This entry is my friend Michael’s review of “What the #$*! Do We Know”
Okay, i sat through the WHOLE movie. This is the kind of train wreck that happens when chemists and physicists and stuff try to do philosophy. Yeah, ok, there were a few parts that weren’t half bad. There were some really good quotes. Parts were very entertaining. Ultimately not a bad movie except it offended my sensibilities as a philosopher.
Basically, the thesis of the movie was that we are all ‘gods’ – that the mind is wonderful and mysterious and full of untapped infinite potential – that we alter our surroundings through thought alone – that we create our own reality. If we could only muster enough faith in ourselves, we could quite literally walk on water. The ‘science’ used to justify all this was quantum mechanics and biochemistry. As far as quantum mechanics goes, I just don’t see what that has to do with the layer of reality we experience on a day-to-day basis. So WHAT if subatomic particles are more like fields of probability than anything physical? So WHAT if they seem to go away when we’re not looking at them? (I mean, what doesn’t?) So WHAT if these particles may pop in and out of existence and we don’t know where they go or where they came from? I mean, sure it’s interesting, but we’re talking about subatomic particles, not my cat. If I had one. Which I don’t. So there. The way it’s presented in the movie, quantum physics allows us to transcend time, space, and substance or something.
The stuff dealing with biochemistry was not half bad, I think, although that’s not something I know a lot about. They explained the relationship between the brain and the cells, and about how patterns of behavior actually reinforce themselves through neurochemistry and other stuff. They had some neat little animated ‘cells’ that were quite entertaining – one of them danced and sang ‘Addicted to Love’ by Robert Palmer. There is a fabulously entertaining scene at a wedding reception with dancing and music and little animated hormones running amok. One of my favorites quotes from the movie is from this scene. A guy is complaining to a bridesmaid that she dipped her shrimp in the sauce twice, and she says, “I’m the sister of the bride – I can put my ASS in the dip if I want to!” Well, I guess you’d have to see it, but you probably shouldn’t bother.
In the middle of that was a complete excoriation of organized religion. There is no such thing as good and evil, according to the movie, just choices – so how dare those pesky religions coerce us into living any particular lifestyle by inflicting on us their system of cosmic punishments and rewards? Not so bad – I’m a recovering fundamentalist myself. Fundamentalist religion gets no sympathy from me. But I just can’t help thinking that if I CHOOSE to pick up an axe and start chopping everybody up, that would be really bad. Really. Even worse, what if someone else did it to me? Is that not evil, but simply a choice?
The movie had an uplifting, powerful, positive message. Too bad a lot of it was just plain wrong. I feel sorry for the unsuspecting public!
Oh, but here’s the scary part. At the end they provide citations. All the commentators explain their degrees and qualifications. They’re all highly educated folks and active in their fields. So, David, they were all supposed to know wht they were talking about.
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