 Welcome back to Piranormal. This is our third installment of our series, third and final installment of our series, Quantum Physics and Metaphysics. So this is Episode 17. For those of you who are just jumping in here, please go back and listen to the first two. 15, 16 and 17 are the episode numbers. There's three parts to this. So in this episode, we want to focus on entanglement. That's kind of a buzzword in the Quantum Mechanics, Metaphysics discussion community. I don't even know if I can call it a community. I guess it's a community out there on the internet. And for those of you who are not familiar, we will again post a short video that illustrates the point of what people are talking about with quantum entanglement and how it leads to statements like, well, if two particles on either side of the universe, you do one thing to one and instantaneously, the other one shows the effect of that, that everything is connected, all is one. So there are a lot of people out there who feel that Quantum Mechanics at this point is a justification or a proof of monism, this notion that all is one. There's no distinction between the material world, the created world, and an external creator. We don't need that idea. Everything is one, everything's always been. It'll continue to be, we don't have a need for an external creator. There's no creator creation distinction that is justifiable in our thinking. So entanglement has something to do with that. We could also sort of extrapolate into some other ideas that I know I've heard and we'll throw it out to our panel in a moment where, well, if everything's connected, then we're all connected as spiritual beings or all spirits are connected in that spirit world, wherever that is. We're connected with them, they're connected with us, we're connected with each other. And we also get into the issue of free will versus determinism. I mean, how one action sort of dictates another action. Is this sort of some justification for a deterministic view of the universe? Do we ever really have independence or autonomy or something that looks like autonomy? Maybe some kind of freedom where our lives and who we are and our path, so to speak, is not being dictated by something else going out there, going on out there in the quantum reality. So these are the subjects we want to cover today and I'm just going to open it up to either our guest, Putty Putnam, can jump in here and with some of the things he's heard or, of course, our panel. We have Doug Van Dorn, Doug Overmire, Trey Strickland, and Natalina Hadeshell. So everybody's here, and Brian Goddawa, everybody's here again, all three times in a row. That's got to be some record. But let me ask you guys, what kind of things have you heard in relation to entanglement that makes us cross from the science, quantum mechanics, over into the metaphysical realm? I think just what you mentioned, Mike, that if these things are entangled, either information is being transmitted faster than light, and we know that can't be the case, or everything is connected, and therefore, everything's connected. And I think it's probably a false dichotomy, but I don't know. So I'm interested in hearing. Yeah, that's what Putty's for. Is that a false dichotomy? Yep. Anybody else? You know, of course, I always bring in the New Age perspective. And when it comes to entanglement, their theory is that since everything is interconnected, and quantum physics proves that, and we know how much Putty loves that phrase, that since quantum physics backs up this theory that everything is interconnected and everything is one, and we live in this universe of infinite possibilities, which they say quantum physics also proves, then as a result, I, as being connected to everything in this universe, not just other people, but every particle in this universe is connected to me and I to it, then I should be able to visualize an outcome that I want to happen in my life and pull it out of this set of infinite possibilities, and then manifest it into being just because everything is one, and I'm part of this grand whole. So ultimately, when you look at popular books like The Secret that talk about the law of attraction, they always inject quantum physics and this idea of quantum entanglement to back up the idea that we are all part of the larger whole and therefore we have these powers to manipulate reality, that ultimately is where it all drives toward, and it's not, to me, it sounds like magic, you know, causal engineering, but they will say it's science. So today is my 24th anniversary, and so I've seen a lot of romantic comedies in my lifetime. And I'm pretty sure that I've never seen one that talks about quantum mechanics, but I'm also pretty sure that every single one of them is rooted in quantum mechanics, because it's all about fatalism and how the two are destined to meet each other and the universe is hooked together. So putty, you have to answer that question for me. I'm sorry, what exactly was that question? Are all romantic comedies rooted in quantum mechanics? Okay, sure. Anybody else want to jump in? What other kind of odd, quirky sort of ideas have you run into that, again, draw upon or dip into this whole entanglement idea, the whole monistic, all-is-one world view? Well, I have a computer one, actually, since I'm a computer guy, and buddy, I'm just going to throw this out there and you can answer this at the end of it, but I understand the communication applications with entanglement, but it's the calculations that interest me. So if you can explain in terms of how we're harnessing quantum mechanics for calculations, I'd like that. You're talking about quantum computers. Is that what you're getting at there? Correct. Go ahead and jump in with that one. It's a bit off the beaten trail, but if that's an answerable question, go ahead. Yeah, so we can start there. That's fine. Quantum computers are interesting and it is an area of a lot of research and a lot of study over the last, oh, I don't know, 15, 20 years, something like that. Quantum computers present a lot of interesting possibilities because they will fundamentally work very different than a normal computer. So a normal computer is basically an extraordinarily complicated machine that takes a whole lot of input in the forms of what are called binary numbers, either ones or zeros. All of the keys, all of the pictures, all of that basically gets compressed all the way down to ones or zeros, and then it produces all kinds of results based on that input. You're adding numbers together, multiplying them, doing all kinds of fancy things, and all those ones and zeros go through a bunch of hoops and then they eventually come back out in the screens and the sounds and whatever else it does. What makes quantum computers enticing is that they propose an ability to create a different kind of computer in which you're no longer computing based on one or zero, but you could make computations based on something that is both one and zero at the same time, which is something that our typical computers don't have the capability to do. Now, that winds up kind of running into a lot of ramifications in terms of how you would use a quantum computer that are sort of interesting. If we were successfully able to create a quantum computer, it would be wonderfully good at solving a set of problems that are very difficult for our normal computers, but it would equally have a whole other set of problems that our regular computers are actually really good at that it would have a really hard time solving, and so it winds up sort of being a different starting point for building computers, and the advantage and or challenge, maybe the challenge probably of that, is that often the kinds of things that are very difficult to compute are used