'The Myth of Quantum Consciousness.'

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This thread went from off topic to way off topic haha , thats proof of consciousness I believe, we are not wet robots randomly firing neurons that cause these decisions a quantum effect could explain this.
 
we are wet robots firing neurons. that's why George can fly and I can't. and you cant conjure a plane when youre falling off a cliff because the wings would break off on the rock face.
 
hamishsubedei said:
I also am terrified of flying , unfortunately I'm trying to get on a plane for a 9 hour flight.
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the take off is the only icky part. you'll be fine.

edit: I'm not afraid of flying. George an di were talking about OBE and dreams. not real life :cool:
 
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I have not watched this video yet but it seems to be exactly about Quantum consciousness and life after death . . . called the Scole Experiment . . . which involved skeptics, scientists, and experiments using electronic media and film, etc . . . It may require its own Thread. . .

External Quote:



THE AFTERLIFE INVESTIGATIONS: The Scole Experiments - FEATURE FILM
ByUFOTVstudios481,251 views
 
Here are some observations about the above film from a skeptics website . . . Take note of #12 and the Conclusion . . .

External Quote:


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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George B said:
Here are some observations about the above film from a skeptics website . . . Take note of #12 and the Conclusion . . .
Click to expand...
oh I saw a documentary on that. not sure if it was the same film. will have to take a look later. the film I saw did debunk a lot I think, or else I looked it up. cant remember. I also don't remember Allison Dubois. interesting link though!

edit: yea that's the documentary I saw. not impressed but the hypey language of the documentary probably didn't help.
theres a lot of debunk links, im choosing this one just cause I like the title and is what I thought at the time.
External Quote:

  • 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.
http://sciblogs.co.nz/bioblog/2010/03/23/how-not-to-do-science-the-scole-experiment/
 
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External Quote:
This documentary is quite good, with some veridical near death experiences .

Note skeptic Susan blackwood did not have a Near Death Experience, she had an out of body hallucination or experience from smoking weed, not quite the same . She claims to have investigated all these experiences but then in the documentary has nothing to say on the veridical claims presented by the documentary.
 
Claim -Susan blackmore
We can have a life review by electrically simulating parts of the brain.
Is this bunk? I know you can activate old memories by simulating parts of the brain but a complete life review ?
 
hamishsubedei said:
Claim -Susan blackmore
We can have a life review by electrically simulating parts of the brain.
Is this bunk? I know you can activate old memories by simulating parts of the brain but a complete life review ?
Click to expand...
I'm not sure they can even purposefully grab any memories at this point. and praying they never are capable of stimulating 'specific' memories. we have enough 'false remembering' problems in psychiatry! http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi...id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub=pubmed&
External Quote:
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.
 
hamishsubedei said:
hmm so this proves that the brain is capable of remembering things, correct me if i don't understand Blackmores assertions here.
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I don't want to watch 50 minutes of video about someone smoking weed. but if her assertion is that
External Quote:
We can have a life review by electrically simulating parts of the brain
I think shes saying it's theoretically possible to have your life flash before your eyes in a NDE due to electrical impulses going haywire or being stimulated by the dying process.

what I'm saying is I agree your life flashing before your eyes is most probably a biological reaction but no one has PROVED that yet, in my opinion
 
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yea don't watch the video for that its quite an interesting video nonetheless ,the video isnt about her smoking weed I was mentioning that she is comparing a weed smoking experience to NDE's of people that have clinically died which I found misleading, she seems to mislead the audience to make herself seem like an expert when she is neither a neuroscientist or doctor but a hippie.
Ok so what she said was completely misleading , it would be strange for the memories to go in order from birth to death if caused by the random firing of neurones but could also be something hardwired into the brain I guess even if it were why would the brain evolve to have such an experience ?
 
hamishsubedei said:
Ok so what she said was completely misleading , it would be strange for the memories to go in order from birth to death if caused by the random firing of neurones but could also be something hardwired into the brain I guess even if it were why would the brain evolve to have such an experience ?
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weird. as I logged off I thought to ask you about that (must be quantum consciousness :eek:). I never really paid attention to 'life flashing before your eyes' but that's how they show it in the movies- linear from birth on. yea that would, in my opinion, be bull biologically. IF its true it has to be psychological. but even then it's weird.

edit: maybe if you start a "near death experience" thread under general discussions* you might get more input from others. this isn't really a topic that interests me much.
*unless you have a specific claim of evidence, then I think it would go in this forum but I'd label it Near death so people can find it.
 
