'The Myth of Quantum Consciousness.'

THE AFTERLIFE INVESTIGATIONS: The Scole Experiments - FEATURE FILM
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http://www.skepticforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=18658

The Scole Experiments (spirits, mediumship, etc.)
Post #1 by Eric D R » Mon Aug 27, 2012 12:28 am
salomed posted the video link to a documentary about the Scole Experiments:
Last night I watched and was pretty flummoxed as to how to deal with it rationally. This morning I checked out some attempts to debunk but could find none, just warranted crits of the methodology rather than actual debunking.If its a hoax, its also a huge and ongoing conspiracy... and.... where are the whistleblowers?


My response:

1) the camera moving around the room in the dark taking photos and then later the film revealing black and white historical photos. but the photos are exactly the same as historical photos that have been taken in the past which are available to the public in books. Nothing compelling there.

2) A film canister placed on the table during a session was then developed and revealed images of script in Latin. Denzil Fairbairn ("Scole Visitor") says "I'm 100% certain that the film I selected was the same film that was returned to me at the end of the session". Certain how? In a dark room, slight of hand can accomplish a lot. If spirits could really put these images on a roll of film that's in its canister, why couldn't they do it without the film being taken out of its sealed box? If they can go thru a canister, then they should be able to go thru a cardboard box. Both points make it look like a setup for hoax. So, indeed, some of the investigators from the society for psychical research brought film of their own and kept it locked inside a box which they held until the film could be developed. The video makes it sound like that film also produced strange spirit-sourced images, but it doesn't say so verbatim, and we don't see the investigators say that themselves on camera. Tricky TV editing?

3) Paolo Pressi (of "il laboratorio") has investigated Bacci's radio that is said to receive voices of spirits and transmit them audibly. So has Emanuel Toriello. I haven't looked into them yet.

4) Members of the Society for Psychical Research, including Montague Keen, Arthur Ellison, David Fontana (book "Is There an Afterlife?") observed the sessions at Scole. Being members of a group with such a title does NOT, per se, mean that they are biased in favor of finding positive results or that their scientific credentials should be called into question.

5) Members of the Scole group were required to empty their pockets before entering the cellar to conduct sessions, but I doubt they were given pat-downs or subjected to a metal detector. If they wanted to keep something hidden in a pocket, they probably could have done so.

6) Additional scientists, including Rupert Sheldrake and Archie Roy, as well as professional magician James Webster, were invited in to make observations. They reportedly found that the "spirits" were able to communicate specialized scientific info that mediums and average citizens would not know or understand. It's key that I say "reportedly". We don't see either of them on camera saying this themselves. This is very important.

7) Sheldrake and Webster did go on camera saying that they personally witnessed small light orbs interacting with them and pushing thru solid objects, such as the table. Sheldrake also said he interacted with a "disembodied hand".

8) The apports (objects arriving in the room) seem really hoaxy and silly. The people who were conducting the sessions could have had those objects in their possession already as collector's items. The camera angle showing the flower petals following at people's feet in the Bacci sessions looks like hoax, unless it was just something done in post-production for effect. But if that's claiming to be actual real-time footage, then it looks like hoax. Here's why: there were no petals on the ground before they fell, so how would the cameraman know to move the camera down to ground level to show that angle? Suddenly the petals fall just as if someone were dropping them from a specific place at the edge of the table. Why not keep the camera where it was, above the table?

9) The SPR investigators/witnesses said, in addition to all the phenomena already mentioned above, they saw luminous angelic and ghostly apparitions form in the room and look at them.

10) The documentary's description of the video camera experiments has some holes. For one thing, it shows lots of images on screen without ever saying directly that those are the images that were captured by the camcorder. It also says "scientists" ruled out video feedback without saying who those "scientists" were. Then it shows Swiss lawyer and businessman Dr. Hans Sherr as investigating these experiments.