advantageously with our computers to keep things protected. For example, the ways that financial transactions are run and your credit card information is communicated in whatever uses these kinds of algorithms to keep all your sensitive information safe. They take all the data and they scramble it in these really complicated ways so that we basically know it's going to be impossible for a normal computer to figure out the data that we would want to be able to figure out, and so therefore it's safe, and we can send your credit card information Amazon.com and you can buy whatever you want to buy. Quantum computers will render some of those things trivial to solve, and so a lot of computer security is going to be interesting to see what happens if quantum computers are indeed able to be created and if they wind up making their way to the mainstream market. That's an interesting question as to whether that'll happen and how that works and whatever, but that's not the only reason that people care about that, but it is a reason that it's a significant thing. My guess would be, by the way, Mike, you mentioned about investing in Bitcoin. My guess would be that quantum computers would probably be able to find Bitcoins very easily as well, so it might be a good time to get out of that market. I don't know. Now, I should admit, so first of all, I did not specialize in quantum computing, and so I'm not as in touch with that field as some other things with respect to quantum mechanics. Creating a quantum computer is going to be a challenge. It has been a challenge. It will continue to be a challenge simply because going back to some of what we talked about in our first conversation and even some of what we're going to talk about today, to do quantum computers, you have to produce these hybrid quantum states that are only possible in quantum mechanical systems. Things are neither left nor right, but they're left and right simultaneously, even though it seems impossible. You have to keep your quantum bits in those intermediate quantum mechanical states while you're doing the calculations, and then only at the end resolve them out to observable things where you can look at the answer, so to speak. It turns out that that's really difficult. It's really difficult to keep your quantum bits in those quantum mechanical hybrid states and not let them rub up against something where they deco here and they lose the intermediate state that you need to be able to do your calculations. There's a tremendous amount of time and work and energy that's going into these things because if we ever were to be able to create a quantum computer, we want to do things like save data and stuff like that that you need to be able to run a computer. Right now, we're lucky if we can get these quantum states to be lasting microseconds and things like that. There's a lot of work going into that. From what I understand, there has been a lot of progress over the last decade. I actually was talking to someone not too long ago about this, and they were really encouraged by the progress in the field. When I was studying, which is coming up on almost 10 years ago now, there were questions as to whether it would even ever be possible to produce these things. Just because it's so complex, it's so technically challenging. There was three or four different directions. People were going. I'm sure that's still the case. My guess would be the prognosis is a little more positive. People probably, from what I can tell, are thinking that it's likely going to be able to do. My guess would be it's going to be a ways out yet before we've got those things happening. Even when we do, it's going to take us a while to figure out what we can and can't do with it. How do we actually use these things? My guess would be for a while, they're going to be tools in scientific labs to solve interesting mathematical and scientific problems. Then perhaps at some point, they'll make their way to an everyday thing. Like I said, they're made to solve a certain class of problem and how exactly that class of problem translates into everyday person's use. The very important things we do, like type word documents and go on Facebook, it's unclear exactly how all that adds up. Does that speak to any of that for you? Yeah, I'm just interested in that. Like you said, it could be left and right. It holds all the possibilities at once. In order to get it to spit out an answer, is there anything like we talked about in part one of the series? Is it the act of observing it where you actually can get it to spit out an answer? That's a great question. Quantum mechanics is inherently statistical. If we're going to use a quantum computer to do a calculation, what we actually need to do is run that calculation about a billion times and look at the overall pattern in all the solutions together, if that makes sense. What you wind up doing is you create this interesting setup that you're running your quantum state through some equivalent, very complicated equivalent of your double slit pattern. You set a bunch of double slits up in some certain configuration or something so that what's happening is it's actually performing a calculation as it quantum wanders through that mess. Then you look at on the average, as you run this thing a zillion times, where did the electrons go or the photons or the whatever, and then that tells you something about all possible solutions to the calculation that you ran with the quantum bits and stuff. You wind up doing the computation by making a high number of observations. Let's get back to monism, maybe less exciting unless we go back to the romantic comedy thing. What about all this everybody's connected and again back to romantic comedy is the soft fatalism of that sort of thing. How should we think about that? Is it legitimate to take quantum theory and say such things? Let's back up even a bit from that and talk just a little bit about what entanglement is because that's where a lot of these things come from. Entanglement refers to a phenomenon in quantum mechanics where what happens is you form a composite system in such a way where the degrees of freedom in your system are interconnected and on top of that you wind up taking advantage of the non-binary, the non-either or nature of quantum mechanics to set your hybrid system in weird states where it's going to produce weird results. That's a lot of very technical speak. Let me try and maybe illustrate that with an example. Electrons, it turns out, and most particles, almost every particle, have a quantum mechanical property that's called spin. It refers to a quantum mechanical analog of as if the electron was rotating as it moves or ever it moves. Spin has two options. It can basically functionally either be rotating clockwise or counterclockwise, you might say. Every electron has this property and every electron is spinning whichever direction it's spinning in the world based on whatever quantum mechanical things it's experiencing. Because it's quantum mechanics, some are spinning clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously because that has not been smeared out yet. What you can do if you're clever is you can take two electrons and you can say these two electrons, I'm going to massage the two of them and do some interesting things to force the combination of these two electrons into a situation where they're either both spinning clockwise or they're both spinning counterclockwise, but they're not in opposite directions. They're both going the same way. I don't know which way that way is, but I know that they're both going the same way. When we have a state like that, that's called these two electrons. We call them entangled because their two spins are connected to one another. They're caught up with each