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Wow!
It took eight years and nine experiments with more 1,000 participants, but the results offer evidence that humans have some ability to anticipate the future.
"Of the various forms of ESP or psi, as we call it, precognition has always most intrigued me because it's the most magical," said Daryl Bem, professor of psychology emeritus, whose study will be published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sometime next year.
"It most violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most non-physicists don't know about them," said Bem, who studied physics before becoming a psychologist.
Publishing on this topic has gladdened the hearts of psi researchers but stumped doubting social psychologists, who cannot fault Bem's mainstream and widely accepted methodology.
Bem became interested in the scientific study of psi (unexplained processes of information or energy transfer) when he was asked to find methodological flaws in one psi researcher's successful extrasensory perception studies -- and couldn't.
"The research and this article are specifically targeted to my fellow social psychologists," Bem said. "I designed the experiments to be persuasive, simple and transparent enough to encourage them to try replicating these experiments for themselves.”
Bem's innovation in the experiments reported in the article was to "take well-known phenomena in psychology and reverse their time course."
Rather than present a stimulus and measure a subject's response, Bem measured the subject's response before the stimulus was presented.
In some earlier experiments by other psi researchers, participants were hooked up to physiological measuring equipment similar to a lie detector that measured emotional arousal.
They sat before a computer and watched randomly selected images; some were erotic or very negative ("like the bloody photos you see on CSI") images.
"Your physiology jumps when you see one of those pictures after watching a series of landscapes or neutral pictures," Bem said. "But the remarkable finding is that your physiology jumps before the provocative picture actually appears on the screen -- even before the computer decides which picture to show you. What it shows is that your physiology can anticipate an upcoming event even though your conscious self might not."
Bem's nine experiments demonstrated similar unconscious influences from future events.
For example, in one experiment, participants saw a list of words and were then given a test in which they tried to retype as many of the words as they could remember.
Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words from the list and gave the participants practice exercises on them.
When their earlier memory test results were checked, it was found that they had remembered more of the words they were to practice later than words they were not going to practice.
In other words, the practice exercises had reached back in time to help them on the earlier test.
All but one of the nine experiments confirmed the hypothesis that psi exists.
The odds against the combined results being due to chance or statistical flukes are about 74 billion to 1, according to Bem.
Throughout his career Bem has taken paths less traveled.
In 1994 he co-authored a series of experiments on telepathy published in another APA journal, the Psychological Bulletin.
"In my work, I have always pursued problems or puzzles that strike me as interesting and have not worried about how it might affect my career. I have a maverick approach to many psychological topics, and I consider myself fortunate that Cornell has always given me the freedom to do that."
Bem, who came to Cornell in 1978 and retired in 2007, said it is unusual for him to work on one topic for eight years, "but this one was a biggie and seemed like an appropriate thing to end my career with. The journal in which it will appear is the same journal that published my very first article 50 years ago."
Bem said he conducted the experiments because he believed that existing research strongly implied that precognition is real.
"I went in optimistic that I would be able to find it with these experiments," he said. "After I started getting positive results, my undergraduate research team seemed puzzled by my enthusiasm and said, 'But didn't you tell us you thought these would work?'
"I said yes, but when I actually see them work, that's very different."
Study showing that humans have some psychic
powers caps Daryl Bem's career
powers caps Daryl Bem's career
It took eight years and nine experiments with more 1,000 participants, but the results offer evidence that humans have some ability to anticipate the future.
"Of the various forms of ESP or psi, as we call it, precognition has always most intrigued me because it's the most magical," said Daryl Bem, professor of psychology emeritus, whose study will be published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sometime next year.
"It most violates our notion of how the physical world works. The phenomena of modern quantum physics are just as mind-boggling, but they are so technical that most non-physicists don't know about them," said Bem, who studied physics before becoming a psychologist.
Publishing on this topic has gladdened the hearts of psi researchers but stumped doubting social psychologists, who cannot fault Bem's mainstream and widely accepted methodology.
Bem became interested in the scientific study of psi (unexplained processes of information or energy transfer) when he was asked to find methodological flaws in one psi researcher's successful extrasensory perception studies -- and couldn't.
"The research and this article are specifically targeted to my fellow social psychologists," Bem said. "I designed the experiments to be persuasive, simple and transparent enough to encourage them to try replicating these experiments for themselves.”
Bem's innovation in the experiments reported in the article was to "take well-known phenomena in psychology and reverse their time course."
Rather than present a stimulus and measure a subject's response, Bem measured the subject's response before the stimulus was presented.
In some earlier experiments by other psi researchers, participants were hooked up to physiological measuring equipment similar to a lie detector that measured emotional arousal.
They sat before a computer and watched randomly selected images; some were erotic or very negative ("like the bloody photos you see on CSI") images.
"Your physiology jumps when you see one of those pictures after watching a series of landscapes or neutral pictures," Bem said. "But the remarkable finding is that your physiology jumps before the provocative picture actually appears on the screen -- even before the computer decides which picture to show you. What it shows is that your physiology can anticipate an upcoming event even though your conscious self might not."
Bem's nine experiments demonstrated similar unconscious influences from future events.
For example, in one experiment, participants saw a list of words and were then given a test in which they tried to retype as many of the words as they could remember.
Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words from the list and gave the participants practice exercises on them.
When their earlier memory test results were checked, it was found that they had remembered more of the words they were to practice later than words they were not going to practice.
In other words, the practice exercises had reached back in time to help them on the earlier test.
All but one of the nine experiments confirmed the hypothesis that psi exists.
The odds against the combined results being due to chance or statistical flukes are about 74 billion to 1, according to Bem.
Throughout his career Bem has taken paths less traveled.
In 1994 he co-authored a series of experiments on telepathy published in another APA journal, the Psychological Bulletin.
"In my work, I have always pursued problems or puzzles that strike me as interesting and have not worried about how it might affect my career. I have a maverick approach to many psychological topics, and I consider myself fortunate that Cornell has always given me the freedom to do that."
Bem, who came to Cornell in 1978 and retired in 2007, said it is unusual for him to work on one topic for eight years, "but this one was a biggie and seemed like an appropriate thing to end my career with. The journal in which it will appear is the same journal that published my very first article 50 years ago."
Bem said he conducted the experiments because he believed that existing research strongly implied that precognition is real.
"I went in optimistic that I would be able to find it with these experiments," he said. "After I started getting positive results, my undergraduate research team seemed puzzled by my enthusiasm and said, 'But didn't you tell us you thought these would work?'
"I said yes, but when I actually see them work, that's very different."
Hmmmm....
A foreign country is planning to use a nuclear bomb to wipe out not only New Delhi, the capital of India, but also large parts of northern India.
Fortunately, India has received advance information and is in a position to not just foil the attack, but also deliver a telling blow to the rogue country.
How was this possible?
Through psychic spies who, using their paranormal powers, kept crucial details of enemy planning at every stage flowing to the authorities who were “controlling” them.
Does that sound far fetched?
This imaginary scenario and other similar ones may not sound that farfetched in the near future.
As mentioned in the last column, for over 20 years, scientists at Stanford Research Institute or SRI in the United States, carried out secret investigations into ESP and psychic phenomena.
The research was supported by the CIA, NASA and many other government agencies for gathering intelligence about world-wide targets in China, USSR, Iran, etc. during the Cold War.
And investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen contends that though the project was ended officially, it continues under another name—Anomalous Mental Cognition, a $3.9 million program founded in 2014 to investigate the existence of precognition.
In her book, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, Jacobsen says: “Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. government pointed to the others’ research into mind control, counter mind control, and psychic phenomena in general, as justification for their research. There were stories of Americans putting telepaths on nuclear submarines, of Soviet mind control rays, and a Russian psychic so powerful she could stop the heart of a frog with only her mind. With each new rumor, some based on actual experiments, others little more than disinformation campaigns, the psychic arms race picked up speed.”
In 2010, Cornell University’s Daryl Bem finished a study on precognition or knowing things that will happen before they do.
His research ultimately affirmed that it is a real, scientific phenomenon.
Over the years, my own interactive experiences with individuals who possess paranormal powers have confirmed that precognition or knowing things that will happen before they do is very much a reality, and it’s not the only fascinating reality.
In Dehra Dun, which is currently the capital of Uttarakhand, Subhe Ram about whom I’ve written time and again, lived in suburban Raipur in a humble dwelling.
But his powers were far from humble.
Subhe Ram possessed an extraordinary power which culminated in paranormal encounters of a very special kind.
He could bring to life amazing real life scenes from the past and the present on a child’s nail—in full colour, but without any sounds.
Fortunately, Subhe Ram, without putting me through the ordeal of too rigorous a training, assigning me initially to do “readings” from the nail.
There was, for instance, this time when a machine gun had gone missing from an Army camp.
The Commanding Officer sought my help in “reading” from the nail, and I was able to see and narrate the sequence of events, which enabled the Army authorities concerned to not just recover the weapon, but scotch a bigger plot as well.
Another time, the “nail screen” provided information to the CBI in a very sensitive case.
Robberies were solved and people traced through the scenes which were reenacted on the nail screen.
The methods of other practitioners vary, with some using a large peepal leaf to serve as a screen, others using a small looking glass while still others used a steel plate and one even used the screen of an old TV set.
But the conditions and purpose never vary.
For example, till old age caught up with him, Subhe Ram helped only “genuine cases”, which meant he wouldn’t bring his paranormal powers into play unless you had a very real problem.
Like several other mystics I have met, he was a living example of how paranormal powers can be utilised for very positive purposes in a practical manner.
It sounds amazing, but I’ve found individuals with remarkable paranormal powers across the length and breadth of India, from the snowy heights of Uri in Kashmir to Land’s End—the shores of the Indian Ocean at Kanyakumari; from the sandy wastes of the Thar desert to the lush green jungles of the Northeast.
It isn’t, though, that individuals like Subhe Ram are a dime a dozen.
They’re relatively rare, but the fact that the same mystical practice can be found in such different, distant parts of India is an important indicator of a deeper meaning and connotations that are paranormal.
Amongst their mystical powers was one which enabled them to tell you what a person thousands of kilometers away was doing at that particular time.
Incidentally, a forested area near a well known five star hotel in New Delhi is inhabited by several “jinns” and “jannats” or supernatural beings who are ready to carry out a host of tasks such as gathering or getting information from a distance, for a price of their asking, of course.
While were were sitting one day with a green robed Sufi in New Delhi, somebody with a major problem arrived and began narrating the details.
He didn’t know a few, like the court room number of the judge who was hearing his case.
