Merkabah

[Wyote]

Some next level trolling against me with this pic

 

[Skarekrow]

Some next level trolling against me with this pic

I’m sorry...what?

 

[ImaginaryBloke]

Some next level trolling against me with this pic

I’m sorry...what?

It is easier to deal with squares. They are easier to draw and are aesthetically more pleasing to the eye.

 

[Wyote]

What I actually saw was like a combination of these two. Less subtle as far as the waviness.
A lot of pieces with similar flow of movement to the first pic, ultimately forming a lotus.

 

[Wyote]

I've seen stuff like this before, but more color, but also more black/less white

 

[Wyote]

I've seen stuff with this sort of aggressive type of motion as well. It has a more playful vibe, but they've captured the idea of the movement well here.

 

[ImaginaryBloke]

Psychic Surgery – Your Eyes Won’t Believe It!

In5D April 14, 2016 Spiritual Awakening
Spread the love

by Michelle Walling, CHLC
Guest Writer, In5D.com

Alternative healing is not new, as shamans across the globe have been healing people with spells, herbs, and psychic surgery way before our sprawling medical hospitals were built. Psychic surgery is a pseudoscientific procedure typically involving the alleged creation of an incision using only the bare hands, the removal of pathological matter, and the spontaneous healing of the incision.

Psychic surgery has been found to exist in the Philippines, South America, the U.K., and Brazil, and probably many remote places without traditional hospitals that would not make it on the 5 o’clock news. The patients are fully awake and are in no pain whatsoever, and they seem to be in an overly relaxed state of being.


Seeing is believing
Everything is energy, and the knowledge of this opens the mind up to learning ways to manipulate your frequency and the frequency of everything around you. Psychic surgery uses the knowledge that the body is actually energy vibrating at a certain frequency, and the mind is the only barrier to manipulating its physiological form. In these surgeries, hands go inside the body and objects are pulled out and the incision is healed instantly after the surgery with no scars.

The mind has never seen these things in our lifetime. We should be able to put ourselves in a frequency that would be able to walk through walls, but unless we know that we can, it will never happen.

The videos
If you are sensitive to the sight of blood or seeing things being pulled out of people, you may not want to watch these!

The first video that got my attention was this one, which looks to be from the 80’s or so.

I decided to fond more examples of psychic surgery and found than interesting short documentary from Aaron Cisneros, who had a thyroid problem. He visited a psychic surgeon in Baguio in the Philippines.

“Brother Laurence Cacten” performed the psychic surgery, and he is a well known in the Philippines for his abilities.

This video is quite realistic as it shows an “incision” made in the abdomen, but then the surgeon goes straight for the heart to pull out some blocked material:

In this video, the “laying on of hands” and energy manipulation was also used after the small psychic surgeries on the abdomen and knees:

The prayer song was included at the end. Chanting, singing, music, and ohming always seem to be used in one way or another in these surgeries.

In this video, the onlookers ohm while the psychic surgeon uses what is termed “black magic” to meticulously pull what looks to me several feet of plastic out of a woman’s abdomen. You can clearly see one of his hands diving below the skin.

I noticed in the above video that the surgeon wore a beautiful white linen shirt, and the assistants were dressed in white too, probably as a part of the ceremonial attribute of purity. They did a good job of not making a mess with the blood!

Religious implications
In most of the videos, there are pictures of Jesus on the walls and the first video even pans directly to the Jesus picture for a few seconds as an implication that Jesus is doing the work through the psychic healer.

Perhaps the true interpretation of the Jesus reference is that all of us have access to the Christ Consciousness and the abilities to manipulate the frequency of energy, including the ability to see and remove energy imbalances psychically in the body. One thing is very clear, the Source energy that does the magic does not care if you are highly religious or not. As long as you are able to tap into it and use it for the right reasons, it is always there and abundant.

The opposing view
Mainstream media was doing its job of opposition and mockery when Johnny Carson did a skit on psychic surgery on the Tonight Show. The video is included in this article because it is very easy to see the difference between the real videos above and the attempt to reproduce theatrical production in this video:

Many people who make a mockery of alternative healing methods are either told to do so by their corporate giant bosses or simply do not have the mental faculties to process what is really happening. The ego’s job is to make fun of things that threaten the very existence of programming and beliefs that have been backed up by repetition and schooling. Anything beyond that would make all of that programming effort a waste of time.

Imagine of a psychic surgeon lived in your neighborhood and could heal pretty much anything you would need traditional surgery for, even removing tumors. Can you think of the implications of the loss of income for the medical, pharmaceutical, educational, and insurance industries? I wonder how many children could have been trained by now to enhance their psychic abilities from a very young age when the abilities were stronger and before they were told they were just making it all up? As the children reach adulthood they could begin to train in this surgery rather than spending thousands of dollars (or hundreds of thousands of dollars) in medical school.

If you are looking for a psychic surgeon, the challenge is separating the wheat from the chaff. I checked out some sites and this one seems to have done a lot of the legwork for you, although I make no guarantees whatsoever on the outcome or validity of it because I have not experienced it myself: http://www.therapies.com/psychic-surgery-movie.html. Laurence Cacten and Jun Labo are featured on this website and were two of the surgeons featured in the videos of this article. I have no idea if they are still alive or practicing, but I wanted to show you how the impossible can be researched to find the answers you need to make it possible.

As we move into a new way of existing on this planet. Alternative healing, alternative energy, sustainable and community living, free trade, and self-governing systems will be created for those who choose it. Awareness of the things that we were never taught makes it easier to manifest once you have experienced it for yourself either by doing it or by witnessing it.

About the author: Michelle Walling, CHLC is a Holistic Life Coach, international public speaker, writer, webmaster, and radio show host. Michelle is the webmaster for MichelleWalling.com, cosmicstarseeds.com, thestarchildren.net, and howtoexitthematrix.com. Michelle is the host of the Cosmic Awakening Show. Her personal Facebook page can be found here.

http://in5d.com/psychic-surgery-your-eyes-wont-believe-it/

I just watched these videos and then I pulled a spoon out of my stomach. I think that I swallowed the spoon as a child.

What sayest thou, Skare?

 

[Skarekrow]

Psychic Surgery – Your Eyes Won’t Believe It!

In5D April 14, 2016 Spiritual Awakening
Spread the love

by Michelle Walling, CHLC
Guest Writer, In5D.com

Alternative healing is not new, as shamans across the globe have been healing people with spells, herbs, and psychic surgery way before our sprawling medical hospitals were built. Psychic surgery is a pseudoscientific procedure typically involving the alleged creation of an incision using only the bare hands, the removal of pathological matter, and the spontaneous healing of the incision.

Psychic surgery has been found to exist in the Philippines, South America, the U.K., and Brazil, and probably many remote places without traditional hospitals that would not make it on the 5 o’clock news. The patients are fully awake and are in no pain whatsoever, and they seem to be in an overly relaxed state of being.


Seeing is believing
Everything is energy, and the knowledge of this opens the mind up to learning ways to manipulate your frequency and the frequency of everything around you. Psychic surgery uses the knowledge that the body is actually energy vibrating at a certain frequency, and the mind is the only barrier to manipulating its physiological form. In these surgeries, hands go inside the body and objects are pulled out and the incision is healed instantly after the surgery with no scars.

The mind has never seen these things in our lifetime. We should be able to put ourselves in a frequency that would be able to walk through walls, but unless we know that we can, it will never happen.

The videos
If you are sensitive to the sight of blood or seeing things being pulled out of people, you may not want to watch these!

The first video that got my attention was this one, which looks to be from the 80’s or so.

I decided to fond more examples of psychic surgery and found than interesting short documentary from Aaron Cisneros, who had a thyroid problem. He visited a psychic surgeon in Baguio in the Philippines.

“Brother Laurence Cacten” performed the psychic surgery, and he is a well known in the Philippines for his abilities.

This video is quite realistic as it shows an “incision” made in the abdomen, but then the surgeon goes straight for the heart to pull out some blocked material:

In this video, the “laying on of hands” and energy manipulation was also used after the small psychic surgeries on the abdomen and knees:

The prayer song was included at the end. Chanting, singing, music, and ohming always seem to be used in one way or another in these surgeries.

