Kanamori
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Save a piece for me, please.
If they're just misunderstood shadow people, they should bring a mini-harp and play some happy music, or give some lessons about the universe, imho.
Merkabah
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Save a piece for me, please.
If they're just misunderstood shadow people, they should bring a mini-harp and play some happy music, or give some lessons about the universe, imho.
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I have envisioned... going on one of those ghost hunting shows and challenging the hosts to prove there are sentient ghosts. They have me sit in a completely dark room by myself in some haunted house or place. Maybe I hear noises that can be explained, my stomach making noise ect.. I am completely fine throughout the entire show, I experience nothing out of the ordinary for the most part. That is until the end where they become frustrated because they have all been running around jumping at shadows and I have not. In the final 15 minutes of the show as I am still sitting alone in the most haunted room in the world unaffected, one of them picks up a stick and runs at me with their night vision goggles on. I am smacked in the back of the head with it. Later they ask me if anything happened while I was alone... Some editing is done and I am now a believer of strange unexplained occurrences.
This is intended as a bit of humor.
This is intended as a bit of humor.
sprinkles
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Even in humor maybe you have something right there.
Maybe on the one hand some people want so much to be believed about something that they find extraordinary. On the other hand maybe you don't find it extraordinary. Maybe it's just normal to you and you feel comfortable with all the subtle things that go on in the dark - you feel it is all normal.
Maybe in both cases you all feel the same things and one party finds things to be extraordinary and the other just sees them as mundane every day occurrences.
Like with the shadow people. I see them a lot. Big deal - they don't scare me.
I also have a very well defined and strong aura and it is normal for me to feel other beings auras interact with mine due to proximity. I don't flip out and say "HEY SCIENCE! THIS IS AMAZING!" because it's every day shit to me.
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[MENTION=6917]sprinkles[/MENTION] I have wondered at this. One person sees something another does not. Does that mean one person is simply more perceptive than another? Does one mind have a capability another does not? If two people see the world so drastically different, which is correct? Are both, is neither?
sprinkles
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Well it makes sense you know. Some people are color blind. Some are tone deaf. Most people hear tones relatively and won't know if something is out of tune without a comparison. Others instantly know if a song is out of tune from the usual. And some can identify the exact pitch of a note by hearing it.
I've had several cases where somebody uploaded a song to YouTube and their encoding made the pitch of the entire song become slightly sharp. I instantly recognize that it is off, but somehow they don't. I've brought it up before: "This recording is off pitch" and they wonder how, because they can't hear it - since the entire song is off pitch the notes relatively sound in tune to them. One can only notice it if they have exact memory of the song like I do.
Skarekrow
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Skarekrow
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Well...I think you are right that many of them are jumping at shadows or squeaking out a fart that they don’t want to admit to on camera...lol.
Or perhaps just by the fact that they are there trying to capture something paranormal happening they are in turn causing something to occur.
Do you feel a malevolence from them or is it pretty neutral?
Some people believe that our perception of the light spectrum is changing...in ancient paintings the sky is often painted as black...as it is in description.
It isn’t until just before the middle ages that we begin to see the blue description and color appear with any frequency. There is a school of thought out there that people are seeing more and more into the ultraviolet and infra-red spectrum.
The idea of the people “creating” the paranormal through their mind was tested.
This idea was actually tested in the early 70’s dubbed “The Phillip Experiment” ( it has been mentioned on this thread before but never really explored in any depth) ((also there was a terrible “horror” movie made about it who's name escapes me at the moment)).
The Philip experiment - Creating a ghost
The Philip experiment
In the 1970's, a group of Canadian parapsychologists wanted to attempt an experiment to create a ghost, proving their theory that the human mind can produce spirits through expectation, imagination and visualization.
The actual experiment took place in Toronto, Canada, in 1972, under the direction of the world-renown expert on poltergeists, Dr A. R. G. Owen.
The members of the experiment proposed an idea... by using extreme and prolonged concentration, they could create their ghost through a collective thought form: Non-physical entities which exist in either the mental or astral plane. In order to create this ghost and make it as 'real' as possible, it needed a life story; a background in which the ghost could 'relate' to.
They named the ghost they were attempting to bring into focus "Philip Aylesford" and created a tragic story, explaining to the fullest and in great detail, his life, and the few actions that lead to his tragic death.
Step two was contacting Philip. In September 1972, the group began their "sittings" and after some initial problems the group attempted to duplicate the atmosphere of a classic spiritualist séance. They dimmed the room's lights, sat around a table and surrounded themselves with pictures of the type of castle they imagined Philip would have lived in, as well as objects from that time period.
Within a few weeks, Philip made contact. Although he did not manifest in spiritual form, appearing as an apparition or ghost, he did make contact through a brief rap on the group's table. "Philip" answered questions that were consistent with his fictitious history, but was unable to provide any information beyond that which the group had conceived. However, "Philip" did give other historically accurate information about real events and people. The Owen group theorized that this latter information came from their own collective unconsciousness.
