[EnergyUnlimited]

I observe, that a concept of multiple universes had been mentioned here on number of occassions.

This originally steamed from peoples having problem with understanding of quantum world.
It is accepted, that quantum system is a superposition of all possible discrete states until a MEASUREMENT (observation act) is taken.
Than quantum superposition collapses to one particular state, which is observed (process known as 'decoherrence').
This reasoning is a base of so-called Copenhagen explanation of the issue, which basically says that "Quatum system is a superposition of all possible discrete states but sometimes it is NOT".
Needless to say many physicists rejected this explanation and it is when multiverse theory came.

This basically say that whenever quantum system is 'forced' to make a choice (say by act of observation), the Universe is splitting into number of new universes, each one of them representing one possible discrete outcome.
Say that electron may have spin +1/2 or -1/2 but is superposition of both. Finding out what the value of spin really is will split Universe into two, in first one scientist is finding +1/2 and in second one his "imposter' will find it -1/2. Obviously they are unable to communicate and one is not aware about existance of the second.

Needless to say, in every second quite fantastic number of splitted Universes is created.
Fantastic as it is, this theory can be tested, but the snag is, that the testing person will not be able to reveal the result to other people involved.

Here comes famous Schrodinger cat experiment:
In original version it relies on placing a cat in black box in front of gun with trigger mechanism relying on quantum system (say radioactive atom, which according to quantum theory is a superposition of decayed and undecayed states).
Now we have:
- atom decayed=gun fire=cat dead.
- atom not decayed=gun does not fire=cat alive.

But wait, the atom is a SUPERPOSITION of decayed and non decayed states and this means gun fires and not fires, means that cat is dead and alive at the same time, means half dead or half alive.
This appear illogical - cat should be either alive or dead but it is difficult to accept cat to be 50% dead for example.
Obviously you can open the box check actual state of radioactive atom and this will determine fate of our cat. Neverless, when box is closed cat still appear to be half dead (if you are doomer) or half alive (for cornucopians).
In similar other experiment someone may find herself to be 28% pregnant for example.

Now to test multiverse theory, a curious scientist could take a place of our unlucky cat and agree with his friends, that from time to time they will be opening a box and checking state of radioactive trigger atom and is he dead or alive.
IF and only IF multiverse theory is correct he will find himself IMMORTAL to this experiment , even if from time to time his friends in splitted universes will be remooving his body from the box.
However if Copenhagen explanation is correct, well...he will pay the price.

[robski]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'R')obski: Oh, I see you're in Australia... hmm, no free phonecalls to there, but we can do email... (OK, me go back to work now!)

[SchroedingersCat]

Speaking from the cat's perspective, I like to think that I have something to do with the state of my state. We live in a looking glass universe, where things may not be what they seem.

Once upon a time, all things were made from the four elements: earth, air, fire & water. Wait -- make that 60, 90, 104. 182. But surely, the atom is the smallest building block in nature. I mean the sub-atomic particle. I mean quarks. I mean strings.

It may very well be that consciousness is the smallest particle. Perhaps consciousness creates form and not the other way round. How about a consciousness-unit that combines with others to make the building blocks of our physically perceived universe. Time has proven itself to be subjective, why not space?

If consciousness is the basic building block of everything, the physical universe is merely a projection; no more or less real than a movie.

[EnergyUnlimited]

I would hesitate very much to accept consciousness as a basic bulding block of everything (or as an other discreete physical entity).
For me it is rather emerging quality, observable only in sufficiently complex systems.
This is why I believe that consciousness would not survive death of its host (because complex system necessary to maintain it no longer function after death).

With Universe being a projection only, it is something what you cannot either proove or disproove.

[gg3]

In fact the original Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment involved a vial of poison gas, which is not surprising given the times in which he was writing. But, as with those who coined the term "Big Bang" and successfully pinned it on Hubble's theory of cosmic origins, Schroedinger was attempting to make a reductio-ad-absurdam disproof of the Copenhagen interpretation, and (unfortunately for him:-), it stuck.