In this video, the onlookers ohm while the psychic surgeon uses what is termed “black magic” to meticulously pull what looks to me several feet of plastic out of a woman’s abdomen. You can clearly see one of his hands diving below the skin.

I noticed in the above video that the surgeon wore a beautiful white linen shirt, and the assistants were dressed in white too, probably as a part of the ceremonial attribute of purity. They did a good job of not making a mess with the blood!

Religious implications
In most of the videos, there are pictures of Jesus on the walls and the first video even pans directly to the Jesus picture for a few seconds as an implication that Jesus is doing the work through the psychic healer.

Perhaps the true interpretation of the Jesus reference is that all of us have access to the Christ Consciousness and the abilities to manipulate the frequency of energy, including the ability to see and remove energy imbalances psychically in the body. One thing is very clear, the Source energy that does the magic does not care if you are highly religious or not. As long as you are able to tap into it and use it for the right reasons, it is always there and abundant.

The opposing view
Mainstream media was doing its job of opposition and mockery when Johnny Carson did a skit on psychic surgery on the Tonight Show. The video is included in this article because it is very easy to see the difference between the real videos above and the attempt to reproduce theatrical production in this video:

Many people who make a mockery of alternative healing methods are either told to do so by their corporate giant bosses or simply do not have the mental faculties to process what is really happening. The ego’s job is to make fun of things that threaten the very existence of programming and beliefs that have been backed up by repetition and schooling. Anything beyond that would make all of that programming effort a waste of time.

Imagine of a psychic surgeon lived in your neighborhood and could heal pretty much anything you would need traditional surgery for, even removing tumors. Can you think of the implications of the loss of income for the medical, pharmaceutical, educational, and insurance industries? I wonder how many children could have been trained by now to enhance their psychic abilities from a very young age when the abilities were stronger and before they were told they were just making it all up? As the children reach adulthood they could begin to train in this surgery rather than spending thousands of dollars (or hundreds of thousands of dollars) in medical school.

If you are looking for a psychic surgeon, the challenge is separating the wheat from the chaff. I checked out some sites and this one seems to have done a lot of the legwork for you, although I make no guarantees whatsoever on the outcome or validity of it because I have not experienced it myself: http://www.therapies.com/psychic-surgery-movie.html. Laurence Cacten and Jun Labo are featured on this website and were two of the surgeons featured in the videos of this article. I have no idea if they are still alive or practicing, but I wanted to show you how the impossible can be researched to find the answers you need to make it possible.

As we move into a new way of existing on this planet. Alternative healing, alternative energy, sustainable and community living, free trade, and self-governing systems will be created for those who choose it. Awareness of the things that we were never taught makes it easier to manifest once you have experienced it for yourself either by doing it or by witnessing it.

About the author: Michelle Walling, CHLC is a Holistic Life Coach, international public speaker, writer, webmaster, and radio show host. Michelle is the webmaster for MichelleWalling.com, cosmicstarseeds.com, thestarchildren.net, and howtoexitthematrix.com. Michelle is the host of the Cosmic Awakening Show. Her personal Facebook page can be found here.

http://in5d.com/psychic-surgery-your-eyes-wont-believe-it/

I just watched these videos and then I pulled a spoon out of my stomach. I think that I swallowed the spoon as a child.

What sayest thou, Skare?

Any time there is blood - it’s total BS...sorry my friend.
Not a real thing....they grab some chicken guts and get em good and bloody and pretend to remove the “source” of all their ails.

This would have to be actual psychokinesis...not that it doesn’t occur, but in such a controlled and deliberate way - why not turn water into wine and proclaim yourself a messiah?

Energetic healing I do believe.
There is some good data and studies to make me lean that way.
There is good data that our consciousness and things like the power of prayer or meditation does actually effect our reality.


Anyhow...

 

[ImaginaryBloke]

Any time there is blood - it’s total BS...sorry my friend.
Not a real thing....they grab some chicken guts and get em good and bloody and pretend to remove the “source” of all their ails.

This would have to be actual psychokinesis...not that it doesn’t occur, but in such a controlled and deliberate way - why not turn water into wine and proclaim yourself a messiah?

Energetic healing I do believe.
There is some good data and studies to make me lean that way.
There is good data that our consciousness and things like the power of prayer or meditation does actually effect our reality.


Anyhow...

I just wanted a second opinion, wondering WTH that was about.
But you do know that some people have metal objects that are found during surgery? (I do not mean the dumb articles like a man had two pounds of metal in hi body. But I mean that, eg., children swallow stuff sometimes.)

 

[Skarekrow]

I just wanted a second opinion, wondering WTH that was about.
But you do know that some people have metal objects that are found during surgery? (I do not mean the dumb articles like a man had two pounds of metal in hi body. But I mean that, eg., children swallow stuff sometimes.)

Sure, sure.
I had to help fix a perforated bowel once from a toothpick that had stuck out both sides of this guy’s small intestine....he was drunk at a party the night before and ate the whole appetizer toothpick and all and it didn’t turn out so well.
I have removed toothbrushes from stomachs - it was this poor autistic kid, had some real issues I guess.
I could write a book about things removed from people’s asses...would make a great coffee table book.
Then there are those who have strange fibers that seems to grow from their skin - dunno if you have seen this?
But also there are those who claim to have various implants by aliens, or inter-dimensional visitors...some have no real legit reason to be there.
IDK though, I’m still up in the air about alien implants, I mean...if they have such great tech, then they could make an implant you couldn’t see or feel right?
Just saying.

 

[Skarekrow]

Cosmic Drama
~ God’s Dream ~

by Alan Watts

from "The Drama of It All"
in "The Essential Alan Watts" found in "God in All Worlds"
by Lucinda Varney​

I want you to think of the curious sensation of nothing that lies behind ourselves.

Think of the blank space behind the eyes, about the silence out of which all sound comes, and about empty space, out of which all the stars appear.
I liken this curious emptiness behind everything to God, an image-less, non-idolatrous God of which we can have no conception at all.

Basically, when you really get down to it, that emptiness is yourself.

Now it sounds very odd in our civilization to say,

"Therefore, I am God," or for that matter, "You are God."

But this is exactly what Jesus said, because in his culture God was conceived as the royal monarch of the universe, and anybody who got up and said,

"Well, I am God," was blasphemous.

He was subversive.
He was claiming to be, if not the boss himself, at least the boss' son, and that was a put-down for everybody else.

But he had to say it that way because, in his culture, they did not have, as the Hindus have, the idea that everybody, not only human beings, but animals and plants, all sentient beings whatsoever, are God in disguise.

Now let me try to explain this a little more clearly.
I cannot help thinking of myself as identical with continuous with one with the whole energy that expresses itself as this universe.

If the universe is made up of stars a star is a center from which energy flows.
In other words there's the middle and all the rays come out from it.

And so I feel that as the image of the whole thing all energy is a center from which rays come out and, therefore, each one of us is an expression of what is basically the whole thing.

In the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions we think of God not only as a monarch but as the maker of the world, and, as a result of that, we look upon the world as an artifact, a sort of machine, created by a great engineer.

There's a different conception in India, where the world is not seen as an artifact, but as a drama.

And therefore God is not the maker and architect of the universe but the actor of it, and is playing all the parts at once, and this connects up with the idea of each one of us as persons, because a person is a mask, from the Latin persona, the mask worn by the actors in Greco-Roman drama.

So this is an entirely different conception of the world, and as I think I shall be able to show you, it makes an amazing amount of sense.

So we start with the premise that you are God, and you don't know how you grow your body, how you make your nervous system work, or how you manage to emerge in this environment of nature.

All this is unknown to you, the you that is not you, the you that is not the ego.

This is God - that is to say, not the cosmic boss, but the fundamental ground of being, the reality that always was, is, and will be, that lies at the basis of reality. That's you.

Suppose you're God.
Suppose you have all time, eternity, and all power at your disposal.

What would you say to yourself after a while,
"Man, get lost."

It's like asking another question which amounts to supposing you were given the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream every night.

Naturally, you could dream any span of time - and it could be anything your wanted - because you make up your mind before you go to sleep.

"Tonight I'm going to dream of so-and-so."

Naturally, you would start out by fulfilling all your wishes.

You would have all the pleasures you could imagine, the most marvelous meals, the most entrancing love affairs, the most romantic journeys; you could listen to music such as no mortal has heard, and see landscapes beyond your wildest dreams.