The sessions took off from there, producing a range of phenomena that could not be explained scientifically. His "spirit" was able to move the table, sliding it from side to side. On more than one occasion, the table chased someone across the room. All hands were clear of the table when this occurred.
In conclusion the experimenters were never able to prove the 'how' and the 'why' behind Philip's manifestation. Was Philip a direct result of the group's collective subconscious or perhaps did they conjure an actual entity that simply latched onto the story?
While some would conclude that they prove that ghosts don't exist, that such things are in our minds only, others say that our unconscious could be responsible for this kind of the phenomena some of the time.
Another point of view is that even though Philip was completely fictional, the Owen group really did contact the spirit world. A playful (or perhaps demonic, some would argue) spirit took the opportunity of these séances to 'act' as Philip and produce the extraordinary psychokinetic phenomena recorded.
Whatever caused the manifestation it seems that it adapted itself to the expectation of the audience, playing the role of the spirit they intended to contact. Since all was based on fiction it could not be the spirit of Philip so what else could it be?
The Philip experiment has been very extraordinary to say the least. It seems to proof that séances can indeed create the type of manifestations that are often reported by participants of such activities. The atmosphere in such a 'sitting' might make people more sensitive for noticing weak noises and signs that normally are overlooked as communication or interaction with non-physical entities.
During the Philip experiment the participants where convinced that some kind of interaction was going on.
With knocks and rasps heard coming from the table, the group's questions where answered and eventually the table moved, danced and reacted on the group's presence.
If this would happen in any ordinary séance it would definitely cause anxiety, fear, excitement and would easily contribute in having people believe inghosts, spirits, demons and non-physical intellectual entities that are capable of communicating with us.
Since the 'Philip' group did expect some kind of manifestation as result of their experiment, their intention and expectation might have contributed to the final result. The intentional creation of the right atmosphere might also have helped to make possible the phenomena. However the resulting interaction with 'Philip' has been rather basic, no voices, no floating bodies, only knocks and moving objects, classical manifestations of ghosts. A real interactive conversation with a ghost was never accomplished.
Would it not be great to be able to communicate openly with ghosts, it could teach us a lot about them, what they are, what attracts them to communicating with us etc. This does not seem to have happened in the Philip experiment and as I am aware it never happened. The reason might be that it just can't be done. We might want to, but from the spirit's point of view it might not be possible. Of course without such a bi-directional conversation we are limited in what we can know about ghosts and spirits.
The result of a communication based on a table that 'raps and knocks' is highly depending on the expectation of the participants. Since the group determines the direction of the conversation, it is likely that the outcome will be approximately what it is expected to be. It does not come close to a real discussion. The manifestations in the 'Philip' experiment only proved that something was manipulating the table and impersonated the ghost of 'Philip' which of course in it's own right is amazing.
In the 'Philip' experiment, questions were asked aloud, that would mean that the spirit was able to hear and/or understand spoken language. Since the team could not hear directly the answers of the spirit (although sometimes a soft whispering was noticeable), the replies came as knocks and rappings from the table, of course this is nothing close to an interactive communication. In a real discussion both parties can lead the direction of the conversation and can choose the topics that are being discussed. When one party can only reply with yes and no then the conversation is limited to the topics that the leading (verbal) party comes up with. Which might be very determined indeed.
Lets assume that the effects witnessed during the experiment were real and that objects like tables can be manipulated invisibly. Of course we still don't know how but if it can be done then science will eventually find out how to replicate these effects.
There will likely be a time that we will have devices that can manipulate objects over distance in such a way that you cannot tell the difference between extraordinary psychokinetic phenomena produced by a ghost and the consequence of operating a super duper high tech device. The result will be spooky effects that cannot easily be explained if you do not know of the existence of such a technology.
Since ghosts and spirits are generally believed to belong to dead persons, the invented ghost experiment should not have had success.
The 'Philip' experiments might therefore reveal that participants of séances are not in control of who is actually their communication partner. The manifestations during the 'Philip' experiment showed that something was manipulating the table and impersonated the ghost of 'Philip'. Given that it could not be the spirit of Philip, what else could it have been?
Could it be possible and that Time Travelers resemble ghosts or spirits?
If time travel is going to be invented and time travelers are capable to resemble non-physical entities then séances might be great opportunities for them to communicate, interact, play and fool around with people of the past.
A séancemight actually turn out to be a unique, relatively safe opportunity for time travelers to interact with the past for the following reasons:
- Séances are commonly used for communicating with spirits of dead people. People participating in seances think of the past, not the future.
- The atmosphere, intention and mindset of the participants might create the optimal circumstances for communication.
- Séances are common practices that have taken place through the centuries and continue to happen regularly.
- Knowledge exchange in séances is limited and hardly exposes a risk of changing the flow of history.
If time travel could really exist in a far future then surely strict procedures and rules would enforce responsible trips. It is not certain whether these rules will allow travelers to communicate, or interact with the past as it is still possible that any interference with the past automatically leads to grave changes in history.
