Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

[Constance]

There are two issues there: One focused on consciousness, the other on the nature of being or dasein, existence itself. To clarify my positions: I believe neuroscience plays a valuable role in consciousness studies, but the question of existence itself, is something else. Questions like where did it come from or what's behind it, can't be answered because of the infinite recursion problem. It's not that we aren't smart enough or don't have powerful enough computers. It's that the problem is by its very nature unsolvable. However, one thing we can be certain of is that because we exist, we're a part of it, which means we're one of the parts of existence that is trying to figure itself out.

Now this is where people sometimes get upset because if the question of existence is unsolvable, and we're the part of it that is trying to figure itself out, that also makes us another part, which is the stupid part, because only someone really stupid would waste all their time trying to solve an unsolvable problem. Right? That's a basic intelligence test right there. We know some dogs are smarter than some cats because when dogs are given the task of getting to their food in an impossible to do situation, they soon stop trying and look at there masters like, "Why are you doing this to me?", but cats just keep trying to get to it even though it's a completely pointless exercise.

So humans are like the cats in the grand design. Sometimes they even dress up like cats and pretend they are cats:

​

Steve addressed your post above and cited Heidegger to help you understand the difference that makes a Difference between the being of things, forces, fields, systems in physical being as objectively measureable by physical science [what-is objectively] and awareness, consciousness, and mind arising with living organisms in the universe. Note that science with its measurements of objectively existing things, forces, fields, systems in the universe could not exist in the first place without the evolution of consciousness and mind -- i.e., intelligent beings aware of their existence within a physical mileau and capable of interrogating the nature of what-is {acts of the mind that could not take place without the presence of consciousness}. Neither you nor @Soupie has yet done the homework necessary to understand the significance of the phenomenological turn in modern philosophy.

ps, you're also wrong in your characterizations of cats and dogs, but that misunderstanding is not worth arguing about. ​

 

[Randall]

Steve addressed your post above

I've got Steve on ignore, which means I don't care what he has to say right now.

and cited Heidegger to help you understand the difference that makes a Difference between the being of things, forces, fields, systems in physical being as objectively measureable by physical science [what-is objectively] and awareness, consciousness, and mind arising with living organisms in the universe.

I don't need Steve ( or anyone else ) to "help me understand" the difference between consciousness and existence per se. Anyone who has read what I've had to say and thinks otherwise are the ones who need the help.

Note that science with its measurements of objectively existing things, forces, fields, systems in the universe could not exist in the first place without the evolution of consciousness and mind -- i.e., intelligent beings aware of their existence within a physical mileau and capable of interrogating the nature of what-is {acts of the mind that could not take place without the presence of consciousness}.

I'm not entirely convinced that consciousness is necessary to get the job done you describe. Perhaps pure intelligence could do the job just as well, maybe even better because it would be unhampered by the kinds of personal biases we have. However mind is another story because of the differing views of what mind is. It seems to vary across the full spectrum from pure intellect to pure experience.

Neither you nor @Soupie has yet done the homework necessary to understand the significance of the phenomenological turn in modern philosophy.

I can't speak for Soup and BTW, I have him on ignore right now too, but personally, with respect to phenomenology, I've been there and done that and don't care about it's "significance" in "modern philosophy", and if you think you've got it all figured out, then that only tells me you don't, because it's not something you figure out. It's more like one of the tools in the toolbox, part of the inventory of investigative equipment or methodology, and it's enough for me to loosely equate it with psychology.

ps, you're also wrong in your characterizations of cats and dogs, but that misunderstanding is not worth arguing about.

Seriously, the unsolvable puzzle test was one I read about on Live Science here: Are Cats Smarter Than Dogs? Helathy Pets also reports that:

"Oxford University researchers tested this theory and found, indeed, that based on EQ (using data from fossils to living species) dogs are becoming progressively more intelligent while cats have stayed mostly the same. As Coren explained:

“This means that not only are dogs smarter than cats, but the gap between the species is increasing over time. At the risk of starting another argument, these data may explain why we never hear about such things as a ‘seeing eye cat,’ ‘police cat’ or ‘search and rescue cat.’” - Source​

And the video I posted with clips from Cats The Musical plainly does show people dressing-up and pretending to be cats, and I must confess that I have seen a live performance of that particular play myself ... lol

NOTE: I first started thinking about phenomenology back in the 70s when I saw a sci-fi movie called Dark Star, in which one of the characters is into it ( phenomenology ) ...

