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What the #$*! Do We Know!? (or What the Bleep Do We Know!? , What tHe #$*! DΘ ωΣ (k)πow!?, or What tHe βLēēΡ DΘ ωΣ (k)πow!? - Australian version) is a 2004 film that combines both documentary interviews, fiction and animation to present connection between science and spirituality. The topics discussed include neurology, quantum physics, psychology, ontology, metaphysics, spirituality. The film features interviews with PhDs in science and spirtuality interspersed with the story of a deaf photographer as she struggles with her past. Computer animated graphics act out principles discussed overlayed with the storyline or to transition scenes.
Synopsis
What the Bleep Do We Know (according to the makers "Bleep" stands for a four letter swear word) blends a fictional story line, discussion, and computer animation to present a view of the physical universe and human life within it, often relating this to neuroscience and quantum physics. Some topics discussed include, that the universe is better thought of as being constructed from thought (or ideas) than from substance, that what has long been considered "empty space" is anything but empty, and that our beliefs in who we are and what is real are not simply observations, but rather form ourselves and our realities. Additionally, a brief discussion of the theory that peptides manufactured in your brain can cause a bodily reaction to an emotion brings a new perspective to old adages such as "think positively" and "be careful what you wish for."
In the fictional story, a photographer (Marlee Matlin) acts as the viewer's avatar as she experiences her life from startlingly new and different perspectives. In addition to the story line, a team of experts in quantum physics, biology, medicine, psychology, and theology discuss the roots and meaning of Amanda's experiences. However, the viewers are left in the dark on the credentials of the experts until the credits at the end of the movie.
The comments of those presented as scientific experts converge on a single theme: "We all create our own reality."
Filmed on location in Portland, Oregon, What the Bleep attempts to present a view that has become increasingly popular with a particular segment of the public over the last few decades. The views are consistent with those of Jane Roberts (the Seth books), Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions), Abraham-Hicks' body of work, and many others.
Promotion
Lacking the funding and resources of the typical Hollywood film, the filmmakers relied on "guerrilla marketing" first to get the film into theaters, then to attract audiences. This has led to accusations, both formal and informal, against the film's proponents of spamming online message boards and forums with many thinly-veiled promotional posts. Initially, the film was released in only two theaters: one in Yelm, Washington (the home of the producers), and the other in Portland, Oregon where it was filmed. Within several weeks, it was in a dozen more theaters (mostly in the western United States), and within six months it had made its way into 200 theaters from coast to coast .
Criticism of the Movie
As a movie, the critics offered a fairly mixed bag of reviews as seen on the movie review website Rotten Tomatoes. Dave Kehr of the New York Times described in his review of the movie, the "transition from quantum mechanics to cognitive therapy" as "plausible" and went on to describe "the subsequent leap — from cognitive therapy into large, hazy spiritual beliefs — isn't as effectively executed. Suddenly people who were talking about subatomic particles are alluding to alternate universes and cosmic forces, all of which can be harnessed in the interest of making Ms. Matlin's character feel better about her thighs."
Controversial aspects of the film
Agenda
The filmmakers and a number of those the film presents as experts to the Ramtha organization. Three of the film's directors are students of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment, a school named for an alleged 35,000 year old spirit which JZ Knight (prominently featured in the film) claims to channel.
Experts
The filmmakers assembled a panel to make their point by discussing facts, opinions, and illustrative examples in ways designed to inform as well as entertain.
The film presents scientific experts to support the film's underlying philosophy, and some scientists on the panel have previously been involved in promoting similar ideas. The filmmakers do not refer to scientific publications or any scientific sources outisde of the panel.
Methods
The film doesn't present any contradictory evidence or discuss any contrarian point of view.
The film doesn't discuss the process of how certain conclusions were reached.
Featured scientists
- JZ Knight/Ramtha appears frequently in the film as a scientist or spiritual teacher of some kind. By the end of the film, during the credits, she is identified as the spirit "Ramtha" who is being "channeled" by "JZ Knight." The three people who wrote, directed, and produced the movie are students of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment. Knight was born Judith Darlene Hampton in Roswell, N.M. The spirit, Ramtha, whom she claims to channel, is "a 35,000 year-old warrior spirit from the lost continent of Atlantis and one of the Ascended Masters." (Knight speaks with an accent because English is not Ramtha's first language.)
- John Hagelin was the head of the 1993 Transcendental Meditation project in Washington, DC. (The Washington TM study [1] was mentioned in the film, but Hagelin was never identified as one of its authors.) He is chairman of the Physics Department at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. The University was founded by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Indian guru who vaulted to fame after becoming the spiritual advisor to the Beatles.
- Amit Goswami, Ph.D. "One of the rare scientists that do not leave out consciousness in explaining quantum physics." [2] He appears in What is Enlightenment magazine, authored the book The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (ISBN 0874777984), and has worked with Deepak Chopra.
