when are you going to get it? you arent better then anyone else here. saying shit like this is getting all too typical for you.
Dude, don't start this again. I was responding to those that won't actually get into the science, they just pick articles that support what they currently believe. I've spent months researching consciousness, I think I have a better handle on it. You want to talk about quantum phsyics, cosmology, neuroscience, psychology, bring it, I've covered them all. But none of you are versed in any of that, so you just talk headlines.
Once, someone came on here with a background in physics, and they agreed with my interpretation of Heissenberg's uncertainty principle. Maybe I do have a better understanding of this subject than you do. You probably know more about Israel than me, but that doesn't mean shit on this thread.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
Yea, but that's junk science. There is no quantum superposition. It's quantum theory that has been distorted.
I don't know if I would call QC junk science, although it may not be far off it. My main reason for skepticism is related to the fact that they invoke a lot of speculation into their ideas.
However superposition is not the idea that I would refer to as speculation. It is a well accepted component of the quantum theory, developedby Erwin Schrodinger and demonstrated in Thomas Young's Double Slit Experiment.
I don't know if I would call QC junk science, although it may not be far off it. My main reason for skepticism is related to the fact that they invoke a lot of speculation into their ideas.
However superposition is not the idea that I would refer to as speculation. It is a well accepted component of the quantum theory, developedby Erwin Schrodinger and demonstrated in Thomas Young's Double Slit Experiment.
No man, the double slit experiment only shows that attempting to detect a particle affects it's behavior. No evidence of superposition. It was speculated that the particles "can be whatever they want" or some shit, like they are every possibility until they collapse. Garbage. They are a wave because the particles interact with each other on a quantum scale, but when you add a quantitative detector it affects the behavior of the particles by overpowering the quantum level determinents.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
you know as fascinating as all this is, why do we need to know how the mind works. i am thankful that mine works at all. and no i am not talking about my brain. to know how things work brings up the possibility of changing and interferring with the workings and that's all a little too brave new world for me.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
upon request, here is the leading article. keep in mind that the survey goes more into depth, and that would be too much to paste into this site.
IN A building that looks, from the outside, like the villain's lair in an early James Bond film, a robot moves around. Called Darwin XI, it is the brainchild of Gerald Edelman. The building is the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, and Dr Edelman is one of an eclectic group of researchers—some of them neurologists and some philosophers—who are trying to explain what is, perhaps, the biggest mystery of the human brain: the nature of consciousness. His approach is to build machines run by computer programs that work the way he thinks that brains work, and then see what happens.
Consciousness is the core of an individual's sense of self, yet, paradoxically, it is the most elusive concept in biology. Even framing the questions is difficult. Broadly, though, researchers have taken three approaches. One is the experimental method embraced by Dr Edelman. A second is to look for consciousness directly in the brain. The third is merely to sit and think about the question. Though empirical scientists sometimes scoff at it, this third method is not to be despised. After all, it was by sitting and thinking about some paradoxical results in physics that Albert Einstein was able to break out of the mental mould of classical physics and invent the non-commonsensical but scientifically successful theory of relativity.
Dr Edelman refers to his theory of consciousness as neural Darwinism. It combines two ideas. The first, as he charmingly puts it, is that “neurons which fire together, wire together.” This process of mutual reinforcement provides the selective pressure that is the prerequisite for any Darwinian-based theory: to those neuronal networks that have shall be given, from those that have not, even what little they have shall be taken away. The resulting changes are the physical basis of learning.
The second part of Dr Edelman's theory is an idea he calls re-entrant mapping. The process of learning can be viewed as one by which reality (as perceived by the senses) is transformed into a representation of reality. Mathematically, this transformation is described as mapping. In Dr Edelman's model of the brain, however, there is a second process: the maps themselves are mapped by other groups of neurons. It is this phenomenon of different groups of neurons watching each other that he refers to as re-entrant mapping.
Whether neural Darwinism is truly a theory of consciousness is moot. It may not, for example, fully account for the feeling of actually experiencing things such as emotions that most people would think central to conscious experience. (Philosophers refer to such consciously experienced feelings as qualia.) As a theory of how brains work, though, it seems to have a lot going for it, for Dr Edelman has used it to construct a series of ever more complex robots that behave, in many ways, like animals. The latest, Darwin XI, has a range of senses: vision, hearing, touch and what Dr Edelman refers to as taste (but which is actually sensitivity to the electrical conductivity of what its “taste” organs are in contact with). It also has whiskers.
Darwin XI can do a lot. It can, for example, learn to navigate mazes in search of rewards, in the way that a laboratory rat does. It can develop preferences, thanks to a pleasure centre that generates what Dr Edelmann calls good taste in response to those rewards. And it can forget those preferences if they are no longer rewarding.
Other robots are able to perform similar tricks, but they have to be trained specifically to do so. The computer that runs Darwin XI can work things out for itself. It is loaded with virtual neurons, the initial strength of whose synapses with one another is allocated by a random number generator, and left to get on with things. It does have a bit of pre-ordained neuro-anatomy (in particular, it has been fitted with the equivalent of a hippocampus) but, like the local specialisation in a real cortex observed by people like Dr Kanwisher, most of the specialisation in Darwin XI simply emerges. This happens through the formation of specialised groups of neurons that resemble the specialised locations seen in real brains. The researchers know this because they can track changes in the way the virtual neurons connect to each other.
So is Darwin XI conscious? Well, it cannot speak, so no one can ask it. But the answer probably depends on whether you think a rat is conscious. That illustrates a big part of the problem of consciousness: no one can agree on who has it, let alone what it is. In fact, the questions are linked. There is a general feeling that what is special about humans is to do not with their being clever, but their being conscious in a different way from most other animals.
