Questioning Consciousness

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby jakell » Thu Mar 09, 2017 6:40 am

0_0 » Wed Mar 01, 2017 6:52 am wrote:It's a shame Schopenahuers philosophy, through no fault of his own or his philosophy, got tainted by the nazis using his terms like in triumph des willens and stuff, cos he really gives a great explanation. Reading his collected work is like a long mushroom trip! Not per se a feel good trip, but ok.. altho it's not as pessimistic as a lot of people seem to think it is either.


Rhyd Wildermuth (of GodsandRadicals) will be pleased at this association you've made. He's a bit upset with John Michael Greer and rarely mentions him without reference to the so-called 'fascist' works of Oswald Spengler, who Greer cites fairly regularly.
At present Greer is doing a philosophy series and is concentrating on Schopenauer, so this would be another opportunity for Rhys to tar him with the F-brush. G&R is a bit light on spirituality, in fact it's largely ideology driven, but namedropping Greer does give them Pagan cred, even if it is in a largely negative context.

Reading Greer's stuff ATM though, I think you are right about using Schopenauer's ideas, they certainly seems to provide an alternative framework to the standard models of our mentality, I'll have a better picture when he gets to the end of this series and I can reread it properly. It remains to be seen if this would address Chalmers' division into the 'hard problem' and the 'easy problem', an approach I was attempting to promote earlier in this thread.
" Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism"
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby dada » Sat Mar 11, 2017 6:14 pm

"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."
Niels Bohr to a young physicist

The Hidden-Variable Theory was started by Albert Einstein, even though he never explicitly used the term "hidden variable." Nevertheless, Einstein was always annoyed by quantum uncertainty, and attacked quantum mechanics from every angle possible, summing up his view in the famous dictum: "God does not play dice with the universe." In 1952, Dr. David Bohm, then considered the most brilliant pupil of J. Robert Oppenheimer, showed explicitly that Einstein's criticisms of quantum theory were valid only if there were a subquantum level: a world below the quantum world. Bohm also showed that this subquantum world could be the hidden variable that collapses the otherwise anarchistic state vector, but only if the supposed variable functioned "nonlocally." This means, in effect, only if space and time do not exist as we think they do.

The trouble with the Copenhagen solution is that, however much Niels Bohr and his defenders may deny it, this path ultimately leads to the conclusion that everything we think we know is only a construct of our brains. Physics then becomes a branch of psychology; it tells us not what the universe does, but what our brains do in organizing their impressions into ideas. The trouble with the multiple-universe model is that, however elegantly it may fit the quantum equation for the state vector, most of us simply can't believe in skillions and skillions of universes—each as vast in space and time as the one we think we're in—where everything that can happen really does happen.

And the trouble with the hidden-variable theory has always been that nobody dared claim they had found any subquantum world, beyond space and time, in which the hidden variables could function. Until recently.

In 1964, Dr. John S. Bell published a demonstration that still has physicists reeling. What Bell seemed to prove was that quantum effects are "nonlocal" in Bohm's sense: that is, they are not just here or there, but both. What this apparently means is that space and time are only real to our mammalian sense organs: they are not really real.

This was the first step toward solving the mystery of Freud's exploding bookcase and similar enigmas of parapsychology, but nobody realized it immediately. The next step came—as is often the case in science— from three sources at once.

In the early to mid-Sixties, Charles Muses, a mathematician interested in para-psychology, Dr. Timothy Leary, the LSD researcher, and Cleve Backster, a polygraph expert who had been investigating ESP in plants, all proposed that consciousness does not reside in the brain alone. Rather, they all proposed that consciousness goes down to the cellular level, to the molecules, to the atoms, and maybe even deeper.

The first to construct a complete quantum theory on this basis was Dr. Evan Harris Walker, a physicist working for the US Army in weapons research. Dr. Walker explains this theory in a paper written with Dr. Nick Herbert: "The hidden-variable theory of consciousness asserts: (1) there is a subquantal level beneath the observational/theoretical structure of ordinary quantum mechanics; (2) events occurring on this subquantal level are the elements of sentient being. This being the case, we find that our consciousness controls physical events through the laws of quantum mechanics."

