Quantum theory and consciousness. Help.

A had a feeling someone was going to post an article about this.

Nice find. I see that there are several hundred pages to digest, so it might take some time - but im on it...

I think I/we have already discussed this though - The answer is in realising that the size of the universe is 0 and that time doesn't flow, but is something our memories travel through - so it seems that the border of 'now' recollection of memories is fuzzy - great, that is something i hadn't thought of, but its obvious now, -E and +E wont perfectly cancel out because of quantum fluctuations - blurring the boundary between past/present and future recollection of the predetermined lives our memories are recollecting as we traverse the memory - because the black areas of fractals have an 'area' that is 'reality' and the rest is 'unreality'. Sweet!

Later...

I wont claim to have grounding in scientific process - nor would I want to appear to be claiming to be cleverer than thou!, but certainly the first few chapters appear to be consistant with established knowledge. Chapter 3 is a beauty - and doesn't seem to violate anything i know of, and yes it appears to show what it claims - i read it all once, but not critically, or thoroughly, and took it as being genuine and not a joke - but hell yes, it seems that responses to stimuli appear before the stimuli is given.

Some of it I find hard to believe, i'd like to believe and its within the framework of what is possible, but something made me skeptical. Im finding it hard to believe you could influence the outcome of a coin toss by thinking about it, but its not impossible. Infact, its quite likely, but its hard to accept.

The latter chapters I cant really comment on - infact im not sure why they are there to be honest. Probably a section for the statistical analysis people, but im not sure it really relates to the central hypothesis.

Whatever it is, its certainly a great, thought-provoking read - and trying to unite the Quantum, Chaos, Reality in the context of the Mind, Psychology, and even God (as a chaotic strange attractor - wouldn't want to pass that one by dmz really! ) is fun.

Its definately worth a second and third read - but i'd have to do a lot more background research into some of the previous experiments and papers they've referred to, but certainly, they have mentioned experiments and papers im familiar with, so it all seems kocher on the first read. If not its a bloody good hoax.

What does Shetline think of this then?

How soon before it was published did you know?...

Complete, total shit. There are a zillion parapsychology studies with people guessing hearts and moons and wavy lines before they see them, but they are not replicable. If they were, it would be the most groundbreaking finding in the history of psychology, maybe the history of science, as would these studies mentioned in this paper.

right... you read it then?

It always amaizes me that a street performer able to perform the simplest trick of making a coin disappear in the palm of his hand garners more fascination from the general public mass than a person making computer chips, or recombinant proteins. Yet, I'm willing to bet all of my money on the fact that most people watching know much less about the making of chips of proteins than of hiding coins between their fingers.

The beauty of a mind unadulterated by complex thoughts and understanding. I envy such people.

no, read the first half again, i dont think the experiments really happened. I think its someone on a 'love-trip' trying to reconsile the divisions between science and religion.

But its one great read regardless.

I wouldn't be suprised if its either fiction or real though.

just doing some research into some of the studies mentioned.

http://listserv.arizona.edu/cgi-bin/...nd&D=1&P=15536

I looked at the studies that Hassan recommended in chapter 3. You're going to need a lot more than a report of a couple studies with a dozen or so subjects to turn everything on its head like this. People have published gazillions of ESP studies. If they were truly replicable and well-done studies, they'd be replicated and would change our understanding of the world. They haven't been replicated, and so they haven't changed anything. It's not just ESP or psychology either: people have reported cold fusion effects and all kinds of such things, only to have them shot down when others can't duplicate them.

regardless of whether this work is fiction or serious, its actually a really interesting subject.

Forgetting x-files or mystic meg trivial nonsense, the most scientifically accurate theory we know of permits all kind of wierd and wonderful things - and its only scientific and religious bigotry and dogma that prevents the mainstream from properly investigating it.

Lets be honest, telepathy, reaction to events before they happen and such like is a bit kooky, and likely to get the masses sniggering at you, but the problem is - that pretty much all of us have experienced things we can't explain rationally - and there are all kinds of explanations we can use to try to rationalize them - from fluke, coincidence, God, demons, aliens, to ignoring and denial, but - if you accept that your computer works when you flick the switch - then you also have to accept that the concept of reality you trust in just doesn't exist - its an illusion with possibilities that go far beyond our current comprehension.

