Category Archives: quantum
notes: biocentrism by robert lanza
biocentrism: how life and consciousness are the keys to understanding the true nature of the universe, by robert lanza, md, with bob berman. benbella books, 2009
“if the big bang had been one-part-in-a-million more powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies and life to develop. if the strong nuclear force were decreased 2 percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together, and plain-vanilla hydrogen would be the only kind of atom in the universe. if the gravitational force were decreased by a hair, stars (including the sun) would not ignite. these are just three of just more than two hundred physical parameters within the solar system and universe so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random – even if that is exactly what standard contemporary physics baldly suggests. these fundamental constants of the universe – constants that are not predicted by any theory – all seem to be carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for the existence of life and consciousness (yes, consciousness raises its annoying paradoxical head yet a third time). the old model has absolutely o reasonable explanation for this. but biocentrism supplies answers, as we shall see. there’s more. brilliant equations that accurately explain the vagaries of motion contradict observations about how things behave on the small scale. (or, to affix the correct labels on it, einstein’s relativity is incompatible with quantum mechanics.)” p7
“the pulses of air by themselves do not constitute any sort of sound, which is obvious because 15-pulse air puffs remain silent no matter how many ears are present. only when a specific range of pulses are present is the ear’s neural architecture designed to let human consciousness conjure the noise experience. in short, an observer, an ear, and a brain are every bit as necessary for the experience of sound as are the air pulses. the external world and consciousness are correlative. and a tree that falls in an empty forest creates only silent air pulses – tiny puffs of wind. when someone dismissively answers ‘of course a tree makes a sound if no one’s nearby,’ they are merely demonstrating their inability to ponder an event nobody attended. they’re finding it too difficult to take themselves out of the equation. they somehow continue to imagine themselves present when they are absent.” P20-1
“charges of the same type repel each other, so the bark’s electrons repel yours, and you feel this electrical repulsive force stopping your fingers from penetrating any further. nothing solid ever meets any other solids when you push on a tree. the atoms in your fingers are each as empty as a vacant football stadium in which a single fly sits on teh fifty-yard line. if we needed solids to stop us (rather than energy fields), our fingers could easily penetrate the tree as if we were swiping at fog.” p22
“Three components are necessary for a rainbow. there must be sun, there must be raindrops, and there must be a conscious eye (or its surrogate, film) at the correct geometric location. if your eyes look directly opposite the sun (that is, at the antisolar point, which is always marked by the shadow of your head), the sunlit water droplets will produce a rainbow that surrounds that precise spot at a distance of forty-two degrees. but your eyes must be located at that spot where the refracted light from the sunlit droplets converges to complete the required geometry. a person next to you will complete his or her own geometry, and will be at the apex of a cone for an entirely different set of droplets, and will therefore see a separate rainbow. their rainbow is very likely to look like yours, but it needn’t be so. the droplets their eyes intercept may be of a different size, and larger droplets make for a more vivid rainbow while at the same time robbing it of blue. then, too, if the sunlit droplets are very nearby, as from a lawn sprinkler, the person nearby may not see a rainbow at all. your rainbow is yours alone. but now we get to our point: what if no one’s there? answer: no rainbow.” p22-3
“in the absence of anyone or any animal, it is easy to see that no rainbow is present. or, if you prefer, there are countless trillions of potential bows, each one blurrily offset from the next by the minutest margin.” p23
“The visual image of that butter, that is, the butter itself, actually exists only inside your brain. that is its location. it is the only place visual images are perceived and cognized. some may imagine that there are two worlds, one ‘out there’ and a separate one being cognized inside the skull. but the ‘two worlds’ model is a myth. nothing is perceived except the perceptions themselves, and nothing exists outside of consciousness. only one visual reality is extant, and there it is. right there. the ‘outside world’ is, therefore, located within the brain or mind. of course, this is so astounding for many people, even if it is obvious to those who study the brain, that it becomes possible to over-think the issue and come up with attempted refutations. ‘yeah, but what about someone born blind?’ ‘and what about touch; if things aren’t out there, how can we feel them?’ none of that changes the reality: touch, too, occurs only within consciousness or the mind.” p36
“”more recent experiments by libet, announced in 2008, analyzing separate, higher-order brain functions, have allowed his research team to predict up to ten seconds in advance which hand a subject is about to decide to raise. ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision. this and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that ‘they’ have performed a conscious decision. it means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling ‘me’ is in charge of hte brain’s workings. libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events. what, then, do we make of all this? first, that we are truly free to enjoy the unfolding of life, including our own lives, unencumbered by the acquired, often guilt-ridden sense of control, and the obsessive need to avoid messing up. we can relax, because we’ll automatically perform anyway.” p39
“as more sophisticated experiments were devised, it became obvious that mere knowledge in the experimenter’s mind is sufficient to cause the wave-function to collapse.” p51
“before bell, it was still considered possible (though increasingly iffy) that local realism – an objective independent universe – could be the truth. before bell, many still clung to the millennia-old assumption that physical states exist before they are measured.” p53
constants: atomic mass unit, avogadro’s number, bohr magneton, bohr radius, boltzmann’s constant, compton wavelength, deuteron mass, electric constant, electron mass, electron-volt, elementary charge, faraday constant, fine structure constant, hartree energy, hydrogen ground state, josephson constant, magnetic constant, molar gas constant, natural unit of action, newtonian constant of gravitation, neutron mass, nuclear magneton, planck constant, planck length, planck mass, planck time, proton mass, rydberg constant, stefan boltzmann constant, speed of light in vacuum, thompson cross section, wien displacement law constant. p85-6
“you either have an astonishingly improbably coincidence revolving around the indisputable fact that the cosmos could have any properties but happens to have exactly the right ones for life or else you have exactly what must be seen if indeed the cosmos is biocentric. either way, the notion of a random billiard-ball cosmos that could have had any forces that boast any range of values, but instead has the weirdly specific ones needed for life, looks impossible enough to seem downright silly.” p91
“at first it was assumed that such uncertainty in quantum theory practice was due to some technological insufficiency on the part of the experimenter or his instruments, some lack of sophistication in the methodology. but it soon became apparent that the unertainty is actually built into the fabric of reality. we see only that for which we are looking. of course, all of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective: time is the inner form of animal sense that animates events – the still frames – of the spatial world. the mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. each weaves a series of still pictures – a series of spatial states – into an order, into the ‘current’ of life. motion is created in our minds by running ‘film cells’ together. remember that everything you perceive – even this page – is actively, repeatedly, being reconstructed inside your head. it’s happening to you right now. your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain. if your mind could stop its ‘motor’ for a moment, you’d get a freeze frame, just as the movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momentum. in fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial states; the same t hing measured with our scientific instruments is called momentum. space can be defined as position, as locked in a single frame. thus, movement through space is an oxymoron. heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here: position (location in space) belongs to the outer world and momentum (which involves the temporal component that adds together still ‘film cells’) belongs to the inner world. by penetrating to the bottom of matter, scientists have reduced the universe to its most basic logic, and time is simply not a feature of the external spatial world.” p100
“werner heisenberg when he said, “a path comes into existence only when you observe it.’ there is neither time nor motion without life. reality is not ‘there’ with definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer.” p101
“the demotion of time from an actual reality to a mere subjective experience, a fiction or even social convention, is central to biocentrism. its ultimate unreality, except as an aid and mutually agreed-upon convenience in everyday life, is yet one more piece of evidence that calls into serious doubt the ‘external universe’ mindset.” p104
“that time is a fixed arrow is a human construction. that we live no the edge of all time is a fantasy. that there is an irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events linked to galaxies and suns and the earth is an even greater fantasy. space and time are forms of animal understanding – period. we carry t hem around with us like turtles with shells. so there simply is no absolute self-existing matrix out there in which physical events occur independent of life.” p106
“the persistent human perception of time almost certainly stems from the chronic act of thinking, the one-word-at-a-time thought process by which ideas and events are visualized and anticipated. in rare moments of clarity and mental emptiness, or when danger or novel experience forces a one-pointed focus upon one’s consciousness, time vanishes, replaced by an ineffably enjoyable feeling of freedom, or the singular focus of escaping immediate peril. time is never cognized normally in such thought-less experiences: ‘i saw the whole accident unfolding in slow motion,’ in sum, from a biocentric point of view, time does not exist in the universe independent of life that notices it, and really doesn’t truly exist within the context of life either.” p109
“life has seemingly taught that time and space are external – and perhaps eternal – realities. they appear to encompass and bind all experiences, and are fundamental rather than secondary to life. they seem to lie above and beyond human experience, the gridwork within which all adventures unfold. as animals, we are organized and wired to use places and time to specify our experiences to ourselves and to others. history defines the past by placing people and events in time and space.” p112
“space, which is solely the conceptual mind’s way of clearing its throat, of pausing between identified symbols. at any rate, this subjective truth of this is now supported by actual experiments (as we saw in teh quantum theory chapters) that strongly suggest distance (space) has no reality whatsoever for entangled particles, no matter how great their apparent separation” p 114-5
“the generation to which einstein belonged had been taught that there existed an objective physical world that unfolded itself according to laws independent of life. ‘the belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject, einstein later wrote, ‘is the basis of all natural science.’ the universe was viewed as a great machine set in motion at the beginning of time, with wheels and cogs that turned according to immutable laws independent of us.” p116
“biocentrism, of course, shows that space is a projection from inside our minds, where experience begins. it is a tool of life, the form of outer sense that allows an organism to coordinate sensory information, and to make judgments regarding the quality and intensity of what is being perceived. space is not a physical phenomenon per se – and should not be studied in the same way as chemicals and moving particles. we animal organisms use this form of perception to organize our sensations into outer experience. in biological terms, the interpretation of sensory input in the brain depends on the neural pathway it takes from the body.” p117
“so we have multiple illusions and processes that routinely impart a false view of space. shall we count the ways? (1) empty space is not empty. (2) distances between objects can and do mutate depending on a multitude of conditions, so that no bedrock distance exists anywhere, between anything and anything else. (3) quantum theory casts serious doubt about whether even distant individual items are truly separated at all. (4) we ‘see’ separations between objects only because we have been conditioned and trained, through language and convention, to draw boundaries.” p118
“what, then, is the true nature of this space? empty? seething with energy and therefore matter-equivalent? real? unreal? a uniquely active field? a field of mind? moreover, if one accepts that the external world occurs only in mind, in consciousness, and that it’s the interior of one’s brain that’s cognized ‘out there’ at this moment, then of course everything is connected with everything else.” p125-6
“the fact that space can both seem to change its appearance through aberration, and actually shrink drastically at high speed, so that the entire universe is only a few steps from end to end, illustrates that it has no inherent, let alone external, structure. it is, rather, an experiential commodity that goes with the flow and mutates under varying circumstances.” p126
“first principle of biocentrism: what we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. an ‘external’ reality, if it existed, would – by definition – have to exist in space. but this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.
second principle of biocentrism: our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. they are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
third principle of biocentrism: the behavior of subatomic particles – indeed all particles and objects – is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.
fourth principle of biocentrism: without consciousness, ‘matter’ dwells in an undetermined state of probability. any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.
fifth principle of biocentrism: the structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. the universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. the ‘universe’ is simply the complete spatiotemporal logic of the self.
sixth principle of biocentrism: time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. it is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
seventh principle of biocentrism: space, like time, is not an object or a t hing. space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. we carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.” p127
“what weinberg and others who have pondered the issue complain about is that, given all the chemistry and physics we know, given the brain’s neurological structure and complex architecture, and its constant trickle-current, it is nothing short of astonishing that the result is – this! the world in all its manifold sights and smells and emotions. a subjective feeling of being, of aliveness, that we all carry so unrelentingly that few give it a moment’s thought. there is no principle of science – in any discipline – that hints or explains how on earth we get this from that.” p174
“it is not solely atoms and proteins that hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. when we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. our thoughts and perceptions have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. even taking cognition to the next step by fabricating a sense of meaning to things necessitates the creation of spatio-temporal relationships, the inner and outer forms of our sensuous intuition.” p175
light = motion
A quantum connection between light and motion
February 6, 2012
(PhysOrg.com) — Physicists have demonstrated a system in which light is used to control the motion of an object that is large enough to be seen with the naked eye at the level where quantum mechanics governs its behavior.
The movement of objects is ultimately governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, which predict some intriguing phenomena: An object could simultaneously be in two places at the same time, and it should always be moving a little, even at a temperature of absolute zero – the oscillator is then said to be in its quantum ‘ground state’. Until recently, these strange predictions of quantum mechanics have only been observed in the motion of tiny objects such as individual atoms. For large objects, the unavoidable coupling of the object to the surrounding environment quickly washes out the quantum properties, in a process known as decoherence. But researchers in EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements have now shown that it is possible to use light to control the vibrational motion of a large object, consisting of a hundred trillion atoms, at the quantum level. The results of their research have been published in the February 2nd edition of Nature magazine.
A ring of light
The object they used was circular in design – a 30-micrometer diameter glass donut mounted on a microchip. Under the direction of Tobias Kippenberg, the team injected a laser into a thin optical fiber, and brought the fiber close to the donut, allowing light to ‘jump’ to the object and circulate around the circumference of the donut up to a million times. Just as the pressure of a finger running along the rim of a wineglass will cause it to hum, the tiny force exerted by the photons traveling inside the glass ring can cause it to vibrate at a well-defined frequency. But the force can in fact also dampen the vibrations, and thus cool down the oscillatory motion.
Cold, colder…
Cooling is crucial to reaching the regime of quantum mechanical motion, as this is normally overshadowed by random thermal fluctuations. For this reason, the structure is placed in a cryostat that brings it to a temperature of less than one degree above absolute zero (−273.15°C). The light launched into the donut slows down the motion one hundred times, thus cooling it even more, very close to the quantum ‘ground state’. And more importantly, the interaction between light and the movement of the oscillator can be made so strong that the two form an intimate connection: A small excitation in the form of a light pulse was fully transformed into a small vibration and back again. For the first time, this transformation between light and motion was made to occur within a time that is short enough so that the quantum properties of the original light pulse are not lost in the process through decoherence. By outpacing decoherence, these results demonstrate the possibility of controlling the quantum properties of an object’s motion. It also provides a way to see the peculiar predictions of quantum mechanics at play in man-made objects.