That couldn't possibly mean what it seems to say, could it? Yes, by all the potbellied gods of Burma, it means exactly what it says: our consciousness controls physical events through the laws of quantum mechanics. We are the hidden variable—or parts of it. There hasn't been a more radical proposition since the Psalms proclaimed (and Jesus repeated), "I said, you are Gods" (John 10:34).

Walker and Herbert have specifically applied this theory to psychokinesis—and here we are getting close to explaining Freud's exploding bookcase. Using an equation devised by Walker to predict the amount of quantum wobble that can be produced by the human mind, they have compared the results predicted with those actually obtained in one classic, long-range investigation of the alleged PK function. The experiments were conducted by Haakon Forwald, a retired electrical engineer, from 1949 to 1970. Forwald's results exactly fit the prediction of Walker's equation. Subjects trying to control randomly falling cubes produced results as far above chance as they should have, according to Walker's math.

Dr. Herbert has carried this line of thought one step further. Director of the C-LIFE Institute (a conscious robot job-shop), Herbert is a soft-spoken fellow who dresses like Einstein did (or a Sixties hippie). He had developed Bell's Theorem into the idea of the "cosmic glue," which holds, in effect, that everything is the cause of everything.

The waters get pretty deep here, but fortunately the cosmic glue can be illustrated, with amusing accuracy, by an old Sufi joke. Nasrudin is out riding when he sees a group of horsemen. Thinking this may be a band of robbers, Nasrudin gallops off hastily. The other men, who are actually friends of his, say, "I wonder where Nasrudin is going in such a hurry?" and trail after him to find out. Nasrudin, feeling himself pursued, races to a graveyard, leaps the fence, and hides behind a tombstone. His friends arrive and, sitting on their horses, lean over the wall to ask, "Why are you hiding behind that tombstone, Nasrudin?" "It's more complicated than you realize," says Nasrudin. "I'm here because of you, and you're here because of me."

In Herbert's cosmic-glue theory, every quantum event is here because of another quantum event, which is here because of the first quantum event. At this level, causality is meaningless, and Herbert prefers to speak of "influence," which acts every which way in time. All of us—past, present, and future—are bound nonlocally by the cosmic glue.

Dr. Herbert claims this is the only theory of quantum causality consistent with Bell's demonstration that cause and effect are nonlocal, and with the Einstein-Bohm claim that nothing in the universe is truly random.

In case the full implications of the cosmic glue still haven't hit you, Herbert will tell you quite bluntly: "Consciousness, nonlocal in space and time, is the hidden variable."

You ask at this point, "If this is true, why don't we notice it?" Why, that is, do we generally feel that our consciousness is located in one place—a few inches behind our foreheads? The physicists haven't tangled with this problem yet, but there are answers to be found in anthropology and psychology. In the first place, not all people feel that the consciousness is necessarily in the brain. The Chinese have always thought it was in the center of gravity of the body, and their ideogram for "mind" literally shows a heart and liver, not a brain. Hindus and Sufis perform daily exercises of moving consciousness all over the body, from the toes and legs and torso onward to the top of the skull and back down again. In the second place, modern psychology has demonstrated that where and how we feel our selves to be is conditioned by childhood experiences, and is not based on any innate physiological seat of ego awareness. And, finally, parapsychology and the study of other societies records ample cases of people who have experienced their consciousness as far, far removed from the physical brain.

According to the cosmic-glue theory, consciousness is everywhere and every-when; we experience it here and now only because we are trained or brainwashed to experience it that way.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby dada » Sat Mar 11, 2017 6:20 pm

"There is a sharp disagreement among competent men as to what can be proved and what cannot be proved, as well as an irreconcilable divergence of opinion as to what is sense and what is nonsense." Eric Temple Bell

Let us, as the Chinese say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and see what we are talking about.