11) If these people are all hoaxters (the Brits holding the cellar sessions at Scole, Bacci in Italy, etc), don't they feel enormously weird or stupid greeting each other, talking, sharing experiences, and getting excited about each other's "experiments", knowing that it's all BS? To me, this casts some doubt on hoax being the general explanation. It's not evidence against hoax, but it casts doubt on it from my view.

12) Dr. Charles Tart discusses "outmoded" Newtonian materialism vs. quantum consciousness theory. He asks whether consciousness might operate on a quantum level, in which case survival of consciousness may not be such an outlandish notion as Newtonian materialsts think it is. I don't know quantum theory, but I recall reading that it regards things on a very tiny subatomic level. The quantum consciousness argument may be that this is the level at which consciousness occurs.

13) Montague Keen, who is prominently featured and interviewed in the documentary, dies during its production. Medium Allison Du Bois (young and beautiful as she is) is called upon to receive a spirit without being told who it is Montague they hope to get in contact with. Can we be sure she had no info? It would have been publicly available knowledge how he died at a conference in front of everyone, and that's the one non-vague detail she provided. What are the folders and files on her lap?

In conclusion: If hoax is what's going on, it would take a conspiracy of people, as salomed said. It would be hard to imagine these SPR investigators like Keen taking their work and interests seriously after playing part in such a hoax. The same could be said for someone like Sheldrake. Magician James Webster felt that it was beyond magic tricks. Of course, there's no proof of anything here. And there are some examples of suspicious and silly-looking phenomena and issues I've raised above. I certainly think a lot of it sounds and looks like hoax, but I also can see where there are many places where one could see reason to cast doubt on hoax in general as the explanation.
Thanks from:
salomed

Eric D R
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• the psychics were effectively free to move around during each seance (no hand-holding), and thus the investigators weren’t able to exclude the possibility of the phenomena they witnessed being generated by the performers themselves.
• they banned any use of still or video cameras – & this included infra-red & night-vision equipment. (One has to wonder why this was the case – if the seance was genuine, this technology would surely be no threat..)
• the box into which unexposed films were locked was supplied, not by the investigators, but by the psychics. What’s more, one of the investigators wrote that he was able to easily open the box in the dark… Films placed in boxes supplied by the ‘researchers’ never developed any images, a fairly suggestive finding.
• the seances were carried out in a room provided by the mediums, not the researchers.
• and – despite the fact that the Scole performances have been hailed as proof positive of an afterlife – there’s been no follow-up at all.

An unexplained phenomenon in neuroscience is the discovery that electrical stimulation in temporal neocortex can cause neurosurgical patients to spontaneously experience memory retrieval. Here we provide the first detailed examination of the neural basis of stimulation-induced memory retrieval by probing brain activity in a patient who reliably recalled memories of his high school (HS) after stimulation at a site in his left temporal lobe. After stimulation, this patient performed a customized memory task in which he was prompted to retrieve information from HS and non-HS topics. At the one site where stimulation evoked HS memories, remembering HS information caused a distinctive pattern of neural activity compared with retrieving non-HS information. Together, these findings suggest that the patient had a cluster of neurons in his temporal lobe that help represent the “high school-ness” of the current cognitive state. We believe that stimulation here evoked HS memories because it altered local neural activity in a way that partially mimicked the normal brain state for HS memories. More broadly, our findings suggest that brain stimulation can evoke memories by recreating neural patterns from normal cognition.

We can have a life review by electrically simulating parts of the brain

In 1973, Susan Blackmore graduated from St Hilda's College, Oxford, with a BA (Hons) degree in psychology and physiology. She received an MSc in environmental psychology in 1974 from the University of Surrey. In 1980, she earned a PhD in parapsychology from the same university, her doctoral thesis was "Extrasensory Perception as a Cognitive Process."[2] Blackmore taught at the University of the West of England in Bristol until 2001.[3] After some period of time spent in research on parapsychology and the paranormal,[4] her attitude towards the field moved from belief to scepticism.[5][6] In 1987, Blackmore wrote that she had believed herself to have undergone an out-of-body experience shortly after she began running the Oxford University Society for Psychical Research (OUSPR):[7][8]