Looking forward
Mechanical vibrations can be coupled to quantum systems of completely different nature (such as electric currents), as well as to light. They could therefore be used to ‘translate’ quantum information between those systems and light signals. This is especially beneficial as it allows to transport quantum information – the basic ingredient of a future quantum computer – over large distances in optical fibers.
More information: Quantum-coherent coupling of a mechanical oscillator to an optical cavity mode, E. Verhagen, S. Deléglise, S. Weis, A. Schliesser, Tobias J. Kippenberg, Nature, January 2012. DOI: 10.1038/nature10787
Provided by Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
consciousness
consciousness.
an unconscious person believes ads and news reports, thinks what everybody knows must be true, gets caught up in their emotions and becomes intensely egotistic (panic about the overwhelming urgency of my needs in this moment).
a conscious person avoids histrionics and strong emotions because they cloud the mind, sees the twist involved in understanding the background truth, the boy and girl are more conscious now; calmer and more insightful, more rational. but in a quantum way, because we’re not talking about regular newtonian rationality.
these are my first thoughts. what does it say on the internet?
all sorts of things. and of course the first thing that came up after a simple search on ‘consciousness’ was a ted talk on quantum consciousness. so, great.
The unconscious is driven by guttural and primitive needs and can be unpredictable. The unconscious is extremely smart. It is also keenly perceptive even if the conscious person is not. It uses various hooks to let you know there are problems. If the problems are small, the behaviors are not usually serious. If they are more pronounced, it usually means there are more serious issues. The unconscious isn’t bad. It just makes life unpleasant when you shove issues on it. Or, when someone else triggers issues. When you are in balance with your needs and internal issues, the unconscious is a very powerful ally to your mental and physical health. You can actually get in touch with your unconscious and “read” it so you know when things aren’t right so you can do something about it. Most “normal” people have a balance between their unconscious and conscious self. When the conscious and unconscious are both aware of the issues, threats and conflicts, there is a kind of balance. The unconscious doesn’t need to raise flags by arresting conscious behavior. The truth is we are all a little imbalanced so even normal people can suddenly exhibit unconscious behavior. Understanding this behavior can give the salesperson remarkable insight into a person’s motivation.
The unconscious person is immensely and clearly perceptive and can be more so than the conscious person. People who are unperceptive as a conscious person can be razor sharp in their clarity of unconscious perception. No matter how unperceptive you think someone is, you can bet their unconscious is reading everything with crystal clarity. I am convinced, based on what I have observed, that no matter how imperceptive a conscious person is, their unconscious is still razor sharp. This means that your unconscious will “see through” almost anything but the conscious self may not. Because of the separation between the two, the conscious you may never perceive something your unconscious sees. For example, if someone is trying to manipulate you or fool you, your unconscious will clearly see the strategy. If the person who is trying to manipulate you is very good at it, you may not consciously be aware of it. Your unconscious will be. If you are in touch with your unconscious, you will feel uncomfortable about what is happening and realize something is wrong. Your gut is a good unconscious indicator. If you are out of touch with your unconscious, you won’t be able to connect the warning signals that something is wrong. People who aren’t in touch with their unconscious go through life unaware about some of their conscious behavior. If the problems are severe enough, their quality of life can be very poor.
Your feelings are a good indication of what your unconscious is telling you. Have you ever been sad or had feelings you couldn’t understand why you experienced them? If you are more connected with your unconscious, you know why you feel a certain way. If you aren’t, you can feel a certain way but not understand why you do. Also, you may be aware of feelings you have but not aware of how you are behaving. This disconnection between the conscious and unconscious can be small or large. It all depends on how many deep issues a person has. These “issues” can be unresolved problems such as being really mad at your parents (unconsciously – so you aren’t aware of being mad), for something they never did for you.
Don’t think only the unintelligent can be out of touch with their unconscious. Very smart people can be out of touch. This is because smart people can be very good at denial. In fact, the smarter you get, the more sophisticated you become at denial. They can be so good at it that they can make most any bad feeling go away. This is why some really smart people seem to do very dumb things. The dumb things are usually unconscious issues surfacing. This is how conflict with the unconscious begins to escalate and manifest itself with behavior the person is unaware of. What is funny is that other people observing a person in denial can read them very clearly. A person in denial can have serious issues and may behave in detrimental ways and not be aware of it. This is important to know when you are dealing with someone with these issues. They simply can’t see them.
The unconscious can be an unfair judge of people and their motivations. It has its own way of interpreting the world and it’s out of a person’s conscious control. An unconscious person can be vengeful and full of rage. Problems in childhood can shape how the adult unconscious person interprets the world around them. When the unconscious person is out of balance with the conscious person there are personality issues. A troubled, unconscious person can be a problem. When you couple this type of unconscious personality to its ability to clearly perceive the outside world’s intentions, you get a paranoid thinking that can be extremely suspicious and judgmental.
The best way is to work around unconscious behavior is to avoid direct confrontation. If you confront a person about what is their unconscious behavior, you will cause the person to become defensive (not good) and you may run the risk of becoming a target of their unconscious. So a good rule to follow is; if you are going to address someone about a particular behavior, make sure you know whether it’s conscious or unconscious.
but many people have a gut feel that something isn’t right with this person. Managers usually understand this behavior when a subordinate is doing it and may use indirect methods to contain them if they get too much out of line. If you are in the crosshairs of an unconscious attack, you cannot deal with it directly. You need to have other people (your peers or manager) be aware of this behavior so you don’t get screwed. The rule is avoid it as much as possible, but if you have to deal with it, you need to build a consensus that this person is a problem. You don’t discuss your problem directly with people, but you make sure there is an audience when this behavior occurs. Even if the unconscious behavior is subtle, most people will see it. If this person is attacking you, they are probably attacking others.
If you are convinced someone is unconsciously trying to attack you there may be little you can do. Understanding the root of their problem will help you deal with it. If a peer is behaving this way with you, this may be their way of competing. Withholding information is another way of exerting power when the person is unconsciously insecure. If your manager is doing unconscious things to you they may not like something about you. Usually it is a way of keeping more power for themselves when they are insecure. You may be a type of person they have trouble dealing with. You may want to try to understand that more and find out what their issue is. In some cases, you can do something about it. You can’t deal directly with their unconscious but you might try to gain more trust from them. If your manager has a problem with your personality, you might want to adjust to make it easier to deal with you. Don’t expect people with unconscious behavior to articulate what they’re doing or cooperate. Because the behavior is unconscious they are unaware of it. You have to deal with it indirectly. If your boss is having problems with you, it is you who have to develop a plan to (1) identify the root of the behavior problem and (2) do something that will make them feel easier about you. Depending on how deeply rooted and problematic the issue is, you may or may not be able to do anything about it.
Don’t forget that you might be the person with the unconscious behavior and are blaming everybody else for your problems. You may have similar unconscious issues with a person who is doing something to you, (see Transference And Counter-Transference ). If you are very much in touch with your behavior, you might be able to discover your unconscious issues. This is very hard to do. People who have good self-analytic skills can do this. Consult with friends or therapists, mentors, anybody you can trust can help give you feedback. Just tell them the story about your manager or peer. If they throw something back in your face that you do that stuff too, you may be guilty or even the initiator. (You may unconsciously choose to ignore sage advice which may be a problem with you – see The Personality Disorder & The Neurotic ). Unfortunately, people understand so little about unconscious behavior many don’t even know it when it’s right under their nose.
if you can get in touch with your unconscious, it can help you read people very well. Most salespeople who are good at their job already have some sensitivity to their unconscious. Unknowingly, they are using their unconscious that has the ability to instantly read people. They are able to ‘read’ it’s subtle messaging and see through to someone else’s unconscious. This is a very powerful tool to help you understand and read people. If you can refine it, your ability to read people and understand their motivations will be greatly enhanced. I guess the next question is how do you do this? Well, it has to do with how well you are connected to your unconscious. For starters, if you understand how to read your feelings and can guess the root of why you have those feelings, you are doing pretty well. For those who can’t yet articulate why you have certain feelings, or maybe can’t recognize you are having feelings, need to get in touch more with your unconscious. To do this, you need to first be able to know when you are having subtle feelings communicated to you. This takes some real perceptive reasoning. You need to know that one thing may mean another. Also note these feelings can be at a very low level. You need to train yourself to recognize they’re there then try to figure out what they mean.
more from this guy
Challenging a belief structure is like shaking the foundation of how we interpret reality. As a salesperson you may inadvertently discover a flaw in someone else’s belief structure. Be careful as to how you move forward. Presenting them with the ‘truth’ may cause them a lot of anxiety. If they can handle it, you may choose to expose them to the truth. If you think they may not handle it well, you might back off. If you really care about the person, then you should help them understand it. You should be with them through the ordeal of relearning all they thought was the way of the world.
Some people exploit destroying people’s belief structures. These people are insecure and are smart enough to have sophisticated perceptions about other people and sense when they are vulnerable. More than likely, these people have a personality disorder because they are insecure and it makes them feel superior to hurt people. People that do this are cruel and have no idea what they do to others. If the opportunity presents itself, you may want to intervene if someone is trying to destroy someone’s belief structure. It all depends on the situation.
and here’s a great definition from him that i can use to fill out my characters
there are two types of people, the personality disorder and the neurotic. The neurotic says “it’s my fault.” The personality disorder says “it’s your fault.” One takes responsibility for their behavior and the other doesn’t. The neurotic will take responsibility for a problem and can try to fix it. The personality disorder will unconsciously or consciously blame others for their predicaments and wish the world would stop screwing them. In business, the neurotic will work with you, admit mistakes and may try to fix problems. The personality disorder will blame others in their organization for their misfortunes and can hold grudges.
and this is completely different, from a dictionary of philosophy. apparently consciousness is THE hot topic today. this is a very thorough study i should read. hell, i should study them all, but i don’t have time to become more than a tyro.
The two broad, traditional and competing theories of mind are dualism and materialism (or physicalism). While there are many versions of each, the former generally holds that the conscious mind or a conscious mental state is non-physical in some sense, whereas the latter holds that, to put it crudely, the mind is the brain, or is caused by neural activity. It is against this general backdrop that many answers to the above questions are formulated and developed. There are also many familiar objections to both materialism and dualism. For example, it is often said that materialism cannot truly explain just how or why some brain states are conscious, and that there is an important “explanatory gap” between mind and matter. On the other hand, dualism faces the problem of explaining how a non-physical substance or mental state can causally interact with the physical body.
Some philosophers attempt to explain consciousness directly in neurophysiological or physical terms, while others offer cognitive theories of consciousness whereby conscious mental states are reduced to some kind of representational relation between mental states and the world. There are a number of such representational theories of consciousness currently on the market, including higher-order theories which hold that what makes a mental state conscious is that the subject is aware of it in some sense. The relationship between consciousness and science is also central in much current theorizing on this topic: How does the brain “bind together” various sensory inputs to produce a unified subjective experience? What are the neural correlates of consciousness? What can be learned from abnormal psychology which might help us to understand normal consciousness? To what extent are animal minds different from human minds? Could an appropriately programmed machine be conscious?
philosophical foundations
the philosophy, well, the magic powers, of the quantum world are the same powers you can see in star wars, dune, high magic, all those mythical places where humans are more like gods. here are various notes i just compiled while looking for references to quantum effects in the real world
“oob Techniques have been developed in an effort to induce OBEs:
Attempting to fall asleep without losing wakefulness. Deliberately teetering between the awake and asleep states is known to cause spontaneous trance episodes at the onset of sleep which are ultimately helpful when attempting to induce an out-of-body experience.
Deep trance and visualisation. The types of visualizations vary; some common imageries used include climbing a rope to “pull out” of one’s body, floating out of one’s body, getting shot out of a cannon, and other similar approaches. hard to use for people who cannot properly relax. Common sensations can arise such as deep vibrations, impressions of very high heart rate (when it actually is in a relaxed state) and such sensations are likely to cause anxieties. A good example of such a technique consists of the popular “Golden Dawn Body of Light Technique”.
Audio/visual stimulation intended to bring the subject into the appropriate state. binaural beats to induce theta brain wave frequencies . sinusoidal wave pulses to achieve similar results. The beta/theta simultaneous brainwave patterns were also observed as effective, apparently easing the lighter sleep condition. The theta frequency is observed monitoring brains of dreaming patients, notably in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, while the beta frequency range is that of normal, relaxed awakened individuals. It is believed that one of the unsuspected powers of the drumming of the American natives during religious ceremonies caused the brain to shift among frequencies to become more receptive to the “other worlds” using similar means.
Chemically induced experiences. there are several types of drugs that can initiate an OBE, primarily the dissociative hallucinogens. Salvia divinorum has been known to produce symptoms in which the user is said to be able to leave their bodies and travel to many places at once. Many users also claim that they feel as if their “soul” falls out of their body. Other drugs such as Methamphetamine have also been known to cause OBEs but do not in themselves cause the effect which appears to happen through the resultant lack of sleep.
Magnetic stimulation of the brain, as with the helmet developed by Michael Persinger.
Electrical stimulation of the brain, particularly the temporoparietal junction (see below).
Sensory deprivation or sensory overload. intense disorientation of the subject by making him lose his space and time references. The brain tends to fill in the gaps when there has been nothing getting into the senses for some time.
Some people who practice BDSM desire to be placed in extreme bondage because it may allow them to have an out-of-body experience and has been reported as such. This is very akin to being placed in a sensory deprivation tank, and the OBE may be induced by the resulting sensory deprivation. Sensory overload does just the opposite, where the subject can for instance be rocked for a long time in a specially designed cradle, or submit to light forms of torture, causing the brain to shut itself off from all sensory input. Both conditions tend to cause confusion and it is this disorientation which often permits the subject to experience vivid, ethereal out-of-body experiences.
Extreme physical effort. running in a marathon could overwork themselves and feel “extraordinarily weightless” and actually see themselves from above. On many occasions this has been put down to dehydration.
