Hi Peter

You're absolutely correct about most scientists being stuck in their old ways. It's as if some are living in the past when classical (Newtonian) physics dominated the mainstream. I get the feeling that they don't like ideas such as quantum entanglement, quantum uncertainty, biocentrism, etc, because it disrupts their cosy little worlds. They crave rationality, logic, a TOE (theory of everything). They need to start opening their minds up more, because the universe appears far stranger than anybody previously thought.

Biocentrism is a great theory, but who is really shaping our reality- is it me? (solipsism, egocentrism,), is it God, is it the programmer of the universe, is it a select group of people (Illuminati?), governments, A.I., alien civilisation, or is it a mass consciousness effort where everybody on the planet has an influence?

I really like this post, Peter, cheers!

Peter,

You are probably right that many scholars and established scientists/researchers struggle with understanding some of the quantum mechanical wierdness and how to interpret and relate these concepts to us in the the newtonian realm of the large. Consciousness is a difficult subject that nobody completely understands.

I have noticed that some of the greatest advancements in science occur when ideas and information from two completely different fields of science merge. I have been following some of the ideas coming from Stuart Hameroff with a keen interest. Although he could be wrong about some of the details... I suspect the basic idea of the brain utilizing entanglement and quantum computations is based in truth.

I read The Holographic Universe back sometime around 1997 and still have a copy with the original ugly cover. Although the book delves into subjects I am personally uncomfortable with considering... my computer science backgound includes computer algorithms utilizing fourier transformations. It is hard to explain exactly why... but I knew there was something about the work of David Bohm and Karl Pribram that might explain certain functions of the brain and nervous system. I just knew the basic ideas behind their model was important.

Unfortunately Neurology/Biology is completely outside my area of research so I get completely lost in the medical nomenclature. However the mathematics I do understand... and I find it absolutely facinating that some of the functions of the human body such as vision can be very accurately described with gabor wavelets. These are the same types of algorithms we use in computer science to build software that can 'see' and recognize patterns.

Some final summarized random thoughts and questions:

1.) A quantum based consciousness might be able to send/recieve information newtonian-long-distance via entanglement. Where does consciousness reside? Is it within or outside the human body?
2.) It should be possible to build machines with visual/auditory/somatosensory computer based systems. We already have high level technology in each category. The only thing missing would be consciousness... but what is consciousness? Can we build consciousness? Will consciousness emerge all by itself?
3.) If it was confirmed that consciousness existed outside of the physical human body... then what exactly is the physical universe?

-TheArchitect


P.S.
We just spoiled the cosmology forum with our off-topic bantor. But who cares... cosmology is boring and nothing interesting ever happpens in that field with the exception of WMAP.

Very cool that you wrote this, TheArchitect. My Master's project was a microprocessor-based system that performed real time FFT's on atmospheric data for spectral analysis. The system flew in a high altitude weather balloon through thunderstorms and compressed the data to match the allow telemetry rate. It was the first of its kind in 1981. So I also read with considerable interest some of Bohm and Pribram's ideas as applied to reality in The Holographic Universe. Could our reality in the time domain be a transformation of data stored in the frequency domain?

Or maybe the transformation is not F->T, but something far more complex, so far beyond our comprehension that we can't see it, or its patterns?

A few random thoughts on your questions...



Seems to me that if you set aside traditional science biases and consider the data itself, the overwhelming evidence is that consciousness continues after death (Pim van Lommel's research on NDEs, Brian Weiss' research on past life regressions, etc.) While what we think of as consciousness probably needs a sufficiently complex neurological system and sensory processing, that alone probably isn't enough to create consciousness. Otherwise, one would have to argue that the "level" of consciousness is a continuum and therefore it exists even in the most basic system containing memory and logic processing. Therefore, a bit of memory and a couple NAND gates are conscious? But then, you have to acknowledge that processing in silicon or wetware wouldn't have to be the only way to do it. Would anybody really think that a mechanical device that carries out logic and memory made out of LEGOs would be conscious?



Maybe that would make the physical universe the emergent property, rather than the other way around?