Exploring Mysticism and Parapsychology. This blog is also an attempt to promote awareness of a Modern Universal Paradigm known as Multi-Dimensional Science. It offers a "Scientific" testable Hypothesis for a more "objective" understanding of claimed Psychic and Spiritual Phenomena. A link to this subject should be found on this page or alternatively it can be found easily via a word search.Please note that the Internet articles here may not always reflect the views of the Blogger.
Posted onFebruary 12, 2014bySean Carroll
Blogger Reference Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science
Greetings from Sihanoukville, Cambodia, or at least the waters immediately off. I’m here as part of Bright Horizons 19, a two-week cruise on the Holland American ship Vollendam, in collaboration with Scientific American. We started in Hong Kong and have been working our way south, stopping a few times in Vietnam, and after this we’ll briefly visit Thailand before finishing in Singapore. A fascinating, once-in-a-lifetime experience, even if two weeks is an amount of time I can’t honestly afford to be taking off. Been getting a touch of work done here and there, but not as much as I would have liked, in between dashes ashore to sample the local cuisine. Although the local cuisine has been pretty spectacular, I have to admit.
My job here is to give a few talks about physics and cosmology to the folks who signed up for the package — a public audience, but the kind of people whose idea of a good time while sailing the South China Sea is hearing talks about molecular biology or world history. Mostly my talks are variations of themes I’ve spoken on frequently before — the Higgs boson, the arrow of time, dark matter and dark energy. But to spice things up I decided to throw in something new, so I wrote up a talk on The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics.
And here it is — the slides, at least. The content is roughly based on my explanation in From Eternity to Here, with a few improvements thrown in.
Two basic goals here. One is to introduce QM to people who don’t know much more about it than a vague notion of “uncertainty” or “fluctuations.” And in particular, to focus on the conceptual foundations, rather than any of the other perfectly legitimate angles one could take: the historical development, the calculational basics, the experimental evidence, the role in modern technology, and so on. Hey, it’s my talk, I might as well concentrate on the parts I’m most fascinated by. So there’s a discussion of entanglement and decoherence that is a bit more specific and detailed than one would often get in a talk of this type, even if it is enlivened by silly pictures of cats and dogs.
The second goal was to give a subtle sales pitch for the Many-Worlds interpretation. Really more damage control than full-on hard sell; the very idea of many worlds is so crazy-sounding and counterintuitive that my job is more to let people know that it’s actually quite a natural implication of the formalism, rather than a bit of ad hoc nonsense tacked on by theorists who have become unmoored from reality. I’m happy to bring up the outstanding issues with the approach, but I do want people to know it should be taken seriously.
Comments welcome, especially since I’ve never tried this approach in a talk before. Of course by only seeing the slides you miss all the witty asides, but the basic substance should come through.
An animated image shows a collision between two subatomic particles embedded in our 3-D universe (or "brane"). The collision produces other particles, including a graviton that escapes from our brane into the extradimensional "bulk" that lies beyond.
updated 6/6/2006 6:54:25 PM ET 2006-06-06T22:54:25
SEATTLE - The cosmos would make perfect sense … if it turns out we're living in a 10- or 11-dimensional realm where gravity is bubbling off a different plane entirely. At least that's what's emerging as the hottest concept on the frontier of physics.
Though these sound like virtually unverifiable claims, physicists are trying to come up with ways to gather evidence to back up or disprove the extradimensional theories currently in vogue. But it’ll take several years to get that evidence, if it can be gotten at all.
The claim that the cosmos has more than the four dimensions we can perceive — that is, three spatial dimensions plus time — is exotic enough. But the quest to prove that claim brings in a virtual menagerie of mysteries: mini-black holes and dark matter, gravitational waves and cosmic inflation, super-high-energy particle collisions and ultra-powerful gamma-ray bursts.
Even the physicists behind today's most-talked-about extradimensional theory, Harvard University's Lisa Randall and Johns Hopkins University's Raman Sundrum, aren't yet exactly sure whether the approaches will pay off.
"Nothing comes with a money-back guarantee," Sundrum told MSNBC.com.
