Doing away with the is word

Now I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, reading and writing about the quantum. More and more I’ve been searching for  connections that seem to bind elements of the quantum with  consciousness and our perceptions of reality. At the same time, I am a huge fan of Albert Ellis and his work in rational emotive behavior therapy. Of course we shouldn’t expect to be loved just because we love.

Albert Ellis also advocated the use of E-Prime, especially in writing, as a way to avoid muddled and blame-based thinking that distresses psychotherapy patients. According to Ellis, rational emotive behavior therapy "has favored E-Prime more than any other form of psychotherapy and I think it is still the only form of therapy that has some of its main books written in E-Prime."

E-prime you ask?

Alfred Korzybski, in 1933 proposed that we should abolish the "is of identity" from the English language. And, in 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. went further and proposed the abolition of all forms of the words "is" or "to be.” An English without "isness" now known as E-Prime, or English-Prime.

By and large, however, E-Prime has not yet caught on either in learned circles or in popular speech.

Oddly, most physicists write in E-Prime a large part of the time, due to the influence of Operationalism -- the philosophy that tells us to define things by operations performed -- but few have any awareness of E-prime as a discipline and most of them lapse into "isness" statements all too frequently

1. The photon is a wave can be re-written to read - The photon behaves as a   wave when constrained by certain instruments

2. The photon is a particle can be written such as:  The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.

3. John is unhappy and grouchy can be re-written to read John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office.

Sure, the first example becomes an operational formulation when rewritten in English Prime and may appear of interest to philosophers and scientists of an operationalist bias, but consider what happens when we move to the second example.

Clearly, written in Standard English, "The photon is a wave," and "The photon is a particle" contradict each other, just like the sentences "Robin is a boy" and "Robin is a girl." Nonetheless, all through the nineteenth century physicists found themselves debating about this and, by the early 1920s, it became obvious that the experimental evidence depended on the instruments or the instrumental set-up (design) of the total experiment. One type of experiment always showed light traveling in waves, and another type always showed light traveling as discrete particles.

3.         To be or not to be,

            That is the question. Hamlet

Become

To live or to die,

I ask myself this.

While teaching at the University of Florida, Korzybski counseled his students to eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual. For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when ..." or "I tend to make myself depressed about … demonstrating the application of general semantics to psychotherapy.

The Fleshy Part of the Thigh - the God Particle

I’ve always thought the sixty-ninth episode of the HBO series, The Sopranos - The Fleshy Part of the Thigh to be one of the deepest and most confronting of the many excellent episodes in the series. I had the chance to watch it again last night.

Tony, in hospital faces his own mortality after being shot by his demented uncle. In the next room, Da Lux, a rapper who was shot while leaving a club is being comforted by his manager and family. We over hear his manager telling his client that getting shot will boost record sales. Da Lux is clearly distressed and in pain.

This episode also has one of my favorite quotes scribbled on a card.   While having his wound dressed the day before surgery, Tony speculates that Janice is responsible for the card - the Ojibwe saying "Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky,"

After learning that Pastor Bob and his followers oppose female contraception, Tony asks them if their God disapproves of Viagra too. Da Lux invites Tony to watch a boxing fight at his hospital room on satellite TV. While watching the prize fight, Paulie moans about how alone everyone is, Schwinn discusses the interconnectivity of all life, telling them how no event or entity can be understood independent from the rest of the world referencing the work of Erwin Schrödinger, Quantum mysticism, and Da Lux agrees with Schwinn: "everything is everything, I'm down with that." 

Schwinn has ideas that are at odds with the beliefs of Pastor Bob, who again visits Tony later and tries to encourage him to find his spirituality. Tony confides to Schwinn he is starting to believe they are all part of something bigger.

Schwinn’s interconnectivity remark - What sounds like a casual remark is of course anything but. It’s the genius of the writers that set up and make room for reflection. Here, mortality, psychology, religion, quantum physics, art and moralism collide.

Interconnectivity, or as Tony puts it “we are all part of something bigger” isn’t, of course, a new idea. Our perception of things, the world is not just an esoteric topic confined to philosophy, but one of neuropsychology, brain structure and function, physics and more. Consciousness, as imperceptible and inexplicable as it may be, could well be at the root of everything we experience. Not just what we think, but what we see, what we feel.

