User:The Rationalist/What the Bleep
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This "documentary" is interesting because it is a mix of truths and falsehoods. A lie is more easily believed if preceded by a few truths. Unfortunately you need degree (or higher) level understanding in the relevant fields to sort out the truth from the hogwash. Quite often the "voice over" is full of rubbish while the "experts" are on the money.
This page is for transcriptions from the film What the bleep, including links to the relevant YouTube sections, plus some of the comments from the YouTube viewers themselves.
Note, there are many versions of this on YouTube, many of them overlapping. The only non-overlapping version I have found is the one by 'Setnor'. These are sequential, for the Setnor versions I have given part numbers.
[edit] Useful links
- Cult watch
- What the bleep
- Amusing review of bleep
- Common Sense in Quantum Physics
- "Quantum" and New Age Victor Stenger
[edit] Setnor part 1
[edit] Setnor part 2
[edit] Setnor part 3
[edit] Setnor part 4
1:30 [Voiceover]. How can an object be in two or more places at the same time? [Amit Goswami ] It's very easy. Instead of thinking of things as things - we all have the habit of thinking that everything around us is already a thing, existing without my input, without my choice - we have to banish that kind of thinking. Instead you really have to recognise that even the material world around us - the chairs, the tables, the rooms, the carpet, camera included - all of these are nothing but possible movements of consciousness. And I am choosing moment to moment out of those movements to bring my actual experience into manifestation. This is the only radical thinking that you need to do. But it is so radical, so difficult, because the tendency is [to think] the world is already out there, independent of my experience. It is not. Quantum physics has been so clear about this. Heisenberg himself, co-discoverer of quantum physics, said that atoms are not things. They are only tendencies. So, instead of thinking of things, you have to think of possibilities. There are possibilities of consciousness.
6:25. Woman curator of museum: "This exhibit comes to us from Japan, from Mr Kosuro Emoto. Mr Emoto became terribly interested in the molecular structure of water, and what affects it. Now water is the most receptive of the four elements. Mr Emoto thought, perhaps it would respond to non-physical events, so he set up a series of studies, applied mental stimuli, and photographed it with a dark field microscope. This first picture is a picture of water from the Fujawara dam. And this picture is the same water after receiving a blessing from a Zen buddhist monk (picture shows a crystalline shape having formed). Now in this next series of pictures Mr Emoto printed out words, taped them to bottles of distilled water, and left them out overnight. This first photograph [a hexagon] is of the pure distilled water, just the essence of itself. These subsequent photographs as you can see. This is the chi of love [snowflake pattern shown]. And we move along here to 'thank you', and you can see where he taped that to this bottle here, but if you read Japanese you already knew that [another pretty hexagonal shape is shown]. Now Mr Emoto speaks of the thought or the intent being the driving force in all this. The science of how this affects the molecules is unknown - except to the water molecules of course [smiles]! And it's really fascinating when you keep in mind that 90% of our bodies are water." [Man with beard turns to Amanda and speaks in intense, serious and authoritative voice]. "Makes you wonder, doesn't it. If thoughts can do that to water, imagine what our thoughts can do to us". [Amanda returns the look, as if to signal she is now starting to realise something profound and important].
Comment: "To all the sceptics who refuse to open their mind to the views in this video, or the any views for that matter, you need to realize your ignorance. I love the comments from all the "all knowing" people here with all the answers, but in my opinion the definition of stupidity is close mindedness and inability to accept and observe all things presented. Ignorance and neglect will never support growth.