other. They're tangled in one another. What's interesting is we don't know either electron, which way it's going, but we know that they're going the same way together whichever way that is, which until you make an observation is both. Both electrons are spinning clockwise and they're both spinning counterclockwise, but neither of them is spinning one way and the other the other way. It's a weird state if that makes sense. Because of the weirdnesses of quantum mechanics, when you make observations, your odd intermediate states wind up disappearing and it condenses to one well-defined state. When you take your two electrons and you say they're either spinning clockwise or counterclockwise, I don't know which because they're doing both right now, what you can do is you can look at just one of them. When you look at just one of them, you'll see that it's spinning either clockwise or counterclockwise. Let's say it's spinning clockwise. I look at electron A and I go, ah, it's spinning clockwise. Well, because the two of these electrons are entangled, as soon as I look at electron A, electron B will be isolated into spinning clockwise. Before that, I couldn't have said that it was spinning clockwise. In fact, nobody even looked at it, but because this is a kind of a hybrid quantum state where the two of their states are together, observing the one forces the other one into clarity as well. That's what the weird thing that we're talking about when we talk about entanglement. That's where you get the idea that these two electrons are connected. They're talking to each other somehow and all of this comes out of this kind of thing. Do we have the same issue here as we did in our first episode with, this is an observation and we can't use our observation to make an ontological statement about the electrons? The fact that we're observing something really is no commentary on what that thing is or why it's doing what it's doing. First of all, I would say that it's almost always true in science, probably, because science is not ontology. I think what I'm talking about is- Metaphysics is certainly ontology. What I'm describing is an experimental phenomenon. Again, it's living in that realm of science. Now, once I start trying to talk about why that's happening, particularly in a field as hard to nail down as quantum mechanics is in terms of physical meaning and so forth, then I've crossed into philosophy, ontology, metaphysics, something like that. Again, you can do that if you want to. It's just that's not science. I think that's a good observation. To think a little more carefully about what statements are reasonable to make about things like entanglement. Entanglement is maybe getting close to the epitome of the weirdness of quantum mechanics. It is really strange because it'd be really nice to be able to say, oh, well, when I looked at electron A and I saw that it was spinning clockwise, it was really spinning clockwise all along and so was electron B. I just didn't know it. What quantum mechanics tells you is like, that's not actually true. It wasn't spinning clockwise until you looked at it and neither was electron B. They were both spinning collectively clockwise and both spinning collectively counterclockwise. When you look at it, they both fixate in the same state. That's weird. That's really weird when you think about it because then you're getting into what a scientist would call non-locality. In other words, something is happening somewhere else and it's not physically connected to its cause. We don't really like this in the scientific realm. If you push on me, I want it to be because something contacted me. We like actions that cause reactions. This is getting into that space where you're like, okay, so if I take electron A and I move it into a different room as electron B and then I look at it, how does electron B know how to do that? It's weird. I'll say that. It's odd. It's strange. It is probably one of the strangest things of quantum mechanics. That being said, let's think a little bit about what entanglement is and what makes sense to say about it or what doesn't make sense to say about it. Entanglement often gets used to, as you pointed out, to argue for a kind of monism. Like, oh, the two electrons are connected in some deep way. They're sort of one and the same and therefore we're all interconnected or something like that. Now, first of all, this is a big jump in logic, not the least of which because entanglement is a manufactured state. Remember how I said in the beginning? You have to take these two electrons and you have to massage them to get them in this weird state entanglement. Entanglement is not the default, if that makes sense. It's a possibility in the quantum space. It is not the default in quantum space and it is way too far to say everything is entangled with everything else. No, that's not at all true. That's very far from true. We can create things where things are observably entangled, but you have to work to make it happen and it's not a permanent state. Once you make that observation and they're both locked into spinning the same direction, then you've observed your quantum system. The entanglement has gone away and now they are independently doing their own thing again. The massaging that you did to get them in that weird state has been undone. Entanglement is neither universal nor permanent. It's a temporary state. It's a temporary thing that quantum mechanics does. As such, to me, all the logical errors aside, you're arguing from this sort of bizarre corner of the theory that most of the time doesn't apply and you're saying that that applies to everything everywhere all the time. We just know that that's not true, if that makes sense. We know that that's not the case. That is awesome. Just describing that this is a manufactured state and it's not permanent. Those two statements just help deconstruct the whole therefore that people make the tremendous leaps in logic. If this is a manufactured state, why is the double slit experiment and the double slit phenomena not a contrived state or is it? Yeah. Well, the double slit thing is really a separate thing than entanglement. You're still setting up an experiment to observe the particles of light, what they do in each slit. You're watching one and not the other. To a layman's ear, the experimental procedure sounds similar. Why is one more contrived than the other? Yeah. The difference is entanglement is not something that you can do with a single particle. Entanglement refers to the collective state of a system. You have to have a system to be entangled. That's why it does head towards ideas like we're all one. In general, I see this kind of thinking actually coming out in a number of different ways because what it's actually confusing in my opinion is it's confusing the fact that there are times that you can kind of like aggregately describe a number of elements in a composite system. There's some ways that that's actually the most useful way to talk about things. But to then say because you can do that, therefore we're all connected in some deep way, is a misnomer. For example, let me just kind of give a real concrete. For instance, sometimes it's helpful to talk about humanity as a whole. We are all part of humanity, each and every one of us. We all fit within that descriptor of a system that includes all of us. You can make statements like humanity is more intelligent than any other species on the planet. We don't take that statement and say, whoa, we're all more intelligent than everyone else. We must be connected to one another. We're all part of the same thing that has this property. We must be interconnected. Well, functionally, that's what you're doing when you're kind of making this jump with entanglement. You're saying, I