And for several nights, oh maybe for a whole month of nights, you would go on that way, having a wonderful time.

But then, after a while, you would begin to think,

"Well, I've seen quite a bit, let's spice it up, let's have a little adventure."

And you would dream of yourself being threatened by all sorts of dangers.
You would rescue princesses from dragons, you would perhaps engage in notable battles, you would be a hero!

And then as time went on, you would dare yourself to do more and more outrageous thing, and at some point in the game you would say,

"Tonight I am going to dream in such a way that I don't know that I'm dreaming," and by so doing you would take the experience of the drama for complete reality.

What a shock when you woke up!
You could really scare yourself!

And then on successive nights you might dare yourself to experience even more extraordinary things just for the contrast when you woke up You could , for example, dream yourself in situation of extreme poverty, disease, agony.

You could, as it were, live the essence of suffering to its most intense point, and then suddenly, wake up and find it was after all nothing but a dream and everything's perfectly OK.

Well, how do you know that's not what you're doing already.
You reading, sitting there with all your problem, with all your whole complicated life situation, it may just be the very dream you decided to get into.

If you don't like it, what fun it'll be when you wake up!

This is the essence of drama.
In drama all the people who see it know it's only a play.

The proscenium arch, the cinema screen tells us,

"Well, this is an illusion, it is not for real."

In other words, they are going to act their parts so convincingly that they're going to have us sitting on the edge of our seats in anxiety, they're going to make us laugh, they're going to make us cry, they're going to make us feel horror.

And all the time, in the back of our minds we have what Germans call hintergedanken, which is a thought way, way, way in the back of our minds, that we're hardly aware of but really know all the time.

In the theater, we have a hintergedanken that it's only a play.

But the mastery of the actors is going to almost convince us that it's real.

And so, imagine a situation in which you have the best of all possible actors, namely God, and the best of all possible audiences ready to be taken in and convinced that it's real, namely God, and that you are all many many masks which the basic consciousness, the basic mind of the universe, is assuming.

To use a verse from G.K. Chesterton:

But now a great thing is in the street
Seems any human nod
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.​

IIt is like the mask of Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, a multiple mask which illustrates the fact that the one who looks out of my eyes and out of everyone's eyes is the same center.

So, when I look at another human being, and I look straight into their eyes, I don't like doing that, there's something embarrassing about looking into someone's eyes too closely.

Don't look at me that closely because I might give myself away!

• You might find out who I really am! And what do you suppose that would be?
  
  
• Do you suppose that another person who looks deeply into your eyes will read all the things you're ashamed of, all your faults, all the things you are guilty of?
  
  
• Or is there some deeper secret than that?

The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look and look and look into another person's eyes you are looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe.

And if you look down beyond that surface beauty, it's the most beautiful jewel in the universe, because that's the universe looking at you.
We are the eyes of the cosmos.

So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you're looking deep into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many-faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts.

Why?

It's perfectly obvious, because if you were God, and you knew everything and were in control of everything, you would be bored to death.
It would be like making love to a plastic woman.

Everything would be completely predictable, completely known, completely clear, no mystery, no surprise whatever.

Look at it another way.
The object of our technology is to control the world, to have a super-electronic pushbutton universe, where we can get anything we want, fulfill any desires simply by pushing a button.

You're Aladdin with the lamp, you rub it, the jinni comes and says,

"Salaam, I'm your humble servant, what do you wish? Anything you want."

And after a while, just as in those dreams I described you would decide one day to forget that you were dreaming, you would say to the jinni of the lamp,

"I would like a surprise."

Or God, in the Court of Heaven, might turn to his vizier, and say,

"Oh, Commander of the Faithful, we are bored."

And the vizier of the Court would reply,

"Oh King, live forever, surely out of the infinitude of your wisdom you can discover some way of not being bored."

And the King would reply,

"Oh vizier, give us a surprise."

That's the whole basis of the story of the Arabian Nights.
Here was a very powerful sultan, who was bored.

And therefore he challenged Scheherazade to tell him a new story every night so that the telling of the tales, getting involved in adventures, would never, never end.

Isn't that the reason why we go to the theater, why we go to the movies, because we want to get out of ourselves?
We want a surprise; and a surprise means that you have to other yourself.

That is to say, there has to enter into your experience some element that is not under your control.

So if our technology were to succeed completely, and everything were to be under our control, we should eventually say,

"We need a new button."

With all these control buttons, we always have to have a button labeled SURPRISE, and just so it doesn't become too dangerous, we'll put a time limit on it - surprise for 15 minutes, for an hour, for a day, for a month, a year, a lifetime.

Then, in the end, when the surprise circuit is finished, we'll be back in control and we'll all know where we are.
And we'll heave a sigh of relief, but, after a while, we'll press the button labeled SURPRISE once more.

You will notice a curious rhythm to what I have been explaining, and this rhythm corresponds to the Hindu idea of the course of time and the way evolution works, an idea drastically different from ours.

First of all, Hindus think of time as circular, as going round - look at your watch, it goes round.
But Westerners tend to think of time in a straight line, a one-way street, and we got that idea from Hebrew religion, and from St. Augustine.

There is a time of creation, then a course of history which leads up to final, eschatological catastrophe, the end of the world, and after that, the judgment, in which all things will be put to right, all questions answered, and justice dealt out to everyone according to his merits.

And that'll be that!

Thereafter the universe will be, in a way, static; there will be the eternally saved and the eternally damned.

Now, many people may not believe that today, but that has been a dominating belief throughout the course of Western history, and it has had a tremendously powerful influence on our culture.

But the Hindus think half of the world is going round and round for always, in a rhythm.

They calculate the rounds in periods that in Sanskrit are called kalpas, and each kalpa lasts for 4,320,000 years.

And so a kalpa is the period or manvantara during which the world as we know it is manifested.
And it is followed by a period, also a kalpa long, 4,320,000 years, which is called pralaya, and this means when the world is not manifested anymore.

And these are the days and nights of Brahma, the godhead.
During the manvantara when the world is manifested, Brahma is asleep, dreaming that he is all of us and everything that's going on, and during the pralaya, which is his day, he's awake, and knows himself, or itself (because it's beyond sex), for who and what he/she/it is.

And then, once again, presses the button - surprise!

As in the course of our dreaming, we would very naturally dream the most pleasant and rapturous dreams first and then get more adventurous, and experience and explore the more venturesome dimensions of experience.

In the same way, the Hindus think of a kalpa of the manifested universe, manvantara, as divided into four periods.
These four periods are of different lengths.

The first is the longest, and the last is the shortest.
They are named in accordance with the throws in the Hindu game of dice.

There are four throws and the throw of four is always the best throw, like the six in our game, the throw of one, the worst throw.

Now, therefore, the first throw is called krita and the epoch, the long, long period for which this throw lasts, is called a yuga.
So we will translate yuga an epoch, and we will translate kalpa as an eon.

Now the word krita means done, as when we say, "well done," and that is a period of the world's existence that we call the Golden Age when everything is perfect, done to perfection.

When it comes to an end, we get treta-yuga that means the throw of three, and in this period of manifestation there's an element of the uncertain, an element of insecurity, an element of adventure in things. It's like a three-legged stool is not as secure as a four-legged one - you're a little more liable to be thrown off balance.

That lasts for a very long time, too, but then we get next what is called dvapara-yuga.

Dyam means two, and in this period, the good and the bad, the pleasurable and the painful, are equally balanced.
But, finally, there comes kaliyuga. Kali means the worst throw, and this lasts for the shortest time.

This is the period of manifestation in which the unpleasurable, painful, diabolical principle finally takes over - but it has the shortest innings.

And at the end of the kali-yuga, the great destroyer of the worlds, God manifested as the destructive principle Shiva, does a dance called the tandava, and he appears, blue-bodied with ten arms, with lightning and fire appearing from every pore in his skin, and does a dance in which the universe is finally destroyed.

The moment of cosmic death is the waking up of Brahma, the creator, for as Shiva turns round and walks off the stage, seen from behind, he is Brahma, the creator, the beginning of it all again.

And Vishnu is the preserver, that is to say, the going on of it all, the whole state of the godhead being manifested as many, many faces.

So, you see, this is a philosophy of the role of evil in life which is rational and merciful.