Near Death Experience (INDEE or NDE). The phenomenology of an NDE usually includes physiological, psychological and transcendental factors such as impressions of being outside the physical body (an out-of-body experience), visions of deceased relatives and religious figures, transcendence of ego and spatiotemporal boundaries and other transcendental experiences . Typically the experience follows a distinct progression, starting with the sensation of floating above one’s body and seeing the surrounding area, followed by the sensation of passing through a tunnel, meeting deceased relatives, and concluding with encountering a being of light .”
body of light – When the Cosmic created the universe, humanity, or the ‘human seed’, that aspect of consciousness which was to grow into realization of godhood, descended from primal unity. This unity is symbolized by the Divine World of Atzilooth, and the Holy Upper Trinity in the Tree of Life.
When consciousness experiences increasing levels of density as matter is created, duality forms and continues to the material world. This first descent from unity to duality is the so-called “Fall” and to prevent a premature return to Unity, that is before all of creation could be encountered, a barrier was placed called in qabalistic literature, the Abyss. This is the “First Day of Creation” or appearance of time/space.
As the descent continued, the human seed experienced progressive levels of sexual polarization as well as being further removed from its memory of Divine consciousness. After the level of Divine Harmony in creation, or Tiphareth, the center of humanities sense of self, an additional barrier was created, the Veil, or Paroketh. This is the appearance of individuality free of the Divine spark.
Finally, a third barrier of Veil is encountered, and that is what separates material creation from the psychic and spiritual worlds. Here, humanity has no memory of its Divine origin, and has complete free will to seek what it desires.
The small ‘child of light’ is often compared to a fetus in the astral womb of the practitioner’s aura and temple. It must be matured, fed, educated, and grown to proper strength so that is can be a help to the magician and not a hindrance, or even potential danger. However, like in all occult activity, dangers come more often from rushing through preliminary work instead of allowing it to proceed in a healthy and natural pace, than from the exercises themselves actually being psychically dangerous.
When we attempt esoteric exercises and a return to Primal Unity, we must pierce the first Viel, or that of the Gate of Life and Death. So called, because few people pierce it except during near-death-experiences (NDE’s), Out-of-Body experiences (OOBE’s), or physical death itself.
The astral body has access to three levels of consciousness, and then must be shed, or encounter the ‘Second Death” in order to penetrate the Veil, or Paroketh, to the next three levels. However, precautions must be undertaken to avoid the destruction of the astral body if the Second Death is to be avoided. If this is not done, then it must be reconstructed with a new birth.
Above the Solar World, the Resurrection Body is established, and it is the ‘body’ or expression of consciousness used for Reintergration to Unity.[2]
While the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh was hotly contested during its developmental stages, with the ‘flesh lovers as they were called, winning out over those believing in a purely spiritual resurrection. Mead points out that the belief in physical resurrection was not universally accepted by the Jews of Jesus’ day, yet, there was a strong Biblical and midrashic tradition of increasing in grades of purity of the individual allowing for ascension and resurrection to take place.
The descriptions of these accounts, Elijah and Jesus, suggest that the bodies they inhabited were the same, and yet not the same. They were tangible, yet could overcome material limitations, such s Jesus’ passing through the locked door.
These ‘bodies’ in fact, are not really separate bodies, but increasingly purified expressions of the personality, the individual and unique expression of God we all carry within us. As one ‘body’ or expression is purified and ‘dies’ another takes its place. What makes the resurrection body different is that while it can and does exist within the material world, it is free from material constraints. This perfect body was, or is, essentially a quintessence.
“With the constant implanting of consciousness, even the tiny amount used here, the cowan [Body of Light] will eventually gain a half conscious mind of its own. You will in fact have partially ensouled it. At this point, it will almost certainly make a bid for freedom. Something you cannot allow for it has no protection against the darker forces who will take it over and use it against you and even against those with whom you are involved. They will think it is you and trust the appearance. Therefor the moment it feels as if the cowan is getting above itself, give it a good psychic shake, and in no uncertain terms remind it who is boss.”
She then suggests withdrawing all contact with the cowan for a lunar month, and to feel no sympathy for this self-created and projected aspect of ourselves. To do otherwise, she warns, is to court disaster. This would in fact, be tantamount to “the Fall” in our own personal microcosm.
These four directives: going slow, performing in a sacred space or enclosure, preventing it from wondering, and reminding the BOL who is boss, are common to Eastern and Western methods of creating the BOL.
What is missing in the modern accounts, but clearly stated in the Oriental ones, is that the BOL is a superior being to physical world, and can be directed to have effects on the physical body, if they are desired. It is these effects which allow for the etherialization of the physical body, increased health, longevity, and possibly even a kind of ‘psychic mutation’ that allows for increased psychic activity along family lines.
For those who do not belong to any formal course of study, it is generally suggested that the first year of activity be spent learning Elemental and Pentagram work. The second year doing planetary work; with the third year being spent integrating the two. The fourth year often focuses on zodiacal magic and the completion of any Pathworking. Pathworking can be started anywhere from the first year on and requires about 1 1/2 years to fully do all of the 32 Paths of the Tree of Life. Since each Path is often done more than once, it is best to allow two to three years for this additional aspect of magical training. Pathworking, particularly Paths 32 through 24 are critical for psychological health and should be done two or three times before doing the second set of Paths, or 23 through 19.[5] Of course, the speed at which one works is not important. It is better to go slowly and diligently and make real progress, than to rush through and simply do the work haphazardly.
“Dark side feeds off anger, jealousy, fear, and hate. telekinesis, telepathy, levitation, deep hypnosis, enhanced empathy, reflexes, precognition, and enhanced speed, strength and accuracy. mind trick. Sith Force Lightning in combat or as an instrument of excruciating torture. enhanced skills in lightsaber combat. the ability to heal or drain the life-force of others, increased resistance to attack, ability to warp space and to dissipate energy attacks.
“Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother
Other Memory: the combined ego and memories of all her female ancestors, distinct identity within the Reverend Mother’s mind, minutiae of observation hyperawareness. Slight differences in air currents or the design of a room detect hidden portals and spyholes; minute variations in a person’s vocal inflection and body language understand a person’s emotional state, and manipulate it. Truthsayers are able to determine whether someone is lying by analyzing their speech, body language, and physical signs like pulse and heart rate. simulflow, literally the simultaneous flow of several threads of consciousness at any given time; mental multitasking. full control over each muscle in her body through training known as prana-bindu. This allows her to bend the last joint in her little toe while remaining otherwise motionless, bend and contort her body in ways that most would consider impossible, or put a remarkable amount of force behind a physical blow. The mental part of prana-bindu, or prana-nervature (prana stands for breath, bindu stands for musculature) is the precise control of the totality of nerves in the human body.
martial art called the weirding way, which incorporates the prana-bindu methods of optimized muscle control, which enable one to deliver powerful blows and to move with extreme precision and speed. The basic principle behind the weirding way is that, “My mind affects my reality.” A user of the weirding way has to know that the action he or she “wants” to perform has already been performed.
Just as the prana-bindu allows the Bene Gesserit to precisely control each muscle and nerve, they also have complete conscious control over the functions of their internal organs and body chemistry.
immune to poisons, change the chemical makeup of any harmful substance in their body and render it harmless. slow her aging process dramatically, controlling every aspect of her metabolism. “
realworld quantum effects
i’m trying to picture what this would look like, when quantum processes in the game / players produce quantum effects in the real world.
researchers reported finding telltale signs of a link between quantum effects and thermodynamic properties in the “heavy fermion” compound YbRh2Si2 (YRS) containing the elements ytterbium, rhodium and silicon. This material contains a quantum critical point that separates a magnetic phase from a non-magnetic one
Phase transitions, such as water vaporizing or melting, typically occur as a result of temperature change. Quantum phase transitions, by contrast, arise when the forces of quantum mechanics drive a macroscopic material from one type of order to another. A quantum critical point describes the material at the cusp of such a transition.
A quantum critical point occurs at the absolute zero of temperature, which cannot be reached experimentally. However, the effects of quantum phase transitions can be seen in the laboratory at sufficiently low temperatures. In the case at hand, a group of experimentalists at the Max Planck Institute of Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden made exquisite measurements at very low temperatures of the properties of the metallic YRS that show a quantum phase transition between a magnetic and a non-magnetic state.
Usually, phase transitions are governed by the behavior of a macroscopic variable, the order parameter. In the case of the liquid to vapor transition mentioned above, the density is the order parameter. For a quantum phase transition, an energy scale describes the energy cost to nucleate a domain with a finite order parameter in the state without that order. This energy scale, believed to be the only relevant one by conventional wisdom, describes the fluctuations of the order parameter. The paper reports the measurements of two thermodynamic properties — magnetization and magnetostriction, or the change in volume as a function of change in magnetic field — as the material was cooled to near absolute zero.
“Our measurements revealed that a second thermodynamic energy scale exists in the YRS compound,” said Philipp Gegenwart. “This additional energy scale goes beyond the theory based on fluctuations of the order parameter.”
One possible explanation for this additional energy scale invokes the destruction of a quantum effect, called entanglement, at the quantum critical point. Another ascribes it to the effective disintegration of an electron into separated spin and charge carrying objects, or excitations.
and
Scientists have long wanted to demonstrate superposition in larger objects but a significant challenge here is to eliminate all thermal vibrations in the object, which mask or destroy quantum effects. To achieve this, the object needs to be cooled down to its quantum ground state – at which point the amplitude of vibrations reduces to close to zero.
The object is a mechanical resonator made of aluminium and aluminium nitride, measuring about 40 µm in length and consisting of around a trillion atoms. It is a thin disc, which resonates at about six billion vibrations per second.
In the experiment, Cleland’s team reduce the amplitude of the vibrations in the resonator by cooling it down to below 0.1 K. The high frequency of the aluminium resonator was key to the experiment’s success, because the temperature to which an object needs to be cooled in order to reach its ground state is proportional to its frequency. “A regular tuning fork, for example [with significantly lower frequency], would need to be cooled by another factor of a million to reach the same state,” Cleland said.
Next, the team measured the quantum state of the resonator by connecting it electrically to a superconducting quantum bit or “qubit”. The qubit acts, in fact, like a “quantum thermometer” that can identify just one quantum thermal excitation, or phonon. Once this has been done, the qubit can then be used to excite a single phonon in the resonator. This excitation can be transferred many times between the resonator and qubit.
In this way the researchers created a superposition state of the resonator where they simultaneously had an excitation in the resonator and no excitation in the resonator, such that when they measured it, the resonator has to “choose” which state it is in. “This is analogous to Schrödinger’s cat being dead and alive at the same time,” says Cleland.
“Unlike other measuring instruments, [the qubit] allowed us to measure the mechanical resonator while preserving all quantum effects,” Cleland told physicsworld.com. “Most measuring instruments disturb the mechanical object by heating it up, and so destroy the very quantum effects being sought.”
The experiments could have important implications for new quantum technologies, like quantum information processing, and for investigating the boundaries between the quantum and classical worlds – one of the least understood areas in physics.
and about decoherence
There are two reasons why in usual materials and behaviors the underlying quantum mechanical nature is masked:
a) As you guessed the small magnitude of the numbers entering and deciding the thresholds of observation of quantum effects. These depend on the small value of h-bar, a constant which controls the scale of clear quantum behavior in interactions.
b) The second reason is coherence. A classic example of coherence/decoherence is the following: when soldiers march across an old bridge they break step. If they do not, if they keep coherently marching in step, the additive and synchronous in time vibrations induced on the bridge may destroy it by resonating with its basic resonance.
When one has a wave description, and quantum mechanics describes the probability of interactions mathematically as a wave, there are phases between waves. If the waves are in step, i.e. the phases are fixed and unchangeable, macroscopic manifestations of quantum effects can appear, as happens with superconductivity and superfluidity. Fortunately for the way we see the world usually, the smallness of h-bar assures that unless great effort is made to keep the phases, the phases are lost statistically, due to zillions of interactions at the molecular level. This is called decoherence and leads to the classical physics level we usually live with.
here are some experiments with psi effects
physiological indices of participants’ emotional arousal were monitored as participants viewed a series of pictures on a computer screen. Most of the pictures were emotionally neutral, but a highly arousing negative or erotic image was displayed on randomly selected trials. As expected, strong emotional arousal occurred when these images appeared on the screen, but the remarkable finding is that the increased arousal was observed to occur a few seconds before the picture appeared, before the computer has even selected the picture to be displayed.
There were no significant sex differences in the present experiment. Over the years, however, the trait of extraversion has been frequently reported as a correlate of psi, with extraverts achieving higher psi scores than introverts.
Eysenck attributed the positive correlation between extraversion and psi to the fact that extraverts “are more susceptible to monotony…[and] respond more favourably to novel stimuli” (1966, p. 59). Sensation seeking is one of the 6 facets of extraversion on the Revised NEO Personality Inventory
In the experiment just reported, for example, there are several possible interpretations of the significant correspondence between the participants’ left/right responses and the computer’s left/right placements of the erotic target pictures:
1. Precognition or retroactive influence: The participant is, in fact, accessing information yet to be determined in the future, implying that the direction of the causal arrow has been reversed.
2. Clairvoyance/remote viewing: The participant is accessing already-determined information in real time, information that is stored in the computer.
3. Psychokinesis: The participant is actually influencing the RNG’s placements of the targets.
4. Artifactual correlation: The output from the RNG is inadequately randomized, containing patterns that fortuitously match participants’ response biases. This produces a spurious correlation between the participant’s guesses and the computer’s placements of the target picture.the correlation between stimulus seeking and psi performance was .17 (p = .02). Table 3 reveals that the subsample of high stimulus seekers achieved an effect size more than twice as large as that of the full sample. In contrast, the hit rate of low stimulus seekers did not depart significantly from chance:
Those who follow contemporary developments in modern physics, however, will be aware that several features of quantum phenomena are themselves incompatible with our everyday conception of physical reality. Many psi researchers see sufficiently compelling parallels between these phenomena and characteristics of psi to warrant considering them as potential candidates for theories of psi. (For a review of theories of psi, see Broderick, 2007, and Radin, 2006.)
