Quantum interconnectedness and ancient Greek Philosophy?

Question

I just learned about Quantum interconnectedness (the basics, only) and I am blown away. Well before socrates or Aristotle were born, a philosopher named Parmenides discussed the same basic idea as quantum interconnectedness suggests. We are all one. According to Parmenides, there is no such thing as not being. Everything is everything. you cannot define any object truthfully because once it is described, you are also describing what it is NOT. and there is no such thing as Not Being. He also goes on to say that sensual perception is not the way to understand Truth. It is all in the mind. I can easily correlate his beliefs with the little I know about quantum connectedness (which can only be understood mathematically -in the mind.

Those of you with more scientific savvy than I have, what do you think?

Answer 1

As a matter of interest, Paramenides visited Athens when he was 65 years old and there he met Socrates who was a young man at the time.

I think that an aquaintance with the ancient philosophers is important for modern scientists and engineers. Philosophy is, after all, about trying to explain life the universe and everything. The problem with a cassual aquaintance is that it is very easy to take what the ancients have written out of context and come to the conclusion that they had grasped some great truth that we have only just come around to re-discovering. In the realm of quantum mechanics, this is unlikely to be correct.

I think that it was Feynman who bassically said that anyone who tells you that he understands quantum mechanics, does not truly understand the problem that we are trying to solve. Now, I know from teaching engineering, that the first thing that you find out when teaching is how little you understand. This is because if you really try to do a good job, you find that you cannot teach something that you do not understand in greater detail than you require of your student.

We are not really in a possition to teach quantum mechanics and say "that is it, that is how it all works, there is no more". What we can do is to say that this is where we have got to so far, there may be some wrong turns that need looking at, but the rest is up to you to find out. It is this possition that leaves us open to taking what has been said in the past out of context and drawing quite incorrect conclussions.

My own feelings on where we are with quantum mechanics is quite simple. Please realise that I am probably quite incorrect. In my field of communications engineering I firmly believe that I understand the effects that will cause errors in a bit stream passing over a radio link. I can do some calculations and give you a probability of errors occuring in the bit stream. I can also tell you what to do to change that probability, and by how much to do it to achieve a certain change. My results can be checked using measurements on the actual system and will be accurate.
What I cannot tell you is what exactly will happen to the nth. bit in the stream. The reason for this is that I do not have sufficient detailed information about all the processes that are causing the errors. Most of the information that I have available is of a statistical nature. Much of the reason for this is that obtaining the detailaed incormation would be far too costly and take far too long. I think that the problem with quantum mechanics is that we do not have sufficient knowledge of exactly what is going on and therefore we can only describe the results in terms of probabilities.

Please do not consider this as any form of criticism of quantum mechanics, it is not. We are looking here at the limits of our knowledge of life the universe and everything, and our ability to observe and measure it all in fine detail. As an example, we can observe entagled photons and we are getting towards being able to use entaglement in every day applications, but understanding how and why it happens, we are not there yet.

Answer 2

It is never surprising to me when philosophical cosmogenies seem to imply physical models of the universe. Philosophical systems are above all models for reality, and physics and philosophy are born of the same concerns. The two disciplines tend to diverge on the rigor of experimental verification (though some modern philosophers are becoming more scientific in that respect). You could say that physics is very much a modern branch of cosmogenic philosophy, which relies on mathematics as a tool.

I do not think that Parmenides had a quantum mechanical (eg inherently probabilistic) model in mind--he was just emphasizing the limitations of perception. In some sense this is anti-quantum mechanics, because (at least locally) QM is a very positivist theory. In QM, if something cannot be measured, it does not exist in a definite way. However the question of exactly how a measurement collapses a wavefunction, and the global extent of this collapse (after all, we are part of the universe, and subject to the same equations, which seem to be deterministic in a global sense) is still open.

Answer 3

It's easy to cause a lot of confusion by tearing physical concepts out of their context.

Some fundamentalstic christs try that to harm the reputation of evolution. Some others disgrace themselfs with dilly discussions about the entropy.

Both, physics and philosophy are very exact sciences. Of course, some parts of quantum physics have some philosophical aspects, which are discussed in metaphysics. Einstein itself had his problems with this consequences, speaking of corelated systems as "spooky long range interaction".

So I prefer to leave the physical concepts where they belong. Things like "the truth" and "mind" are hard to define, so that a really useful discussion is possible, remember science is not about guessing and believing, but about proofs and consistent theories.

So of course, although interpretation of the quantum mechanics is a fascinating topic, I don't expect that there's an easy to understand philosophical or religious underlaying principle. At least not for us "simple" human beings who live in our everyday world with three dimensions and deterministic mechanics. Richard Feynman, a famous physicist and nobel prize winner, said that nobody, even him, really understands quantum mechanics. We just can use it and calculate things, but we have no real picture of it in our mind.

Answer 4

Philosophy is just guesses without evidence. There is much we still don't know about how the universe is put together. It's better to admit that and just look towards new evidence and theories than to dwell too much on what people thought a couple thousand years ago.

Answer 5

I think if the head of Quantum Information here read this he would say you were over simplifying things... then probably make me do a project to investigate it!

Answer 6

if nothing is the centre and circumference of everywhere and all that really exists is conciounsss then the mind must contain everything

Answer 7

Sort of. Here's something that'll keep you thinking. "Nothing exists until it is observed (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste)."

Answer 8

you may enjoy this video.

http://www.whatthebleep.com/whatthebleep/

(I got it through the library)