Article (New Scientist): "Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it "

An article that I recently came across in New Scientist reminds me of a graduate seminar I took with Professor Karen Barad a couple of years ago here at UC Santa Cruz. The seminar focused on feminist approaches to ontology, which is just a fancy philosophical way for describing our understanding of the nature of reality. Barad, a formally trained physicist and feminist philosopher, wanted us to appreciate the multidimensional value of quantum physics, and to use concepts from quantum physics to think about the political implications of the way we develop our conceptual frameworks for understanding the nature of reality in the context of scientific experiments. What is reality, and how do we come to know it? Barad is a very intense and gifted intellectual, and definitely way ahead of her time. Follow the link below to the New Scientist article on the reality--er, realities--of quantum physics that made me think of Barad and her teachings.

Disclaimer: I must say I have a major problem with the wording of the article's title (as would Barad I imagine) , because it seems to downplay/distort the fact that humans must act collectively *with* reality, they do not simply determine it in some kind of unidirectional way. According to Barad, the materialization of reality is a collective process, and humans are simply one among many actors/actants involved in this collective materialization, and, like other actors/actants, they have the capacity to intervene in this process. But I'll stop here because I don't want to get sucked into the whole "post-humanism"(whatever that means) debate. All I will say is that I do not buy into the basic idea (regardless of the rhetoric in which it is embedded) that humans are simply by-products of environmental conditions. Mindfulness and self-reflection--in the human sense--matter immensely, and so does dignity for that matter. So I personally don't think the word post-humanism (or post-anything for that matter!) is necessary to get at the basic point of what Barad says about the collective (e.g. relational) materialization of reality--although Barad herself may very well disagree with me! But alas I digress.

*image courtesy of http://lifeonplanetkstar.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/universal-consciousness1.jpg

Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it