“Mahatjinn, go to the High Court and find out the room number of Judge so and so”, the Sufi ordered his jinn , who lived in—mind boggling though it may sound—a small pan masala tin.
Mahatjinn was back in seconds with the information.
Jinns, janaats and other spirits are also used to deliver messages.
Gathering intelligence or information and delivering messages or passing on information are perhaps the most important aspects in warfare, combating terrorism and generally thwarting or outwitting the enemy.
Obviously, psychic intelligence or information gathering can go a long way not only in winning wars, whether against a country or terrorists, but also in promoting peace.
In fact, instead of relying on a nuclear deterrent the world would be a far safer place if a psychic deterrent could be used instead.
Aha, India or such and such country, has a strong network of exceptional pychics—stronger than spy satellites in space, planning a strike against them is pointless.
Perhaps the research into the paranormal being carried out and funded by some of the world’s most powerful countries is not so bizarre after all.
The paranormal as a tool for warfare
A foreign country is planning to use a nuclear bomb to wipe out not only New Delhi, the capital of India, but also large parts of northern India.
Fortunately, India has received advance information and is in a position to not just foil the attack, but also deliver a telling blow to the rogue country.
How was this possible?
Through psychic spies who, using their paranormal powers, kept crucial details of enemy planning at every stage flowing to the authorities who were “controlling” them.
Does that sound far fetched?
This imaginary scenario and other similar ones may not sound that farfetched in the near future.
As mentioned in the last column, for over 20 years, scientists at Stanford Research Institute or SRI in the United States, carried out secret investigations into ESP and psychic phenomena.
The research was supported by the CIA, NASA and many other government agencies for gathering intelligence about world-wide targets in China, USSR, Iran, etc. during the Cold War.
And investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen contends that though the project was ended officially, it continues under another name—Anomalous Mental Cognition, a $3.9 million program founded in 2014 to investigate the existence of precognition.
In her book, Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government’s Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis, Jacobsen says: “Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. government pointed to the others’ research into mind control, counter mind control, and psychic phenomena in general, as justification for their research. There were stories of Americans putting telepaths on nuclear submarines, of Soviet mind control rays, and a Russian psychic so powerful she could stop the heart of a frog with only her mind. With each new rumor, some based on actual experiments, others little more than disinformation campaigns, the psychic arms race picked up speed.”
In 2010, Cornell University’s Daryl Bem finished a study on precognition or knowing things that will happen before they do.
His research ultimately affirmed that it is a real, scientific phenomenon.
Over the years, my own interactive experiences with individuals who possess paranormal powers have confirmed that precognition or knowing things that will happen before they do is very much a reality, and it’s not the only fascinating reality.
In Dehra Dun, which is currently the capital of Uttarakhand, Subhe Ram about whom I’ve written time and again, lived in suburban Raipur in a humble dwelling.
But his powers were far from humble.
Subhe Ram possessed an extraordinary power which culminated in paranormal encounters of a very special kind.
He could bring to life amazing real life scenes from the past and the present on a child’s nail—in full colour, but without any sounds.
Fortunately, Subhe Ram, without putting me through the ordeal of too rigorous a training, assigning me initially to do “readings” from the nail.
There was, for instance, this time when a machine gun had gone missing from an Army camp.
The Commanding Officer sought my help in “reading” from the nail, and I was able to see and narrate the sequence of events, which enabled the Army authorities concerned to not just recover the weapon, but scotch a bigger plot as well.
Another time, the “nail screen” provided information to the CBI in a very sensitive case.
Robberies were solved and people traced through the scenes which were reenacted on the nail screen.
The methods of other practitioners vary, with some using a large peepal leaf to serve as a screen, others using a small looking glass while still others used a steel plate and one even used the screen of an old TV set.
But the conditions and purpose never vary.
For example, till old age caught up with him, Subhe Ram helped only “genuine cases”, which meant he wouldn’t bring his paranormal powers into play unless you had a very real problem.
Like several other mystics I have met, he was a living example of how paranormal powers can be utilised for very positive purposes in a practical manner.
It sounds amazing, but I’ve found individuals with remarkable paranormal powers across the length and breadth of India, from the snowy heights of Uri in Kashmir to Land’s End—the shores of the Indian Ocean at Kanyakumari; from the sandy wastes of the Thar desert to the lush green jungles of the Northeast.
It isn’t, though, that individuals like Subhe Ram are a dime a dozen.
They’re relatively rare, but the fact that the same mystical practice can be found in such different, distant parts of India is an important indicator of a deeper meaning and connotations that are paranormal.
Amongst their mystical powers was one which enabled them to tell you what a person thousands of kilometers away was doing at that particular time.
Incidentally, a forested area near a well known five star hotel in New Delhi is inhabited by several “jinns” and “jannats” or supernatural beings who are ready to carry out a host of tasks such as gathering or getting information from a distance, for a price of their asking, of course.
While were were sitting one day with a green robed Sufi in New Delhi, somebody with a major problem arrived and began narrating the details.
He didn’t know a few, like the court room number of the judge who was hearing his case.
“Mahatjinn, go to the High Court and find out the room number of Judge so and so”, the Sufi ordered his jinn , who lived in—mind boggling though it may sound—a small pan masala tin.
Mahatjinn was back in seconds with the information.
Jinns, janaats and other spirits are also used to deliver messages.
Gathering intelligence or information and delivering messages or passing on information are perhaps the most important aspects in warfare, combating terrorism and generally thwarting or outwitting the enemy.
Obviously, psychic intelligence or information gathering can go a long way not only in winning wars, whether against a country or terrorists, but also in promoting peace.
In fact, instead of relying on a nuclear deterrent the world would be a far safer place if a psychic deterrent could be used instead.
Aha, India or such and such country, has a strong network of exceptional pychics—stronger than spy satellites in space, planning a strike against them is pointless.
Perhaps the research into the paranormal being carried out and funded by some of the world’s most powerful countries is not so bizarre after all.
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Some curious observations...at least the article doesn’t totally write-off the possibility of the non-materialist.
Enjoy!
What Does Quantum Theory Actually Tell Us about Reality?
Nearly a century after its founding, physicists and philosophers still don’t know—but they’re working on it
By Anil Ananthaswamy on September 3, 2018
Credit: Alexandre Gondran Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
For a demonstration that overturned the great Isaac Newton’s ideas about the nature of light, it was staggeringly simple.
It “may be repeated with great ease, wherever the sun shines,” the English physicist Thomas Young told the members of the Royal Society in London in November 1803, describing what is now known as a double-slit experiment, and Young wasn’t being overly melodramatic.
He had come up with an elegant and decidedly homespun experiment to show light’s wavelike nature, and in doing so refuted Newton’s theory that light is made of corpuscles, or particles.
But the birth of quantum physics in the early 1900s made it clear that light is made of tiny, indivisible units, or quanta, of energy, which we call photons. Young’s experiment, when done with single photons or even single particles of matter, such as electrons and neutrons, is a conundrum to behold, raising fundamental questions about the very nature of reality.
Some have even used it to argue that the quantum world is influenced by human consciousness, giving our minds an agency and a place in the ontology of the universe.
But does the simple experiment really make such a case?
In the modern quantum form, Young’s experiment involves beaming individual particles of light or matter at two slits or openings cut into an otherwise opaque barrier.
On the other side of the barrier is a screen that records the arrival of the particles (say, a photographic plate in the case of photons).
Common sense leads us to expect that photons should go through one slit or the other and pile up behind each slit.
They don’t.
Rather, they go to certain parts of the screen and avoid others, creating alternating bands of light and dark.
These so-called interference fringes, the kind you get when two sets of waves overlap.
When the crests of one wave line up with the crests of another, you get constructive interference (bright bands), and when the crests align with troughs you get destructive interference (darkness).
But there’s only one photon going through the apparatus at any one time.
It’s as if each photon is going through both slits at once and interfering with itself.
This doesn’t make classical sense.
Mathematically speaking, however, what goes through both slits is not a physical particle or a physical wave but something called a wave function—an abstract mathematical function that represents the photon’s state (in this case its position).
The wave function behaves like a wave.
It hits the two slits, and new waves emanate from each slit on the other side, spread and eventually interfere with each other.
The combined wave function can be used to work out the probabilities of where one might find the photon.
The photon has a high probability of being found where the two wave functions constructively interfere and is unlikely to be found in regions of destructive interference.
The measurement—in this case the interaction of the wave function with the photographic plate—is said to “collapse” the wave function.
It goes from being spread out before measurement to peaking at one of those places where the photon materializes upon measurement.
This apparent measurement-induced collapse of the wave function is the source of many conceptual difficulties in quantum mechanics.
Before the collapse, there’s no way to tell with certainty where the photon will land; it can appear at any one of the places of non-zero probability.
There’s no way to chart the photon’s trajectory from the source to the detector.
The photon is not real in the sense that a plane flying from San Francisco to New York is real.
Werner Heisenberg, among others, interpreted the mathematics to mean that reality doesn’t exist until observed.
“The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them ... is impossible,” he wrote. John Wheeler, too, used a variant of the double-slit experiment to argue that “no elementary quantum phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (‘observed,’ ‘indelibly recorded’) phenomenon.”
But quantum theory is entirely unclear about what constitutes a “measurement.”
It simply postulates that the measuring device must be classical, without defining where such a boundary between the classical and quantum lies, thus leaving the door open for those who think that human consciousness needs to be invoked for collapse.
Last May, Henry Stapp and colleagues argued, in this forum, that the double-slit experiment and its modern variants provide evidence that “a conscious observer may be indispensable” to make sense of the quantum realm and that a transpersonal mind underlies the material world.
But these experiments don’t constitute empirical evidence for such claims.
In the double-slit experiment done with single photons, all one can do is verify the probabilistic predictions of the mathematics.
If the probabilities are borne out over the course of sending tens of thousands of identical photons through the double slit, the theory claims that each photon’s wave function collapsed—thanks to an ill-defined process called measurement.
That’s all.
Also, there are other ways of interpreting the double-slit experiment.
Take the de Broglie-Bohm theory, which says that reality is both wave and particle.
A photon heads towards the double slit with a definite position at all times and goes through one slit or the other; so each photon has a trajectory.
It’s riding a pilot wave, which goes through both slits, interferes and then guides the photon to a location of constructive interference.
In 1979, Chris Dewdney and colleagues at Birkbeck College, London, simulated the theory’s prediction for the trajectories of particles going through the double slit.
In the past decade, experimentalists have verified that such trajectories exist, albeit by using a controversial technique called weak measurements.
The controversy notwithstanding, the experiments show that the de Broglie-Bohm theory remains in the running as an explanation for the behavior of the quantum world.