Since ghosts and spirits are generally believed to belong to dead persons no relationship with the future is expected and therefore might be a great safe opportunity for time travelers to impersonate such a spirit and communicate with mediums under false pretences. However it is also known that these spirits have answered questions about future events like, when and how do I die...
[video=youtube_share;X2lGPT2J1cc]http://youtu.be/X2lGPT2J1cc[/video]
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sprinkles
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One might say it feels like malevolence, but I think that is a relative perspective most of the time.
This isn't to say there aren't malevolent beings. I'm sure there are plenty since malevolence exists so much in humans too.
However there's also this otherworldly sense. Where the being is simply foreign. To cite a fictional example, Saya from Saya no Uta. She's what one might call an eldrich abomination - a Lovecraftian monster like Cthulhu - except she's not really evil. All she wants is to propagate her species and she needed an intelligent, sentient host species to do that. She wanted to combine herself with human DNA. Yet she didn't identify with humans. Humans to her were like bugs are often to humans - mostly unrelatable. She killed and ate many humans as well, mostly because she was just hungry, and the sight of her true form would drive most humans insane anyway so she figured she might as well kill them and eat them I suppose. But it didn't seem like it was out of hate or cruelty, she was just different.
In fact, the human she paired up with, Fuminori, was probably far more malevolent and insidious than Saya was. Saya was just a being from another world, while Fuminori was driven mad and driven to murder and cannibalism, things that would ordinarily break a human's moral foundation.
Skarekrow
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I gotcha.
Have you ever tried to catch proof of them? Like maybe set-up your webcam with motion sensor turned on?
sprinkles
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I have not. However I believe that even if I did, and it could see them, they're intelligent enough to avoid it. Just as Saya lived in a hospital and only became a legend but was otherwise completely undetected. The few people who did see her by accident would disappear.
Saya was also highly intelligent and understood how humans work on a fundamental level and she understood their technology and their languages. For example she could operate a cell phone quite easily so she wasn't ignorant to being detected. She just didn't understand humans social structure except for what she had read in books.
Skarekrow
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Still, I would be curious to see if anything was caught...if you ever get bored...although, I wouldn’t want you to disappear because you acknowledged and tried to capture images of them...lol.
sprinkles
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Maybe. I'm sure if they could be caught though it would be by security cameras or something. Something from a neutral source would surely have evidence. And even if I did manage it, it'd probably be decried as a hoax. We always try to explain things away even when things are really really weird. Maybe it's the sense of security that brings, I don't know.
Skarekrow
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[MENTION=10252]say what[/MENTION]
A Neuroscientist Explains How Meditation Changes Your Brain
Do you struggle, like me, with monkey-mind? Is your brain also a little unsettled, restless, capricious, whimsical, fanciful, inconstant, confused, indecisive, or uncontrollable? That’s the definition of “monkey mind” I’ve been given!
If you need more motivation to take up this transformative practice, neuroscience research has shown that meditation and mindfulness training can cause neuroplastic changes to the gray matter of your brain.
A group of Harvard neuroscientists interested in mindfulness meditation have reported that brain structures change after only eight weeks of meditation practice.
Sara Lazar, Ph.D., the study’s senior author, said in a press release,
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day.”
To test their idea the neuroscientists enrolled 16 people in an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course. The course promised to improve participants’ mindfulness and well-being, and reduce their levels of stress.
Everyone received audio recordings containing 45-minute guided mindfulness exercises (body scan, yoga, and sitting meditation) that they were instructed to practice daily at home. And to facilitate the integration of mindfulness into daily life, they were also taught to practice mindfulness informally in everyday activities such as eating, walking, washing the dishes, taking a shower, and so on. On average, the meditation group participants spent an average of 27 minutes a day practicing some form of mindfulness.
Magnetic resonance images (MRI scans) of everyone’s brains were taken before and after they completed the meditation training, and a control group of people who didn’t do any mindfulness training also had their brains scanned.After completing the mindfulness course, all participants reported significant improvement in measures of mindfulness, such as “acting with awareness” and“non-judging.”
What was startling was that the MRI scans showed that mindfulness groups increased gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus, the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum. Brain regions involved in learning and memory, emotion regulation, sense of self, and perspective taking!
Britta Hölzel, the lead author on the paper says,
“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life.”
Sarah Lazar also noted,
“This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
A Neuroscientist Explains How Meditation Changes Your Brain
Do you struggle, like me, with monkey-mind? Is your brain also a little unsettled, restless, capricious, whimsical, fanciful, inconstant, confused, indecisive, or uncontrollable? That’s the definition of “monkey mind” I’ve been given!
If you need more motivation to take up this transformative practice, neuroscience research has shown that meditation and mindfulness training can cause neuroplastic changes to the gray matter of your brain.
A group of Harvard neuroscientists interested in mindfulness meditation have reported that brain structures change after only eight weeks of meditation practice.
Sara Lazar, Ph.D., the study’s senior author, said in a press release,
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day.”
To test their idea the neuroscientists enrolled 16 people in an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course. The course promised to improve participants’ mindfulness and well-being, and reduce their levels of stress.
