Reply #32: Actually

[Squeech]

we've been in the realm of the absurd for the last six years. Might as well try and make absurdity work for us for a change.

I compare this idea to the weird, observer-dependent situations that emerge at the quantum level, the kind of thing that spawns the gedankenexperiment known as Schrodinger's Cat. Because you have to go to great lengths even to perceive events at that level, and because the techniques necessary to make those observations are so intrusive that they effect the results, and because the equations that theoretically explain that stuff yield ambiguous solutions to individual cases, Schrodinger says you don't know what's going to happen unless and until you try it.

The upshot of this is that, according to our current understanding of quantum mechanics, reality at the quantum level really is that slippery. And I think that this implies "reality" can be influenced by consciousness. Serious physicists have already proposed this. (The argument I remember was that new subatomic particles had a tendency to emerge just when theoreticians needed them.)

This doesn't necessarily mean that our meditations will make a Diebold machine suddenly countermand its programming and stop registering votes for Republicans, spurious or otherwise. But what it might mean is that errors may break in our favor for a change. For example, a hacked machine intended to go to a Democratic precinct might get rerouted to a Republican precinct instead, where it won't do any extra harm, due to a glitch in the paperwork. Or consider this scenario: assume the code that runs on the machines is burned into e-proms, which I think is likely, and that there's no way to tell which of these chips contains honest code and which contains the compromised version by visual inspection, which I also think is likely. Now consider a surreptitious operation where Republican operatives plant the compromised chips into some of the machines. Let's say such an operative (let's call him Karl) has just opened up a machine and swapped the chips. The good chip is now on the table next to the machine. Just then Karl decides he really needs another cup of coffee (because of course this work is happening in the dead of night). When he gets back, maybe he forgets he already made the swap, and does it again. Now the good chip is back in place!

Did we definitively make that happen with our magical thinking?

Do you insist that everything in the world happens for one and only one reason? Just sayin'.