The inward eye
One feature of human consciousness that students of the field suggest might be unique is an awareness of self. The idea that self-awareness might be specific to humans and a few close relatives resulted from an experiment done three decades ago by Gordon Gallup, who now works at the University of Albany in New York state. This showed that chimpanzees (and, as subsequently emerged, other great apes) share with humans the ability to recognise themselves in a mirror, whereas monkeys and various other reasonably intelligent species, such as dogs, do not. A few species that are not apes have also passed the mirror test, including elephants and dolphins. But most animals fail it.
All the species that have passed have something in common: abnormally large cerebral cortices relative to the rest of their brains. Whether self-awareness simply emerges from a large cortex or whether selection for it necessarily results in one is unclear. Perhaps it is both. What is interesting about Dr Edelman's theory is that awareness of self is built into it. That, in essence, is what re-entrant mapping is.
Such self-awareness is not, however, indivisible. One treatment for serious epilepsy is to cut the corpus callosum and the other nervous connections between the two hemispheres of the brain, which stops the fit passing from one hemisphere to the other. This does not usually affect a person's everyday behaviour, but sometimes the two hemispheres have completely different personalities, and where that happens the individual's behaviour does change—indeed, he ceases to be an individual as the hemispheres fight for control of the body. The conflict often manifests itself in the person's hands, each controlled by a different hemisphere, trying to do opposing things. One hand may try to put on a piece of clothing, for example, while the other tries to remove it.
Tales of mystery and imagination
At first sight such cases seem extraordinary. But they are merely striking illustrations of a broader point: that in the brain nothing is ever quite what it seems, and experience and common sense are little use when formulating theories about the self. Two of the lesion studies mentioned in the introduction to this survey, dealing with the inability to perceive motion and recognise faces, arise from the fact that visual experience, which for those who can see is the dominant form of conscious experience, is a complete fabrication. What is consciously perceived is not a simple mapping of the images that fall on the retina. Instead, the signals from the optic nerves are deconstructed and re-formed in a process so demanding that it involves about a third of the cerebral cortex.
Even those with healthy brains get a hint of this in the form of optical illusions. These are patterns that the image-reconstruction process finds it confusing to deal with. An even more obvious discord between reality and perception is colour. The world is not really coloured, it just looks that way because it is tremendously useful that it should, so the retina has cells that are particularly sensitive to three different wavelengths of light, and the brain weaves the signals from them together to create the phenomenon called colour.
Colours are good examples of qualia—the things that people feel that they are experiencing. Much of the philosophical side of the study of consciousness seeks either to explain qualia or to explain them away. They are, for example, at the heart of the question of dualism. For it is hard to ask what is generating them and what is perceiving them without concluding that the processes are separate.
Daniel Dennett, a doyen among philosophers of consciousness, disparagingly refers to the putative “observing self” in this scenario as a homunculus. He calls the mental stage on which the qualia supposedly act out their play the Cartesian theatre, after Descartes, the philosopher who thought the soul resided in the pineal gland. And he points out that exactly the same problem applies to how the homunculus would perceive its own qualia. Turn the theatre into a cinema, though, and Antonio Damasio quite likes the analogy. His twist is to place the observing self in the film itself, rather than in the audience. That is not a particularly easy idea to grasp, but it does seem to bear some relationship to Dr Edelman's idea of re-entrant mapping.
That something in the brain really is performing the role of an observing self is suggested by the work of Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr Libet used electroencephalography to look at brain activity during the process of making simple decisions such as when to move a finger. He showed that the process which leads to the act starts about three-tenths of a second before an individual is consciously aware of it. In other words, the observer is just that: an observer, not a decider. This may explain the feeling that most people have experienced at one time or another of having deliberately done something that they had not actually wanted or intended to.
Though Dr Libet's experiment is almost laughably simple, it pokes a stick in a very deep pond. A feeling of freedom to make conscious choices is at the heart of most people's sense of themselves. Even Freud, who popularised the idea of the unconscious, believed that conscious free-willed thought could override unconscious desires. One way of interpreting Dr Libet's work, though, could be that such free will is, like colour vision, simply a powerful illusion. An actor in a film, perhaps. But an actor reading from somebody else's script.
The truth, unsatisfactory though it is, is that no one really knows. Nor does anyone know where the next breakthrough will come from. Perhaps Dr Edelman, or one of his successors, will build a robot that can describe its own qualia-like experiences. Perhaps neuroanatomy will throw up a surprising, crucial observation. Or perhaps a bored, unregarded clerk will come to the rescue with an insight that dominates 21st-century thinking in the way that relativity dominated the 20th.
I don't know if I would call QC junk science, although it may not be far off it. My main reason for skepticism is related to the fact that they invoke a lot of speculation into their ideas.
However superposition is not the idea that I would refer to as speculation. It is a well accepted component of the quantum theory, developedby Erwin Schrodinger and demonstrated in Thomas Young's Double Slit Experiment.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
No man, the double slit experiment only shows that attempting to detect a particle affects it's behavior. No evidence of superposition. It was speculated that the particles "can be whatever they want" or some shit, like they are every possibility until they collapse. Garbage. They are a wave because the particles interact with each other on a quantum scale, but when you add a quantitative detector it affects the behavior of the particles by overpowering the quantum level determinents.
When done with a normal light source the light and dark patterns can be explained by wave interference.
However the experiment has been replicated so that only a single photon enters the device at a time. The single photon is fired through the double slit and makes a 'spot' on the sensor screen. This is repeated numerous times and the combined effect is recorded.