[edit] Setnor part 5
[Stuart Hameroff] It's only in conscious experience that it seems that we move forward in time. In quantum theory it seems that you can also go backwards in time, and there's some suggestion that processes in the brain, related to consciousness, project backwards in time". For example, in the late 1970's, a neurophysiologist at the university of California San Francisco named Ben Livet did some very famous experiments. What Libet did was to study patients who were having neurosurgery on their brains, with their brains exposed, while they were awake. They were given a local anaesthetic to numb the area of the skull and scalp, and they were awake, and they would talk to these people. So for example what he did was he would stimulate their little finger and look at the part of the sensory cortex on the opposite side that was related to that, record from it electrically and ask the patient when he or she felt the stimulus on their little finger. And he would also stimulate that area of the cortex. Now what you would think would be that if you stimulate the little finger it takes a finite period of time to get to the opposite side of the cortex, so the patient would report it a fraction of a second later, after the stimulus, and when you stimulate it directly the patient would report it immediately. He found just the opposite. When you stimulated the little finger, the patient felt it immediately, and when he stimulated directly on the cortex, there was a delay. After sorting through all the data and repeating it over and over, Libet came to the conclusion that somehow the brain was projecting information backwards in time. So that it did take a finite amount of time to get to the sensory cortex but the brain projected it backwards in time so that the conscious perception was that the stimulus was felt when the pinch actually occurred.
Comment from this version "this whole thing means that we need completely trash all of known science. But this reminds me of when i was in school. My teachers lied to me in fifth grade. Then when i got into eight grade i had to use what i know as a stepping stone to learn this new information that was being given to me, and then trash it once i had learnt all that my eight grade had to offer to me. "
[Lynne McTaggart, 1:06 - 2:23] One of the most interesting experiments with random event generators occurred when it was really out of time. Some investigators at Princeton decided they would try to see whether or not you could affect a random machine after it had run. So they converted it so instead of having a computer with a visual screen they had a computerised situation that was audio tapes. And they had it with clicks to the left ear and clicks in the right ear. And they already played this, with nobody listening to it, so that it already ran, they put that in the vault, and they then gave the tape, the already run tape, to a participant, and said, take it home, I want you to listen to it, and I want you to make more left ear clicks than right ear clicks - send your intention to it. So the person did, they handed back the tape, and they played it, and lo and behold, they played the one in the vault too, and they discovered that they were both the same, and they both had more left clicks than right clicks. So what was going on here? Well it wasn't as though the person who was the participant had actually affected it at the moment he was listening to it. His thoughts and his intentions had actually moved back down the time line and affected it at the moment it was generated.
comment Our greatest minds, scholars, prophets have been telling us this forever, most of us think it's mumbo jumbo. Hopefully Quantum Physics will be this small point of light in the dark, which will grow to enlighten us all and make Humanity's existence on this Earth a nicer one. After all "It's Just a Ride" - Bill Hicks. Comment. This is all supported by quantum mechanics, we can influence the answer by deciding the question. time does not mattter and probability waves break down and become meaninless, only we we want to know matters, what we need to see. "
[edit] Setnor part 6
Comment: Thank you SO MUCH [...] for posting this video series! I have loved watching each and every video segment! I appreciate it so much! I have learned so much as well!
Miceal Ledwith - a former Roman Catholic monsignor who paid compensation in 2002 for allegedly abusing a child, features often in this section.
I was basically trying to find the answers to what I've often called those four great questions that everybody faces whether they realise it or not, even the agnostics and the atheists, as well as the believers and the pious, that is: who are we, where do we come from, what should we do, and where are we going? And if you don't answer those four great questions, obviously your life is pretty meaningless. And many people just stuff those questions down - they want the answers made for them, they want someone like Jesus or Buddha or somebody else to do it for them. It can't be done. It's like wanting someone to be born for you, or to die for you, or to eat your lunch for you. These things are inescapably personal.
The answer to the third question (what should I do), is probably 'don't abuse children'.
2:25 - Amanda gets the wedding assignment.
[Lynne McTaggart]. One of the problems with organised religion is that there is this sense of separateness, that it is only good to be a Protestant, that people who are Catholics are the only people who know the way, and I think now our current understanding of quantum physics is this understanding of complete unity, and so that we have to derive our spirituality from a sense of unity.
Comment: "Watch the whole movie.. its more about quantumfysics, NLP, chemo-biology and other sientifics than about a religion".