If we think God is playing with the world, has created it for his pleasure, and has created all these other beings and they go through the most horrible torments - terminal cancer, children being burned with napalm, concentration camps, the Inquisition, the horrors that human beings go through how is that possibly justifiable?

We try by saying,

"Well, some God must have created it; if a God didn't create it, there's nobody in charge and there's no rationality to the whole thing.
It's just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
It's a ridiculous system and the only out is suicide."

But suppose it's the kind of thing I've described to you, supposing it isn't that God is pleasing himself with all these victims, showing off his justice by either rewarding them or punishing them, supposing it's quite different from that.

Suppose that God is the one playing all the parts, that God is the child being burned to death with napalm.
There is no victim except the victor.

All the different roles which are being experienced, all the different feelings which are being felt, are being felt by the one who originally desires, decides, wills to go into that very situation.

Curiously enough, there is something parallel to this in christianity.

There's a passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians in which he says a very curious thing:

"Let this mind be in you which was also in Jesus, who being in the form of God, did not think identity with God a thing to be clung to, but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation, and was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross."

Here you have exactly the same idea, the idea of God becoming human, suffering all that human beings can suffer, even death.

And St. Paul is saying,

"Let this mind be in you," that is to say, let the same kind of consciousness be in you that was in Jesus.

Jesus knew he was God.

Wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy or you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in the nut house (which is the same thing).

But if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations,

"My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God," they'll laugh and say, "Oh, congratulations, at last you found out."

 

[ImaginaryBloke]

Sure, sure.
I had to help fix a perforated bowel once from a toothpick that had stuck out both sides of this guy’s small intestine....he was drunk at a party the night before and ate the whole appetizer toothpick and all and it didn’t turn out so well.
I have removed toothbrushes from stomachs - it was this poor autistic kid, had some real issues I guess.
I could write a book about things removed from people’s asses...would make a great coffee table book.
Then there are those who have strange fibers that seems to grow from their skin - dunno if you have seen this?
But also there are those who claim to have various implants by aliens, or inter-dimensional visitors...some have no real legit reason to be there.
IDK though, I’m still up in the air about alien implants, I mean...if they have such great tech, then they could make an implant you couldn’t see or feel right?
Just saying.

The Coffee Table Book | Seinfeld | TBS

I 'luv' the idea of a coffee table book. ​

 

[Skarekrow]

The Coffee Table Book | Seinfeld | TBS

I 'luv' the idea of a coffee table book. ​

I think the long halogen light tube sticking out of the guy’s ass had to take the cake.
Everyone, including the person who put it there, was too afraid to pull it out for fear that it would crack and thus explode like such light tubes are prone to do.
Once under anesthesia his sphincter relaxed and it slid right out, thank god without filling his bowels with extremely tiny shards of glass and mercury.
We would probably would have had to remove that portion of the colon and he would have had a colostomy bag...thankfully not though.
Yea!!

The hobo who put a Power-aid bottle up his ass take second place....there were live fruit flies still buzzing around inside.
Sufficed to say, we did not open the top.

 

[Skarekrow]

 

[Skarekrow]

​

 

[Skarekrow]

Been a while since I have posted articles on here.
I have been dealing with extra pain issues, but am fine otherwise.
It’s just been preoccupying my time.
Hoping everyone is doing well, sending you all my love.
M


According to Gary Douglas, founder of Access Consciousness and author of Right Body for You - How to have a Healthy Relationship with your Body, the activation of 32 points, or "Bars", around the head through light touch will delete or release thought patterns that no longer serve a person.

This purging process can affect all areas of one's life,

• healing
  
  
• body
  
  
• control
  
  
• awareness
  
  
• creativity
  
  
• power
  
  
• aging
  
  
• money,
  

...and more.


This image shows the location of these access bars and how each will affect different aspects of our lives.

 

[Skarekrow]

Reality
~ Is Matter Real? ~

by Jan Westerhoff
02 October 2012
from Livasperiklis Website

Jan Westerhoff is a philosopher at the University of Durham and the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies,
both in the UK, and author of Reality: A very short introduction

(Oxford University Press, 2011)

How do electrons know how to make an Airy pattern? ​

It’s relatively easy to demonstrate what physical reality isn’t.
It is much harder to work out what it is.

NOTHING seems more real than the world of everyday objects, but things are not as they seem.

A set of relatively simple experiments reveals enormous holes is our intuitive understanding of physical reality.
Trying to explain what goes on leads to some very peculiar and often highly surprising theories of the world around us.

Here is a simple example.

Take an ordinary desk lamp, a few pieces of cardboard with holes of decreasing sizes, and some sort of projection screen such as a white wall.
If you put a piece of cardboard between the lamp and the wall, you will see a bright patch where the light passes through the hole in the cardboard.

If you now replace the cardboard with pieces containing smaller and smaller holes, the patch too will diminish in size.

Once we get below a certain size, however, the pattern on the wall changes from a small dot to a series of concentric dark and light rings, rather like an archery target.

This is the “Airy pattern” - a characteristic sign of a wave being forced through a hole (see image).

In itself, this is not very surprising.
After all, we know that light is a wave, so it should display wave-like behavior.

But now consider what happens if we change the set-up of the experiment a bit.
Instead of a lamp, we use a device that shoots out electrons, like that found in old-fashioned TV sets; instead of the wall, we use a plate of glass coated with a phosphor that lights up when an electron strikes it.

We can therefore use this screen to track the places where the electrons hit.

The results are similar: with sufficiently small holes we get an Airy pattern.

This now seems peculiar:

Electrons are particles located at precise points and cannot be split.
Yet they are behaving like waves that can smear out across space, are divisible, and merge into one another when they meet.

Perhaps it is not that strange after all.

Water consists of molecules, yet it behaves like a wave.
The Airy pattern may just emerge when enough particles come together, whether they are water molecules or electrons.

A simple variant of the experiments shows, however, that this cannot be right.
Suppose we reduce the output of the electron gun to one particle each minute.

The Airy pattern is gone, and all we see is a small flash every minute.
Let’s leave this set-up to run for a while, recording each small flash as it occurs.

Afterwards, we map the locations of all the thousands of flashes.

Surprisingly, we do not end up with a random arrangement of dots, but with the Airy pattern again.
This result is extremely strange.

No individual electron can know where all the earlier and later electrons are going to hit, so they cannot communicate with each other to create the bulls-eye pattern.

Rather, each electron must have travelled like a wave through the hole to produce the characteristic pattern, then changed back into a particle to produce the point on the screen.

This, of course, is the famous wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics.

This strange behavior is shared by any sufficiently small piece of matter, including electrons, neutrons, photons and other elementary particles, but not just by these.

Similar effects have been observed for objects that are large enough in principle to be seen under a microscope, such as buckyballs.

In order to explain the peculiar behavior of such objects, physicists associate a wave function with each of them.

Despite the fact that these waves have the usual properties of more familiar waves such as sound or water waves, including amplitude (how far up or down it deviates from the rest state), phase (at what point in a cycle the wave is), and interference (so that “up” and “down” phases of waves meeting each other cancel out), what they are waves in is not at all transparent.

Einstein aptly spoke of a “phantom field” as their medium.

For a wave in an ordinary medium such as water, we can calculate its energy at any one point by taking the square of its amplitude.

Wave functions, however, carry no energy.
Instead, the square of their amplitude at any given point gives us the probability of observing the particle if a detector such as the phosphor-coated screen is placed there.

Clearly, the point where an object switches from being a probability wave, with its potential existence smeared out across space, and becomes an actual, spatially localized object is crucially important to understanding whether matter is real.

What exactly happens when the wave function collapses - when among the countless possibilities where the particle could be at any moment, one is chosen, while all the others are rejected?

First of all, we have to ask ourselves when this choice is made.
In the example described above, it seems to happen just before the flash on the phosphor screen.

At this moment, a measurement of the electron’s position was made by a piece of phosphor glowing as the particle struck it, so there must have been an electron there, and not just a probability wave.

But assume we cannot be in the lab to observe the experiment, so we point a camera at the phosphor screen and have the result sent via a satellite link to a computer on our desktop.

In this case, the flash of light emitted from the phosphor screen has to travel to the camera recording it, and the process is repeated: like the electrons, light also travels as a wave and arrives as a particle.

