The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [81]
The film’s nadir is an interview with “Ramtha,” a thirty-five-thousand-year-old spirit channeled by a fifty-eight-year-old woman named J. Z. Knight. In fact, it turns out that many of the film’s producers, writers, and actors are members of Ramtha’s “School of Enlightenment,” where New Age pabulum is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.
The attempt to link the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you know its speed, and vice versa) to mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness) is based on Penrose and Hameroff’s theory of quantum consciousness, which has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.
Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. The conjecture (and that’s all it is) is that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons and thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave-function collapse can come about only when an atom is “observed” (that is, affected in any way by something else), neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggests that “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms to molecules to neurons to … 20
In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum,21 University of Colorado particle physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum mechanically the system’s typical mass m, speed v, and distance d must be on the order of Planck’s constant h. “If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically.” Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter molecules, and their speed across the distance of the synapse, are about three orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-macro connection. Subatomic particles may be altered when they are observed, but the moon is there even if no one looks at it. So what the #$*! is going on here?
Physics envy. The history of science is littered with the failed pipe dreams of ever-alluring reductionist schemes to explain the inner workings of the mind—schemes increasingly set forth in the ambitious wake of Descartes’s own famous attempt, some four centuries ago, to reduce all mental functioning to the actions of swirling vortices of atoms, supposedly dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization.
Near-Death Experiences
Since the advent of powerful jet planes capable of such g-force acceleration that pilots can lose consciousness during aerial combat maneuvering, the U.S. Air Force and Navy have undertaken a number of studies on how to fight what is called G-LOC, or g-force-induced loss of consciousness, including special flight suits and training in centrifuges. Dr. James Whinnery was hired by the military to direct the training and study of pilots at the Naval Air Warfare Center centrifuge in Warminster, Pennsylvania. He discovered a remarkable phenomenon: the majority of pilots experienced what Whinnery called “dreamlets,” or brief episodes of tunnel vision, sometimes with a bright light at the end of the tunnel, as well as a sense of floating, sometimes paralysis, and often euphoria and a feeling of peace and serenity when they came back