The development in quantum mechanics that has created the most excitement and discussion among physicists, philosophers, and psi researchers is the empirical confirmation of Bell’s theorem (Cushing & McMullin, 1989; Herbert, 1987; Radin, 2006), which implies that any realist model of physical reality that is compatible with quantum mechanics must be nonlocal: It must allow for the possibility that particles that have once interacted can become entangled so that even when they are later separated by arbitrarily large distances, an observation made on one of the particles will be correlated with what will be observed on its entangled partners in ways that are incompatible with any physically permissible causal mechanism (such as a signal transmitted between them). The most extensive discussion of how entanglement might provide a theory for psi will be found in Radin’s (2006) Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality. Radin argued that over the past century, most of the fundamental assumptions about the fabric of physical reality have been revised in the direction predicted by genuine psi. This is why I propose that psi is the human experience of the entangled universe. Quantum entanglement as presently understood in elementary atomic systems is, by itself, insufficient to explain psi. But the ontological parallels implied by entanglement and psi are so compelling that I believe they’d be foolish to ignore (p. 235).
Bell’s theorem highlights a second prominent feature of quantum theory: the role that the act of observation plays in determining what will be observed. For example, the common-sense assumption that dynamic properties of a particle (e. g., its position and momentum) have definite values before they are actually observed is falsified by the empirical confirmation of Bell’s theorem. Instead, the values of such properties remain only probabilities until the act of observation “collapses the quantum wavefunction” and causes the properties to acquire definite values. Even before Bell’s theorem, it was known that whether light behaves like waves or like particles depends on the conditions of observation. These features of quantum mechanics have led to “observational” theories of psi in which it is not just the act of observation but the consciousness of the human observer that plays an active role in what will be observed (Radin, 2006, pp 251–252). As Radin acknowledges in the paragraph quoted above, quantum entanglement does not yet provide an explanatory model of psi. More generally, quantum theories of psi currently serve more as metaphors than models, and some psi researchers with backgrounds in physics are even more skeptical: “I don’t think quantum mechanics will have anything to do with the final understanding of psi” (Edwin May, quoted in Broderick, 2007, p. 257).
priests and prophets
talking to jim about ex-kurt in the machine. he’d been thinking about it, and saw a resemblance to kurtz in heart of darkness.
He starts out, years before the novella begins, as an imperialist in the best tradition of the “white man’s burden“. The reader is introduced to a painting of Kurtz’s, depicting a blindfolded woman bearing a torch against a nearly black background, and clearly symbolic of his former views. Kurtz is also the author of a “pamphlet” regarding the civilization of the natives. However, over the course of his stay in Africa, he becomes corrupted. He takes his pamphlet and scribbles in, at the very end, the words “Exterminate all the brutes!” He induces the natives to worship him, setting up rituals and venerations worthy of a tyrant. By the time Marlow, the protagonist, sees Kurtz, he is ill with “jungle fever” and almost dead. Marlow seizes Kurtz and endeavors to take him back down the river in his steamboat. Kurtz dies on the boat with the last words, “The horror! The horror!”
and while i didn’t name my character after marlon brando, the similarity is kind of cool.
kurtz starts out idealistic, but becomes corrupted by his power and grows bloated and sick, looking forward to being defeated so he can end his misery. and ex-kurt is really very tired of being god of the machine and spends a lot of his time figuring out a way to be relieved of his burden.
at first, when jim was describing kurtz’s character, i thought that this characterization really must belong to the boy, who is on the wrong side for most of the story. but the boy is never world weary, never longs for death, never really sees how ridiculous his posturing is until he sees it in the eyes of the girl. but ex-kurt has no such mirror, no peers, no companion, only adulation and worship from those he considers inferior. so maybe we can inform kurt’s character with marlon brando.
i can see it.
***
and how did that get to priests and prophets? something else jim said.
institutionalized religion exists to hide the knowledge of the christ consciousness within you. priests exist to enforce rules, and prophets exist to break them and remind people of the ultimate existence of consciousness thru love. 22:36
prophets are in touch with the spirit of god. they’re wild, they don’t listen to human admonishments, they’re driven by their personal experience with god. as such, they’re dangerous to an orderly society; loners – unpredictable, intransigent, fanatical. priests, on the other hand, gather and maintain flocks of believers, educate them in doctrine, enforce laws and traditions that promote the organized religion that has grown up around the prophet’s energy and probable flame-out.
The priest is a formal role in a formal system which is engaged in a more-or-less permanent and regular set of rituals. Because of this, the priest’s claim to legitimate authority rests with his or her adherence to traditional or legal requirements for the role.
The magician, on the other hand, may be similarly involved with influencing sprits and gods, but this effort is individual (rather than part of an organized system) and occasional (rather than as part of an ongoing effort or set of rituals). Magicians might be thought of as being specialized in an unorganized and even informal religious system. A magician or sorcerer’s claim to legitimacy rests almost entirely with his or her effectiveness. Tradition certainly plays a role, but due to the largely informal nature of the role, a magician who is unable to “produce” what is promised is one whose authority simply won’t be acknowledged for long.
Finally, the prophet was for Weber an idealized religious figure who is motivated by a “calling” of a higher power which places him or her outside traditional or legal religious structures. If people recognize this person as having any legitimate authority, it is on the basis of his or her personal charisma and the belief that claims to divine revelation are correct. Should enough followers join the following, a social and/or religious revolution may result. Such leaders also typically posses extraordinary powers,
One type of religious specialist which later researchers have focused upon, but which Weber didn’t address, is that of shaman. A typical shaman shares certain characteristics which can be found in all three of the others discussed thus far. Like a charismatic prophet, the shaman derives his legitimacy through personal contact with the divine rather than through standardized religious education or structures, as with the priest.
Like the priest, however, the shaman is engaged in regular and organized religious rituals, very different from the magician. On the other hand, like the magician, the shaman’s legitimacy is also in part dependent upon effectiveness — a shaman who doesn’t “produce” will end up being replaced. Shamans are not separated from the people in the way that priests usually are; instead, they are very much a part of the community’s life.
***
3. Managing the causes of social unrest is vastly more effective than managing unrest. A lot of people – the old and the young – have lost their chosen futures. Pensions have evaporated, and graduating into a recession is a horrible experience. People need to see real accountability from those who skimmed the cream off the good times, and continue to skim it off the bad times. Yes, I understand the argument that paying reasonable salaries to top brass in banks will cause talent flight. Yes, I understand that the Duke of Westminster really does need all that land. But you are not explaining this to me: you are explaining it to bankrupt store managers who slotted themselves into a machine that promised a stable life and future, and then fired them out the back end when the economy turned. You’re explaining it to kids who did four years in university to graduate into a world they cannot practice their profession in. People are angry and they are going to force change. The question is in what areas can ground be given – in what areas can people be made accountable for their behavior on the way up the curve – which is not simply beheading people who are standing in the wrong crowd? The rich are not by their nature villains, and those who profiteered on lax regulation and more fundamentally, on unrealistic expectations are hard to pick out of the crowd in a manner which will satisfy people who have witnessed their pensions evaporate. People, in general, do not want blood, but they want to feel that the hardship is shared in at least a somewhat equitable manner. Irrational things like seeing the ultra-rich abandon their sixth home sooth people at a level which has little to do with reason. Strategic management of public outrage to produce positive change where possible (national transformation) without it turning into, ahem, class war requires real political innovation in government. Very serious thought should be given to designing those pressure valves before Summer 2009. Remember: creating positive ways for people to manage their outrage is vastly cheaper than policing. Destructive rage can be turned into constructive measures if there is a public perception of integrity and shared sacrifice in the process. In 2009, however, a public perception of integrity means actual integrity must be present and the same is true of shared sacrifice. Welcome to the panopticon.
4. How the young are to shape their lives when deprived of hope of progress through stable career paths. The vast majority of young people today will be poorer than their parents, often far poorer, and there are few if any cultural reserves to tell people that money is not the goal of life at that stage. Unrealistic expectations not backed by real productivity have built up most people’s understandings of their rational entitlements to implausible levels, and yet there is no clear path to puncturing those expectations in a manner which does not make a mockery of the investments that people have made in education, in simple work, and in career. The social contract between the individual, the state and the market has been violated, and there is no way to repair that damage in the short term, although sincere apologies help. The way out is offered by education, particularly liberal education and broad-based vocational training (plumbers who do roofs,) the arts, sports, musical culture – any area where a person can define themselves as successful, as worthy, even as great – without requiring massive access to money through a healthy, functioning economy. The “brass ring” is gone for perhaps an entire generation, but creative and productive use of talent should not have been artificially restricted to market success in the first place: money was how, not why, and it is by examining this fundamental identity again that we can find the creative freedom to offer cultural roles to people who might have wished to be rich, but find that path blocked.
quantum culture
here are a few quotes.
We’re becoming a quantum culture – one that that has slowly become more and more aware of itself and the reactions that result from its actions – how the present constantly implicates the tomorrow. We have an unquenchable thirst for who we are and where we are from. As we begin to become more aware of ourselves and our surroundings, we slowly begin to alter our reality.
The quantum culture is one that is looking. We constantly seek input, data – and this information, while often wavering between disorienting and sedating, disheartening and amazing, is ultimately a small step toward enlightenment.
and another
Chapters are devoted to the history of quantum aesthetics, quantum art, quantum literature, quantum politics, quantum anthropology, and so forth. In the end, the general elements of a quantum culture are outlined, and the differences that this culture shows with respect to old conceptualizations of this domain are explained. With respect to the field of cultural studies, this new approach to cultural analysis changes how societies can be investigated as well as provides cultural studies with a more comprehensive and integrated framework. Specifically noteworthy is that quantum aesthetics is less reductionistic than research strategies of the past.
and here’s somebody who’s working on the same head of steam i am.
The main principle of Quantum Thinking is to hold two seemingly opposite ideas in one’s mind at once and understand both ideas to be fully true.
At the conference, we should consider six areas of Quantum Culture: (1) New Mathematics and Quantum Computing in Software (2) Quantum Medicine (3) Politics (4) Language (5) Real/Virtual Institutions for the Dissemination of Knowledge (includes education, museums, and Wikipedia) (6) Embodiment (includes a certain advanced kind of electronic art, dance, and social choreography).
Once you start thinking in a “quantum” way, the answer to almost every question becomes “yes and no.” And both sides contain huge truths which cannot be negated by the other.
Every intellectual (or spiritual, etc.) tradition that we respect has more or less operated independently from all the others. From the point of view of my Star Trek belief-system, the dream of a global culture, what we need now is a quantum leap forward to an epistemology where I have my own commitments, coming from my own biography and traditions, but I am also much more understanding of the importance and value of other traditions. We need a global thinking, in my view, one that is also deeply respectful and understanding of the singularities of each tradition.
anti quantum mechanics
this is taken from a longer blog post filled with equations i can’t quite follow. but the points he makes in the discussion after are full of insights, and not only into quantum mechanics, but the minds trying to encompass it, or really, trying to dismiss and conquer it. thanks lubos motl
It means that if you want to preserve the idea of some “realism”, you must abandon the assumption of locality (which won’t be enough, as argued below: I have to say it in advance). The individual spins are actually not encoded in some “local variables”. There has to be a communication which guarantees that the value of an individual spin σ1,2,3x,y that you measure depends on what other experimenters in the Solar System just decided to measure and what outcomes they received.
If this were true, you would of course have to give up relativity because there would now be fully physical superluminal signals instantly propagating through the Solar System. I designed the position of the three laboratories so that they were spacelike separated: not even light was fast enough to exchange the information.
But of course, the people who are eager to deny quantum mechanics, whatever the costs are, are also eager to deny Einstein’s relativity when it’s needed. And indeed, it’s needed. Fine. So they may believe that quantum mechanics is fundamentally wrong – it just appears to be correct – and in the same way, relativity has to be an illusion, too. At the fundamental level, objects do communicate by signals that are not just “slightly faster than light” but they are arbitrarily fast. All the major sharp qualitative insights that have been found in physics during the 20th century may be just illusions – and there is some mundane classical “mechanism” that is faking quantum mechanics and that is faking relativity.
What would it really mean if the measurement of a single electron’s spin depended on everything in the Solar System that has occurred so far, including measurements done on another planet a picosecond ago? If you really believe this thing – and it is on par to the belief that Young Earth creationism is fundamentally correct and the fossils are just a conspiracy to make the world look different than what it actually is – then you inevitably have to assume that there is a preferred reference frame in which the “real material physics” is actually taking place.
This attitude of yours, namely attempts to find arbitrarily contrived “mechanisms” whose only goal is to deny something we almost directly observe – could be used in any other context in science and outside science, too. You may deny that people have visited the Moon, that the species have evolved, that the Earth has been here for billions of years, that the events in the Middle Ages actually took place. With enough dishonesty, you may deny anything.
You may hope that the answer is Yes but from the beginning, it’s clear that you need to make billions of particular choices that don’t really exist in Nature and that have no observable consequences. And for you to isolate the “faked quantum mechanics” inside a more general class of similar theories, most of which don’t fake any quantum mechanical theory, you will need to adjust an infinite number of parameters. You will need an infinite amount of fine-tuning. Just to be sure, the amount of dishonesty you need to claim that such a proposed theory is a “real alternative” to proper quantum mechanics is much larger than the amount of dishonesty that a Young Earth creationist needs to dismiss the importance of fossils. The creationists only needs to “overlook” or “reinterpret” a finite number of fossils. You need to claim that infinitely many quantities predicted to be almost certainly nonzero by your non-quantum, non-relativistic theory (all the observable consequences of preferred inertial systems and material collapses) just happen to be accidentally zero. This denial of everything that physics knows about the natural phenomena is needed for you to protect your pet medieval belief in realism.
Obviously, they need to say that there is a real “wave function” or “density matrix” that should be treated in the same wave as a classical electromagnetic wave. Then there are some GRW-like collapses that make the world encoded in the “wave function as hidden variables” look like the real one. The wave functions must sometimes “literally collapse” and they suddenly shrink “in a particular reference frame”.
You need to make the collapse physical and because the wave function quickly “shrinks” in this mode of reasoning, you need to specify a particular reference frame in which it “shrinks”. Aside from choosing a particular reference frame, you will also have to choose a particular border above which things “really behave classically”. I say it’s artificial as well because according to quantum mechanics, the same quantum mechanical rules fundamentally apply to all systems, and not just the small ones.