Everyone received audio recordings containing 45-minute guided mindfulness exercises (body scan, yoga, and sitting meditation) that they were instructed to practice daily at home. And to facilitate the integration of mindfulness into daily life, they were also taught to practice mindfulness informally in everyday activities such as eating, walking, washing the dishes, taking a shower, and so on. On average, the meditation group participants spent an average of 27 minutes a day practicing some form of mindfulness.
Magnetic resonance images (MRI scans) of everyone’s brains were taken before and after they completed the meditation training, and a control group of people who didn’t do any mindfulness training also had their brains scanned.After completing the mindfulness course, all participants reported significant improvement in measures of mindfulness, such as “acting with awareness” and“non-judging.”
What was startling was that the MRI scans showed that mindfulness groups increased gray matter concentration within the left hippocampus, the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporo-parietal junction, and the cerebellum. Brain regions involved in learning and memory, emotion regulation, sense of self, and perspective taking!
Britta Hölzel, the lead author on the paper says,
“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life.”
Sarah Lazar also noted,
“This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
[video=youtube;m8rRzTtP7Tc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=m8rRzTtP7Tc[/video]
Skarekrow
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@sprinkles @say what @muir @Eventhorizon @efromm @digitalbum
(and whomever else I may have missed)
Very interesting stuff here!!
Why all the fuss? Because without conscious awareness there would be no science, no literature, no art, and no civilization—no one would be aware of anything. And without intention, the concepts of free will and creativity, central to the experience of being human, would reduce us all to purposeless automatons. Most ordinary people don’t like the idea of being machines; most scientists apparently do. I think this culture split may have arisen because it absolves scientists from any blame about their choice of clothes and whether or not their socks match. Machines can’t be held responsible for their fashion sense, so ipso facto we are machines.
Understanding consciousness and intention is also important because they are closely related to our conceptions of reality. If consciousness is literally caused by brain activity, then the universe begins to look like a clockwork machine.The behavior of machines is fully determined: They don’t have free will, they’re independent of observers, and they have no intrinsic purpose or meaning. By contrast, if consciousness is fundamental and in some way gives rise to matter and energy, then the brain is more like a “receiver” of a distributed awareness, and the universe becomes permeated with meaning, volition, and intention. These two approaches lead to radically different world views about who and what we are. Which is more plausible?
It may be that, as in the myth of Tantalus, a fully adequate answer is doomed to remain enticingly close but beyond our grasp. Achieving an adequate solution may require something greater than human intelligence. As Einstein noted, and Kurt Gödel demonstrated through his famous Incompleteness Theory, it is (in essence) impossible to see outside a box while still confined within it. This of course hasn’t stopped anyone from trying. If machine intelligence evolves beyond human intelligence, which is not inconceivable, then one day it may fully understand why scientists can’t dress properly, but ironically we won’t be capable of understanding its explanation.
MIND AS MACHINE
Given the success of mechanistic models used in physics, biology, and the neurosciences, many scientists today view consciousness and intention as by-products of the marvelous machine called the human body. This machine is still mystifying in many ways but regarded in principle as no different than a fancy clock radio or a Buick. Radios and cars do not have teleological ghosts within them that care about creativity or free will, and so, according to the mainstream mechanistic view, neither do we.
This model has a great deal of persuasive evidence in favor of it. We know that brain injury, disease, and psychedelic drugs can generate dramatic changes in one’s behavior,perception, and sense of self. Computer simulationsdemonstrate that massively parallel neural computationcan account for some aspects of the amazing pattern recognition and associative memory capacities of the human mind. Brain imaging devices reveal tight correlations between our intentions and patterns of electrical and hemodynamic activity in the brain. Technologies relying on these observations are leading to new forms of “augmented cognition”—ways of artificially enhancing mental capacities. Rising interest is reflected in the growth of published articles, from a handful in the 1980s to more than a hundred in 2006 alone. Such advances suggest that mechanistic models of consciousness are pointing in thecorrect explanatory direction.
In light of this, the mechanistic paradigm has become the leading scientific contender for understanding consciousness. But successful paradigms tend to erect blinders against countervailing evidence. A few such challenges can be dismissed as minor annoyances that will probably go awayif ignored. But if numerous challenges persist and evidence continues to support them, then the foundational assumptions underlying the leading paradigm will eventually crack. A case can be made that we are headed in that direction.
CHALLENGING THE MACHINE PARADIGM
Challenges to a clockwork view of the mind include the phenomena of extended perceptual and cognitive capacities such as intuition, genius, psychic and mystical experiences, and extended intentional capacities such as direct mind-matter interactions.
Consider intuition, which is widely regarded as the source of creative genius in scientific discovery, technological innovation, business decisions, medical diagnoses, and artistic achievement. Based on comparative reviews of the lives of scientific icons, scholars agree that nearly without exception the greatest mathematicians and scientists have relied more on intuition than on rational inference. Given its central role in advancing science and civilization, one might expect that science has thoroughly investigated intuition, but until very recently this area of inquiry has been carefully avoided. Perhaps this is because the quasi-magical aura associated with intuition has been an embarrassment to science, which prides itself on methodical, rational knowing.
