Can Things Get Better? Part III

Perhaps we can trace our “scientific” faith to our early ancestors who believed in magic—they attempted to manipulate nature by any means they thought would work. When some manipulation did finally work, perhaps the need to simplify and explain how it works overcame the need to accept the mystical implications of how it works in the hope that greater control of nature would result. Through such a “needy” theory, the belief in a theoretical model—complexity emerges from simplicity—arose and strengthened in scientific mindsets. Hence, why believe in the spiritual realm or even why accept its opposite tenet, simplicity emerges from complexity (hence, matter arises from mind)?
A difficult question, but one that needs looking into. First, though, consider just how does any belief arise? I think that a belief reflects a vision of hope (or despair) and desire for change (or constancy)—possibly (and this is my own spin on this), a message from a future waiting to be realized. In quantum physics we deal with possible futures all of the time. These possibilities appear as abstract mathematical forms including vectors, waves, and complex numbers, as seen from a perspective of the present moment. Today, even more than 100 years since the inception of quantum physics and its acceptance in scientific reasoning (indeed forming the base of that reasoning), even though its theoretical structures remain intact, debate still rages over what it means. Consensus indicates that whatever quantum physics means modern science cannot be useful or predictive without these abstract (neo-Platonic) possibility-forms providing the ground of all being of modern science.
Although many interpretations of quantum physics continue to circulate, several posit the notion that both future and past events play a role in the construction of everyday reality (I’ll mention only physicist John Cramer’s “Transactional Interpretation” and Yakir Aharonov and Lev Vaidman’s “Time Symmetric Quantum Formulism”). In my view (and possibly in theirs) all possible futures are in continual contact with each and every present moment of conscious (and unconscious) awareness, kind of like the way a piece of a hologram (made from the waves reflecting off all points on an object) contains a whole picture of that object (see my book, Matter into Feeling).