can produce this kind of property of this system. Therefore, I can draw some conclusion about all the elements of that system. And that's just not a true step in logic. You can create a state where a system is entangled with the elements are entangled. But that doesn't mean those elements are entangled all the time, or that it has anything about the nature of those elements. It's just a fact about the system as the composite kind of collection. Does that make sense? I feel like I'm using a lot more scientific words than we've used up until now. But this is so kind of on that fringe, it's hard to talk about. There was a little piece of sophistry I thought it was on one of the videos. I don't remember if it was one that we were supposed to watch or not. But the guy, he just made this comment about entanglement that went back to the Big Bang, and he goes, because of the Big Bang, and we all came from kind of that one particle, and because entanglement is true, then everything is connected. And so it sounded like he was trying to connect it to some kind of a scientific idea with the Big Bang. But pretty much it was nonsense. Oh, total nonsense. There are like three things wrong with that. Yeah. But so to kind of circle back, that idea that entanglement is real, but it's a manufactured system and it's not a permanent state. And what that means then, when you begin to fast forward that, is that you can't really take that as a basis for arguing for monism. Like you can, sure, we can all produce kind of systems where the elements have some kind of shared property. That doesn't mean that they're connected to one another. It doesn't mean that there's some deeper root underneath all of them. And what's happening is kind of the weirdness of how quantum mechanics and observation works is blending with the shared properties of elements in a system. And people who aren't thinking carefully take those two things and say, oh, they're somehow talking to each other. And it's a thing. It forces that correlation of the weird out in an even deeper way, if that makes sense. Hey, Paddy, a question. Does entanglement necessitate some kind of a mind to put together a system in this way? Or have they observed entanglement that just appears by accident? You said some earlier that I couldn't quite tell that the answer was for that. Sure, yeah. I'm sure that it does happen by accident in some ways. Quantum mechanics, just kind of all things happen. It's kind of the bottom line thinking, because it's all based on so much randomness and so forth. I'm sure that it happens to some percentage in nature. It's definitely not a front and center phenomenon. It's sure it's kind of popping in and out once in a while, but it's not at all the time. Again, when you hit these things, the question you have to ask yourself is this, is this was connected to the core thing of the way the universe works? Why did it take us so long to find this? So entanglement, again, wasn't even found in the very beginning of quantum mechanics. Entanglement starts coming in 30, 40, 50 years after the field is discovered because it's not the default. It's a weird corner of the theory. You've got quantum mechanics, which takes us 300 years of science to find, and you've got entanglement, which is the weird corner of that theory. You're getting so far out there that to argue that this is the way everything is interconnected, it feels like a stretch. Thoughts on all of that? I know that one got a little more scientific. I mean, if it's a temporary state, and again, I'm using the word contrived because that's the one that pops into my head here, but temporary impermanent state, then I hate to sound so simplistic. Does this apply in any way to any sort of metaphysical or theological idea? Because you could flip this on its head and say, well, good grief, now I feel like the universe is coming apart. We're all going to die. Nothing's secure. We're headed for disintegration, all this kind of stuff. Walk us in off the ledge, or somebody off the ledge. And what does this apply in any regard? Because this all gets, it does get connected to the all is one thing, and the non-limitation of non-spatial existence, which of course goes back into the other dimensions and all that kind of stuff. So there's that. I mean, does this apply to any of that? Because what about precognitive dreams and deja vu? Because you'll often hear these things or read these things discussed either utilizing in some way this entanglement idea. Well, there's no real space and time. So your dream, you were able to sort of drift out of one dimension into the other. And because of entanglement, you were able to see the future or see the past or you're somehow connected. Is there any sort of reasoned trajectory to any of that? So we've run the gamut now. The world's disintegrating right before our eyes, even though we can't see it, because what Putty just said about quantum stuff, as opposed to everything's connected intimately and this explains this or that phenomena. So where are we at here? Well, yeah. So talking about the disintegration of all the elements and all of that, I think what I would say is this, is that before entanglement was discovered, nobody thought that was the case. Nobody felt the universe was falling apart. So what entanglement tells us is it's possible to kind of take a small connect, a small element of the universe and thread it together so that it's unusually connected in a way that kind of goes beyond what's quote unquote normal, right? And what I'm saying is that, yeah, that's absolutely true. That is the case, but it is not the usual. It does go beyond what's normal. And so it doesn't redefine what normal is. And I think the consequence of that is that entanglement is neither what unites us all together, but nor does it mean that there's nothing else that's active in the universe either, right? I mean, so if we didn't think the universe was falling apart before we knew about entanglement, then just because entanglement doesn't connect everything together, doesn't mean we should expect the universe to be falling apart now. Yeah, something's holding it together. Yeah, it's all I'm doing is I'm just putting a little bit of parameters around this entanglement thing so it doesn't move from two electrons to the entire observable universe in one jump. Yeah, it seems like there's better explanations for déjà vu or two twins are born and they go in different directions. And yeah, look, they have the same sort of behaviors or all the funny little things we've all heard. Whatever the cause of déjà vu or claims of reincarnation or memories from other consciousnesses, whatever the causes are, it's not quantum entanglement. Maybe it's genetic memory like we talked about a few episodes ago, or maybe it's the magnetic poles or whatever influencing animals a certain way. I mean, we discussed different ideas, but whatever it is, using quantum entanglement is distorting the idea. Yeah, I just don't see how it possibly could be. First of all, I don't know how you could create an entangled space big enough where you could have things like memories and stuff. A memory is not held by one electron. I'm not a neuroscientist. I don't know exactly how memories are stored, but I can promise you it's not held by one electron. So what does it look like to get an entangled state that's big enough to carry a memory? I don't know, but even if that were possible, then you run into the problem that it's a temporary state. So once the shared memory is somehow observed, then the entanglement is severed and the system is going to continue to move forward unconnected. All right, let me sound like the metaphysical, I don't know, I'll just, the metaphysical person. Please do. Well, look, buddy, it's like because of the quantum