What the bleep do YOU know?

Ok, so here's the deal. This blog, Bentham's Ford, has been created in an attempt to hassle my friend Karen (one of the brightest of London's sparks) into some sort of literary action. Let's see if it works. It'll probably just be an occasional mind-dump for me and her to use from time to time, and if that's the case, then so be it.

I'll kick off by tackling a rather grand, universal subject so she has a large and potential limitless palette from which to respond. Last night we sat chatting and drinking in The Island Queen (one of Angel's best kept secrets, it would seem) and the course of our conversation took in a great many subjects. From mysteriously sleepy French horses to the suitability of orange as the colour for a packet of Salt and Vinegar crisps, right the way through to our main topic of discussion, "What the Bleep Do We Know?" Released in 2004, "What the Bleep..." is film that defies any attempt at compartmentalisation. Part documentary, part dramatic narrative, part animation, the film is generally acknowledged as a layman's guide to some of the more mind-boggling aspects of Quantum Physics. Claiming to explore some tricky connections between Spirituality and Quantum Mechanics, God and Molecular Biology, taking in consciousness, neurology and addiction along the way, "What the Bleep..." has provoked some seriously disparate responses from those who've seen it. A brisk flick through the Wikipedia entry for the film is enough to arm yourself with the names of various big guns of the modern scientific community (Dawkins, Simon Singh, etc) who regard it, at best as "ridiculous balderdash" and, at worse as a "rampant example of abuse by charlatans and cults."

Very much a layman in terms of Quantum Physics and not wanting to wade too far into discussing the rights and wrongs of the science on offer, I do however want to make one point that eluded me after one too many Sierra Nevadas last night. The reason to get any film made is, by and large, one of entertainment. How best to appeal to those laymen willing to sit through a documentary on Quantum Physics? Make it entertaining. Skirting round the subject of the frankly terrible dramatisation featuring Marlee Matlin (an attempt by the filmakers to entertain, one could easily surmise), it strikes me that the science on offer really is the science of entertainment. It's science porn. It's science porn shot through the soft-focus lens of spirituality. Does it work? You betcha. I love it. In the words of the great Eddie Izzard, "it blows [your] mind into a different hairdo." But like most exploitative material, look a little closer or take a while to think about it, and you get left with that empty feeling of having used and having been used. Not having time here to discuss the entirety of the film, I'll bypass the "I've come to fix your boiler" set-up and head for the money shot (or one of them at any rate). "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." So says Amit Goswami (a leading light of the Quantum Consciousness movement) at one point in the film and frankly on hearing those words that's me spent and ready for a cigarette. Logically, I can understand what his point is, but it's so far removed from the reality of my life experience, so untouchable a concept that I feel like an adolescent boy again wondering in awe at what a naked woman actually looks like. Certainly the possibility of ever touching one seemed very remote around the age of fifteen, and so it is with the possibility of ever truly experiencing and comprehending Goswami's point today. Instead of endlessly searching for proof of these "movements of consciousness", we're happy to dip into a bit of top-shelf science, enjoy ourselves for a evening and shove it under some other DVDs in the back of the cupboard once we're done.

I am reluctant to dismiss outright, like Dawkins et al, the viewpoints of the interviewees in the film knowing that the healthiest mind admits to knowing nothing. We really don't know very much at all, and a connection between science and spirituality (for want of a better term) may well be proven years down the line. In the meantime, hand me the kleenex...

RF