So why bother? Physicists aren't just spinning out these tales of 11 dimensions for the amusement of science-fiction writers. Rather, unseen dimensions seem to offer the best hope for solving the kinds of problems that have frustrated theorists since Albert Einstein's day.
The incredible lightness of gravity For decades, physicists have puzzled over the weakness of gravity in comparison with the other fundamental forces of nature.
"A tiny magnet can lift a paper clip, even though all the mass of the earth is pulling it in the opposite direction," Randall noted in her book on the search for extra dimensions, titled "Warped Passages."
Einstein tried to come up with an overarching theory that could apply equally well to gravity and the other forces, but just couldn't do it. In fact, the theories that govern gravity and quantum mechanics are totally separate, and totally incompatible in the four-dimensional world we know.
Over the past couple of decades, Einstein's successors have focused their quest for a "theory of everything" on string theory — the idea that the fundamental constituents of matter are tiny stringlike objects vibrating at different frequencies. String theorists could come up with equations to cover gravity as well as quantum effects, as long as they were given 10 or 11 dimensions to work with.
Straining to explain branes The theories work even better if you can think of our four-dimensional space-time continuum as a type of membrane, or "brane," embedded in a "bulk" that takes in even more dimensions. Randall and Sundrum found that gravity's comparative weakness was perfectly understandable if particles called gravitons could leak off a brane into a five-dimensional bulk. In fact, they said, it could well be that gravitons are leaking across the bulk into our own brane (the "Weakbrane") from an extradimensional brane nearby (the "Gravitybrane").
Admittedly, this sounds like a made-up world straight from "Alice in Wonderland" — and indeed, Alice has been invoked more than once by theorists themselves. The only thing that could save extradimensional physics from the fiction shelf is the prospect of finding real-world evidence to support the braneworld concept.
Although there are no guarantees, Randall and Sundrum are holding out hope that ambitious experiments will soon produce precisely that kind of evidence. "Within the next five years, we might actually encounter these extra dimensions," Randall said during a talk last week in Seattle.
Smashing particles The problem with detecting the fifth dimension (or the sixth, seventh, and so on) is that our bodies are built to measure only the three old-fashioned spatial dimensions, plus time as a fourth dimension.
Scientists have been hoping that at least one of the extra dimensions might be rolled up in such a way that its influence could be seen by measuring gravity's pull on a scale of, say, a millimeter or less. So far, no anomalies have been officially reported, although there have been occasional blips that are likely due to tiny experimental errors rather than the fifth dimension.
A more promising avenue should start to open up next year, when a 5.3-mile-wide (8.6-kilometer-wide) underground particle accelerator comes online at Europe's CERN laboratory, on the French-Swiss border. The accelerator, dubbed the Large Hadron Collider , just might be able to smash protons together with enough energy to spawn subatomic particles that have momentum in the extra dimensions.
This momentum, Randall said, would be seen as extra mass. So if the LHC produces classes of new particles that carry the same charges as normal particles but appear to be heavier by certain amounts, that could be a tip-off to the fifth dimension. If the theory is correct, such anomalies should be detected "probably within a few years of runs at CERN," Randall said.
Detecting gravitational waves Randall said another avenue could have to do with gravity waves — a phenomenon that is predicted by Einstein's general relativity theory but has not yet been detected. Components of the $365 million Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, are just getting up to speed in Louisiana and Washington state.
Jack Lindholm (left); JHU (right)
Physicists Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum have developed a five-dimensional model to explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces.
Physicists have said there's a chance that LIGO may achieve the first-ever detection of gravity waves, and almost 200,000 users have signed up to help to process LIGO data through the Einstein @ Home distributed-computing project. But Randall told MSNBC.com that not even LIGO would be able to pick up the data she's looking for.
Randall and Sundrum speculate that the space we inhabit and see all around us may have made a transition from a more overtly extradimensional state early on — perhaps as part of the process of cosmic inflation.
"The extradimensional picture may actually contain an inflation mechanism which, under favorable circumstances, would produce observable gravitational waves, the details of which may give away some features of their extradimensional origin," Sundrum explained.