The story so far: the parapsychologists have accumulated a great deal of strange data about wild, bizarre behaviors of human consciousness. Although they have labeled these strange experiences with many names, the data all seem to reduce to the phenomenon of consciousness acting as if it were not imprisoned in the brain, as if it could migrate elsewhere occasionally ("out-of-body experience"), or as if there were nonsensory openings through which information from elsewhere can leak in. The quantum physicists, meanwhile, have found a subatomic jumpiness or randomness that cannot be reconciled with common-sense ideas of cause and effect. Aside from saying the whole problem is in our heads (the Copenhagen interpretation) or that everything that can happen does happen (the multiple-universe model), the most plausible theory that has been devised is the hidden-variable theory which, together with Bell's Theorem of cosmic glue, suggests that consciousness is nonlocal in space and time (not locked into the brain).

The hidden-variable theory is gaining ground because its central assumption of nonlocality (Bell's Theorem) has been experimentally confirmed five times since 1974. These experiments showed that two photons (light particles), once in contact, will continue to react as if still in contact, no matter how far apart they are in space, exactly as predicted by Bell's math—and just as would be true if Walker and Herbert are right in claiming that quantum events are controlled by a consciousness which transcends space and time.

In San Francisco, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, President of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group, has gone a step beyond Walker and Herbert. "Below the spacetime level of the universe we perceive," Sarfatti says, "is the subquantal world of minimum intelligences. Imagine them as micro micro-microcomputers. They make up the hardware of the universe and are localized in space and time." (Each is here or there, not both.) "But," Sarfatti goes on, "the software or programming is nonlocal in Bell's sense." (The cosmic blueprint is here, there, and everywhere; now, then, and everywhen.) "The hidden variable," Sarfatti concludes, grinning benignly over his Mephistophelean black beard, "is not precisely consciousness, as Herbert and Walker think, but information."

Information in modern science has a very special mathematical meaning, more specific than in ordinary speech. Without going into the math of it, information is coherent order, as distinguished from noise, which is incoherent chaos.

Biological evolution is the gradual emergence of information out of chaos. To the biologist, it is information in the genetic code of the cherrystone that tells it to grow into a cherry tree and not a teakettle. To the modern sociologist, information is the roads, customs, and traditions that mold random individuals into a society. If Sarfatti is right, information is also coded into the quantum foam, telling it to grow into the universe of space and time we know.

Imagine that your brain is a biological computer, as most neurologists now think. Imagine further that all subquantal events are also computers (micro-micro-microcomputers, as Sarfatti says.) Imagine finally that the universe is also a computer—a mega-mega-mcgacomputer. What Bell's Theorem means, according to Sarfatti, is that the hardware of this interlocking system of intelligent Chinese boxes—or computers within computers within computers— is localized in space and time; but the programming—the subquantal hidden variable—is everywhere and everywhen.

This sounds suspiciously like a definition of God, because God is, according to all theologians, just such a nonlocal programmer—omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. But if this information system is a kind of God, or a scientific analog of God, it is also you and me... and the lamppost. The information, remember, is nonlocal in space and time; so the whole universe and every particle in it partakes of the information, and is thus a cocreator of the whole, but on different scales. Is this not what the pantheists have been claiming for millenniums?

Currently, Sarfatti is attempting to demonstrate this interpretation of Bell's Theorem practically by designing a faster-than-light communication system (US patent disclosure #071165, May 12, 1978). Although Dr. Carl Sagan has pontificated that this whole project seems to him "at most a playful notion," there is already a patent search afoot because of rumors that one or more other inventors are trying to patent the same device. Sarfatti also claims an unnamed intelligence agency is very interested in this, and a nuclear engineer, who has not given me permission to use his name, claims that the Russians already have such a device. (Faster-than-light communication does not contradict Einstein, incidentally. The Theory of Relativity says only that energy cannot travel faster than light. Bell's non-local information system, as developed by Sarfatti, does not transfer energy but only information [order].