Crucially, the theory does not need observers or measurements or a non-material consciousness.
Neither do so-called collapse theories, which argue that wavefunctions collapse randomly: the more the number of particles in the quantum system, the more likely the collapse.
Observers merely discover the outcome.
Markus Arndt’s team at the University of Vienna in Austria has been testing these theories by sending larger and larger molecules through the double slit.
Collapse theories predict that when particles of matter become more massive than some threshold, they cannot remain in a quantum superposition of going through both slits at once, and this will destroy the interference pattern.
Arndt’s team has sent a molecule with more than 800 atoms through the double slit, and they still see interference.
The search for the threshold continues.
Roger Penrose has his own version of a collapse theory, in which the more massive the mass of the object in superposition, the faster it’ll collapse to one state or the other, because of gravitational instabilities.
Again, it’s an observer-independent theory.
No consciousness needed.
Dirk Bouwmeester at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is testing Penrose’s idea with a version of the double-slit experiment.
Conceptually, the idea is to not just put a photon into a superposition of going through two slits at once, but to also put one of the slits in a superposition of being in two locations at once.
According to Penrose, the displaced slit will either stay in superposition or collapse while the photon is in flight, leading to different types of interference patterns.
The collapse will depend on the mass of the slits.
Bouwmeester has been at work on this experiment for a decade and may soon be able to verify or refute Penrose’s claims.
If nothing else, these experiments are showing that we cannot yet make any claims about the nature of reality, even if the claims are well-motivated mathematically or philosophically.
And given that neuroscientists and philosophers of mind don’t agree on the nature of consciousness, claims that it collapses wave functions are premature at best and misleading and wrong at worst.
Enjoy!
What Does Quantum Theory Actually Tell Us about Reality?
Nearly a century after its founding, physicists and philosophers still don’t know—but they’re working on it
By Anil Ananthaswamy on September 3, 2018
Credit: Alexandre Gondran Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
For a demonstration that overturned the great Isaac Newton’s ideas about the nature of light, it was staggeringly simple.
It “may be repeated with great ease, wherever the sun shines,” the English physicist Thomas Young told the members of the Royal Society in London in November 1803, describing what is now known as a double-slit experiment, and Young wasn’t being overly melodramatic.
He had come up with an elegant and decidedly homespun experiment to show light’s wavelike nature, and in doing so refuted Newton’s theory that light is made of corpuscles, or particles.
But the birth of quantum physics in the early 1900s made it clear that light is made of tiny, indivisible units, or quanta, of energy, which we call photons. Young’s experiment, when done with single photons or even single particles of matter, such as electrons and neutrons, is a conundrum to behold, raising fundamental questions about the very nature of reality.
Some have even used it to argue that the quantum world is influenced by human consciousness, giving our minds an agency and a place in the ontology of the universe.
But does the simple experiment really make such a case?
In the modern quantum form, Young’s experiment involves beaming individual particles of light or matter at two slits or openings cut into an otherwise opaque barrier.
On the other side of the barrier is a screen that records the arrival of the particles (say, a photographic plate in the case of photons).
Common sense leads us to expect that photons should go through one slit or the other and pile up behind each slit.
They don’t.
Rather, they go to certain parts of the screen and avoid others, creating alternating bands of light and dark.
These so-called interference fringes, the kind you get when two sets of waves overlap.
When the crests of one wave line up with the crests of another, you get constructive interference (bright bands), and when the crests align with troughs you get destructive interference (darkness).
But there’s only one photon going through the apparatus at any one time.
It’s as if each photon is going through both slits at once and interfering with itself.
This doesn’t make classical sense.
Mathematically speaking, however, what goes through both slits is not a physical particle or a physical wave but something called a wave function—an abstract mathematical function that represents the photon’s state (in this case its position).
The wave function behaves like a wave.
It hits the two slits, and new waves emanate from each slit on the other side, spread and eventually interfere with each other.
The combined wave function can be used to work out the probabilities of where one might find the photon.
The photon has a high probability of being found where the two wave functions constructively interfere and is unlikely to be found in regions of destructive interference.
The measurement—in this case the interaction of the wave function with the photographic plate—is said to “collapse” the wave function.
It goes from being spread out before measurement to peaking at one of those places where the photon materializes upon measurement.
This apparent measurement-induced collapse of the wave function is the source of many conceptual difficulties in quantum mechanics.
Before the collapse, there’s no way to tell with certainty where the photon will land; it can appear at any one of the places of non-zero probability.
There’s no way to chart the photon’s trajectory from the source to the detector.
The photon is not real in the sense that a plane flying from San Francisco to New York is real.
Werner Heisenberg, among others, interpreted the mathematics to mean that reality doesn’t exist until observed.
“The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them ... is impossible,” he wrote. John Wheeler, too, used a variant of the double-slit experiment to argue that “no elementary quantum phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (‘observed,’ ‘indelibly recorded’) phenomenon.”
But quantum theory is entirely unclear about what constitutes a “measurement.”
It simply postulates that the measuring device must be classical, without defining where such a boundary between the classical and quantum lies, thus leaving the door open for those who think that human consciousness needs to be invoked for collapse.
Last May, Henry Stapp and colleagues argued, in this forum, that the double-slit experiment and its modern variants provide evidence that “a conscious observer may be indispensable” to make sense of the quantum realm and that a transpersonal mind underlies the material world.
But these experiments don’t constitute empirical evidence for such claims.
In the double-slit experiment done with single photons, all one can do is verify the probabilistic predictions of the mathematics.
If the probabilities are borne out over the course of sending tens of thousands of identical photons through the double slit, the theory claims that each photon’s wave function collapsed—thanks to an ill-defined process called measurement.
That’s all.
Also, there are other ways of interpreting the double-slit experiment.
Take the de Broglie-Bohm theory, which says that reality is both wave and particle.
A photon heads towards the double slit with a definite position at all times and goes through one slit or the other; so each photon has a trajectory.
It’s riding a pilot wave, which goes through both slits, interferes and then guides the photon to a location of constructive interference.
In 1979, Chris Dewdney and colleagues at Birkbeck College, London, simulated the theory’s prediction for the trajectories of particles going through the double slit.
In the past decade, experimentalists have verified that such trajectories exist, albeit by using a controversial technique called weak measurements.
The controversy notwithstanding, the experiments show that the de Broglie-Bohm theory remains in the running as an explanation for the behavior of the quantum world.
Crucially, the theory does not need observers or measurements or a non-material consciousness.
Neither do so-called collapse theories, which argue that wavefunctions collapse randomly: the more the number of particles in the quantum system, the more likely the collapse.
Observers merely discover the outcome.
Markus Arndt’s team at the University of Vienna in Austria has been testing these theories by sending larger and larger molecules through the double slit.
Collapse theories predict that when particles of matter become more massive than some threshold, they cannot remain in a quantum superposition of going through both slits at once, and this will destroy the interference pattern.
Arndt’s team has sent a molecule with more than 800 atoms through the double slit, and they still see interference.
The search for the threshold continues.
Roger Penrose has his own version of a collapse theory, in which the more massive the mass of the object in superposition, the faster it’ll collapse to one state or the other, because of gravitational instabilities.
Again, it’s an observer-independent theory.
No consciousness needed.
Dirk Bouwmeester at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is testing Penrose’s idea with a version of the double-slit experiment.
Conceptually, the idea is to not just put a photon into a superposition of going through two slits at once, but to also put one of the slits in a superposition of being in two locations at once.
According to Penrose, the displaced slit will either stay in superposition or collapse while the photon is in flight, leading to different types of interference patterns.
The collapse will depend on the mass of the slits.
Bouwmeester has been at work on this experiment for a decade and may soon be able to verify or refute Penrose’s claims.
If nothing else, these experiments are showing that we cannot yet make any claims about the nature of reality, even if the claims are well-motivated mathematically or philosophically.
And given that neuroscientists and philosophers of mind don’t agree on the nature of consciousness, claims that it collapses wave functions are premature at best and misleading and wrong at worst.
Anthony de Mello - Awareness
On waking up...
Will I be of help to you?
On the proper kind of selfishness, and wanting happiness...
On psychology...
On waking up...
Will I be of help to you?
On the proper kind of selfishness, and wanting happiness...
On psychology...
People get trapped by the great scientific theories in the same way we can get trapped by our great spiritual formalisations. They are all incomplete and full of metaphors - yes they have some insight, and they have lots of signposts pointing onwards. Being only human, so often we mistake the signposts for the goals, the metaphors for the reality.Some curious observations...at least the article doesn’t totally write-off the possibility of the non-materialist.
Enjoy!
What Does Quantum Theory Actually Tell Us about Reality?
Nearly a century after its founding, physicists and philosophers still don’t know—but they’re working on it
By Anil Ananthaswamy on September 3, 2018
Credit: Alexandre Gondran Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
For a demonstration that overturned the great Isaac Newton’s ideas about the nature of light, it was staggeringly simple.
It “may be repeated with great ease, wherever the sun shines,” the English physicist Thomas Young told the members of the Royal Society in London in November 1803, describing what is now known as a double-slit experiment, and Young wasn’t being overly melodramatic.
He had come up with an elegant and decidedly homespun experiment to show light’s wavelike nature, and in doing so refuted Newton’s theory that light is made of corpuscles, or particles.
But the birth of quantum physics in the early 1900s made it clear that light is made of tiny, indivisible units, or quanta, of energy, which we call photons. Young’s experiment, when done with single photons or even single particles of matter, such as electrons and neutrons, is a conundrum to behold, raising fundamental questions about the very nature of reality.
Some have even used it to argue that the quantum world is influenced by human consciousness, giving our minds an agency and a place in the ontology of the universe.
But does the simple experiment really make such a case?
In the modern quantum form, Young’s experiment involves beaming individual particles of light or matter at two slits or openings cut into an otherwise opaque barrier.
On the other side of the barrier is a screen that records the arrival of the particles (say, a photographic plate in the case of photons).
Common sense leads us to expect that photons should go through one slit or the other and pile up behind each slit.
They don’t.
Rather, they go to certain parts of the screen and avoid others, creating alternating bands of light and dark.
These so-called interference fringes, the kind you get when two sets of waves overlap.
When the crests of one wave line up with the crests of another, you get constructive interference (bright bands), and when the crests align with troughs you get destructive interference (darkness).
But there’s only one photon going through the apparatus at any one time.
It’s as if each photon is going through both slits at once and interfering with itself.
This doesn’t make classical sense.
Mathematically speaking, however, what goes through both slits is not a physical particle or a physical wave but something called a wave function—an abstract mathematical function that represents the photon’s state (in this case its position).
The wave function behaves like a wave.
