here is a pretty charming cartoon featuring the fallibility of memory, its animated by cartoonist Chris Ware using audio from This American Life. Hope you enjoy it,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf9W7cxi48g

Thank you for making a very clear assessment of an issue that continues to come up in discussions between Skeptics and Atheists, as well as Skeptics and Deists and people of other faiths.

While I don’t believe that this issue will ever stop being a catalyst for engaging and endless discussion between folks interested in the questions posed by believers and non-believers alike to Skeptics on these matters, I think if we can assert your well thought out and rational approach, we can keep this discussion from overwhelming and overshadowing the many other topics that are important to Skepticism.

Other prominent Skeptics continue to have to spend their time defending their position on discussing Faith or choosing not to discuss Faith alongside many of the other familiar memes, as choosing not to engage in these types of debates as seen as an attempt to deny that there is a need to discuss them at all. The biggest issue here, at least in my opinion, is that so much time is devoted to this issue – upon which I think we mostly agree – that discussions of dangerous and timely issues such as anti-vax rhetoric, dangerous homeopathy, and other topics of consumer protection and Science advocacy get lost or moved relegated to “also ran” status.

The sooner that Skeptics can come to a blanket understanding about the relationship between ideas of Faith and Belief (you are right to point out that Religion is an altogether different matter, as is the Church as an establishment) the sooner we can ease tensions that invariably arise between Skeptics and Atheists who see us as not caring about the question, or looking to avoid it.

Again, thank you for stating this idea so clearly. I can only hope this article will be widely disseminated.

Thanks for your response.
A layman is never sure he has things right, so it’s good to get some feedback from an authoritative source (not that we should believe all authoritative sources without question of course!)

“Therefore, that should actually be point number 1″

That is why I called it “the real killer” argument

In the sprit of the post, I was taking the point from your short dismissal and beating it to death.

What you write is absolutely correct. I was expanding a little on quantum mechanics as applied to macroscopic objects (your points 1 and 2). Your third point is both true and very important to the understanding of the implications of QM, and applies to all QM considerations, macroscopic or not. Therefore, that should actually be point number 1, with the other two as a follow-up to explain why it is also ridiculous even to drag QM into macroscopic matters.

Show me with quotes, and I’ll admit I was wrong.

And okay, now I’m being defensive.

I was being as brief and as dismissive as possible.

I think there are three reasons and, if I may be allowed, I will rephrase the two you mentioned in my own words:

1) Although quantum effects do occur at the macroscopic scale of ordinary everyday objects, the effect is so vanishingly small that, after jumping a wall every second for a trillions upon trillions of years, your chance of landing on the other side is still so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from it.
2) Quantum indeterminacy applies only for as long as a quantum particle is not interacting. For a macroscopic object consisting of trillions upon trillions of quantum particles, this is a vanishingly, infinitesimally small period of time.

But the third reason is the real killer:

3) The “oberver” has no special place in quantum mechanics. In particular, *consciousness* plays absolutely no role at all in decoherance. In the original double slit experiments, the “oberver” was simply a “detection device” placed at the slits. A detection device is, of course, not conscious. The experimenter himself could have dropped dead after pushing the time delay button to start the experiment for all it would matter to the outcome of the experiment.

It is simply nonsense that moon doesn’t exist if no conscious oberver is watching. It is not true, it never was true, and never will be true.

BJ

I’m not a physicists either, but the answer to that question, if it is a serious one, is “no”.

I am a physicist, and the answer to that question, if we are to take it seriously, is that it is meaningless. Applying quantum-mechanical concepts to macroscopic objects — let alone entire species — is tenuous under the best of circumstances, and in most cases outright ridiculous, given the fact that truly macroscopic objects a) exist on scales many orders of magnitude larger than Planck’s constant (meaning that quantum effects are going to be negligibly small), and b) will suffer immediate decoherence, destroying any quantum-mechanical superposition.

Macroscopic objects are well described by classical physics, which means exactly that it makes no sense to ask about quantum-mechanical effects. This, by the way, is what Stephen Hawking referred to when he famously said that “when someone mentions Schrödinger’s cat, I go for my gun.”

“I am no Physicist.
From the quantum standpoint does it exist if it is not observed?”

I’m not a physicists either, but the answer to that question, if it is a serious one, is “no”.