In spiritual because it seems there is evidence our brains work using quantum mechanics rules.
I put it here because maybe if that is true, there could be connections like quantum entanglement, maybe that could explain things like telepathy and spiritual feelings.
Here is one piece about that in Nature mag.
https://www.nature.com/articles/440611a
21d
@sonhouse saidQuantum Entanglement. Is that like a mental disease? Has a nice ring to it.
In spiritual because it seems there is evidence our brains work using quantum mechanics rules.
I put it here because maybe if that is true, there could be connections like quantum entanglement, maybe that could explain things like telepathy and spiritual feelings.
Here is one piece about that in Nature mag.
https://www.nature.com/articles/440611a
I heard that it describes the function of the Spirit that directs the formation of life at the atomic level, evidence for intelligent design.
But it's science, so I'm probably full of sh it.
@sonhouse said
In spiritual because it seems there is evidence our brains work using quantum mechanics rules.
I put it here because maybe if that is true, there could be connections like quantum entanglement, maybe that could explain things like telepathy and spiritual feelings.
Here is one piece about that in Nature mag.
https://www.nature.com/articles/440611a
One passage therein has caught my eye:
Why should evolution have turned to quantum computation, so fickle and capricious, if classical neural-network computations are evidently entirely sufficient to deal with the problems encountered by nervous systems?
The word "evidently" is loaded here. We do not know in the least that "classical neural-network computations" are in fact sufficient to deal with problems encountered by a nervous system. What problems would those be, anyway? Admittedly I skimmed much of the article, so I may have missed something. But my point is that we do not know whether other influences are in play that inform nervous systems how to behave in different situations.
Here's a problem I think about now and then: philosophical zombies. A philosophical zombie is an entity that in every way looks and acts like, say, a human, but has absolutely no conscious awareness. Physicalists (a.k.a. materialists) assume that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon emergent from arrangements of particles. That is, consciousness is sort of an accidental development. But is this assumption reasonable?
Biological evolution is entirely in the business of rearranging particles to give rise to speciation. So, given this, I would say that somehow a leap has been made somewhere. Human philosophical zombies should surely have evolved instead of the likes of us, since it is only sufficient that humans behave a certain way to be the evolutionary "success" that they are today. Having an introspectively accessible conscious inner life would seem to be superfluous.
I think there is another way we should be looking at this problem that makes more sense from a metaphysical as well as biological perspective, but I'll hold off on it for the moment.
Another interesting passage:
It is far more likely that the material basis of consciousness can be understood within a purely neurobiological framework, without invoking any quantum-mechanical deus ex machina.
It seems strange that, ex hypothesi, it should be assumed that neurobiological phenomena just don't need no stinkin' quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is at the foundation of physical reality, and while one can talk about decoherence and quantum phenomena "averaging out" in larger physical systems so as to result in classical behavior, we have no real good reason to believe that this is what happens in nervous systems. We're still apes poking at a black box and hooting and gibbering about the mystery of it all, so we should not be making broad-sweeping pronouncements about what's going on in the box before it is opened more than a crack. Sir Roger Penrose is right to keep an open mind about the possibility that quantum phenomena influence how brains work.
Frankly, what we have here are physicalists not only denying the possibility that consciousness could be a fundamental aspect of reality that brains filter, process, and focus (called the Filter Theory), but also denying that a well-researched fundamental physical theory, namely quantum mechanics, could be of any importance to the problem at hand. It starts to become understandable how neuroscientists have utterly failed to explain even a scintilla of the phenomenon known as consciousness to this day. All we have are a raft of neural correlates of consciousness worked out.
21d
@Soothfast saidYou guys are smart. Maybe even smart enough. I know I'm not.
One passage therein has caught my eye:Why should evolution have turned to quantum computation, so fickle and capricious, if classical neural-network computations are evidently entirely sufficient to deal with the problems encountered by nervous systems?
The word "evidently" is loaded here. We do not know in the least that "classical neural-netwo ...[text shortened]... consciousness to this day. All we have are a raft of neural correlates of consciousness worked out.
20d
@josephws
In quantum mechanics, two particles or photons can be 'entangled' which means they have exactly the same status like energy, spin, temperature and such, and if one of them gets changed, say a photon ramming into it, the other one reacts also even if it is a light year apart.
I was just thinking if quantum effects gives us consciousness maybe two brains could entangle themselves maybe from love of each other, not sure, but some way they could become entangled and maybe explain why some people faced with the disappearance of a loved one, they say SHE IS ALIVE, somehow feeling the state of the loved one.
20d
@sonhouse saidI find the phenomenon of consciousness itself to be fascinating, and so don't really spend much time considering paranormal phenomena. But if the physical arises within consciousness (empirically coherent) rather than the reverse (a prejudiced abstraction), I should think that increases the chances that certain paranormal phenomena are real.
@josephws
In quantum mechanics, two particles or photons can be 'entangled' which means they have exactly the same status like energy, spin, temperature and such, and if one of them gets changed, say a photon ramming into it, the other one reacts also even if it is a light year apart.
I was just thinking if quantum effects gives us consciousness maybe two brains could ent ...[text shortened]... the disappearance of a loved one, they say SHE IS ALIVE, somehow feeling the state of the loved one.
But the signal-to-noise ratio out there on the subject of the paranormal is diminishingly low. There's so much New Age nonsense out there, not to mention the old-school nonsense such as astrology.
There's also the question of how to test for the paranormal in a controlled setting. Paranormal events may be acausal (at least from the perspective of our 4-dimensional spacetime physic), and be manifestations of, say, some kind of Jungian synchronicity that points to something semantically significant. Such significance cannot be jimmied up on cue in a lab, probably.
Synchronicity is a concept that Carl Gustav Jung and the Nobelian physicist Wolfgang Pauli corresponded about at length sometime in the 1950s. Just spitballing here, since I'm not well-read on the topic, but I'd say that quantum entanglement could be a very simple kind of synchronicity phenomenon, though Jung had in mind all manners of "significant coincidences" encountered by humans in the course of life. Yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but other times a coincidence seems to be something more than due to mere chance.
Right now I'd say there is one paranormal phenomenon known to exist, and that is consciousness itself. Emergentism, which is the (metaphysical!) notion that a pile of dead particles can become self-aware when arranged a certain way, is to this day just a genie apparating from a lamp; a magical notion about as indefensible as the belief that a planet in a certain constellation can influence events on Earth in some meaningful way.
Bernard Carr is a physicist of repute who is well-known for his fascination with the paranormal. If you go to
https://www.youtube.com/@essentiafoundation/videos
you can find a lot of videos featuring Dr. Carr talking about the subject, some of which include discussions on the nature of time itself.
20d
@Soothfast
Yeah and now the word on the street is time itself is an illusion. Sure looks real when your time clock goes to zero though🙂