human mind. He had this intense collaboration with Carl Jung, trying to bridge the gap between hard science and the stuff people usually write poems about. They were looking for a unified theory that covered both the tiny particles and the deep, messy layers of the psyche. It’s a pretty ambitious leap, I guess. Maybe too ambitious? Who knows. Then there's the whole "Pauli Effect" thing. There were these stories about him being such a walking disaster zone that whenever he walked into a lab, equipment would spontaneously break or experiments would fail. It’s almost funny, in a dark sort of way. A man so fundamentally tied to the laws of the universe that his mere presence seemed to disrupt them. Or maybe he was just unlucky. Or maybe he was just clumsy. It’s hard to say. Anyway, he was a complicated figure. Brilliant, sure, but definitely someone who lived on the edge of what science considers "normal." He spent his life chasing these deep, underlying symmetries in nature, trying to find the logic behind the chaos. It makes you wonder if we're even close to finding what he was looking for. Probably not. We're likely still just scratching the surface. And then... suddenly, even those tiny, negligible influences start carrying some serious weight. I guess that’s just how it works when you're dealing with a world built on uncertainty. Everything gets messy.
It’s like... okay, imagine this fat pig just sitting there at the kitchen table. He’s just sitting. He’s still. You look at him, you know he’s staying put, right? And you can tell exactly how much he’s moving—or rather, that he isn't moving at all. But then you try to do that with an electron, and everything just breaks. If you check to see if it's staying still, or how much it’s vibrating, you lose its position. Or if you find out where it is, you have no clue about its movement. You just can't have both. It's impossible.
Think about it like a ping pong ball trapped between two walls. It bounces back and forth. The closer you move those walls together to pin it down, the more precisely you’re defining its position, but the faster it starts vibrating.
That's why consciousness seemed so irrelevant in all of this back then. It wasn't interacting with the objective reality being observed and measured. Back then, the idea that consciousness was just some byproduct of electrical impulses in the brain could pass as a viable theory. Nowadays? That theory can't walk a single step. Maybe that's one reason why top-tier scientists and physicists like David Bohm don't look at spirituality with such blatant contempt anymore.
The truth is, we have no clue what consciousness actually is. Nobody does. Not the wizards, not the spiritualists, and certainly not those Eastern gurus. But just because we're lost doesn't mean we know jack shit, as any cult leader or self-help guru would probably tell you.
I suppose I partially agree with you. I mean, maybe mathematics can be used as a sort of tool to help us grasp the world, but actual perception... that can only happen through experience. Math might give us a blueprint of a territory, but if we want to actually see that territory, we need eyes to look with, right?
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Fair enough. Which is exactly why I tend to think that positivist science has hit a wall in certain areas. Beyond that point, you've got magicians. And I don't mean those "self-improvement" types, but people with "clear vision." True geniuses—that's how Schopenhauer used to describe them.