Perhaps the most rational way to try to explain this wierdness is not to invent delusions or paranormalities - but to try to solve them within the framework that already exists. It does mean that you are going to have to set aside the giggle factor and suspend the illusions of how you think the world should or shouldn't work - but at the end of the day, the mind or soul is a product of a highly complex computer which works within the framework of the laws of Quantum Mechanics - so perhaps the only explaination to be had is in what we know to be valid already. If you accept that your computer works, you have a framework for understanding telepathy. QM is weird, telepathy is wierd. There already exists a greater link between the two, than you'll get in trying to rationalise things in the context of God, coincidence or fluke.

Fortunately we know very accurately what these rules are that make our computers work - we just dont really have a grasp of what they 'mean'.

Sure there is alot of crap, fraud and bollocks in this, and its hard to throw off images of cranky old ladies reading the tea-leaves. It might even be a dead-end path.

As for the experiments (if genuine) being hard to reproduce - thats entirely what you'd expect when dealing with Quantum Mechanics multiplied by Chaos, so its not a reason to give up.

Seconded.

The whole house of cards rests on a flawed supposition that energy is directed in time dependent on whether or not it is negative. Unfortunately only the energies magnitudes are negative, not their flow through time.

A good background for debunking this drivel is this Scientific American articlehttp://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/sf.../wormhole.html

The gist there is the positive energies needed to pair to a meaningful negative energy pulse are beyond astronomical. Who can withstand energies on the order of several hundred million suns to create this wormhole that would be able to somehow activate enough neurons to cause a conscious reaction?

Don't you just hate it when the paper only presents the favorable side of the math and conveniently leaves out the rest of the theory? I can prove 1+ 1 = 1 doing that! [It's an age old mathematical trick that relies on algebraically creating a division by zero which is hidden in the symbols. Everything looks fine until you plug in the numbers and run into that little stumbling block.]

unfortunately, this is the product of a catastrophy that goes back 70 years to people who couldn't accept the implications of symmetry.

Not quite sure how to take that. Are you saying the Sintropia authors have their symmetry right or wrong?

It is a matter of symmetry, you are correct there. The Sintropia gents just decided to arbitrarily choose an alternate axis to display symmetry about and that just doesn't work.

The descriptions of the three studies were sufficiently poor that I can't see how to even faithfully reproduce the set-up. Unfortunately for them that means one of two things. Either their writing sucks (which it doesn't - it reads pretty well). Or the studies have some fatal flaw in them which is sufficiently disguised by the lax description.

<statistics alert!>Another flag is this: getting p-values in those ranges with only a couple hundred subjects seems fishy to me, something like only one false negative or positive in the entire test. NO test data is that clean. The only way to overcome basic noise and generate those p-values is to have sample sizes in the tens to hundreds of thousands. And that's not what they said they had.

Well, if I understand it correctly, Dirac's equations are perfectly symmetrical and Heisenberg refused to accept it. Unfortunately for heisenberg, dirac was shown to be right, but he tried very hard to invent all kinds of fudges to explain away his conviction that the negative solutions were just mathmatical curiosities or impossibilities - because it went against his conviction of common sense. Sadly this still lives on today, rather than accepting what the philosophy of QM implies. Unfortunately, the proof of the positrons existance pretty much confirms that what happens in the positive also happens equally in the negative. (remembering that infact they are back to front!) There is not this huge difference between a positron and an electron that your link implies.

So for me the simplest explanation is to accept that spacetime and energy is equal in the negative and positive - because its what the experimental data shows, and what the math predicts. I'm not buying this concept of "Quantum Interest" - because there is no need for it - Its a fudge created, because the implications of equal positive and negative cannot be accepted because it causes problems in our minds about the notion of reality.