The Bohmian theories say that the wave function “objectively exists” but it is just a “pilot wave” that drives another “objectively real” degree of freedom, the particle’s actual coordinate and velocity. However, in the case of the spin, the GHZM experiment unambiguously shows that the “actual value of the spins” can’t exist in the classical sense, so the particle-like portion of the Bohmian degrees of freedom or “beables” have to be thrown away, anyway. If you want to describe spins of particles, you may only use the “wave function” part of the Bohmian “beables” and this wave function spreads just like any other one.
Quantum mechanics has no problem with the spreading of this wave function because the wave function only encodes a half-baked complexified probability distribution which should be interpreted as the state of someone’s knowledge, not as objective reality. If you want to say that the wave function describes some features of the objective reality, you have to offer some actual material mechanisms that “keep it from spreading”. In the articles about the GRW collapse theories, including the recent one about Steven Weinberg, I’ve explained that any mechanism of “collapses” that you add into your theory to produce big enough effects to make the “objective wave function” more classical will inevitably introduce new perturbations that are safely excluded experimentally. So you will fail, anyway.
At the end, I think that even with the unlimited but finite amount of dishonesty, you simply can’t construct a “realist” model that will fake quantum mechanics. The ultimate problem is that observers are quantum mechanical systems as well – and they may interfere with themselves.
the “moment” when the collapse occurs is completely subjective.
This statement has many aspects. The simplest one to understand was mentioned at the beginning: if there were a “real collapse”, it would mean that the wave function of a particle that was just absorbed must “instantly disappear” from the rest of the space. However, the term “instantly” requires you to specify a particular reference frame because special relativity guarantees that “now” has a different meaning for observers in different states of motion.
When you look how Nature actually works, i.e. when you study these issues quantum mechanically, the reference frame in which the wave function collapses “now” is completely unphysical because the portions of the wave functions that “disappear” can’t influence anything that latter happens, not even in principle! They just describe some a priori possible outcomes that didn’t materialize; they only exist in the head of a physicist who calculates the predicted probabilities. When a different outcome becomes a fact, we have to switch to conditional probabilities so the outcomes violating the corresponding conditions just don’t affect any future predictions or outcomes. By the very definition of conditional probabilities, the influence of the later-disappeared portions of the wave function on any observable phenomena is exactly zero, something that wouldn’t be possible in any natural “realist” theory.
A few paragraphs ago, I also mentioned another aspect of this “subjectivity” of the collapse: less accurate observers may want to “perceive an outcome of a measurement” and they may do so prematurely. More accurate observers are calculating things more accurately so they still describe the rest of the world, including the sloppy/smaller observers from the previous sentence, by superpositions, so that they don’t forget about their potential to interfere. In quantum mechanics, this aspect of the subjectivity of the collapse is unsurprising and free of problems, too. The “collapse” just means a subjective process by which “a physicist is taking recently observed facts into account” (he modifies his state of knowledge about the world) and it doesn’t matter when he does so. Different observers predicting the same measurable final outcomes may do so at different stages and they will still agree about the predictions of events that they may consider as shared facts. These collapses don’t have to have objectively unique properties, moments, and shapes – and indeed, they demonstrably don’t: they’re a part of a subjective cannon allowing physicists to make valid probabilistic predictions.
Any “realist” description of the collapse must inevitably choose a point beyond which the collapse is “strictly real” and the potential for interference is lost after that point. But in the world around us, as described by quantum mechanics, this never happens. In principle, it is always possible to think about a more accurate observer who calculates the motion of all particles – including us – using the exact wave function with arbitrary superpositions etc. Any “realist” picture of the “wave function collapse” must introduce a new “bureaucratic intervention” after which the world is “obliged to behave classically”. For the GRW collapse proponents, this intervention is the “flash” that shrinks a wave function. For the many-worlds advocates, it’s the moment when you “objectively split the world” into many.
But according to quantum mechanics, such events when the properties of the physical systems become “exactly classical” never occur. As we study larger objects, the classical approximation becomes more tolerable, but it is never fundamentally right. So the collapses and the events in which the many worlds split never occur. And they don’t need to occur because the amplitudes only have a probabilistic interpretation and probabilistic distributions are allowed to spread without the underlying truth’s becoming fuzzy.
What I finally want to emphasize is that all this redundant and “objectively real but totally unobservable” superstructure – from many worlds to extra invisible Bohmian positions of particles (which can’t help in the case of spin or particle production, anyway) or other hidden variables to GRW collapses prescribed from above – is only being invented because certain people behave as bigots who are unable to admit that the physics research in the 20th century has irreversibly falsified all intrinsically classical models of the reality. All the new “fanciful stuff” with tons of choices and processes (superluminal communication, preferred frames, collapses, the length scale to which the GRW collapses shrink the wave function, the frequency of such flashes etc.) that can never be observed and with the infinite amount of fine-tuning and obfuscation that is needed for it to fake the real, relativistic quantum world (to guarantee that none of the new predictions is really observed) is only being proposed because some people’s bigotry has no limits. Their dogmas about “realism” are more important for them than any amount of empirical evidence, more important for them than everything that science has actually found.
…forces us to understand science as a gadget to organize our observations rather than to promote the idea about an “independent real world”
conquering the mind
exercises for mind control. not them controlling your mind, you controlling your mind.
here’s a whole course on magic for kids.
here are some typical mind exercises.
a bunch of aikido warmup exercises, good for generating ki.
how to use that pre-sleep wandering state to program your sleep.
machines that train your brain to produce whatever-waves.
yoga and pilates and their insights on stilling the mind.
zen and the art of controlling your thoughts by telling jokes.
regular meditation exercises.
tantric sex.
rock and roll, dance, sound, singing.
are we just talking about brainwaves here? is deep meditation equivalent to whatever waves on the eeg? alpha and theta. if you induce these waves, do you lapse into these states?
notes: the yoga of time travel
the yoga of time travel: how the mind can defeat time, by fred alan wolf phd, 2004 quest books
“to time travel you need to leave some baggage behind. nothing too big – just your ego, is all. for what clouds the time traveler’s access to the future and the past is nothing more than the illusion that she is a singular entity, an ego or ‘i’, living in an objectifiable world of time and space. this illusion is extremely difficult to break free of, no doubt. krishna tells arjuna that to do this he must become a devotee of krishna himself. by that he means seeing into the great creator-destroyer that is time in and of itself. what does this mean in the context of this book? what is the ego, anyway? we will see that it is actually defined in terms of what it does: it acts as a focus for possibilities, a way to change the possible outcomes of a person’s life into actualities. in doing so, it also acts as an anchor pinning the mind in time rather than in the timeless realm of krishna” p19
“every soul on earth, whether or not that soul remembers it, desires something that is impossible to manifest. this one desire acts as fuel for all desires. every soul desires to be one with krishna, even while remaining in the illusion! that means that each one of us desirs to be a supreme master of all that is. from the meekest to the boldest, from those who profess egoless devotion to those who assert themselves controlling dynasties, corporations, or just mastering poses in yoga, all of us are here because we desire to be eone with god, the creator, sustainer, and destroyer of all.
“clearly, no individual is capable of taking on the role of the supreme lord. krishna realizes this and knows what every soul wants at heart; so to accommodate them all, he gives every sentient form the ability to focus and defocus possibility, which has much to do with the sense that we can control events in our lives. recognizing also that each one will eventually see the futility inherent in this illusion of control, krishna nevertheless allows each one to die and reincarnate over and over agin, enabling the illusion to persist as long as each being remains enchanted by it.
“in this way, each of us may forget krishna, forget to peer into the body of time, and enjoy some feeling of power over a piece of the illusionary play.” p19-20
“indian society, on the other hand, ‘seems to have the notion that time as experienced depends on the state of awareness of the individual, and hence time functions in a variety of subjective forms. so chronology in india is unreliable, in any linear objective sense, and most events were simply ‘a long time ago.” that is, the indian mind does not see time as a simple imaginary scaffolding – something projected by t he mind ‘out there’ as a skeleton or framework upon which the real business of the world is measured and compared. instead, time exists integrally and inseparably from space and matter; as a result, it can change in a nonlinear manner.” p29-30
“we may not be able to appreciate the full impact of einstein’s proposal today, f or during the past fifty years or so we have become more receptive to nonmechanical and even spiritual ideas making their way into scientific thinking. but in the late nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, western society had quite a mechanical view of the world. a rigid materialism had developed and spread across europe, and soon after, along with the tide of european immigrants, the currents of culture had carried it across the atlantic to the united states. a quiet kind of arrogance ensued as many scientists claimed the age of scientific discovery was over.” p43
“ramana explained to those who inquired that it is the mind that is vast, not the world. the knower is ever greater than the known, and the seer is greater than the seen. that which is known is contained within the knower, and that which is seen is in the seer; the vast expanse of the sky is in the mind, not outside, because the mind is everywhere and there is no outside to it.
“…the primary ignorance, out of which all external phenomena appear to arise, is the ego-sense. going beyond this sense becomes a difficult task. you need to accept the role of primary ignorance and its limitation and see how the world of your own ignorant mind sets into motion a limited way of fear connected to your belief that you are confined by space and time.” p56
“here is the essential key that opens the lock to time travel: find ways to suspend your bodily awareness. this can be accomplished in two paradoxically differrent ways. one way is to do as maharshi did – contemplate your essential self by holding one thought in your mind, ‘i am not the body.’ the second way involves practicing mindfully what patanjali calls asanas, the physical poses and reposes used to bring the mind to concentration and absorption. as iyengar explains, this often involves perfecting the asanas, going beyond the trials of learning the poses to discover both the power and the limitations of the finite body. that is, by becoming fully conscious of the body, the practitioner realizes that he or she is other than the body and merges with the soul.” p50
“when it comes to measuring time, even though we all know what a watch does, and even what an atomic clock does, we don’t really know what we are measuring because we can’t compare any one measurement with anything else….i can’t even compare the second that just passed with the one i am experiencing now…we never get our hands on that interval. i may have a concept about these two different seconds, but since those times are not ‘present’ here and now for me to perceive, they remain immeasurable.
“all past times remain so. all future times also are immeasurable, since they, too, are not here at hand, as it were. we can anticipate the future time only in our imaginations, and the past times are only in our memories – if we have them, and if not, past events too are only experienced in our imagination.
“so that leaves just the time you are experiencing now as a possibly measurable quantity. but the instant you claim to measure it, by, say, looking at the watch on your writs, that time mysteriously vanishes into the great depths of the immeasurable past. hence, has any time actually ever been measured? has any time really ever ‘passed?’…thus there really is no present moment – or no past moment or future moment – ever present at all. it appears that time is moving, but if you actually look close enough, what you’ll see is one thing vanishing and another appearing. your mind puts these vanishing and appearing acts together and connects them, and in doing so provides you with your first, and primary illusion of continuity, meaning the semblance of past, present, and future. but as with any good illusion, don’t fall for it; it is your trickster-mind fooling you into believing in the persistence of time.” p60-1
“an animal darts out into the street ahead of your car, and you manage to hit t he brakes in less than a half-second from the tie the light form the headlights reflects from the animal to your eyes. there are many other equally ordinary examples in which, libet would ague, the person is totally unconscious at the time of response. that is, the reaction is faster than the perception.
“libet refers to his theory of consciousness as ‘subjective antedating’ or subjective referral in time. his data show that a person, although able to react to stimuli withing a hundred-thousandths (100 milliseconds) of a second, is not actually aware of what he or she is reacting to for several hundred milliseconds, up to a full half-second. yet when asked just when he or she became aware of a stimulus produced by a certain event, the person responds as if he or she were aware at the time of the event itself.
“a good example would be a 100-meter runner at a track meet. he leaves the starting block around 100 milliseconds after the starter has fired his gun. but it is not until some 250-400 milliseconds later that he actually perceives the gun shot. by this time he is well on the way towards the finish line, perhaps five meters down the track. yet if we ask him later about his experience, he will say he was conscious of the shot at the time he pushed off from the block. amazing as it may sound to us, libet claims that it is not possible for the runner to be conscious of the shot even though he responds as if he were.” p66-7
“the concept of ‘temporal thickness.’ having a certain thickness in time means that our human experience can’t really be narrowed down to infinitesimal instances – one following the next, in order. rather, each instance must be ‘fuzzy,’ or spread out, occupying an extent of time.” p76.
“there may be a field acting in the fourth dimension, tending to keep us moving toward the future, just as gravity acts in three-dimensional space, tending to keep us moving downward.” p78
“an entire human life, which exists over time, can be conceptualized as a four-dimensional tube set in a four-dimensional block of spacetime. the time traveler explains that each of us exists as a solid entity in four dimensions. every person has fuzzy thicknesses extending in all dimensions and consciousness precipitating out, instant by instant, like a dew drop from a fog, with each drop a fuzzy cross section of the person’s whole life. although we exist as four-dimensional beings frozen in space-time, we only experience the precipitation process, moment by moment. consciousness moves along only one of those dimensions – the time dimension – and only ‘sees’ a cross section of the whole, which it takes to be the whole being at a certain time…a living person would be the whole tube extended in four dimensions, so that an actual baby appears as a three-dimensional cross section through the tube, a young man as another cross section, and an old man as another, taken at the end of the temporal dimension for that particular individual.
“this notion of ‘block spacetime’ is pervasive in modern physics theory arising from minkowski’s vision discussed in chapter 3. ‘ordinary’ time travel frees one from the ‘time tube’ instantaneous cross section in four-dimensional spacetime and allows one to move along the temporal dimension as freely as one moves from one room of a house to another. to actually accomplish this, however, means finding some technology that can counter the natural tendency to move along the tube in a singe direction – into the future – instant by instant as we all seem compelled to do.” p79
“most of today’s sciences undergo change as the discoveries made in them through the use of quantum physical principles became more evident.” p99
“the autonomy principle. it says that we can do experiments in our local neighborhood without reference to or concern for the rest of the universe…said differently, i can assume that the actions of distant stars and planets need not be taken into account when i boil water for tea or decide to take the dog for a walk. if this principle wasn’t true, any action i take would evoke all kinds of consequences for the rest of the world or even the universe at large.
“magical belief systems base their logic on just such notions: that we are not autonomous, that everything is connected.
