A Quantum Anomaly Changes What We Know About Reality

There are some in the scientific community who believe that we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift in the perceived reality, or paradigm, experienced by humanity, or at least those populations exposed to current scientific breakthroughs.

Pixabay Scientific American reports that as researchers delve deeper into quantum mechanics, unlocking the mysteries it holds, there is a growing cognitive shift in how ‘reality’ is perceived. The shift, if it occurs, will involve humanity’s departure from the non-contextuality of our sensory observations. What this means, for example, is that your observation of an object is not dependent on how someone else at a different location and/or angle perceives the object.

QuoteFancy In his book, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ author and philosopher Thomas Kuhn writes that “something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’” What scientists have found is that quantum mechanics insists that how you perceive an object does depend to some degree on how someone else views it, something called “quantum entanglement”.

Einstein waved off the contrasting theories of reality by saying that quantum mechanics was an incomplete science. That dismissal was shot down in 1964, when scientist John Bell proved that quantum entanglement was a possibility.

Over time, a growing list of reality ‘anomalies’ have emerged and has reached the point of ‘critical mass’, says Kuhn. The anomalies, according to people like Kuhn, have painted the current paradigm into a corner, leaving the traditionalists with only one ‘out’. Scientific American writes that “the only alternative left for those holding on to the current paradigm is to postulate some form of non-locality: nature must have—or so they speculate—observation-independent hidden properties, entirely missed by QM, which are ‘smeared out’ across spacetime.

Wikipedia It is this allegedly omnipresent, invisible but objective background that supposedly orchestrates entanglement from ‘behind the scenes.’” Such an ‘out’ would cause a fundamental and counterintuitive redefining of “objectivity.” While the quantum entanglement theory only exists on a subatomic level and in laboratory settings “we know that they are there, for their existence has been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt. Therefore, when we believe that we see objects and events outside and independent of mind, we are wrong in at least some essential sense. A new paradigm is needed to accommodate and make sense of the anomalies; one wherein mind itself is understood to be the essence—cognitively but also physically—of what we perceive when we look at the world around ourselves,” writes Scientific American.

What do you think?