What is interesting to the layman about all this is that such a device, if built, would function precisely as the brain does in those altered states of consciousness studied by parapsychology. It would be a model of the extrasensory circuits of the brain, just as an ordinary computer is a model of the brain's logical circuits. And Sarfatti strongly suspects that, whether the Russians have this or not, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations certainly do. When Sagan says that Sarfatti's hope of contacting extraterrestrials this way is "playful," Sarfatti replies that Sagan's attempts to contact them by radio represents "electromagnetic chauvinism." So there.)

http://www.metaphysicspirit.com/books/The%20Illuminati%20Papers.pdf

Collection of essays, interviews, etc. Many of the subjects addressed in this brief read would further the discussion on several current RI threads. In that sense, it could have been written just yesterday.

That isn't a good thing, in my opinion. Although it isn't really a bad thing, either. I guess (sigh). I like the style of presentation: many of the pieces are credited to "fictional" characters. As a result, "Bob" appears to be as real as any other.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Sat Mar 11, 2017 7:10 pm

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Elvis » Sat Mar 11, 2017 7:33 pm

“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Iamwhomiam » Sat Mar 11, 2017 11:47 pm

:thumbsup :phew:
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Elvis » Thu Apr 13, 2017 8:10 pm

Take an hour to listen to this revolutionary scientist interviewed by Paul Kennedy of CBC Radio's program, "Ideas."

Science is confirming the consciousness-based universe. The brain-based mechanistic view is over:

Tuesday April 11, 2017

Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

Listen to Full Episode

Paul Kennedy has his understanding of reality turned-upside-down by Dr. Robert Lanza in this paradigm-shifting hour. Dr. Lanza provides a compelling argument for consciousness as the basis for the universe, rather than consciousness simply being its by-product.

"Why do you insist the universe is not a conscious intelligence, when it gives birth to conscious intelligences?", questioned the Roman philosopher Cicero. Over two-thousand years later scientist Dr. Robert Lanza responds to Cicero's philosophical query with a groundbreaking book Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death. Biocentrism is a new theory that upends everything we might assume about ourselves and the world around us. The most basic assumption Dr. Lanza's biocentric theory challenges is our fundamental understanding of the "way things are."

"Biologists describe the origin of life as a random occurrence in a dead universe, but have no real understanding of how life began or why the universe appears to have been exquisitely designed for its emergence."


​Science tells us that our universe all began with a sudden explosion -- a big bang -- about 13.8 billion years ago. Dr. Lanza writes:"In this model, the universe was presented as a kind of self-operating machine. It was composed of stupid stuff, meaning atoms of hydrogen and other elements that had no innate intelligence. Nor did any sort of external intelligence rule. Rather, unseen forces such as gravity and electromagnetism, acting according to the random laws of chance, produced everything we observe... As for how consciousness could arise in the first place, no one even has guesses. We cannot fathom how lumps of carbon, drops of water, or atoms of insensate hydrogen ever came together and acquired a sense of smell. The issue is apparently too baffling to raise at all."

In this model the universe is regarded as objective -- existing independent of any observer -- made of matter, ruled by mechanistic laws. Consciousness -- or the observer -- is simply a part of the matter-based universe. But this model not only fails to fully address the conundrum of consciousness. It also fails to answer other puzzling questions: what was there before the Big Bang? Why does the universe seem exquisitely designed for the emergence of life? Why is there something instead of nothing? This is where Dr. Lanza's biocentric theory of the universe comes in, to show us the inherent flaw in the standard explanation for origins of the universe.

"Most people believe that there's an independent physical universe "out there" that has nothing to do with our awareness of it. This seeming truth persisted without much dissent until the birth of quantum mechanics. Only then did a credible science voice appear, which resonated with those who claimed that the universe does not seem to exist without a perceiver of that universe."


Dr. Lanza says the problem is we have everything upside down. He takes the common assumption that the universe led to the creation of life and argues that it's the other way around: that life is not a byproduct of the universe, but its very source. Or put another way, consciousness is what gives rise to our sense of there being an "out there" when, in fact, the world we experience around us is actually created in our consciousness. As if anticipating our bemused response, Dr. Lanza writes: "But, you may protest, aren't there two worlds? The external 'real world', and then another, separate visual world in your head? No, there is only one. Where the visual image is perceived is where it actually is. There is nothing outside of of perception ... but the illusion of an external world comes from language. Everyone you meet participates in the same charade. It's not malevolent, but useful, as when you say, 'Please pass the salt over there.' What purpose would it serve to ask for that salt shaker 'inside your head'? It is customary to allude to the world as existing outside of us."