I also tend to think that consciousness (or more accurately, "mind") is not the singular fundamental from which all else springs. That would be getting close to "spiritual monism," which Chalmers refutes (please don't make me summarize that part of his arguement here!). Rather, I tend to stick with the interactionist model whereby information is a fundamental quantity and mind is the outcome of local and nonlocal interactions between information and sufficiently-complex brains. Though, I might be wrong; and the data from OBEs (again, which may only be lucid dreams with some nonlocal information getting through) tend to be very very interesting because of the possibility of increased nonlocal bandwidth, which in turn is a potentially highly subversive idea if it proves to be correct.

There are a number of Many Universes models. One of them calls for each quantum wave function collapse to spawn a bifurcation and a new universe. This seems to me improbable because it's not clear whence comes the energy to do that (possibly from the zero point field? or dark energy?).

Another of them calls for universes that largely do not interact with each other and are spawned by other physical processes rather than wave-function collapse. In this case there is not an endless multiplication of universes; the energy to create the existing set comes into play further upstream; they may pop into and out of existence, but they do so in a more regular and restrained sort of way, if that makes any sense.


More to be said later about why OBErs occasionally land in apparent parallel universes that have people like us in them. Suffiice for now to say that teleology, while impermissible in non-willful physical systems, is permissible (perhaps required) in organisms that have free will, and "like attracts like" is psychologically lawful.

[AIM9X]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SchroedingersCat', 'S')peaking from the cat's perspective, I like to think that I have something to do with the state of my state. We live in a looking glass universe, where things may not be what they seem.

Once upon a time, all things were made from the four elements: earth, air, fire & water. Wait -- make that 60, 90, 104. 182. But surely, the atom is the smallest building block in nature. I mean the sub-atomic particle. I mean quarks. I mean strings.

It may very well be that consciousness is the smallest particle. Perhaps consciousness creates form and not the other way round. How about a consciousness-unit that combines with others to make the building blocks of our physically perceived universe. Time has proven itself to be subjective, why not space?

If consciousness is the basic building block of everything, the physical universe is merely a projection; no more or less real than a movie.

[Aaron]

test

[EnergyUnlimited]

Pure matter could be of so-called Planck density, 10 E95kg*m-3 and this is huge. Such a density of matter is probably within singularities (it is often said, that density there is infinited, but quantum effects are likely to put limit on that and according to many physicists it is reasonable informed guess).
With this density entire Universe (10 E80kg) should fit into a volume of average bacterial cell.

Pure vacuum - well it does not exist. Heisenberg principle spoils a fun here. There are always so-called virtual particles popping in and out of existence. No pure vacuum, sorry...

Atoms are FAR emptier, than you suspect.
Nearly all mass is in their nuclei. 1cm-3 of nuclear matter weig ca. 100 millions of tons.
1cm-3 of densest elements (iridium/osmium) weigh about 22 grams.

[SchroedingersCat]

Norman Friedman wrote a great book called 'Bridging Science and Spirit.' In it, he compares physics, metaphysics and sprituality. For the physics piece he draw upon Bohm's work with the 'implicate order.' Basically the idea that the physical universe is an unfolding wave of consciousness.

One of the serious limitations our universe gives us is that any tools we create to measure our universe are made of the elements in our universe. Our consciousness (not necessarily our minds) is the only tool we have that might not be subject to that limitation.

[EnergyUnlimited]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SchroedingersCat', 'N')orman Friedman wrote a great book called 'Bridging Science and Spirit.' In it, he compares physics, metaphysics and sprituality. For the physics piece he draw upon Bohm's work with the 'implicate order.' Basically the idea that the physical universe is an unfolding wave of consciousness.

One of the serious limitations our universe gives us is that any tools we create to measure our universe are made of the elements in our universe. Our consciousness (not necessarily our minds) is the only tool we have that might not be subject to that limitation.