Although LIGO wouldn't be sensitive enough to pick up on that extradimensional fingerprint, Randall said a future U.S.-European space probe known as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, just might have a chance.
Sundrum, however, said the theoretical linkage between extra dimensions and cosmic inflation "has not yet hit that robust note on which you could base strong conclusions." Moreover, it's not clear exactly when LISA might be launched. The current best guess is sometime before the year 2014.
Catching gamma-ray bursts Just in the past couple of weeks, two other physicists have suggested a different avenue for testing the Randall-Sundrum theory. This would involve using a NASA probe called the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST, which is due for launch next year.
In their paper, published online May 24 in the journal Physical Review D, Rutgers University's Charles Keeton and Duke University's Arlie Petters focus on a particular type of miniature black hole that appears to be predicted as an outgrowth of the extradimensional warping effect.
"This is something with the mass of an asteroid, but it's microscopic in size," Petters told MSNBC.com.
If the mini-black holes exist, Keeton and Petters say GLAST should register a characteristic light-bending effect as it observes bursts of gamma rays from distant sources. Such an experiment could prove that brane theory comes closer to the truth than Einstein's relativity theory — and could also lend weight to the idea that the mini-black holes account for at least some of our universe's mysterious dark matter.
"If braneworld black holes form even 1 percent of the dark matter in our part of the galaxy — a cautious assumption — there should be several thousand braneworld black holes in our solar system," Petters said.
Randall and Sundrum told MSNBC.com that they were initially skeptical about the ideas proposed by Keeton and Petters, but they are still reviewing the details. For now, Sundrum said he was willing to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt: "You give them more rope, because if they're right, then it's off-the-scale fantastic."
The important thing is that physicists are actually coming up with ideas to test hypotheses that seemed untestable not so long ago, Keeton told MSNBC.com.
"We're proposing a new test of the braneworld model, but it's certainly not the only possibility," he said. "This fits into the broader picture of the community trying to test this."
“When you come to zero, when you come to the nothingness, at that moment there is a vibration.” *
Bapak Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo
The latihan, the central experiential practice of Subud, is an awakening of a capacity that all human beings possess: to come to a place free from those worldly influences that distract the mind and feelings, disturbing an overall sense of equanimity. In letting go, or surrendering in the latihan, it is possible to be aware of and feel the 'sound of silence'** that is the universal vibration of life. Freed from the turbulence of day-to-day thoughts and feelings, it is possible to become aware of an inner spiritual intelligence that guides our experience in the latihan, as well as in our daily lives. And those who practise the latihan may discover their own truth and understanding, which enable them to develop their individual human potential. Since the latihan is a process of spontaneous inner receiving it is different for everyone, and often changes with each latihan. In letting go and allowing the subtle energy within to move through us, we are better able to follow our inner guidance, which varies from physical movements and sounds, to inner sensations and understanding. It is possible, in this state of quiet acceptance, to feel a deeper connection with the whole. In Muhammad Subuh’s words: "Clearly the only thing that separates one person from another, especially when they are not related, is the ego. If it is the soul that is working, there is no separation." ***
Practising the latihan
In Subud, people meet to practise the latihan in a local venue, men and women separately, with each latihan being approximately 30 minutes. There is usually a preparation period of up to three months before a person comes to their first latihan, which is known as the ‘opening’. Many people find this period useful, as it is can be a time of subtle change, creating an inner readiness to experience the latihan.
Meaning of the word latihan
The word latihan, short for latihan kejiwaan [Indonesian], translates literally as spiritual training. Since the experience of the latihan is unique for each person, people in Subud often have different ways of describing their own experience of the process and the impact it has on their individual lives.
