MovieChat Forums > What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole (2006) Discussion > Sound movie, but only if you are willing...

Sound movie, but only if you are willing to think for yourself.


While I do believe it is wrong for someone to be mislead and guided by propoganda, I don't believe this film aims to achieve this.

Taking an independant standpoint and assessing the facts is what really counts, and in learning or realisation one assimilates knowledge from as many sources as possible. Blindly believing whatever you are told is both foolish and irrational.

I just finished watching this film, and although I found it a tad boring at times I can sympathise with the authors with the neccessity to appeal to a larger range of people. Without the "story" so to speak, the majority of viewers would have turned away instantly if it was presented as purely a documentary and discussion into this controversial subject. While you may argue that using such means to entice potential viewers is dishonest, at least it offers a radical film to skeptics who in turn may change their opinions or conversely reinforce the ones they held previously.

Recently I have been seeking answers and researching into the general observations and so called "big questions" that hit us all at some point. Even though the film seems a bit ridiculous at times, the majority of the non-quantum theory behind it seems acceptable enough to contemplate. That saying I did not swallow the whole load and expect my life to change instantly as a result. However, I have been living my life with a more positive attitude, adopting some of the theories and beliefs in this film to my own agenda, and as a result my life has become much more pleasurable.

People who I have read disputing claims or vigourously defending them both have good points, but they also have a lot of flaws. Just because you as an individual percieve reality differently to another individual, does not give you the right to attempt to destroy anothers' beliefs. Is it that you get a pleasure out of disproving others, or that you feel the neccessity to back your own beliefs in fear of their legitimacy? A lot of people found hope and control in this film, while others found nothing. Big deal? Just because you didn't benefit from it, don't feel obligated to extend your personal depression to the rest of us.

Either way, fear of the unknown is what drives me in life. While I feel for those desperately clinging to the commonly accepted (and by their standards as the majority agree, it is more likely to be true) "observations" of consciesness and matter, I also feel that clinging to the past won't neccessarily help you in the future.

Any further discussion would be interesting, I'd like to see how others interpreted and adapted this film. After all, it is all just SPECULATION AND THEORY, so individual interpretation is what matters.

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<i>(and by their standards as the majority agree, it is more likely to be true)<i>

For the love of god! Not another moron thinking he's openminded, adventurous and a rebel-thinker because he rejects reason. Never in any thread I read here has it been uttered that majority rules makes thruth, quite the opposite even. To say such is disingenious and stubbornly foolish.

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[deleted]

[deleted]

Yet another in the exodus of evidence to faith!

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OK Kancerman, here's the deal. I'm fine with a movie saying that these things are our beliefs and ideas. Everone is entitled to an opinion. This movie then goes one step further and offers evidence based in science for these beliefs.

In science there is this agreement that everyone can look at the evidence, even try to find the evidence on their own. If everyone accepts the evidence, great, we can use it to support some idea. If there is something questionable about the evidence, or if nobody else can find it, then everyone agrees not to use that evidence.

Now if someone uses scientific evidence to back up their ideas, they have to be willing to let others examine, possibly decline the evidence. If everyone accepts the evidence, great, you can use it to back up the idea. If a lot of people say "wait, there's a mistake in the evidence", then you can't use it to back up the idea.

Now some people might say "I don't need evidence for my ideas", fine. But why bother using science and evidence to back up the ideas? Either offer the ideas without any evidence or use the evidence and allow others to eximine it for flaws.

If people aren't allowed to look at the evidence, it's not really proof. Weapons of Mass Destruction were called evidence until people were allowed to examine the proof.

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I have to say it somewhere. This movie presents no false science. It is also very clear where the proper science is and where the people's opinions are. Using science to back up your ideas is called supporting your claims. If someone were to make claims without scientific support, then you would say the claims are bogus. Now if someone makes claims with scientific support they are ridiculed as well. So according to you, you can't have opinions that deviate from the majority in any sense, or else you are making an error. No branch of knowledge would get anywhere with your weird logic.

