Of new age mysticism and pseudoscience

Old age mystics or gurus will take digs at modern ones by calling them 'new age' tauntingly, as if their own notions being of ancient origins or derived from ancient texts are any superior. I would place both, although unable to distinguish them, in the same pan as that of pseudoscience. 

Bigger disappointments are the new-age biologists, extending themselves into areas of physics, cosmology and quantum physics which are definitely not their area of expertise at all. They will mercilessly use Quantum Physics experiments and the weirdness of its results to distort notions in theri popular books with unexplained concepts like consciousness. They would be better off replacing the term consciousness with 'god’.
                                         

Like the new age gurus, they rely on misunderstood results of quantum physics, relativity theory, the big bang origin of the universe and so their hypothesis also fall into the category of what is generally known as “pseudoscience”. 

Distorting results of particle physics, special theory of relativity, quantum physics and most recently the results from CERN on the Higgs-Boson particle discovery ( which the media immediately termed as the ‘God particle’) is not new. You can find earlier books by Physicists and by cell biologist who believe in the power of consciousness to bring changes to biology itself, and even to matter and other physical realities!

A pseudoscience is a set of ideas put forth as scientific whey they are not scientific.

Such authors claim that consciousness created the universe ( replace the word with god, and see how this claim is any different from religion).

The idea is just as absurd as from religion. Such hypotheses are not scientific theories because nowhere are there any testable predictions that the hypothesis can offer. A scientific theory must offer results and be able to predict results that are testable, verifiable and falsifiable. In fact,most fall into the category of ideas that are so bad, they even can’t said to be false. Idealism category is where they belong at best. They only attempt to explain life, the universe and everything else, presuming that explaining something is science. 

Quantum physicists point out some huge and common distortions that a pseudo-scientist will use: 

The double slit experiment : here she/he confuses observer with ‘consciousness’.

The results of this experiment do not depend on if there is an observer like a conscious being present or absent. It depends on whether or not there is a detector, before or after the photon passes through the silts. If the photon has to interact with any particle of matter, then the probability wave must collapse and it behaves like a particle. If the photon is not detected, it continues to travel as a wave until it hits the film or photon detector on the other side of the slit, where the wave function collapses. The only thing that matters is whether or not the photons are detected or interacted with in any way prior to or after passing through the slits. This has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness or an observer. This is the common misunderstanding of the quantum gurus and many other popular authors. 
          

Another of his/her common mistake is to extrapolate from quantum experiments, in which conditions are very carefully controlled, to normal everyday macroscopic conditions. Something like in the analogy to your kitchen, as if your kitchen is not really there unless you are there to observe your kitchen. (If I am in the bathroom, the kitchen is not there). There is no justification in quantum mechanism for such a macroscopic extrapolation. Particles will interact with each other to collapse all the wave forms and when we get to a kitchen all the quantum weirdness disappears and essentially classical physics rules in the kitchen. The kitchen certainly does not disappear. It is a macroscopic phenomenon, not a microscopic event. 

Yet another misunderstanding frequently used by such authors is the observer effect from Einstein’s theory of relativity. Here they use the idea that since time and space are relative to the observer, then time and space are only in the mind and have no objective reality. The theory of relativity is actually about using space-time instead of time and space separately. The framework of reference becomes space-time. This made sense of the experiments in particle physics as well as space physics or cosmology. Again, they have used this misunderstanding of relativity theory to misguide the public into believing that objective reality is something that comes out of consciousness. 

Really, consciousness comes out of matter, out of objective reality.

A subjective experience, when out of touch with objective reality is termed psychosis or even hallucination or delusion, of grandeur or of humility. 

Besides these distortions of science, other scientific concepts like the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the Schrodinger’s cat experiment of wave equations, the particle’s entanglement at a large distance ( the famous spooky action at a distance), have also been misused by unscrupulous authors and gurus. 

No doubt that a hypothesis is an idea, a form of idealism at best or a belief system. But if it offers no testable predictions, nor has any practical applications like actual scientific hypothesis have, it is predominantly pseudoscience. 

There are certainly gaps in science which are not yet filled, but that does not mean that these gaps will never be filled. What pseudoscientists do is that they propose hypothesis which try to fill the gaps with inexpiable terms like consciousness (equating this to god, which is just another unexplained term).

  

These hypotheses are not testable, verifiable or falsifiable, and so are clearly not scientific.

However, as cognitive sciences advance with neurosciences probing the brain, intelligence has become a little more intelligible, and at a very abstract level of analysis, the problem has been solved. But consciousness or sentience, the raw sensation of toothaches and saltiness and intoxicating music, is still a riddle. Still even consciousness is not as difficult a mystery as it used to be. Parts of the mystery have been ripped off and turned into ordinary scientific problems. 

The pseudo-scientific ideas of consciousness, do work in selling their books though, to the gullible general public, which again has no clear idea of what quantum physics or relativity or cosmology or neuroscience is really about, and so they buy the idea and the book.

And that is what really matters for the new age authors: selling their books, or for the old school age / new age gurus: expanding their cult following, or new-age authors metamorphosing into new-age cult leaders.