[edit] Setnor part 7
[edit] Setnor part 8
[edit] Setnor part 9
[edit] Setnor part 10
[Voiceover] If you make the effort to sit down and design a new life, and you make it the most important thing, and you spend time every day feeding it, like a gardener feeds a seed, you will produce fruit. [...] We are running the whole xxxx. We are running it collectively. It's there, it has such flexibility, that anything you can imagine it will create, and you learn. Your intention causes this thing to materialise once you're conscious enough. [...] If we practice, our mental rehearsal, and our skill in being able to do it will show that certain brain circuits will grow as a result of our effort. It will become easier to do in other words. If we accept that idea then it will allow us to go back the next day and do it with more certainty and with more acceptance. [...] when we can make thought more real than anything else, our brain is designed to do that. The frontal lobe, with its enormous space, as the altar upon which we place a thought, and it gives us the permission to hold the thought for an extended period of time, and it lowers the volume to external stimuli, we lose track of time and space. That's the moment we are stepping into the quantum field. Tat's the moment that we are making thought more real than anything else.
comment: Oh you're totally right. Physics never progressed beyond this point. No further investigation was ever done into why this happens. No one proposed any follow up experiments. No mathematical explanation was ever investigated and all scientific investigation stopped exactly where the explanation stopped in this film. No one knows why and no one will ever know. All physics that followed this has been mathematical expressions of our bafflement.
comment: This "documentary" is interesting because it is a mix of truths and falsehoods. A lie is more easily believed if preceded by a few truths. Unfortunately you need degree (or higher) level understanding in the relevant fields to sort out the truth from the hogwash. Quite often the "voice over" is full of rubbish while the "experts" are on the money.
[edit] Setnor part 11
Lynne McTaggart]. We are finding non-locality everywhere. In our bodies, in space, from stars. In regions of the zero point field, everything is connected. And so we have this, this involvement in everything. We are our world. There is no 'out there' out there. There is no place where we and everything else begins. We are all connected.
[Dean Radin]. You take this notion of an entangled universe, and you apply it to human experience, because human experience is part of the universe as well. And you say, well, let's assume that the experience is entangled, and then how would it manifest, and we could start going through ways in which it would manifest. There is connection with another mind - we call it telepathy. There's a connection to some other object somewhere, we would call it clairvoyance. There's a connection that transcends time, we call it precognition. There is a connection in which my intention is expressed in the world in some way, we might call it psychokinesis, or distant healing or something of that sort. So you can go through a list of perhaps 12 kinds of psychic experience - and they've gotten labels over the years, like telepathy - but this really is just the tip of the iceberg.
[Stuart Hameroff] I think entanglement - collapse in one system inducing collapse in another, actually what happens is a parapsychological phenomena. And it's also true that time can go backwards so that they don't even have to be simultaneous. One can occur before or after the other. And you get experiences, particularly when, when patients report leaving their body and floating above them, watching their bodies being worked on, could be do to the fact that consciousness ultimate is a process of fundamental space-time geometry.
[edit] Setnor part 12
[edit] Setnor part 13
Dean Radin.
It's tricky - I don't want to know if you want to go there. You do want to go there? So. Entanglement is space separated and time separated. One way of looking very specifically at the time separation aspect ... it's much easier to do this with one individual rather than two, because, who are you better entangled with than anyone than yourself. It's you future self that you are entangled with, and your past self. So that the experiment I developed to look at this is, we wire you up typically to look at skin conductance, but also heart rate and other parameters. You sit in front of a computer screen and you press a button, and you know that five seconds later you are going to see a picture. It could be a very calm picture or a very emotional picture. And it's randomly selected by the computer immediately before it's shown. So when you press the button, the future is not yet determined. So, you need real precognition in order to be able to jump into the future and get it somehow. So, since we are looking at physiology, we know what happens to physiology after you see an emotional image, we know what happens if you see a calm image. The question is, does that future experience leak into your present? Does it happen before you see the picture, and through this experiment you can see what happens. Electrical activity of the heart - ekg - this photoplasmograph, which is the amount of blood in the fingertip, and respiration - breathing in breathing out. Press the button, well what happens to physiology, well it it starts rising before the image appears, it may suggest that you are about to get an emotional picture. And if it stays calm maybe it suggests you are going to get a calm picture. So we have done this kind of experiment for several hundred people and colleagues have run this experiment as well, and as it turns out that is exactly what you see. People become aroused before randomly selected pictures in the future that happen to be emotional, and they remain calm before randomly selected pictures that are calm. This has been seen in heart rate changes, in skin conductance, in the brain and basically systemically throughout the body. We are entangled with our future self.