Dr. Robert Lanza is a noted scientist, who has been called by U.S. News & World a "genius" and "renegade thinker", likening him to Albert Einstein. He is head of Astellas Global Regenerative Medicine, Octata Chief Scientific Officer, and adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/biocentri ... -1.3789414


This video is on the CBC page, but do listen to the much longer radio interview!


https://youtu.be/zI_F4nOKDSM

I'll have more later, but for now one question: I'm not sure why they call it "Biocentrism"; wouldn't 'bio-centric' be the opposite of what they're saying, i.e., that the origin of consciousness is not biological? If that's clear.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby BenDhyan » Mon May 22, 2017 6:50 am

^^ Thanks Elvis....from the article, these are a couple of my favorite questions...."It also fails to answer other puzzling questions: what was there before the Big Bang? Why does the universe seem exquisitely designed for the emergence of life? Why is there something instead of nothing?"

Clearly logically, something can not come from nothing, but some people, including some scientists, believe it possible. Anyone disagree, feel free to explain?
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby chump » Mon May 22, 2017 8:24 am

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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Wed May 24, 2017 8:12 am

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research- ... picks=true

The moment that the philosopher René Descartes first considered that famous phrase, "I think, therefore I am," he realized that the existence of his body could be doubted in a way that the existence of his mind could not. This led him to controversially believe that the mind must be made of different kind of stuff than the body; that the mind was, perhaps, immaterial.

Since then, centuries of science have cast a shadow over Descartes' argument. Physicists and biologists have been remarkably successful at explaining the workings of the universe and our bodies without having to appeal to anything more than what exists in the ontology of the material world.

But Descartes might be making a comeback, if a hunch by researcher Lucien Hardy at the Perimeter Institute in Canada has anything to say about it. Hardy has devised an experiment involving quantum entanglement that could finally prove whether the mind is truly material or immaterial, reports New Scientist.

How to measure something we don't quite understand

Quantum entanglement, something Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," is a bizarre phenomenon that involves two particles that are mysteriously and instantaneously linked, such that action to one of the particles will immediately influence the other, even if they are light-years apart. Decades of quantum experiments have verified that entanglement is a real phenomenon, but we still don't understand how it works. You might say that entanglement is in the same camp with consciousness: it seems to exist even though we don't know how or why.

Now Hardy believes that the same experiments that prove that entanglement is a real phenomenon might be able to prove that human consciousness is immaterial. He has proposed a modified experiment involving two entangled particles are set 100 kilometers apart. At each end, around 100 humans are to be hooked up to EEG headsets that can read their brain activity. These EEG signals will then be used to influence the particles at each location.

Hardy contends that if the amount of correlation between the actions of the two entangled particles doesn’t match with previous experiments that study entanglement, it will imply a violation of quantum theory. In other words, such a result would suggest that the entangled measurements are being controlled by processes outside the purview of standard physics.

“[If] you only saw a violation of quantum theory when you had systems that might be regarded as conscious, humans or other animals, that would certainly be exciting. I can’t imagine a more striking experimental result in physics than that,” claimed Hardy. “We’d want to debate as to what that meant.”

There would certainly be a debate. Even if aberrant measurements did result from Hardy's new twist on an old quantum experiment, it's unclear whether this would mean that the mind is immaterial. But it's a result that would at least pour lots of new fuel on the ancient philosophical fire.

“There is an enormous probability that nothing special will happen, and that quantum physics will not change,” said Nicolas Gisin at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who was not involved in Hardy's proposal. “But if someone does the experiment and gets a surprising result, the reward is enormous. It would be the first time we as scientists can put our hands on this mind-body or problem of consciousness.”
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby smoking since 1879 » Wed May 24, 2017 9:21 am

Pele'sDaughter » Wed May 24, 2017 1:12 pm wrote:http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/quantum-experiment-could-test-if-human-consciousness-material-or-immaterial?google_editors_picks=true

The moment that the philosopher René Descartes first considered that famous phrase, "I think, therefore I am," he realized that the existence of his body could be doubted in a way that the existence of his mind could not. This led him to controversially believe that the mind must be made of different kind of stuff than the body; that the mind was, perhaps, immaterial.

