What the [Bleep] Do We Know? (The movie)

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

I just saw this movie tonight and I’d sort of like to get some other views on it. For thise who haven’t seen it, it’s a discussion of quantum mechanics, epistemology and New Age spirituality, featuring interviews with a number of physicists, theologians, doctors and that nutball “Ramtha” woman interspersed with a bizarre dramatized story featuring Marlee Matlin.

Over all, I thought some of the physics discussions were fascinating as well as the points about how consciousness “creates” reality. I would have been happy simply with that and I thought the Marlee Matlin bits were opaque and distracting.

There were a couple of claims in the film that I’m curious about. One was a claim that the Indians where Columbus first landed literally could not see his ships approaching because they had no “memory” from which they could interpret the visual data (or something). The movie claims that a shaman noticed ripples in the water off in the distance and stood there every day until he could see the boats. Once he could see them, he told everyone else and since he was their shamn, they believed him and suddenly they could see the boats. Needless to say my Doper bullshit detector went off rather loudly, but some of the people in the movie were pretty serious scientists so I wonder if it’s one of those things that sounds like BS but it’s true. Does anybody know?

Another claim in the movie was that consciosness literally creates “reality” and one of the physicists said that if you really, truly believed with all of your being that you could walk on water you could walk on water. He also says that it’s pretty much impossible to really control your consciousness that much and that most “positive thinking” is really just a thin patina on consciousness as a whole.

Could someone who knows more about quantum physics tell me if that guy was whooshing me or was he expressing some real theoretical aspect of QP?

Also, I would just welcome any opinions or thoughts at all on the film. I think it was flawed but that it had some really good material in it. I had to rest my brain when i came out of that thing.

[Cisco]

I was supposed to see this movie for a Philosophy of Religion class last semester but I was kind of broke at the time…Maybe if it’s still playing around here I’ll check it out.

The things you’re describing about the Indians not seeing Columbus’s ships and walking on water…etc sound a lot like the things discussed in Michael Talbot’s book The Holographic Universe. It’s a really fun read, and I love to believe that those things are true and joke with my friends about it, but the bottom line is [I don’t know how to end this sentence.]

Get my point?

[DMark]

I just heard of the film two days ago, and have read it is creating quite the buzz and from the review, and your comments, I can’t wait to get to see it. One comment from the review was that every major film studio looked at it and passed (surprise surprise) but that the audience reaction so far has been amazing. There was a hint that this was going to be the next sleeper blockbuster.

[BytopianDream]

@Diogenes the Cynic

There were a couple of claims in the film that I’m curious about. One was a claim that the Indians where Columbus first landed literally could not see his ships approaching because they had no “memory” from which they could interpret the visual data (or something). The movie claims that a shaman noticed ripples in the water off in the distance and stood there every day until he could see the boats. Once he could see them, he told everyone else and since he was their shamn, they believed him and suddenly they could see the boats. Needless to say my Doper bullshit detector went off rather loudly, but some of the people in the movie were pretty serious scientists so I wonder if it’s one of those things that sounds like BS but it’s true. Does anybody know?

Okay, this is going to be possibly very obtuse.

I had a Cognitive Psychology class and the Prof and the book of the class discussed perception and cognition. Perception being not the physical signals that your brain receives, but how your consciousness interprets the signals. Cognition being how you interpret and make sense of the information.

Anyhow, there is a difference between how island peoples, forest peoples and plains peoples perceive visual information. Using scientific studies, they found that forest people versus plains people had different perceptions based on distance and height. Forest people would be able to tell that certain vertical lines were actually different lengths, while plains people couldn’t. Plains people could tell depth a lot better than forest people. Island people had less vertical lines perception, but had even less depth perception (perceived differences and ability to judge and reconsile depth, not actual physiological ability) than forest peoples.

Now, beyond that, ships from a long way away could be perceived as drift wood way the F out in the ocean. Your visual system says “Hey, look, something is there!” But your mind says “Big Whoop-tee Do! Drift wood, only seem that 9 billion times, ignore it!” Thus, the natives would overlook the actual stimulus as nothing because they had been habituated (and possibly socialized, i.e. “nothing important washes up from the ocean”) to overlook it.

Now, I’ve read stuff about this movie and don’t seem to like it because of the possible mysticism=physics thing (which I dislike). But, if they are actually saying that Cubans didn’t know a ship and thus could not physically see a ship, then I call BS. It is dang easy to prove that people who do not know or understand a stimulus can perceive it. Just show a baby something it’s never seen.

So, the natives may have easily overlooked the ship as “Nothing can survive out that far in the ocean” or for other perceptual reasions, but not physiologically not seen it even if pointing it out with a telescope.

Hope that helps. If not and you want to buy a psychology book for too much money, Here is My Cognitive Psychology Book For My Cite. It’s not a horrible read thankfully, but yes, I did pay the $100 for it new [Insert Pit Worthy Cursing Here].

[SnakeSpirit]

Still waiting for it to play out here in the Specific Ocean Islands…

The ships? From an anthropologist’s view point, they might not have been able to determine what they were, but as far as being able to see them: they saw large shapes out at sea with white (or off white) flexible attachments to upright poles.