What people say about the latihan
Here are a few words from people who practise the latihan in Subud, which illustrate the differences in personal experience of the latihan: The latihan is the core of my life. It has led me by the hand and shown me who I really am. Being someone with a well-trained critical mind, the latihan has helped me to know the forces behind my thoughts and emotions and enabled me to live in greater harmony with this tough world we live in. The latihan itself has been an incredible journey encompassing every experience in life - a very powerful feeling of space, depth and joy. For me, what sets the latihan apart from any other spiritual practice is that it's not about trying to leave a part of you behind in order to feel some kind of 'out-of-this-world' enlightenment. The beauty and intricacy of the experiences I've had during latihan come about because something (which I like to call 'God') is making every part of me - mind, body, heart and soul - come alive. In other words, I'm being trained to become my truest, fullest self, for both this world and whatever comes after. The latihan helps me get closer to my true self, as it fine-tunes my intuition. Over the years the latihan has become an invaluable life tool - the regular practice of tuning into my inner awareness provides an essential balance to my thinking, feeling and being. To sense inwardly, as well as outwardly, the dynamics of relationships, of my work, and my sense of self. The latihan broadens my awareness and deepens my understanding of the stuff of life. After doing the latihan since July 1966, I have no doubts about it. I’ve learned to accept my faults, learned to laugh, have a clean calm feeling inside and my heart has been opened. I hoped the latihan would enable me to become more 'spiritual' and wise. Oddly enough it did something different. I slowly became more practical, and also more connected with my body and emotions. I now see this as a sort of foundation level, which had been missing on my journey towards wholeness. It's like learning to dance a new dance with life. I used to live in narrow field enclosed by walls and knock my head on the walls thinking: that's it, that's what life is about. Latihan has reopened a sense of discovery and unexplored possibilities in me. I now have discovered a door, and behind it a peaceful lake and some fields of joy. It's not all sorted for sure - there are always new walls! But I have scope for action rather then just knocking my head on the next wall... and I know there are beautiful spots on the way. It frees you up to live – and shine your colours in the world! My practice of the latihan has been like having access to my own personal doorway to a world where the mystery of my deepest self lies, connected to God, to other people and other beings. I make the effort to go and open the door twice a week and get something different at every visit – sometimes nothing more useful that a little peace of mind, and at other times a pure feeling of grace or contrition or awe. I try to live up to the knowledge I have gained of who my deepest self is and can be like in my regular life, and am amazed that the door has never ever been shut when I reached for it. When I attended my first latihan, at a time of depression, I was frightened that I was going to be taken over by something out of my control. Instead I experienced a sense of joy that I recognised as being my own true self. It was truly an unexpected gift and I went home happy for the first time in months. That was 34 years ago. When things are difficult and I feel doubts, I still remember that experience as a touchstone.
* Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, recorded on 17 January 1981 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Reference 81 JKT 2 ** "... When you come to the place where you are completely free from all the material influences ... then you will feel the sound of the silence: the vibration of life which is the Adil Ilham ..." ~ Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, recorded on 17 January 1981 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Reference 81 JKT 2 *** Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, recorded on 31 July 1966 in Cilandak, Indonesia. Reference: 63 TJK 2
A secret society is a social organization which requires its members to conceal certain activities—such as rites of initiation or club ceremonies—from outsiders. Members may be required to conceal or deny their membership, and are often sworn to hold the society's secrets by an oath. The term "secret society" is often used to describe fraternal organizations that may have secret ceremonies, but is also commonly applied to organizations ranging from the common and innocuous (collegiate fraternities) to mythical organizations described in conspiracy theories as immensely powerful, with self-serving financial or political agendas, global reach, and often satanic beliefs.
P. Morrissey/flickrThe market for stories of paranormal academe is a rich one. There’s Heidi Julavits’s widely acclaimed 2012 novel The Vanishers, which takes place at a New England college for aspiring Sylvia Brownes. And, of course, there’s Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters—Marvel’s take on Andover or Choate—where teachers read minds and students pass like ghosts through ivy-covered walls.
The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine is decidedly less fantastic than either Julavits’s or Marvel’s creations, but it's nevertheless a fascinating place. Founded in 1967 by Dr. Ian Stevenson—originally as the Division of Personality Studies—its mission is “the scientific empirical investigation of phenomena that suggest that currently accepted scientific assumptions and theories about the nature of mind or consciousness, and its relation to matter, may be incomplete.”