The temporal lobe assigns meaning to whatever stimuli hit our senses. In short, it is the temporal lobe that gives us meaning to what we see, what we hear, etc. Temporal lobe damage can affect our ability to assign meaning to normally familiar objects. And interestingly, in some cases of temporal lobe damage that cause temporal lobe seizures, such patients can be overwhelmed with spiritual and emotional feelings beyond the norms of human experience.

So where, or how does the discovery of an elementary particle such as the Higgs boson sit? The Higgs boson, or the “God particle” explains how elementary particles gain mass by interacting with other particles within an invisible field of energy. Sure, the 2013 Nobel prize went to Francois Englert of Belgium and Peter Higgs of the United Kingdom for the theory of how particles acquire mass. This was borne out when researchers confirmed the existence in 2012 of the God particle.

But, Where did the thought of the Higgs boson come from? Does this particle exist only in our mind? Can it be manipulated by our thoughts? Is it possible that matter isn’t so much a thing as it is a perspective? If so, could it be that by changing this perspective we might discover that our essential nature isn’t matter-based after all?

The quantum brain and consciousness

I’ve been having an on-going discussion with a colleague about mind-brain duality and the nature of consciousness – when we both came across a piece of writing (author unknown) which goes something like this:

“If we work up a competent knowledge of the physics and electrical engineering of our TV sets, that knowledge will not help us to decide how far to trust the person talking on the screen". This was in the context of Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue’s theoretical framework, Quantum Brain Dynamics (QBD) to help examine consciousness scientifically.

I wanted to pull together my thoughts and at the same time try and better understand QBD. This work seems to be based on the original physical theory of memory and brain functioning found in the work by Ricciardi and Umezawa in the 1960s. Jibu and Yasue aim to reveal the kind of physical phenomena that might underpin the process of consciousness from a physical point of view.

As we know there are numerous models explaining consciousness and even George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four bleak outlook is a contender in Daniel Dennett's multiple drafts model of consciousness; a theory of consciousness based upon Cognitivism.

David Bohm took the view that quantum theory and relativity contradicted one another, and that this contradiction implied that there existed a more fundamental level in the physical universe pointing towards a deeper theory. This more fundamental level was proposed to represent an undivided wholeness and an implicate order, from which arises the explicate order of the universe as we experience it.

Bohm's proposed implicate order applies both to matter and consciousness, and he suggests that it could explain the relationship between them. Mind and matter are here seen as projections into our explicate order from the underlying reality of the implicate order. Bohm claims that when we look at the matter in space, we can see nothing in these concepts that helps us to understand consciousness.

Bohm sees the movement, change or flow and also the coherence of experiences, such as listening to music as a manifestation of the implicate order. He claims to derive evidence for this from the work of Jean Piaget in studying infants. Bohm, however, never proposed any specific brain mechanism by which his implicate order could emerge in a way that was relevant to consciousness, nor any means by which the propositions could be tested or falsified.

Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff collaborated to produce the theory known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) although each initially developing their ideas independently.  Penrose came to the problem from the point of view of pure mathematics and in particular Gödel's theorem.

Gödel, in 1931 proved that any theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. Further to that, for any consistent formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory. To put this in more simple terms; any system which is expressive enough to be consistent and complete is also expressive enough to contain self-referential statements which doom it to incompleteness.

In the 1989 book, The Emperor's New Mind, Penrose argued that the theorem showed that the brain had the ability to go beyond what could be achieved by axioms or formal systems. He argued that this meant that the brain had some additional function that was not based on algorithms.   

Penrose went on to consider what it was in the human brain that was not driven by algorithms. Given the algorithm-based nature of most of physics, he decided that the random choice of position etc. that occurs when a quantum wave collapses into a particle was the only possibility for a non-computable process. However, Penrose conceded that the randomness of the wave function collapse, although free from algorithms, is not really a basis for any useful form of human understanding.

Penrose proposed a second form of wave function collapse that could apply where quanta did not interact with the environment, but might collapse on their own accord. He suggests that each quantum superposition has its own piece of space-time curvature, and when these become separated by more than the Planck length, they become unstable and collapse.