Right now quantum mechanics is open for lots of interpretation (yes this is according to the scientific community). There are nine current majorly accepted ones: Copenhagen, Extreme Copenhagen, Decoherence and Consistent Histories, Many Worlds, Transactional, Bohm, GRW, Ithaca, and Quantum Logic. Read about them. At this point in time you cannot "eximine it for flaws" yet. Even the scientific community is divided now. I think it is great that some religious people are finally deciding to look to science. These crazy alternatives that are being offered are at least coherent unlike Christianity.

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I found this movie utterly fascinating, and it was only until a friend of mine compared his world- and reality-view to something I said concerning time and space, that it dawned upon me: we are here to observe. As doctor Quantum in his very accessible animationway of explaining tells us: when observed, matter behaves differently, so the outcome of the double slit experiment changes when observed by the measuring device. People are here to observe. The meaning of our existence is to see what is around us, otherwise it would not exist. It would not have to choose, or be narrowed down to, a single option in a string, or wave, of probabilities. It would be everything. But since man is here, reality is here, and so is reality's appearance and matter becomes one.

Later there is a reference to entanglement and how space is merely a construct to give the illusion there is 'emptiness' inbetween different objects. This suggests space and time are one, and us, the people, wander through it lineairly along. Time is not an obstruction, man is the obstruction for time. Consciousness and awareness lets time operate as we observe it. If not observed, there is no time and no passing. This is demonstrated in the flatland-segment. We are incapable of understanding the unity of time and space, just like 2d objects and things dont understand the third dimension.

Utterly fascinating, like I said before. It could drive one insane.

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The grass is always greener where the dogs are sh¡tting.

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Quantum theory: 60 years of confusing perception with reality.

Special relativity: A century of confusing perception with reality.

"The meaning of our existence is to see what is around us, otherwise it would not exist."

Not provable. We can't know in any form whether or not the world would exist without observers. Maybe you should try thinking of it this way: The only thing that we, as humans, know is that we observe. The meaning of our existence must then lie in the fact that we are active observers. If we did not observe, would WE still exist?

Yeah...things can exist whether or not we're around. How arrogant a notion to believe otherwise.

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How arrogant of you to say that. I am not making claims, I am just throwing around my thoughts. And I don't have to prove whatever, like a Christian doesn't need proof of his belief.

Let me just have this tiny shred of philosophical enigma!

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The grass is always greener where the dogs are sh¡tting.

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That was not arrogance. I was making a point to jar you into a different perspective.

It's arrogant because it presumes that existence is dependant on humans, considering that there is evidence to prove otherwise.

And Christians have "proof". They call it faith. Do you have that kind of faith in your beliefs, or are you open to new perspectives?

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Very thought provoking movie.

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The trouble with that is that quantum "observation" is a bit of a misnomer. The uncertainty principle doesn't require a human presence—or even a living presence. Any time two particles interact in any way that requires the transfer of information about state of either particle, that counts as an observation.

Shouldn't you be worried about your life, instead of that usless peepee of yours?

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KancerMan, I wish I was as smart as you. Honestly. That was an incredible comment.

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This film is ignorant throughout. First reason (and major one): quantum activities do not work on a macroscopic (bigger than atomic particles, actually)level - so electrons quantum tunneling/teleporting does NOT in any way, shape or form mean atoms or anything larger than atoms can do so.

Schrodinger's cat is a thought experiment - it does NOT work in the macroscopic world because it is far too large.

The approaching ship thing is a load of feces and does not apply even on the quantum level, much less in the real world (although I suspect I know what happened that made the idiots who made this film think that something on the quantum level worked this way - though it also would NOT work like they were thinking in quantum or real world).

The film is basically a propanganda piece, with the usual misapplication of scientific terms to things they have nothing to do with, designed to promote a fraudulant woman who pretends to "channel" the spirit of a nonexistant idiot from the long past who never says anything that can be checked or proven/disproven and of who's existence there is not and never has been any proof.

I abhor idiots who think that "think for yourself" means "blindly accept what somebody else tells you without testing, checking, verifying it for yourself AND asking yourself the ultimate question for stuff like this: "Where does the money go?"

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I think I get where you're coming from, ulht1, but perhaps you should think twice about the name-calling -- particularly since you yourself weren't able to enunciate any one of your claims clearly or coherently.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

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