It hits the two slits, and new waves emanate from each slit on the other side, spread and eventually interfere with each other.
The combined wave function can be used to work out the probabilities of where one might find the photon.
The photon has a high probability of being found where the two wave functions constructively interfere and is unlikely to be found in regions of destructive interference.
The measurement—in this case the interaction of the wave function with the photographic plate—is said to “collapse” the wave function.
It goes from being spread out before measurement to peaking at one of those places where the photon materializes upon measurement.
This apparent measurement-induced collapse of the wave function is the source of many conceptual difficulties in quantum mechanics.
Before the collapse, there’s no way to tell with certainty where the photon will land; it can appear at any one of the places of non-zero probability.
There’s no way to chart the photon’s trajectory from the source to the detector.
The photon is not real in the sense that a plane flying from San Francisco to New York is real.
Werner Heisenberg, among others, interpreted the mathematics to mean that reality doesn’t exist until observed.
“The idea of an objective real world whose smallest parts exist objectively in the same sense as stones or trees exist, independently of whether or not we observe them ... is impossible,” he wrote. John Wheeler, too, used a variant of the double-slit experiment to argue that “no elementary quantum phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (‘observed,’ ‘indelibly recorded’) phenomenon.”
But quantum theory is entirely unclear about what constitutes a “measurement.”
It simply postulates that the measuring device must be classical, without defining where such a boundary between the classical and quantum lies, thus leaving the door open for those who think that human consciousness needs to be invoked for collapse.
Last May, Henry Stapp and colleagues argued, in this forum, that the double-slit experiment and its modern variants provide evidence that “a conscious observer may be indispensable” to make sense of the quantum realm and that a transpersonal mind underlies the material world.
But these experiments don’t constitute empirical evidence for such claims.
In the double-slit experiment done with single photons, all one can do is verify the probabilistic predictions of the mathematics.
If the probabilities are borne out over the course of sending tens of thousands of identical photons through the double slit, the theory claims that each photon’s wave function collapsed—thanks to an ill-defined process called measurement.
That’s all.
Also, there are other ways of interpreting the double-slit experiment.
Take the de Broglie-Bohm theory, which says that reality is both wave and particle.
A photon heads towards the double slit with a definite position at all times and goes through one slit or the other; so each photon has a trajectory.
It’s riding a pilot wave, which goes through both slits, interferes and then guides the photon to a location of constructive interference.
In 1979, Chris Dewdney and colleagues at Birkbeck College, London, simulated the theory’s prediction for the trajectories of particles going through the double slit.
In the past decade, experimentalists have verified that such trajectories exist, albeit by using a controversial technique called weak measurements.
The controversy notwithstanding, the experiments show that the de Broglie-Bohm theory remains in the running as an explanation for the behavior of the quantum world.
Crucially, the theory does not need observers or measurements or a non-material consciousness.
Neither do so-called collapse theories, which argue that wavefunctions collapse randomly: the more the number of particles in the quantum system, the more likely the collapse.
Observers merely discover the outcome.
Markus Arndt’s team at the University of Vienna in Austria has been testing these theories by sending larger and larger molecules through the double slit.
Collapse theories predict that when particles of matter become more massive than some threshold, they cannot remain in a quantum superposition of going through both slits at once, and this will destroy the interference pattern.
Arndt’s team has sent a molecule with more than 800 atoms through the double slit, and they still see interference.
The search for the threshold continues.
Roger Penrose has his own version of a collapse theory, in which the more massive the mass of the object in superposition, the faster it’ll collapse to one state or the other, because of gravitational instabilities.
Again, it’s an observer-independent theory.
No consciousness needed.
Dirk Bouwmeester at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is testing Penrose’s idea with a version of the double-slit experiment.
Conceptually, the idea is to not just put a photon into a superposition of going through two slits at once, but to also put one of the slits in a superposition of being in two locations at once.
According to Penrose, the displaced slit will either stay in superposition or collapse while the photon is in flight, leading to different types of interference patterns.
The collapse will depend on the mass of the slits.
Bouwmeester has been at work on this experiment for a decade and may soon be able to verify or refute Penrose’s claims.
If nothing else, these experiments are showing that we cannot yet make any claims about the nature of reality, even if the claims are well-motivated mathematically or philosophically.
And given that neuroscientists and philosophers of mind don’t agree on the nature of consciousness, claims that it collapses wave functions are premature at best and misleading and wrong at worst.
D
Deleted member 16771
Yeah, at some point we'll have a paradigm shift and it will all make complete sense.
Yes, I very much agree with you both!
I simply don’t see why it would be so strange or an issue for consciousness being able to collapse a wave function.
And in fact, there are several others who have claimed in their own studies to have proven this already.
And they may have, but such claims are usually given much higher scrutiny than more mundane subjects and also are usually lacking a working model of how it is doing what it is doing and thus is written off as unexplained but of no real significance.
There is a very clear bias in science against what is understood and what is not.
It seems true to me that many scientists and people narrowly limit themselves to what is possible in this reality and what isn’t.
There are those who are dedicated to proving all such strange phenomena as false or impossible and I welcome any and all fair scrutiny...in many cases it only helps to solidify the argument they are against.
But people like James Randi take it past the realm of keeping a true mind of a skeptic - which is one of open-mindedness...and has only served to solidify his own biases with his “defrauding” of the psychic nature...much as one watches “To Catch a Predator” on TV...he already knows they are a fraud and he exposes them as such, but has done no serious investigating into actual PSI claims - which our own government and others have stated do in fact exist.
As an ex-magician he’s a showman and that’s how he’s made his money...not by serious investigations into the paranormal.
Anyhow...science thinks that faith is a bad word...but to me it is how much control our own spiritual willpower has over the reality we are living in.
Have a good one and much love to you both!
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Magic mushrooms 'reboot' brain in depressed people – study
Patients unresponsive to conventional treatments benefit when treated with natural psychoactive compound,
but researchers warn against self medication
Magic mushrooms contain psilocybin, a psychoactive compound that led to reduction in depressive symptoms when given to patients in trials.
Patients unresponsive to conventional treatments benefit when treated with natural psychoactive compound,
but researchers warn against self medication
Magic mushrooms contain psilocybin, a psychoactive compound that led to reduction in depressive symptoms when given to patients in trials.
Magic mushrooms may effectively “reset” the activity of key brain circuits known to play a role in depression, the latest study to highlight the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics suggests.
Psychedelics have shown promising results in the treatment of depression and addictions in a number of clinical trials over the last decade.
Imperial College London researchers used psilocybin – the psychoactive compound that occurs naturally in magic mushrooms – to treat a small number of patients with depression, monitoring their brain function, before and after.
Images of patients’ brains revealed changes in brain activity that were associated with marked and lasting reductions in depressive symptoms and participants in the trial reported benefits lasting up to five weeks after treatment.
Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial, who led the study, said: “We have shown for the first time clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments.
“Several of our patients described feeling ‘reset’ after the treatment and often used computer analogies. For example, one said he felt like his brain had been ‘defragged’ like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt ‘rebooted’.
“Psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary ‘kick start’ they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a ‘reset’ analogy. Similar brain effects to these have been seen with electroconvulsive therapy.”
For the study, published in Scientific Reports on Friday, 20 patients with treatment-resistant depression were given two doses of psilocybin (10 mg and 25 mg), with the second dose a week after the first.
Of these, 19 underwent initial brain imaging and then a second scan one day after the high dose treatment.
The team used two main brain imaging methods to measure changes in blood flow and the crosstalk between brain regions, with patients reporting their depressive symptoms through completing clinical questionnaires.
Immediately following treatment with psilocybin, patients reported a decrease in depressive symptoms, such as improvements in mood and stress relief.
MRI imaging revealed reduced blood flow in areas of the brain, including the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped region of the brain known to be involved in processing emotional responses, stress and fear.
The authors believe the findings provide a new window into what happens in the brains of people after they have ‘come down’ from a psychedelic, with an initial disintegration of brain networks during the drug ‘trip’ followed by a re-integration afterwards.
Last year, two US studies showed that a single dose of psilocybin could lift the anxiety and depression experienced by people with advanced cancer for six months or even longer.
The Imperial College researchers acknowledge that the significance of their results is limited by the small sample size and the absence of a control/placebo group for comparison.
They also stress that it would be dangerous for patients with depression to attempt to self-medicate.
(Which is why you find people who are informed)
Professor David Nutt, director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit in the division of brain sciences, and senior author of the paper, said: “Larger studies are needed to see if this positive effect can be reproduced in more patients. But these initial findings are exciting and provide another treatment avenue to explore.”
The authors currently plan to test psilocybin against a leading antidepressant in a trial set to start early next year.
The research was supported by the Medical Research Council, the Alex Mosley Charitable Trust and the Safra Foundation.
“One cannot shape the world without being reshaped in the process.
Each gain of power requires its own sacrifice.”
― Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic
There is a constructive and destructive power in thought alone.
Beware the stories you read or tell;
subtly, at night,
beneath the waters of consciousness,
they are altering your world.
-Ben Okri
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
“The lucid dream, located as it is at a crossroads between worlds and states of consciousness,
places the magician in a unique position to influence the
delicate balance of consciousness and the interplay it has on matter in the waking state,
and is thus an opportunity to test one’s ability in the art of adjusting the mutable fabric of Maya.”
― Zeena Schreck
True spirituality is not a high, not a rush, not an altered state.
It has been fine to romance it for a while, but our times call for something far more real, grounded, and responsible;
something radically alive and naturally integral;
something that shakes us to our very core until we stop treating spiritual deepening as a something to dabble in here and there.
Authentic spirituality is not some little flicker or buzz of knowingness,
not a psychedelic blast-through or a mellow hanging-out on some exalted plane of consciousness,
not a bubble of immunity, but a vast fire of liberation,
an exquisitely fitting crucible and sanctuary, providing both heat and light for what must be done.
Most of the time when we’re immersed in spiritual bypassing, we like the light but not the heat,
doing whatever we can to distance ourselves from the flames.
“What gives light must endure burning.”
“Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with.
This is why it is given a bad name.
It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego,
which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control.”
– Terence McKenna
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“One cannot shape the world without being reshaped in the process.
Each gain of power requires its own sacrifice.”
― Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic
There is a constructive and destructive power in thought alone.
Beware the stories you read or tell;
subtly, at night,
beneath the waters of consciousness,
they are altering your world.
-Ben Okri
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
“The lucid dream, located as it is at a crossroads between worlds and states of consciousness,
places the magician in a unique position to influence the
delicate balance of consciousness and the interplay it has on matter in the waking state,
and is thus an opportunity to test one’s ability in the art of adjusting the mutable fabric of Maya.”
― Zeena Schreck
True spirituality is not a high, not a rush, not an altered state.
It has been fine to romance it for a while, but our times call for something far more real, grounded, and responsible;
something radically alive and naturally integral;
something that shakes us to our very core until we stop treating spiritual deepening as a something to dabble in here and there.
Authentic spirituality is not some little flicker or buzz of knowingness,
not a psychedelic blast-through or a mellow hanging-out on some exalted plane of consciousness,
not a bubble of immunity, but a vast fire of liberation,
an exquisitely fitting crucible and sanctuary, providing both heat and light for what must be done.
Most of the time when we’re immersed in spiritual bypassing, we like the light but not the heat,
doing whatever we can to distance ourselves from the flames.
“What gives light must endure burning.”
“Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with.
This is why it is given a bad name.
It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego,
which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control.”
– Terence McKenna
I'm stealing your first picture Skare!!
So badass! I luv it.
Please do!!I'm stealing your first picture Skare!!
So badass! I luv it.
I agree!
Bizarre...
Enjoy!
@Wyote
You totally gotta try to print something haunted now....lol.
Technology Meets the Paranormal:
3D Printing Cursed and Haunted Objects
We live in an ever developing, technological world full of amazing new discoveries, slick gadgetry, and constant incredible breakthroughs in science.
It sometimes seems that in this rapidly advancing society of technological wizardry that there is no place anymore for such arcane things as charms, totems, or cursed items or haunted objects, and that these are surely the relics of a fading, dying past mired in the murky word of the supernatural and occult.
Yet these things still lurk out in the periphery, and in at least one case the worlds of high technology and the supernatural have managed to collide in the oddest of ways.
One of the more fascinating inventions of recent times is the process of 3D printing, in which a 3-dimensional object is recreated layer by layer based on computer controlled data and scans of a model.
Such objects can be fashioned of almost any material and can be a wide range of sizes or shapes, making the potential applications of the process virtually limitless.
Indeed, 3D printing has been used in the automotive industry, the medical field, the military, the clothing industry, you name it.
Tools, toys, parts, firearms, automotive and electrical components, scientific instruments, medical implants, prosthetic limbs, even food, it seems almost anything can be conjured up seemingly from thin air by 3D printing in this day and age.
Bizarrely, and perhaps inevitably, 3D printing has even been used to reproduce actual haunted, cursed objects.
Wait, what?
The whole weird experiment started with the alleged discovery of a strange hand-carved statue supposedly found by some hikers stashed away and abandoned, quite possibly hidden, in a dim cave somewhere in the Catskill Mountains of New York.
The doll is creepy to say the least, with a length of filthy cord wrapped around its neck and rusty nails driven into its eyes, and it seems like the sort of thing most people would cringe at and leave lying where it was, but in this case the hikers took it home with them.
(morons)
It is a decision they would apparently later regret.
Almost immediately strange phenomena purportedly began to occur around the house, starting with inexplicable bumps, knocks, thuds, thumps, and other anomalous noises in the night when no one else was around, mixed with the persistent, intangible sense of being watched, but it quickly graduated to more frightening fare.
Shadowy apparitions began to be seen lurking about, odd smells such as that of stagnant water or decay would appear and disappear, and it was reported that the strange doll would move on its own, changing locations when no one was looking and almost always later found in a different room from where it was left, and even tiny muddy footprints were allegedly discovered around the house.
The pet dog of the house was apparently terrified of it and peed in the house on several occasions even though it never had done that before, and would often refuse to enter the premises at all.
On one occasion the homeowner claims that they saw an entity crouching in a darkened room that looked like a haggard old crone completely naked and dripping with water, with reflective eyes like those of a cat, leading to the doll’s sinister nickname “The Crone of the Catskills.”
The seemingly possessed object drew great interest from paranormal investigators Dana Matthews & Greg Newkirk, who were able to acquire it for their spooky Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and Occult, a vast repository of some of the world’s most haunted or cursed objects.
It is definitely one of the creepier museums out there, and it seems that the Crone would be perfectly at home here.
And it was, in the sense that it went right on with its scary bag of tricks.
On various occasions the figure was said to knock over furniture and a plastic figure of Jesus Christ on a wooden crucifix from the wall, pulling out the nails out in the process that were never found, as well as leave its muddy footprints all over the museum and the smell of fetid pond water in its wake, and there is one instance in which video footage was captured of the statue actually moving.
There were times when heavy furniture toppled over for no apparent reason to almost smash the museum owners or their guests, and the doll was known to roll off of tables on its own.
More sinister still were reports of those who touched or even looked at the Crone the wrong way becoming violently ill or ending up in freak accidents.
A burning, itching sensation was not uncommon for people who gazed at it too long, and there was a general natural aversion people felt in its presence, as if they were being repelled and pushed away.
People who physically touched the figurine had it the worse, allegedly being overcome with sudden and inexplicable violent seizures and prompting the enactment of a strict no-touching rule for the cursed object.
Indeed, the Crone was soon wrapped up in a pillowcase, stashed in a padlocked box, and taken out of the exhibition.
The statue did not respond to any attempts to placate it, and things supposedly got so bad that the directors, who remember were housing the scariest, most haunted items on the planet, didn’t even want it anymore, and they mulled over putting the doll back into the cave where it had been found.
For now it remains with the museum on a no-touch basis, and is rarely shown to visitors.
The Crone of the Catskills
It seems like a good plan to put it back, as it is apparent that disturbing its resting place caused whatever ominous and malignant force is attached to it to lash out, but before doing that it was decided to make it the subject of an off-the-wall experiment thought up by paranormal researchers Karl Pfieffer and Connor Randal.
They proposed trying what is perhaps the world’s first attempt to 3D print a haunted object, while at the same time attempting to communicate with the malevolent, restless entity attached to it via psychic and livestreaming the whole thing on a museums member’s only Facebook page, on Halloween night no less.
Other 3D scanning projects soon followed, including that of a haunted mask and various cursed idols, in a project meant to create a 3D catalogue of haunted and cursed items.
3D printing a cursed object inhabited by a very pissed off, very aggressive evil force or spirit, what could possibly go wrong?
Apparently, making 3D prints of these haunted objects had some strange consequences, including freak equipment malfunctions, almost as if the objects did not want to be scanned, and museum founder Greg Newkirk explained some of these unexplainable issues thus:
We’ve had equipment malfunction in bizarre ways, artifacts mysteriously go missing before we can scan them, and just two weeks ago, we went to print a 3D duplicate of a haunted mask we’ve named The Fetid Face and it completely melted the printer.
It destroyed the equipment.
Some artifacts are so plagued with problems that no scan can be successfully made at all.
On top of this, some of the 3D scan prints have been claimed to have exhibited strange phenomena in their own right after the printing, as if some of the ghostly energy from their progenitor has attached itself to these copies as well.
Concerning the strange defiance of being printed shown by some objects and the odd tendency for the prints to mimic certain aspects of the paranormal from their parent, Newkirk has said:
In hindsight, I guess we should have anticipated this, but when it comes to working with haunted artifacts in new, unexplored ways, you never know what’s going to happen.
We’re attempting something that’s never been done before, laying the groundwork for future study of paranormally-active objects.
There are going to be quirks we can’t see coming.
Members will email us and let us know that something strange is happening with their copy.
Maybe it’s possible that we’ve captured more than just the image of these artifacts in the scan – maybe we’re actually capturing a bit of their essence.
It seems like with 3D printing people will try and make or replicate just about anything, and it seems that we have officially stepped into the world of recreating cursed objects.
Good idea or not (probably not), there are some interesting issues this raises, not the least of which is just what quality does an object possess that makes it haunted in the first place, and what anchors a spirit or ghost to it?
Is it the object itself or some mysterious unseen quality permeating it?
Are these prints upsetting or confusing the spirits?
If the object were to be replicated perfectly down to the last molecule would the entity then be anchored to that thing as well or would a curse cling to the replica?
It is all a curious little mental exercise to contemplate, and a new dimension on the nature of ghosts and cursed items.
Or maybe it is all a bunch of rubbish and there are not ghosts or curses to begin with?
Whether one believes in the supernatural or not, the project of 3D printing haunted items is certainly an odd little curiosity that melds the dark world of the paranormal with the shiny toys of modern technology.
Enjoy!
@Wyote
You totally gotta try to print something haunted now....lol.
Technology Meets the Paranormal:
3D Printing Cursed and Haunted Objects
We live in an ever developing, technological world full of amazing new discoveries, slick gadgetry, and constant incredible breakthroughs in science.
It sometimes seems that in this rapidly advancing society of technological wizardry that there is no place anymore for such arcane things as charms, totems, or cursed items or haunted objects, and that these are surely the relics of a fading, dying past mired in the murky word of the supernatural and occult.
Yet these things still lurk out in the periphery, and in at least one case the worlds of high technology and the supernatural have managed to collide in the oddest of ways.
One of the more fascinating inventions of recent times is the process of 3D printing, in which a 3-dimensional object is recreated layer by layer based on computer controlled data and scans of a model.
Such objects can be fashioned of almost any material and can be a wide range of sizes or shapes, making the potential applications of the process virtually limitless.
Indeed, 3D printing has been used in the automotive industry, the medical field, the military, the clothing industry, you name it.
Tools, toys, parts, firearms, automotive and electrical components, scientific instruments, medical implants, prosthetic limbs, even food, it seems almost anything can be conjured up seemingly from thin air by 3D printing in this day and age.
Bizarrely, and perhaps inevitably, 3D printing has even been used to reproduce actual haunted, cursed objects.
Wait, what?
The whole weird experiment started with the alleged discovery of a strange hand-carved statue supposedly found by some hikers stashed away and abandoned, quite possibly hidden, in a dim cave somewhere in the Catskill Mountains of New York.
The doll is creepy to say the least, with a length of filthy cord wrapped around its neck and rusty nails driven into its eyes, and it seems like the sort of thing most people would cringe at and leave lying where it was, but in this case the hikers took it home with them.
(morons)
It is a decision they would apparently later regret.
Almost immediately strange phenomena purportedly began to occur around the house, starting with inexplicable bumps, knocks, thuds, thumps, and other anomalous noises in the night when no one else was around, mixed with the persistent, intangible sense of being watched, but it quickly graduated to more frightening fare.
Shadowy apparitions began to be seen lurking about, odd smells such as that of stagnant water or decay would appear and disappear, and it was reported that the strange doll would move on its own, changing locations when no one was looking and almost always later found in a different room from where it was left, and even tiny muddy footprints were allegedly discovered around the house.