While rare genius can be found at the far edges of intuition, nearer to everyday experience are more common forms of nonsensory, nonrational ways of knowing, including psychic phenomena such as clairvoyance and precognition. These forms of knowing appear to be incompatible with mechanistic, sensory-based, computational models of mind, and indeed it is difficult to imagine how one might build a machine that can sense what is happening at a distance in space or time without the use of known signals or forces. This failure of imagination underlies many scientists’ rejection of these phenomena. Despite such discomforts, experiments continue to demonstrate that these phenomena stubbornly remain.
Extended mental and cognitive capacities provide a formidable challenge to the machine-mind model, but an even greater challenge is intention. If mind is a machine, then free will is an illusion, and illusions cannot extend beyond the body. Yet here too there is substantial evidence in favor of intentional mind-matter interactions with random events, photons, cell cultures, and human physiology and behavior. The existence of such effects presents an annoying challenge to mechanistic models, and it suggests that reality itself may be more fluid than commonly supposed.
PUTTING INTENTION TO THE TEST
To give a flavor for how the power of intention is being studied in the laboratory, let’s briefly consider two experiments recently conducted at IONS. The first explored the quantum observer effect—modern physics ’“skeleton inthe closet” suggesting that consciousness is inextricably wound into the fabric of reality. Experienced meditators and nonmeditators were asked to imagine that they could intuitively perceive a low-intensity laser beam in a distant, shielded Michelson interferometer. If such nonlocal observation were possible, it would theoretically “collapse” the photons’ quantum wave-functions and change the pattern of light produced by the interferometer.
The optical apparatus we used was sealed inside the double steel-walled, shielded chamber in the IONS laboratory while participants sat quietly outside the chamber with their eyes closed. Light patterns created by the interferometer were recorded by a cooled digital camera once per second, and the average illumination levels of these images were compared in counter-balanced distant observation versus no observation periods. According to the design of the study, a lower overall level of illumination was predicted to occur during the distant observation condition.
The outcome of the experiment was in accordance with the prediction, with odds of 500 to 1. This result was primarily due to nine sessions involving the experienced meditators, who together had combined odds against chance of over 100,000 to 1. We examined many conventional explanations and potential artifacts that might have accounted for these results and foundthem to be implausible. The study suggests that intuitive perception and intentional action are fundamentally linked at the quantum level. It also supports time-honored meditation lore about the siddhis, or mental powers, associated with highly trained, tightly focused intentions.
The second experiment involved the role of intention in food. The motivation for this study was the possibility that good intentions in cooking might do more than simply make the chef feel good—they might act as a form of intentional ingredient that affects the people who eat that food. To test this idea, we used a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled protocol to see if chocolate exposed to “good intentions” would enhance peoples’ mood more than unexposed chocolate. We assigned volunteers to one of four blinded and matched groups, three of which would eat intentionally treated chocolate and one which would eat the same but untreated chocolate as a placebo control.
We asked participants to record their mood each day for a week using a standard questionnaire; on three of those days, each person ate a half-ounce of dark chocolate twice a day at prescribed times. The intentions were applied by Tibetan Buddhist monks, a Mongolian shaman, and an intention-imprinted device similar to those tested by Stanford Professor Emeritus William Tiller and his colleagues. Measurements focused on changes in participants’ sense of energy,vigor, and well-being.
The results showed that on the third day of chocolate eating, the average mood reported by the intention groups had improved significantly more than the same measure in the control group, with odds against chance of 25 to 1 and a rise in absolute mood of 67 percent. Analysis of a planned subset of study participants who on average eat less than 3 ounces of chocolate a week, and were thus more likely to be psychoactively sensitive to this food, showed a stronger improvement, with odds against chance of 10,000 to 1 and an improvement in mood of about 1,000 percent.
A MALLEABLE REALITY
The results of the preceding experiments suggest that physical and mental realities are related to each other in some essential way. This implies that the symbols we use to mentally represent the world may also be related to our understanding of physical reality. Nobel Laureate physicist Eugene Wigner marveled over the astonishing ability of mathematics, the symbolic language of science, to accurately describe the behavior of the physical world. He noted that in spite of the baffling complexities of the world, some aspects are sufficiently stable that we’ve been lucky enough to identify “laws of nature.” Without those regularities science would never have developed. Wigner believed it was not at all natural that such laws of nature should exist, much less that we’ve been able to discover some of them.
Like Wigner, mathematician Sir Roger Penrose noted that some of the basic physical laws “are precise to an extraordinary degree, far beyond the precision of our direct sense experiences or of the combined calculational powers of all conscious individuals within the ken of mankind.” Penrose mentioned as an example Newton’s gravitational theory as applied to the movements of the solar system, which is precise to one part in 10 million. Einstein’s theory of relativity then improved on Newton by another factor of 10 million, and it also predicted bizarre new effects such as black holes and gravitational lenses. When astrophysicists went looking for these unexpected phenomena, to everyone’s astonishment (except perhaps Einstein’s) they found them.
Penrose offered that the amazing accuracy of the mathematical predictions “was not the result of a new theory being introduced only to make sense of vast amounts of new data. The extra precision was seen only after each theory had been produced . . .” One way ofinterpreting this is that pure mathematics is in contact with the realm of Platonic ideas and forms. This implies the independent existence of a purely mental or symbolic reality.
For those who insist that mind is nothing more than brain, then mathematics is nothing more than the brain’s representation of our observations of a preexisting physical world. This seems reasonable until we unpack the argument: Mathematical symbols generated by three pounds of clockwork tissue somehow describe not only vast swatches of the physical universe to an inconceivable degree of precision but they also predict phenomena that strongly contradict common sense, such as quantum entanglement and black holes. Those same mathematical equations must necessarily include the behavior of the very brains that created the mathematics in the first place. How is it possible for this tissue to describe itself and far more exotic realms with such dazzling accuracy?
One possibility is that the universe is composed of a complementary substance that has both physical and mental aspects, similar to physicist David Bohm’s idea of coexisting explicate and implicate orders. Within this view, scientists seeking to confirm theoretical predictions based on pure mathematics discover that the observable universe closely matches their predictions not because the mathematics was miraculous, but because their expectations literally caused physical reality and its “laws” to manifest.
This outrageous idea borders on the solipsistic “New Age” fantasy that if we only wish hard enough, we can create our own reality. Hardly anyone takes radical solipsism literally, except that it just might contain a small kernelof truth. Perhaps some aspects of physical reality really are shaped by our expectations and intentions. Perhaps the fabric of reality is woven from the woof of matter/energy and the warp of mind. Instead of giving us grandiose superpowers, we have individual “micropowers” that in the collective scale up to shape the world we experience.
Beyond such speculations, one thing is certain: Gaining a deeper understanding of consciousness will play an increasingly important role in twenty-first-century science. If the evolution of knowledge in this century exceeds that of the last, which seems likely, then we can look forward to a future that’s likely to redefine our concepts of reality far more than any of the strangest concepts we’ve encountered so far.
DEAN RADIN, PhD, is senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is the author of The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (Harper San Francisco, 1997), and most recently of Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality(Paraview, 2006).
(and whomever else I may have missed)
Very interesting stuff here!!
Intention and Reality - The Ghost in the Machine Returns
By Dr. Dean Radin PhD
Few topics generate more false confidence or genuine bewilderment than the nature of consciousness. At scientific conferences, debates about the origins of consciousness—especially the purposeful, intentional aspects of consciousness—resemble professional wrestling matches more than sober academic affairs. Skeptics hold meetings where they fervently reinforce their belief that intentions (like consciousness) are mere illusions manufactured by the brain. Popular books and movies promoting the power of intention, such as The Secret, are runaway bestsellers.
By Dr. Dean Radin PhD
Why all the fuss? Because without conscious awareness there would be no science, no literature, no art, and no civilization—no one would be aware of anything. And without intention, the concepts of free will and creativity, central to the experience of being human, would reduce us all to purposeless automatons. Most ordinary people don’t like the idea of being machines; most scientists apparently do. I think this culture split may have arisen because it absolves scientists from any blame about their choice of clothes and whether or not their socks match. Machines can’t be held responsible for their fashion sense, so ipso facto we are machines.
Understanding consciousness and intention is also important because they are closely related to our conceptions of reality. If consciousness is literally caused by brain activity, then the universe begins to look like a clockwork machine.The behavior of machines is fully determined: They don’t have free will, they’re independent of observers, and they have no intrinsic purpose or meaning. By contrast, if consciousness is fundamental and in some way gives rise to matter and energy, then the brain is more like a “receiver” of a distributed awareness, and the universe becomes permeated with meaning, volition, and intention. These two approaches lead to radically different world views about who and what we are. Which is more plausible?
It may be that, as in the myth of Tantalus, a fully adequate answer is doomed to remain enticingly close but beyond our grasp. Achieving an adequate solution may require something greater than human intelligence. As Einstein noted, and Kurt Gödel demonstrated through his famous Incompleteness Theory, it is (in essence) impossible to see outside a box while still confined within it. This of course hasn’t stopped anyone from trying. If machine intelligence evolves beyond human intelligence, which is not inconceivable, then one day it may fully understand why scientists can’t dress properly, but ironically we won’t be capable of understanding its explanation.
MIND AS MACHINE
Given the success of mechanistic models used in physics, biology, and the neurosciences, many scientists today view consciousness and intention as by-products of the marvelous machine called the human body. This machine is still mystifying in many ways but regarded in principle as no different than a fancy clock radio or a Buick. Radios and cars do not have teleological ghosts within them that care about creativity or free will, and so, according to the mainstream mechanistic view, neither do we.
