Greeting Economists, James Devine writes, "since we really don't understand quantum mechanics, new age religion must be okay."
Doyle, Another path into this territory that Jim is bringing up is to look at what religions try to understand. They focus upon the connection process humans engage in. In the case of quantum mechanics since some parts of small things are not resolved by conventional methods of 'knowing' something the idea of the connection between things is left up in the air so to speak. Some religions try to say that a spirit in the landscape is there as animism posits, but what they are really talking about is the networked properties of connecting knowledge together. The spirit is a metaphor for how knowledge is obtained and shared. Since in many cases material knowledge falls short of a goal of knowing how things work, then a traditional theory of how the 'spirit' or the mind is in the landscape awaits use as a means of dealing with the emotional challenges that ignorance entails. In mathematics trying to know what is actually the connection in the quantum world still has considerable merit. String theory is an attempt to posit a connection process that would allow us to 'unify' the landscape in terms of how things work. While no one says various physics have resolved the interconnection of things, there is a sense that previous versions of what the universe is have been better penetrated than just relying upon what a spiritual tradition might imply. The spiritual tradition resting upon the concept that somethings are just unknowable. String theory is an attempt to invent a technique of knowledge analysis to know matter at the quantum level. But the concept also illustrates a long tradition in favor of 'knowing' as opposed to 'unknowable' in terms of matter. For example, in quantum computing, we can know some things via the properties of quantum mechanics we can't know through conventional sequential (Von Neumann) computing or for that matter parallel processing. Prime number encryption being an example of something Quantum Computing can address in a knowable manner. It's also true that mathematics has limits of 'knowing' in the sense of what Godel asserts about the self consistency of a set of assumptions. Nevertheless, all that Quantum Mechanics brings up is the old debate about what we can know and what 'knowing' means. And the riposte is of course that 'knowing' continues to expand even with quantum computing. Such that if we find happiness as Marlee Matlin (a disabled actress) finds, we are not looking for knowledge (since ignoring the issue of what materially quantum events are leaves the status quo intact) we are looking for emotion structure (through new age religion) that works best for that individual. thanks, Doyle