The pet dog of the house was apparently terrified of it and peed in the house on several occasions even though it never had done that before, and would often refuse to enter the premises at all.
On one occasion the homeowner claims that they saw an entity crouching in a darkened room that looked like a haggard old crone completely naked and dripping with water, with reflective eyes like those of a cat, leading to the doll’s sinister nickname “The Crone of the Catskills.”
The seemingly possessed object drew great interest from paranormal investigators Dana Matthews & Greg Newkirk, who were able to acquire it for their spooky Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and Occult, a vast repository of some of the world’s most haunted or cursed objects.
It is definitely one of the creepier museums out there, and it seems that the Crone would be perfectly at home here.
And it was, in the sense that it went right on with its scary bag of tricks.
On various occasions the figure was said to knock over furniture and a plastic figure of Jesus Christ on a wooden crucifix from the wall, pulling out the nails out in the process that were never found, as well as leave its muddy footprints all over the museum and the smell of fetid pond water in its wake, and there is one instance in which video footage was captured of the statue actually moving.
There were times when heavy furniture toppled over for no apparent reason to almost smash the museum owners or their guests, and the doll was known to roll off of tables on its own.
More sinister still were reports of those who touched or even looked at the Crone the wrong way becoming violently ill or ending up in freak accidents.
A burning, itching sensation was not uncommon for people who gazed at it too long, and there was a general natural aversion people felt in its presence, as if they were being repelled and pushed away.
People who physically touched the figurine had it the worse, allegedly being overcome with sudden and inexplicable violent seizures and prompting the enactment of a strict no-touching rule for the cursed object.
Indeed, the Crone was soon wrapped up in a pillowcase, stashed in a padlocked box, and taken out of the exhibition.
The statue did not respond to any attempts to placate it, and things supposedly got so bad that the directors, who remember were housing the scariest, most haunted items on the planet, didn’t even want it anymore, and they mulled over putting the doll back into the cave where it had been found.
For now it remains with the museum on a no-touch basis, and is rarely shown to visitors.
The Crone of the Catskills
It seems like a good plan to put it back, as it is apparent that disturbing its resting place caused whatever ominous and malignant force is attached to it to lash out, but before doing that it was decided to make it the subject of an off-the-wall experiment thought up by paranormal researchers Karl Pfieffer and Connor Randal.
They proposed trying what is perhaps the world’s first attempt to 3D print a haunted object, while at the same time attempting to communicate with the malevolent, restless entity attached to it via psychic and livestreaming the whole thing on a museums member’s only Facebook page, on Halloween night no less.
Other 3D scanning projects soon followed, including that of a haunted mask and various cursed idols, in a project meant to create a 3D catalogue of haunted and cursed items.
3D printing a cursed object inhabited by a very pissed off, very aggressive evil force or spirit, what could possibly go wrong?
Apparently, making 3D prints of these haunted objects had some strange consequences, including freak equipment malfunctions, almost as if the objects did not want to be scanned, and museum founder Greg Newkirk explained some of these unexplainable issues thus:
We’ve had equipment malfunction in bizarre ways, artifacts mysteriously go missing before we can scan them, and just two weeks ago, we went to print a 3D duplicate of a haunted mask we’ve named The Fetid Face and it completely melted the printer.
It destroyed the equipment.
Some artifacts are so plagued with problems that no scan can be successfully made at all.
On top of this, some of the 3D scan prints have been claimed to have exhibited strange phenomena in their own right after the printing, as if some of the ghostly energy from their progenitor has attached itself to these copies as well.
Concerning the strange defiance of being printed shown by some objects and the odd tendency for the prints to mimic certain aspects of the paranormal from their parent, Newkirk has said:
In hindsight, I guess we should have anticipated this, but when it comes to working with haunted artifacts in new, unexplored ways, you never know what’s going to happen.
We’re attempting something that’s never been done before, laying the groundwork for future study of paranormally-active objects.
There are going to be quirks we can’t see coming.
Members will email us and let us know that something strange is happening with their copy.
Maybe it’s possible that we’ve captured more than just the image of these artifacts in the scan – maybe we’re actually capturing a bit of their essence.
It seems like with 3D printing people will try and make or replicate just about anything, and it seems that we have officially stepped into the world of recreating cursed objects.
Good idea or not (probably not), there are some interesting issues this raises, not the least of which is just what quality does an object possess that makes it haunted in the first place, and what anchors a spirit or ghost to it?
Is it the object itself or some mysterious unseen quality permeating it?
Are these prints upsetting or confusing the spirits?
If the object were to be replicated perfectly down to the last molecule would the entity then be anchored to that thing as well or would a curse cling to the replica?
It is all a curious little mental exercise to contemplate, and a new dimension on the nature of ghosts and cursed items.
Or maybe it is all a bunch of rubbish and there are not ghosts or curses to begin with?
Whether one believes in the supernatural or not, the project of 3D printing haunted items is certainly an odd little curiosity that melds the dark world of the paranormal with the shiny toys of modern technology.
- Sep 28, 2008
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What is Ego?
From the Latin for "I" and similar to the Greek Εγώ.
In religion, spirituality, mythology, and mysticism, the term ego is very different from how the word is used in the "psychoanalysis" of Freud (nineteenth century).
Spiritual psychology is the core meaning of all religious and mythological symbolism, dating back to the origins of all great civilizations.
In spiritual psychology, the term ego refers to structures in the mind that trap the Consciousness (soul, Psyche, buddha nature, jiva, nephesh).
Although we "feel ourselves" as the ego, the reality is that the ego is a cage that traps our true nature.
That is, our true nature is "in" the ego, trapped.
That is what is symbolized in all of our ancient myths.
Of key importance in spiritual psychology is the impermanence and unreliability of the ego.
Our egoic "sense of self" is fleeting, subject to forces we do not and cannot control, and ultimately always leads to suffering.
Thus, the wise person seeks to find a stable, reliable, beneficial foundation in their psyche, which is the free, unmodified Consciousness.
To succeed in this effort requires very precise training and many years of psychological work.
The ego is a multiplicity of contradictory psychological elements that we have inside, and are in their sum the "ego.”
Each one is also called "an ego" or an "I.”
Every ego is a psychological defect that produces suffering.
The ego is often symbolized as:
three: such as in the three Furies, or the three traitors of Jesus, Chiram Abiff, Job, etc.
The three traitors relate to our three brains or three centers of psychological processing
seven: as in the seven capital sins: laziness (sloth), lust, pride, anger (hate), envy, greed (avarice), gluttony
legion: in their infinite combinations, such as the serpents on Medusa's head, the many heads of the Hydra killed by Heracles, or the "legion" that afflicted the suffering man in the wilderness of the Christian Gospels
It is universally represented that our re-union with the Divine—which in Latin is called religare, the root of the word "religion," and in Sanskrit is called Yoga , "to unite"—is achieved through the death of the ego, that which causes the division.
With this concept as a foundation, one can understand the symbolic martyrdom of the saints, the descent into the underworld, the battles with the dragons or monsters (symbols of the animalistic ego), etc.
Through this psychological death, the Consciousness (or soul; i.e. Beatrice, Persephone, Helen, Sita, etc.) is freed from its cage, and liberation from suffering is achieved.
Source - Gnostic Teachings
"Any Attempt at Liberation, no Matter how Great it might Be,
if it does not Take into Consideration the Necessity to Dissolve the Ego, it is Condemned to Failure."
~ Samael Aun Weor
if it does not Take into Consideration the Necessity to Dissolve the Ego, it is Condemned to Failure."
~ Samael Aun Weor
Some fascinating theories and ideas to ponder.
Enjoy!
Should Quantum Anomalies Make Us Rethink Reality?
Inexplicable lab results may be telling us we’re on the cusp of a new scientific paradigm
By Bernardo Kastrup on April 19, 2018
Every generation tends to believe that its views on the nature of reality are either true or quite close to the truth.
We are no exception to this: although we know that the ideas of earlier generations were each time supplanted by those of a later one, we still believe that this time we got it right.
Our ancestors were naïve and superstitious, but we are objective—or so we tell ourselves.
We know that matter/energy, outside and independent of mind, is the fundamental stuff of nature, everything else being derived from it—or do we?
In fact, studies have shown that there is an intimate relationship between the world we perceive and the conceptual categories encoded in the language we speak.
We don’t perceive a purely objective world out there, but one subliminally pre-partitioned and pre-interpreted according to culture-bound categories.
For instance, “color words in a given language shape human perception of color.”
A brain imaging study suggests that language processing areas are directly involved even in the simplest discriminations of basic colors.
Moreover, this kind of “categorical perception is a phenomenon that has been reported not only for color, but for other perceptual continua, such as phonemes, musical tones and facial expressions.”
In an important sense, we see what our unexamined cultural categories teach us to see, which may help explain why every generation is so confident in their own worldview.
Allow me to elaborate.
The conceptual-ladenness of perception isn’t a new insight.
Back in 1957, philosopher Owen Barfield wrote:
“I do not perceive any thing with my sense-organs alone.… Thus, I may say, loosely, that I ‘hear a thrush singing.’ But in strict truth all that I ever merely ‘hear’—all that I ever hear simply by virtue of having ears—is sound. When I ‘hear a thrush singing,’ I am hearing … with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling and … will.” (Saving the Appearances)
As argued by philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science itself falls prey to this inherent subjectivity of perception.
Defining a “paradigm” as an “implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief,” he wrote:
“something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’”
Hence, because we perceive and experiment on things and events partly defined by an implicit paradigm, these things and events tend to confirm, by construction, the paradigm.
No wonder then that we are so confident today that nature consists of arrangements of matter/energy outside and independent of mind.
Yet, as Kuhn pointed out, when enough “anomalies”—empirically undeniable observations that cannot be accommodated by the reigning belief system—accumulate over time and reach critical mass, paradigms change.
We may be close to one such a defining moment today, as an increasing body of evidence from quantum mechanics (QM) renders the current paradigm untenable.
Indeed, according to the current paradigm, the properties of an object should exist and have definite values even when the object is not being observed: the moon should exist and have whatever weight, shape, size and color it has even when nobody is looking at it.
Moreover, a mere act of observation should not change the values of these properties.
Operationally, all this is captured in the notion of “non-contextuality”: the outcome of an observation should not depend on the way other, separate but simultaneous observations are performed.
After all, what I perceive when I look at the night sky should not depend on the way other people look at the night sky along with me, for the properties of the night sky uncovered by my observation should not depend on theirs.
The problem is that, according to QM, the outcome of an observation can depend on the way another, separate but simultaneous, observation is performed.
