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Where Do Spirits Meet Electrons?
I enjoy reading physicist Sean Carroll because he is a penetrating thinker and good communicator. A recent blog post of his hits on a theme that raises fundamental issues of concern to Mormons. First, let's set the backdrop. We're all familiar with the following statement from Joseph Smith, canonized as D&C 131:7-8:
There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter.
In Church discourse the term spirit can mean several things, but let's focus on personal spirit body.
Back to Carroll, I'm actually going to quote from two different blog posts interchangeably (here and here) because they are related.
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?
If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that [the Dirac equation, which describes the behavior of electrons] is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
I suppose we non-physicists can just blithely say that there is more physics out there to discover (like dark matter), and I'm sure that Carroll would be thrilled if that prospect looked like a reality. (Just today I saw an article about the doldrums particle physicists are in because the Standard Model has been validated in such detail that there seems little to get excited about on the horizon.) But even still, are the laws of physics in a rock different than in a brain? And who hasn't wondered where in the spectrum of life a spirit gets involved (proteins, viruses, bacteria, plants, worms, and so on)? It seems like the best answer these kinds of questions can garner is a shrug of the shoulders. (Maybe I need to look harder?)
None of this is truly novel; beginning in the Renaissance anatomists tried to figure out where in the brain the soul was located, eventually giving up. Carroll has just put the question in a straightforward fundamental form. Perhaps a lot of how we think about spirits is wrong--a combination of speculation and misinterpreted experience that has been propagated in our culture for ages. (Sometimes I think that we are so used to our embodied state that we seriously underestimate what "bondage", as the scriptures put it, the lack of a body is.) Be that as it may, it appears that spirits will unfortunately remain something we have no scientific right to believe in for the foreseeable future.
5 comments:
I suspect that spirits are largely information. We might even think of them as programming. And while there is a spirit, our body is doing most of the hard work of thinking and acting. All information requires energy, and energy and mass are interchangeable.
What would leave it immeasurable with a scale, but still leaves open the question of how it affects electrons.
Take a look at "Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision" chapter 2 "A Standard Physics Model of Spirit". Though presented more as a proposal of how we as engineers could eventually control biological machines with software, one way to give a possible mechanism for body-spirit interaction is that we don't insist the spirit be literally co-located with the body in the physical sense, but located in a safe location (the spirit world -- a simulated environment held in some substrate) and entangled with particles located in microtubules of cells. Since quantum effects in microtubules have been observed, and microtubules are the control center of cells, it should not be too much of a stretch to think that such control could eventually be possible.
Thanks for stopping by, Scott. I reviewed the book last year. I am sympathetic to the idea that spirit and body are not necessarily co-located. I appreciate creative thinking, although I'm not yet buying that microtubules are central players here. How would that entanglement be established anyway? Microtubules are dynamic structures, and I'm sure there is constant turnover of tubulin. And what is special about tubulin that would facilitate such interactions? Anyway, those are just a few of the questions that come to mind.
I wonder if the mainstream physics that we are taught may not be so open/shut case.
Here is a website that presents a very different explanation for physics and math. The spiritual implications are very interesting.
www.milesmathis.com
Enjoy.
AB
I wonder if the mainstream physics that we are taught may not be so open/shut case.
Here is a website that presents a very different explanation for physics and math. The spiritual implications are very interesting.
www.milesmathis.com
Enjoy.
AB
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