I personally find scientific explanations to be very beautiful and full. There is more in any scientific theory than any other explanations. The fullness is there, the beauty is there. Maybe it's all in the interpretation.
Well there are times when scientific explanation is very comforting and certainly does assist in a better understanding, I just haven't found it to be in all cases. And I'm fairly certain that would always be the case for me. Only because my thinking is that if I completely, totally and utterly believe in science over all else, I may as well be touting religion. I guess I look at things as they come up and try to find out as much as I can in an effort to understand and if the scientific explanation makes sense to me, then I would go with it and if a more spiritual explanation seems to cover it better so be it. But all things change and we learn new things every day and how we interpret things changes as we gain knowledge so who knows how I will feel about these things, souls and GOD and spirituality and the like 10 or even 20 years from now? Yes, I think it is in the interpretation. And I can see how you would take comfort from the science. Perhaps it's just me? I take comfort in very little.
That's incorrect. Check out Nobel Laureate in theoretical physics Murray Gell-Mann. One of many theoretical physicists who wholely disagree with Talbot.
By the way Talbot is a science-fiction writer, not a physicist.
So because one theoretical physicist has disagreed with Talbot, that automatically means he must be wrong?
http://www.centerforsacredsciences.org/teachings/science.html
The fact that quantum physics has rendered the materialist paradigm scientifically untenable means that an otherwise insurmountable barrier to a rapprochement between science and religion (at least in its mystical aspect) has been removed. And while quantum physics does not "prove" mystical teachings (as some overly eager enthusiasts have claimed), the fundamental reality which it describes is not at all incompatible with the fundamental reality testified to by the mystics.
One example of this can be seen in the similarity between the modes of description which both scientists and mystics have been forced to adopt. In order to give a complete account of the properties of physical systems, quantum physicists have had to resort to a paradoxical form of expression called complementarity. For instance, sub-atomic phenomena can be thought of both as "waves" and as "particles." As Heisenberg points out, however, these two concepts are:
...mutually exclusive, because a certain thing cannot at the same time be a particle (i.e., a substance confined to a very small volume) and a wave (i.e., a field spread out over a large space), but the two[taken together] complement each other.8
Likewise, attempts by mystics to communicate what their spiritual practices have disclosed always result in one of those paradoxical statements for which mystics have become so famous. To give but one example, listen to the way the great Sufi shaykh, Ibn `Arabi, characterizes what he calls the "Reality of realities:"
If you say that this thing is the [temporal] Universe, you are right. If you say that it is God who is eternal, you are right. If you say that it is neither the Universe nor God but is something conveying some additional meaning, you are right. All these views are correct, for it is the whole comprising the eternal and the temporal.9
An even more striking example of how science's and mysticism's perceptions of reality intersect concerns the relationship between subject and object. For quantum physics, deciding where one begins and the other ends presents something of a quandary. Here is how physicist-mathematician, John S. Bell, sums up the problem:
The subject-object distinction is indeed at the very root of the unease that many people feel in connection with quantum mechanics. Some such distinction is dictated by the postulates of the theory, but exactly where or when to make it is not prescribed.
So... where does he say anything spiritual or anything about a holographic universe. What he talks about there is nothing of the sort.
If you want to find out, you can do a search on the board for "David Bohm". I've quoted a ton of stuff on him here in the past. You scoffed at the quotes I've posted from this well-known physicist and man-who-hung-out-with-Einstein-and-discussed-theory-with-him. You've dismissed him because of the spiritual things he's said. Besides on the board, there is lots to read about him elsewhere. I'm sure if you're interested, you'll find it.
His big theory is about the "holomovement"--which is how he perceives all that we see and know about. And he co-developed a holographic model of the brain.
"Bohm also made significant theoretical contributions to neuropsychology and the development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain" ~wikipedia
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
Soul classically implies a metaphysical thing that transcends the body.
not really. soul = psuche = breathe of life.... our being, who we are, the act of us living, thinking, analyzing, feeling, desiring are all elements that compose a soul. it's nothing metaphysical.
i think, for the most part, people confuse attributes of spirit with souls. but these two are completely separate forms. a spirit is the metaphysical part of a being.... that's the part we can't "prove" even exists.
This isn't the land of opportunity, it's the land of competition.
If you want to find out, you can do a search on the board for "David Bohm". I've quoted a ton of stuff on him here in the past. You scoffed at the quotes I've posted from this well-known physicist and man-who-hung-out-with-Einstein-and-discussed-theory-with-him. You've dismissed him because of the spiritual things he's said. Besides on the board, there is lots to read about him elsewhere. I'm sure if you're interested, you'll find it.
His big theory is about the "holomovement"--which is how he perceives all that we see and know about. And he co-developed a holographic model of the brain.
"Bohm also made significant theoretical contributions to neuropsychology and the development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain" ~wikipedia
So this psychologist and this physicist come up with a model of human cognition. Yet, I don't read it in books about neuroscience.