Because of quantum uncertainty, we cannot know where each single photon will strike the screen, but the combined effect is identical to the interference pattern for a normal light source.
The paradox is this- the photon behaves like a particle when it is fired and when it strikes the screen, but the overall interference pattern means that all of the particles have as a whole, still behaved like a wave.
Superposition is a possible solution. The photon has an associated wave function, and passes through both slits simulteneously (in fact it takes every possible trajectory).
This (to my knowledge) is the only current explanation for the interference pattern achieved through repeating the firing of a single photon through the double slit experiment. If you know of any other current explanation let me know, I would be very interested.
Also, John Wheeler, from the university of texas, has demonstrated the impact of observation on the quantum world through his delayed choice experiment. I will have to look it up again but I will get back to you about that one.
Dude, don't start this again. I was responding to those that won't actually get into the science, they just pick articles that support what they currently believe.
I'll get into the science of consciousness, when you get into the practice of subjective consciousness. The ways to spiritual awareness/consciousness have been mapped and can be followed by anyone.
When you've been to Rome you won't really care if people tell you it's impossible and that it does not exist. You've cleverly disguised your own bias from yourself. You know the consciousness drill ahnimus: preconception.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
When done with a normal light source the light and dark patterns can be explained by wave interference.
However the experiment has been replicated so that only a single photon enters the device at a time. The single photon is fired through the double slit and makes a 'spot' on the sensor screen. This is repeated numerous times and the combined effect is recorded.
Because of quantum uncertainty, we cannot know where each single photon will strike the screen, but the combined effect is identical to the interference pattern for a normal light source.
The paradox is this- the photon behaves like a particle when it is fired and when it strikes the screen, but the overall interference pattern means that all of the particles have as a whole, still behaved like a wave.
Superposition is a possible solution. The photon has an associated wave function, and passes through both slits simulteneously (in fact it takes every possible trajectory).
This (to my knowledge) is the only current explanation for the interference pattern achieved through repeating the firing of a single photon through the double slit experiment. If you know of any other current explanation let me know, I would be very interested.
Also, John Wheeler, from the university of texas, has demonstrated the impact of observation on the quantum world through his delayed choice experiment. I will have to look it up again but I will get back to you about that one.
I have an explanation. Firstly, we know that "nothing" is not nothing. Even where no matter exists, dark matter may exist. But we know air is made up of Hyrdogen and Oxygen atoms. So the electrons or photons may create a rift in this or the ether to create an interference. Makes a lot more sense than superposition to me.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
A refresher--On insight and reason Taken from an interview with physicist David Bohm:
Bohm: "...it's the insight that does it, you see, the insight is not you, right? The insight being supreme intelligence is able to rearrange the very structural matter of the brain which underlies thought so as to remove that message which is causing the confusion, leaving the necessary information and leaving the brain open to perceive reality in a different way. But at present, it's blocked, the conditioning blocks us, because it creates a pressure to maintain what is familiar and old, and makes people frightened to consider anything new. So, reality is limited by the message which has already been deeply impressed upon the brain cells from early childhood. Now the insight actually removes the message which is causing this block.
Weber: And makes us then commensurable with it?
Bohm: It opens thought up to be fresh and new again so that it can operate rationally. One could say that to remain within this block is completely irrational. It's the result of pressure. You adopt the idea that this block is truth because it relieves the pressure of uncertainty.
Weber: I see, but when you see the term "rationally" or "reasonably" shall we be very clear? You don't mean what the Enlightenment meant, or Descarte, you mean something far beyond that.
Bohm: Reason may have two sources. One is the memory, which is mechanical, rather like a computer.
Weber: Combining the right things.
Bohm: Yes, we may have reason from there and that is subject to all the irrational pressures which are also in the memory: emotional pressures, fears, all those experiences and so on, and so that kind of reasoning is very limited. It can very quickly get caught in self-deception.
Weber: And to you that signifies a barrier. That is not what you're speaking of.
Bohm: That's right. But then there may be reason which flows from insight and a reason which is operating as an instrument of intelligence. That's an entirely different kind of reason.
Weber: It implies what? Order, but not mechanical order?
Bohm: Not mechanical order, and not limited by pressure, you see. Let's take a physicist. If he's been subjected to all these courses in quantum mechanics and pressures to think in this way: he'll be approved of if he does, disapproved of if he doesn't, he gets a job if he does, not if he doesn't, and so on and so on, the minute the idea occurs of thinking in another way, there will be an intense pressure which will blot it out. So, therefore, that isn't reason anymore, it's unreason.
Weber: But he'll think it's reason. He'll rationalize it.
Bohm: He'll think it's reason, yes, he'll say it's reason because he's blotted out all this pressure. It all happens very fast and automatically.
Weber: And he's confirmed by the consensus of the physical community?
Bohm: Well, everybody's doing the same thing, you see. They all reinforce each other and they all say it's right, but it's all the same.
Weber: Can we go back for a moment? This possible state that you speak of where intelligence or insight operates because it's unblocked because I've taken away the obstacles....
Bohm: It's insight that's taken away the obstacles, not me, right?
Weber: All right. What it would be in touch with, you imply is beyond the nonmanifest, is the source of the nonmanifest. Are you implying that that's the domain of, shall we call it "the sacred"?
Bohm: Well, it has been called the sacred. As we know "holy" is based on the word "whole", it could be called whole, or wholeness. See, the word "sacred" has unfortunately come to mean something different from its original root, that is to say a sacrifice that you make. Now it's closely connected with the idea of organized religions making sacrifices and things like that, and it has a great many connotations which are unfortunate.