- Candace Pert wrote the book Molecules of Emotion in 1997 (foreword written by Deepak Chopra) where she espoused views very similar to those of the film. Some aspects of the film appeared to be based on her book. For example, the first ten minutes of the movie can be summarized by a quote from pages 146-148 of Molecules of Emotion where she writes:
- There is no objective reality! ... Emotions are constantly regulating what we experience as "reality." The decision about what sensory information travels to your brain and what gets filtered depends on what signals the receptors are receiving from the peptides ... For example, when the tall European ships first approached the early Native Americans, it was such an "impossible" vision in their reality that their highly-filtered perceptions couldn't register what was happening, and they literally failed to "see" the ships.
- Another point in the movie can be well summarized by page 285, where she writes:
- The tendency to ignore emotions is oldthink, a remnant of the still-reigning paradigm that keeps us focused on the material level of health, the physicality of it. But the emotions are a key element in the self-care because they allow us to enter into the bodymind's conversation. By getting in touch with our emotions, both by listening to them and by directing them through the psychosomatic network, we gain access to the healing wisdom that is everyone's natural biological right.
- Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D recently wrote The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time. (Interesting note: he says he is also known by the name "Captain Quantum"—an animated character that was created for the movie but not used in the released version) He also appears in videos, including Shamanic Physics: "Fred Alan Wolf discusses his efforts to explain shamanic realities in terms of modern physics. He suggests that shamans interact with parallel universes and are able to enter into the world of the dead." [3]
Most of the other scientists appearing in the movie have similar New Age beliefs and affiliations, with one notable exception:
- Dr. David Albert, a philosopher of physics and professor at Columbia University, speaks frequently throughout the movie. While it may appear as though he supports the ideas that are presented in the movie, according to a Popular Science article, he is "outraged at the final product." [4] The article states that Dr. Albert granted the filmmakers a near-four hour interview about quantum mechanics being unrelated to consciousness or spirituality. His interview was then edited and incorporated into the film in such a way that misrepresented his views. In the article, Dr. Albert also expresses his feelings of gullibility after having been "taken" by the filmmakers.
Other alleged experts featured in the film include Joe Dispenza, a chiropractor and author, and himself a devotee of Ramtha's School of Enlightenment [5]; Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, an author, and associate director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona; Miceal Ledwith, author and former professer of theology at Maynooth College in Ireland; Daniel Monti, physician and director of the Mind-Body Medicine Program at Thomas Jefferson University; Andrew B. Newberg, Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania assistant professor of radiology, and physician in nuclear medicine; Jeffery Satinover, psychiatrist and author; William Tiller, Professor Emeritus of Material Science and Engineering at Stanford University, and author of over 250 scientific publications.
Controversial studies
Transcendental Meditation study
As described in the film, the study involved using 5,000 people in June and July of 1993 to do Transcendental Meditation (TM) to reduce violent crime in Washington, DC (which has one of the highest per-capita homicide rates in the US). By counting the number of Homicides, Rapes, and Assaults (HRA), the study came to the conclusion TM reduced crime rates by 18%. Based on the numbers reported in their own study, the HRA crime rate was about 30% higher in 1993 than the average crime rate between 1988-1992. The HRA crime rate showed a decline around the middle of the two month period where TM was practiced and remained relatively low (by 1993 standards) for several months afterward, though the decline was small enough that the reduced HRA crime rate was still about 10-15% higher than average at that time of year. There was no reduction in the homicide rate during the period of the study. Whether this means that TM caused a drop in that year's unusually high HRA rate, or whether the HRA rate naturally dropped closer to its more typical frequency is the issue.
Water Crystals
Masaru Emoto's work (The Hidden Messages in Water) plays a prominent role in a scene set in a subway tunnel, where the main character happens upon a presentation of displays showing images of water crystals. In the movie, "before" and "after" photographs of water are presented as evidence that specific words written on pieces of paper and affixed to different containers of water have the power to transform the water into beautiful crystalline shapes. Examples include "You make me sick", "Love and Gratitude", and "Merci". The procedure followed by Emoto can be found at this site. In the movie, it is claimed that "non-physical events" of "mental stimuli" are the cause of this transformation, but skeptics have pointed out that the "after" photographs are microscopic images of the water after being frozen (aka snowflakes) — a step not disclosed in the movie.
Additional problems arise when it becomes clear that Emoto's work is more artistic than scientific. For example, Emoto never submitted his work for peer review, and he did not utilise double blind methodology. If this had been the case, the individual providing the specimen (i.e., the person who selected the water sample, poured it into the container, labeled the container with a message, and froze it) would need to be a different person than the individual who later received the ice for analysis and photography. This second individual would also need to be unaware of what each specimen had been labelled. If the same person performed all of these tasks, this individual could easily select sections of the frozen water that matched what they wanted to see, perhaps unconsciously (a phenomenon otherwise known as confirmation bias). In other words, if the individual wanted to demonstrate that happy words produced aesthetically pleasing shapes, they only needed to find a section of the ice which was aesthetically pleasing. Conversely, if they wanted to demonstrate that angry words created aesthetically displeasing crystals, they again just needed to search until they found a section that did not look as good. Emoto also claims that polluted water does not crystallize. Depending on the properties of the pollutant, heavily polluted water will still form crystals, though the crystals may contain more crystallographic defects than pure water would. These changes in the way the crystals form can be readily explained using basic chemistry and physics.