It's most likely wrong. The best description of observation and predictor is a vector coding model
1.5 A chief benefit of PDP models is the power of representing information in combinations of activities of many units. The basic idea is that a dozen detector cells considered separately can encode only 12 states, for example, while 12 binary units considered in combination can detect 2 to the 12th power or 4096 states. As the number of units escalates to brain proportions, the advantages of combinatoric coding become overwhelming. Though this idea has been around for a long time (i.e., Bridgeman, 1971), it was neglected in the enthusiasm for detectors of lines, edges, faces, and even hands. The book points out how vector coding can combine combinatoric efficiency with distributed processing to retrieve separate messages from overlapping sets of simulated neurons. The idea is not a new one; it was standard fare for Cornell undergraduates in the mid-1960s, and the mathematics is a first cousin of the orthogonal polynomials known to every student of statistics. But here distributed coding is combined with powerful simulation techniques and with architectures that make the ideas realizable.
1.6 The new approach distinguishes several types of distributed codes, with vector coding for instance being useful in some situations and vector averaging in others. The approach can make sense of the myriad of different neural responses, each neuron seemingly having its own ``personality'' of response profile, taking combinatoric advantage of the diversity to create distinct vector codes for every possible situation. The approach is causing a re-evaluation of data that had been uninterpretable under the old feature detector scheme, but fit well with vector coding (Bridgeman, 1992).
Part of the problem I see with the holonomic brain theory is the same as CEMI Field Theory. The "waves" or "fields" aren't strong enough to stimulate closed junctions. It also doesn't explain experimental data, or offer any further research.
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
Unless as I thought by your quotes, he is really describing PDP parallel distributed processing. Then it's not such a fanciful theory. Then it says nothing about souls or spirits.
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
So this psychologist and this physicist come up with a model of human cognition. Yet, I don't read it in books about neuroscience.
Karl H. Pribram is far more than a psychologist--he's a board certified neurosurgeon, and also a professor of psychology and psychiatry.
"he did pioneering work on defineing the limbic systems, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes and the classical motor cortex." ~wikipedia
"Karl Pribram, Ph.D., accepted the first Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Prize at Charles University in Prague on Tuesday. Pribram is a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Georgetown and is world-famous for his achievements in neuroscience."http://www.katherineneville.com/karl_havel_prize.htm
What you read in books is not the guide of what exists as valid theory. Instead, it indicates your subjective awareness.
You seem to practice the "one is right, others are wrong" mentality. I personally understand that various "maps"/theories regarding the same phenomena can exist side by side, and do.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
Unless as I thought by your quotes, he is really describing PDP parallel distributed processing. Then it's not such a fanciful theory. Then it says nothing about souls or spirits.
'Bohm believes that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in the generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of unfoldment in all matter, including supposedly "inanimate" matter such as electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a "protointelligence" in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations of Bohm's ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain "could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness. The separation of the two -- matter and spirit -- is an abstraction. The ground is always one." 'http://www.theosophy-nw.org/theosnw/science/prat-boh.htm
"The implicate order represents the proposal of a general metaphysical concept in terms of which it is claimed that matter and consciousness might both be understood, in the sense that it is proposed that both matter and consciousness: (i) enfold the structure of the whole within each region, and (ii) involve continuous processes of enfoldment and unfoldment." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_Explicate_Order
"Many, along with Bohm himself, have seen strong connections between his ideas and ideas from the East. There are particularly strong connections to Buddhism, for which Einstein also shared sympathy." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_Explicate_Order
"I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment...."
~ David Bohm: "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" http://www.david-bohm.net/
"Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing." http://www.david-bohm.net/
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
MISHLOVE: To the average layman, why would they be interested in this? Is there some significance to people in their everyday lives, or in their workaday worlds, in the business of life?
PRIBRAM: Sure, and this is the critical thing -- that if indeed we're right that these quantum-like phenomena, or the rules of quantum mechanics, apply all the way through to our psychological processes, to what's going on in the nervous system -- then we have an explanation perhaps, certainly we have a parallel, to the kind of experiences that people have called spiritual experiences. Because the descriptions you get with spiritual experiences seem to parallel the descriptions of quantum physics. That's why Fritjof Capra wrote The Tao of Physics, why we have The Dancing Wu Li Masters, and all of this sort of thing that's come along. And in fact Bohr and Heisenberg already knew; Schroedinger talked about the Upanishads, and Bohr used the yin and yang as his symbol. Because the conceptions that grew out of watching the quantum level -- and therefore now the neurological and psychophysical level, now that it's a psychological level as well -- seem to have a great deal in common with our spiritual experience. Now what do I mean by spiritual experience? You talked about mental activity, calling it the mind. That aspect of mental activity, which is very human -- it may be true of other species as well, but we don't know -- but in human endeavor many of us at least seem to need to get in contact with larger issues, whether they're cosmology, or some kind of biological larger issue, or a social one, or it's formalized in some kind of religious activity. But we want to belong. And that is what I define as the spiritual aspects of man's nature.
You know, I really liked this interview, except this part of it. It seems to me this is a non sequitur. At the same time he is only defining "spiritual experience" as "want to belong" in some "formalized... religious activity".