What sorts of “phenomena” qualify? Largely your typical catalog of Forteana: ESP, poltergeists, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, “claimed memories of past lives.” So yes: In 2014, there is a center for paranormal research at a totally legitimate (and respected) American institution of higher learning. But unlike the X-Mansion, or other fictional psy-schools, DOPS doesn’t employ any practicing psychics. The teachers can’t read minds, and the students don’t walk through walls. DOPS is home to a small group of hardworking, impressively credentialed scientists with minds for stats and figures.
Dr. Jim Tucker, a Bonner-Lowry Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, is one such scientist. With a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Dr. Tucker arrived in Charlottesville to complete his postgraduate training at UVA’s Health Services Center in 1986. After a few years running a private psychiatric practice (still in Charlottesville), Dr. Tucker returned to UVA to work under Dr. Stevenson and carry out research on the possibility of life after death.
Someone has a vision of God. Or feels one with the universe. Or has a near-death experience that gives them a glimpse of heaven. Or comes to know that Jesus loves her.
What should we make of such experiences?
They are undeniably subjective. Yet so is everything that we humans experience as conscious beings. I have no direct access to the consciousness of any other person, nor does anyone else have access to mine.
There are two extreme answers to the question I posed.
One is to make subjectivity unquestionable. If somebody says "I've seen God!" no one else has a right to challenge them, or look into the basis for their subjective experience. The other answer is to deny subjectivity, making truth a matter of purely objective evidence that can be rigorously substantiated.
I like the middle way espoused in Stanislas Dehaene's book, "Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts."
Dehaene, a neuroscientist, says that researchers into human consciousness need to take subjectivity seriously. There is a big difference between the brain experiencing something unconsciously, and consciously.
All this evidence points to an important conclusion, the third key ingredient in our budding science of consciousness: subjective reports can and should be trusted.
...Whatever information we are conscious of, we can name it, rate it, judge it, or memorize it much better than we can when it is subliminal. In other words, human observers are neither random nor whimsical about their subjective reports: when they report an honest-to-god feeling of seeing, such conscious access corresponds to a massive change in information processing, which almost always results in an enhanced performance.
But subjectivity shouldn't be accepted unquestioningly. People can be wrong, and often are, about the reality of what they experience.
This being said, we should not be naïve about introspection: while it certainly provides raw data for the psychologist, it is not a direct window into the operations of the mind. When a neurological or psychiatric patient tells us that he sees faces in the dark, we do not take him literally -- but neither should we deny that he has had this experience.
We just need to explain why he has had it -- perhaps because of a spontaneous, possibly epileptic activation of the face circuits in his temporal lobe.
Even in normal people, introspection can be demonstrably wrong. By definition, we have no access to our many unconscious processes -- but this does not prevent us from making up stories about them... Consider what happens when we try to make sense of our past actions. People often invent all sorts of contorted, after-the-fact interpretations for their decisions -- oblivious to their true unconscious motivations.
...However, as a measure, introspection still constitutes the perfect, indeed the only, platform on which to build a science of consciousness, because it supplies a crucial half of the equation -- namely, how subjects feel about some experience (however wrong they are about the ground truth).
To attain a scientific understanding of consciousness, we cognitive neuroscientists "just" have to determine the other half of the equation: Which objective neurobiological events systematically underlie a person's subjective experience?
Dehaene goes on to offer the example of near-death experiences. Some surgery patients report that they leave their bodies during anesthesia and are able to look down upon their inert body from on high. He asks, "Should we take them seriously? Does out-of-body flight 'really' happen?"
Experiments have shown that stimulating a part of the brain can produce an out-of-body experience. So...
Out-of-body flight "really" happens, then -- it is a real physical event, but only in the patient's brain and, as a result, in his subjective experience. The out-of-body state is, by and large, an exacerbated form of the dizziness that we all experience when our vision disagrees with our vestibular system, as on a rocking boat.
So, yes, every honestly reported subjective experience is real, because someone had the experience. But only by knowing what produced that experience, the neurological correlates, can we assess whether it was "merely" subjective or a reflection of objective reality.