What reason is there to believe that the switch from probability wave to particle actually occurred on the phosphor screen, and not in the camera?

At first, it seemed as if the phosphor screen was the measuring instrument, and the electron was the thing being measured.
But now the measuring device is the camera and the phosphor screen is part of what is measured.

Given that any physical object transmitting the measurement we can add on to this sequence - the camera, the computer, our eyes, our brain - is made up of particles with the same properties as the electron, how can we determine any particular step at which to place the cut between what is measured and what is doing the measuring?

This ever-expanding chain is called the von Neumann chain, after the physicist and mathematician John von Neumann.

One of his Princeton University colleagues, Eugene Wigner, made a suggestion as to where to make the cut.
As we follow the von Neumann chain upwards, the first entity we encounter that is not made up in any straightforward fashion out of pieces of matter is the consciousness of the observer.

We might therefore want to say that when consciousness enters the picture, the wave function collapses and the probability wave turns into a particle.

The idea that consciousness brings everyday reality into existence is, of course, deeply strange; perhaps it is little wonder that it is a minority viewpoint.

There is another way of interpreting the measurement problem that does not involve consciousness - though it has peculiar ramifications of its own.
But for now let’s explore Wigner’s idea in more depth.

If a conscious observer does not collapse the wave function, curious consequences follow.
As more and more objects get sucked into the vortex of von Neumann’s chain by changing from being a measuring instrument to being part of what is measured, the “spread-out” structure of the probability wave becomes a property of these objects too.

The “superposed” nature of the electron - its ability to be at various places at once - now also affects the measuring instruments.

It has been verified experimentally that not just the unobservable small, but objects large enough to be seen under a microscope, such as a 60-micrometre-long metal strip, can exhibit such superposition behavior.

Of course, we can’t look through a microscope and see the metal strip being at two places at once, as this would immediately collapse the wave function. Yet it is clear that the indeterminacy we found at the atomic level can spread to the macro level.

Yet if we accept that the wave function must collapse as soon as consciousness enters the measurement, the consequences are even more curious.

If we decide to break off the chain at this point, it follows that, according to one of our definitions of reality, matter cannot be regarded as real.
If consciousness is required to turn ghostly probability waves into things that are more or less like the objects we meet in everyday life, how can we say that matter is what would be there anyway, whether or not human minds were around?

But perhaps this is a bit too hasty.
Even if we agree with the idea that consciousness is required to break the chain, all that follows is that the dynamic attributes of matter such as position, momentum and spin orientation are mind-dependent.

It does not follow that its static attributes, including mass and charge, are dependent on in this.

The static attributes are there whether we look or not.

Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves whether redefining matter as “a set of static attributes” preserves enough of its content to allow us to regard matter as real.

In a world without minds, there would still be attributes such as mass and charge, but things would not be at any particular location or travel in any particular direction.

Such a world has virtually nothing in common with the world as it appears to us.

Werner Heisenberg observed that:

“the ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible… Atoms are not things.”

It seems that the best we are going to get at this point is the claim that some things are there independent of whether we, as human observers, are there, even though they might have very little to do with our ordinary understanding of matter.

Does our understanding of the reality of matter change if we choose the other strong definition of reality - not by what is there anyway, but by what provides the foundation for everything else (see “Reality - The definition“)?

In order to answer this question, we have to look at the key scientific notion of a reductive explanation.

Much of the power of scientific theories derives from the insight that we can use a theory that applies to a certain set of objects to explain the behavior of a quite different set of objects.

We therefore don’t need a separate set of laws and principles to explain the second set.

A good example is the way in which theories from physics and chemistry, dealing with inanimate matter, can be used to explain biological processes. There is no need to postulate a special physics or a special chemistry to explain an organism’s metabolism, how it procreates, how its genetic information is passed on, or how it ages and dies.

The behavior of the cells that make up the organism can be accounted for in terms of the nucleus, mitochondria and other subcellular entities, which can in turn be explained in terms of chemical reactions based on the behavior of molecules and the atoms that compose them.

For this reason, explanations of biological processes can be said to be reducible to chemical and ultimately to physical ones.

If we pursue a reductive explanation for the phenomena around us, a first step is to reduce statements about the medium-sized goods that surround us - bricks, brains, bees, bills and bacteria - to statements about fundamental material objects, such as molecules.

We then realize everything about these things can be explained in terms of their constituents, namely their atoms.

Atoms, of course, have parts as well, and we are now well on our way through the realm of ever smaller subatomic particles, perhaps (if string theory is correct) all the way down to vibrating strings of pure energy.

So far we have not reached the most fundamental objects.
In fact, there is not even an agreement that there are any such objects.

Yet this is no reason to stop our reductionist explanation here, since we can always understand the most basic physical objects in terms of where they are in space and time. Instead of talking about a certain particle that exists at such-and-such a place for such-and-such a period of time, we can simply reduce this to talk about a certain region in space that is occupied between two different times.

We can go even more fundamental.

If we take an arbitrary fixed point in space, and a stable unit of spatial distance, we can specify any other point in space by three coordinates.
These simply tell us to go so many units up or down, so many units left or right, and so many units back or forth.

We can do the same with points in time.

We now have a way of expressing points in space-time as sets of four numbers, x, y, z and t, where x, y, and z represent the three spatial dimensions and t the time dimension.

In this way, reality can be boiled down to numbers.

And this opens the door to something yet more fundamental.
Mathematicians have found a way of reducing numbers to something even more basic: sets.

To do this, they replace the number 0 with the empty set, the number 1 with the set that contains just the empty set, and so on (see “Reality - Is everything made of numbers?“ - below insert).

- Reality -

Is Everything Made of Numbers?

by Amanda Gefter

extracted from New Scientist Magazine - 29 September 2012

Amanda Gefter is a writer and New Scientist consultant based in Boston, Massachusetts.

***

The fact that the natural world can be described so precisely

by mathematics is telling us something profound, says Amanda Gefter.


WHEN Albert Einstein finally completed his general theory of relativity in 1916,
he looked down at the equations and discovered an unexpected message: the universe is expanding.

Einstein didn't believe the physical universe could shrink or grow, so he ignored what the equations were telling him,
Thirteen years later, Edwin Hubble found clear evidence of the universe's expansion.
Einstein had missed the opportunity to make the most dramatic scientific prediction in history.

How did Einstein's equations "know" that the universe was expanding when he did not?

If mathematics is nothing more than a language we use to describe the world, an invention of the human brain,
how can it possibly churn out anything beyond what we put in?

"It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here," wrote physicist Eugene Wigner in his classic 1960 paper
"The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" (Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol 13, p 1).

The prescience of mathematics seems no less miraculous today.

At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva,
Switzerland, physicists recently observed the fingerprints of a particle that was
arguably discovered 48 years ago lurking in the equations of particle physics.

How is it possible that mathematics "knows" about Higgs particles or any other feature of physical reality?

"Maybe it's because math is reality," says physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University, New York.

Perhaps if we dig deep enough, we would find that physical objects like tables and chairs are ultimately not made of particles or strings, but of numbers.

"These are very difficult issues," says philosopher of science James Ladyman of the University of Bristol, UK,
"but it might be less misleading to say that the universe is made of maths than to say it is made of matter."

Difficult indeed.

What does it mean to say that the universe is "made of mathematics"?

An obvious starting point is to ask what mathematics is made of.
The late physicist John Wheeler said that the "basis of all mathematics is 0 = 0”.
All mathematical structures can be derived from something called "the empty set", the set that contains no elements.

Say this set corresponds to zero; you can then define the number 1 as the set that contains only the empty set, Z as the set containing the sets corresponding to 0 and 1, and so on, Keep nesting the nothingness like invisible Russian dolls and eventually all of mathematics appears.

Mathematician Ian Stewart of the University of Warwick, UK, calls this,

"the dreadful secret of mathematics: it's all based on nothing" (New Scientist, 19 November 2011, p 44).

Reality may come down to mathematics, but mathematics comes down to nothing at all.

That may be the ultimate clue to existence - after all, a universe made of nothing to require a physical origin at all.

"A dodecahedron was never created," says Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"To be created, something first has to not exist in space or time and then exist."

A dodecahedron doesn't exist in space or time at all, he says - it exists independently of them.

"Space and time themselves are contained within larger mathematical structures," he adds.

These structures just exist; they can't be created or destroyed.