To me, that isn't spiritual, that's social. How does the distributed processing of the brain, even if it's computationally similar to quantum fluctuations, how does that mean we have "spirits"?
I think they are taking these computational methods that hint of past principles like "Yin Yan" and make the assumption that proves all of chinese philosophy, or at least the parts chosen by Pribram.
I just don't see the connection. Maybe he means something completely different by spirituality. But it does not follow from computational models that spirits exist, and in this interview he only suggests that it might be true. He's not as sure of it as you are.
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
So, again, the bottom line is that "The Holographic Universe" is written about the Holographic model of well-known physicist, David Bohm.
Fine, but that doesn't make it right.
What does it explain besides religious experience? Which I argue, it doesn't explain very well and other, better, explanations exist, especially since the work of Persinger.
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
GELL-MANN: Yes, it's confused them. For instance, one very distinguished physicist, student of quantum mechanics, has said that he doesn't like any such approach, because if it were right, then you should be encouraged to play Russian roulette for high stakes, since in one of the equally real worlds you would win. Well, it's kind of silly, because we experience, of course, at every branching only one branch, and to talk about the others being real is confusing.
MISHLOVE: But these confusions and paradoxes seem to come up everywhere in quantum physics.
GELL-MANN: Well, I don't think it's necessary. I think one can try to reduce the amount of confusion, and also to reduce the amount of nonsense that's talked about quantum mechanics. I have a chapter in my book called "Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle," because people have talked a great deal of nonsense about quantum mechanics.
MISHLOVE: But these people, as I understand it, are some of the great physicists. You mentioned Niels Bohr.
GELL-MANN: I didn't say that Niels Bohr had said anything foolish. I said that his Copenhagen interpretation may now be regarded as partial and approximate, but not wrong.
MISHLOVE: I understand that.
GELL-MANN: And not foolish, either.
MISHLOVE: I certainly didn't mean to imply that. I think we would agree that he's one of the founders of quantum physics, and he's universally honored. But didn't he say that if you look at quantum physics and you don't get dizzy by it, you don't understand it?
GELL-MANN: Let's see if I can translate the sentence carefully. If someone says that he can think or talk about quantum physics without becoming dizzy, that shows only that he has not understood anything whatever about it.
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
What does it explain besides religious experience? Which I argue, it doesn't explain very well and other, better, explanations exist, especially since the work of Persinger.
If you really want to know, there's a ton of stuff on the internet on the Holographic model. You see what you want to see, and I don't think this fits your map of the world, so you'll dismiss it, and that's okay. His model emerged out of the problems in quantum physics, not spirituality issues. But again, you're not really looking to know.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
MISHLOVE: The paradox here, if I understand it, is that in quantum theory the probabilistic event is sort of viewed as a probability function, or sometimes I've even heard the term a probability cloud. It's as if both true and false are occurring at the same time.
GELL-MANN: Yes, and that's what I think is very misleading, and my colleagues think is very misleading. In the Schroedinger cat story, for example, the part I told is very reasonable and simply illustrates that a probabilistic quantum event can be coupled to some classical change in the heavy, macroscopic objects around us. That's fine. But the other thing people say is, "Well, suppose the cat is in a box, and the quantum event occurs, but you don't know which way it went, and the cat is dead if it went one way and alive if it went the other, and so until you open the box and see, well, the cat is in some sort of funny quantum-mechanical, coherent mixture of being dead and being alive. That's very strange and paradoxical and weird, and so on." It isn't really true.
MISHLOVE: That was the point Schroedinger tried to make.
GELL-MANN: Well, I don't know exactly what he was after, but it's a point that people have belabored after Schroedinger, and I think it's not really a very good way to look at it, because a live cat certainly is in interaction with its environment. It's not isolated.
MISHLOVE: That's right.
GELL-MANN: Even the dead cat is in interaction with its environment. It's decaying, emanating various chemicals. The live cat of course is breathing and in contact with its environment. Even if the cat is in a box, the box is in contact with the environment. It's being hit by photons from elsewhere in the universe. It's radiating a certain number of photons because it's not at absolute zero; if it were at absolute zero it would certainly not contain a live cat. And so on and so forth. Therefore, whatever it is that we're talking about, it's in interaction with other things, and those other things are being averaged over and integrated over and not seen. And under those conditions, the two situations, alive and dead, decohere, as we say. There is no interference between them; they are simply alternatives -- just like the alternatives at the race track when either one horse wins or another horse wins; there's nothing mysterious or peculiar about it. And when you open the box it's no different from the experience that you may actually have of going to the airport and accepting a cat box and not knowing whether the poor animal is alive or dead until you open the box. It's exactly the same. The two situations are on different branches of history. They are not coherent with each other because of the interaction with the rest of the world that's averaged over.
MISHLOVE: This is very deep material. I can't claim to understand everything that you've said, Dr. Gell-Mann, but it seems as if you're saying the environment itself is affecting the situation.
GELL-MANN: Well, that's how the alternatives become decoherent with one another.
MISHLOVE: What does decoherent mean? We only have a minute now.
GELL-MANN: It means that you can assign a probability to each alternative, and you don't have interference terms that prevent you from assigning those probabilities. In other words, it means that the situation is no different from that at the race track.