[gg3]

Strictly speaking, EnergyUnlimited is within the conservative interpretation of Hammeroff/Penrose; in that nonlocal effects are no more evidence of mind-outside-of-brain than local perception. You mundanely see, hear, etc. things that are at a distance from you but this does not mean that "you" are where those events are occurring, you are just perceiving photons or sound waves etc. reflected from or originating at those events. So if you have nonlocal perception, you are getting a "trickle of bits" from an event but that does not mean "you" are "there" at the event. "You" can still be localized in your brain.

Though again, OBEs are a subversive anomaly. Leaving aside the issue of accommodating them within an acceptable theory, they are "parsimonious" in the manner of Occam's razor. Hypothesis 1: Mind has temporarily localized itself outside of the brain. Hypothesis 2: The brain has created a complex illusion to accommodate increased nonlocal bandwidth occurring in realtime. Hypothesis 3: The bandwidth of nonlocal information remains small, a "trickle of bits" accumulates over a period of time, and the brain then creates an even more complex set of illusions to condense the "replay" into psychological realtime.

In hypothesis 3, you have to assume a lot of time-displaced information is being ordered by the brain into a correct time sequence. Now pardon my subjectivity here, but I already have enough trouble scheduling my daily appointments at clients' sites!, so the idea of being able to accurately time-order a bunch of nonlocal data, is difficult to envision, particularly if this runs as a latent function "in the background" outside of awareness. I can't imagine that a task like that wouldn't be detectable in terms of a performance decrement in other cognitive functions. So to make this work, requires a bunch of explanatory mechanisms, and seems unlikely even though most of those mechanisms would be entirely within the scope of present theory.

In hypothesis 2, you have increased nonlocal information input plus a complex illusion. One might ask, "why would the brain go through the trouble to create an illusion of that degree of complexity?," but the answer could be that the brain does not create that illusion, the illusion arises as an emergent property of the perceptual inputs, just as occurrs under numerous other conditions with purely local perception. So this could be a reasonable and parsimonious explanation that is still within the scope of present theory.

But here, the only difference between hypothesis 2 and hypothesis 1, are the issues of a) illusion vs. accurate perception of ontological status, and b) mind localized within brain vs. mind localized elsewhere.

Now it seems to me that all forms of near-death experience (NDE) as well as OBEs, would be counterproductive to survival of the individual. After all, most people who have NDEs or OBEs end up concluding that mind can survive death of the brain/body, and this makes them more likely to face death with acceptance rather than resistance. Death-acceptors are less likely to survive combat or predator encounters than death-avoiders. So the question is, why do these experiences persist if this is the case?

One could argue that NDEs and OBEs provide a basis for altruistic behavior. All of the instincts of the human organism are already death-averse, so the small decrease in death-avoidance on the part of NDEers and OBEers would not ordinarily affect behavior. However under extreme conditions, for example "tribe under attack," an NDEer or OBEer might be more willing to go into combat to preserve the tribe. This has obvious survival value in a collective sense, and humans after all are predominantly collective creatures when they are facing collective survival threats.

So, tribes in which the "emergent illusion" of OBE occurred along with the nonlocal perception of remote events, would have an advantage over tribes where the nonlocal perception was equally vivid but the individuals did not believe themselves to have "left their bodies."

And thus we come back full-circle to Monroe (again) and Frank on the website, saying that there is no "there," it's all "here" and it's a matter of phase-angle relationships. You don't "leave" your body, you just shift attention/awareness to go out of phase with the inputs from nearby spacetime, and into phase with the inputs from more-remote spacetime. Still, this seems more of a model than a theory, and thus we go 'round the circle just a bit more and come back to the simplicity of "leaving"-as-"leaving."

Clearly there aren't conclusive answers to this one yet. I'm eager to dig into the anecdotal reports (Frank et. al.) in detail to see what they might suggest that could be used to derive testable hypotheses.

[SchroedingersCat]

Whenever we bring up the concept of consciousness existing outside the physical realm we run into the problem of subjective versus objective observation. Subjectively, I have experienced lucid dreams, directed dreams, group dreams, oobe's, and telepathy. Some of these experiences have been verified by the participation of others. All of this is still subjective. There were no instruments measuring brainwave activity or electomagnetic activity or the like. However, the people involved sure knew that something had happened.