Since then, centuries of science have cast a shadow over Descartes' argument. Physicists and biologists have been remarkably successful at explaining the workings of the universe and our bodies without having to appeal to anything more than what exists in the ontology of the material world.

But Descartes might be making a comeback, if a hunch by researcher Lucien Hardy at the Perimeter Institute in Canada has anything to say about it. Hardy has devised an experiment involving quantum entanglement that could finally prove whether the mind is truly material or immaterial, reports New Scientist.

How to measure something we don't quite understand

Quantum entanglement, something Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," is a bizarre phenomenon that involves two particles that are mysteriously and instantaneously linked, such that action to one of the particles will immediately influence the other, even if they are light-years apart. Decades of quantum experiments have verified that entanglement is a real phenomenon, but we still don't understand how it works. You might say that entanglement is in the same camp with consciousness: it seems to exist even though we don't know how or why.

Now Hardy believes that the same experiments that prove that entanglement is a real phenomenon might be able to prove that human consciousness is immaterial. He has proposed a modified experiment involving two entangled particles are set 100 kilometers apart. At each end, around 100 humans are to be hooked up to EEG headsets that can read their brain activity. These EEG signals will then be used to influence the particles at each location.

Hardy contends that if the amount of correlation between the actions of the two entangled particles doesn’t match with previous experiments that study entanglement, it will imply a violation of quantum theory. In other words, such a result would suggest that the entangled measurements are being controlled by processes outside the purview of standard physics.

“[If] you only saw a violation of quantum theory when you had systems that might be regarded as conscious, humans or other animals, that would certainly be exciting. I can’t imagine a more striking experimental result in physics than that,” claimed Hardy. “We’d want to debate as to what that meant.”

There would certainly be a debate. Even if aberrant measurements did result from Hardy's new twist on an old quantum experiment, it's unclear whether this would mean that the mind is immaterial. But it's a result that would at least pour lots of new fuel on the ancient philosophical fire.

“There is an enormous probability that nothing special will happen, and that quantum physics will not change,” said Nicolas Gisin at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who was not involved in Hardy's proposal. “But if someone does the experiment and gets a surprising result, the reward is enormous. It would be the first time we as scientists can put our hands on this mind-body or problem of consciousness.”



what i don't understand is why the need for these EEG hats.
... "These EEG signals will then be used to influence the particles at each location." ...

influence how? if the output is just plugged into the 'entanglement measuring machine(tm)' then they prove nothing, might as well be a push button.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby DrEvil » Thu May 25, 2017 5:16 pm

BenDhyan » Mon May 22, 2017 12:50 pm wrote:^^ Thanks Elvis....from the article, these are a couple of my favorite questions...."It also fails to answer other puzzling questions: what was there before the Big Bang? Why does the universe seem exquisitely designed for the emergence of life? Why is there something instead of nothing?"

Clearly logically, something can not come from nothing, but some people, including some scientists, believe it possible. Anyone disagree, feel free to explain?


I'll give it a go. The Big Bang created spacetime, so the question of before is meaningless. Time didn't exist (in our universe) until the Big Bang.

Fine tuning: Depends on your view of reality. If you subscribe to the multiverse it makes perfect sense, we're in the universe that supports our kind of life while there's countless other universes that don't.

Even without the multiverse you have the anthropic principle. The simplified version is something like:
If this universe didn't support our kind of life we wouldn't be here to ask the question in the first place.

It appears fine tuned to our existence, while in reality we are fine tuned to be able to exist in this universe because our type of life is what's possible with current laws of physics.