“together, the autonomy principle and the grandfather and creativity paradoxes constitute an unstated assumption called the chronology tenet that concludes simply: you cannot move backward through time. if the chronology tenet is not actually a part of physics, why do we believe in it? the reason has more to do with our commonsense view of causality than with physics. we believe that if something happens, there must have been a prior cause plus a means by which the cause leads to the effect. travel into the future does not violate this commonsense view, but travel to the past, even for the briefest of times, apparently does.
“let’s examine this conclusion more clearly. we have seen how the general theory and the special theories of relativity introduce new ideas about time. specifically, through the time dilation effect, which briefly says that when in motion time slows down, the special theory of relativity allows us to travel to the distant future while aging minimally. here no causality paradoxes are encountered, even though such travel would certainly be weird.” p99-100
but does travel to the past really violate the laws of causality? if we examine closely what we mean by time in light of quantum physics principles, we find that travel to the past does not violate any of the paradoxes or principles of the chronology tenet, and in fact remains within the laws of causality. to see how this is so, we need to consider how the physics of general relativity predicts the existence of what are called closed timelike lines. these are trajectories through space that at first move forward in time but then curve around and go backward through time, arriving right back where they started at precisely the time they started. the word timelike here just means that any motion along that line will appear to be going in the direction of ever-increasing time for the one moving along it less than the speed of light. the lines are called timelike because anyone moving along them would experience the clock ticking along normally. when the person arrives in the past, the clock would show a normal time advance. and the lines are called closed to remind us that they loop backward in time. later, we will see what happens when we open them, but allow them still to go back in time. these closed lines in spacetime were first found to be solutions to einstein’s general theory of relativity equations by kurt godel. although they seem to be physically impossible, it turns out that the general theory of relativity does not find them so.
“we also need to examine quantum physics’ notion of parallel universes: the proposition that instead of a single universe containing all there is, there are an infinite number of universes; the matter in all the other universes manifests as ‘parallel ghosts’ when contemplated from any single universe. all of time travel’s paradoxes are resolved, provided that closed timelike lines can be opened so that they thread their way into parallel worlds.” p100-101
“hoyle based his tale on the parallel-universes interpretation of quantum physics by implying that other times could coexist as if they were parallel universes overlapping with ours in our time period. it may appear strange to the reader that a theory of science like quantum physics can have different interpretations. although quantum physics is a well-founded theory and its equations are certainly not in question, there are several competing understandings of just what quantum physics means. surprising and fantastic as it may seem, the parallel-universes interpretation appears to be the most straightforward, but certainly controversial, understanding of quantum physics to date. however, regardless of interpretation, quantum physics has proved itself to be the best physical theory we have to date. so far, nothing contradicts its bizarre predictions, and we have been witnessing its implications for well over a hundred years. in fact, it is the basis of today’s age of information technology. p102-3
“in the parallel-universe view of quantum physics, when the same weighted die is rolled, all of the numbers show up after a single roll. the reason we see only one number is that each time an observation occurs, the observer splits and enters into each of the six worlds predicted – again her appearance in these alternative universe being dictated by the weighting of the odds. the world where she observes the number 3 is five times as likely as any of the other worlds where the other numbers are observed by parallel ‘shes’. yet all of th worlds supposedly occur. how are we to understand one world being ‘heavier,’ in a probability sort of way, than any off the others? this question , in fact, is what convines many physicists that parallel universes are implausible.
“…in spite of its bizarreness, the parallel-universes view of quantum physics remains a completely deterministic theory – it accounts for our subjective experiences by providing a reasonable history of possible outcomes we would, or could, se ein each of the worlds we happen to inhabit. in other worlds, in whichever world we are, the results we see will be consistent with the classical view. it explains probability outcomes by taking all outcomes into account, provided we let the observers of those outcomes multiply without end.
“any universe you may inhabit at the moment will seem real enough with the others hidden from plain view. however, the same thing will be true for each off the other universes and other ‘yous’ as well. that’s what makes parallel universes seem so unbelievable; how can there be copies of me that i have no knowledge of?” p104-5
you can think of it in two ways. you exist in parallel worlds that are indistinguishable from each other as far as you can determine. hence, they don’t exist as separate worlds for you. for you and your ‘twins’ there will be just one ‘you’ experiencing one universe. thus we have the remarkable situation that one universe at any time has an infinite number of identical copies, and you are in all of them dong texactly the same thing you are doing in this universe – wherever and whenever ‘this’ universe happens to be.
“i suggest that this ‘fact’ of quantum physics lies at the root of the inherent stability of all atoms and thus all material objects, and that it is largely responsible for the inertia of objects and why matter appears as solid as it does. every object in the universe, large or small, is incessantly splitting, and these splits, resulting in multiple appearances in multiple universes, reinforce each other, making the objects appear solid in every one of the universes…
“if you can’t see any difference between any of these worlds, then why bother with them at all? that’s where the closed timelike lines come in. we need these parallel universes to make time travel a reality, and we need closed timelike lines to make the paradoxes of time travel go away. closed timelike lines must open out and thread their way through these universes in order that no paradoxes occur.
“remember the example of the four-dimensional tube discussed in the previous chapter? that tube stretched across time from birth to death and, in terms of timelike lines, is an open tube of lines. but just imagine the death end of the tube joined to the birth end, so that the tube now becomes made up of closed timelike lines. the paradox immediately arises that the person is now not only in two places at the same time, but is also two people of different ages at the same time!
“as we see in the upcoming resolution of the chronology tenet, time-travel paradoxes are resolved by opening closed timelike loops so that they thread from one parallel universe to another. now, for example, when a dying traveler goes back in time to his birth, he ends u p in a parallel universe where he sees his parallel self being born. strange, yes, but not forbidden by the laws of physics.” p105-6
“until very recent times, it was believed that quantum physics only applied to the atomic and subatomic world, a world that was well below human perception. today, scientists believe that quantum physical effects can also be observed on a larger time and space scale, well within the world of human perception.” p116
“to arrive at a probability for a sequence of events, you have to imagine the possibility moving as a wave through time from a specific starting point (for example, the flipping of the coin), then reversing itself when the wave reaches a specific future time (the coin landing on the floor), and finally coming backward through time to where it all started. these two ‘flows’ of possibility-waves then come together multiplying each other.” p116
“when a possibility-wave completes its turn-around cycle and multiplies with itself, the possibility becomes a probability. physicists now believe that at this point, the even in question is ‘waiting to be observed,’ so to speak; even though it has not yet been observed, it can no longer be termed unobserved. in fact, usually, the completion of a cycle and the final observation of an event are simultaneous. hence, the coin, which was previously capable of existing in one of two possible states (heads or tails), suddenly jumps into one of those states (say, tails) at the instant it is observed. this is called the quantum physical observer effect.” p117
“1. quantum physics deals with a new kind of object called a possibility-wave, adn everything in the world, including your brain and your mind, has a possibility-wave.
2. possibilitiy-waves travel both forward and backward in time.
3. possibility-waves can be superposed (added together) to create new possibility-waves.
4. possibility-waves can be multiplied (squared) to create probabilities.” p121
“two alternative possibilities can interfere with each other. by ‘interfere’ i mean that two, or more, possible outcomes somehow coalesce and produce a result that isn’t present in either of the source universes taken separately, but appears in a new universe of its own, provided someone makes the attempt to observe it.
“according to deutsch, the two possibilities in the double-slit experiment, although describing only a single particle, are composed of two real, parallel-world particles – each particle really existing somehow in its own separate universe. both universes are required to explain the interference. the pattern of hits on the record screen is not a simple compounding of particles passing through one slit or the other, but is the product of each particle interfering with its ‘ghost’ particle in the other parallel world. yet since the particles exist in separate and parallel universes, only one particle is ever found in any one universe. that would explain why only a single spot is observed (in each universe) after the particle passes through the slits. thus in any single universe, even though the p article in the other universe is not present, the effect of its presence mysteriously changes the course of the observed particle’s history and its final destination.
“parallel universes are not the easiest things to contemplate, and until recently many physicists preferred other interpretations of quantum physics. in the bohr interpretation (named after niels bohr, a major contributor to the discovery of quantum physics), the observer of an event, such as a particle striking a screen, causes the event to occur. bohr said that the simple act of observation changes quantum events, turning them from possibility-waves into probabilities. when an observation takes place, the object under scrutiny is thought to suddenly ‘pop’ into existence. this has come to be knows as the observer effect.” p122
“either the particles of matter do not exist when they are not observed and are only present when an observation takes place, or the particles do exist in an infinite number of parallel universes with a single observer branching out as parallel beings in all of them. in some sense these schools of thought may be saying the same thing, but this possibility is by no means clear. so far no experiment can tell the difference between any one interpretation and another. the sudden appearance of an object probably seems just as mysterious as the presence of parallel universes. it’s most likely a measure of the limitation of the human mind, which thinks in concrete terms, that the quantum world appears paradoxical and mysterious to our thinking.” p122-3
“the observer effect doesn’t necessarily provide a determined answer for the observer, but it does acknowledge that the object in question is ‘out there,’ waiting to be discovered. whatever the result will be, the event of its existence is not in question. whereas before observation, the object in question can not be said to be ‘out there’ at all. it resides in a mysterious world of possibility-waves.
“in the parallel universes interpretation, on the other hand, there is nothing special about the observer’s point of view. when an observer observes an atomic object, the object changes by slitting into parallel worlds – but so does the observer. the parallel universes interpretation in fact explains the observer effect – the impact an observer has upon a physical system simply because he or she observed it: nothing magical happens. the observer simply becomes part of the universe(s) in which the observation takes place.
“in summary, the bohr interpretation says: we don’t know how an act of observation really takes place, but it can be imagined as the collapse of the wave to a single point. in the parallel universes interpretation, no collapse takes place. instead, all possibilities arise in separate parallel universes. the possibility-wave is a means to take into account the interference potential of any universe with any other. thus, when we say an object can move along alternative trajectories in parallel universes, we are saying the same thing as the object has a possibility-wave in one universe. deutsch clearly had this in mind when he began thinking about quantum computers. deutsch’s interpretation says: it’s possible to construct a quantum computer that operates without any collapse effects of observation. if one does not make any attempt to look into its operation, the quantum computer will perform as if it were in parallel universes rather than in a single universe. ultimately, when an observer looks in for a result, one can then treat the effect of this observation as if it were a collapse. the observer simply enters into as many universes as there are possible outcomes form the quantum computer. since he doesn’t care about he other ‘ghost’ quantum computers, the outcome to him appears as if a collapse had occurred. in effect, the collapse can be put in the hands f the user. as i hinted above, this device uses the weirdness of quantum physics to carry out special calculations and predictions. deutsch reasons that without using the parallel-universes interpretation, it would be difficult to fully understand how a quantum computer would operate.” p123-4
“one insight to be gained is that time and possibility are intimately connected, far more intimately than could have been even thought about before the discoveries of quantum physics. the connection between time and possibility is very subtle and has to do with how possibilities change into probabilities when awareness enters into the picture.” p136
“it may be useful to look at what i mean by knowledge and awareness in terms suggested by quantum-physics principles. awareness is a two-pronged physical action – one, when a possibility changes into a probability and two, when a probability changes. a probability can change into a certainty or not; if not, it can become less certain or it can become more certain. i will at times use the world consciousness to mean the same thing as awareness. knowledge is the outcome of acts of awareness. it can be thought of objectively as something physical. we experience knowledge as memory. that is, once we know something it enters memory. however, knowledge can change,; it can be gained and even be lost, and awareness can also change knowledge by its action of changing probabilities and possibilities.” p 136-7
“certainly changing the physical situation as indicated above can change a possibility-wave, for, after all, the possibility-wave represents the physical situation. in the remainder of this chapter, we will explore another way in which such a change can occur. we will see how a possibility-wave can change as a result of making different choices in the ways we go about observation. i call this simply changing awareness. simple, yes, but such a change is profound in its implication.
“if we can learn to alter our awareness in a certain way – that is, learn to become mind yogis, we can change possibilities, alter outcomes, and even enable outcomes to ‘flow’ as new possibility-waves that eventually emerge as new physical events.” p138
“when a qubit’s possibility-waves add together, they can produce different probabilities of the qubits having values zero or one. these possibility-waves are crucial to the operation of quantum computers. in fact, that is the whole point of designing quantum computers in the first place: to take advantage of this new kind of computer addition called the law of superposition in quantum physics (see chapter 7 and the appendix). when two opposite qubit possibility-waves are present, the probability for observing a qubit value is different from the situation when only one such wave is present. the two possibilities crate an interesting situation, in that they can act together and affect quite strongly what takes place in the real world.
“it is strange to think that adding two possibility-waves can product a result that changes our perceived reality. it certainly seems unreal that a single qubit, or any object for that matter, can move in opposite directions at the same time. but according to quantum physics, all unobserved objects must behave in this strange way; they must simultaneously move in as many directions as is possible for them. because the unobserved qubit can move in both directions at the same time, it will do so. when we see that adding two possibility-waves together changes both our observation of reality and reality itself, we need to consider that the two possibility-waves might also be ‘real,’ in spite of the imaginal quality of such ideas as negative possibility-waves and the factthat we never see them.” p143-4
“when we tally up the results of our observations of anything, tiny or not, what we see are ‘real’ things. we deal with probability-curves, not possibility-waves, and we determine the odds as if possibility-waves did not exist. yet they apparently do exist. not only that, from the viewpoint of quantum physics, they are essential to every perception we make. in the end, it is the squaring of all possibility-waves that allows us to make sense of the world. i mean sense in two ways: the ability to directly perceive that world through our common senses, and the ability to order and understand what we perceive.
“let’s review what we know about possibility-waves and probability curves. we know that probability-curves add up to produce outcome probabilities. we know that when possibility-waves add up, they either cancel or reinforce each other, each option producing a very different outcome probability. when we consider possibility-waves, we add them and then square the result to get a probability-curve. but when we only consider separate probability-curves, we add them to get a single probability-curve.
“consider the following questions:
1. what determines whether we add probability-curves after squaring possibility-waves or add possibility-waves before squaring them to yield a probability-curve?
2. in other words, when do we add probability-curves and when do we add possibility-waves?
3. put slightly differently, which comes first: add and then square, or square and then add?