This happens with so-called “quantum entanglement” and it contradicts the current paradigm in an important sense, as discussed above.
Although Einstein argued in 1935 that the contradiction arose merely because QM is incomplete, John Bell proved mathematically, in 1964, that the predictions of QM regarding entanglement cannot be accounted for by Einstein’s alleged incompleteness.
So to salvage the current paradigm there is an important sense in which one has to reject the predictions of QM regarding entanglement.
Yet, since Alain Aspect’s seminal experiments in 1981–82, these predictions have been repeatedly confirmed, with potential experimental loopholes closed one by one.
1998 was a particularly fruitful year, with two remarkable experiments performed in Switzerland and Austria.
In 2011 and 2015, new experiments again challenged non-contextuality.
Commenting on this, physicist Anton Zeilinger has been quoted as saying that “there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure [that is, observe] about a system has [an independent] reality.”
Finally, Dutch researchers successfully performed a test closing all remaining potential loopholes, which was considered by Nature the “toughest test yet.”
The only alternative left for those holding on to the current paradigm is to postulate some form of non-locality: nature must have—or so they speculate—observation-independent hidden properties, entirely missed by QM, which are “smeared out” across spacetime.
It is this allegedly omnipresent, invisible but objective background that supposedly orchestrates entanglement from “behind the scenes.”
It turns out, however, that some predictions of QM are incompatible with non-contextuality even for a large and important class of non-local theories. Experimental results reported in 2007 and 2010 have confirmed these predictions.
To reconcile these results with the current paradigm would require a profoundly counterintuitive redefinition of what we call “objectivity.”
And since contemporary culture has come to associate objectivity with reality itself, the science press felt compelled to report on this by pronouncing, “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality.”
The tension between the anomalies and the current paradigm can only be tolerated by ignoring the anomalies.
This has been possible so far because the anomalies are only observed in laboratories.
Yet we know that they are there, for their existence has been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt.
Therefore, when we believe that we see objects and events outside and independent of mind, we are wrong in at least some essential sense.
A new paradigm is needed to accommodate and make sense of the anomalies; one wherein mind itself is understood to be the essence—cognitively but also physically—of what we perceive when we look at the world around ourselves.
Some of you may have already heard of the so-called “quantum theory of consciousness.”
I’ve encountered different versions of it over the years.
It presents a method of integrating traditional religious views of the “soul,” the “afterlife,” and the possibility of “other realms of existence” with contemporary scientific theories of the relationships between consciousness and the body, between subjective perception and objective physical reality.
According to this theory, our consciousness or mind exists as a sphere or domain of living — or self-aware — energy-information beyond our perceived 3-dimensional reality and cosmos.
Our body, which, of course, exists within the 3-dimensional universe, receives the energy-information transmissions of our removed consciousness in the way that a radio receives radio signals from a broadcast station.
We experience these transmissions or signals as our thoughts, feelings, mental images, and other forms of mental activity.
Even more importantly, we experience our mental activity as somehow occurring within our body, within some internal realm of experience, just as we seem to hear sound coming from within the radio as if the radio itself somehow contains all of the music and so forth that come out of it.
However, just as the broadcasts that come out of the radio actually originate from a distant broadcast station, our thoughts and feelings which seem to appear from inside our “head” actually come from a transcendent realm where our actual mind is located.
This alternative view of the relationship between mind and body was proposed as early as the 19th century and perhaps most notably by French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson.
What’s interesting about this theory is that it can accommodate both the most cutting-edge experimental observations of neuroscience and quantum physics as well as what are currently considered the most unbelievable aspects of religious teachings.
If our brain really is a radio receiving mental transmissions from and delivering perceptual information to a mind outside of space-time, when the brain is damaged we can expect to observe corresponding damage to mental function just as damaging a radio will interfere with its ability to tune and broadcast properly.
However, killing the brain doesn’t necessarily kill the mind, just as smashing a radio doesn’t eliminate the radio broadcasts coming from the radio stations.
Mainstream scientists like to say that the brain creates consciousness and that consciousness cannot survive without the brain.
But, under the quantum theory of consciousness, it’s just as plausible to argue that consciousness exists before the formation of the brain and therefore can exist after the death of the brain.
In fact, it’s possible to reverse the common understanding of the causal relationship between the outer universe and the human mind.
We commonly believe that the universe — an incalculably vast and complex chain of physical events — created consciousness, our self-aware, thinking, feeling mind.
But it might just as well be that a preexisting consciousness or mind causes the creation of the universe.
How would this be possible?
This is where things get “quantum.”
In quantum physics for the past one hundred years, it’s been famously observed that, depending on the presence or absence of an observing human mind, subatomic entities like electrons and photons behave like pellet-like particles or waves.
When we attempt to observe their behavior using measuring instruments, they appear as particles.
But when such instruments are removed, they behave like waves, meaning they don’t seem to be located in any specific point in space at any given moment.
Unobserved, they are theorized to exist in a “superposition,” the range of all locations that it will be possible for them to appear in when they are observed.
Until they are observed, they do not exist in space or time.
They are literally dependent on the presence of the mind to attain a position in 3-dimensional reality.
Similarly, then, without the presence of the human mind, the physical universe may exist in a kind of superposition — an infinite range of possible modes of occurrence.
Which is to say, it doesn’t exist at all as a “physical” universe unless the human mind is present.
From this quantum perspective, the human mind, our consciousness, creates and sustains what seems like a universe much vaster and older than, as well as independent of, ourselves.
Mainstream scientists are profoundly uncomfortable with such “mystical” viewpoints.
They laugh at and even sometimes despise the idea of things like spirits, ghosts, psychic powers, reincarnation, heaven, hell, angels, demons, and other invisible, immaterial entities.
This is because these are associated with the medieval European past when the suppression of reason led to atrocities like witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, and the demonization of mental illness.
Their discomfort is understandable.
But there’s a peculiar, distinctly irrational and illogical strand of opinion in the modern culture of the professional scientific community.
Science, by its own definition, is the investigation of one domain, namely, the observable material world.
As a scientist, then, saying that you’re only going to investigate one domain of phenomena does not logically mean that no other such domain exists.
It’s one thing to say I’m only going to explore the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s something else entirely to go on and say that no other oceans exist.
And it’s downright unscientific to say no other oceans can possibly exist and you’re crazy if you think they do.
In a word, it’s bad science to say that no observations, except the kind of ones that I make, are possible.
By definition, science has limited itself to one realm of exploration.
This means, like it or not, there’s no logical or “scientific” basis for it to make comments about other possible realms.
All you can really say is: “I don’t know. Based on what I’ve observed, it seems difficult to explain, but the truth is, I haven’t investigated that.”
I haven’t put in the same kind of effort with the same kind of resources and the same level of enthusiasm to investigate that.
I personally just find it hard to accept.
It’s okay to be uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, but can’t we be honest about it?
That, by the way, is exactly how I felt when I first encountered the invention of the microwave oven.
A device that heats food in seconds from the inside out.
It was hard to believe.
New possibilities are always hard to believe — until we invent or discover them.
Everything we take for granted now was considered impossible only a hundred years ago: Airplanes, submarines, space shuttles, and real-time audio-video communication between distant locations.
There are things in our homes that were literally unimaginable back then: Cellphones and tablets linked to an “internet,” automobiles with GPS devices communicating with satellites in space, the microwave oven I just mentioned, TVs, and so forth.
You get the picture.
Fundamental paradigmatic transformations are impossible to predict.
But we can make the common-sense observation that nearly everything we take for granted as an absolute, unquestionable, unchangeable fact of existence becomes overturned every few decades.
And just as the average citizen of the late 19th century was literally unable to dream of what would appear only a few decades away, like the nuclear bomb, DNA, digital programming, laser surgery, A.I., and, yes, quantum physics, the only thing we can say with total certainty is that our own future will likewise bring unimaginable changes and discoveries.
If there is one thing that history teaches, it’s that today’s insane impossibilities become tomorrow’s every-day reality.
So what kind of crazy changes are coming down the pike toward us?
How about:
If you’re a true-believing futurist, you’ll find me humdrum and unimaginative.
One way or the other, all of this assumes, of course, that a nuclear war, a viral epidemic, climate change or our A.I. descendants won’t wipe us out first. But I don’t think they will.
Because we are, after all, the creators of reality.
Enjoy!
Should Quantum Anomalies Make Us Rethink Reality?
Inexplicable lab results may be telling us we’re on the cusp of a new scientific paradigm
By Bernardo Kastrup on April 19, 2018
Every generation tends to believe that its views on the nature of reality are either true or quite close to the truth.
We are no exception to this: although we know that the ideas of earlier generations were each time supplanted by those of a later one, we still believe that this time we got it right.
Our ancestors were naïve and superstitious, but we are objective—or so we tell ourselves.
We know that matter/energy, outside and independent of mind, is the fundamental stuff of nature, everything else being derived from it—or do we?
In fact, studies have shown that there is an intimate relationship between the world we perceive and the conceptual categories encoded in the language we speak.
We don’t perceive a purely objective world out there, but one subliminally pre-partitioned and pre-interpreted according to culture-bound categories.
For instance, “color words in a given language shape human perception of color.”
A brain imaging study suggests that language processing areas are directly involved even in the simplest discriminations of basic colors.
Moreover, this kind of “categorical perception is a phenomenon that has been reported not only for color, but for other perceptual continua, such as phonemes, musical tones and facial expressions.”
In an important sense, we see what our unexamined cultural categories teach us to see, which may help explain why every generation is so confident in their own worldview.
Allow me to elaborate.
The conceptual-ladenness of perception isn’t a new insight.
Back in 1957, philosopher Owen Barfield wrote:
“I do not perceive any thing with my sense-organs alone.… Thus, I may say, loosely, that I ‘hear a thrush singing.’ But in strict truth all that I ever merely ‘hear’—all that I ever hear simply by virtue of having ears—is sound. When I ‘hear a thrush singing,’ I am hearing … with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling and … will.” (Saving the Appearances)
As argued by philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science itself falls prey to this inherent subjectivity of perception.
Defining a “paradigm” as an “implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief,” he wrote:
“something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’”
Hence, because we perceive and experiment on things and events partly defined by an implicit paradigm, these things and events tend to confirm, by construction, the paradigm.
No wonder then that we are so confident today that nature consists of arrangements of matter/energy outside and independent of mind.
Yet, as Kuhn pointed out, when enough “anomalies”—empirically undeniable observations that cannot be accommodated by the reigning belief system—accumulate over time and reach critical mass, paradigms change.
We may be close to one such a defining moment today, as an increasing body of evidence from quantum mechanics (QM) renders the current paradigm untenable.