entanglement and all this quantum stuff shows us that the size doesn't matter. There is no time and space and spatial stuff doesn't matter. So why are you limiting it to this inferior size where this just won't work? Because you're going to hear, I think, stuff like that, and well, if it's temporary, that thought has to go somewhere, that memory has to go, so maybe it just switches to a different particle or something like that. You're going to hear stuff like this, so how do you sort of get that off of the past? I would say, yeah, that's great. So I would say, you know, to say that entanglement means that time and space don't matter is to not really understand entanglement because these particles are only going to get entangled in time and space. Once they are entangled, they can do some interesting things that don't seem like they make a lot of sense in time and space, but we have to entangle them in time and space. It's only because we can entangle them in time and space that we can make them behave oddly. And so to take that as an argument that time and space don't exist or something like that is to not really understand the phenomenon. How's that? You like that? Oh, that just crushed my world. I'm holding back tears now. Again, you hear these things, and this is important because the missing link, I mean, I'm sure there's more than one, but the missing element here is just the simple statement you just made. Well, we have to have them in time and space to do this or that to them because it's not like we can suspend time and space to conduct our experiment. That's just not possible. And even if someone turns around and says, well, everything's pot, well, they didn't do it that way because we don't know how to do that. When you realize that one point, it becomes a self-defeating proposition because we can't do that. Yeah. And there's no way that I know to entangle things that doesn't take advantage of the reality of time and space to create that entanglement. Whether moving something somewhere or using some time-length massage particles in some way, you have to use time and space to create entanglement. And to take it a step further, people listening to this go up and watch the video, it specifically says in the entanglement video, it's only a minute or so that because of this effect, because we're observing this effect, something of the effect that time and space are just irrelevant. Right. Yeah. And very much that is, it's the thing where somebody's got their metaphysical picture that they're reading into the science. I mean, it's the same thing as what people do with the scriptures. They've got a worldview that they read into the scriptures. Same thing just with experiment instead of texts. Right. The worldview becomes a filter for the observation. Again, failing to distinguish the observation from ontological statements. Yep. Yep. Exactly. And I mean, unfortunately, I'm sure you feel the same way. If you just wish you could shake the person a little bit and help them see that that's what they're doing, but I don't know. It's really hard from the inside to see that somehow or something like that. From the outside, it sure looks awful clear, but from the inside. See, for me, I would just say, okay, I'm going to take your strong's concordance now and not give it back to you. Right. Exactly. Maybe you need to turn off the TV or something. Tell people to turn off the TV or stop watching Morgan Freeman. You're not allowed to say quantum anymore. Just strike that one. You run into that and you feel kind of useless when you can't sort of help people to know the things they don't know so that they understand why you're not buying what they're selling. It's frustrating. Right. So kind of taking all of that then, I know we had talked about visualization. Nathalina, you have brought that up and are all romantic comedies rooted in quantum mechanics. It's going to take this to the real meat of application. I've not read certainly anywhere near as much of the literature, Nathalina. Let me kind of just share the argument as I understand it. And then you correct me if I'm not right. All right. Because I don't want to be speaking out of turn here. But my understanding of that kind of an argument is essentially this. Well, quantum mechanics quote unquote proves that everything is interconnected because of entanglement or something like that. Therefore, that means that I am connected to basically everything else in the universe. And if I can leverage that connection somehow, then that gives me kind of a window of the ability to influence other things in the universe through that connection. So therefore, I'm going to use visualization because visualization is connected to my consciousness and consciousness is connected to quantum mechanics somehow. And so I'm going to use my visualization to open the quantum mechanics door to leverage the universe so that I can make what I want to happen happen. Is that kind of basically the gist of the argument there? Pretty much. I mean, the argument for why visualization is a thing goes back to the role of the observer. You know, they try to just sort of wind all of these things together. And so I as an observer can affect the way that these different infinite possibilities work. Then that also means that I as the observer who happens to also be connected to the universe and all of these different possibilities should be able to simply pluck one of my favorite possibility out and visualize that it is going to be my new reality and then it will be. And the reason I keep bringing it up as crazy as it all sounds is because it's such a prevalent way of thinking. I mean, it is almost mainstream thought at this point. You know, you've got Oprah teaching this stuff. You've got all of these different self-help people that are teaching this as a scientifically proven principle. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, you know, as far as I can tell, I'm not a history of a religion's expert. And so I'm not going to claim that. But, you know, from what I can tell, this is kind of mostly a remasking of, like this is a new age set of ideas, which is sort of a reframing, maybe I should say, of a lot of Eastern mysticism, right? I mean, this is kind of typical stuff that's been happening for a long, long, long, long time. They're just throwing scientific labels on it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's what I thought. Yeah. And in fact, they'll pull these yogis out. That'll be like, yeah, we've been saying this for a thousand years. Now science confirms it. Right. Right. Yeah. So, I would say there's a couple of snags with all of that. You know, we talked about, I think, more of the first episode, but I think it's come up since then that observation is not necessarily related to consciousness. And to assume that observation and consciousness are identical is a logical fallacy, I believe. You know, so a good example, we've talked a little bit about CERN last episode, right? So when they make these observations at CERN, all that's happening is stuff is flying into detectors and getting logged on computers. There's no consciousness presence at these observations. And yet the observations are playing the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. And so the observer, I don't think, is something that we should necessarily see as personal. The observer is more often than not a detector, not a person. And so because of that, I think the link between observation and consciousness is fairly tenuous. The second thing I would say with that is that the idea that observation alters a system is not the same thing as the idea that observation can adjust a system or can change a system in a specific way. So for example, I'm trying to think of a good example, if I spin