What The Bleep Do We Know!? Study Group

Hi Folks,

A few months back this thread very briefly touched upon the movie "What The Bleep Do We Know!?"

If there is interest from others, I would love to set up a study group which can meet in-world to discuss the movie and the many topics related to and stemming from this movie.

Please drop a message here or contact me in-world with your interest.

-Ghoti

Wow, not single person interested?

-Ghoti

Have no fear, Ghoti -- I just now saw your post.

I am definitely interested, but am not in game as often as I would like. Let's meet up in world and figure something out.

Hullo!!

Great to hear I'm not the only one.

So! Paulo and one other person have expressed interest in exploring more fully the concepts in this film.

I'm surprised none of the other InnerLife people have responded, but perhaps they have just not seen the thread. I'll do some in-world evangelizing and see who else might be interested in discussions.

Here are some URLs. In particular interest are the link to the What The Bleep Study Guide and Dov Baron's study guide which I'd like to use in our discussions.

What The Bleep Homepage - Lots of good background information. Their links page has links to sites by most of the thinkers involved in the film.

What The Bleep Study Guide - The official study guide. I'd like to use this and the next link to guide our discussions.

What The Bleep Does It Mean? - Dov Baron's very well put together study guide for the movie.

Institute of Noetic Sciences' What The Bleep forums - More good discussion.

Mind Hacks - Great blog site by the authors of the book by the same name. Not part of the What The Bleep phenomenon directly, but related in that it talks about how we sense our world and provides tests ('hacks') to test where the holes are in our perception... very good stuff.

I'll contact folks in-world ASAP and get things set up!

-Ghoti

I thought it was an ok movie... It had some nice touches, and covered some topics in interesting ways, but there was a huge amount of new-age speculation in there too. Some of the PhDs they had on there are really not in the mainstream of science, although I think they were portrayed as such.

I did get the worrying sense that whenever something came up that I actually knew about, I was thinking "Well yeah what they're saying (in the film) isn't quite right...", and so I have to wonder about all the other things in the film that seemed very reasonable but that I don't personally know much about.

I haven't seen it, though I always wanted to. I heard good things about it.

Oooo! Homework!

coco

Yeah, the movie is pretty heavy on the new-agey aspects. The '35,000-year-old spirit warrior' Ramtha is even in it (channeled by JZ Knight), LOL if one believes in such stuff. IMHO, this in no way lessens the potential for great discussion around these topics.



There's a whole host of great thinkers involved in this film. Indeed, many of them are not in the 'mainstream'. If I wanted to stay in the mainstream, I'd be suggesting a Sagan & Hawking study group. Personally, I like my science to push the fringes of what is accepted knowledge and what may (or may not... this is why we explore) pan out to be the new great paradigm-changing discoveries akin to those of Copernicus and Newton.

It should also be noted that I know of at least one of the scientists (Dr. David Albert) that appeared in the film now states that his words were taken out of context.



Can you give a concrete example? There were some moments like this for me as well and I found that as I have gone back and read/reread more books on the subject it turned out to be my understanding of the theory in question that was at fault.

This stuff is on the very cutting edge of what (the bleep!) we know. Even names that are accepted as the Truth today (like Sagan, Hawking, Einstein, etc) were once considered fringe. Scientists that stay in the mainstream generally do not make great discoveries. Its when they step outside the bounds of general accepted theories and explore the great unknown that has the greatest potential to expand our understanding.

-Ghoti

I think the movie failed to say anything particularly concrete. It seemed to be on one topic, then kind of slide off into another topic and stay there for a while. They didn't actually reveal anything really solid, and brand new in my opinion. And I think some of the graphics they used went too far to cartoon-ise the science, where I would have liked more depth of explanation.

Popular Science did a scathing review of the movie. I haven't seen it but it's apparantly junk science. The main people behind the film are cultists. It's too bad becaue people seem to really dig it. Would have been nice to have a real science movie get that attention.

Yeah at first I thought the movie was going to really present something new and amazing, like the shows on the Discovery channel and stuff, but it never really scratched the surface. It said all matter is connected I think, but never said how or why, and it mentioned the many worlds theory, but never really explained it. Left me feeling a bit like I'd had a starter but not the main course.

I would love to. Sad thing is I have not gotten the movie yet and would not be able to talk intelligently with facts about the movie. This is a subject I am really interested in and sadly have little real knowledge in it..

The study guides and such that I posted can actually give you a pretty good overview of the concepts that are presented in the movie and can prompt you for what books and other sources might be useful in exploring these concepts.

In fact, I believe the movie was written just for this purpose. It is NOT a comprehensive analysis of the concepts presented. It gives layman's explainations for the theories and concepts presented, with the intention of getting people thinking about these things.



I can not find the PopSci review online.

The wiki page covers some of the controversy.
Skeptic Magazine had a good skeptical review.
Answers.com also has a decent review that mentions some of these points as well.

The three directors of the film are students of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment... which is what I think you refer to as 'cultists'. I too am skeptical of RSE, but I do not let that stop me from exploring the concepts presented in the film.

-Ghoti

There's out of the mainstream and there's pseudoscience. It's not always easy to tell the difference, but there wasn't much in the movie to tell me that these guys are basing what they say on either experiment or theory.


I was wondering about that - if they got to see how their words were being used in the movie. There was a fair bit of conversation that kept switching between the different interviews mid sentence IIRC, I wonder if they got something the scientists did not intend out of that, or if it was just for effect.


The one I remember: they go from "a conscious observer is needed to collapse the quantum superposition" (which is certainly not the only interpretation - I like the many worlds hypothesis), to "we can change reality with our minds" without taking a breath. They made a few pretty large leaps in that 30 seconds of monologue.


Were they? I think Einstein's stuff was accepted by everyone pretty much immediately. Copernicus would probably be a better example.


The do have to be following the scientific method though. And I'm not convinced that the people behind "bleep" are.

Read some of their books. The scientific method is live and well. I particularly enjoyed "The Self-Aware Universe" by Amit Goswami. Well written and throughly documented.



Even in the many worlds theory (as I understand it from my reading) it still takes the effort of a conscious observer to collapse the superposition to the one outcome that is experienced.

In the classical case of Schrodinger's Cat, by opening the box to observe the state of the cat, the scientist changes reality (fixes it to one position) by the act of observing (her mind being the impliment used to observe).

The film definately couches all of this in sensational language, but at the root, that is what is said.

-Ghoti