[edit] Setnor part 14
credits and further interviews
- Fred Alan Wolf is the man with white beard in front of waterfall. "Ph D in physics from UCLA - author of several books including 'Matter into Feeling: A new alchemy of science and spirit' and 'Taking the quantum leap;'.
- Mr Emoto talks about how he did the water experiment.
- Amit Goswami - is the man with the flat cap and glasses - professor of physics, university of Oregon, senior scholar in residence, Institute of Noetic sciences. Author of several books including 'self aware universe', 'physics of the soul'.
- John Hagelin - jowls and receding hairline - professor of physics and director of the institute of science, technology and public policy at maharishi university. Claims to have been at Stamford, and 100 publications.
- Miceal Ledwith - irish accent, "formerly professor of systematic theology at Maynooth college in Ireland.
- Daniel Monti. Director of the mind-body medicine program at Thomas Jefferson university. (physician with training in psychiatry).
- Andrew Newbefg. Assistant professor, department of radiology.
- Candace Pert.
- Jeffery Satinover - MD (psychiatry).
- William Tiller
[edit] Allegations that the film was a hoax, reviews &c
The critic Roger Ebert alleged in 2004 that the film was a 'hoax', and stated in another review:
Their discussions about this quantum phenomenon reminded me wonderfully of the explanations of the same topic in "What the #$*! Do We Know," a recent "documentary" in which one of the "expert physicists" has been unmasked as a chiropractor, and the filmmakers are all followers of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old spirit guide from Atlantis. Because nobody knows $#!t about quantum physics, this doc actually got respectful reviews from gullible critics like me, because it made about as much sense as most of what I've read on the subject."
The reply to his allegation is on the bleep website here. They say
[...] we take serious exception to your recent characterization of our film as "a hoax." And we’re concerned that you would print such a charge on the basis of "several readers unmasking the documentary." Not only are we personally offended, we find in the incident another chilling precedent, and hope you will feel the necessity to set the record straight. The concepts we present in "Bleep" can be found in Taoism, Buddhism, Yoga, the Alice Bailey material, Kabballah, Theosophy, Unitarianism, Christian Science, and dozens of other religions, spiritual disciplines and paths. This explains why audience members from all these spiritual backgrounds, and others, embrace our film as a reflection of their own teachings. Also known as The Perennial Wisdom, or The Perennial Philosophy, these teachings have been defined as "a body of knowledge designed to promote a spiritual understanding of our lives as human souls incarnate." It’s been around forever. What’s new, however, is the research that now tends to prove scientifically what these teachings have always espoused: that, through some natural mechanism, as yet not fully understood, each of us is creating our own reality; that, at an essential level, everything is connected; that what exists "physically" is actually mostly empty; and that the only time we ever really have – or have had -- is NOW! (My emphasis).
The Wikipedia article does not mention that serious critics almost universally panned the film.
Mainstream filmgoers have more or less ignored the film, while the critics have almost universally panned it. Maitland McDonagh, of TV Guide, says the film “quickly tumbles down a rabbit hole of annoying psychobabble, dubious science, and embarrassingly silly animation.” Washington Post critic Michael O'Sullivan described the film as “Part talking-head documentary, part live-action narrative featurette and part goofy animation [that] fails on all three levels… stiffly written, badly acted, choppily edited, and awkwardly redundant…On the whole, it feels like a cross between a PBS special hosted by a series of low-rent Deepak Chopras and an infomercial for self-help audio tapes. Bleep, indeed.” Nick Schager of Slant magazine concluded that, “If people are truly able to construct their own destinies, then I can only hope that What the Bleep, with its hokey and derivative CGI, John Tesh-influenced score, and screeching electronic sound effects, will beget a future devoid of these filmmakers’ creepily cultish work.”
And this does not include the BBC review, which was scathing.
a documentary aimed at the totally gullible [...]