MISHLOVE: OK, and a quantum system is coherent, which means you can't separate it out.
GELL-MANN: If you treat a system in too much detail -- too fine-grained a history -- then you will end up with these interference problems, and you cannot assign probabilities to such fine-grained histories, and you mustn't do so. You cannot discuss them as alternatives.
MISHLOVE: I suppose in summary one might say that the fine-grained, quantum world is really very, very different from the coarse world.
GELL-MANN: And the coarse world is the only one that can be dealt with, and the only one that is dealt with. The other one is just in the background.
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
If you really want to know, there's a ton of stuff on the internet on the Holographic model. You see what you want to see, and I don't think this fits your map of the world, so you'll dismiss it, and that's okay. His model emerged out of the problems in quantum physics, not spirituality issues. But again, you're not really looking to know.
I'm just interpreting it completely different from you.
He didn't define "spiritual experience" as "integrated oneness with the universe" he defined it as "want to belong", in the interview he even says "secretion of the pineal gland" which is a physical property, if you did not have a pineal gland, you wouldn't have the experience. He is not ever describing metaphysics, but a computational model called parallel distributed processing
But it seems he is making the suggestion that because QM might be similar mathematically that consciousness might also "emerge" from that. Or some other fanciful theory, but he's not saying it's an absolute fact, sounds like speculation. Maybe you are reading what you want to read, or maybe you really don't understand the subject matter.
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'm just interpreting it completely different from you.
He didn't define "spiritual experience" as "integrated oneness with the universe" he defined it as "want to belong", in the interview he even says "secretion of the pineal gland" which is a physical property, if you did not have a pineal gland, you wouldn't have the experience. He is not ever describing metaphysics, but a computational model called parallel distributed processing
But it seems he is making the suggestion that because QM might be similar mathematically that consciousness might also "emerge" from that. Or some other fanciful theory, but he's not saying it's an absolute fact, sounds like speculation. Maybe you are reading what you want to read, or maybe you really don't understand the subject matter.
You've definitely not read much of this man's stuff, huh? As I say, I've quoted David Bohm's own words from extensive interviews all over this forum. It's there for those who choose to read it. And all over the internet.
For the record, even those who believe in chakra systems believe one of the chakras is correlated to the pineal gland. Any holistic theory must include the physical. That does not minimize the spiritual aspects.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
You've definitely not read much of this man's stuff, huh? As I say, I've quoted David Bohm's own words from extensive interviews all over this forum. It's there for those who choose to read it. And all over the internet.
For the record, even those who believe in chakra systems believe one of the chakras is correlated to the pineal gland. Any holistic theory must include the physical. That does not minimize the spiritual aspects.
The problem is in how you define "spiritual". Clearly Pribram hasn't defined it as anything mystical or metaphysical. In-fact, he refers to the mind-brain dichotomy as being false.
PRIBRAM: Well, I don't like the term the mind, because it reifies -- that means it makes a thing of -- something that's a process. We pay attention, we see, we hear. Those are all mental processes, mental activities. But there isn't a thing called the mind. There might be something you want to call yourself, but the mind sort of makes something concrete out of something that's very multifaceted
In addition, Pribram is not the authority on consciousness.
In fact there have been many theories published which are at least as general and non-specific as the present model, including Selfridge's Pandemonium theory, Triesman's Feature Integration Theory, Neisser's Iconic Memory Theory, Thorndyke's Schemas concept, Rosch's Prototype theory of memory, Kosslyn's theory of mental imagery, Atkinson & Schiffrin's model of memory, Gibson's theory of Direct Perception, Biederman's Geon theory, Crick's theory of quantum consciousness, Pribram's holographic theory, De Valois' Fourier theory, McClelland's Interactive Activation Model, Kirkpatrick's Simulated Annealing concept, McClelland's PDP approach, etc. While some of these models do make specific psychophysical predictions, their actual mechanism of operation are often described in the most vague and general terms. Nevertheless, all of these theories have been rightfully published in the literature even in the absence of either direct neurophysiological or psychophysical evidence, or complete mathematical specification (and sometimes both), because until the essential principles of operation of the brain have been established beyond a doubt, such theories enrich the discussion of possible principles and mechanisms of neurocomputation.
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
Gary Cottrell's face recognition ANN uses "holonic" imagery. This work by Pribram reminded me of it. I think that's more or less the aplication of Pribram's work. It relates to how the brain represents information. That is all.
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 problem is in how you define "spiritual". Clearly Pribram hasn't defined it as anything mystical or metaphysical. In-fact, he refers to the mind-brain dichotomy as being false.
Do you recall that I believe such duality is false, too?
Yes, I don't recall whether either of them use terms like spiritual, however, Bohm describes basically the same stuff I "see"--the implicate or "subtle" order wherein "reality" unfolds from. And while it's invisible, it's still "physical". And then he goes farther to talk about the levels that unfold beyond that, which are absolutely unreal and not of this world. And these levels "inform" our reality. And when our thinking is so unrealistic, through "insight" we can get insights into the real reality that most people are completely out of touch with.