Im sorry - but that is 'our' problem for our minds to comprehend - and it might lead to some pretty scary changes about what we conceive as reality,

The best thing QM could do right now is go back 70 years and really sort out the problem of why we need to introduce these fudges, and fiddling the maths to avoid these problems and accept what it really says.

What will probably happen though to continue upon the same path as current and keep inventing fudges to make things work and flatly deny that there is any problem anyway.

Personally, I prefer the Cramer model of transactional QM - its beautifully simplistically symetrically elegant - and I suspect the reason its not accepted is because it has some very awkward consequences - lack of free will and that everything is just an unfolding illusion of 0 dimensions.(my suggestions) Maybe its just time to accept what is says, and it is probably where the paranormal guys get their inspiration.

http://www.npl.washington.edu/ti/

What do you mean lack of free will? We all have free will, everybody knows that.

I think you misunderstand me, I agree the equations involving negative energy are symmetric. It's just that symmetry long the magnitude axis does not imply symmetry along the time axis. So negative energy exists and has much physical use, but it doesn't go backwards in time just because it has negative magnitude. That takes too many mathematical leaps of faith for me to buy.

I think it's more controversial than you suggest. I'm not even sure how you'd prove free will. "OK, do something totally unpredictable... Now!" What we do is based on 1) our genes and 2) our environment. Where does that leave free will?

Related, (but not completely on topic)... a question for all you physics knowledgeable folks....
What is the property of space/vacuum/whatever that governs the speed of light (in a vacuum), faster than which nothing can travel? There must surely be a physical reason for this constant being what it is (approx. 186,000 mpsec.), rather than "that's the way is is because it is"....

There's probably a simple reason for this which has been explained decades ago... but casually looking around for an answer, I found nothing... yet.

I'm coming out of a series of discussions of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, and one of the principal interests in that novel is fate/chance/free will.

Every time someone says "free will" now I chuckle. How can you have "will" if it is not "free"?

And yes, for anyone interested, I've read Milton's(?) de Doctrina Christiana (which is about free will) cover to cover.

Things like this always sound so interesting, but I'd rather put my energy into reading Roger Penrose's books about consciousness: The Emperor's New Mind, Shadows of the Mind, and a later book for which I don't have the title. I suspect that Penrose's book will be a more rewarding read, when I get around to it. I wish I weren't such a slow reader.

I dont think you will either, maybe someone else knows more, and it might have something to do with the higgs field if thats ever shown to be correct,

but this is something else that i find issue with in QM from looking at the explainations of things from our POV. The question of positive and negative time - and the speed of it - is irrelavent from the POV of energy. Time, distance and polarity doesnt exist for energy, from its own POV the things we perceive about it dont exist.

Negative time is the same as positive time because time doesn't exist for energy.
Negative energy and positive energy are the same thing, because polarity doesn't exist
Distance doesn't exist, because at 'c' - there is no distance.

We are looking at the universe from our POV and perceptions to get an explanation of the universe. IMO to really understand it, we need to look at the universes POV, and how it would perceive itself to get an explanation of us.

This is why people like Heisenberg called dirac's equation "Learned trash" and spent years trying to make it fit his perception of common sense. It led Einstein to invent the cosmological constant and quip "God does not play dice"

The universe doesnt give a toss about our perceptions of reality or common sense. Were not going to be able to twist the truth to make it fit our desires.

so in regard to the original question, what causes the speed limit of light - light itself tells us that it is not moving. There is no movement of light - einstein shows us that because at the speed of light there is no distance or time. Light moves at a big fat 0 mph. Miles and per hour are concepts that simply dont exist from its own POV.

The question is what causes us to perceive that light moves at 186k mps - And that turns the view of the universe on its head. A leap that apparently we are not ready to embrace.

I have thought of an 'car' analogy that might make my idea easier to understand.

Einstein shows us through relativity that time slows as we approach the speed of light - there is a subtle difference in how this could be achieved - but perceived from our POV to be exactly the same thing.

Imagine time to be an engine revving constantly at the same speed - and our perception of time as the wheels of our car. The relativistic effect of time is a clutch that progressively slips as our wheels spin closer to the speed of the engine.