Books

• Parapsychology and out-of-the-body experiences. Hove, England: Transpersonal Books. 1978. ISBN 9780906326015.
• Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-of-the-Body Experiences (1st ed.). London: Heinemann. 1982. ISBN 9780434074709. (2nd ed.). ISBN 978089733-3443.
• The Adventures of a Parapsychologist (1st ed.). Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. 1986. ISBN 9780879753603. (2nd ed. revised). ISBN 9781573920612.
• Dying to Live: Science and the Near-death Experience. London: Grafton. 1993. ISBN 9780586092125. (US ed.). ISBN 0879758708.
• —; Hart-Davis, Adam (1995). Test your psychic powers (1st ed.). London: Thorsons. ISBN 1855384418. (US ed.). ISBN 0806996692.
• The Meme Machine (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. 1999. ISBN 0198503652.
• Consciousness: An Introduction (1st ed.). London: Hodder & Stoughton. 2003. ISBN 9780340809099. (US ed.) ISBN 9780195153439.
• Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. 2005. ISBN 9780191578052.
• Conversations on Consciousness. Oxford University Press. 2005. ISBN 9780191604867.
• Ten Zen Questions. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. 2009. ISBN 9781851686421. (paperback). ISBN 185168798X.

well how do they measure microtubule vibration?

Apolygraph(popularly referred to as alie detector) measures and records several physiological indices such as blood pressure,pulse,respiration, andskin conductivity while the subject is asked and answers a series of questions.[1]The belief underpinning the use of the polygraph is that deceptive answers will produce physiological responses that can be differentiated from those associated with non-deceptive answers.

http://nirmukta.com/2009/12/14/bioc...f-a-conscious-universe/?ModPagespeed=noscript
1. Introduction

The impulse to see human life as central to the existence of the universe is manifested in the mystical traditions of practically all cultures. It is so fundamental to the way pre-scientific people viewed reality that it may be, to a certain extent, ingrained in the way our psyche has evolved, like the need for meaning and the idea of a supernatural God. As science and reason dismantle the idea of the centrality of human life in the functioning of the objective universe, the emotional impulse has been to resort to finer and finer misinterpretations of the science involved. Mystical thinkers use these misrepresentations of science to paint over the gaps in our scientific understanding of the universe, belittling, in the process, science and its greatest heroes.

In their recent article in The Huffington Post, biologist Robert Lanza and mystic Deepak Chopra put forward their idea that the universe is itself a product of our consciousness, and not the other way around as scientists have been telling us. In essence, these authors are re-inventing idealism, an ancient philosophical concept that fell out of favour with the advent of the scientific revolution. According to the idealists, the mind creates all of reality. Many ancient Eastern and Western philosophical schools subscribe to this idealistic notion of the nature of reality. In the modern context, idealism has been supplemented with a brand of quantum mysticism and relabeled as biocentrism. According to Chopra and Lanza, this idea makes Darwin’s theory of the biological evolution and diversification of life insignificant. Both these men, although they come from different backgrounds, have independently expressed these ideas before with some popular success. In the article under discussion their different styles converge to present a uniquely mystical and bizarre worldview, which we wish to debunk here.

2. Biocentrism Misinterprets Several Scientifically Testable Truths

The scientific background to the biocentrism idea is described in Robert Lanza’s book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, in which Lanza proposes that biology and not physics is the key to understanding the universe. Vital to his proposal is the idea that the universe does not really exist unless it is being observed by a conscious observer. To support this idea, Lanza makes a series of claims:

(a) Lanza questions the conventional idea that space and time exist as objective properties of the universe. In doing this, he argues that space and time are products of human consciousness and do not exist outside of the observer. Indeed, Lanza concludes that everything we perceive is created by the act of perception.

The intent behind this argument is to help consolidate the view that subjective experience is all there is. However, if you dig into what Lanza says it becomes clear that he is positioning the relativistic nature of reality to make it seem incongruous with its objective existence. His reasoning relies on a subtle muddling of the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity.