God is in the Neurons

Video on Self-awareness, spirituality and the brain.
This spectacular video is not only a visual delight. It probes deep into perception, reality and the human emotional condition. Some conclusions are startling - Worth a watch

First Quantum Effects Seen in Visible Object

http://io9.com/5497720/first-quantum-effects-seen-in-visible-object



Does Schrödinger's cat really exist? You bet. The first ever quantum superposition in an object visible to the naked eye has been observed.

Aaron O'Connell and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, did not actually produce a cat that was dead and alive at the same time, as Erwin Schrödinger proposed in a notorious thought experiment 75 years ago. But they did show that a tiny resonating strip of metal – only 60 micrometres long, but big enough to be seen without a microscope – can both oscillate and not oscillate at the same time. Alas, you couldn't actually see the effect happening, because that very act of observation would take it out of superposition.

"We talk about quantum weirdness and things being in two places at once, but it all involves atoms and molecules, stuff we don't normally interact with," says O'Connell, who presented the results at the March meeting of the American Physical Society in Portland, Oregon.

Bridge between worlds?
Proving that all objects, whatever their size, obeys the same rules has long been a goal of physicists. But with quantum mechanics it is no trivial matter: the larger an object, the more easily its fragile quantum state is destroyed by the disruptive influence of the world around it. O'Connell's experiments required delicate control and a temperature of just 25 millikelvin to measure the state in the few nanoseconds before it was broken down by disruptive influences from outside.

"It was a close call, but sufficient to see a first quantum signature," says Markus Aspelmeyer of the University of Vienna, Austria, who was not involved in the research.

The key was to connect the resonating strip to a superconducting qubit – a tiny electric circuit that can easily be prepared in a quantum superposition of two energy states. "The qubit acts as a bridge between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds," says O'Connell. By tuning the frequency at which the qubit cycled between its two states to match the resonant frequency of the metallic strip, the qubit's quantum state could be transferred to the resonator at will.

When measured afterwards, the resonator was sometimes in its non-oscillating ground state and sometimes in an oscillating "excited" state. The number of times it was measured to be in each state followed the probabilistic rules of quantum mechanics.

Next, the cat?
"It's like you have a child's swing that goes back and forth," says O'Connell. "We pushed the swing and didn't push the swing at the same time."

"This is challenging and creative work," says Khaled Karrai of Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, Germany. "If correct, it is a breakthrough."

Schrödinger's cat would be unlikely to survive the frigid temperatures of such experiments, so it is perhaps not the next milestone to look out for. But now the spooky influence of quantum physics on visible objects has been proved, can we expect to be putting an object as large as a real child's swing into an indeterminate quantum state any time soon? O'Connell thinks so. "I'd say in the near future – in the next 20 years."

Robert Wilson on the Nature of reality

Robert Anton Wilson (1932-NEVER) One of the most profound and important scientific philosophers of this century, Wilson has written many important works of fiction and non-fiction. His vast intelligence and sharp wit are sufficient to shock and enlighten the most heavily imprinted domesticated primate nervous system. He is American and an author of 33 influential books, became, at various times, a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, futurist, libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an Episkopos, Pope, and a Saint of Discordianism by Discordians who care to label him as such, Wilson helped publicize the group/religion/melee through his writings, interviews, and strolls. Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth." "My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."

In this video Robert describes the nature of reality.

The possibility of changing consciousness was discovered in the Orient 2500 years ago, at least. Techniques were discovered to quiet the mind, pacify the mind, remove emotional compulsions. These were organized into the science of Yoga. As John Lilly says, “Yoga is the science of the East. Science is the Yoga of the West.” Science is a yoga, too. Science is a way of trying to reach an objective level in which your emotional compulsions and prejudices aren’t twisting all the facts to fit in with your reality tunnel.

The scientific worldview grew up in the west between 1500 and 1750, largely due to mystics who were known as Hermeticists. This Hermetic scientific revolution saw theology as its enemy, and there was no conflict between Hermeticism and science. They were both based on experiment, find out what happens if you “do this,” and they were both opposed to the authority of the Church.


Shortly after 1600 this began to split, and this Hermetic tradition faded into the background, and we developed for the first time in history a science that had absolutely no connection to anything except pure reason. The hermetic tradition was that there is no such thing as pure reason, you have to first work on your own perceiving apparatus to correct your prejudices, and the scientist is not separate from what the scientist observes.

The general yogic attitude, “you are the master that makes the grass green,” –western science lost that insight, and from Newton onwards we have the idea that it doesn’t matter who you are, if you follow scientific procedure you’ll find the truth.

This began to break down after 1900, due to Sigmund Freud, who pointed out that even scientists, they’re human beings, they may have neurosis, and they may have elaborate rationalizations for neurosis. The influence of Karl Marx pointed out that no matter what you’re theorizing about it’s a mirror of your economic status.

So, science began to have data to look at science itself critically. That’s how intelligence increases, when intelligence looks at intelligence and criticizes intelligence. So we got to the point where we could look at science and say, “science is the product of people!”

People are doing this, and their prejudices are getting into it. It’s not just enough to say you will be objective, you’ve got to learn to change yourself from the inside out before you can even approximate towards objectivity

When Albert Hoffman, after accidentally ingesting LSD, when through a profound experience… It took him 40 years to figure out what LSD meant. In 1982 he wrote an essay in which he said, “There is no objective reality separate from us.”