Dark Star - Talking To The Bomb

 

[smcder]

I've got Steve on ignore, which means I don't care what he has to say right now. I don't need Steve ( or anyone else ) to "help me understand" the difference between consciousness and existence per se. Anyone who has read what I've had to say and thinks otherwise are the ones who need the help. I'm not entirely convinced that consciousness is necessary to get the job done you describe. Perhaps pure intelligence could do the job just as well, maybe even better because it would be unhampered by the kinds of personal biases we have. However mind is another story because of the differing views of what mind is. It seems to vary the full spectrum from pure intellect to pure experience. I can't speak for Soup and BTW, I have him on ignore right now too, but personally, with respect to phenomenology, I've been there and done that and don't care about it's "significance" in "modern philosophy", and if you think you've got it all figured out, then that only tells me you don't, because it's not something you figure out. It's more like one of the tools in the toolbox, part of the inventory of investigative equipment or methodology, and it's enough for me to loosely equate it with psychology. Seriously, the unsolvable puzzle test was one I read about on Live Science here: Are Cats Smarter Than Dogs? Helathy Pets also reports that:

"Oxford University researchers tested this theory and found, indeed, that based on EQ (using data from fossils to living species) dogs are becoming progressively more intelligent while cats have stayed mostly the same. As Coren explained:

“This means that not only are dogs smarter than cats, but the gap between the species is increasing over time. At the risk of starting another argument, these data may explain why we never hear about such things as a ‘seeing eye cat,’ ‘police cat’ or ‘search and rescue cat.’” - Source​

And the video I posted with clips from Cats The Musical plainly does show people dressing-up and pretending to be cats, and I must confess that I have seen a live performance of that particular play myself ... lol

NOTE: I first started thinking about phenomenology back in the 70s when I saw a sci-fi movie called Dark Star, in which one of the characters is into it ...

Dark Star - Talking To The Bomb

Police cat proves you can fight crime, even if you sleep 16 hours a day

 

[smcder]

ABSTRACT
Richard Feynman once famously quipped that no one understands quantum mechanics, and popular accounts continue to promulgate the view that QM is an intractable mystery (probably because that helps to sell books). QM is certainly unintuitive, but the idea that no one understands it is far from the truth. In fact, QM is no more difficult to understand than relativity.

The problem is that the vast majority of popular accounts of QM are simply flat-out wrong. They are based on the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of QM, which has been thoroughly discredited for decades. It turns out that if Copenhagen were true then it would be possible to communicate faster than light, and hence send signals backwards in time. This talk describes an alternative interpretation based on quantum information theory (QIT) which is consistent with current scientific knowledge. It turns out that there is a simple intuition that makes almost all quantum mysteries simply evaporate, and replaces them with an easily understood (albeit strange) insight: measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon, and you don't really exist.

 

[victimized]

Steve addressed your post above and cited Heidegger to help you understand the difference that makes a Difference between the being of things, forces, fields, systems in physical being as objectively measureable by physical science [what-is objectively] and awareness, consciousness, and mind arising with living organisms in the universe. Note that science with its measurements of objectively existing things, forces, fields, systems in the universe could not exist in the first place without the evolution of consciousness and mind -- i.e., intelligent beings aware of their existence within a physical mileau and capable of interrogating the nature of what-is {acts of the mind that could not take place without the presence of consciousness}. Neither you nor @Soupie has yet done the homework necessary to understand the significance of the phenomenological turn in modern philosophy.

ps, you're also wrong in your characterizations of cats and dogs, but that misunderstanding is not worth arguing about. ​

You are a human being, owner of a human organic body, with organic chemicals and you use your brain function to self express.

No matter who you are as a human, if your brain functions in a healthy status, personally you are healthy. Yet you live with a huge population who interact with you every day and either support your presence or attack and abuse your presence. And so you express your life and mind state in the condition in which you exist.

How does this status have or own a scientific verdict? It does not.
What about the fact that if we all stopped having sex, the amount of mutative genetics would not exist for your perusal. Has this circumstance got anything to do with a scientific study of consciousness? No. Humans having sex is their own choice...the life form having no choice about its inheritance.

Yet you scientific b......s consider yourself as an important self status giving value to the presence of other life forms as if you have a human right or a human review of "I am correct and you are not".

Humans gave themselves this status and I personally due to my physical and spiritual attack actually hate your guts scientists, especially occult scientists.

Also is the human review that an animal is not your consciousness, so who do you think you are giving other presences a status about their consciousness through a human review. The other life forms are not yours to value.

The consideration of all states is actually not considerable, for the only reason any other information was considered by our ancient occult brother was because he wanted to "own it all". Instead he had our life incinerated because he also wanted to own occult powers where no organic life ever existed.

The reason science is occult (what is hidden) is that power itself is locked and sealed inside of other conditions and then the occultist scientist lets it out.....powers that are not in support of any natural life existence.