Something from nothing: I know I've seen the physics arguments for it somewhere but off hand I can't remember them so I'll skip that bit. Probably something something infinite (infinity of some kind is the only thing that makes sense to me (not counting things human brains are physically incapable of comprehending), otherwise you just get an endless (infinite, hah!) Matryoshka doll of "but what's outside the universe, and what's outside that..").
The simplest answer would be "everything has always been".
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby smoking since 1879 » Thu May 25, 2017 5:49 pm

DrEvil » Thu May 25, 2017 10:16 pm wrote:
BenDhyan » Mon May 22, 2017 12:50 pm wrote:^^ Thanks Elvis....from the article, these are a couple of my favorite questions...."It also fails to answer other puzzling questions: what was there before the Big Bang? Why does the universe seem exquisitely designed for the emergence of life? Why is there something instead of nothing?"

Clearly logically, something can not come from nothing, but some people, including some scientists, believe it possible. Anyone disagree, feel free to explain?


I'll give it a go. The Big Bang created spacetime, so the question of before is meaningless. Time didn't exist (in our universe) until the Big Bang.

Fine tuning: Depends on your view of reality. If you subscribe to the multiverse it makes perfect sense, we're in the universe that supports our kind of life while there's countless other universes that don't.

Even without the multiverse you have the anthropic principle. The simplified version is something like:
If this universe didn't support our kind of life we wouldn't be here to ask the question in the first place.

It appears fine tuned to our existence, while in reality we are fine tuned to be able to exist in this universe because our type of life is what's possible with current laws of physics.

Something from nothing: I know I've seen the physics arguments for it somewhere but off hand I can't remember them so I'll skip that bit. Probably something something infinite (infinity of some kind is the only thing that makes sense to me (not counting things human brains are physically incapable of comprehending), otherwise you just get an endless (infinite, hah!) Matryoshka doll of "but what's outside the universe, and what's outside that..").
The simplest answer would be "everything has always been".



spacetime ... time is not a dimension, things change and we notice, we call that time
big bang ... it's only a theory, Lemaître still needs his cosmic egg.
multiverse ... massive cop out - explains anything, everything and nothing

just sayin :wink:


Multiverse or Universe? - Andre Linde (SETI Talks)


Halton Arp Intrinsic Red Shift


The Milky Way - Evidence For Seyfert Activity in the Recent Past

:partydance:
"Now that the assertive, the self-aggrandising, the arrogant and the self-opinionated have allowed their obnoxious foolishness to beggar us all I see no reason in listening to their drivelling nonsense any more." Stanilic
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby BenDhyan » Thu May 25, 2017 8:04 pm

smoking since 1879 » Fri May 26, 2017 7:49 am wrote:
spacetime ... time is not a dimension, things change and we notice, we call that time

big bang ... it's only a theory, Lemaître still needs his cosmic egg.

Precisely, let's say we see a meteorite flash across the night sky for what we estimate is about 10 seconds, while the moving meteorite is a real in the physical sense, the time estimation is merely a mental calculation.

Yes, to suggest that universal existence could arise from non-existence is, imho, just not credible.
.
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Re: Questioning Consciousness

Postby dada » Thu May 25, 2017 9:40 pm

The simplest answer would be "everything has always been".


And now, everything is always been.

There's no past, only memories. No future, only projections. No present to hold on to. There's just a timefield. Even worse, every moment contains every other, and they all co-arise.

I think of our perception of time like a spotlight. We narrow our focus to view slices of the field. Sometimes we experience a 'sense' of the field, but as we can't explain it (our experiences of the field) with the current models of mainstream pop physics, we dismiss it. But the brain has other settings besides spotlight. Floodlight, strobe. Laser-pointer, for entertaining the cat.

Can something come from nothing. I think so, yes. It appears to me that something comes from nothing. It also appears that there is an ultimate substance. Depends on how you look at it. "It" in this case being you.

Anyway, it's just philosophical musings to make definitive statements about the concepts of something and nothing. Matter is made of mostly space. And even the vacuum contains swirls of potential energy. The empty light years are brimming with dark matter. So there's no such thing as 'pure' something existing, or nothing, not existing. It's the cycling changes, which are time, which is a field, which we look at using spotlights.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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