So, in the cases where more than one person was involved, what can we determine? Suggestion? Altering of memories to try and fit in with the group? Lies? Hints of something that does not fit into our traditional ideas of perception, time and space?

I vote for the last one.

Ever try cloud vaporizing? Lie back and look at the puffy clouds going by. Imagine blue sky where a cloud is. Cloud goes away. Pretty cool stuff and easy to demonstrate.

[gg3]

SchroedingersCat: "All of the above", and "it depends."

You don't need EEGs or other sophisticated means of making measurements. What's needed is trained observers, i.e. anyone who is going to do this kind of internal exploration should spent a lot of time training themselves to discriminate observations from interpretations, subjective sensations from objective correlates, and so on. Mindfulness meditation is highly useful here.

What you're trying to determine in the course of a project, will in turn affect the techniques of observation and the controls that are used.

For something like OBEs, it's useful for any given person to determine if their experiences have objective correlates. For example you have an OBE and observe your friend across town sweeping up a pile of spilled dry cereal off the floor while their kid giggles and their cat perches on a chair in the kitchen. The kitchen clock says 3:15pm.

So you wake up, write out your experience, email it to yourself so you have a time-stamp, and then ring up your friend and say, "hey can you do me a favor and write out a couple of paragraphs about what you were doing around quarter past three today? And then email me when done?"

You get your friend's write up and it's basically the same except it wasnt spilled cereal it was a box of kitty-treats and your friend's kid is holding the cat so the cat doesn't try to take advantage of the situation. OK, pretty close, potentially interesting. And you have decent records of what happened.

For other purposes you might want to take note of other factors. A good background in experimental psychology is helpful here. Knowing how to operationalize variables correctly is highly useful so you actually measure what you want to measure and not something else. Statistical method is highly useful so you can, over a lengthy period of time, determine if apparent patterns in the data are significant.

BTW, in all of this, I operate on the assumption that individuals who are voluntarily engaged in a deliberate search for knowledge, are acting truthfully unless there is good reason to believe otherwise. In point of fact I did run across a case once where a couple of individuals essentially conspired to falsely report something for purposes of gaining social status. By that time I had already gotten a clue that these individuals were not to be trusted, and of course the end of that story is that their participation in anything I was doing came to a quick and conclusive end. Aside from those individuals, it's far more common for people to simply misinterpret things and to honestly believe their misinterpretations. Thus the point about trained observers.

Note also, misinterpretations are as easily conveyed among individuals, as any other cognitive or emotional or sensory content. You would be surprised at the degree to which this happens. Again, observer training helps much in reducing that tendency.

Clearly the fact is that we're investigating areas that are notoriously difficult and subject to all manner of errors. IMHO half the fun of this is in trying to reduce the error factors and increase the quality of the data. In any case, the error factors and all of that don't invalidate any of this as subject matter for inquiry; over time, good data accumulate, errors sift out, patterns emerge, and lawful behavior points toward viable naturalistic explanations.

[SchroedingersCat]

It seems to me that remote viewing ond oobe's would have been a major advatage in natural selection. Maybe the odd bits of this that are still around are remnents of those abilities.

Imagine a small, stone-age tribe. The ability to see what's in the next valley or on the other side of the forest without physically risking the journey would give you a great advantage over those who needed to physically go look. I would bet that the shaman is the codification of those who had the ability in pre-history.

Once the world got a bit tamer those abilities would not be as useful. Maybe it could be used to find the last bits of oil underground. I heard the former Soviet Union had a big program in remote viewing during the cold war. Could be why they have found so much oil at unusual depths.