This became obvious to others due to quantum physics. Physicists discovered that the atomic world is just not describable in terms of Aristotilean logic. You can’t describe anything on the quantum level accurately unless you include the observer in your picture. So quantum physics turned out to be saying exactly the same thing as the psychedelic revolution was saying: That there is no objective reality separate from us, all we know is the reality that we are co-creators of. The reality conceived, put together by our nervous systems.

At this point it becomes obvious that intelligence can be raised, consciousness can be altered, all we have to do is learn how to change our nervous system and we can go to wider and wider reality tunnels, and bigger and bigger levels of perception. The government made drugs illegal…if you’re a politician, the last thing you want is intelligence increase.

But nobody has made pranayama illegal yet because it is impossible to enforce. You just have to read a book on yoga, learn how to breath, and you find you go into an entirely different consciousness state. Then you go back into your ordinary consciousness, think about that state, then go back into that state and think about ordinary consciousness. Already you’re in I- squared, you’re finding out how your nervous system works.

We are moving more and more to the place where we can change our nervous system, change our reality tunnels. Once you look down on your reality tunnel…methodist, Jewish, hippy, capitalist..iranian Muslim fundamentalist… you can compare reality tunnels, and then you’re on a higher level of intelligence already. Because you’re no longer a conditioned mechanism just following the reality tunnel that was accidentally imprinted or conditioned, and you can start choosing your reality tunnels.

Richard Dawkins on Reality

In this talk notable evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins points out just how weird reality might be. He talks about how we have evolved to fit into a so-called “Middle World” where we can’t observe the very large or very small. The universe might just be a whole lot queerer than we suppose. Or, as Dawkins points out, than we even can suppose.

Are there things about the universe that will be for ever beyond our grasp but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence? Are there things about the universe that are un-graspable by any mind however superior?

Science has thought us against all intuition that apparently solid objects like crystals and rocks are almost entirely composed of empty space. The familiar analogy is that the nucleus of an atom is like a fly in the middle of a sports stadium and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

Our brains have evolved to think that only solid, material things are real at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuations in a vacuum seem unreal. We find real matter comforting only because we have evolved to survive in middle world where matter is a useful fiction.

VEDIC PHYSICS: Scientific Origin of Hinduism

The Vedas can be read at many levels, it is said. Those who have heard the chanting of the Vedas by trained priests will be overwhelmed by the sounds that transport one to a different world. You may not know enough Sanskrit to understand a word but the combination of sounds will make your body a tuning fork resonating to some cosmic sounds. You can read some good translations and find in the Vedas an uplifting philosophy and a beautiful metaphysic.

What it is, says Dr. Roy of the University of Toronto, is a treatise on cosmology, and it challenges some of the hypotheses that modern physicists have come up with till now about the nature and size of the universe. The Rig Veda is a book of science, and the only reason that we have not been able to understand the science in it is because of the layers of ignorance and mis-interpretations that have accumulated over the millenia, says Roy in this intriguing book, Vedic Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism (1999).

The sages considered the universe to be made of "fluid" (not as fluid as in water but "the flow of matter particles"), and that it was rotating. The rotation's effect on this spherical volume of fluid makes it take the shape of a spheroid (the shape of an egg). In the standard Big Bang model the universe is not rotating but its constituents are. The Big Bang theory has been challenged, for example, by those proposing a steady state model, and the book provides quick but precise summaries of those opposing theories. The Big Bang model also proposes that the mass-energy before the universe came into being was concentrated at a single point. The Vedas instead tell us that in the beginning there was no mass-energy. It was a complete void. Ed Tyron in 1973 put forward a theory that makes the same argument. The Vedic sages considered the creation of mass-energy to be continuous and that it was being created on the surface of the universe. If you wonder how a void can have a surface Roy has some fascinating explanations. In the Vedic model the universe has a center which is at absolute rest. There is an axis of the universe passing through this center around which the universe is rotating. Space can be divided into two, manifested and unmanifested, and the creation of matter and antimatter will continue as long as the universe is expanding. While in the Big Bang model the universe can be open or closed, the Vedic model suggests differently. And the cyclic model proposed by scientists, that is the universe will expand and contract continuously is also modified in the Vedic model. It suggests that each cycle is independent of the other and there is no limitation on how many cycles there can be. Roy supports all his claims by providing the specific location of the verse in the scriptures. The verses have been translated into English, and the scientific meaning of the verse is explained by dissecting the words and providing other supporting evidence from elsewhere in the Vedas.

"Roy's basic premise is that the mind ­ by analysis, reflection on everyday phenomena, and grasping the nature of its own self ­ can discover a considerable amount of science, and this is what the Vedic rishis did.... Roy's method goes counter to the orthodoxy that outer knowledge cannot be discovered by an analysis of the inner. But there is accumulating evidence from cognitive science and biology that the inner and the outer are connected. For example, biological systems are equipped with clocks tuned to the motions of the sun, the moon, and other astronomical phenomena. Indian thinkers have always insisted on the presence of such connections, claiming that this is how the mind is able to know the physical world. In Vedic thought this is expressed by the notion of 'bandhu' that connect the biological, the terrestrial, and the astronomical.... The Vedic focus on mind and consciousness is paralleled by the central place of the observer in modern physics. In quantum mechanics the state changes in an abrupt fashion when an observation is made and this has prompted some physicists to claim that consciousness should be the primary category of the universe, distinct from physical matter" (p. xiii, xiv).

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