That raises a big question: why is the universe only made of some of the available mathematics?

"There's a lot of math out there," Greene says.

"Today only a tiny sliver of it has a realization in the physical world.
Pull any math book off the shelf and most of the equations in it don't correspond to any physical object or physical process."

It is true that seemingly arcane and unphysical mathematics does, sometimes, turn out to correspond to the real world.

Imaginary numbers, for instance, were once considered totally deserving of their name,
but are now used to describe the behavior of elementary particles; non-Euclidean geometry eventually showed up as gravity.

Even so, these phenomena represent a tiny slice of all the mathematics out there.

Not so fast, says Max Tegmark.

"I believe that physical existence and mathematical existence are the same, so any structure that exists mathematically is also real," he says.

So what about the mathematics our universe doesn't use?

"Other mathematical structures correspond to other universes," Tegmark says.

He calls this the "level 4 multiverse", and it is far stranger than the multiverses that cosmologists often discuss.

Their common-or-garden multiverses are governed by the same basic mathematical rules as our universe,
but Tegmark's level 4 multiverse operates with completely different mathematics.

All of this sounds bizarre, but the hypothesis that physical reality is fundamentally mathematical has passed every test.

"If physics hits a roadblock at which point it turns out that it's impossible to proceed, we might find that nature can't be captured mathematically,”
Tegmark says.

"But it's really remarkable that that hasn't happened,
Galileo said that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics - and that was 400 years ago."

If reality isn't, at bottom, mathematics, what is it?

"Maybe someday we'll encounter an alien civilization and we'll show them what we've discovered about the universe," Greene says.

"They'll say, 'Ah, math. We tried that. It only takes you so far, Here's the real thing,'
What would that be? It's hard to imagine.
Our understanding of fundamental reality is at an early stage." ​

All the properties of numbers also hold for all these ersatz numbers made from sets.

It seems as if we have now reduced all of the material world around us to an array of sets.
For this reason, it is important to know what these mathematical objects called sets really are.

There are two views of mathematical objects that are important in this context.

• First, there is the view of them as “Platonic” objects. This means that mathematical objects are unlike all other objects we encounter.
  
  They are not made of matter, they do not exist in space or time, do not change, cannot be created or destroyed, and could not have failed to exist.
  
  According to the Platonic understanding, mathematical objects exist in a “third realm”, distinct from the world of matter, on the one hand, and the world of mental entities, such as perceptions, thoughts and feelings, on the other.
  
  
• Second, we can understand mathematical objects as fundamentally mental in nature. They are of the same kind as the other things that pass through our mind: thoughts and plans, concepts and ideas.
  
  They are not wholly subjective; other people can have the very same mathematical object in their minds as we have in ours, so that when we both talk about the Pythagorean theorem, we are talking about the same thing.
  
  Still, they do not exist except in the minds in which they occur.

Either of these understandings leads to a curious result.

If the bottom level of the world consists of sets, and if sets are not material but are instead some Platonic entities, material objects have completely disappeared from view and cannot be real in the sense of constituting a fundamental basis of all existence.

If we follow scientific reductionism all the way down, we end up with stuff that certainly does not look like tiny pebbles or billiard balls, not even like strings vibrating in a multidimensional space, but more like what pure mathematics deals with.

Of course, the Platonistic view of mathematical objects is hardly uncontroversial, and many people find it hard to get any clear idea of how objects could exist outside of space and time.

But if we take mathematical objects to be mental in nature, we end up with an even stranger scenario.

The scientific reductionist sets out to reduce the human mind to the activity of the brain, the brain to an assembly of interacting cells, the cells to molecules, the molecules to atoms, the atoms to subatomic particles, the subatomic particles to collections of space-time points, the collections of space-time points to sets of numbers, and the sets of numbers to pure sets.

But at the very end of this reduction, we now seem to loop right back to where we came from: to the mental entities.

We encounter a similar curious loop in the most influential way of understanding quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation.
Unlike Wigner’s consciousness-based interpretation, this does not assume the wave function collapses when a conscious mind observes the outcome of some experiment.

Instead, it happens when the system to be measured (the electron) interacts with the measuring device (the phosphor screen).
For this reason, it has to be assumed that the phosphor screen will not itself exhibit the peculiar quantum behavior shown by the electron.

In the Copenhagen interpretation, then, things and processes describable in terms of familiar classical concepts are the foundation of any physical interpretation.

And this is where the circularity comes in.

We analyze the everyday world of medium-sized material things in terms of smaller and smaller constituents until we deal with parts that are so small that quantum effects become relevant for describing them.

But when it comes to spelling out what is really going on when a wave function collapses into an electron hitting a phosphor screen, we don’t ground our explanation in some yet more minute micro-level structures; we ground it in terms of readings made by non-quantum material things.

What this means is that instead of going further down, we instead jump right back up to the level of concrete phenomena of sensory perception, namely measuring devices such as phosphor screens and cameras.

Once more, we are in a situation where we cannot say that the world of quantum objects is fundamental.
Nor can we say that the world of measuring devices is fundamental since these devices are themselves nothing but large conglomerations of quantum objects.

We therefore have a circle of things depending on each other, even though, unlike in the previous case, mental objects are no longer part of this circle.

As a result, neither the phosphor screen nor the minute electron can be regarded as real in any fundamental sense, since neither constitutes a class of objects that everything depends on.

What we thought we should take to be the most fundamental turns out to involve essentially what we regarded as the least fundamental.

In our search for foundations, we have gone round in a circle, from the mind, via various components of matter, back to the mind - or, in the case of the Copenhagen interpretation, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and then back to the macroscopic.

But this just means that nothing is fundamental, in the same way there is no first or last stop on London Underground’s Circle Line.

The moral to draw from the reductionist scenario seems to be that either what is fundamental is not material, or that nothing at all is fundamental.

 

[Wyote]

Hmm.

 

[James]

Reality
~ Is Matter Real? ~

by Jan Westerhoff
02 October 2012
from Livasperiklis Website

Jan Westerhoff is a philosopher at the University of Durham and the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies,
both in the UK, and author of Reality: A very short introduction

(Oxford University Press, 2011)

How do electrons know how to make an Airy pattern? ​

It’s relatively easy to demonstrate what physical reality isn’t.
It is much harder to work out what it is.

NOTHING seems more real than the world of everyday objects, but things are not as they seem.

A set of relatively simple experiments reveals enormous holes is our intuitive understanding of physical reality.
Trying to explain what goes on leads to some very peculiar and often highly surprising theories of the world around us.

Here is a simple example.

Take an ordinary desk lamp, a few pieces of cardboard with holes of decreasing sizes, and some sort of projection screen such as a white wall.
If you put a piece of cardboard between the lamp and the wall, you will see a bright patch where the light passes through the hole in the cardboard.

If you now replace the cardboard with pieces containing smaller and smaller holes, the patch too will diminish in size.

Once we get below a certain size, however, the pattern on the wall changes from a small dot to a series of concentric dark and light rings, rather like an archery target.

This is the “Airy pattern” - a characteristic sign of a wave being forced through a hole (see image).

In itself, this is not very surprising.
After all, we know that light is a wave, so it should display wave-like behavior.

But now consider what happens if we change the set-up of the experiment a bit.
Instead of a lamp, we use a device that shoots out electrons, like that found in old-fashioned TV sets; instead of the wall, we use a plate of glass coated with a phosphor that lights up when an electron strikes it.

We can therefore use this screen to track the places where the electrons hit.

The results are similar: with sufficiently small holes we get an Airy pattern.

This now seems peculiar:

Electrons are particles located at precise points and cannot be split.
Yet they are behaving like waves that can smear out across space, are divisible, and merge into one another when they meet.

Perhaps it is not that strange after all.

Water consists of molecules, yet it behaves like a wave.
The Airy pattern may just emerge when enough particles come together, whether they are water molecules or electrons.

A simple variant of the experiments shows, however, that this cannot be right.
Suppose we reduce the output of the electron gun to one particle each minute.

The Airy pattern is gone, and all we see is a small flash every minute.
Let’s leave this set-up to run for a while, recording each small flash as it occurs.

Afterwards, we map the locations of all the thousands of flashes.

Surprisingly, we do not end up with a random arrangement of dots, but with the Airy pattern again.
This result is extremely strange.