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
Gary Cottrell's face recognition ANN uses "holonic" imagery. This work by Pribram reminded me of it. I think that's more or less the aplication of Pribram's work. It relates to how the brain represents information. That is all.
Again, I don't take your subjective awareness as a gauge of what exists "out there".
"The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth." ~ Niels Bohr
Collaborating with quantum physicist David Bohm from the University of London, Pribram began to develop the Holographic Brain Theory in the late 1960s. His famous model of the brain contrasted with the conventional model of the brain, which suggested that the brain stores memory in one location. With his Holographic model, however, Pribram suggested that memory is distributed throughout the brain. His theory is based on the invention of holography by Dr. Dennis Gabor, a physicist who received the 1971 Nobel Prize in physics for his invention and development of the holographic method. Holography is the science that underlies the production of a hologram: a three-dimensional image that is recorded and stored for retrieval.
Pribram's theory suggests that the memories stored throughout the brain are initially received as holograms and then coded for storage. This means the brain acts much like a camera: Like the lens of your eye, the lens of a camera focuses the light reflected from the object to create an image; later, after you download (or print) your photos, you determine what the object is. Your retina, the neural cells in the back of the eye, performs a Fourier transformation that maps point spread functions. This Fourier transformation taking place in the brain compresses the information the lens transmits, just as a camera compresses a captured image for storage.
Objects are seen because of the light that they reflect. The eye focuses that light from its "blurry" state, into an image that you can recognize and thus give meaning. The brain establishes initial identification based on information gathered from the physical environment. Not unlike the Hollywood Blockbuster "The Matrix " with Keanu Reeves, the world that we recognize is called into question - but Pribram is not the character Morpheus, suggesting that people can dodge bullets or fly if you "free your mind." However, he does pose the idea of two realities - the world of the blur (the images we see without focusing) and the world of the focused images (the world that we perceive).
The input of images into the brain, and their initial identification, creates memories, like photos in an album. Our brain codes these memories for interpretation. Pribram suggests that the brain turns what we experience into signs and symbols, also known as codes. In 1970, in his lecture, "What Makes Man Human," about the evolution of the human brain, Pribram stated that humans code and recode all the time, even for profit - that all our work and artistic endeavors are a product of coding and our perception of the environment around us. For example, artists may see a fruit basket and draw it in a way that fits their interpretation of what is in the fruit basket and what the fruit basket represents to them. A fruit basket may be just a fruit basket, but to you it may mean something more. Or a photo of a woman dressed in red may provide a good memory for some and a bad memory for others.
I guess I'm still missing the part where Pribram says that there are metaphysical spirits that transcend the human body and integrate into the oneness of the universe, or however the babble goes.
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
Do you recall that I believe such duality is false, too?
Yes, I don't recall whether either of them use terms like spiritual, however, Bohm describes basically the same stuff I "see"--the implicate or "subtle" order wherein "reality" unfolds from. And while it's invisible, it's still "physical". And then he goes farther to talk about the levels that unfold beyond that, which are absolutely unreal and not of this world. And these levels "inform" our reality. And when our thinking is so unrealistic, through "insight" we can get insights into the real reality that most people are completely out of touch with.
Or you can get a completely deluded view of reality.
Are you aware that all human observations depend on reflectivity of the EM spectrum? If an object does not reflect X-Ray, UV, etc... then we cannot see it and therefor will never know that it exists, unless like black-holes we observe the activity of light affected by the black-hole. That is going to be extremely difficult for elementary particles. Which is why we have theoretical physics, string theory, quantum mechanics, etc..
You must be very confident in your brain to think that you can answer the biggest questions of all human history simply by asking yourself. You must be God Angelica!.
Bohm's description, and Pribram's theories are nothing of the sort. Those are Talbot's interpretations and you cleave to them. You aren't talking fact, you are talking speculation and I haven't seen a single bit of evidence supporting your or Talbot's claims.
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
Color Opponent Cells, you have 3 of them and 3 receptors (R,G,B) I think I've shown this before. If each axis has 20 different positions, then the total possible combinations - in a vector coding scheme - is approx. 10,000. Which is coherent with the total number of colors we can actually see.
That theory works out and this is the kind of distributed processing that Pribram describes. How anyone gets anything else out of that is beyond me. Wishful thinking I think.
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
When she can tell me the role the hippocampus plays in the retrieval of spatial memory. Then maybe I'll think she takes this stuff as seriously as I do. Until then, it all seems rather unsophisticated 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
I dont think anyone is out to prove souls or spirits to you here Ahnimus. A lot of questions are asked that neither you or the scientists you quote have a satisfacory explanation of. Angelica is furthermore illustrating that scientists arent united over any theories or explanations on the issues. And that she can posit other scientists other than your favoured ones to prove it.
As little as anyone here can prove souls/spirituality, can you disprove them. You can say they are unlikely, not necessary and unprobable. But that is not proof either. That is your position and belief on the subject.
And for a man so opposed to values, will and other such "delusions" you certainly hold a very value-based position a lot of the time. ie. your thoughts on criminology.