He is doing exactly the same circumstance that he has before, wanting to personally own the presence of his own spiritual families life form, when he owns his own life form. So he is trying to give all organic life form a conscious value as if he is going to produce a life model based on consciousness. Yet you ignorant self......I am not an animal...and I do not own any link to an animal.....my holy Mother who happens to have lived once and died.

Is it any wonder that you have been attacking our life, by trying to consider ownership of consciousness, as if you do not own consciousness? Maybe you should do a human self consideration, that maybe your form of mind does not own itself and instead all you believe in is what the AI is communicating to your brain.

If you taught us to have sexual intercourse for the purpose of making our life enslaved to all of your own status review.....to murder, to send to war to murder, to enslave and torment and torture.......how about for once doing it to your own body and presence and leave us all alone.

 

[smcder]

Paper from the above video:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

A page from Garret's blog

Rondam Ramblings: The quantum conspiracy

I gave a talk at Google the other day entitled, with tongue-in-cheek, The Quantum Conspiracy: What Popularizers of Quantum Mechanics Don't Want You to Know. It's basically a recap of this paper that I wrote ten years ago. Despite my efforts to enlighten the world, you will still read in the popular press nonsense like, "When an aspect of one [entangled] photon’s quantum state is measured, the other photon changes in response, even when the two photons are separated by large distance."

No, nothing changes when you "measure" an entangled photon. Watch the talk (or read the paper) to find out why. Physicists have known this for decades now. Why does the popular press have such a hard time getting it right?

 

[smcder]

http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

So Mermin was on the right track, but he didn’t get it quite right: not only is the moon is not really there when nobody looks, but it isn't really there even when you do look! "Physical reality" is not "real", but information-theoretical reality is. We are not physical entities, but informational ones. We are made of, to quote Mermin, "correlations without correlata." We are not made of atoms, we are made of (quantum) bits. At the risk of stretching a metaphor beyond its breaking point, what we usually call reality is “really” a very high quality simulation running on a quantum computer.

It ends rather dismally with a Zen koan ... proving that even if QM can be understood ... Zen can not.

 

[Constance]

From Quanta, new experimental support for pilot-wave theory . . .

Dan Falk, New Support for Alternative Quantum View
An experiment claims to have invalidated a decades-old criticism against pilot-wave theory, an alternative formulation of quantum mechanics that avoids the most baffling features of the subatomic universe.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160517-pilot-wave-theory-gains-experimental-support/

There's much we could discuss here based on this paper and the comments following it. First these two comments, with more to follow in my next few posts:

"Howard Wiseman says:
May 18, 2016 at 7:12 am

The two comments here (by Pradeep Mutalik and Lubos Motl) nicely illustrate the problem with terminology in this area, a problem I've addressed a number of times, most recently in
[1503.06413] Causarum Investigatio and the Two Bell's Theorems of John Bell
"Causarum Investigatio and the two Bell's Theorems of John Bell"
to be published in
Quantum [Un]Speakables II - Half a Century of Bell's | Reinhold Bertlmann | Springer

For Mutalik, nonlocality is demonstrated whenever a Bell's inequality is violated for space-like separated events. I maintain we should call that a violation of *local causality* (a notion defined by Bell in 1976) rather than of locality. The "causality" element here is appropriate because this notion is built on the assumption that correlated events must have a common cause that explains the correlation. This is not the case in a purely operational interpretation of quantum mechanics.

For Motl, nonlocality means signalling faster than light. I maintain we should call that a violation of *signal locality* rather than of locality."

and

"John Duffield says:
May 18, 2016 at 8:31 am

An interesting report. I've noted Aephraim Steinberg [Sternberg] et al before, see the physicsworld breakthroughs of 2011 (Physics World reveals its top 10 breakthroughs for 2011 - physicsworld.com). Jeff Lundeen et al were in second place doing related "weak measurement" work.

Having looked into this general topic, I'd say that the problem here is that the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong because it's cargo-cult claptrap: the E=hf photon is not some wave of probability that determines the location of a point-particle. But on top of that, the Bohmian interpretation is missing the trick: the photon isn't some speck that has a pilot wave. See Jeff Lundeen's semi-technical explanation (SemiTechnical_Wavefunction) where he says wavefunction is real. It's like the photon IS the pilot wave. But when you detect it at one of the slits, you perform something akin to an optical Fourier transform on it. So you convert it into something pointlike and it goes through that slit only. Then when you detect it at the screen, you again convert it into something pointlike, so you see a dot on the screen.

It's similar for the electron. The electron isn't some speck that has a field, it IS field. In atomic orbitals electrons "exist as standing waves". Standing wave, standing field. We made the electron out of a photon in pair production, we can diffract electrons, it IS a wave, in a closed path. For an analogy, think of a hurricane. The eye of the storm is not what the storm is. That's where there is no wind. That's where there is no storm. In similar vein the pilot wave IS the electron, not the thing in the middle."