Weber: But you feel the word whole, holy is....?
Bohm: Is a bit better, yes. ...
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
I'll get into the science of consciousness, when you get into the practice of subjective consciousness. The ways to spiritual awareness/consciousness have been mapped and can be followed by anyone.
When you've been to Rome you won't really care if people tell you it's impossible and that it does not exist. You've cleverly disguised your own bias from yourself. You know the consciousness drill ahnimus: preconception.
Yea, but I personally enjoy keeping my sanity. I won't walk the road to madness.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
Angelica. Intuition is processed by the frontal insular cortex. That's a fact.
There is still nothing metaphysical about it. It's just a different algorithm.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
Angelica. Intuition is processed by the frontal insular cortex. That's a fact.
There is still nothing metaphysical about it. It's just a different algorithm.
Do you really think that what you know compares to the truths that exist? Do you know the whole truth, Ahnimus? You'd better with your unwillingness to keep an open mind.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
Angelica. Intuition is processed by the frontal insular cortex. That's a fact.
There is still nothing metaphysical about it. It's just a different algorithm.
Oh, and did you read the post 41, and the implications about insight? It doesn't sound like it if you are still talking about the brain.
"it's the insight that does it, you see, the insight is not you, right? The insight being supreme intelligence is able to rearrange the very structural matter of the brain which underlies thought so as to remove that message which is causing the confusion, leaving the necessary information and leaving the brain open to perceive reality in a different way."
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
Do you really think that what you know compares to the truths that exist? Do you know the whole truth, Ahnimus? You'd better with your unwillingness to keep an open mind.
Umm, my viewpoints have changed drastically several times in the last few years. When was the last time your viewpoint changed? I've never whitnessed it.
I'm not fighting for some doctrine or personal experience. This is the facts. I'm fighting for truth, if truth appears in some other form, then fine. But I'm just battling static.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
Oh, and did you read the post 41, and the implications about insight? It doesn't sound like it if you are still talking about the brain.
"it's the insight that does it, you see, the insight is not you, right? The insight being supreme intelligence is able to rearrange the very structural matter of the brain which underlies thought so as to remove that message which is causing the confusion, leaving the necessary information and leaving the brain open to perceive reality in a different way."
You totally misinterpret that statement.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
The brain disregards past information to allow for perceiving new information clearly.
It's just spiced up because of the preconception of the author.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
I have an explanation. Firstly, we know that "nothing" is not nothing. Even where no matter exists, dark matter may exist. But we know air is made up of Hyrdogen and Oxygen atoms. So the electrons or photons may create a rift in this or the ether to create an interference. Makes a lot more sense than superposition to me.
But not to the majority of the world's experts on quatum mechanics, or they would be proposing that, rather than superposition, as an explanation for single photon interference patters.
However I will say that I by no means view superposition as proven, just that it is currently the best theory to explain a fascinating paradox. It may well be replaced by a better theory in a few years time, or alternatively new evidence may well be found to support it. I would not be overly surprised either way.
The brain disregards past information to allow for perceiving new information clearly.
It's just spiced up because of the preconception of the author.
Oh, so now the author is spicing up brain info?
How about this:
"Weber: All right. What it would be in touch with, you imply is beyond the nonmanifest, is the source of the nonmanifest. Are you implying that that's the domain of, shall we call it "the sacred"?
Bohm: Well, it has been called the sacred. As we know "holy" is based on the word "whole", it could be called whole, or wholeness.
This "author" was a brilliant physicist, who with help of Karl Pribrim, front running brain/mind specialist developed a holistic theory of the universe. The theory contained the idea of a manifest universe, that sprung from the unmanifest universe--on the physical level. And the idea was that both sprung from a "Source". He's not just supporting your brain stuff Ahnimus--he's talking beyond the physical aspects of life.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
"Weber: All right. What it would be in touch with, you imply is beyond the nonmanifest, is the source of the nonmanifest. Are you implying that that's the domain of, shall we call it "the sacred"?
Bohm: Well, it has been called the sacred. As we know "holy" is based on the word "whole", it could be called whole, or wholeness.
This "author" was a brilliant physicist, who with help of Karl Pribrim, front running brain/mind specialist developed a holistic theory of the universe. The theory contained the idea of a manifest universe, that sprung from the unmanifest universe--on the physical level. And the idea was that both sprung from a "Source". He's not just supporting your brain stuff Ahnimus--he's talking beyond the physical aspects of life.
It's not based on anything but speculation. It's garbage science.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
But not to the majority of the world's experts on quatum mechanics, or they would be proposing that, rather than superposition, as an explanation for single photon interference patters.
However I will say that I by no means view superposition as proven, just that it is currently the best theory to explain a fascinating paradox. It may well be replaced by a better theory in a few years time, or alternatively new evidence may well be found to support it. I would not be overly surprised either way.
Since the beginnings of science, people have attempted to solve the problem of free will using scientific methods. Early scientific thought often pictured the universe as deterministic,[45] and some thinkers believed that it was simply a matter of gathering sufficient information to be able to predict future events with perfect accuracy. This vision entailed that free will must be an illusion.
