Reality . . .What a Concept

 

         Ben and I are discussing physics and I'm reminded of a joke.

         Heisenberg and Schrodinger are in a car. They get pulled over by a police car. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"

         "No, but I know exactly where I am" Heisenberg replies. The cop says "You were doing 55 in a 35." Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts "Great! Now I'm lost!"

         The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says "Do you know you have a dead cat back here?"

         "We do now!" shouts Schrodinger.

 

         "Ha, that's a good one, but what about the contradiction between Newtonian and Quantum Physics?" he wonders.

          The physical Newtonian world is pretty predictable but the mind is more like  unpredictable nature of Quantum physics and the way people view reality. Like the source of dreams, creativity and the appeal of David Hasseloff.

         "Our thoughts are made of energy, where do they go once they’re thought?”  I ask as a koan. Ben is silent a long time.

         " Since energy is never lost--merely converted, they must be converted into something else?" Ben suggests.

         “Ah, very good grasshopper.” I answer, playing the role of the zen roshi.        

         "Fortunately others have thought of this," I offer a quote:

         "IMAGINE that someone asks you how to distinguish consciousness from unconsciousness – a difficult task indeed. If consciousness has a physical basis, can the same be said about unconsciousness?
         You might have expected psychologists to have tackled this question, but perhaps not physicists. After all, physics is concerned with the study of matter and radiation. . .  Wolfgang Pauli. . .  proposed that the interaction between consciousness and unconsciousness is analogous to one of the central ideas in quantum physics, called complementarity – that it is impossible to distinguish between the behaviour of an atomic object and its interaction with the instrument observing it."  -Andrei Khrennikov, Professor of Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics at Linnaeus University.

         "Duh, of course consciousness is a quantum phenomenon, class dismissed," Ben utters facetiously.