Along this line, David Lane and Andrea Diem-Lane have written an interesting essay, "The Material Basis of Near-Death Experiences." Check it out. The essay addresses a similar theme: what should we make of a subjective claim about supernaturalism, when it can be explained by natural causes?
- See more at: http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2014/02/subjective-experiences-can-be-studied-objectively.html#sthash.kPQmT7Qo.dpuf
I've got no problem with a scientifically and logically defensible conclusion: neither I, nor anyone else, has free will.
(Of course, I had no choice but to write that sentence.)
The whole existentialist and religious thing -- most early existentialists were Christians -- puts way too much undeserved pressure on us to choose the right thing to do.
Maybe this made some sense when little was known about the brain, biology, genetics, systems theory, ecology, and such.
But now it is clear that reality is a web of interdependencies, interelationships, cause and effect linkages. Demonstrable evidence for a non-material free-floating soul that freely decides what to do is precisely zero.
Which is fine with me.
See some of my previous blog posts on this subject here, here, here, here, and here. I'm happier feeling like a part of a grand whole, rather than an isolated bit of freely choosing something-or-other.
Believers in free will don't have a coherent explanation of how such exists. Yet they do their best to buck up their subjective sense of freedom with slippery arguments like compatibilism.
I do my best to understand compatibilist arguments. But fail. Just seems like the last gasp of die-hard philosophers who want to play some word games before being overwhelmed by scientific truth.
A few years ago Sam Harris wrote a book called "Free Will."
Compatibilist philosopher Daniel Dennett recently wrote a response to Harris' contention that we don't have any. After which Daniel Meissler demolished Dennett's attempted critique in a great piece, "Daniel Dennett is wrong about free will."
If you're interested in this subject, for reasons beyond your control, you need to read what Meissler wrote. Great stuff. Hard to believe how anyone could believe in free will after reading his piece. The comments are interesting also.
Here's a few excerpts to whet your reading appetite.
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"Seriously? Do you [Dennett] really think that, in a country where only half of the population believes in evolution, any significant percentage of people are going to have an advanced belief in free will?
No. They aren’t. Most believe that people make choices independently of causes, to a significant degree, and therefore deserve reward and punishment. This is the basis of the American justice system and of much of our culture. This highly nuanced dance that Dennett is doing isn’t on the radar because they don’t even have radar.
Ask someone why a murderer deserves to die. Ask 1,000 people in a scientifically valid poll. You’ll find that most people believe the following: The murderer had a choice. That means that despite their bad upbringing, despite their drugged out mom, despite whatever hardships, they had the concrete, tangible, and available OPTION to not commit that murder.
So they are 100% guilty. Period.
That’s the resolution that most people have in this country when it comes to considering free will. Not everyone, but most.
...None of these things get us to freedom unless you’re describing it in the loosest and most useless way possible. As I said in the opening, he’s basically saying that if it feels free then it is, and that’s the best you’re going to get.
Well, I don’t have to accept the best illusion I’m going to get and call it freedom. I’d rather, for the sake of human dignity and the respect for reason, acknowledge that it’s an illusion and work within that framework. It’s more true, which I think is generally more healthy.
...These things are not in your control. They happen to you. They trim your options down to the limited set that present themselves to you from, well…you don’t know where. That was Harris’ entire point. Whatever options get presented for you to choose from are labeled as your freedom, and you’re not even thinking about all the others that weren’t presented.
What’s free about that?
Oh, right, it’s as free as it can be, and we should be happy with that.
Sure, and a shackled slave is free to run from the plantation in lots of different ways:
In a straight line
In a zig-zag pattern
Towards the river
Picking from available options is illusory freedom because it ignores the fact that you were only presented a few choices, and you weren’t the one who chose them. This is true without even mentioning the uncomfortable bit that you’re also not the one picking afterwards.
...As I said at the start: Dennett’s argument reduces to this:
We have free will because we feel like we do
We have moral responsibility because it’s practical to behave as if we do
This is a reckless assault on truth in the name of wishful thinking."
- See more at: http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2014/01/brilliant-arguments-in-favor-of-no-free-will.html#sthash.3Ykr50fW.dpuf
ARTICLE SOURCE REF SUBUD BRITAIN