Modern science, on the other hand, is a mixture of deterministic and stochastic theories.[46] The possibility that the universe at the macroscopic level may be governed by indeterministic laws, as it is at the quantum level, has revived interest in free will among physicists. Quantum mechanics predicts events only in terms of probabilities, casting doubt on whether the universe is deterministic at all. However, if an action is taken due to quantum randomness, this in itself, means that free will is still absent, as such action can not be controllable by someone claimed to posses such free will. Some scientific determinists, following Albert Einstein, believe in so-called "hidden variable theories" that entail that beneath the probabilities of quantum mechanics there are fixed variables (see the EPR paradox).[47] These theories were cast into doubt by the discovery of Bell's Inequality.[47] Robert Kane has capitalized on the success of quantum mechanics and chaos theory in order to defend incompatibilist freedom in his The Significance of Free Will and other writing.[48]
I can assure beyond doubt that "most physicists" don't my the quantum indetermination garbage, and even if they do, it still doesn't prove we have any super intelligence, or super control over those mechanisms. They exist at a level of reality of which we do not exist. They are frivilous arguments. Garbage.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
This is why you and I cannot relate on these subjects. I'm not interested in dogmatic lay-science. I am interested in understanding reality.
Yea me too, but I'm not interested in crazy theories about super-intelligence existing as some ethereal force in the universe that interferes with our normal brain activity. It's bullshit.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
Yea me too, but I'm not interested in crazy theories about super-intelligence existing as some ethereal force in the universe that interferes with our normal brain activity. It's bullshit.
Keep that mind shut to possibilities you cannot understand.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
Keep that mind shut to possibilities you cannot understand.
I'm just not a megalomaniac that needs metaphysical explanations for reality. I like versions of reality that are based on real science and not just speculation. If science proves that God has an uplink to our brains and is the source of intuition, then I'll probably still be skeptical, but I'll be more likely to believe it. However, science doesn't prove that, some megalomaniacs try to say it does, but it just doesn't. It's garbage. Rubbish.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
I can assure beyond doubt that "most physicists" don't my the quantum indetermination garbage, and even if they do, it still doesn't prove we have any super intelligence, or super control over those mechanisms. They exist at a level of reality of which we do not exist. They are frivilous arguments. Garbage.
I think you misunderstand a few of my posts.I am not arguing for or against free will. Personally I am inclined to believe free will is an illusion, but still am a long way from deciding on that. I included the summary of quantum consciousness for people's interest, not because I believe it to be a reflection of reality.
I would be interested in where you get your information from about what physicists believe. I am yet to read a published rejection of the uncertainty principle and all that it entails- but would be very interested if you have one.
As for super intelligence, I have no idea where you figured I believe in any super intelligence or super control mechanisms.
I am merely suggesting that superposition is a legitimate scientific theory, and the best current explanation for the single photon interference pattern. How people choose to use superposition (arguing for quantum consciousness etc.), well, I will judge every idea on its merits.
I think you misunderstand a few of my posts.I am not arguing for or against free will. Personally I am inclined to believe free will is an illusion, but still am a long way from deciding on that. I included the summary of quantum consciousness for people's interest, not because I believe it to be a reflection of reality.
I would be interested in where you get your information from about what physicists believe. I am yet to read a published rejection of the uncertainty principle and all that it entails- but would be very interested if you have one.
As for super intelligence, I have no idea where you figured I believe in any super intelligence or super control mechanisms.
I am merely suggesting that superposition is a legitimate scientific theory, and the best current explanation for the single photon interference pattern. How people choose to use superposition (arguing for quantum consciousness etc.), well, I will judge every idea on its merits.
Well, anyway, superposition hinges on the uncertainty principle and our inability to detect what the particles are actually doing. Superpositioning is merely a stab in the dark at what is going on in the quantum world. Know what uncertainty is? The inability to perfectly measure things, in the case of quantum mechanics, we can't hardly measure it at all. So, I don't see superpositioning as being a valid argument. It's just a shoddy theory IMO.
I necessarily have the passion for writing this, and you have the passion for condemning me; both of us are equally fools, equally the toys of destiny. Your nature is to do harm, mine is to love truth, and to make it public in spite of you. - Voltaire
Well, anyway, superposition hinges on the uncertainty principle and our inability to detect what the particles are actually doing. Superpositioning is merely a stab in the dark at what is going on in the quantum world. Know what uncertainty is? The inability to perfectly measure things, in the case of quantum mechanics, we can't hardly measure it at all. So, I don't see superpositioning as being a valid argument. It's just a shoddy theory IMO.
I guess we might find out eventually. If they can ever get Quantum computers up and running that would be some pretty conclusive evidence of quantum superposition.
Comments
Dude, don't start this again. I was responding to those that won't actually get into the science, they just pick articles that support what they currently believe. I've spent months researching consciousness, I think I have a better handle on it. You want to talk about quantum phsyics, cosmology, neuroscience, psychology, bring it, I've covered them all. But none of you are versed in any of that, so you just talk headlines.
Once, someone came on here with a background in physics, and they agreed with my interpretation of Heissenberg's uncertainty principle. Maybe I do have a better understanding of this subject than you do. You probably know more about Israel than me, but that doesn't mean shit on this thread.
I don't know if I would call QC junk science, although it may not be far off it. My main reason for skepticism is related to the fact that they invoke a lot of speculation into their ideas.
However superposition is not the idea that I would refer to as speculation. It is a well accepted component of the quantum theory, developedby Erwin Schrodinger and demonstrated in Thomas Young's Double Slit Experiment.
No man, the double slit experiment only shows that attempting to detect a particle affects it's behavior. No evidence of superposition. It was speculated that the particles "can be whatever they want" or some shit, like they are every possibility until they collapse. Garbage. They are a wave because the particles interact with each other on a quantum scale, but when you add a quantitative detector it affects the behavior of the particles by overpowering the quantum level determinents.
take a good look
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lie beside me
i just need to say
upon request, here is the leading article. keep in mind that the survey goes more into depth, and that would be too much to paste into this site.
IN A building that looks, from the outside, like the villain's lair in an early James Bond film, a robot moves around. Called Darwin XI, it is the brainchild of Gerald Edelman. The building is the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, and Dr Edelman is one of an eclectic group of researchers—some of them neurologists and some philosophers—who are trying to explain what is, perhaps, the biggest mystery of the human brain: the nature of consciousness. His approach is to build machines run by computer programs that work the way he thinks that brains work, and then see what happens.
Consciousness is the core of an individual's sense of self, yet, paradoxically, it is the most elusive concept in biology. Even framing the questions is difficult. Broadly, though, researchers have taken three approaches. One is the experimental method embraced by Dr Edelman. A second is to look for consciousness directly in the brain. The third is merely to sit and think about the question. Though empirical scientists sometimes scoff at it, this third method is not to be despised. After all, it was by sitting and thinking about some paradoxical results in physics that Albert Einstein was able to break out of the mental mould of classical physics and invent the non-commonsensical but scientifically successful theory of relativity.
Dr Edelman refers to his theory of consciousness as neural Darwinism. It combines two ideas. The first, as he charmingly puts it, is that “neurons which fire together, wire together.” This process of mutual reinforcement provides the selective pressure that is the prerequisite for any Darwinian-based theory: to those neuronal networks that have shall be given, from those that have not, even what little they have shall be taken away. The resulting changes are the physical basis of learning.
The second part of Dr Edelman's theory is an idea he calls re-entrant mapping. The process of learning can be viewed as one by which reality (as perceived by the senses) is transformed into a representation of reality. Mathematically, this transformation is described as mapping. In Dr Edelman's model of the brain, however, there is a second process: the maps themselves are mapped by other groups of neurons. It is this phenomenon of different groups of neurons watching each other that he refers to as re-entrant mapping.
Whether neural Darwinism is truly a theory of consciousness is moot. It may not, for example, fully account for the feeling of actually experiencing things such as emotions that most people would think central to conscious experience. (Philosophers refer to such consciously experienced feelings as qualia.) As a theory of how brains work, though, it seems to have a lot going for it, for Dr Edelman has used it to construct a series of ever more complex robots that behave, in many ways, like animals. The latest, Darwin XI, has a range of senses: vision, hearing, touch and what Dr Edelman refers to as taste (but which is actually sensitivity to the electrical conductivity of what its “taste” organs are in contact with). It also has whiskers.
Darwin XI can do a lot. It can, for example, learn to navigate mazes in search of rewards, in the way that a laboratory rat does. It can develop preferences, thanks to a pleasure centre that generates what Dr Edelmann calls good taste in response to those rewards. And it can forget those preferences if they are no longer rewarding.
Other robots are able to perform similar tricks, but they have to be trained specifically to do so. The computer that runs Darwin XI can work things out for itself. It is loaded with virtual neurons, the initial strength of whose synapses with one another is allocated by a random number generator, and left to get on with things. It does have a bit of pre-ordained neuro-anatomy (in particular, it has been fitted with the equivalent of a hippocampus) but, like the local specialisation in a real cortex observed by people like Dr Kanwisher, most of the specialisation in Darwin XI simply emerges. This happens through the formation of specialised groups of neurons that resemble the specialised locations seen in real brains. The researchers know this because they can track changes in the way the virtual neurons connect to each other.
So is Darwin XI conscious? Well, it cannot speak, so no one can ask it. But the answer probably depends on whether you think a rat is conscious. That illustrates a big part of the problem of consciousness: no one can agree on who has it, let alone what it is. In fact, the questions are linked. There is a general feeling that what is special about humans is to do not with their being clever, but their being conscious in a different way from most other animals.
The inward eye
One feature of human consciousness that students of the field suggest might be unique is an awareness of self. The idea that self-awareness might be specific to humans and a few close relatives resulted from an experiment done three decades ago by Gordon Gallup, who now works at the University of Albany in New York state. This showed that chimpanzees (and, as subsequently emerged, other great apes) share with humans the ability to recognise themselves in a mirror, whereas monkeys and various other reasonably intelligent species, such as dogs, do not. A few species that are not apes have also passed the mirror test, including elephants and dolphins. But most animals fail it.
All the species that have passed have something in common: abnormally large cerebral cortices relative to the rest of their brains. Whether self-awareness simply emerges from a large cortex or whether selection for it necessarily results in one is unclear. Perhaps it is both. What is interesting about Dr Edelman's theory is that awareness of self is built into it. That, in essence, is what re-entrant mapping is.
Such self-awareness is not, however, indivisible. One treatment for serious epilepsy is to cut the corpus callosum and the other nervous connections between the two hemispheres of the brain, which stops the fit passing from one hemisphere to the other. This does not usually affect a person's everyday behaviour, but sometimes the two hemispheres have completely different personalities, and where that happens the individual's behaviour does change—indeed, he ceases to be an individual as the hemispheres fight for control of the body. The conflict often manifests itself in the person's hands, each controlled by a different hemisphere, trying to do opposing things. One hand may try to put on a piece of clothing, for example, while the other tries to remove it.
Tales of mystery and imagination
At first sight such cases seem extraordinary. But they are merely striking illustrations of a broader point: that in the brain nothing is ever quite what it seems, and experience and common sense are little use when formulating theories about the self. Two of the lesion studies mentioned in the introduction to this survey, dealing with the inability to perceive motion and recognise faces, arise from the fact that visual experience, which for those who can see is the dominant form of conscious experience, is a complete fabrication. What is consciously perceived is not a simple mapping of the images that fall on the retina. Instead, the signals from the optic nerves are deconstructed and re-formed in a process so demanding that it involves about a third of the cerebral cortex.
Even those with healthy brains get a hint of this in the form of optical illusions. These are patterns that the image-reconstruction process finds it confusing to deal with. An even more obvious discord between reality and perception is colour. The world is not really coloured, it just looks that way because it is tremendously useful that it should, so the retina has cells that are particularly sensitive to three different wavelengths of light, and the brain weaves the signals from them together to create the phenomenon called colour.
Colours are good examples of qualia—the things that people feel that they are experiencing. Much of the philosophical side of the study of consciousness seeks either to explain qualia or to explain them away. They are, for example, at the heart of the question of dualism. For it is hard to ask what is generating them and what is perceiving them without concluding that the processes are separate.
Daniel Dennett, a doyen among philosophers of consciousness, disparagingly refers to the putative “observing self” in this scenario as a homunculus. He calls the mental stage on which the qualia supposedly act out their play the Cartesian theatre, after Descartes, the philosopher who thought the soul resided in the pineal gland. And he points out that exactly the same problem applies to how the homunculus would perceive its own qualia. Turn the theatre into a cinema, though, and Antonio Damasio quite likes the analogy. His twist is to place the observing self in the film itself, rather than in the audience. That is not a particularly easy idea to grasp, but it does seem to bear some relationship to Dr Edelman's idea of re-entrant mapping.
That something in the brain really is performing the role of an observing self is suggested by the work of Benjamin Libet at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr Libet used electroencephalography to look at brain activity during the process of making simple decisions such as when to move a finger. He showed that the process which leads to the act starts about three-tenths of a second before an individual is consciously aware of it. In other words, the observer is just that: an observer, not a decider. This may explain the feeling that most people have experienced at one time or another of having deliberately done something that they had not actually wanted or intended to.
Though Dr Libet's experiment is almost laughably simple, it pokes a stick in a very deep pond. A feeling of freedom to make conscious choices is at the heart of most people's sense of themselves. Even Freud, who popularised the idea of the unconscious, believed that conscious free-willed thought could override unconscious desires. One way of interpreting Dr Libet's work, though, could be that such free will is, like colour vision, simply a powerful illusion. An actor in a film, perhaps. But an actor reading from somebody else's script.
The truth, unsatisfactory though it is, is that no one really knows. Nor does anyone know where the next breakthrough will come from. Perhaps Dr Edelman, or one of his successors, will build a robot that can describe its own qualia-like experiences. Perhaps neuroanatomy will throw up a surprising, crucial observation. Or perhaps a bored, unregarded clerk will come to the rescue with an insight that dominates 21st-century thinking in the way that relativity dominated the 20th.
Here is the D-Slit experiment as presented in the movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc
Tell me that's not a whole load of speculation.
When done with a normal light source the light and dark patterns can be explained by wave interference.
However the experiment has been replicated so that only a single photon enters the device at a time. The single photon is fired through the double slit and makes a 'spot' on the sensor screen. This is repeated numerous times and the combined effect is recorded.
Because of quantum uncertainty, we cannot know where each single photon will strike the screen, but the combined effect is identical to the interference pattern for a normal light source.
The paradox is this- the photon behaves like a particle when it is fired and when it strikes the screen, but the overall interference pattern means that all of the particles have as a whole, still behaved like a wave.
Superposition is a possible solution. The photon has an associated wave function, and passes through both slits simulteneously (in fact it takes every possible trajectory).
This (to my knowledge) is the only current explanation for the interference pattern achieved through repeating the firing of a single photon through the double slit experiment. If you know of any other current explanation let me know, I would be very interested.
Also, John Wheeler, from the university of texas, has demonstrated the impact of observation on the quantum world through his delayed choice experiment. I will have to look it up again but I will get back to you about that one.
When you've been to Rome you won't really care if people tell you it's impossible and that it does not exist. You've cleverly disguised your own bias from yourself. You know the consciousness drill ahnimus: preconception.
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I have an explanation. Firstly, we know that "nothing" is not nothing. Even where no matter exists, dark matter may exist. But we know air is made up of Hyrdogen and Oxygen atoms. So the electrons or photons may create a rift in this or the ether to create an interference. Makes a lot more sense than superposition to me.
Bohm: "...it's the insight that does it, you see, the insight is not you, right? The insight being supreme intelligence is able to rearrange the very structural matter of the brain which underlies thought so as to remove that message which is causing the confusion, leaving the necessary information and leaving the brain open to perceive reality in a different way. But at present, it's blocked, the conditioning blocks us, because it creates a pressure to maintain what is familiar and old, and makes people frightened to consider anything new. So, reality is limited by the message which has already been deeply impressed upon the brain cells from early childhood. Now the insight actually removes the message which is causing this block.
Weber: And makes us then commensurable with it?
Bohm: It opens thought up to be fresh and new again so that it can operate rationally. One could say that to remain within this block is completely irrational. It's the result of pressure. You adopt the idea that this block is truth because it relieves the pressure of uncertainty.
Weber: I see, but when you see the term "rationally" or "reasonably" shall we be very clear? You don't mean what the Enlightenment meant, or Descarte, you mean something far beyond that.
Bohm: Reason may have two sources. One is the memory, which is mechanical, rather like a computer.
Weber: Combining the right things.
Bohm: Yes, we may have reason from there and that is subject to all the irrational pressures which are also in the memory: emotional pressures, fears, all those experiences and so on, and so that kind of reasoning is very limited. It can very quickly get caught in self-deception.
Weber: And to you that signifies a barrier. That is not what you're speaking of.