Peace
Dan
"YOU [humans] NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?" - Death
"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." - Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
I dont think anyone is out to prove souls or spirits to you here Ahnimus. A lot of questions are asked that neither you or the scientists you quote have a satisfacory explanation of. Angelica is furthermore illustrating that scientists arent united over any theories or explanations on the issues. And that she can posit other scientists other than your favoured ones to prove it.
As little as anyone here can prove souls/spirituality, can you disprove them. You can say they are unlikely, not necessary and unprobable. But that is not proof either. That is your position and belief on the subject.
And for a man so opposed to values, will and other such "delusions" you certainly hold a very value-based position a lot of the time. ie. your thoughts on criminology.
Peace
Dan
I'm not opposed to values, I'm opposed to the value given to values.
Keep in mind that I'm not opposed to mysticism, it would be great if we had eternal souls or spirits. Why wouldn't I want that?
It's not a matter of want though, because I don't value an ought more than an is. I'm critical of the steps taken to come to these conclusions. It seems that the process goes like this "Bohr was a physicist. Bohr had a Yin Yan. Therefor Chinese Philosophy is true." Therein lies my distaste for these theories.
The burden of proof is typically on the person making the knowledge claim. Byrnzie suggested that "physicists have declared souls/spirits exist", his reference was Michael C Talbot's The Holographic Universe which was a queue for Angelica to jump in with quotes from Pribram and Bohm. The impression is that Byrnzie and Angelica believe that Pribram and Bohm's work as interpreted by Talbot proves the existence of souls/spirits.
I'm challenging a knowledge claim. That is the nature of progress. Progress does not arise from the acceptance of all competing theories. Or else, we would still be talking about the invisible matter that escapes wood when it burns (Phlogiston). That theory was replaced by oxidation, which better describes what is happening, predicts rusting and fire and is coherent with observational evidence.
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
When she can tell me the role the hippocampus plays in the retrieval of spatial memory. Then maybe I'll think she takes this stuff as seriously as I do. Until then, it all seems rather unsophisticated to me.
Comments
*~You're IT Bert!~*
Hold on to the thread
The currents will shift
jesus is dead too, but he got a religion. you just gotta believe in miracles ryan.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
So because one theoretical physicist has disagreed with Talbot, that automatically means he must be wrong?
The fact that quantum physics has rendered the materialist paradigm scientifically untenable means that an otherwise insurmountable barrier to a rapprochement between science and religion (at least in its mystical aspect) has been removed. And while quantum physics does not "prove" mystical teachings (as some overly eager enthusiasts have claimed), the fundamental reality which it describes is not at all incompatible with the fundamental reality testified to by the mystics.
One example of this can be seen in the similarity between the modes of description which both scientists and mystics have been forced to adopt. In order to give a complete account of the properties of physical systems, quantum physicists have had to resort to a paradoxical form of expression called complementarity. For instance, sub-atomic phenomena can be thought of both as "waves" and as "particles." As Heisenberg points out, however, these two concepts are:
...mutually exclusive, because a certain thing cannot at the same time be a particle (i.e., a substance confined to a very small volume) and a wave (i.e., a field spread out over a large space), but the two[taken together] complement each other.8
Likewise, attempts by mystics to communicate what their spiritual practices have disclosed always result in one of those paradoxical statements for which mystics have become so famous. To give but one example, listen to the way the great Sufi shaykh, Ibn `Arabi, characterizes what he calls the "Reality of realities:"
If you say that this thing is the [temporal] Universe, you are right. If you say that it is God who is eternal, you are right. If you say that it is neither the Universe nor God but is something conveying some additional meaning, you are right. All these views are correct, for it is the whole comprising the eternal and the temporal.9
An even more striking example of how science's and mysticism's perceptions of reality intersect concerns the relationship between subject and object. For quantum physics, deciding where one begins and the other ends presents something of a quandary. Here is how physicist-mathematician, John S. Bell, sums up the problem:
The subject-object distinction is indeed at the very root of the unease that many people feel in connection with quantum mechanics. Some such distinction is dictated by the postulates of the theory, but exactly where or when to make it is not prescribed.
His big theory is about the "holomovement"--which is how he perceives all that we see and know about. And he co-developed a holographic model of the brain.
"Bohm also made significant theoretical contributions to neuropsychology and the development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain" ~wikipedia
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
i think, for the most part, people confuse attributes of spirit with souls. but these two are completely separate forms. a spirit is the metaphysical part of a being.... that's the part we can't "prove" even exists.
So this psychologist and this physicist come up with a model of human cognition. Yet, I don't read it in books about neuroscience.
It's most likely wrong. The best description of observation and predictor is a vector coding model
Part of the problem I see with the holonomic brain theory is the same as CEMI Field Theory. The "waves" or "fields" aren't strong enough to stimulate closed junctions. It also doesn't explain experimental data, or offer any further research.