 

[Constance]

Also:

"Bob says:
May 19, 2016 at 6:30 am

I agree with John Duffield's eye-of-the-hurricane analogy; I have always pictured the wave(field)/particle duality as a whirlpool. In this way, the field and the particle-like observations are the result of the interaction of whirlpools. The extended field (spiraling waves) of the electron or photon interact with those of a 'particle' (e/m field) of the slit's material as it passes through, which would then convert the particle (concentrated) attribute of the electron/photon to a wave-like attribute while converting the wave (extended) attribute of the electron/photon to a particle-like attribute.

Further, since 'entanglement' refers to the simultaneous measure of the state (a partial attribute) of two particles, it may be that the extended attributes of the two entangled particles overlap across the large distance, and it is the transformation of the attribute (such as spin state) across this overlap that happens 'immediately'. After all, it is the rho component of the whirlpool (photon) that is measured as constant 'c', and the theta component of the whirlpool (transformation of field/particle) that may be observed as 'immediate', or simultaneous.

The analogy of interacting whirlpools also lends itself well to relativity, with the exchanging of space and time attributes modeled as rho and theta components of whirlpools."

 

[Constance]

And questions raised in this comment:

Pradeep Mutalik says:
May 19, 2016 at 5:39

"This is definitely a great article with great discussion. Thank you, Dan Falk, and all commenters here.

@Howard Wiseman,
I agree completely with your exhortation to follow proper terminology, and I went through your illuminating paper. I still don’t quite grasp your subtle differentiation of “local causality” and “parameter independence – signaling at the hidden-variable level,” though. Is it that the latter applies only to realist theories, whereas the former applies to operationalist theories as well?

In this connection it is a little amusing to see George Opletal referring to Luboš Motl as a “Czech realist.” No doubt he means a realist in the sense of “pragmatist” and not in the philosophical sense ̶ Luboš seems to be definitely an operationalist of the “shut up and calculate” variety.

I am all for developing realist models like Bohm’s. While I understand the need for practicing physicists to use the mathematically most elegant formulations, we do not need to make QM weirder than it is by confusing mathematical descriptions of reality with reality itself ̶ the map in NOT the territory. I can accept the existence of any kind of weird physical objects/fields that can play within time and space dimensions (any number of them) such as waves that can instantaneously spread out their essence across the universe, entangled composite objects that internally violate relativistic signaling limits in a way we cannot, space quantization a la Roger’s comment, Bob’s whirlpool model and so on. Yes, there could be objects of this type – who are we to proscribe them, with our limited experience in the micro domain? But to claim that mathematical models such as the wave functions existing in multidimensional complex Hilbert spaces, and objective probabilities, are real objects, is to break with all other science, and should not be done unless all else fails. I think we are far from that point. When we postulate sub-quantum objects, it will, of course, be necessary to postulate hidden features that we cannot experimentally access today and may never be able to – that is fine, and to be expected, as long as it is done in a principled and parsimonious way. Who knows, a successful model of this type may actually one day extend QM. That being said, we await a realist model that reflects the elegance of the quantum formalism.

I have some questions for commenters here who are better versed in QM than I am. Please forgive and point out any obvious things that are off-base – I’m trying to understand these things more deeply. 

@ Joshua McMichael
Thanks for posting this interesting abstract. The abstract states, “Our result suggests that giving up the concept of locality is not sufficient to be consistent with quantum experiments, unless certain intuitive features of realism are abandoned.” My question is: does the Bohm pilot wave model have features that need to be abandoned or is it compatible with the Leggett inequality?

@George Opletal
As I understand it, decoherence doesn’t explain why one particular alternative is selected, unless you accept the hyperpromiscuous baggage of the Many Worlds theory. Is there any objection to a sub-quantum randomizing mechanism at a scale far below the Planck scale which kicks in whenever the degree of entanglement exceeds a certain threshold?

@John Duffield
If the photon is really the pilot wave, isn’t it correct to say that it’s unlike any wave we know, because the wave completely disappears from everywhere when “something akin to an optical Fourier transform” is applied to it. Don’t we need to have to have a physical model of how something so dispersed becomes pointlike across spatial dimensions instantly? All this seems to indicate that quantum objects are truly timeless or outside of time in some way.

@ G. ’t Hooft
Very interesting comment. I want to echo Jim’s comment. Your answer will probably go over my head, but please try. Thanks!