No individual electron can know where all the earlier and later electrons are going to hit, so they cannot communicate with each other to create the bulls-eye pattern.

Rather, each electron must have travelled like a wave through the hole to produce the characteristic pattern, then changed back into a particle to produce the point on the screen.

This, of course, is the famous wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics.

This strange behavior is shared by any sufficiently small piece of matter, including electrons, neutrons, photons and other elementary particles, but not just by these.

Similar effects have been observed for objects that are large enough in principle to be seen under a microscope, such as buckyballs.

In order to explain the peculiar behavior of such objects, physicists associate a wave function with each of them.

Despite the fact that these waves have the usual properties of more familiar waves such as sound or water waves, including amplitude (how far up or down it deviates from the rest state), phase (at what point in a cycle the wave is), and interference (so that “up” and “down” phases of waves meeting each other cancel out), what they are waves in is not at all transparent.

Einstein aptly spoke of a “phantom field” as their medium.

For a wave in an ordinary medium such as water, we can calculate its energy at any one point by taking the square of its amplitude.

Wave functions, however, carry no energy.
Instead, the square of their amplitude at any given point gives us the probability of observing the particle if a detector such as the phosphor-coated screen is placed there.

Clearly, the point where an object switches from being a probability wave, with its potential existence smeared out across space, and becomes an actual, spatially localized object is crucially important to understanding whether matter is real.

What exactly happens when the wave function collapses - when among the countless possibilities where the particle could be at any moment, one is chosen, while all the others are rejected?

First of all, we have to ask ourselves when this choice is made.
In the example described above, it seems to happen just before the flash on the phosphor screen.

At this moment, a measurement of the electron’s position was made by a piece of phosphor glowing as the particle struck it, so there must have been an electron there, and not just a probability wave.

But assume we cannot be in the lab to observe the experiment, so we point a camera at the phosphor screen and have the result sent via a satellite link to a computer on our desktop.

In this case, the flash of light emitted from the phosphor screen has to travel to the camera recording it, and the process is repeated: like the electrons, light also travels as a wave and arrives as a particle.

What reason is there to believe that the switch from probability wave to particle actually occurred on the phosphor screen, and not in the camera?

At first, it seemed as if the phosphor screen was the measuring instrument, and the electron was the thing being measured.
But now the measuring device is the camera and the phosphor screen is part of what is measured.

Given that any physical object transmitting the measurement we can add on to this sequence - the camera, the computer, our eyes, our brain - is made up of particles with the same properties as the electron, how can we determine any particular step at which to place the cut between what is measured and what is doing the measuring?

This ever-expanding chain is called the von Neumann chain, after the physicist and mathematician John von Neumann.

One of his Princeton University colleagues, Eugene Wigner, made a suggestion as to where to make the cut.
As we follow the von Neumann chain upwards, the first entity we encounter that is not made up in any straightforward fashion out of pieces of matter is the consciousness of the observer.

We might therefore want to say that when consciousness enters the picture, the wave function collapses and the probability wave turns into a particle.

The idea that consciousness brings everyday reality into existence is, of course, deeply strange; perhaps it is little wonder that it is a minority viewpoint.

There is another way of interpreting the measurement problem that does not involve consciousness - though it has peculiar ramifications of its own.
But for now let’s explore Wigner’s idea in more depth.

If a conscious observer does not collapse the wave function, curious consequences follow.
As more and more objects get sucked into the vortex of von Neumann’s chain by changing from being a measuring instrument to being part of what is measured, the “spread-out” structure of the probability wave becomes a property of these objects too.

The “superposed” nature of the electron - its ability to be at various places at once - now also affects the measuring instruments.

It has been verified experimentally that not just the unobservable small, but objects large enough to be seen under a microscope, such as a 60-micrometre-long metal strip, can exhibit such superposition behavior.

Of course, we can’t look through a microscope and see the metal strip being at two places at once, as this would immediately collapse the wave function. Yet it is clear that the indeterminacy we found at the atomic level can spread to the macro level.

Yet if we accept that the wave function must collapse as soon as consciousness enters the measurement, the consequences are even more curious.

If we decide to break off the chain at this point, it follows that, according to one of our definitions of reality, matter cannot be regarded as real.
If consciousness is required to turn ghostly probability waves into things that are more or less like the objects we meet in everyday life, how can we say that matter is what would be there anyway, whether or not human minds were around?

But perhaps this is a bit too hasty.
Even if we agree with the idea that consciousness is required to break the chain, all that follows is that the dynamic attributes of matter such as position, momentum and spin orientation are mind-dependent.

It does not follow that its static attributes, including mass and charge, are dependent on in this.

The static attributes are there whether we look or not.

Nevertheless, we have to ask ourselves whether redefining matter as “a set of static attributes” preserves enough of its content to allow us to regard matter as real.

In a world without minds, there would still be attributes such as mass and charge, but things would not be at any particular location or travel in any particular direction.

Such a world has virtually nothing in common with the world as it appears to us.

Werner Heisenberg observed that:

“the ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’ of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation, however, is impossible… Atoms are not things.”

It seems that the best we are going to get at this point is the claim that some things are there independent of whether we, as human observers, are there, even though they might have very little to do with our ordinary understanding of matter.

Does our understanding of the reality of matter change if we choose the other strong definition of reality - not by what is there anyway, but by what provides the foundation for everything else (see “Reality - The definition“)?

In order to answer this question, we have to look at the key scientific notion of a reductive explanation.

Much of the power of scientific theories derives from the insight that we can use a theory that applies to a certain set of objects to explain the behavior of a quite different set of objects.

We therefore don’t need a separate set of laws and principles to explain the second set.

A good example is the way in which theories from physics and chemistry, dealing with inanimate matter, can be used to explain biological processes. There is no need to postulate a special physics or a special chemistry to explain an organism’s metabolism, how it procreates, how its genetic information is passed on, or how it ages and dies.

The behavior of the cells that make up the organism can be accounted for in terms of the nucleus, mitochondria and other subcellular entities, which can in turn be explained in terms of chemical reactions based on the behavior of molecules and the atoms that compose them.

For this reason, explanations of biological processes can be said to be reducible to chemical and ultimately to physical ones.

If we pursue a reductive explanation for the phenomena around us, a first step is to reduce statements about the medium-sized goods that surround us - bricks, brains, bees, bills and bacteria - to statements about fundamental material objects, such as molecules.

We then realize everything about these things can be explained in terms of their constituents, namely their atoms.

Atoms, of course, have parts as well, and we are now well on our way through the realm of ever smaller subatomic particles, perhaps (if string theory is correct) all the way down to vibrating strings of pure energy.

So far we have not reached the most fundamental objects.
In fact, there is not even an agreement that there are any such objects.

Yet this is no reason to stop our reductionist explanation here, since we can always understand the most basic physical objects in terms of where they are in space and time. Instead of talking about a certain particle that exists at such-and-such a place for such-and-such a period of time, we can simply reduce this to talk about a certain region in space that is occupied between two different times.

We can go even more fundamental.

If we take an arbitrary fixed point in space, and a stable unit of spatial distance, we can specify any other point in space by three coordinates.
These simply tell us to go so many units up or down, so many units left or right, and so many units back or forth.

We can do the same with points in time.

We now have a way of expressing points in space-time as sets of four numbers, x, y, z and t, where x, y, and z represent the three spatial dimensions and t the time dimension.

In this way, reality can be boiled down to numbers.

And this opens the door to something yet more fundamental.
Mathematicians have found a way of reducing numbers to something even more basic: sets.

To do this, they replace the number 0 with the empty set, the number 1 with the set that contains just the empty set, and so on (see “Reality - Is everything made of numbers?“ - below insert).

- Reality -

Is Everything Made of Numbers?

by Amanda Gefter

extracted from New Scientist Magazine - 29 September 2012

Amanda Gefter is a writer and New Scientist consultant based in Boston, Massachusetts.

***

The fact that the natural world can be described so precisely

by mathematics is telling us something profound, says Amanda Gefter.


WHEN Albert Einstein finally completed his general theory of relativity in 1916,
he looked down at the equations and discovered an unexpected message: the universe is expanding.

Einstein didn't believe the physical universe could shrink or grow, so he ignored what the equations were telling him,
Thirteen years later, Edwin Hubble found clear evidence of the universe's expansion.
Einstein had missed the opportunity to make the most dramatic scientific prediction in history.