Indeed, according to the current paradigm, the properties of an object should exist and have definite values even when the object is not being observed: the moon should exist and have whatever weight, shape, size and color it has even when nobody is looking at it.
Moreover, a mere act of observation should not change the values of these properties.
Operationally, all this is captured in the notion of “non-contextuality”: the outcome of an observation should not depend on the way other, separate but simultaneous observations are performed.
After all, what I perceive when I look at the night sky should not depend on the way other people look at the night sky along with me, for the properties of the night sky uncovered by my observation should not depend on theirs.
The problem is that, according to QM, the outcome of an observation can depend on the way another, separate but simultaneous, observation is performed.
This happens with so-called “quantum entanglement” and it contradicts the current paradigm in an important sense, as discussed above.
Although Einstein argued in 1935 that the contradiction arose merely because QM is incomplete, John Bell proved mathematically, in 1964, that the predictions of QM regarding entanglement cannot be accounted for by Einstein’s alleged incompleteness.
So to salvage the current paradigm there is an important sense in which one has to reject the predictions of QM regarding entanglement.
Yet, since Alain Aspect’s seminal experiments in 1981–82, these predictions have been repeatedly confirmed, with potential experimental loopholes closed one by one.
1998 was a particularly fruitful year, with two remarkable experiments performed in Switzerland and Austria.
In 2011 and 2015, new experiments again challenged non-contextuality.
Commenting on this, physicist Anton Zeilinger has been quoted as saying that “there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure [that is, observe] about a system has [an independent] reality.”
Finally, Dutch researchers successfully performed a test closing all remaining potential loopholes, which was considered by Nature the “toughest test yet.”
The only alternative left for those holding on to the current paradigm is to postulate some form of non-locality: nature must have—or so they speculate—observation-independent hidden properties, entirely missed by QM, which are “smeared out” across spacetime.
It is this allegedly omnipresent, invisible but objective background that supposedly orchestrates entanglement from “behind the scenes.”
It turns out, however, that some predictions of QM are incompatible with non-contextuality even for a large and important class of non-local theories. Experimental results reported in 2007 and 2010 have confirmed these predictions.
To reconcile these results with the current paradigm would require a profoundly counterintuitive redefinition of what we call “objectivity.”
And since contemporary culture has come to associate objectivity with reality itself, the science press felt compelled to report on this by pronouncing, “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality.”
The tension between the anomalies and the current paradigm can only be tolerated by ignoring the anomalies.
This has been possible so far because the anomalies are only observed in laboratories.
Yet we know that they are there, for their existence has been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt.
Therefore, when we believe that we see objects and events outside and independent of mind, we are wrong in at least some essential sense.
A new paradigm is needed to accommodate and make sense of the anomalies; one wherein mind itself is understood to be the essence—cognitively but also physically—of what we perceive when we look at the world around ourselves.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A Quantum Theory of Consciousness
Dharma Master Hwansan Sunim, Contributor
Teacher of the Living Phrase Son Meditation of traditional Korean Buddhism and representative disciple of Son Master Songdam, the most venerated Buddhist master of Korea.
A Quantum Theory of Consciousness
Dharma Master Hwansan Sunim, Contributor
Teacher of the Living Phrase Son Meditation of traditional Korean Buddhism and representative disciple of Son Master Songdam, the most venerated Buddhist master of Korea.
Some of you may have already heard of the so-called “quantum theory of consciousness.”
I’ve encountered different versions of it over the years.
It presents a method of integrating traditional religious views of the “soul,” the “afterlife,” and the possibility of “other realms of existence” with contemporary scientific theories of the relationships between consciousness and the body, between subjective perception and objective physical reality.
According to this theory, our consciousness or mind exists as a sphere or domain of living — or self-aware — energy-information beyond our perceived 3-dimensional reality and cosmos.
Our body, which, of course, exists within the 3-dimensional universe, receives the energy-information transmissions of our removed consciousness in the way that a radio receives radio signals from a broadcast station.
We experience these transmissions or signals as our thoughts, feelings, mental images, and other forms of mental activity.
Even more importantly, we experience our mental activity as somehow occurring within our body, within some internal realm of experience, just as we seem to hear sound coming from within the radio as if the radio itself somehow contains all of the music and so forth that come out of it.
However, just as the broadcasts that come out of the radio actually originate from a distant broadcast station, our thoughts and feelings which seem to appear from inside our “head” actually come from a transcendent realm where our actual mind is located.
This alternative view of the relationship between mind and body was proposed as early as the 19th century and perhaps most notably by French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson.
What’s interesting about this theory is that it can accommodate both the most cutting-edge experimental observations of neuroscience and quantum physics as well as what are currently considered the most unbelievable aspects of religious teachings.
If our brain really is a radio receiving mental transmissions from and delivering perceptual information to a mind outside of space-time, when the brain is damaged we can expect to observe corresponding damage to mental function just as damaging a radio will interfere with its ability to tune and broadcast properly.
However, killing the brain doesn’t necessarily kill the mind, just as smashing a radio doesn’t eliminate the radio broadcasts coming from the radio stations.
Mainstream scientists like to say that the brain creates consciousness and that consciousness cannot survive without the brain.
But, under the quantum theory of consciousness, it’s just as plausible to argue that consciousness exists before the formation of the brain and therefore can exist after the death of the brain.
In fact, it’s possible to reverse the common understanding of the causal relationship between the outer universe and the human mind.
We commonly believe that the universe — an incalculably vast and complex chain of physical events — created consciousness, our self-aware, thinking, feeling mind.
But it might just as well be that a preexisting consciousness or mind causes the creation of the universe.
How would this be possible?
This is where things get “quantum.”
In quantum physics for the past one hundred years, it’s been famously observed that, depending on the presence or absence of an observing human mind, subatomic entities like electrons and photons behave like pellet-like particles or waves.
When we attempt to observe their behavior using measuring instruments, they appear as particles.
But when such instruments are removed, they behave like waves, meaning they don’t seem to be located in any specific point in space at any given moment.
Unobserved, they are theorized to exist in a “superposition,” the range of all locations that it will be possible for them to appear in when they are observed.
Until they are observed, they do not exist in space or time.
They are literally dependent on the presence of the mind to attain a position in 3-dimensional reality.
Similarly, then, without the presence of the human mind, the physical universe may exist in a kind of superposition — an infinite range of possible modes of occurrence.
Which is to say, it doesn’t exist at all as a “physical” universe unless the human mind is present.
From this quantum perspective, the human mind, our consciousness, creates and sustains what seems like a universe much vaster and older than, as well as independent of, ourselves.
Mainstream scientists are profoundly uncomfortable with such “mystical” viewpoints.
They laugh at and even sometimes despise the idea of things like spirits, ghosts, psychic powers, reincarnation, heaven, hell, angels, demons, and other invisible, immaterial entities.
This is because these are associated with the medieval European past when the suppression of reason led to atrocities like witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition, and the demonization of mental illness.
Their discomfort is understandable.
But there’s a peculiar, distinctly irrational and illogical strand of opinion in the modern culture of the professional scientific community.
Science, by its own definition, is the investigation of one domain, namely, the observable material world.
As a scientist, then, saying that you’re only going to investigate one domain of phenomena does not logically mean that no other such domain exists.
It’s one thing to say I’m only going to explore the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s something else entirely to go on and say that no other oceans exist.
And it’s downright unscientific to say no other oceans can possibly exist and you’re crazy if you think they do.
In a word, it’s bad science to say that no observations, except the kind of ones that I make, are possible.
By definition, science has limited itself to one realm of exploration.
This means, like it or not, there’s no logical or “scientific” basis for it to make comments about other possible realms.
All you can really say is: “I don’t know. Based on what I’ve observed, it seems difficult to explain, but the truth is, I haven’t investigated that.”
I haven’t put in the same kind of effort with the same kind of resources and the same level of enthusiasm to investigate that.
I personally just find it hard to accept.
It’s okay to be uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, but can’t we be honest about it?
That, by the way, is exactly how I felt when I first encountered the invention of the microwave oven.
A device that heats food in seconds from the inside out.
It was hard to believe.
New possibilities are always hard to believe — until we invent or discover them.
Everything we take for granted now was considered impossible only a hundred years ago: Airplanes, submarines, space shuttles, and real-time audio-video communication between distant locations.
There are things in our homes that were literally unimaginable back then: Cellphones and tablets linked to an “internet,” automobiles with GPS devices communicating with satellites in space, the microwave oven I just mentioned, TVs, and so forth.
You get the picture.
Fundamental paradigmatic transformations are impossible to predict.
But we can make the common-sense observation that nearly everything we take for granted as an absolute, unquestionable, unchangeable fact of existence becomes overturned every few decades.
And just as the average citizen of the late 19th century was literally unable to dream of what would appear only a few decades away, like the nuclear bomb, DNA, digital programming, laser surgery, A.I., and, yes, quantum physics, the only thing we can say with total certainty is that our own future will likewise bring unimaginable changes and discoveries.
If there is one thing that history teaches, it’s that today’s insane impossibilities become tomorrow’s every-day reality.
So what kind of crazy changes are coming down the pike toward us?
How about:
- Proof that human beings possess nearly unlimited latent abilities in extra-sensory perception
- The discovery that each human being possesses not one, but several bodies
- The acceptance of psychic surgery as a medical practice
- The replacement of the theory of genetic evolution by a theory of self-evolving consciousness
- The discovery (or long-overdue revelation of) the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations
- The acceptance of the survival of consciousness after death
- Confirmation of the reality of reincarnation, ghosts, and other realms of post-mortal existence
- The acceptance of the existence of other forms of intelligent consciousness not only in other animals and plants, but within “inanimate” matter as well
- The measured observation of not only other planets, stars, and galaxies, but other entire universes
- The discovery of subatomic universes
- The direct exploration of all such worlds using instantaneous, non-fuel-based modes of translocation — perhaps involving the teleportation of consciousness
- The confirmation that all such worlds and universes are a holographic projection of the mind, i.e. an “illusion”
- The observation of not only other realms of non-material existence, but other forms of non-materially based intelligence — spirit guides, angels, demons, gods, fairies, call them what you will
- The vanishing of the distinction between matter, energy, thought, feeling, and awareness
- The invention of time travel — but, of course, it won’t be mechanical in nature
If you’re a true-believing futurist, you’ll find me humdrum and unimaginative.
One way or the other, all of this assumes, of course, that a nuclear war, a viral epidemic, climate change or our A.I. descendants won’t wipe us out first. But I don’t think they will.
Because we are, after all, the creators of reality.