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hamishsubedei said:
she seems to mislead the audience to make herself seem like an expert when she is neither a neuroscientist or doctor but a hippie.
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Bit of a lie.
External Quote:

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

esp.JPG


lovely :confused:
 
back to connected consciousness: so I'm watching mythbusters (episode 61 Deadly Straw) and they are testing interconnected consciousness!

mythbusters.JPG
 
hamishsubedei said:
External Quote:
I didn't get to see the whole episode did they find out what caused this effect?
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in that clip you put, the first jumps would probably be because they were physically moving the plant. I mean they put it in the cargo container so vibrations from planes going overhead didn't disrupt the results.

the esp part was funny, their reactions, but when they switched to an EEG machine they got no response at all. so they said it was "an artifact of the machine".
 
An EEG just a very sensative oscilloscope, for lack of a better term. It picks up electromagnetic waves and translates those impulses into the scribbles you see on the paper. The test was supposed to show whether or not all living things are connected through those impulses... if I remember my biology classes correctly, all living things produce some form of electricity just through the processes of life, so the EEG was a good instrument to use.
 
How does a polygraph machine differ to an EEG, It could be some other effect that is causing the polygraph to spike, they did recreate the original experiment its 99.99percnt likely to be bunk but hey why not test again and try and find out why it does that .
 
External Quote:
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph

Grant said it was an "artifact of the machine". this link is about artifacts or outliers but it's a bit late night for me to follow it completely. perhaps youll have better luck. http://www.stat.cmu.edu/tr/tr766/tr766.pdf
 
So i had this crazy idea that maybe the plant respires when people think of fire and that plants could do it in a protective mechanism in some interplant communication we are not aware of .
 
Came across another criticism of Lanza's ideas, quite a good one, and from a secular Indian perspective.

External Quote:
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.
Continues...
 
To the OP

In all honesty, applying unabridged quantum theory to describe all of the interactions in molecules as large as proteins is fruitless since we have not the computing power to do so - if we did there would be no need for the painstaking crystallography- and spectroscopy-based techniques that we currently employ to determine their structure, since we would just plug the structural formula into a program and it would determine it exactly for us.

As a result when applying physics to biomolecules inherent simplifications have to be employed, thus theories using bleeding-edge QM formulae and extrapolating them to molecules as huge as microtubules and then further extrapolating this to the neural network in order to explain behaviour such as consciousness are about as easy to prove or validate as the standard religious theories.

They might be right but, with all due respect to Penrose, it's a total Hail Mary and not really science.

If you're interested in molecular/atomic-level processes which can lead to an appreciation of brain functions, I'd suggest checking out the CAM Kinases and their putative role in memory (my Neuro professor who was apparently nominated for the Nobel both this year and last couldn't stop talking about it).
 
Does anyone have real evidence about recorded events during total shut-off, any reliable confirmation as it is hard to remember anything if it is not recorded? (I know the thread is old, cant resist the subject) Some things to consider May everyone accept that conscience changes itself by changing the physical "base" of it's existence , otherwise we have to assume that we are nothing but random events in the brain, if existance creates the concience (as you can ulter it by will). Interesting scientific "stuff" for everyone to consider in the research: Lucid dreaming experiments, DMT experiments and meditation (dmt release). Concience observes itself can and will figure it out…
Little chance i'll get a good answer, but I started to believe in God after experimenting with LD for a couple years, using natural substances like DMT and finally complete dmt fly-out during Kriya yoga and binaural bits.. we'll figure it out, all of us...
 
qed said:
It is essential to realize that staring at the double slit experiment will not cause the pattern to change.

Set up the experiment with two slits and electrons being fired. The pattern will be wave-like (i.e. interference).

Stare at it all you like, the pattern will not change (and you will not see the electrons).

On the other hand, if you fire photons at the passing electrons, the photons and electrons interact, and you will "see" which hole the electron passed through. However, now the pattern will change. Instead of a wave pattern, it will look the same as the pattern obtained if you shot bullets.
Click to expand...

What if you put the detector on only a single slit so that it can only interact with an electron going through that slit.
What will happen to the electron going through the slit without a detector and thus without photons interacting with it?
If the electron's wave function still collapses, that would seem to debunk the idea that it is the interaction that is causing the wave collapse.

Actually it's already known.
A detector on only a single slit causes wave collapse on the electron passing through the other (unobserved) slit even though the electron going through the unobserved slit never interacted with any photons.

"Which-path" knowledge is sufficient to collapse the wave function.
The fact that it is known which path the electron must have taken (even through a matter of deduction when it fails to go through the observed slit) is sufficient to actualize the electron into reality.
Also, the experiment has been conducted with C60 which has 60 atoms, not just electrons.
It is unknown what the upper limit is in size but it could very well be everything.

Also note that before knowledge about the particle (either through a detector or the photographic plate at the back wall, both of which are amplification devices like telescopes or microscopes), it is said that the path the electron (or C60) takes is not an element of reality. Even though it seems to have all potential possibilities before knowledge, there's nothing actually there. There is no real wave there before it actualizes into a particle.

That is to say, the wave in the wave function has never been observed.
It could never be observed.
The moment you attempt to observe it, it actualizes into a distinct particle and what's more, seemingly always was a particle even back to the source of emission (as though it went back in time after knowledge was obtained to have always been a distinct particle before which there was nothing but infinite potentiality).
 
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John Martin said:
If the electron's wave function still collapses, that would seem to debunk the idea that it is the interaction that is causing the wave collapse.
Click to expand...
I disagree (but most respectfully).

From the (sequentially) single particle version of the double slit experiment, we know that the wave of the single electron must pass through both slits.

So the process of detecting on a single slit will interfere with the wave of each emitted electron, causing it to collapse, hence the now well defined particle (electron) passes through precisely one of the slits (and the measured distribution will be particle-like not wave-like).

[PS: I am assuming from your CV that you do not believe "consciousness" plays a role in QM?]
 
qed said:
I disagree (but most respectfully).

From the (sequentially) single particle version of the double slit experiment, we know that the wave of the single electron must pass through both slits.

So the process of detecting on a single slit will interfere with the wave of each emitted electron, causing it to collapse, hence the now well defined particle (electron) passes through precisely one of the slits (and the measured distribution will be particle-like not wave-like).

[PS: I am assuming from your CV that you do not believe "consciousness" plays a role in QM?]
Click to expand...

The wave of the single electron seems to pass through both, neither, the left, and the right all simultaneously, superimposed on top of each other. So, yes, it's possible there is still interaction. But a better question: Is there actually a wave that passes through both? We infer this from the behavior at the back wall (interference pattern), but no such wave has ever been observed or could be observed. The wave is not considered an element of reality.

I wonder what would happen if you put the detector at the source of emission in a way that could not detect which slit the electron would go through. Not sure if that experiment has been done.

Another experiment, the delayed choice quantum eraser, which uses entangled particles seems to indicate that interaction is not what causes the collapse but knowledge of which path the electron took. Even after detection (interaction), an interference pattern results when the information about which path the electron took is erased.

To say that consciousness plays a role or not assumes we actually know what consciousness is. I know we believe we know, but I think that is a belief.
I think there is nothing wrong with speculation, including re-evaluating "facts" which are actually based on beliefs.
When confronted with something like this that appears inexplicable, we can either investigate further and propose ideas that fit the experimental observations or we can assume a mechanism that fits neatly with presuppositions even if there are experiments that have been conducted that seem to contradict this.
 
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With respect to this thread, there are two issues.

[1] "Consciousness" can (or can only) be explained via QM.

[2] QM demands the notion of "consciousness".

Do you agree that

[1] is currently in the realm of speculation,

while

[2] is bunk (probably stemming from that cat) [to "observe" simply means to set up the experiment so that the path is determinable (by a robot say)]?
 
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