How did Einstein's equations "know" that the universe was expanding when he did not?

If mathematics is nothing more than a language we use to describe the world, an invention of the human brain,
how can it possibly churn out anything beyond what we put in?

"It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here," wrote physicist Eugene Wigner in his classic 1960 paper
"The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" (Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol 13, p 1).

The prescience of mathematics seems no less miraculous today.

At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva,
Switzerland, physicists recently observed the fingerprints of a particle that was
arguably discovered 48 years ago lurking in the equations of particle physics.

How is it possible that mathematics "knows" about Higgs particles or any other feature of physical reality?

"Maybe it's because math is reality," says physicist Brian Greene of Columbia University, New York.

Perhaps if we dig deep enough, we would find that physical objects like tables and chairs are ultimately not made of particles or strings, but of numbers.

"These are very difficult issues," says philosopher of science James Ladyman of the University of Bristol, UK,
"but it might be less misleading to say that the universe is made of maths than to say it is made of matter."

Difficult indeed.

What does it mean to say that the universe is "made of mathematics"?

An obvious starting point is to ask what mathematics is made of.
The late physicist John Wheeler said that the "basis of all mathematics is 0 = 0”.
All mathematical structures can be derived from something called "the empty set", the set that contains no elements.

Say this set corresponds to zero; you can then define the number 1 as the set that contains only the empty set, Z as the set containing the sets corresponding to 0 and 1, and so on, Keep nesting the nothingness like invisible Russian dolls and eventually all of mathematics appears.

Mathematician Ian Stewart of the University of Warwick, UK, calls this,

"the dreadful secret of mathematics: it's all based on nothing" (New Scientist, 19 November 2011, p 44).

Reality may come down to mathematics, but mathematics comes down to nothing at all.

That may be the ultimate clue to existence - after all, a universe made of nothing to require a physical origin at all.

"A dodecahedron was never created," says Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"To be created, something first has to not exist in space or time and then exist."

A dodecahedron doesn't exist in space or time at all, he says - it exists independently of them.

"Space and time themselves are contained within larger mathematical structures," he adds.

These structures just exist; they can't be created or destroyed.

That raises a big question: why is the universe only made of some of the available mathematics?

"There's a lot of math out there," Greene says.

"Today only a tiny sliver of it has a realization in the physical world.
Pull any math book off the shelf and most of the equations in it don't correspond to any physical object or physical process."

It is true that seemingly arcane and unphysical mathematics does, sometimes, turn out to correspond to the real world.

Imaginary numbers, for instance, were once considered totally deserving of their name,
but are now used to describe the behavior of elementary particles; non-Euclidean geometry eventually showed up as gravity.

Even so, these phenomena represent a tiny slice of all the mathematics out there.

Not so fast, says Max Tegmark.

"I believe that physical existence and mathematical existence are the same, so any structure that exists mathematically is also real," he says.

So what about the mathematics our universe doesn't use?

"Other mathematical structures correspond to other universes," Tegmark says.

He calls this the "level 4 multiverse", and it is far stranger than the multiverses that cosmologists often discuss.

Their common-or-garden multiverses are governed by the same basic mathematical rules as our universe,
but Tegmark's level 4 multiverse operates with completely different mathematics.

All of this sounds bizarre, but the hypothesis that physical reality is fundamentally mathematical has passed every test.

"If physics hits a roadblock at which point it turns out that it's impossible to proceed, we might find that nature can't be captured mathematically,”
Tegmark says.

"But it's really remarkable that that hasn't happened,
Galileo said that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics - and that was 400 years ago."

If reality isn't, at bottom, mathematics, what is it?

"Maybe someday we'll encounter an alien civilization and we'll show them what we've discovered about the universe," Greene says.

"They'll say, 'Ah, math. We tried that. It only takes you so far, Here's the real thing,'
What would that be? It's hard to imagine.
Our understanding of fundamental reality is at an early stage." ​

All the properties of numbers also hold for all these ersatz numbers made from sets.

It seems as if we have now reduced all of the material world around us to an array of sets.
For this reason, it is important to know what these mathematical objects called sets really are.

There are two views of mathematical objects that are important in this context.

• First, there is the view of them as “Platonic” objects. This means that mathematical objects are unlike all other objects we encounter.
  
  They are not made of matter, they do not exist in space or time, do not change, cannot be created or destroyed, and could not have failed to exist.
  
  According to the Platonic understanding, mathematical objects exist in a “third realm”, distinct from the world of matter, on the one hand, and the world of mental entities, such as perceptions, thoughts and feelings, on the other.
  
  
• Second, we can understand mathematical objects as fundamentally mental in nature. They are of the same kind as the other things that pass through our mind: thoughts and plans, concepts and ideas.
  
  They are not wholly subjective; other people can have the very same mathematical object in their minds as we have in ours, so that when we both talk about the Pythagorean theorem, we are talking about the same thing.
  
  Still, they do not exist except in the minds in which they occur.

Either of these understandings leads to a curious result.

If the bottom level of the world consists of sets, and if sets are not material but are instead some Platonic entities, material objects have completely disappeared from view and cannot be real in the sense of constituting a fundamental basis of all existence.

If we follow scientific reductionism all the way down, we end up with stuff that certainly does not look like tiny pebbles or billiard balls, not even like strings vibrating in a multidimensional space, but more like what pure mathematics deals with.

Of course, the Platonistic view of mathematical objects is hardly uncontroversial, and many people find it hard to get any clear idea of how objects could exist outside of space and time.

But if we take mathematical objects to be mental in nature, we end up with an even stranger scenario.

The scientific reductionist sets out to reduce the human mind to the activity of the brain, the brain to an assembly of interacting cells, the cells to molecules, the molecules to atoms, the atoms to subatomic particles, the subatomic particles to collections of space-time points, the collections of space-time points to sets of numbers, and the sets of numbers to pure sets.

But at the very end of this reduction, we now seem to loop right back to where we came from: to the mental entities.

We encounter a similar curious loop in the most influential way of understanding quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation.
Unlike Wigner’s consciousness-based interpretation, this does not assume the wave function collapses when a conscious mind observes the outcome of some experiment.

Instead, it happens when the system to be measured (the electron) interacts with the measuring device (the phosphor screen).
For this reason, it has to be assumed that the phosphor screen will not itself exhibit the peculiar quantum behavior shown by the electron.

In the Copenhagen interpretation, then, things and processes describable in terms of familiar classical concepts are the foundation of any physical interpretation.

And this is where the circularity comes in.

We analyze the everyday world of medium-sized material things in terms of smaller and smaller constituents until we deal with parts that are so small that quantum effects become relevant for describing them.

But when it comes to spelling out what is really going on when a wave function collapses into an electron hitting a phosphor screen, we don’t ground our explanation in some yet more minute micro-level structures; we ground it in terms of readings made by non-quantum material things.

What this means is that instead of going further down, we instead jump right back up to the level of concrete phenomena of sensory perception, namely measuring devices such as phosphor screens and cameras.

Once more, we are in a situation where we cannot say that the world of quantum objects is fundamental.
Nor can we say that the world of measuring devices is fundamental since these devices are themselves nothing but large conglomerations of quantum objects.

We therefore have a circle of things depending on each other, even though, unlike in the previous case, mental objects are no longer part of this circle.

As a result, neither the phosphor screen nor the minute electron can be regarded as real in any fundamental sense, since neither constitutes a class of objects that everything depends on.

What we thought we should take to be the most fundamental turns out to involve essentially what we regarded as the least fundamental.

In our search for foundations, we have gone round in a circle, from the mind, via various components of matter, back to the mind - or, in the case of the Copenhagen interpretation, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and then back to the macroscopic.

But this just means that nothing is fundamental, in the same way there is no first or last stop on London Underground’s Circle Line.

The moral to draw from the reductionist scenario seems to be that either what is fundamental is not material, or that nothing at all is fundamental.

I think the science is important, especially the pursuit of medicine, exploration of prime numbers, and improvement of our existence in nature. However I think in many ways infj feel there's something else. Like being at a magicians show, that isn't a trick, but that's not quite real either.

 

[Wyote]

Like being at a magicians show, that isn't a trick, but that's not quite real either.

The Prestige!