ETA: Here is 't Hooft's comment:

G. ’t Hooft says:
May 19, 2016 at 5:12 am

"Amazingly, most people still don’t understand that sending signals faster than light requires that commutators of operators do not vanish outside the light cone. In QFT, they do, while correlation functions (expectation values of time ordered products of operators) do not vanish at all outside the light cone. In fact they can be very strong there. It’s the correlation functions, not the commutators, that cause the violation of Bell inequalities and the like. Once you realize this, all weirdness of qm goes away. No need for pilot waves or all those ugly concoctions some people come up with to explain “wave function collapse” etc.
Unfortunately, we probably first have to understand how to quantize gravity in order to discover models that show in detail what happens. As long as we don’t, people will continue to worry about “superdeterminism”, “conspiracy” and the like."

@Anyone who wants to answer
(I might be completely off-base here)
Bohm’s pilot waves are internal features of the model that have to violate relativity in order to be compatible with QM. Why should these internal features need to be made compatible with relativity? They obviously cannot. As long as QM is compatible with relativity, that’s all that matters: after all, on the surface Bohm’s model is compatible with QM isn’t it? Only the surface needs to be compatible with relativity, the internals don't. Is this wrong?"

 

[Constance]

Another significant paper from Quanta:
George Musser, Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time

Extracts:

"You might call this “supermemory,” except that the category of “memory” doesn’t seem to capture what’s going on."

"For now, if you ask why quantum particles produce the strong temporal correlations, physicists basically will say "Because."


"Quantum Time Capsules

Things get more interesting still — offering the potential for quantum time capsules and other fun stuff — when we move to quantum field theory, a more advanced version of quantum mechanics that describes the electromagnetic field and other fields of nature. A field is a highly entangled system. Different parts of it are mutually correlated: A random fluctuation of the field in one place will be matched by a random fluctuation in another. (“Parts” here refers both to regions of space and to spans of time.)

Even a perfect vacuum, which is defined as the absence of particles, will still have quantum fields. And these fields are always vibrating. Space looks empty because the vibrations cancel each other out. And to do this, they must be entangled. The cancellation requires the full set of vibrations; a subset won’t necessarily cancel out. But a subset is all you ever see.

If an idealized detector just sits in a vacuum, it will not detect particles. However, any practical detector has a limited range. The field will appear imbalanced to it, and it will detect particles in a vacuum, clicking away like a Geiger counter in a uranium mine. In 1976 Bill Unruh, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, showed that the detection rate goes up if the detector is accelerating, since the detector loses sensitivity to the regions of space it is moving away from. Accelerate it very strongly and it will click like mad, and the particles it sees will be entangled with particles that remain beyond its view.

In 2011 Olson and Ralph showed that much the same thing happens if the detector can be made to accelerate through time. They described a detector that is sensitive to photons of a single frequency at any one time. The detector sweeps through frequencies like a police radio scanner, moving from lower to higher frequencies (or the other way around). If it sweeps at a quickening pace, it will scan right off the end of the radio dial and cease to function altogether. Because the detector works for only a limited period of time, it lacks sensitivity to the full range of field vibrations, creating the same imbalances that Unruh predicted. Only now, the particles it picks up will be entangled with particles in a hidden region of time — namely, the future.

Olson and Ralph suggest constructing the detector from a loop of superconducting material. Tuned to pick up near-infrared light and completing a scan in a few femtoseconds (10–15 second), the loop would see the vacuum glowing like a gas at room temperature. No feasible detector accelerating through space could achieve that, so Olson and Ralph’s experiment would be an important test of quantum field theory. It could also vindicate Stephen Hawking’s ideas about black-hole evaporation, which involve the same basic physics.

If you build two such detectors, one that accelerates and one that decelerates at the same rate, then the particles seen by one detector will be correlated with the particles seen by the other. The first detector might pick up a string of stray particles at random intervals. Minutes or years later, the second detector will pick up another string of stray particles at the same intervals — a spooky recurrence of events. “If you just look at them individually, then they’re randomly clicking, but if you get a click in one, then you know that there’s going to be a click in the other one if you look at a particular time,” Ralph said.

These temporal correlations are the ingredients for that quantum time capsule. The original idea for such a contraption goes back to James Franson, a physicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. (Franson used spacelike correlations; Olson and Ralph say temporal correlations may make it easier.) You write your message, encode each bit in a photon, and use one of your special detectors to measure those photons along with the background field, thus effectively encrypting your bits. You then store the outcome in the capsule and bury it.

At the designated future time, your descendants measure the field with the paired detector. The two outcomes, together, will reconstitute the original information. “The state is disembodied for the time between [the two measurements], but is encoded somehow in these correlations in the vacuum,” Ralph said. Because your descendants must wait for the second detector to be triggered, there’s no way to unscramble the message before its time."


"The Nature of Space-Time

These temporal correlations are also challenging physicists’ assumptions about the nature of space-time. Whenever two events are correlated and it’s not a fluke, there are two explanations: One event causes the other, or some third factor causes both. A background assumption to this logic is that events occur in a given order, dictated by their locations in space and time. Since quantum correlations — certainly the spatial kind, possibly the temporal — are too strong to be explained using one of these two explanations, physicists are revisiting their assumptions. “We cannot really explain these correlations,” said Ämin Baumeler, a physicist at the University of Italian Switzerland in Lugano, Switzerland. “There’s no mechanism for how these correlations appear. So, they don’t really fit into our notion of space-time.”

Building on an idea by Lucien Hardy, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute, Brukner and his colleagues have studied how events might be related to one another without presupposing the existence of space-time. If the setup of one event depends on the outcome of another, you deduce that it occurs later; if the events are completely independent, they must occur far apart in space and time. Such an approach puts spatial and temporal correlations on an equal footing. And it also allows for correlations that are neither spatial nor temporal — meaning that the experiments don’t all fit together consistently and there’s no way to situate them within space and time."

"Only when these indeterminate causal relations between events are pruned away — so that nature realizes only some of the possibilities available to it — do space and time become meaningful. Quantum correlations come first, space-time later. Exactly how does space-time emerge out of the quantum world? Brukner said he is still unsure. As with the time capsule, the answer will come only when the time is right."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160119-time-entanglement/

 

[smcder]

@Constance I'm pretty lost when it comes to QM and have been promising myself for some time that I need to remedy that. What I understood the "Quantum Conspiracy" paper above to mean is that observation is measurement is entanglement and that consciousness per se does not collapse the quantum field ... he says this has been well understood in Physics for a long time, his approach - but just has been taken for granted and that poorly defined "observation" has allowed a lot of popularizers to run rampant with ideas.

 

[smcder]

I want to continue with QM but I also want to post this

I think it fits more with @Soupie idea of "Extended Mind" and also with @Urology's "field" theory of consciousness. I know mostly Sheldrake from the "Trialogues" with McKenna and Abraham - where he was a sober and intelligent interlocutor in counterpoint to the unreliable but brilliant McKenna and the more staid mathematical mind of Abraham, really fascinating talks that I've posted before.

In Sheldrake's talk above to Google, around 10 minutes in he discusses millitary and security knowledge of these effects, that they are taken for granted in these fields (and it certainly mirrors my experience working with the public) and also among hunters and wildlife photographers.

Very interesting stuff - and I think Sheldrake is gutsy and persistent.

 

[Randall]

I'd like to see further discussion, by quantum theorists, of these two comments following that paper:

"Howard Wiseman says:
May 18, 2016 at 7:12 am

The two comments here (by Pradeep Mutalik and Lubos Motl) nicely illustrate the problem with terminology in this area, a problem I've addressed a number of times, most recently in
[1503.06413] Causarum Investigatio and the Two Bell's Theorems of John Bell
"Causarum Investigatio and the two Bell's Theorems of John Bell"
to be published in
Quantum [Un]Speakables II - Half a Century of Bell's | Reinhold Bertlmann | Springer

For Mutalik, nonlocality is demonstrated whenever a Bell's inequality is violated for space-like separated events. I maintain we should call that a violation of *local causality* (a notion defined by Bell in 1976) rather than of locality. The "causality" element here is appropriate because this notion is built on the assumption that correlated events must have a common cause that explains the correlation. This is not the case in a purely operational interpretation of quantum mechanics.

For Motl, nonlocality means signalling faster than light. I maintain we should call that a violation of *signal locality* rather than of locality."

and

"John Duffield says:
May 18, 2016 at 8:31 am

An interesting report. I've noted Aephraim Steinberg et al before, see the physicsworld breakthroughs of 2011 (Physics World reveals its top 10 breakthroughs for 2011 - physicsworld.com). Jeff Lundeen et al were in second place doing related "weak measurement" work.

Having looked into this general topic, I'd say that the problem here is that the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong because it's cargo-cult claptrap: the E=hf photon is not some wave of probability that determines the location of a point-particle. But on top of that, the Bohmian interpretation is missing the trick: the photon isn't some speck that has a pilot wave. See Jeff Lundeen's semi-technical explanation (SemiTechnical_Wavefunction) where he says wavefunction is real. It's like the photon IS the pilot wave. But when you detect it at one of the slits, you perform something akin to an optical Fourier transform on it. So you convert it into something pointlike and it goes through that slit only. Then when you detect it at the screen, you again convert it into something pointlike, so you see a dot on the screen.

It's similar for the electron. The electron isn't some speck that has a field, it IS field. In atomic orbitals electrons "exist as standing waves". Standing wave, standing field. We made the electron out of a photon in pair production, we can diffract electrons, it IS a wave, in a closed path. For an analogy, think of a hurricane. The eye of the storm is not what the storm is. That's where there is no wind. That's where there is no storm. In similar vein the pilot wave IS the electron, not the thing in the middle."

If the point of point of reading the material in posts is to respond with what we make of them, then it seems that above boils down to this:

Nonlocality is basically the same as quantum entanglement and that idea is based on the idea of particles ( quanta ), which are the foundation of quantum theory, which like any other concept of the physical are models that help predict the behavior of physical things, and like any model, the model is not the same as the thing it is a model of. In the case of quantum physics the model is built on math, not physical reality, and as such can be manipulated in ways that physical reality cannot, at least not like some popular science/sci-fi portrayals I've seen.

The allusion to the double-slit experiment above also falls into this category and reveals that the writer doesn't have a complete picture of the situation there. It seems to me that most people don't, and time and time again I've seen QM and the double slit experiment used to substantiate what is called quantum woo. In this case the idea that the experiment converts waves into particles is sheer woo. It does no such thing. The writer would know this if they had done thorough homework on the experiment, including the actual equipment used in the high-end experiments where single photons are fired one by one toward the slits.

It should also be mentioned that the double slit related experiment reveals particle-wave duality. It was other experiments were the first to test the QE theory. Here's a pretty good article for the masses: This bizarre experiment just produced the best evidence yet of the universe's 'spooky' side

 

[Constance]

From the comments following the Musser article "Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time," this one makes the most sense to me:

Chris says:
March 29, 2016 at 9:29 am

"From a position of neurological solipsism both space and time are part of our brain function. Take sight for example: photons are reflected from an object's surface, go into the eyes and the resultant neurological processing creates the best example of virtual reality we have. The brain constructs from and in itself the 'external' visual world that we experience. This process is a one way street. Everything we see, including the space in which it is placed, is internal to the brain. Our sensory systems all work like this. So, as everything you see in the world is inside your head (including your head) things do not really have a distance between them and you because they are you. If distance in our individual neurological reality is not real then how long does it take for an object to travel a mile. Turtles all the way down. A real external reality that is external to this creative process is unknowable directly."

 

[Randall]

I contend that the quantum time capsule can't work anyplace but in the math. But this part:

"The Nature of Space-Time

These temporal correlations are also challenging physicists’ assumptions about the nature of space-time. Whenever two events are correlated and it’s not a fluke, there are two explanations: One event causes the other, or some third factor causes both. A background assumption to this logic is that events occur in a given order, dictated by their locations in space and time. Since quantum correlations — certainly the spatial kind, possibly the temporal — are too strong to be explained using one of these two explanations, physicists are revisiting their assumptions. “We cannot really explain these correlations,” said Ämin Baumeler, a physicist at the University of Italian Switzerland in Lugano, Switzerland. “There’s no mechanism for how these correlations appear. So, they don’t really fit into our notion of space-time.”

Building on an idea by Lucien Hardy, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute, Brukner and his colleagues have studied how events might be related to one another without presupposing the existence of space-time. If the setup of one event depends on the outcome of another, you deduce that it occurs later; if the events are completely independent, they must occur far apart in space and time. Such an approach puts spatial and temporal correlations on an equal footing. And it also allows for correlations that are neither spatial nor temporal — meaning that the experiments don’t all fit together consistently and there’s no way to situate them within space and time."

"Only when these indeterminate causal relations between events are pruned away — so that nature realizes only some of the possibilities available to it — do space and time become meaningful. Quantum correlations come first, space-time later. Exactly how does space-time emerge out of the quantum world? Brukner said he is still unsure. As with the time capsule, the answer will come only when the time is right."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160119-time-entanglement/

Very good . To add: The computational theory of our universe's cosmology ( that I've inserted many times into our discussions ) does provide an explanation for the anomalies mentioned, and that is one reason it has been taken more and more seriously over the years.

 

[smcder]

From the comments following the Musser article "Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time," this one makes the most sense to me:

Chris says:
March 29, 2016 at 9:29 am

"From a position of neurological solipsism both space and time are part of our brain function. Take sight for example: photons are reflected from an object's surface, go into the eyes and the resultant neurological processing creates the best example of virtual reality we have. The brain constructs from and in itself the 'external' visual world that we experience. This process is a one way street. Everything we see, including the space in which it is placed, is internal to the brain. Our sensory systems all work like this. So, as everything you see in the world is inside your head (including your head) things do not really have a distance between them and you because they are you. If distance in our individual neurological reality is not real then how long does it take for an object to travel a mile. Turtles all the way down. A real external reality that is external to this creative process is unknowable directly."

@Soupie is this not your position also??