From our POV the effect is the same, but the underlying mechanics are different. Conventionally perception of time is controlled by the speed of the engine.

Its possible, that as we test and probe the higgs field theory, that we find that this field is acting like my clutch - some things pass through it relatively unscathed like photons, while other elements go through and are slowed so that they aquire mass and time.

To be really precise, you need to invert the analogy so that the engine is always still, and the clutch acts more like a brake slowing the wheels...

No, you dont know that at all, you like to believe you have it because if you don't then it becomes almost impossible to function. Perhaps free-will is a concept created by religion to buffer you from the truth so that you can more easily be controlled by them, or to protect you from reality that you are a complete pawn to the mechanics of the universe. Such things could cause all kinds of pandemonium and depression if generally accepted.

You could of course exercise your free-will in knowing you're right, by not responding to this post.

whatever you decide to do, respond or not, you lose, because both options become my will, so i just took the illusion of freedom away from you.

I'd welcome comments, but I believe it is explained by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Constants in physics are the result of fields, such as gravity. The universe has a total mass and a density, which results in an overall gravitational field in the universe. Change it, and the speed of light will change. This explains why light slows down when it gets close to a heavy object, like a star. It explains why light cannot get out of a super heavy object like a black hole.

Fields like gravity and electromagnetism determine all the physical constants, not just the speed of light. This is how we have discovered that the universe is finely tuned so that life may exist somewhere, which happens to be earth. It has been debated whether such fine tuning is the results of an intelligent designer, or whether it is random chance. in some cases the fine tuning is to within one part in 10 to the 100th power. Although chance is easily ruled out for a single universe, some speculate that there are an infinite number of universes, and we are the lucky ones to be in the right universe. But that's another topic. Even the existence of other universes is unknowable according to one theory.

Sammi,

a better way to think about it is that the speed of light is a constant, period. Our units are arbitrary; it could be 530 barsdeit/umpta as long as it is 530 everywhere (in empty space).

The reason it is a constant is another issue, the speed of light represents a maximum value of speed which is not due to any physical property of the universe but rather due to the simple fact that space and time are coupled and there will always be one speed where the universe collapses to a point and time doesn't change... The reason photons and other massless particles travel at this speed is also due to the fact that in the photon frame any mass would result in an infinite density; any particles with mass cannot act as only energy carriers...

Nice contradiction.

yes it a bit of a bitch.

im quite convinced free-will and other such religious concepts are not designed to lead us to the truth, but have been crafted to protect us from it.

So what is your conclusion? Yea or Nay to free will?

suppose it is possible to prove that you 'dont' have free-will other than us contemplating it and making a case for the belief we hold

is it beneficial to society and the individual if this truth (no-free will) were to be revealed to the masses?

Might cause a problem - technically you wouldn't be responsible for your actions.

Discussions like this could go on for forever in some forums. Personally, I don't think free-will and non-free-will are mutually exclusive, if we put them in the light of multidimensional reality, with 9 to 12 spacial dimensions and two or three dimensions of time. I read a book a while back that went into this subject. However, we are evidently not capable of visualizing or thinking beyond the three spacial dimensions we know, and a half dimension of time, always increasing. As a result, we can only argue forever. (See, Beyond the Cosmos, by Hugh Ross, PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics.)

which is why we're all here anyway. Perhaps its better to be honest and embrace that, than forge a mask and pretend were here for debate.

You / we might have some free will. But only within our own cultually and individually socialized limits... by far more limiting than the 3 dimensions mentioned.

If this is indeed true, how do we explain the way gravity of a star bends the light traveling near it in space? Also, what explains why light cannot get out of a black hole, if it is not the extreme gravitational field? Then too, why do we need an inertial frame of reference, stationary with the stars and therefore stationary with the gravitational fields? If gravitational fields mean nothing to light, then we could just as well use a rotating frame of reference to solve many problems in physics.

Um, have you even studied general relativity?

It is space that bends around objects not light...

The speed of light does indeed change, however, but it is constant under identical conditions...

Does it matter?

Isn't perception everything?