[robski]

gg, 3

Just thought that I would inform you and anyone else that is interested that there is a new ( and better quality) site with a forums index @ http://www.explorations-in-consciousness.com

There is already a discussion that you may enjoy jumping into:

[Link

( There is no pressure though, LOL)

[sicophiliac]

Id like to comment on a couple things, first OBEs, out of body experiences. Have any experiments been done to prove thier validiy or attemp to prove they even exist and arent just dreams or illusions ?
It would seem an easy test to set up. You have a subject in one room go into an OBE, next room over arrange various things.. chairs,table maybe a plant or maybe some blocks on the floor in a distinct pattern or arangement. Have the guy go into an out of body experience.. go into that room and view everything he can and report to the testers what he saw and where. Make sure obviously that the room is locked and that he had no way of knowing the arangement of the items in that room. I am sure my hypothetical test idea is nothing new or particularly original, it just seems like a very simple way to verify the vailidity of OBEs in general.

Also with regards to matter being mostly nothing, yeah I beleive its something like 1 billionth or .000000001% of matter is empty space. Then if you really get down to it the basic particles ( i use that term loosly) that make up matter might very well be the 1 dimensional strings. Now traditional thinking and common sense doesnt really apply to the idea of 1 dimensional objects being real since they have zero width or height. But you have to think of this from a larger perspective, not just our 3 dimensional observable world. I think they should rather be thought of as bits of information that exist in perhaps dozens of dimensions that manifest themselves as strings in our observable universe. The idea of physical dimensions being relevant is only so due to the fact were observing them from the perspective of a 3 dimensional universe and our minds are utterly hard wired to process information that way.

BTW has anybody here watched that movie What The Bleep Do We Know? Its more or less right along the lines of this general topic.

[gg3]

Sicophiliac:

Yes, there have been a number of peer-reviewed studies published on OBEs. The protocols are similar to what you describe: random targets are arranged at a distance under conditions that preclude cheating. Generally this is done double-blind so the personnel who are monitoring the experiment have no idea what the targets were until after the data collection phase is wrapped up. In general the findings are that OBEs occasionally produce successful results on remote viewing tests, at about the same level as other types of remote viewing exercises. This is what is meant by the term "OBEs with objective correlates," i.e. there is a report of an objective event that can be verified.

By the way these experiments also look at EEG (electrical activity in the brain), and in fact there are specific EEG signatures that correlate pretty closely with OBEs. They are similar to what you see with lucid dreams, but have subtle differences (what exactly those differences mean is still subject of some speculation, i.e. we don't know exactly what's going on even though we can see the external indications of it).

Here we need to make careful distinctions about what is going on.

First of all, there is the subjective sensation that one's mind (or more accurately, the apparent location from which one is perceiving) does not coincide with the location of one's physical body. This by itself is an interesting phenomenon regardless of its cause or its ontological status, in the same manner as other types of altered states experiences are of interest.

At minimum we have something here that is similar to a lucid dream. However, the interesting difference is that the lucid dreamer believes that s/he is dreaming, whereas the person having an OBE does not believe themselves to be dreaming. (And note, as I view these things, the issue of personal belief is irrelevant to the ontological status of the experience. Belief, like any other subjective state, is only another piece of data in the overall description of a state.) So there are already some interesting research questions to be asked about what constitutes the basis for the belief that one is or is not dreaming.

Next we also have, in some cases, accurate remote viewing. One can for research purposes parse this out from the subjective state and look at it by and of itself. So far it does not appear to differ significantly from other types of remote viewing in terms of accuracy: statistically, a small amount of information gets through nonlocally, regardless of the method a person uses to get at it (this is consistent with current theory in cognitive science, which holds that the brain can detect nonlocal signal and is usually doing so as a low-level background functinon, see also Hameroff & Penrose).

However what is different, is the amount of sensory content: A person in a conventional remote viewing experiment is sitting quietly in a chair with their eyes closed, describing sensations that are usually not particularly vivid, and is aware of being in the chair sitting in the lab. In contrast, a person having an OBE feels that their mind is visiting the distant location, and is having very vivid sensory experiences of that location.

Now interestingly, in OBEs, the accurate stuff gets mixed with some that is inaccurate. For example (putting this in the first-person to make it easier to understand): I lie down, go OBE, float down the hall and then into the adjacent building at the psych lab where the random targets are displayed on a video monitor. In the room I see a picture of a zebra on the video monitor, and I also see some chairs arranged around a desk in the room, and I also see a custodian in the room vacuuming the carpets. Then I return to my body and sit up and write out the details. The zebra on the video was correct. The chairs around the desk were correct, though the desk had a white formica top instead of the woodgrain I thought I saw. But the custodian was not in there vacuuming, and in fact the custodian doesn't come in to vacuum until after business hours.

So whence comes this mix of good and bad data...? My going hypothesis is that what has actually occurred is that the brain has picked up the usual "slow trickle of bits" i.e. low-bandwidth nonlocal information, and has used its normal "extrapolation/inference" function to "imagine" other details of the room. For example, "table" gets through and "woodgrain" is added. "Carpet" gets through, and via association, "custodian" is added.

I've done human subject research on altered states and communication, and observed a very similar process: one person mentions a word or brief phrase about something they are experiencing, and the other person in the shared hypnotic state immediately experiences the whole scene. For example, person A says "we're standing on the bridge of the Enterprise," and person B immediately gets the whole scene as per Star Trek. The interesting thing about this is, it illustrates how fast the brain's extrapolation/inference mechanisms can turn a very small bit of input data into a very large high-bandwidth sensory representation.

If this can happen for "local" information, i.e. things you see, hear, etc. in your immediate environment (e.g. hearing another person's words), it probably also happens for nonlocal information, i.e. things you pick up remotely for example in a remote viewing experiment or an OBE. Hence you see a clean carpet and infer a custodian and his vacuum, and turn the inference into a complete sensory representation including the sound of the vacuum and the custodian whistling a tune.

I'll tell you this: I think it is highly likely that the real solution to the "hard problem" of the very existence of consciousness, is going to prove to be very simple and at the same time profound, and is going to fit right in with everything else we know in the physical sciences. But the outcome of that will be a view of reality that is as much at odds with most peoples' idea of "common sense" as quantum physics and string theory. On the other hand, "common sense" can evolve. Even though we still talk about the sun "rising" and "setting," we know, in a common sense sort of way, that the earth is revolving and is orbiting the sun.

[gg3]

Robski, has that new site replaced the "astralpulse" site, or is it a continuation with the same people, or an entirely unrelated site? And has Frank shown back up again? Sorry for my taking a while to dig into this but it deserves un-interrupted time which is not easily found here...:-)

[sicophiliac]

GG3 - So kind of like real life events can get incorperated into a dream with a great deal of fiction so then can fictional stuff be thrown into OBE observations to fill in some blanks. I guess that is plausable, but do the accurate observations represent a siginficant enough percentage of total claimed observations as to eliminate the possibility of just random guessing?
I was thinking that of course in an OBE the person doesnt have eyeballs there in the other room absorbing lightwaves reflecting off the surfaces of various objects otherwise others could observe two dark spots in the air comperable to human retinas... (that'd be quite creepy I must say) So then picking up the information in other ways might seem to be the only explanation. Who is to guess how or what ways but I could presume that it envolves higher dimensions of space where 3 dimensional space and its properties and limitations are not so relevant. Maybe its just a perception that the mind is in another place outside the body and bioligical brain but in reality the mind as opened a window through a higher dimension to access information from another point in space-time. If the subject can observe enough in the environment it might confuse them or give them the impression they are actually there. Where as remove viewing would seem to be less thorough of an experience and more just flashes of images and info and what not so the subject thinks of the experience more as just picking up non local information?

[Doly]

In my opinion, people are extraordinarily good at guessing, better than it's normally believed. Most of this "extra-sensory perception" stuff is probably good guessing (extracting conclusions from very little information), with a certain amount of good luck thrown in.

This comes from somebody that often makes scarily accurate predictions, whenever I wonder about the future of a person or situation. I have made the occassional prediction that is accurate beyond anything that seems possible with the available information. (Like the exact circumstances of somebody's funeral, several months before the person died, and when even the doctors were uncertain about the prognosis.)

But I have also made pretty big mistakes. Which makes me think, the scarily accurate ones just hit the statistical tail.