 

[Constance]

@Constance I'm pretty lost when it comes to QM and have been promising myself for some time that I need to remedy that. What I understood the "Quantum Conspiracy" paper above to mean is that observation is measurement is entanglement and that consciousness per se does not collapse the quantum field ... he says this has been well understood in Physics for a long time, his approach - but just has been taken for granted and that poorly defined "observation" has allowed a lot of popularizers to run rampant with ideas.

I think you've understood what the author of that paper is saying, and what he writes seems sound to me in opposing the idea that consciousness can collapse 'the quantum field' [ETA: if what he means by 'the quantum field' is the holistic holographically entangled quantum field]. I do think that consciousness in its temporally experiential open-endedness is affected by quantum entanglement as it functions in the universe in general and in local experience in living organisms. Perhaps one way of expressing this is to say that locality and nonlocality are integrated in q entanglement everywhere and everywhen [ETA: but that no individually situated consciousness operationally integrated in and with local, temporal, existential 'reality' can 'collapse' quantum entanglement as a whole, nor of course can any specific experiment undertaken in 'local reality' do more than interfere with quantum processes cut out from, isolated from, quantum interconnectedness extending beyond the scope of the experiment].

I am not an expert in QM either but I did spend years reading papers in QM and QFT and conversations among various quantum theorists interested in consciousness. I think that the core unresolved issues in quantum theory are deeply related to the complexity of consciousness as it is understood to involve the interaction of 'waking' consciousness/mind and the subconscious mind. Thompson's latest book, Waking, Dreaming, Being, provides evidence that the entire complex of consciousness remains integrated in dreaming and even in non-dreaming sleep in a minimal but continual state of awareness of being. I know you've read that book as well; do you think I've made a fair summary of his thesis in it? If not, I'm interested in any corrections you can provide.

 

[Constance]

@Soupie is this not your position also??

I too am interested in hearing @Soupie's response to your question.

And also interested in how Soupie thinks Hoffman would respond to this comment, reposted here for readers' convenience:

"From a position of neurological solipsism both space and time are part of our brain function. Take sight for example: photons are reflected from an object's surface, go into the eyes and the resultant neurological processing creates the best example of virtual reality we have. The brain constructs from and in itself the 'external' visual world that we experience. This process is a one way street. Everything we see, including the space in which it is placed, is internal to the brain. Our sensory systems all work like this. So, as everything you see in the world is inside your head (including your head) things do not really have a distance between them and you because they are you. If distance in our individual neurological reality is not real then how long does it take for an object to travel a mile. Turtles all the way down. A real external reality that is external to this creative process is unknowable directly."

 

[smcder]

I think you've understood what the author of that paper is saying, and what he writes seems sound to me in opposing the idea that consciousness can collapse 'the quantum field' [ETA: if what he means by 'the quantum field' is the holistic holographically entangled quantum field]. I do think that consciousness in its temporally experiential open-endedness is affected by quantum entanglement as it functions in the universe in general and in local experience in living organisms. Perhaps one way of expressing this is to say that locality and nonlocality are integrated in q entanglement everywhere and everywhen [ETA: but that no individually situated consciousness operationally integrated in and with local, temporal, existential 'reality' can 'collapse' quantum entanglement as a whole, nor of course can any specific experiment undertaken in 'local reality' do more than interfere with quantum processes cut out from, isolated from, quantum interconnectedness extending beyond the scope of the experiment].

I am not an expert in QM either but I did spend years reading papers in QM and QFT and conversations among various quantum theorists interested in consciousness. I think that the core unresolved issues in quantum theory are deeply related to the complexity of consciousness as it is understood to involve the interaction of 'waking' consciousness/mind and the subconscious mind. Thompson's latest book, Waking, Dreaming, Being, provides evidence that the entire complex of consciousness remains integrated in dreaming and even in non-dreaming sleep in a minimal but continual state of awareness of being. I know you've read that book as well; do you think I've made a fair summary of his thesis in it? If not, I'm interested in any corrections you can provide.

I re-listened to a bit of Thompson speak on WDB at CIIS and he mentions an experiment involving binocular vision ... the results of the experiment varied considerably when they brought in Tibetan monks, i.e. persons with highly trained attention ... I've often thought and posted here, whether the Libet-type of "free will" experiment might also have a different outcome if attentionally-trained subjects were used or if a type of training were to take place ... just as we seem to be able to move any process into unconsciousness with practice, so too do we seem to be able to move any unconscious aspect into consciousness .... the Buddhist idea of free will is complex (actually as is the Western idea - I don't think most people hold a necessarily naive idea of free will, certainly dealing with the difference in what we will and what we do is a common experience for all of us and most of us reflect to some degree on that gap and understand that we don't simply will what we do) ... sorry for the long () ... the Buddhist idea of free will is complex and comes out of the practice of meditation(s) so it certainly informs it.

FREE WILL
LIBET experiments
attention training
meditation