“since possibility-waves are apparently a figment of our mind, it seems the answer to the first question can be stated simply enough: our mind. and since probability-curves do correspond to reality – that stuff ‘out there’ – the answer to the second question must be: we add probability-curves when we become conscious of ‘out there,’ so it should logical follow that we would add possibility-waves when we remain conscious of ‘in here’ rather than ‘out there.’ the answer to the third question is: when we deal with the world as we imagine it to be, we add and then square. but when we deal with the world outside of our minds, we square and then add.” p150-1
“certainly we see evidence of this connection in this business of adding possibility-waves and then squaring them to get probability-curves, or of squaring the possibility-waves and then adding the resultant probability-curves. i would like to add mind into the equation, so to speak, and simply say that this is what mind does. it converts possibility-waves to probability-curves by performing this squaring operation, which then produces probabilistic effects in the real world.” p152
“the normally accepted point of view, originating with bohr and in which some physicists believe, imagines that when any observation occurs the possibility-wave paranormally squares itself, producing a probability-curve. in explaining this squaring operation, this school of thought usually evokes some form of ‘magical wand’ to carry out the squaring operation, yet no one can find a quantum rule spelling out how some sort of physical agent could ever appear.
“recognizing this limitation, cramer asked: how does this squaring ocur? he notied that this operation is a little different from just multiplying the wave by itself. to compute the probability of the even, the wave must actually be multiplied by another wave that is nevertheless nearly the same in form and content as the original wave. this other possibility-wave, for mathematical reasons, is called the complex-conjugate wave, and it differs in a subtle way from the original possibility-wave.” p152-3
“even though quantum physics is quite rigorous, nowhere in it is there any law explaining what occurs physically when a quantum wave is multiplied by its complex-conjugate. nowhere is the complex-conjugate wave given any physical significance, except for a funny little quirk: the complex-conjugate wave happens to be a solution to the same equations of quantum physics solved by the original possibility-wave, provided that in writing those equations you let time run backward instead of forward!…if the quantum wave is a real wave, then the conjugate wave is also a real physical wave, but with a twist in time.” p153
“the conjugate possibility-wave travels in the opposite spatial direction as it goes back through time, eventually reaching the original possibility-wave’s origin. we imagine that at every point along its way it meets up with the original wave coming forward in time. the two then combine in space. in physics, the conjugate wave is said to ‘modulate’ the original wave. ..
“when the future-generated conjugate wave propagates back through time to the origin of the quantum wave itself, it meets the original quantum wave. then in space and tiem the two waves multiply, and the result is the creation of the probablity-curve for the event occurring in space and time.” p155
“[john g.] cramer calls the original wave an ‘offer’ wave, the conjugate wave an ‘echo’ wave, and the multiplication of the two a ‘transaction.’ a transaction occurs – involving an offer and an echo – much like that between a computer and a peripheral device…in these examples, an offer wave is sent to a receiver. the receiver accepts the offer and sends confirmation back along the same line…
“every observation is both the start of a wave propagating toward the future in search of a receiver-event and itself the receiver of a wave that propagated towards it from some past observation-event. in other words, every observation – every act of conscious awareness – sends out both a wave toward the future and a wave toward the past. both the beginning of the wave and the end appear in our minds – our future mind, our present mind, and our past mind. two events in normal, or serial, time are then said to be significantly connected, that is, meaningfully associated, with respect to each other, provided that the transaction between them conserves the necessary physical constants and satisfies the necessary boundary conditions.
“but an interesting problem remains: which future even sends back the echo wave? cramer believes that only one future does this – the one producing the echo that happens to have the best chance of forming a successful transaction with the present.” p156
“it seems that cramer’s ideas must be interpreted in light of the parallel universes theory. all futures return the message, not just the best-chance future. there are more futures ‘listening’ to the broadcast than just the one with the most sensitive and powerful receiver. in other worlds, each parallel world contains a single future event that connects with the present even through the modulation effect. indeed, this is how the parallel worlds become separate from each other – once a modulation takes place, the parallel worlds split off and no longer interfere with each other.
“what about time? if both the possibility-wave and the complex-conjugate wave are real, time must not be like a one-way river after all. events that have passed must still be around. events that will be must exist like new scenes around blind corners on the roads of life. and if both the future and the past exist, then, quantum physics implies, devices must be feasible that can enable us to tune in on the future and resonate with the past.
“these devices seem to be our own brains, with our minds the controlling factors. when we remember a past event, we are not digging through anything like a file or computer memory bank. rather, following quantum rules, we are constructing a past based on the multiplication of two clashing time-order streams of possibility-waves. taken literally, this means that the past stream (the one flowing from past to present) must originate in the past the same way that the present steam (the one flowing from present to past) originates in the present. past and present, then, somehow exist side-by-side.
“it follows that the future, too, exists side-by-side with the present and that at this moment we are sending possibility-waves in that direction. moreover, someone called ‘me’ in the future is also sending back through time conjugate possibility-waves, which will clash with the waves being generated now.
“if these streams ‘match,’ in the sense that the modulation produces a combined wave of some strength, and if there is a ‘resonance,’ meaning that the future and the present events are meaningful for me, then a real future is created from my present point of view and a real memory of sequences is created in the future. if the streams do not match – meaning that the combined wave is weak and there is no resonance – then the connection of that future and that present will be less meaningful. meaningful here refers to the probability-curve. the implied law of time travel is: the greater the probability, the more meaningful the transaction and the greater the chance of it occurring.
“the closer in time the sources of these waves are, the more likely it is that the two counter-time possibility-wave streams will produce a strong probability with a good chance of becoming real. quite possibly, visionaries are those who successfully marry streams coming from time-distant sources, and people unable to cope with life are those who lack the ability for even the shortest time distances.
“for most of us, though we might not be aware of it, time travel toward both the very near future and the immediate past already occurs in our minds. we saw the evidence for this as presented by ben libet and his associates, in chapter 4. libet showed that we become aware of a bodily sensation, such as a sound that just happened, by referring back in time from a later moment of a brain signal arrival to the earlier moment of the bodily sensation. in other words, we seem to be aware of events before our brain registers them.
“think for a moment of the past, present, and future existing side-by-side. if we were able totally to ‘marry’ corresponding times in each and every moment of our time-bound existences, there would indeed be no sense of time for us. we would all realize the timeless state that many spiritual traditions take to be our true and basic state of being. instead, we find ourselves entering into one or the other parallel universe and thus failing to discriminate between the many past- and future-sending stations and all of the parallel universes attempting to communicate with us. thus we live time-bound lives disconnected to some extent from other possible pasts and futures.” p156-8
“those we call visionaries may well be those who are able to tune out everyday life and tune in to these other worlds.” p159
“reality as we perceive it, according to quantum physics, depends on the subtle relationship between a possibility-wave and a probability-curve. possibility-waves determine when and with what likelihood events occur. they don’t do so directly, however, for they are submerged under the reality we perceive. yet they are capable of both reinforcing and canceling each other, thereby affecting what we perceive by ‘shaving the odds’. these odds show up as probability-curves, which determine the probabilities of the events in question. probability-curves arise when two related possibility-waves multiply each other. we can envision one of the waves as moving forward in time between two events happening at different times, ad the other as moving backward through time between the same two events. through this process, time itself emerges, as do our immediate experiences. the causal relationships we see between events themselves arise from this deeper order where the possibility-waves reside.” p159
every skill we perform – even the ability to sit in a chair or read a book – implies a probability-curve in our consciousness whose effect is being expressed through time , even if we have forgotten all about working with that curve or never even knew such a curve existed..
“when we no longer have to pay attention to the probability-curve involved in any skill, we label that skill a habit. even thought habits appear to be unconscious, they actually are not. we can become aware of them at any time – in many cases, simply by willing our minds to do so. although habits are difficult to change, we all know they can be changed if we bring them into our immediate awareness. in fact, that is the practice of mind yoga and of yoga in general.
“in essence, mind yoga is at first the practice of bringing habits to consciousness. this practice lays the groundwork for the kind of time travel i discussed in chapter 7, based on what we have learned from the sphere of many radii. the time traveler sitting in the sphere travels in time as the sphere shifts his possibility-wave. mind yoga enables you to make similar shifts in your possibility-wave. hence we need to deal with the possibility-waves that underlie our habitual behavior and see how they get changed into probability-curves. the possibility-waves, however, are not available to us in spacetime. we must deal with them in the subtler level of reality that i call sub-spac4etime and realize that our conscious experiences in fact arise from this realm. the question is, how to we access sub-spacetime?” p165-6
“crucial throughout your developmen was your instinctive concern with survival – your ability to move your body and care for and protect it. hence you have come to believe you have no choice in the matter: you are what your body tells you it is through the feedback loops in the nervous system.
“the spiritual traditions of the world tell us that we are more than merely what our bodies tell us we are. and many of us – mystics and nonmystics alike – may catch glimpses of what they’re talking about from time to time. but these insights also tend to be explained in physical terms. the conviction that material objects are more real is so convincing that it becomes our default assumption. it takes a lot of teaching and practice – a steady practice of mind yoga – to convince us otherwise.
“this habitual notion – that the physical world is more real – continues to make its presence felt in science, even though quantum physics tells us repeatedly that the basis of this notion is flawed. that basis is the conviction that the world we experience is the world of classical, newtonian physics, and it is fixed in our minds through powerful logic and buttressed with mathematical argument. if this view of things were true, it would mean that consciousness must arise out of the interactions of matierial objects. but in none of our neurological or biological studies of these interactions do we see anything like consciousness emerge.
“it is important to note that when we observe consciousness in others, we are objectifying it, seeing it in terms of what our sense organs tell us. but when we observe consciousness within ourselves, this process of objectification totally, and necessarily, fails. this faulty assumption is first of all the belief, based on our observations, that others we see around us are physical beings who ‘have’ consciousness; and secondly, that the connection between material processes and the consciousness we think we’re seeing applies to our own inner experiences in the same way. hence we believe that, whatever mind is, it has grown out of matter in some causal manner.
“let me go through the evidence for believing that mind arises out of matter. it its strongly based on the theory of evolution.
“we see that intelligent entities like animals and people exhibit varying degrees of complexity. we appear to be more complex than single-celled animals, for example, so we take it for granted that our sophisticated minds arose from this complexity. in brief, amoebae don’t think because they are too simple; we thing because we are sufficiently complex.
“…we see evidence that through random events affecting genetic material of simple animals exposed to environmental changes over many life spans, these life forms adapt. they learn to make changes that fit the changes occurring in their environment…
“we understand survival in terms of the law of cause and effect. how a creature adapts itself depends on cuases affecting its life span handed down to it from its ancestors…
“these observations – and i am sure more could be added – would certainly be true, provided the ground on which they are based was solid itself. but even though these arguments are scientifically based, they still rely on the commonsense view that space, time, and matter are fundamental. hence, anything that doesn’t fit into a matrix built up from these three elements, must not and cannot be real or have any effect on reality. but quantum physics tells us relentlessly that there is something prior to space, time, an matter. i call it a sub-spacetime. others have called it the imaginal realm, and in present quantum theory it is posited to be an infinitely dimensional space. quantum processes are vital in this realm, and what we call consciousness appears to play a fundamental role at the level of even the most primary matter, consisting of atoms and subatomic particles. with the presence of consciousness at that level and with principles of quantum physics factored in, modern science necessarily changes the belief expressed above that consciousness or mind arose from matter, as the theory of evolution would have it.” p168-9
“you can think of the sub-spacetime realm as the great unconscious mind of god or the fundamental ground upon which reality appearing as mind and matter emerge. the way in which this all takes place can be grasped through the roles played by possibility-waves and their transformation into probability-curves.
“possibility-waves appear to exist purely within the sub-spacetime realm. probability-curves form our ‘out there’ consciousness; they mark time and bind the mind to the present. in contrast, possibility-waves form our ‘in here’ consciousness, free the mind from the present, and allow the mind to be free of time.” p169-70
“it seems to be the way mind enters into the sub-spacetime realm, indeed ‘plays’ within it and emerges from it with the whole material universe in tow.
“the mind has the facility to form the ‘out there’ material world of space and time. i am referring here to the operation of ‘squaring’ – the multiplying of one possibility-wave by its complex conjugate possibility-wave. by this squaring mechanism, objective realities (probability-curves) are created ‘out there’ from the possibility-waves undulating within the subjective-unconscious-imaginal sub-spacetime ‘in-here’ realm. in the process of squaring and then dealing with probability-curves, the mind moves from the purely imaginal realm into awareness of the physical realm.
“how does the mind construct reality? i speculate that it is by accessing the squaring operation, which i believe is what yoga and other mental disciplines show us how to do. there are two processes involved in the squaring operation. ‘squaring,’ which is an act bringing the mind to a focus, and ‘unsquaring,’ which allows the mind to defocus of ‘let go’ of whatever it has been focused on.
“how do these mind actions compare to yoga teaching? teachers of yoga tell me that the purpose of poses (asanas) in yoga is to bring awareness of body to mind. the way in which this awareness occurs takes place in steps that often involve holding a pose for a period of time and then ‘breathing into it’ and adjusting the pose accordingly. mind yoga is really no different; the language has just changed to take into account what we know about the sub-spacetime realm and its relation to the physical spacetime world. when the mind ‘squares’ a possibility-wave, awareness arises or manifests as something physical; an objective comes into focus. in yogic terms, this could be the awareness of the body in a pose or the awareness that something new is emerging into thought or feeling. so ‘squaring’ is the same as entering into a pose in yoga. when the ‘breathing into it’ takes place, the pose is adjusted. this is the same as ‘letting go’ or the process of ‘unsquaring,’ which changes the next ‘squaring’ operation by making it either more or less probable of success. letting go introduces indeterminacy into the next outcome. it means that the next act of focusing (squaring) will not be as predictable as the focusing act prior to it apparently was. in this way we are able to make adjustments, just as the yoga teacher adjusts your pose in a class. if you held onto the pose, you wouldn’t be able to change.
“we could say that our potential ability to ‘square things up,’ meaning address the way we handle our likes and dislikes and manage our thoughts and feelings ‘in here,’ lies in being able to align our thinking either with the past or with the future. practices like meditation and yoga offer us the prospect of adjusting the dynamics involved in the squaring and unsquaring operations, opening the door to new possibilities ‘out there,’ and, most important to our time travel discussion, being able to move a point of view either backward or forward in time. at first the idea of being able to adjust the squaring operation may sound as strange as the concept of the squaring operation itself. it turns out, however, that the squaring and, with it, the possibility of alteration through unsquaring fall within your mental abilities – your field of consciousness. indeed, if they didn’t you wouldn’t be able to make up your mind or change it. for squaring and unsquaring are what we do when we exercise the mind to form a point of view or open the mind to learn something new.