"he did pioneering work on defineing the limbic systems, the relationship of the frontal cortex to the limbic system, the sensory specific "association" cortex of the parietal and temporal lobes and the classical motor cortex." ~wikipedia
"Karl Pribram, Ph.D., accepted the first Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Prize at Charles University in Prague on Tuesday. Pribram is a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Georgetown and is world-famous for his achievements in neuroscience." http://www.katherineneville.com/karl_havel_prize.htm
What you read in books is not the guide of what exists as valid theory. Instead, it indicates your subjective awareness.
You seem to practice the "one is right, others are wrong" mentality. I personally understand that various "maps"/theories regarding the same phenomena can exist side by side, and do.
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
"The implicate order represents the proposal of a general metaphysical concept in terms of which it is claimed that matter and consciousness might both be understood, in the sense that it is proposed that both matter and consciousness: (i) enfold the structure of the whole within each region, and (ii) involve continuous processes of enfoldment and unfoldment." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_Explicate_Order
"Many, along with Bohm himself, have seen strong connections between his ideas and ideas from the East. There are particularly strong connections to Buddhism, for which Einstein also shared sympathy." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_Explicate_Order
"I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment...."
~ David Bohm: "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" http://www.david-bohm.net/
"Bohm suggests that the whole universe can be thought of as a kind of giant, flowing hologram, or holomovement, in which a total order is contained, in some implicit sense, in each region of space and time. The explicate order is a projection from higher dimensional levels of reality, and the apparent stability and solidity of the objects and entities composing it are generated and sustained by a ceaseless process of enfoldment and unfoldment, for subatomic particles are constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallizing."
http://www.david-bohm.net/
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
You know, I really liked this interview, except this part of it. It seems to me this is a non sequitur. At the same time he is only defining "spiritual experience" as "want to belong" in some "formalized... religious activity".
To me, that isn't spiritual, that's social. How does the distributed processing of the brain, even if it's computationally similar to quantum fluctuations, how does that mean we have "spirits"?
I think they are taking these computational methods that hint of past principles like "Yin Yan" and make the assumption that proves all of chinese philosophy, or at least the parts chosen by Pribram.
I just don't see the connection. Maybe he means something completely different by spirituality. But it does not follow from computational models that spirits exist, and in this interview he only suggests that it might be true. He's not as sure of it as you are.
Here is another great Mishlove interview with a completely different prespective from a Nobel Laureate in theoretical physics.
http://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/gell1.htm
Fine, but that doesn't make it right.
What does it explain besides religious experience? Which I argue, it doesn't explain very well and other, better, explanations exist, especially since the work of Persinger.
http://www.williamjames.com/transcripts/gell1.htm
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
GELL-MANN: Yes, and that's what I think is very misleading, and my colleagues think is very misleading. In the Schroedinger cat story, for example, the part I told is very reasonable and simply illustrates that a probabilistic quantum event can be coupled to some classical change in the heavy, macroscopic objects around us. That's fine. But the other thing people say is, "Well, suppose the cat is in a box, and the quantum event occurs, but you don't know which way it went, and the cat is dead if it went one way and alive if it went the other, and so until you open the box and see, well, the cat is in some sort of funny quantum-mechanical, coherent mixture of being dead and being alive. That's very strange and paradoxical and weird, and so on." It isn't really true.
MISHLOVE: That was the point Schroedinger tried to make.
GELL-MANN: Well, I don't know exactly what he was after, but it's a point that people have belabored after Schroedinger, and I think it's not really a very good way to look at it, because a live cat certainly is in interaction with its environment. It's not isolated.
MISHLOVE: That's right.
GELL-MANN: Even the dead cat is in interaction with its environment. It's decaying, emanating various chemicals. The live cat of course is breathing and in contact with its environment. Even if the cat is in a box, the box is in contact with the environment. It's being hit by photons from elsewhere in the universe. It's radiating a certain number of photons because it's not at absolute zero; if it were at absolute zero it would certainly not contain a live cat. And so on and so forth. Therefore, whatever it is that we're talking about, it's in interaction with other things, and those other things are being averaged over and integrated over and not seen. And under those conditions, the two situations, alive and dead, decohere, as we say. There is no interference between them; they are simply alternatives -- just like the alternatives at the race track when either one horse wins or another horse wins; there's nothing mysterious or peculiar about it. And when you open the box it's no different from the experience that you may actually have of going to the airport and accepting a cat box and not knowing whether the poor animal is alive or dead until you open the box. It's exactly the same. The two situations are on different branches of history. They are not coherent with each other because of the interaction with the rest of the world that's averaged over.
MISHLOVE: This is very deep material. I can't claim to understand everything that you've said, Dr. Gell-Mann, but it seems as if you're saying the environment itself is affecting the situation.
GELL-MANN: Well, that's how the alternatives become decoherent with one another.
MISHLOVE: What does decoherent mean? We only have a minute now.
GELL-MANN: It means that you can assign a probability to each alternative, and you don't have interference terms that prevent you from assigning those probabilities. In other words, it means that the situation is no different from that at the race track.
MISHLOVE: OK, and a quantum system is coherent, which means you can't separate it out.
GELL-MANN: If you treat a system in too much detail -- too fine-grained a history -- then you will end up with these interference problems, and you cannot assign probabilities to such fine-grained histories, and you mustn't do so. You cannot discuss them as alternatives.
