What the bleep?

I'm in Toronto, staying at a hotel downtown. This is a business trip, so I have no family with me. I love traveling with family, but I am nowhere near so fond of traveling on business.

Fortunately, I have a book. I went to the library Tuesday night and took out three of them - one about visiting Buddhist monks, another about Thomas Aquinas' arguments for the coexistence of faith and reason, and What the BLEEP do We Know? (the book version of the film, by the same auteurs. Now I have not seen that film, which everyone has recommended to me. But some of what I've read in the book resonates very heavily with me, even though I was aware of most of the science.

In fact the book synthesizes a lot of what I'd been thinking about these last few words into an organic whole. I read Roger Penrose's The Emperors New Mind a few years ago. Although the purpose of the book is to debunk the idea that artificial intelligence can mimic conciousness simply by throwing processors and clever code at the problem, he accomplishes much, much more. To make his he posits a convincing argument, using the physiology of vertebrate neurons, that thought is quantum mechanical... and that this is the reason conciousness is as intuitive as it is. When we see a problem's solution, we don't roll the thought over in our mind and calculate that it has a 72.3% probability. We see that it is the problem's resolution - we have a eureka moment.

Of course, What the Bleep do We Know takes quantum mechanics much further into a spiritual realm than a pure scientist would. But it is interesting to note that even cosmologists who study subatomic physics in a more sober and narrow way are prone to the very same note of spirituality when they draw conclusions from their study. I've read more than a few Discover articles where scientists matter of factly describe the self-realizing nature of the quantum mechanical universe.