Sometimes I wonder how much of quantum mechanics' notorious difficulty is that it is truly hard to understand, and how much is simply that it is hard to understand in English.

People hear "virtual particle" and have no clue what that means and associate it with other "virtual" things. Or, more directly connected to the title of this story, hear that matter is "merely" "vacuum fluctuations", which, thanks in no small part to Star Trek, we think has connotations of instability or transientness.

No. Matter is matter. Matter is stable on a cosmological scale, and no amount of fiddling with English words shall add or remove one iota of stability. Matter may consist of vacuum fluctuations (where you probably know neither what is meant by vacuum nor what is meant by fluctuations), matter may consist of the infinite love of fuzzy puppies, matter may be divine farting, but matter is matter, it is what it is, and there is nothing more or less "real" about it today than there was yesterday.

I hate the pattern of:

1. In your ignorance, define X as Y. (Example: "My soul is a material thing that houses my consciousness and leaves my body when I die.")

2. Find out Y isn't real. ("We have weighed the body between life and death, and the mass is the same. Y does not exist.")

3. Declare that X isn't real. Usually with a whole lot of "aHA! Got you!" thrown in for good measure. ("Therefore, nothing like the soul exists and you religious people are morons for believing in anything supernatural!" If you can't see the logical flaw in that argument, look harder...)

We get this pattern in crappy articles about QM all the time. Consciousness too.

Not to turn this into a religious/philosophical argument, but I've yet to hear a good definition for the soul that's congruous with the symptoms of brain damage. I'd appreciate any insights you have, though.

Soul is "like" radio waves, brain is "like" radio, consciousness is "like" radio program. Damage to radio results in garbled signal.

Note: I'm not saying I believe the definition or that it is complete, and I'm certainly not going to defend it, but maybe worth thinking about.

I hesitated to give an example precisely because I didn't want to get into that topic, but it was just too vague without it, and trying to find something innocuous was just too hard.

Similarly how walking is what the feet does, conscience is what the brain does.

Well, there still is an unspecific and vague line between 'quantum' and 'classical' objects, entanglement is hard to understand and there isn't even a metric for more than simplest cases, and quantum systems appear to evolve in ways which classical computers cannot (it is believed) even approximate quickly enough. So it's likely that there's some fundamental complexity there...

This pattern is called a Sylogism. Everybody hates sylogisms as it's mostly used to manipulate.

1) Syllogisms are mostly used for manipulation 2) Everyone hates manipulation .`.) Everyone hates syllogisms.

...nope, doesn't work for me.

Ok you got me ! :)

I was getting at something more specific than just a logical fallacy, but specifically the part where you sanctimoniously declare "aHA! It isn't real!" It is true that is a special case of a more general logical fallacy, but I see this specific one pop up a lot, reifying ignorance, then declaring it false as if that actually proves something.

Eh?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylogism