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by Elvis » Thu Dec 05, 2019 10:02 pm
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6130 ... e-reality/
A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
Mar 12, 2019
Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities.
Since then, physicists have used the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment to explore the nature of measurement and to argue over whether objective facts can exist. That’s important because scientists carry out experiments to establish objective facts. But if they experience different realities, the argument goes, how can they agree on what these facts might be?
That’s provided some entertaining fodder for after-dinner conversation, but Wigner’s thought experiment has never been more than that—just a thought experiment.
Last year, however, physicists noticed that recent advances in quantum technologies have made it possible to reproduce the Wigner’s Friend test in a real experiment. In other words, it ought to be possible to create different realities and compare them in the lab to find out whether they can be reconciled.
And today, Massimiliano Proietti at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a few colleagues say they have performed this experiment for the first time: they have created different realities and compared them. Their conclusion is that Wigner was correct—these realities can be made irreconcilable so that it is impossible to agree on objective facts about an experiment.
Wigner’s original thought experiment is straightforward in principle. It begins with a single polarized photon that, when measured, can have either a horizontal polarization or a vertical polarization. But before the measurement, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the photon exists in both polarization states at the same time—a so-called superposition.
Wigner imagined a friend in a different lab measuring the state of this photon and storing the result, while Wigner observed from afar. Wigner has no information about his friend’s measurement and so is forced to assume that the photon and the measurement of it are in a superposition of all possible outcomes of the experiment.
Wigner can even perform an experiment to determine whether this superposition exists or not. This is a kind of interference experiment showing that the photon and the measurement are indeed in a superposition.
From Wigner’s point of view, this is a “fact”—the superposition exists. And this fact suggests that a measurement cannot have taken place.
But this is in stark contrast to the point of view of the friend, who has indeed measured the photon’s polarization and recorded it. The friend can even call Wigner and say the measurement has been done (provided the outcome is not revealed).
So the two realities are at odds with each other. “This calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,” say Proietti and co.
That’s the theory, but last year Caslav Brukner, at the University of Vienna in Austria, came up with a way to re-create the Wigner’s Friend experiment in the lab by means of techniques involving the entanglement of many particles at the same time.
The breakthrough that Proietti and co have made is to carry this out. “In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario,” they say.
They use these six entangled photons to create two alternate realities—one representing Wigner and one representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition.
The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted.
That raises some fascinating questions that are forcing physicists to reconsider the nature of reality.
The idea that observers can ultimately reconcile their measurements of some kind of fundamental reality is based on several assumptions. The first is that universal facts actually exist and that observers can agree on them.
But there are other assumptions too. One is that observers have the freedom to make whatever observations they want. And another is that the choices one observer makes do not influence the choices other observers make—an assumption that physicists call locality.
If there is an objective reality that everyone can agree on, then these assumptions all hold.
But Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.
Of course, there is another way out for those hanging on to the conventional view of reality. This is that there is some other loophole that the experimenters have overlooked. Indeed, physicists have tried to close loopholes in similar experiments for years, although they concede that it may never be possible to close them all.
Nevertheless, the work has important implications for the work of scientists. “The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them,” say Proietti and co. And yet in the same paper, they undermine this idea, perhaps fatally.
The next step is to go further: to construct experiments creating increasingly bizarre alternate realities that cannot be reconciled. Where this will take us is anybody’s guess. But Wigner, and his friend, would surely not be surprised.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080 : Experimental Rejection of Observer-Independence in the Quantum World
by Harvey » Thu Dec 05, 2019 10:29 pm
by DrEvil » Fri Dec 06, 2019 10:35 am
by Harvey » Fri Dec 06, 2019 8:37 pm
DrEvil » Fri Dec 06, 2019 3:35 pm wrote:^^Quantum immortality. Say you're Schroedinger's Cat. From your point of view you never die in the experiment, as your consciousness keeps going in the universe where you survived the box.
by JackRiddler » Fri Dec 06, 2019 9:57 pm
Harvey » Fri Dec 06, 2019 7:37 pm wrote:DrEvil » Fri Dec 06, 2019 3:35 pm wrote:^^Quantum immortality. Say you're Schroedinger's Cat. From your point of view you never die in the experiment, as your consciousness keeps going in the universe where you survived the box.
Yes, exactly.
by Harvey » Fri Dec 06, 2019 10:54 pm
JackRiddler » Sat Dec 07, 2019 2:57 am wrote:Harvey » Fri Dec 06, 2019 7:37 pm wrote:DrEvil » Fri Dec 06, 2019 3:35 pm wrote:^^Quantum immortality. Say you're Schroedinger's Cat. From your point of view you never die in the experiment, as your consciousness keeps going in the universe where you survived the box.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah, once you think of infinite alternate universes in which every contingency that can happen will happen, it doesn't take long before you think of this as yet another way to deny death.
"Often, to observe or exploit quantum mechanical phenomena systems need to be cooled to very low temperatures. This however does not seem to be the case in some biological systems, which display quantum properties even at ambient temperatures.
[snip]
Energy transfer in light-harvesting macromolecules is assisted by specific vibrational motions of the chromophores," said Alexanda Olaya-Castro (UCL Physics & Astronomy), supervisor and co-author of the research. "We found that the properties of some of the chromophore vibrations that assist energy transfer during photosynthesis can never be described with classical laws, and moreover, this non-classical behaviour enhances the efficiency of the energy transfer."
https://phys.org/news/2014-01-quantum-m ... hesis.html
by DrEvil » Sat Dec 07, 2019 1:13 pm
It has been suggested that a bacterial colony loosely mimics a biological neural network.
by chump » Sun Dec 08, 2019 10:36 pm
https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2019/11 ... d-control/Foundation of Mass Mind Control
by Jon Rappoport
November 27, 2019
[…]
Let’s start here: symbols have meanings because someone assigns those meanings.
Despite common belief, symbols aren’t tagged with meanings in some cosmic way that precedes humans’ presence on the scene.
Of course, various groups would like to believe otherwise. They want you to react to symbols as if they were permanent, eternal, unavoidable, engraved in stone.
This is the objective of all cosmology: “It’s the way things are, get used to it, accept it, the universe is built in this fashion, there’s nothing you can do about it, remain passive, don’t rebel, comprehend what is given to you.”
It’s how priest classes have always operated. They paint a mural and try to get everyone to prostrate themselves before it.
They say, “This symbol is evil, avoid it and reject it. This symbol is good, praise it.”
Humans will take it to the bank. They’ll go so far as to presume God decided which symbols stand for evil and which stand for good. Naturally, they have an inside line on God’s motives and intents.
Then we have those who argue that certain symbols have meaning created by a collaboration of “collective consciousness.” And this, they claim (“woo-woo”), is very, very powerful.
Yes, it’s powerful if you don’t reject it. It’s powerful if you believe that collective consciousness contains some sort of magic. It doesn’t. It’s just another version of consensus reality.
Some people cling to the idea of the boogie man. They swim in it. They derive their moral stance from it. They depend on it. Without it, they wouldn’t know what to do. And that’s exactly why they claim symbols of evil are inherent and forever and horrible: they wouldn’t know what to do if they abandoned the notion. They’d be lost. Utterly lost.
Therefore, they grotesquely pump up the concept that some symbols are dangerous and can only be dispelled by other symbols.
The truth is, for the individual, symbols are whatever he wants to make of them. He’s free to turn them upside down, inside out, drain them of all meaning, add new meaning, slather them with mayo and mustard, grill them with cheese, pave the driveway with them, hang them from the rafters, step on them, toss them in the garbage, hurl them out of apartment windows, snort them up his nose.
What other people might think about all this is supremely irrelevant.
Society always wants to parade an ever-increasing column of symbols past the populace and define them.
Mass mind control focuses on two elements: image and feeling.
By linking the two primary elements (this is a form of symbol-making), it is possible to short-circuit thought and “cut to the chase,” when it comes to enlisting the allegiance of huge populations.
[…]
Projecting emotion into a newspaper image of the president, FDR. Projecting emotion into the screen image of Tony Curtis. Projecting emotion into a video of a painter working in his studio.
When people encounter an image, when they invest it with importance, they project feeling into the image—and this all happens in a private sphere, a private space.
If this didn’t happen, there would be no way to control populations through images. It wouldn’t work. It all starts with a person setting up his own personal feedback loop that travels from him to an image and back again.
Coming out of World War 2, US psychological warfare operatives knew they could turn their skills to political purposes. They had just succeeded in making Americans believe that all Japanese and German people were horribly evil. They had been able to manipulate imagery successfully in that area. Why couldn’t they shape America’s view of a whole planet that lay beyond personal experience?
They could and they did. But the power to do that emanated from the fact that every person invests images with feeling. That’s where it really starts.
[…]
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with investing emotion in images. It can be exhilarating. It can be uplifting. As a painter, I know this in spades. Putting emotion into images can, in fact, vault you into a different perception of reality.
But on the downside, it can also take you into lockstep with what media operatives want you to experience, second-hand.
We focus to such a degree on how we are being manipulated that we don’t stop to consider how we are participating in the operation. And our own role is clear and stark: we invest images with feeling.
So how does one individual’s projection of feeling into an image become a uniform projection of the same feeling into one image, by millions of people? How does what one person invests privately become mass mind control?
Through external instruction or cues.
Why does this work? Why do millions of people fall into line?
Because they don’t realize they started the whole ball rolling themselves. All they know is: images are connected to feelings.
If they knew they were the real power in the whole operation, if they knew they were investing feelings into images all day long, if they could actually slow down enough to see how they do this….then they would be far less prone to taking instruction about what feelings they “ought to” invest in second-hand images.
Hypnotherapist Jack True unceremoniously put it to me this way: “If a dog could analyze how he got from eating meat to drooling at the sound of a bell that came at feeding time, he could stop drooling.”
[…]
Nowhere are we told we can back up a step and realize that we are the ones who begin the whole process, by projecting feelings into images. Any images.
Imagine a thought-experiment. You’re watching your computer screen. It holds an image of a tall blue vase. With purpose, you project the feeling of joy into the vase. Then you project the feeling of disgust. Then, fear. Then, worry. Then, pleasure…on purpose.The objective is to gain some measure of consciousness about an unconscious process.
When I was 19, I was sent to a trained expert in New York to take a Rorschach (ink-blot) Test. I was displaying signs of what would now be called Oppositional Defiance Disorder.
The expert said he wanted me to tell him everything I saw in each ink-blot. I took him at his word.
An hour later, I was still working on the first blot. I was describing everything from bats and owls and chickens to space ships and buckets of hidden treasure in caves.
Well, I was cheating a little. I wasn’t really describing what I saw. I was imagining. I was taking off from what was on the page and improvising. This was outside the bounds of the Test.
The expert was seething. He was sweating, because he had many other blots to show me, and it was late in the afternoon, and he was looking at spending the entire evening with me. Finally, he held up his hand and put an end to the Test.
I wasn’t playing his game. Among other sins, I wasn’t investing dumbed-down feelings in the images. Therefore, my choices of “what to see” in the blots expanded greatly.
When I go to a museum, I like to watch people stand in front of abstract paintings. Many of them are stumped. They’re trying to figure out what feelings they “are supposed to” project into the painting. They’re looking for “instruction,” and there isn’t any. They’re asking for mind control, and they’re not getting it.
Fanaticism of any kind begins with individuals projecting feelings into images. This is harnessed by leaders, who then choose the images and direct which feelings are permitted. The tempting prospect for the follower is: participation in a drama that goes beyond what he would ordinarily experience in life. This is bolstered by the idea that what he is doing is moral.
In the 2012 election season, people on the left were urged to project messianic feelings into images of Barack Obama. People on the right were cued to invest feelings of pride, hope, and “tradition” into images of Mitt Romney. On both sides, it was principally images that were presented. The real candidates weren’t actually experienced.
Since Vietnam, shooting wars have been more difficult to sustain among soldiers. “In the old days,” feelings of hatred could be projected into images of enemies that included civilians, so overtly killing everybody on foreign soil was easier to accept. Now, soldiers are taught “enemy combatant” and “civilian” are two different images that require the injection of two different feelings.
Here at home, police and military are taught, more and more, to invest feelings of suspicion into images of American civilians. This is an acceleration of mass mind control for law enforcement.
The astonishing number of civilians who participate in government and corporate surveillance of the public, through technological means, learn to invest “dead empty feelings” into images of citizens, as if these targets are nothing more than ciphers, units.
The bizarre instances of police detaining and questioning parents who allow their children to play unsupervised reveal another accelerating trend. These confrontations start with neighbors snitching on the parents. The neighbors have learned to invest feelings of panic, suspicion, and anger in images of “free children.”
In all these cases, there is no real experience. It’s all second-hand. It’s all feeling-projected-into-image.
[…]
You’ve heard people say, So-and-so celebrity has become a caricature of himself. Well, that’s what it means. The person has projected massive feelings of approval into an image of himself—often an image shown on television.
As a society, we can go on this way until we become a horrific cartoon of ourselves (we’re already there), or we can step back and discover how we invest emotion into images, and then use that process to pour feeling into visions of our own choosing and invent better futures.
Since the dawn of time, leaders have portrayed themselves as gods. They’ve assembled teams to promote that image, so their followers could project powerful emotion into the image and thereby cement the leaders’ control and power.
The game isn’t new. Understanding the roots of it within each individual could, however, break the trance of mass mind control.
During the first West Nile “outbreak” of 1999, I spoke with a student who had just dropped out of medical school. He told me he’d been looking at electron-microscope photos of the West Nile Virus, and he suddenly realized he was “supposed to” invest feelings of fear in those images.
Somehow, he broke free from the image-feeling link. He was rather stunned at the experience. His entire conditioning as a medical student evaporated.
Parents all over the world are having the same experience vis-a-vis vaccines. They realize they’re supposed to invest fear in images of germs and disease, and they’re also supposed to invest feelings of hope and confidence in images of needles and vaccines. They see the game. They’re supposed to ignore evidence that vaccines are dangerous and ineffective. They’re supposed to remain victims of mass mind control.
But they’ve awakened.
We’ve all been taught that what we feel is always and everywhere out of our control. These feelings are simply part of us, and we have to act on them. The alternative would be to sit on them and repress them and turn into androids, robots.
This is simply not true. There are an infinite number of feelings, and as strange as it may sound, we can literally invent them.
This, it is said, is inhuman. It’s a bad idea. It’s wrong. It would lead us to “deserting the human community.”
Nonsense. That’s part of the propaganda of mind control. If the controllers can convince us that we’re working from a limited map of emotions and we have to stay within that territory, they can manipulate that limited set of feelings and trap us.
(The power of art is that it shows us there are so many more emotions than we had previously imagined. We can be much freer than we supposed.)
The synthetic world of mind control and the handful of feelings that are linked to images is what keeps us in thrall.
The natural world—the world of what we can be—is so much wider and more thrilling and revealing.
[… con’d]
by chump » Sun Dec 15, 2019 12:08 am
by chump » Tue Dec 24, 2019 8:41 am
https://heavy.com/news/2019/12/ram-dass ... -at-age-88
Ram Dass Dead: America’s Spiritual Teacher Dies At Age 88
by Emily Bicks, Cecember 23, 2019
Ram Dass, whose real name was Richard Alpert, was a clinical psychologist known as America’s preeminent spiritual leader. He died on December 22, 2019 at the age of 88.
Dass received his name, which means “Servant of God” in Hindu, from guru Neem Karoli Baba, who’s also known as Maharaj-ji. Dass met him while on a meditative trip to Eastern India in 1967, according to the biography on his website. It was a pivotal meeting that completely changed the course of Dass’s life, and inspired him to author the book, Be Here Now, which has sold more than 2 million copies.
Prior to meeting Maharaj-ji, Dass was a Harvard professor. In collaboration with Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg, they researched psilocybin, LSD-25, and other psychedelic drugs, Dass’ website explains. Their research was so controversial that Dass and Leary were tossed out of Harvard academia, and the two professors decided to go on their own psychedelic journey. They traveled to Mexico, ate mushrooms, and studied the source of consciousness itself, mind expansion, and drugs being a catalyst for spiritual thinkers, according to his biography.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B3XEwX5nBmm/
Maharaji said to me, “Love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God.” …and I have been trying to do what he told me.
▫️
So, on this one trip I took the Greyhound bus down to Santa Fe, NM from Fort Collins, CO. I get on the Greyhound bus, and I haven’t been on the Greyhound in years for some reason or another. It’s a particularly dingy Greyhound bus, and I go and I sit in the rear. Just as the bus is about to take off this huge man gets on the bus and I think, “He’s not gonna sit next to me.” See, and I think, I can try to use all my powers to try and keep this from happening.
▫️
So of course he sits next to me, and he takes up half of my seat, and oh, I just think, “This is gonna be so horrible,” the whole trip. I’ve got my book and I’m scrunching into the corner, because, “I’m gonna read my holy book.” I think I’m going to use it as some form of purification for the situation.
▫️
Then he turns to me and he says, “Going to Santa Fe?” and my first reaction is, you know, to say yes or nothing at all, or to act like I didn’t hear him. I think I will just sit next to him, but I just don’t want to have to talk to him.
▫️
Then I hear Maharajji’s voice and it’s saying, “I didn’t tell you to read books, I told you to love everyone, serve everyone, and remember God.”
▫️
So then, I suddenly realize that this is Maharajji doing a trip on me. He’s very clever, incredibly clever.
▫️
I turned to the man sitting next to me and I say, “Well as a matter of fact, I am going to Santa Fe. Where are you going?” We start up a conversation and we talk through the whole trip, and that’s what it’s about. That’s what “loving and serving and remembering” is. We got off the bus and it was just a trip. Just a trip.
▫️
– Ram Dass
[…]
Dass famously said, “If you want to see how enlightened you are, go spend a week with your family,”
[… con’d]
by thrulookingglass » Tue Dec 24, 2019 11:53 am
by Harvey » Tue Dec 24, 2019 4:39 pm
by Sounder » Wed Dec 25, 2019 8:12 am
by Harvey » Wed Dec 25, 2019 10:36 am
DrEvil » Sat Dec 07, 2019 6:13 pm wrote:I've been fascinated by the idea of bacterial intelligence ever since I read Blood Music and Vitals by Greg Bear. Blood Music even has consensus reality involved when (spoiler alert) the intelligent bacteria prevent a nuclear strike by collectively making themselves believe that reality is just different enough that the physics involved in a nuclear bomb won't work anymore, and since there are trillions of them they change the fabric of reality just long enough that the nukes are all duds. Vitals is about (more spoiler alerts) bacterial hive minds and immortality.
Microbial intelligence is a real thing btw:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_intelligenceIt has been suggested that a bacterial colony loosely mimics a biological neural network.
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