MISHLOVE: I suppose in summary one might say that the fine-grained, quantum world is really very, very different from the coarse world.
GELL-MANN: And the coarse world is the only one that can be dealt with, and the only one that is dealt with. The other one is just in the background.
I'm just interpreting it completely different from you.
He didn't define "spiritual experience" as "integrated oneness with the universe" he defined it as "want to belong", in the interview he even says "secretion of the pineal gland" which is a physical property, if you did not have a pineal gland, you wouldn't have the experience. He is not ever describing metaphysics, but a computational model called parallel distributed processing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_distributed_processing#Parallel_distributed_processing
But it seems he is making the suggestion that because QM might be similar mathematically that consciousness might also "emerge" from that. Or some other fanciful theory, but he's not saying it's an absolute fact, sounds like speculation. Maybe you are reading what you want to read, or maybe you really don't understand the subject matter.
For the record, even those who believe in chakra systems believe one of the chakras is correlated to the pineal gland. Any holistic theory must include the physical. That does not minimize the spiritual aspects.
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
The problem is in how you define "spiritual". Clearly Pribram hasn't defined it as anything mystical or metaphysical. In-fact, he refers to the mind-brain dichotomy as being false.
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~sai/pribram.htm
In addition, Pribram is not the authority on consciousness.
http://sharp.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/orivar/rebut3-A7.html
Yes, I don't recall whether either of them use terms like spiritual, however, Bohm describes basically the same stuff I "see"--the implicate or "subtle" order wherein "reality" unfolds from. And while it's invisible, it's still "physical". And then he goes farther to talk about the levels that unfold beyond that, which are absolutely unreal and not of this world. And these levels "inform" our reality. And when our thinking is so unrealistic, through "insight" we can get insights into the real reality that most people are completely out of touch with.
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
http://www.myspace.com/illuminatta
Rhinocerous Surprise '08!!!
ahnimus is getting schooled.
by a girl!
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http://www.ostina.org/content/view/2329/755/
I guess I'm still missing the part where Pribram says that there are metaphysical spirits that transcend the human body and integrate into the oneness of the universe, or however the babble goes.
Or you can get a completely deluded view of reality.
Are you aware that all human observations depend on reflectivity of the EM spectrum? If an object does not reflect X-Ray, UV, etc... then we cannot see it and therefor will never know that it exists, unless like black-holes we observe the activity of light affected by the black-hole. That is going to be extremely difficult for elementary particles. Which is why we have theoretical physics, string theory, quantum mechanics, etc..
You must be very confident in your brain to think that you can answer the biggest questions of all human history simply by asking yourself. You must be God Angelica!.
Bohm's description, and Pribram's theories are nothing of the sort. Those are Talbot's interpretations and you cleave to them. You aren't talking fact, you are talking speculation and I haven't seen a single bit of evidence supporting your or Talbot's claims.
Color Opponent Cells, you have 3 of them and 3 receptors (R,G,B) I think I've shown this before. If each axis has 20 different positions, then the total possible combinations - in a vector coding scheme - is approx. 10,000. Which is coherent with the total number of colors we can actually see.
That theory works out and this is the kind of distributed processing that Pribram describes. How anyone gets anything else out of that is beyond me. Wishful thinking I think.
Yea right.
When she can tell me the role the hippocampus plays in the retrieval of spatial memory. Then maybe I'll think she takes this stuff as seriously as I do. Until then, it all seems rather unsophisticated to me.
As little as anyone here can prove souls/spirituality, can you disprove them. You can say they are unlikely, not necessary and unprobable. But that is not proof either. That is your position and belief on the subject.
And for a man so opposed to values, will and other such "delusions" you certainly hold a very value-based position a lot of the time. ie. your thoughts on criminology.
Peace
Dan
"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." - Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965
I'm not opposed to values, I'm opposed to the value given to values.
Keep in mind that I'm not opposed to mysticism, it would be great if we had eternal souls or spirits. Why wouldn't I want that?
It's not a matter of want though, because I don't value an ought more than an is. I'm critical of the steps taken to come to these conclusions. It seems that the process goes like this "Bohr was a physicist. Bohr had a Yin Yan. Therefor Chinese Philosophy is true." Therein lies my distaste for these theories.
The burden of proof is typically on the person making the knowledge claim. Byrnzie suggested that "physicists have declared souls/spirits exist", his reference was Michael C Talbot's The Holographic Universe which was a queue for Angelica to jump in with quotes from Pribram and Bohm. The impression is that Byrnzie and Angelica believe that Pribram and Bohm's work as interpreted by Talbot proves the existence of souls/spirits.
I'm challenging a knowledge claim. That is the nature of progress. Progress does not arise from the acceptance of all competing theories. Or else, we would still be talking about the invisible matter that escapes wood when it burns (Phlogiston). That theory was replaced by oxidation, which better describes what is happening, predicts rusting and fire and is coherent with observational evidence.
You're such a roguish dope.
all posts by ©gue_barium are protected under US copyright law and are not to be reproduced, exchanged or sold
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