This model has a great deal of persuasive evidence in favor of it. We know that brain injury, disease, and psychedelic drugs can generate dramatic changes in one’s behavior,perception, and sense of self. Computer simulationsdemonstrate that massively parallel neural computationcan account for some aspects of the amazing pattern recognition and associative memory capacities of the human mind. Brain imaging devices reveal tight correlations between our intentions and patterns of electrical and hemodynamic activity in the brain. Technologies relying on these observations are leading to new forms of “augmented cognition”—ways of artificially enhancing mental capacities. Rising interest is reflected in the growth of published articles, from a handful in the 1980s to more than a hundred in 2006 alone. Such advances suggest that mechanistic models of consciousness are pointing in thecorrect explanatory direction.
In light of this, the mechanistic paradigm has become the leading scientific contender for understanding consciousness. But successful paradigms tend to erect blinders against countervailing evidence. A few such challenges can be dismissed as minor annoyances that will probably go awayif ignored. But if numerous challenges persist and evidence continues to support them, then the foundational assumptions underlying the leading paradigm will eventually crack. A case can be made that we are headed in that direction.
CHALLENGING THE MACHINE PARADIGM
Challenges to a clockwork view of the mind include the phenomena of extended perceptual and cognitive capacities such as intuition, genius, psychic and mystical experiences, and extended intentional capacities such as direct mind-matter interactions.
Consider intuition, which is widely regarded as the source of creative genius in scientific discovery, technological innovation, business decisions, medical diagnoses, and artistic achievement. Based on comparative reviews of the lives of scientific icons, scholars agree that nearly without exception the greatest mathematicians and scientists have relied more on intuition than on rational inference. Given its central role in advancing science and civilization, one might expect that science has thoroughly investigated intuition, but until very recently this area of inquiry has been carefully avoided. Perhaps this is because the quasi-magical aura associated with intuition has been an embarrassment to science, which prides itself on methodical, rational knowing.
While rare genius can be found at the far edges of intuition, nearer to everyday experience are more common forms of nonsensory, nonrational ways of knowing, including psychic phenomena such as clairvoyance and precognition. These forms of knowing appear to be incompatible with mechanistic, sensory-based, computational models of mind, and indeed it is difficult to imagine how one might build a machine that can sense what is happening at a distance in space or time without the use of known signals or forces. This failure of imagination underlies many scientists’ rejection of these phenomena. Despite such discomforts, experiments continue to demonstrate that these phenomena stubbornly remain.
Extended mental and cognitive capacities provide a formidable challenge to the machine-mind model, but an even greater challenge is intention. If mind is a machine, then free will is an illusion, and illusions cannot extend beyond the body. Yet here too there is substantial evidence in favor of intentional mind-matter interactions with random events, photons, cell cultures, and human physiology and behavior. The existence of such effects presents an annoying challenge to mechanistic models, and it suggests that reality itself may be more fluid than commonly supposed.
PUTTING INTENTION TO THE TEST
To give a flavor for how the power of intention is being studied in the laboratory, let’s briefly consider two experiments recently conducted at IONS. The first explored the quantum observer effect—modern physics ’“skeleton inthe closet” suggesting that consciousness is inextricably wound into the fabric of reality. Experienced meditators and nonmeditators were asked to imagine that they could intuitively perceive a low-intensity laser beam in a distant, shielded Michelson interferometer. If such nonlocal observation were possible, it would theoretically “collapse” the photons’ quantum wave-functions and change the pattern of light produced by the interferometer.
The optical apparatus we used was sealed inside the double steel-walled, shielded chamber in the IONS laboratory while participants sat quietly outside the chamber with their eyes closed. Light patterns created by the interferometer were recorded by a cooled digital camera once per second, and the average illumination levels of these images were compared in counter-balanced distant observation versus no observation periods. According to the design of the study, a lower overall level of illumination was predicted to occur during the distant observation condition.
The outcome of the experiment was in accordance with the prediction, with odds of 500 to 1. This result was primarily due to nine sessions involving the experienced meditators, who together had combined odds against chance of over 100,000 to 1. We examined many conventional explanations and potential artifacts that might have accounted for these results and foundthem to be implausible. The study suggests that intuitive perception and intentional action are fundamentally linked at the quantum level. It also supports time-honored meditation lore about the siddhis, or mental powers, associated with highly trained, tightly focused intentions.
The second experiment involved the role of intention in food. The motivation for this study was the possibility that good intentions in cooking might do more than simply make the chef feel good—they might act as a form of intentional ingredient that affects the people who eat that food. To test this idea, we used a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled protocol to see if chocolate exposed to “good intentions” would enhance peoples’ mood more than unexposed chocolate. We assigned volunteers to one of four blinded and matched groups, three of which would eat intentionally treated chocolate and one which would eat the same but untreated chocolate as a placebo control.
We asked participants to record their mood each day for a week using a standard questionnaire; on three of those days, each person ate a half-ounce of dark chocolate twice a day at prescribed times. The intentions were applied by Tibetan Buddhist monks, a Mongolian shaman, and an intention-imprinted device similar to those tested by Stanford Professor Emeritus William Tiller and his colleagues. Measurements focused on changes in participants’ sense of energy,vigor, and well-being.
