# The Spiritual Implications of Quantum Physics  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jeff Carreira]] - Full Title: The Spiritual Implications of Quantum Physics - Category: #books ## Highlights - Perhaps reality is being created in each and every moment, as it is being experienced. ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=254)) - The physical universe is one level of reality and the world of meaningful and useful things is another, and both are equally real. When Thomas Kuhn makes the point that when a paradigm shifts nothing changes, but everything’s different, he is essentially speaking about these two levels of being. The physical world of the universe does not change, but the meaningful world of utility changes dramatically. ([Location 278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=278)) - One of the most famous early experiments of the new physics was the double slit experiment, which illustrates the bizarre implications of the dual, wave and particle, nature of light. The set up for the double slit experiment is easy to picture. It is basically a surface with two parallel slits cut into it that light can shine through. Before we start talking about light, let’s think for a minute about water. Imagine a breakwater on the shore with two openings in it. As the waves pass through the openings, they will spread on the other side in circles that expand in all directions. That’s because, as we said before, waves bend around corners. The waves that emerge through one of the openings will eventually start running into waves that passed through the other. The same will be true of light waves passing through the two slits. The light spreads out in concentric circles and the light from one slit will eventually make contact with the light from the other one. Now we add a screen to our experimental set up so that the light hits it. Because the waves of light from one slit overlap with the light from the other, they produce what is an interference pattern on the screen. The place where the light crest of a wave from one slit overlaps the crest of a light wave from the other shows up brightly on the screen in that spot, any place where the troughs of two light waves meet will cancel out leaving no light in that spot. Figure 1. The Double Slit Experiment Now let’s not think about light or water waves, but bullets instead. Imagine that there are two slits in a castle wall, and you were shooting bullets through them. Bullets fly straight, they don’t bend around corners like waves do. So, if there were people inside, they could hide around the corner and not get shot. It also means that all the bullets will land on the wall roughly opposite whichever slit they entered through. Bullet holes will accumulate in just two places on the opposite wall. No matter how many bullets you shoot they will all hit the wall opposite in one of the two places. No bullets will bend around the corner of one slit and interfere with the bullets passing through the other one. Bullets travel in straight lines. They always stay in their own lane. We don’t expect to see just two light spots when we shine light through two slits. We expect an interference pattern of many bright spots because waves travel around corners and interfere with each other. And ordinarily, when we shine light through two slits, that is exactly what we see. Then scientists wondered about something. What if they only allowed one photon at a time to pass through the slits? When they tried, they still found an interference pattern. Now this was weird. How did one photon interfere with itself? A single photon must either pass through one slit or the other. If you shoot photons through a surface with only one slit you don’t get an interference pattern, but add a second slit and you do, even though any one… ([Location 382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=382)) - The cartoon begins showing apples growing on a tree and saying that the tree is doing something intelligent; it is ‘appling’. It goes on to describe a group of aliens who discover a dead planet and dismiss it as nothing but a bunch of rocks. The aliens return millions of years later and find the dead planet is now full of people. They were wrong. The planet wasn’t dead, it was alive and intelligent. It did something smart, it peopled. Watts sums up the point this way, “We grow out of this world, in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree. If evolution means anything, it means that.” I want you to consider the possibility that consciousness didn’t evolve on this planet; it was here from the start. ([Location 495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=495)) - Among spiritual groups, it’s hard to find anyone who would self-identify as a materialist, but most of us are much more materialistic than we realize. I don’t mean that we like to have nice things, I mean we assume without realizing it that matter, things we can see and touch, are more real than the things we can only feel and think about in our minds. ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=500)) - Because of the way we understand consciousness, we tend to imagine that something is conscious if it appears to exhibit the kind of consciousness that we have. Of course, this is changing. Some of us recognize the consciousness of animals, and even plants, but we have a long way to go before rocks would commonly be considered conscious. ([Location 569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=569)) - found it painful to watch. The doctor seemed to take the bait every time. He would restate his claim about the universe being conscious becoming more and more frustrated that the other debaters would not engage with the idea beyond demanding ([Location 577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=577)) - I kept wanting him to switch the conversation around. I wanted him to ask the others to prove that matter exists, or time, or space. If he had asked, they would not have been able to prove these claims either, except maybe to say that their existence is obvious. This brings us again to the challenge of verisimilitude – some things just seem true to us. But things that appear to be true aren’t necessarily truer. ([Location 578](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=578)) - It’s time for us to catch up with our own science. We need to be open to the fact that consciousness is not something that got added to the universe late in the game. Consciousness is an inseparable aspect of reality. ([Location 606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0917WMZ92&location=606))