My 16-yr old daughter burst into tears. "It can't be! It can't be that way!" she cried.

I had just finished explaining to her the Schroedinger's Cat paradox of Quantum Mechanics, that until we open the box, the cat is neither dead nor alive, but in some mysterious entangled state.

My realist daughter thought this was appalling. How could reality be so weird, depending on whether we look or not. "Surely", she said, "God would be looking."

"Maybe", I said,"but then it is a hidden variable theory (the situation is fixed, just hidden from our sight), and we know that there is a verifiable difference between hidden variable theories and QM. Experiments have been conducted, and QM statistics wins over hidden variables. So if God knows, it is still different from "fixed but hidden", He isn't telling us."

That brought the tears.

But what this illustrates in Physics is a well known problem in Philosophy: things change when you look for them. The classic example is the Hedonistic Paradox, that the more you seek pleasure, the less you find it. And you thought QM was weird!

If more people understood this strange property of nature, we'd have a lot more contented customers out there, and a lot fewer rehab centers. It seems to be a really hard concept to swallow. "You mean, if I want to be happy, I can't find it in buying booze, floozies and flings?"

"Nope"  "Okay, then, what if I get a solid job, a gorgeous wife, and house in the 'burbs?"

"Nope" "Well then, what about 2.3 kids, and a stint with Habitat for Humanity?"

"Nope" "What are you saying? Shall I dump everything then and spend 6 months in a hut in Nepal?"

"Nope" "I give up. What are you saying I should do?"

"Do the stuff you like, and bit of the stuff you don't but should like. Think about what you can do to make a difference in the world. Love your wife. Be good to your kids. Listen to their complaints and try to improve. And,
oh, ten years from now evaluate if you aren't happier than when you started."  "And that will make me happy?"

"Maybe not, but by then you won't care." At this point, you get this unbelieving stare, a shake of the head, and our poor friend decides you didn't understand the question.

Because the whole problem with happiness, is that it isn't a material thing, its an attitude. And attitudes aren't something that can be bought or sold or changed like socks. Somehow attitudes are things that morph as we morph, that are formed by experience, by endurance, by living out  what life brings in. So the question, "What can I do to be happy?" is poorly-posed, it has no answer. Much like asking "Do you go out or at night?"

Then looking for happiness, like looking for Schroedinger's cat, changes everything, because the thing we are looking for is of the same nature as the act of looking, we cannot separate the observations from the thing observed. This is as obvious as "You can't have your cake and eat it too.", because the act of eating changes the thing that is eaten. It is just that we normally don't think we've changed a tree by looking at it. When we say to a shopkeeper "just looking" it means nothing has transpired. But of course, something has. For if that shopkeeper were selling, say girlie movies, he might still want to be reimbursed. Which demonstrates that looking is not as benign as it first appears. Top secret UFO files, pornography, hate e-mail, copyrighted Flickr files, are all things  in the news recently that change by observation.

The paradigm we need to understand, is that we are intimately connected to knowledge, just as we are intimately connected to our arms and legs. We do not live in a material universe, but in a spiritual-material universe. QM is telling us that even physicists cannot separate the material from the spiritual, but must take both into account. A touching piece on Tony Snow, relates the lesson he learned from his first bout with cancer, is all about this interplay between his body and eternity. Perhaps the reason this is so hard to understand, and takes a sledgehammer like cancer to reach us, is that our culture and society have so embraced the materialist separation between the two worlds. The paradox is there to remind us, they aren't.

But what really prompted this post, was James Dobson's comment about Presidential hopeful, Fred Thompson.
It is a normal desire of every conservative voter to elect a Christian leader. But is it like the paradox of seeking happiness?

The problem is that in trying to determine whether a candidate is christian, changes the candidate. Just looking, makes a difference in the candidate's presentation. Of the past 7 presidents, we had a Quaker (gasp!), followed by an Episcopalian of all things. Then a born-again Southern Baptist, still married to his first wife, followed by a man on his second marriage and of no particular religion, giving almost nothing ($1000) to church/charity, and hardly ever attending church. Then we had his successor, another Episcopalian, followed by a Southern Baptist, married to his first wife, and now finally, a Methodist.  So tell me, from their electoral campaign, professed church membership and marital status, which two were the most conservative Christians of the bunch? Based on their actions and term in office, which were the most conservative Christians? Do you see a problem with the whole
effort of evaluating a candidate's Christianity?

If Christianity were a material thing, undisturbed by observation, then there would be no paradox. But like happiness, it is an attitude. And attitudes change when they are put under scrutiny. For one thing, they get very shy. Or does Dobson have the ability like Jesus, "knowing their thoughts"? Even if he did, why would I put my faith in Dobson's paranormal abilities? Would it not be better for me to determine this on my own, perhaps based on the candidate's historical deeds?

It has been my observation that the more one professes to be a Christian, the less likely they are to behave like one. The more one tries to find happiness, the less likely they are to be happy. The more one flaunts their wealth, the less they likely have of it. The more one tries to appear attractive, the less attractive they feel inside. If it is so very important to sway the evangelical vote represented by James Dobson, then they will loudly proclaim on all the conservative outlets just how religious they are. And as much as I admire the institution of marriage, it appears that non-divorce is not the same as fidelity, nor divorce the same as infidelity. Neither church membership nor marital status can be taken at face value, having been transformed by scrutiny.

The paradigm of paradox reminds us that there is no separating being from doing, attitudes from deeds, observations from actions. By all means vote for a conservative Christian candidate, but I am betting on the candidate who downplays the importance of his faith, because like his kids, it means too much to him to bring it under public scrutiny.

[Note: This "Tale of Two Houses" appeared in my e-mail Monday, and makes the point perfectly]

House 1: The four-bedroom home was planned so that "every room has a relationship with something in the landscape that's different from the room next door. Each of the rooms feels like a slightly different place."  The resulting single-story house is a paragon of environmental planning. The passive-solar house is built of honey-colored native limestone and positioned to absorb winter sunlight, warming the interior walkways and walls of the 4,000-square-foot residence. Geothermal heat pumps circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet deep in the ground. These waters pass through a heat exchange system that keeps the home warm in winter and cool in summer.  A 25,000-gallon underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof urns;  wastewater from sinks, toilets, and showers cascades into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is then used to irrigate the landscaping around the four-bedroom home, which uses indigenous grasses, shrubs, and flowers to complete the exterior treatment of the home. This house consumes 25% of the energy of an average American home.  (Source:  Cowboys and Indians Magazine, Oct. 2002 and Chicago Tribune April 2001.)

House 2: This 20-room, 8-bathroom house includes a heated indoor pool and consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year.  The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, this house devoured nearly 221,000 kWh, more than 20 times the national average. Last August alone, the house burned through 22,619 kWh, guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of this energy consumption, the average monthly electric bill topped $1,359. Also, natural gas bills for this house and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.  In total, this house had nearly $30,000 in combined electricity and natural gas bills for 2006. (Source: The Tennessean, Mar 2007)

Whose houses are these?

The leading candidates in the 2000 presidential election.

Oh, and the second house is in Nashville, the first one is in Crawford.