The results showed that on the third day of chocolate eating, the average mood reported by the intention groups had improved significantly more than the same measure in the control group, with odds against chance of 25 to 1 and a rise in absolute mood of 67 percent. Analysis of a planned subset of study participants who on average eat less than 3 ounces of chocolate a week, and were thus more likely to be psychoactively sensitive to this food, showed a stronger improvement, with odds against chance of 10,000 to 1 and an improvement in mood of about 1,000 percent.
A MALLEABLE REALITY
The results of the preceding experiments suggest that physical and mental realities are related to each other in some essential way. This implies that the symbols we use to mentally represent the world may also be related to our understanding of physical reality. Nobel Laureate physicist Eugene Wigner marveled over the astonishing ability of mathematics, the symbolic language of science, to accurately describe the behavior of the physical world. He noted that in spite of the baffling complexities of the world, some aspects are sufficiently stable that we’ve been lucky enough to identify “laws of nature.” Without those regularities science would never have developed. Wigner believed it was not at all natural that such laws of nature should exist, much less that we’ve been able to discover some of them.
Like Wigner, mathematician Sir Roger Penrose noted that some of the basic physical laws “are precise to an extraordinary degree, far beyond the precision of our direct sense experiences or of the combined calculational powers of all conscious individuals within the ken of mankind.” Penrose mentioned as an example Newton’s gravitational theory as applied to the movements of the solar system, which is precise to one part in 10 million. Einstein’s theory of relativity then improved on Newton by another factor of 10 million, and it also predicted bizarre new effects such as black holes and gravitational lenses. When astrophysicists went looking for these unexpected phenomena, to everyone’s astonishment (except perhaps Einstein’s) they found them.
Penrose offered that the amazing accuracy of the mathematical predictions “was not the result of a new theory being introduced only to make sense of vast amounts of new data. The extra precision was seen only after each theory had been produced . . .” One way ofinterpreting this is that pure mathematics is in contact with the realm of Platonic ideas and forms. This implies the independent existence of a purely mental or symbolic reality.
For those who insist that mind is nothing more than brain, then mathematics is nothing more than the brain’s representation of our observations of a preexisting physical world. This seems reasonable until we unpack the argument: Mathematical symbols generated by three pounds of clockwork tissue somehow describe not only vast swatches of the physical universe to an inconceivable degree of precision but they also predict phenomena that strongly contradict common sense, such as quantum entanglement and black holes. Those same mathematical equations must necessarily include the behavior of the very brains that created the mathematics in the first place. How is it possible for this tissue to describe itself and far more exotic realms with such dazzling accuracy?
One possibility is that the universe is composed of a complementary substance that has both physical and mental aspects, similar to physicist David Bohm’s idea of coexisting explicate and implicate orders. Within this view, scientists seeking to confirm theoretical predictions based on pure mathematics discover that the observable universe closely matches their predictions not because the mathematics was miraculous, but because their expectations literally caused physical reality and its “laws” to manifest.
This outrageous idea borders on the solipsistic “New Age” fantasy that if we only wish hard enough, we can create our own reality. Hardly anyone takes radical solipsism literally, except that it just might contain a small kernelof truth. Perhaps some aspects of physical reality really are shaped by our expectations and intentions. Perhaps the fabric of reality is woven from the woof of matter/energy and the warp of mind. Instead of giving us grandiose superpowers, we have individual “micropowers” that in the collective scale up to shape the world we experience.
Beyond such speculations, one thing is certain: Gaining a deeper understanding of consciousness will play an increasingly important role in twenty-first-century science. If the evolution of knowledge in this century exceeds that of the last, which seems likely, then we can look forward to a future that’s likely to redefine our concepts of reality far more than any of the strangest concepts we’ve encountered so far.
DEAN RADIN, PhD, is senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. He is the author of The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (Harper San Francisco, 1997), and most recently of Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality(Paraview, 2006).
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Here...I took a picture of one last night...lol.
All you did was show it your d.. So impressed!
muir
Banned
- MBTI
- INFJ
[MENTION=5045]Skarekrow[/MENTION]
That comment in the article you posted about many scientists wanting to believe that we are all machines is interesting and reminded me of the recent film DIVERGENCE where society is split into 5 factiosn depending on their personality types. The scientific group is called 'Erudite' and they end up trying to take things over and treat everyone as robots!
I think there is somethign about logic heavy personality types that they veer towards machines rather than humans
This most definately has consequences for our society
That comment in the article you posted about many scientists wanting to believe that we are all machines is interesting and reminded me of the recent film DIVERGENCE where society is split into 5 factiosn depending on their personality types. The scientific group is called 'Erudite' and they end up trying to take things over and treat everyone as robots!
I think there is somethign about logic heavy personality types that they veer towards machines rather than humans
This most definately has consequences for our society
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
Awesome stuff...
You know there is a theory that it was the separation of the left and right brain (which they speculated could have been quite common until our brains evolved more) that caused people to hear “God” when in fact it was just the other side of their brain speaking from a disconnected state.
This would also explain why people don’t “hear God” anymore.
- MBTI
- INTJ
Here...I took a picture of one last night...lol.
If you saw this in real life. What would be your reaction?
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
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