- Shifting from quantum theory to mystical mumbo jumbo in the blink of an eye, it blends hard science fact with Star Trek visuals, and talking head interviewees with a deadly dull drama about hearing impaired photographer Amanda
- It's tough to separate the science fact from the science fiction in this attempt to explain life, the universe and everything
- If you take What The Bleep at face value, you'll believe that it's been scientifically proven that labelling jars of tap water with negative or positive words actually changes the shapes of the water molecules themselves, or that mass meditation can reduce crime rates, or that reality is just a holodeck, or... Well, you get the idea.
- "LESS STEPHEN HAWKING, MORE OPRAH WINFREY"
- Eagerly pushing a New Age agenda this is less Stephen Hawking, more Oprah Winfrey: the self-help manual for the multiplex audiences of the 21st century. It feels like an advert for a cult, so it's no surprise to learn that the filmmakers allegedly have ties to the kooky folk at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. Credulity required.
[edit] Lynne McTaggart's intention experiments
Lynne McTaggart features prominently in the film (though she does not appear in the list of academically credentialled scientists). Her claims that consciousness can remotely affect the material world are central to the idea of the film that the protagonist Amanda can take control of her life by the power of thought.
There is an interview with McTaggart here. And one of her websites here about 'intention experiments'. These show how people across the Internet can use their powers of thought to change things that are happening in the physical world.
[edit] David Albert's critique of the film
Albert had previously denounced (Salon, Sep 16, 2004) the way the makers had misrepresented his views. In an issue of The Stranger (Feb 8 2006), he gave further reasons for his dissatisfaction with the film, especially the second (DVD release) version.
- I have seen the second film. It is swarming with scientific inaccuracies, and its overall thesis is (in my opinion) wildly and irresponsibly wrong. Let me elaborate on that a bit.
- The argument of these movies (and of the second one in particular) runs something like this:
- Up through the end of the 19th century, science (and physics in particular) was at work on the construction of a thoroughly MECHANICAL, thoroughly CLOCKWORK sort of a picture of the universe - a picture that seemed to have no room in it for God and spirit and freedom and mystery and all sorts of other stuff that we thought we wanted. And in the 20th century, with the advent of Quantum Mechanics, there was a great crisis in that project, and there were announcements, from many quarters, that the project had broken down, that it was now at an end, that it would need to be replaced by something else. And the argument of the movie is that this crisis somehow obviously amounts to a dramatic and long-awaited re-affirmation of the truth of this other, ancient, pre-scientific world-view, a re-affirmation of the existence and of the centrality of God and freedom and spirit and mystery and so on.
- And there are two very large and very serious problems with that argument:
- 1) The film neglects to make any mention whatever of the fact that there has been a growing consensus among serious investigators of the foundations of Quantum Mechanics for 30 or 40 years now that this crisis of mechanism has PASSED, that we now see a way OUT of it, that (in so far as we can tell at present) the original, mechanistic, scientific project is very much alive and well. (The second film actually does a reasonably good job, with some help from me, of explaining how that crisis arose. But, as I said above, it makes no mention at all of the fact that that crisis has now passed. All of my numerous attempts to explain to the producers how we have now found our way OUT of that crisis were cut out of the final versions of both movies.)
- 2) Both of these films are wildly wrong about what a collapse of the project of mechanism (if such a collapse had indeed occurred, which it did not!) would have MEANT. Both of these films are wildly wrong (that is) about where a collapse of the project of mechanism (if such a collapse had indeed occurred, which it did not) would have LEFT us. The film makers are apparently convinced that such a collapse would straightforwardly resuscitate the old metaphysics of God and spirit and so fourth, but they offer no reasons whatsoever for thinking that, and I cannot imagine what such a reason might be.
- It seems to me that what's at issue (at the end of the day) between serious investigators of the foundations of quantum mechanics and the producers of the "what the bleep" movies is very much of a piece with what was at issue between Galileo and the Vatican, and very much of a piece with what was at issue between Darwin and the Victorians. There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is some powerful and reassuring and accessible image of OURSELVES. That's the impulse that the What the Bleep films seem to me to flatter and to endorse and (finally) to exploit - and that, more than any of their particular factual inaccuracies - is what bother me me about them. It is precisely he business of resisting that demand, it is precisely the business of approaching the world with open and authentic wonder, and with a sharp, cold eye, and singularly intent upon the truth, that's called science.