Bohm: That's right. But then there may be reason which flows from insight and a reason which is operating as an instrument of intelligence. That's an entirely different kind of reason.
Weber: It implies what? Order, but not mechanical order?
Bohm: Not mechanical order, and not limited by pressure, you see. Let's take a physicist. If he's been subjected to all these courses in quantum mechanics and pressures to think in this way: he'll be approved of if he does, disapproved of if he doesn't, he gets a job if he does, not if he doesn't, and so on and so on, the minute the idea occurs of thinking in another way, there will be an intense pressure which will blot it out. So, therefore, that isn't reason anymore, it's unreason.
Weber: But he'll think it's reason. He'll rationalize it.
Bohm: He'll think it's reason, yes, he'll say it's reason because he's blotted out all this pressure. It all happens very fast and automatically.
Weber: And he's confirmed by the consensus of the physical community?
Bohm: Well, everybody's doing the same thing, you see. They all reinforce each other and they all say it's right, but it's all the same.
Weber: Can we go back for a moment? This possible state that you speak of where intelligence or insight operates because it's unblocked because I've taken away the obstacles....
Bohm: It's insight that's taken away the obstacles, not me, right?
Weber: All right. What it would be in touch with, you imply is beyond the nonmanifest, is the source of the nonmanifest. Are you implying that that's the domain of, shall we call it "the sacred"?
Bohm: Well, it has been called the sacred. As we know "holy" is based on the word "whole", it could be called whole, or wholeness. See, the word "sacred" has unfortunately come to mean something different from its original root, that is to say a sacrifice that you make. Now it's closely connected with the idea of organized religions making sacrifices and things like that, and it has a great many connotations which are unfortunate.
Weber: But you feel the word whole, holy is....?
Bohm: Is a bit better, yes. ...
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Yea, but I personally enjoy keeping my sanity. I won't walk the road to madness.
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
There is still nothing metaphysical about it. It's just a different algorithm.
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
"it's the insight that does it, you see, the insight is not you, right? The insight being supreme intelligence is able to rearrange the very structural matter of the brain which underlies thought so as to remove that message which is causing the confusion, leaving the necessary information and leaving the brain open to perceive reality in a different way."
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
Umm, my viewpoints have changed drastically several times in the last few years. When was the last time your viewpoint changed? I've never whitnessed it.
I'm not fighting for some doctrine or personal experience. This is the facts. I'm fighting for truth, if truth appears in some other form, then fine. But I'm just battling static.
You totally misinterpret that statement.
How do you read it?
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Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
The brain disregards past information to allow for perceiving new information clearly.
It's just spiced up because of the preconception of the author.
But not to the majority of the world's experts on quatum mechanics, or they would be proposing that, rather than superposition, as an explanation for single photon interference patters.
However I will say that I by no means view superposition as proven, just that it is currently the best theory to explain a fascinating paradox. It may well be replaced by a better theory in a few years time, or alternatively new evidence may well be found to support it. I would not be overly surprised either way.
How about this:
"Weber: All right. What it would be in touch with, you imply is beyond the nonmanifest, is the source of the nonmanifest. Are you implying that that's the domain of, shall we call it "the sacred"?
Bohm: Well, it has been called the sacred. As we know "holy" is based on the word "whole", it could be called whole, or wholeness.
This "author" was a brilliant physicist, who with help of Karl Pribrim, front running brain/mind specialist developed a holistic theory of the universe. The theory contained the idea of a manifest universe, that sprung from the unmanifest universe--on the physical level. And the idea was that both sprung from a "Source". He's not just supporting your brain stuff Ahnimus--he's talking beyond the physical aspects of life.
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It's not based on anything but speculation. It's garbage science.
This is just a short clipping from wikipedia
I can assure beyond doubt that "most physicists" don't my the quantum indetermination garbage, and even if they do, it still doesn't prove we have any super intelligence, or super control over those mechanisms. They exist at a level of reality of which we do not exist. They are frivilous arguments. Garbage.
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Yea me too, but I'm not interested in crazy theories about super-intelligence existing as some ethereal force in the universe that interferes with our normal brain activity. It's bullshit.
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
I'm just not a megalomaniac that needs metaphysical explanations for reality. I like versions of reality that are based on real science and not just speculation. If science proves that God has an uplink to our brains and is the source of intuition, then I'll probably still be skeptical, but I'll be more likely to believe it. However, science doesn't prove that, some megalomaniacs try to say it does, but it just doesn't. It's garbage. Rubbish.
I think you misunderstand a few of my posts.I am not arguing for or against free will. Personally I am inclined to believe free will is an illusion, but still am a long way from deciding on that. I included the summary of quantum consciousness for people's interest, not because I believe it to be a reflection of reality.
I would be interested in where you get your information from about what physicists believe. I am yet to read a published rejection of the uncertainty principle and all that it entails- but would be very interested if you have one.
As for super intelligence, I have no idea where you figured I believe in any super intelligence or super control mechanisms.
I am merely suggesting that superposition is a legitimate scientific theory, and the best current explanation for the single photon interference pattern. How people choose to use superposition (arguing for quantum consciousness etc.), well, I will judge every idea on its merits.
Well, anyway, superposition hinges on the uncertainty principle and our inability to detect what the particles are actually doing. Superpositioning is merely a stab in the dark at what is going on in the quantum world. Know what uncertainty is? The inability to perfectly measure things, in the case of quantum mechanics, we can't hardly measure it at all. So, I don't see superpositioning as being a valid argument. It's just a shoddy theory IMO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
I guess we might find out eventually. If they can ever get Quantum computers up and running that would be some pretty conclusive evidence of quantum superposition.