Give us a break!

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

Snake, Yeah, that’s what I would think too but the movie showed them as not being able to see anything at all, just water.

Bytopian, I once took an anthro class and heard some very similar things about plains people vs bush people. I remember an anecdote about some pygmies who had never been out of the bush travelling to an open area and seeing some antelopes off in the distance. Because they had no experience at having to gauge those kinds of distances, they thought the antelope were very close and very small. Their depth perception was that screwed up.

So yeah, I can buy the natives on San Salvador not understanding what the ships were or think they were seeing men walk on water, but seeing nothing at all made no sense to me.

BTW, the mystical/new agey aspects of the film are kept somewhat at a minimum. It’s presented in such a way as to be provacative more than anything else a dn to show that what we think of as “reality” is not as simple or as substantial as it seems.

I could have done without the Ramtha lady, though.

[sleeping]

Salon Review

If we accept this idea that we create our reality by our thoughts, our intentions, what we choose to focus on, all that stuff you talk about in the film, what does this say about society as a whole? We must be creating a collective reality, right? Did we create George W. Bush as president?

Mark Vicente: Absolutely.

Why?

Vicente: American society is all about blame. We love to be victims and we don’t want to take responsibility. I know this is an unpopular idea and, listen, I don’t like George Bush and I don’t like Republicans, and by saying this I am not saying we should just be quiet and not do anything about it. But I am saying that we should take responsibility for the idea that when you want to be a victim, when you want to have something to complain about because you become addicted to it, you’ll need to find a tyrant to fulfill that need to feel victimized and feel like you have no power. That man, in my opinion, currently fills that need.

I wanted to see it at first, but now I’m not so sure. Opinions like the above deserve a big :rolleyes:, as I doubt the connotations of a collective unconscious and Freudianism are lost on anyone.

I would certainly believe that some primitive peoples can have problems with their depth perception as a result of hundreds (or thousands) of years of a very fixed lifestyle, but the general vibe I got from that interview was that these guys are just marketing yet another self-empowerment film, possibly mixed in with a plug for their cult.

Still, it would be unfair to render judgement without seeing it, so I’ll stop there.

[sleeping]

Ah, it seems it’s bunk after all.

[Tyrrell_McAllister]

Disclaimer: I have not seen this film, so I can only judge its claims based on how they are portrayed in your post and the other media I’ve read. With that out of the way…

@Diogenes the Cynic

One was a claim that the Indians where Columbus first landed literally could not see his ships approaching because they had no “memory” from which they could interpret the visual data (or something). The movie claims that a shaman noticed ripples in the water off in the distance and stood there every day until he could see the boats. Once he could see them, he told everyone else and since he was their shamn, they believed him and suddenly they could see the boats.

I don’t see how this claim can be given any credence whatsoever. Each of us is born into this world having no “memory” of any of the objects that occupy it. At least when we are young, we encounter things all the time which are like nothing we’ve ever seen before. If the human sensory apparatus were really so flawed that anything genuinely new was literally invisible, then this would be a very common experience which we all would have had. This phenomenon of invisibility would be so common place as to be unremarkable, and we certainly wouldn’t have to go back 500 years to find poorly documented examples of it.

@Diogenes the Cynic

Needless to say my Doper bullshit detector went off rather loudly, but some of the people in the movie were pretty serious scientists so I wonder if it’s one of those things that sounds like BS but it’s true.

I would not be so certain that these “scientists” are so serious. After reading about this film in another thread (SnakeSpirit’s What the #!*% Do WE Know?! - The Movie), I looked up some of the individuals billed as phycisists in the Wikipedia entry on the movie. My post in that thread listed some of my findings.

Also in that thread N9IWP posted a link to a letter to Ebert which said in part:

I … am doing research in the field of experimental particle physics … I even searched for their names using the search engine of the High Energy Physics database … Nothing came up … I warn you that the content of the film may have little or nothing to do with the actual theory of quantum mechanics.

@Diogenes the Cynic

Another claim in the movie was that consciosness literally creates “reality” and one of the physicists said that if you really, truly believed with all of your being that you could walk on water you could walk on water. He also says that it’s pretty much impossible to really control your consciousness that much and that most “positive thinking” is really just a thin patina on consciousness as a whole.

Could someone who knows more about quantum physics tell me if that guy was whooshing me or was he expressing some real theoretical aspect of QP?

QM says that the act of observation influences the observed. It does not say that we get to determine what we observe by mere effort of will. On the contrary, when we perform an experiment over and over again (say, firing a photon through two slits at a screen), the equations of QM determine with very high levels of precision what proportion of the time we will observe a given outcome (say, the photon striking a particular region of the screen).

[Tyrrell_McAllister]

My favorite quote from sleeping’s link:

One of the few legitimate academics in the film, David Albert, a philosopher of physics at Columbia University, is outraged at the final product. He says that he spent four hours patiently explaining to the filmmakers why quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness or spirituality, only to see his statements edited and cut to the point where it appears as though he and the spirit warrior [Ramtha] are speaking with one voice. “I was taken,” Albert admits. “I was really gullible, but I learned my lesson.”

[Sampiro]

@Diogenes the Cynic

There were a couple of claims in the film that I’m curious about. One was a claim that the Indians where Columbus first landed literally could not see his ships approaching because they had no “memory” from which they could interpret the visual data (or something).

That’s absolutely absurd. The Plans Indians certainly didn’t have any trouble “seeing” trains centuries later even though they’d never encountered anything remotely like them. Pocohantas was the toast of London as Rebecca Rolfe; there’s certainly no record that she was able to see the palaces and houses and wharves and quays and ladies covered in jeweled gowns and elaborate coiffures she encountered because she’d never encountered anything remotely like them in pre-Contact/immediately post-Contact Mid-Atlantic America, and I’m pretty sure somebody would have noticed if she’d kept asking “what building are you talking about? All I see is a blue-screen”.

@Diogones the Cynic

Another claim in the movie was that consciosness literally creates “reality” and one of the physicists said that if you really, truly believed with all of your being that you could walk on water you could walk on water. He also says that it’s pretty much impossible to really control your consciousness that much and that most “positive thinking” is really just a thin patina on consciousness as a whole.

I remember reading this as a 20ish kid in the books of Richard Bach among many others and thinking perhaps it was true. Then one day I went onto my balcony to grill a hamburger while listening to my walkman and my roommate, not knowing I was outside, closed the sliding glass door behind me. With every fiber of my being I believed the glass door was open- it was nowhere in my mind that it wasn’t or even that maybe it wasn’t- yet when I walked back towards the living room -K-BLUNK!- I bumped my noggin nonetheless. The door may have been in my face but it wasn’t in my mind. That’s when I rethought that whole line of reasoning. (Incidentally, my dog has occasionally learned this lesson also.)

[Sampiro]

uh… the above should read that there is no record Pochohantas was UNable to see the palaces et al.

I did like one touch in the almost unwatchably bad movie Erik the Viking, however; towards the end the Viking party enters Valhalla but the Christian priest who is with them is unable to see it.

[Zoe]

The book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has some interesting insight into what the newly sighted perceive at first. It doesn’t make much sense to them. That might give some credence into what is said about the Indian’s perception.

But I have a great deal of difficulty believing anything with Ramtha as a source.

Also, I wonder if David Albert has scientific data to back up his claim that quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness or spirituality. He may be an authority on one but not the other. Maybe he should stick with science for now.

[Zoe]

I should add that only a small section of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is about the newly sighted.

[SnakeSpirit]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Another claim in the movie was that consciosness literally creates “reality” and one of the physicists said that if you really, truly believed with all of your being that you could walk on water you could walk on water.

You know, I remember hearing that somewhere else…

let’s see… hmmm.

Oh yes, it was that fellow Jesus, of Nazereth. Didn’t realize e was a Quantum Physicist!

[Tyrrell_McAllister]

@Zoe

The book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has some interesting insight into what the newly sighted perceive at first. It doesn’t make much sense to them. That might give some credence into what is said about the Indian’s perception.

Could you elaborate on why the experiences of the newly sighted add credence to the claims about the Indians’ perception?

Also, I wonder if David Albert has scientific data to back up his claim that quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness or spirituality. He may be an authority on one but not the other. Maybe he should stick with science for now.

One can safely say that QM has nothing to do with spirituality the same way that one can say that Euclidean geometry has nothing to do with spirituality. QM is a mathematical scientific theory, while spirituality is intrinsically a nonscientific concept. One may be inspired by QM in constructing one’s spiritual views, but no-one could ever claim to have used QM to prove or disprove a spiritual view.

As for whether he should “stick with science”, Albert has a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, but he is a professor of philosophy at Columbia university. His specialties are listed here as being “Philosophical Problems of Modern Physics, Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, Philosophy of Space and Time, Philosophy of Science.” He has written a text entitled “Quantum Mechanics and Experience”.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

To follow up on what Ebert said from today’s Answer Man column:

Q. While the film “What the #$*! Do We Know!?” parades itself as a tell-all about quantum physics, it turns out that it’s actually a 111-minute infomercial for … that’s right, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. In fact, the three filmmakers, [William] Arntz, [Betsy] Chasse and [Mark] Vicente, are all devotees of Ramtha.

There’s little to no accurate science in the film, and, as a physicist pointed out recently in your Answer Man column, the individuals who are quoted are pretty far from qualified experts on the field of quantum mechanics. Case in point: One of the persons expounding on causality and quantum physics (Dispenza) is a chiropractor. The film’s sole purpose appears to be to promote the ideology of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. A quick browse through their Web site will clearly demonstrate that the film’s pseudoscientific nonsense comes straight from the teachings of the RSE.

Rubin Safaya, Edina, Minn.

A. Several other readers also unmasked the documentary as a hoax. I knew there had to be something fishy when the expert who made the most sense was channeling a 35,000-year-old seer from Atlantis.