藍色情懷

　　In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV's AM Northwest in Portland, Ore., with the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film's central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed millions.

　　2004年春天，我上了美國俄勒岡波特蘭 卡度電視台的節目「西北美」（AM Northwest），當時還有「這到底是什麼#$*!東西！我們知道嗎？！」這部片名不雅電影的製作人。該影片剪接巧妙，女主角由瑪莉．瑪琳 （Marlee Matlin）扮演擁有一雙夢幻明眸的攝影師，她要讓顯然毫無道理的世界變得合理，該片的要旨是：透過意識和量子力學，我們創造自己的現實世界。我從未想 像過這樣的電影會成功，但它確實賺了幾百萬美元。

　　The film's avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as "quantum flapdoodle." University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: "The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies." Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground's tendencies.

　　《生命的答案，水知道》一書的作者、日本研究者江本勝的工作，主要就是演示思想如何改變冰晶的結構──在裝著漂亮晶體的杯子上黏著「愛」字，而播放貓王的「傷心旅店」一曲，會使得其他冰晶分裂為二。他的「燃燒的愛」能把水燒開嗎？

　　The film's nadir is an interview with "Ramtha," a 35,000-year-old spirit channeled by a woman named JZ Knight. I wondered where humans spoke English with an Indian accent 35,000 years ago. Many of the films' participants are members of Ramtha's "School of Enlightenment," where New Age pabulum is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.

　　電影的最低潮是「拉姆撒」（Ramtha，3萬5000歲的精靈附身在名叫南特的女人身上）的訪談。我倒想知道，3萬5000年前哪裡有操印度口音英語的人類。電影中的許多參與者都是拉姆撒「啟蒙學校」的成員，該校是寶貴的週末特惠日，發放「新世紀靈糧」的地方。

　　The attempt to link the weirdness of the quantum world to mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness) is not new. The best candidate to connect the two comes from University of Oxford physicist Roger Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff of the Arizona Health Sciences Center, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light. Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Their conjecture (and that's all it is) is that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that results in the quantum coherence of atoms. The quantum coherence causes neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons, thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern that creates thought and consciousness. Because a wave-function collapse can come about only when an atom is "observed" (that is, affected in any way by something else), the late neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggested that "mind" may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms....

　 　把量子世界的詭異和巨觀世界的神秘（例如意識）連接起來，這種嘗試已經不新鮮了。其中佼佼者是英國牛津大學的物理學家彭若斯和美國亞利桑那健康科學中心 的醫師漢羅夫，他們的量子意識理論產生的熱比光多（攻擊比榮耀多）。我們的神經元裡有一些極小的中空「微管」，扮演著鷹架一樣的角色。他們的推測是（而且 這就是全部）：微管裡某些東西可以引發「波函數崩陷」，以取得原子的「量子相干性」。量子相干性使神經元之間的突觸釋出神經傳遞物，從而使眾多神經一起 「開火」，進而產生思想和意識。因為僅當一個原子「被觀察」時，才會產生波函數崩陷（也就是某個東西以任何方式影響了它），這個理論的另一位支持者、已故 神經科學家埃克爾斯爵士（Sir John Eccles）甚至提出，「心智」也許是遞歸迴路（指從原子到分子到神經元到思想到意識到心智到原子……）裡的觀察者。

　　In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge. In his book The Unconscious Quantum (Prometheus Books, 1995), University of Colorado physicist Victor Stenger demonstrates that for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck's constant (h). "If mvd is much greater than h, then the system probably can be treated classically." Stenger computes that the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of the synapse are about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential. There is no micro-macro connection. Then what the #$*! is going on here?

　　實際上，次原子量子效 應和大尺度巨觀系統的鴻溝太大了，它們之間不能架橋。科羅拉多大學物理學家史坦格（Victor Stenger）在他的著作《無意識的量子》（1995年普羅米修司出版）證明：一個系統要描述為量子系統，它的質量（m）、速度（v）和距離（d）必須 與普朗克常數（h）同一級數。「如果mvd遠大於h，該系統就視為古典系統。」史坦格計算出神經傳遞物分子的質量和它們越過突觸距離的速度，約是大於量子 效應的兩個級數。這裡沒有「微觀–巨觀」的連結。所以，這裡到底發生什麼#$*!事情？

　　Physics envy. The lure of reducing complex problems to basic physical principles has dominated the philosophy of science since Descartes's failed attempt some four centuries ago to explain cognition by the actions of swirling vortices of atoms dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. We should be exploring consciousness at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organization. Biology envy.

　　物理學妒忌。把複雜問題化約成基本物理原理的誘惑，自 從笛卡兒以來已經主宰科學哲學四個世紀。當時笛卡兒試圖以原子的舞動旋轉來解釋認知和意識，但他失敗了。這個「笛卡兒之夢」提供了確定感，可是面對生物學 的複雜性時很快就瓦解了。我們應該在神經和更高的層次探索意識，那裡的因果分析箭頭指向浮現和自組織等原理。生物學妒忌。