a quarter on a desk, it's spinning upright for a while. It's not heads or tails. But at some point it's going to fall into heads or tails. And when I see that, I'll have known that the system has changed. It's not kind of in this hybrid state anymore. It's locked into heads or to tails. But that observation didn't force the system to do that. I didn't go, I want it to be heads. I want it to be heads. I want to be heads. Or if I look at and I want it to be heads, if I look at it, it'll make it become heads. There's a causality that is not implied in quantum mechanics. And so if I come along and I slam my hand down on the quarter and force it to be either heads or tails, then it changes the system. Absolutely. But it didn't change the system the way I wanted it to. It just changed the system. And I don't really have any input into how the system changed. And in fact, what quantum mechanics, if you were actually honest with it, would tell you is that there's no possible way that you can make the system do what you want because all of quantum mechanics is random until you make observations. So the actual premise of quantum mechanics, in my opinion, undermines that thinking, which is that I can somehow force the system the way that I want it to be by observation when all of quantum mechanics outside of that kind of thinking says the state is undetermined, can't be pinned down, cannot be said to be anything until you observe. You can't nudge it because there is no way. Like it doesn't exist until it's observed is basically what quantum mechanics says. And so this idea that I can push the system in a direction through observation, that's a foreign idea. That's not kind of what's there, if that makes sense. And so this idea that we can visualize and manifest reality, again, sure, I get it. It gets kind of flouted as quantum mechanics or whatever. But you have so many things that don't fit there. You have the issue of scale, which we talked about. Quantum mechanic, those effects don't scale up to human being-sized things. Almost never does that happen. If we're real hard to make it happen. It's why quantum computers are hard to make. So you've got that. You've got the fallacy of causation of events instead of the just altering through observation of events. There's just a lot of snags in that, if that makes sense. You can't even build a model, it would seem for that, because going back to your coin spinning illustration, we spin the coin a thousand times. We observe which face is up when it lands and we record that. Well, the odds are astronomical that the next thousand spins are going to produce not only the same number of heads and tails, but in the same order. There's no way to predict that, is what you're saying. But I like the coin spinning thing. To me, that's really helpful, because we've all done that and we all know the virtual impossibility of any sort of predictability to that and to transfer that very obvious phenomenon that we're all familiar with to the quantum world, I think really makes the point. To predict it, you'd have to tamper with it. You'd have to do something to set it up, but at that level, you can't even do that. Yeah, you can't. You absolutely can't. The randomness of quantum mechanics actually undermines the idea that you can control it. Yeah, yeah. That's an important point. Yeah. I think talking about romantic comedies, I would even say the same idea extends to fatalism. Actually, if you want to argue metaphysics from science, I would say that you actually have a hard time not becoming fatalistic until you come to quantum mechanics, because up until quantum mechanics, you have a very deterministic picture of things. If I can just understand the setup of everything, where everything is, where it's all headed, then reality determines, marches forward according to a well-defined set of rules, and everything is predictable. That's the picture until you get to quantum mechanics, at which point quantum mechanics says, yeah, forget that idea. That's a nice thought, but it's not so much. That's what makes quantum mechanics actually feel so grating when it comes onto the scene, because it takes everything that we're used to with science and throws it on its head and says, well, you might think that you can have a deterministic universe, but you can't. It's just not possible. If anything, I would say quantum mechanics demonstrates that romantic comedies aren't reality. Not that we really needed proof of that anyway, but... That's reassuring. That's funny. We should point out, too, that what Nat brought up and what you're talking about is different than the old mind over matter, even though the New Age community is going to say, well, what about mind over matter? That's been proven. Well, if you're talking about the effect of your thoughts on some brain plasticity, or some other physical component of your body, that's really not the same thing, because that would be traceable to maybe something that, as we're thinking of thoughts, the brain is working a certain way. The brain's connectivity to the systems in our body produces a certain result. It's not the same thing as what we're talking about here with entanglement. Or say another example, that would be psychosomatic illness, which, yes, is absolutely a different thing. But unfortunately, because the people who are excited about this have taken the idea of consciousness and tried to take consciousness and marry it to quantum mechanics through this observer thing, mental states wind up getting associated with quantum mechanics very, very highly, or often frequently, that's what I'm looking for. The problem is that your mind exists on a scale where the quantum effects get washed out. Your thoughts exist in a non-quantum realm. The rules of quantum mechanics aren't accurate descriptors of how the neurochemicals flow through your brain and your neurons fire and those kinds of things. It's not in the quantum space. As soon as you start arguing that kind of stuff, you're kind of piecing together ideas mostly at random. Don't you think that just because obviously most of these theories that I'm talking about are based on mystical experiences and trying to apply a scientific rationale to it. For example, they'll say what we used to call magic. We can now accurately, with our understanding of quantum physics, we can now accurately call it causal engineering because we're realizing what we're doing is a scientific work rather than a mystical practice. We're hearing these things and once again, it does sound so outrageous that these people who maybe come from a place of Eastern mysticism are trying to prove their faith system with quantum physics. But isn't it cautionary too for those of us who are Christians who might be tempted to do the same thing? Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm not a whole lot more comfortable with people using quantum mechanics. Again, I had mentioned that I'm a charismatic in the last episode. People could equally try and take quantum mechanics and use that as the explanation for how the gifts of the spirit might work, for example. I'm personally no more comfortable with that than the yogis grabbing it and saying, this proves our transcendental meditation or whatever the case may be. Either way, it's a case of misapplying science in that you're taking ideas outside of the boundaries of where science can take them. So there was an experiment that was done. I think it was on the Canary Islands where they had some sort of a particle beam thing or something and they managed to get one particle from one island to the next instantaneously. You familiar with that? Let me see if I can find it real quick. I was watching this. I think it was a Brian Green, maybe like a PBS show or something where they introduced this subject with entanglement. And then he took that to the idea of Star Trek transportation of other sorts of things. So what are your thoughts on that and how it might relate to some of the things we're talking about here? It seemed to me in the video that he was making this leap that you've talked about many times now on these episodes that maybe something in a quantum realm, you can get to do that. But as soon as you move up into the realm even of an atom, it doesn't work that way. And yet he was making it sound like, well, with enough sophistication, we could find a way to get zillions and zillions of these particles together that all make up, whether it's a box or a human, and then we could, using quantum mechanics, teleport it across space. Right. So, okay. Sorry. I was just brushing up on that again real quick here. This is the kind of thing where you're, of course, you guys want to ask the most bizarre, interesting things and I want to be responsible in addressing them. So, okay, got my head wrapped around the quantum teleportation thing, I think. What exactly was the question again? Is that a precursor to, you know, Star Trek type human being teleportation? Yeah. I mean, you can apply it in all kinds of different ways. I suppose you could apply it on a physical level like Star Trek, or you could maybe apply it on some sort of a memory level, manipulating some sort of a memory thought from one place to another if you could figure out how to get it down to the quantum level or whatever. There's probably a lot of applications, but I was just wondering what do you think about the idea of moving that out of the quantum realm into the realm of you and me? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, quantum teleportation basically is, it's kind of on the intersection of a couple of things we've talked about here. What's happening is quantum teleportation is the idea of using entanglements to compute in, say, a quantum computing type situation. So, if you entangle two things and move them into separate rooms, and then you're like, hey, I want to communicate this data to the other room, and you can somehow work with the entangled pair, you may be able to get data to quote unquote teleport from one room to the next, is the idea. So, I'll say a few things. First of all, if we were going to try and ramp this up to talking about whether humans can teleport with such a thing like this, I think one of the, this is probably epistemological questions, if epistemology is the right word, I think it is here. Is the same set of atoms in the same quantum state as I am right now identical to me, I think is a question, right? So, his answer was, yes, it is. That was the answer that he gave. Right. Sure. Right. Yeah. So, a materialist is likely going to argue that it is. I think I would be less convinced of that, but I'd also probably have to think carefully. But the idea basically is you're not actually teleporting objects, you're teleporting information. And the question is, is it possible to teleport information in such a way where sort of all the equivalent of the information of me gets replicated in another state? You know, is that the sum of who I am and so forth and so on? I don't know. That's maybe a question I could speculate on if you'd like me to. But to talk more concretely about what you're saying about like, does this mean that someday if I forget my lunch at home, I can just have it teleported to me, I'd be surprised if that's ever doable. Like I said, you're running into some major quantum mechanics issues. And anytime that you're doing the kind of thing where you're trying to replicate or move information or move an extended quantum state. That's what I mean. Move an extended quantum state. So like, it's one thing to move an electron or a photon or something like that. Right. But we're talking about, you know, an apple is, you know, some ridiculously high number of, you know, of atoms. You've got, you know, billions upon billions upon billions upon billions upon billions upon billions upon billions of them. And, you know, the randomness of quantum mechanics really starts undermining you when you're talking about massive numbers of atoms and so forth and that size. Like, how do you, how do you possibly, you know, navigate the randomness that's going to creep into the system when you're dealing with, you know, 10 to the 20 plus atoms. So I'll be surprised. I think it could be developed commercially into helpful things on the quantum computing scale. So it may be useful for some day. I would imagine not in the, you know, immediate future, but someday it might be useful for allowing us to save on our quantum computing power bill, you know, and just kind of teleport data from my quantum computer at home to my quantum computer or work, you know, or my quantum smartphone or whatever it is. But I don't think, I don't think we're talking about object teleportation here. The sheer amount of information that goes into these objects is extremely prohibitive. Remember, one of the things that Einstein discovered for us, which is kind of mind bending is that, you know, energy and matter are interchangeable, right? And so what that means is like we tend to think of information as not having a quote unquote cost when it comes to matter, when it comes to, you know, like we tend to think of physical things and energy is the sort of ethereal thing out there somewhere that doesn't really correspond to physical things, right? But if information is basically always encoded in energy in some way, which means it is a physical thing. And so the amount of information that you're going to have to specify to replicate physical objects is really, really, really intense. And then like, how do you actually turn that information into objects and so on? It gets real complicated, real complicated. So it's a cute idea. I'll be surprised if it ever becomes a reality. You know, Michael Crichton, I don't know if you guys have ever read his novel Timeline, but I hate to use the word realistic, but he was a little more realistic. Essentially, the people were not going back in time. They were like the metaphor that was used in the novel is it was like making a fax, you know, a fax of yourself, you know, to transport it, you know, to some different time. So it was you, but it wasn't you. You know, at that moment, then of course, in the fiction, you know, storytelling there, that had an unfortunate effect over time. But he was kind of tracking on the sorts of limitations that you're talking about and then extrapolating from that. So at least it was more quote unquote realistic in that respect. Yeah. Well, let's we should wrap up our series here. I had promised in the previous episode to take a few minutes at the end here to ask the real simple question. Okay, what did we learn? In other words, in all that we've heard, what are what are points of advice for what to say and not to say or maybe I should put it this way, how to how to talk about quantum physics as it relates to metaphysics or theology. And then, you know, beyond that, how would you see what we can say applied to other subjects that we talk about here on on paranormal things like, you know, new death, near death experiences, out of body experiences, you know, the whole precognition deja vu, I mean, can it apply in any way or how as we go forward and cover some of these topics, you know, we're naturally going to have this series floating around in our heads. But is there, you know, sort of a way to just be more intelligent digesters of material that we read about some of these other things based on our discussions over these last three episodes? I definitely learned that quantum physics is really, really, really hard. It's really, really complicated, extra, extra complicated. And so I think, and I used this phrase before, but I think it's impossible to be an armchair quantum physicist. In other words, there are so many bits of, you know, clips in blog posts and even books and in this type of thing that try to break it down to like a quantum physics for dummies. And you can watch it and think, oh, I get it. Like, I get that. That makes sense to me. It's not that hard. Chances are, you don't get it. Even if it seems like it makes sense because it's really extra complicated. So even if you have a surface understanding of a principle of quantum physics, you probably don't have a full understanding of it. So you probably, unless you're a scientist, shouldn't try to teach it or necessarily apply it to your existing faith system because you're probably applying it incorrectly. And I think that if we've learned anything in these last three episodes, it's that there really isn't much of a correlation between things that are happening on the quantum level and things that are happening in our reality or in our consciousness, in our spirituality. It seems that these are separate things. So I don't know that we could necessarily with confidence apply it to a lot of these topics that we discuss because it's it, my takeaway is that it's this sort of other realm that we don't even know if or how it interacts with our understanding of reality, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think for me, pretty much similar same thing, but in different words is just reinforced to me the importance of not tying one's metaphysics or theology or religion, religious beliefs to a scientific model. And I remember reading about this when I read Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions years ago. And I think it stuck with me and it came out strongly again in these three sessions. And I mean, this goes beyond just, can we extrapolate quantum physics out to justify our worldview? But I think it applies a lot to the Bible because we come to the issues of like Genesis one and what we call scientific concordism, where many Christians try to make the Bible connect to scientific theories, like the day age theory or whatever, what have you evolution or not evolution or six day creation, whatever. The attempt to tie scientific theories to the Bible is often very tenuous as well, because I don't see the Bible being a scientific book in that sense. So I kind of see that connection leading into other areas as well. And so I think it was very helpful to clarify that. Yeah, and I would encourage people who are Christians or have high view of scripture or whatever, however they want to describe themselves to not be alarmed by what Brian and Natalina just said. Because what it comes down to is actually something really simple. It goes back to the old, well, there's scientific inquiry and scientific evidence, and then there's sort of legal inquiry or philosophical inquiry. It's an issue of logical coherence. I mean, different questions are testable in different ways. Different truth propositions are testable in different ways. Some truth propositions will conform very nicely to the tools of science, and others will not conform at all. And that's the way it's always been. So deal with it. You don't feel like you're forced to use the tools of science to prove some sort of proposition. And when you discover that you really can't, then you sort of have to abandon that proposition. Well, that might be a deeply flawed conclusion, because not everything conforms to the tools of science. It just doesn't. It's always been that way. It's not going to change because even within the realm of science, we've run into several things here that Putty has just said, we not only don't know that scientifically, but we don't even really know how to test it, that sort of thing, or even create a model. Or we can create a model, but we don't know how to really validate or invalidate the model. Science has limitations. Let's just face it, let's just deal with it. And not every question conforms to one particular set of tools or trajectory of inquiry. So it's not that your faith believes or something the Bible says. Just because that can't conform to a specific methodology that operates in the realm of science doesn't mean that the proposition can't be tested in some other way. So pick the right method. And there was a really good quote. I think it was in one of the articles you had us read, maybe by Stenger. And he said, while he disagreed that quantum physics really proved anything spiritual, it wasn't completely useless to the Christian life because what it does point at is design. And it can, the intricacy of it all almost to the point of over design, and that we can look at it even just from that perspective, that there is such complexity in matter and in all of these different systems that it's beautiful. So it's not disproving anything. It's actually just a beautiful example of design. I think for me I had kind of two things and they're related to what Nat and Brian said, but I don't know that they're exactly identical. And they're both tied together by the concept of confusion to me. There's a lot of confusion in this world and a lot of confusion with what you read people talking about with quantum mechanics and whatever weird thing they want to get into. So I think it was the second episode. I was really struck with how the quantum physical world, and we were talking about dimensions at that point, it's not the same thing to say something is spiritual or to say that it's in another dimension. And people confuse those two. And the other one is, and I think we saw, I saw this from the very first, like five minutes of our first episode, is how badly people confuse physics or quantum physics with metaphysics. And I think people, and I really want to try and be more aware of this myself when, as we move forward into other topics that when somebody makes what they think is a scientific claim, what they're claiming is a scientific claim. From what I've seen, chances are pretty high that they're actually not making a scientific claim at all. They've moved into metaphysics. And I think that's something that we really need to be looking out for. Anybody else? Putty, your final thoughts? I'm glad this is over. Thanks for coming, man. I enjoyed it. It's fun to get a chance to discuss. You know, you guys are really trying to be careful thinkers. And I appreciate that most of the time when I discuss this topic with people of faith, they're looking for me to say the very kinds of things that we've been talking about and me saying, we shouldn't say stuff like that. And so I really appreciate just being able to talk about this with a group of critical thinkers that are doing their best to think honestly and carefully and not just kind of grab something to reinforce their faith because it's possible to get there somehow or whatever it is. So no, I really enjoyed the talk and I'm grateful for the chance to do it with you guys. Well, thank you and thank everybody for being along for the ride. I think again, like I said last time, this I believe is going to be useful to a lot of people over the course of time as they find this and listen to it. So all of you in your your social media channels, please direct people to these three episodes because I do think they will be really helpful. Thanks for coming. Bye, everyone. Thanks, buddy. Yeah, thanks. Definitely. Thanks, buddy. You were great, man. Oh, thanks. It was a lot of fun. And hey, if there's any other way, you know, that I can help you guys out or whatever, just let me know. I was actually thinking, I was like, we didn't even talk about like Big Pang or anything like that. So, you know, just consider me a friend. However, I can help you guys out on your journey. All right, thank you.