Emoto essentially appears to have arbitrarily decided what constitutes a "brilliant crystal" and an "incomplete crystal", but in a movie claiming a scientific base grounded in quantum mechanics, a quantification of what defines such crystals is required.
James Randi, founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, has publicly offered [6] Emoto one-million dollars if his results can be reproduced in a double-blind study.
Controversial statements about quantum physics
As the purported experts speak throughout the movie, they make several references to concepts, ideas, and alleged facts about quantum physics and other specific items. However, they make little to no effort to explain what these things are.
Some of the film's experts, particularly Amit Goswami, repeatedly refer to the process of measurement and observation in quantum mechanics and speculate about the relation between consciousness and the material world. They claim for example that human beings have the capability to create their own reality; Dr. Miceal Ledwith even asserts that human beings have the capability of walking on water.
Most physicists do not believe this ability to freely choose the future to be true in anything other than a metaphorical sense. The facts of measurement and observation are far more prosaic. Specifically, if a system is in a state described by a wave function, the measurement process affects the state in a non-deterministic, but statistically predictable way. In particular, after a measurement is applied, the state description by a single wave function may be destroyed, being replaced by a statistical ensemble of wave functions. The nature of measurement operations in quantum physics can be described using various mathematical formalisms such as the relative state formulation or its equivalent form the many-worlds interpretation. Noted physicists such as David Deutsch do take this interpretation quite literally.
However, some see the many-worlds interpretation as supporting the view that we, in some sense, 'choose' from an infinite ensemble of possible universes (note however that David Deutsch himself rejects any such extrapolation of his views).
Other expressions of ambiguous or unexplained meaning used by the experts include:
- "Infecting the Quantum Field"
- Emotion as "holographically-imprinted chemicals"
- Anti-gravity magnets
- The "observer" of reality (i.e. humans) is a "spirit in the four-layered bio-body suit"
Crew
Filmmakers
- William Arntz: Producer, Director, Screenwriter
- Betsy Chasse: Producer, Director, Screenwriter
- Mark Vicente: Director, Director of Photography
Cast
- Marlee Matlin .... Amanda
- Elaine Hendrix .... Jennifer
- Barry Newman .... Frank
- Robert Bailey .... Reggie
- John Ross Bowie .... Elliot
- Armin Shimerman .... Man
- Robert Blanche .... Bob
- Jeff S. Dodge .... Extra (on train)
Physicists
- William Tiller, Ph.D.
- Amit Goswami, Ph.D.
- John Hagelin, Ph.D.
- Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.
- David Albert, Ph.D.
Neurologists, anesthesiologists and physicians
- Dr. Masaru Emoto (*received certification from the "Open International University for Alternative Medicines" as a Doctor of Alternative Medicine)
- Stuart Hameroff M.D.
- Dr. Jeffrey Satinover
- Andrew B. Newberg, M.D.
- Dr. Daniel Monti
- Dr. Joseph Dispenza
Molecular biology
- Dr. Candace Pert
Spiritual teachers, mystics and scholars
- Ramtha (via JZ Knight)
- Dr. Miceal Ledwith
Awards
- Awards given in 2004:
- Ashland Independent Film Festival — Best Documentary
- DCIFF — DC Independent Film Festival — Grand Jury Documentary Award
- Maui Film Festival — Audience Choice Award — Best Hybrid Documentary
- Houston World Fest — Platinum Remi Award
- Sedona International Film Festival Audience Choice Award, Most Thought-Provoking Film.
See also
- Cherry picking (choosing examples selectively)
- Controversial
- Do Jump performed in this movie.
- List of alternative, speculative and disputed theories
- Meaning of life
- Philosophy of science
- Protoscience
- Quantum mechanics
- Many-worlds interpretation
- Parallel universe
- The Matrix
- CSICOP
External links
- The Skeptic's Dictionary on J.Z. Knight
- The Skeptic's Dictionary on Channeling
- The Skeptic's Dictionary explains how the myth of Atlantis began from misunderstanding an allegory
- Official site
- What the #$*! Do We Know!? at IMDb
- Interview on radio show The Connection with co-director Mark Vicente, Dr. Fred Alan Wolf and Dr. Michael Shermer, October 14, 2004
- Review by The Skeptics Society/Skeptic magazine
- Review of "What the Bleep Do We Know" by Anna Darrah
- "Create Your Day" music by Twinflame inspired by the film
- E-Philosopher debate on the validity of the claims put forth in the movie
- "Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics Review Intuitor's highly critical review of the film
- "Bleep of Faith" Dr Albert describes his experience of being interviewed for the film, and describes how he feels he was misrepresented
- Dr. David Albert
- Masaru Emoto
- Ramtha School of Enlightenment
- Fred Alan Wolf
- "Quantum Physics Quackery", Skeptical Inquirer, January 1997 (discusses book The Self-Aware Universe)
- Ramtha
- Bleep Study Guide from Institute of Noetic Sciences
- MP3 of teleseminar with Will Arntz - from Shift in Action, sponsored by Institute of Noetic Sciences