“you can think of a point of view in any given moment as a focal point – a site where a possibility-wave from the past or the future meets and mixes with a possibility-wave issuing from the present moment, thus squaring and producing a probability-curve. we saw with the bell-shaped curve that many individual events go into constructing a single skill of ours such that it becomes a habit. the same applies to our construction of reality. any single focal point, or moment of reality, may be more or less precise…the more focused moments are when we perceive reality as objective, ‘out there.’ the more unfocused or blurry moments are moments of subjective perception, directed ‘in here’ – or else directed ‘out there’ but with less insistence that the world presents itself to us as we expect it.
“focused and unfocused sites occur in a sequential pattern. our conscious experience consists of a sequence of these focal points, sites of more specific focus separated by sites of unfocused possibilities.
“continuing with my speculative point of view, i suggest that this sequence of focused and unfocused sites is what offers us the perception of time. the sequence provides us with a temporal sense – the ability to objectify our experiences throught the measure of time, as well as our own self-awareness and memory. in this sense, time and consciousness are actually different labels for one and the same thing – the process by which we become attached to material existence. having recognized what causes our attachment to the everyday world of matter and causality, we can detach ourselves from its confines – that is, we can defeat time.” p170-2
“the object appears blurry because it has no actual fixed position. that is, in fact, the whole point of quantum physics – to deal with the blurs and find some way to take them into account. one way is simply to deny that the object exists at all until the blur becomes focused. this was the bohr interpretation discussed earlier. another way is to think of the blur as if it were an overlap of possible ‘real’ objects – each object existing in a separate parallel universe – just as if one had each possible object appearing as a picture on a transparency and overlaid them above a light source. this was the parallel-universes interpretation discussed earlier. the greater the blur area, the greater is the number of parallel universes involved. these potential parallel universes exist in sub-spacetime. physicist amit goswami refers to this sub-spacetime array of cellophane universes as a potentia or ideaistic reality that resides beyond spacetime. physicist roger penrose wrote extensively about this idealistic reality as a third world of existence, akin to plato’s world of ideals. penrose takes the existence of this world quite seriously and believes that consciousness works in a nonalgorithmic manner in its actions of squaring. as we have seen, i take it that the squaring arises from the mechanism suggested by cramer’s transactional interpretation.
“let’s see if we can discover how objeCts manifest in spacetime from beyond spacetime, using this picture as our guide. we can imagine a sequence of blurry and focused photos as shown in fig. 9.2 [from l-r and bottom-top, fuzzy, more fuzzy, focal point, little fuzzy, more fuzzy, focal point. underneath a diagonal line l-r labeled temporal order. caption reads focal points of consciousness mark time]. we also note that the sequence can be put into an order. which ‘photo’ should be first and which second? in other words, how should we sort the sequence?
“to deal with the sorting problem, think about what it would mean if no focal points were to occur in the whole universe. if we could step back from it and watch, without squaring, all possibility-waves, we would see the universe evolve by getting more and more blurry. in fact, all that would exist would be a growing blur of uncertainty with nothing really ever happening and no one really ever witnessing anything occurring. if such a thing were to occur in the universe around us, it would become more and more chaotic and entropy would reign supreme.
“but nothing like that occurs because mind enters into the growing disorder and plays a role by bringing in a focal point of view – an ability to choose – which it does through the act of squaring. however, in so doing, although an orderly world of cause and effect arises, a quality of life begins to fade. for with greater certainty, there also comes less joy, less spontaneity, and certainly little room for mystery and surprise. the dance of life appears to be a dance involving focusing and unfocusing, squaring and unsquaring – letting go of – possibility-waves, so that mastery of life and the occurrence of novelty, joy, bliss , and sorrow can continue.
“taking into account the continual play of mind within the sub-spacetime arena, in fact, t here seems to be a natural order of relative focus and blurriness – certainty and uncertainty – to the way we construct the sequence of focus and unfocused sites we call reality.
“any sequence of three sub-spacetime sites containing a focal point is called a ‘triplet.’ in any such sequence, the normal and natural order is a larger blur prior to the focal point and a smaller blur following it (see figure 9.3). in other words, a focused site of consciousness is preceded by an unfocused site of greater possibility or uncertainty and is followed by an unofocused site that is nevertheless more certain than the previous unfocused site. said yet another way, the relative certainty of a focused site reduces the possibilities. we know little or nothing about the object – or a group of objects or a whole scene – before the focused perception, and we know more about it afterwards.
“i call this the quantum law of normal time order. the word normal is important. this is the order that nature, including the human mind, follows on its own. and in so doing, nature creates the objective time order we have grown accustomed to.
“normally, in relation to the focal point, the precedent blur appears larger than the posterior blur. but it is also possible for both blurs to be the same size or for the precedent blur to be smaller than the posterior blur. each sequence of three points – each triplet – depicts a different order, with the focal point always in the middle of the blurs. if the precedent blur is larger than the posterior blur – the ‘normal’ situation – the sequence represents some gain of control over and knowledge about the object in question. if the precedent blur is the same size as the posterior blur – the ‘balanced’ situation – the sequence represents some habitual behavior and a degree of control over the object. if the precedent blur is smaller than the posterior blur – the ‘reversed’ situation – the sequence represents some loss of control over and knowledge of the object.
“you can think of the focal points as places in spacetime where objective awareness occurs and the more blurred sites as places where objective awareness diminishes but subjective awareness persists. squaring, which changes a possibility-wave into a probability-curve, corresponds to the process that produces a focused point, or ‘sudden awareness,’ while unsquaring produces a blurred site, that is, ‘unawareness’ or unconsciousness. that is to say, blurring represents a fuzziness in the sense of reality or the content of the perception.
“before squaring, multiple possibilities exist in sub-spacetime. after squaring, the number of possibilities is less. in other words, even though you might not know where the object is, it has now become tangible. although the object is in focus in sub-spacetime, its actual position in the objective realm of spacetime still remains undetermined. you can think of it as having a real existence somewhere at sometime. in other words, it counts as an objective choice that is present, even t hough you may not actually observe that choice. it exists in the same sense that different choices exist as possible outcomes. this means it has entered what i’ll call objective consciousness, even though you may not yet experience that knowledge.” p174-6
“mind yoga consists of controlling sequences of focal points and blurs, in other words, of controlling triplets.” p177
“[fig 9.4, alternating blurs and points rising from lr left, connected by arrows. blurs gradually get smaller toward uppr rt. diagonal line l-r says time order emerging. captions – control of an emerging time order and creating a habit] in figure 9.4, we see a series of triple sequences arranged according to a diminishing of the blurs until a triplet arises where the posterior and precedent blurs are approximately the same size. this sequencing represents a growing control over the object and marks habitual behavior; that is, the degree of uncertainty both before and after the actual perception of reality is minimized and hardly changes. when control is established, temporal order or causality emerges. we gain an understanding of the process and the ability to control and predict its behavior. in other words, the sequence becomes a habit wherein the probable consequences are narrowed, as indicated by the narrowing of the blurs and the emergence of a greater number of focal points. in time, the unfocused past becomes entirely unavailable and only the focused control remains as past reality. what we believe to be the past, whether pleasant or not, appears to us as events over which we had some control. even though we may have had a lot less control over the actual events, the fact that we remember them itself gives us a certain degree of control over them.
“the natural course of possibility-waves, without the intervention of consciousness to create a focused point, is to go from a more- to a less-focused pattern. that is why our perception of reality tends to blur and spread out after a focused moment. we can use this natural process to advantage. in figure 9.5 we see a ‘letting go’ process wherein the object appears to be going in reverse of the picture shown in figure 9/4 [difference is diagonal line now runs r-l and says time order going backward, and caption says time reversal, letting go of the past]. this corresponds to letting go of any anticipation or control and also of any clear memory of the past, which is the key to many meditation practices and most particularly to yoga. when we let go, we ‘unfocus’ or free up any picture we had of where, when, and how an object exists. we let go of expectations. once an object is ‘freed,’ moreover, the possibilities associated with it increase at any particular location in spacetime. the unfocused object ‘spreads out,’ meaning that we are no longer looking for possible positions th object may have in the future, and no attempt is made to square again the possibility-wave for any of these possible positions. the spreading of a freed object continues and in general would continue to fill the entire universe if no further squaring ever took place. in psychological terms, this corresponds to forgiving ourself or another, giving up expectations, and even facing the moment of death.
“these two abilities, focusing and letting go, constitute the basic binary activity of conscious life. through focus we learn to control or master the skills we need to cope, and through unfocusing we learn to relax and let the world in without judgment. the progression created by successive focal points of concentration and fuzziness – ‘crunch’ and ‘relax’ – establishes a time order, which is the basis for the history of the individual.
from your birth until your death, you will believe, and the world around you will most likely insist, that you have lived your life along a time line pointing to ever-increasing years and old age. but as we have learned, that line has several loops in it, allowing you through the processes of squaring and unsquaring to move forward or backward in time while the remaining world moves on in agreed temporal order. becoming a time traveler through mind yoga means learning how and when to focus and unfocus your mind. traveling forward in time means following the natural order shown in figure 9.4, while traveling backward means reversing that order, as shown in figure 9.5.
“it is interesting to compare the evolving time order presented here and its reversal with the thermodynamic arrow of time introduced in chapter 4. there we saw that, contrary to what i am proposing here, the requirement of energy losses due to friction inherent in any machine’s operation tends to imply that the direction of time is associated with these losses in available energy to do work. in today’s technology, we look at this as the law of increasing entropy and see it as a measure of these energy losses. we tend to believe that entropy increases as time goes on. hence the more chaotic it becomes the later it becomes.
“i explained that quantum physics indicates that without observers, possibility-waves tend to spread out emulating this law of entropy. but no time would appear in such a universe. possibilities would just go on increasing without end. but, and this is crucial, the world involving ourselves appears to reverse that law. when such a reversal arises, we usually give arguments based on energy to account for the reversal, in the same sense that a refrigerator reverses the law of entropy by pumping heat from a cold body to a warmer body simply because we add energy to it. consciousness acts in the universe like the energy added to a refrigerator – it reverses the law of entropy. and because it is so prevalent, i take this to be the natural temporal law of the universe including mind, whereas thermodynamics, physics, and science in general omit the actions of mind in their calculations.
“in summary, when an unsquaring operation occurs, a letting go or some kind of release takes place, and for the system time goes backward. for example, you experienced this state all the time as a baby, when you were constantly opening your mind to learn something new in order to understand your environment and grow up. the letting go that takes place in mind yoga is akin to returning to this childlike state. instead of maximizing entropy, which implies decrepitude, it is a simpler, more probable, and thereby more creative state, and while in it, time travel becomes possible.” p178-81
“the concepts of time and mind are reconcilable – and can, in fact, have the same meaning.
“this realization comes from recognizing that the mind works by a process of defocusing and focusing, which means it can learn how to let go of memories (allowing them to return to the great blur of possibility), and it can learn how to focus in on possibilities (allowing a specific event to come into being). this process is also the practice of mind yoga. while that much may seem sensible, in chapter 9 i added a new twist by suggesting that this process is actually what brings time about. hence, the relation between mind and time takes on a whole new meaning.
“through the practice of focusing and defocusing, although we may not realize it in our everyday lives, time is actually being created, and this creation makes time travel a necessary part of the way that mind functions and the way time works…the mind would travel forward in time following the natural sequence shown in figure 9.4 and travel backward following the reverse sequence shown in figure 9.5. every day of or mental life, we follow both directions as we go about doing our tasks. when we let go of old habits, we move backward in time; and when we follow habitual behavior, we move forward. of course, this process refers to our subjective time-sense, which may run counter to or in the same direction as objective time.
“not only does our ‘in here’ time direction change in the focusing and defocusing processes, but the rate the process ensues can also change. that is, we can move forward or backward through time either faster or slower than the rate at which objective time progresses. i discuss this rate change in more detail later. it is my speculation that, through our realization of the different way time functions ‘in here,’ we actually came to the discovery and agreement among our fellows needed to create objective time. evolutionarily, we needed objective time because time travel was confusing. human beings created objective time to assist in their communal survival.” p183-4
“time travel as envisioned through the mind, though, is a very different thing [as constructing an actual time machine using a sphere of many radii], and bringing it into the discussion immediately plunges us into the areas of psychology and spirituality. the mind is not objectifiable; hence, experiments dealing with it are ultimately indirect – including experimentation on human and animal behavior and its possible modification through physical means or stimuli of some kind. using the mind for time travel is not only indirect, it is also highly subjective. as such, it becomes part of spiritual discipline as much as of psychology.
“i briefly explained in chapter 1 that time travel using the mind gives the traveler a whole new vista of possible exploration, but it also requires a sacrifice. many of us feel the need to carry lots of baggage when we travel any distance; however, to time travel we must leave some seemingly very important luggage behind. that baggage, which is our egos and our sense of individuality, may be something we would rather not and, indeed, may not even be able to leave. it is this luggage that prevents the time traveler’s access to the future and the past. we have spent our lives developing our sense of who and what we believe we are. the ego appears to us as robust and indispensable, yet ancient spiritual teaching tells us that it is only an illusion through which each of us conceives of ourselves as a singular entity, or ‘i.'” p184-5
“possibly our notions about the mind have been put in the wrong categories to begin with. because the mind cannot be objectified, objective – psychological or behavioristic – ways of thinking about it will not and cannot pertain. but a new, subjective model of the mind could change the way we think scientifically and influence research in a science of mind.” p186
“the key to our grasp of the true message of spirituality, as ell as of the means to time travel, is our ability to become aware of that extra baggage we all carry called the ego – or our normal, everyday state of waking consciousness in which we think of ourselves as ‘i.’ but what is the ego, really? i like to thin k of it as a closed surface in the imaginal realm of the mind. any closed surface will do. you could imagine a spherical bubble, for example. for this discussion, think of a six-sided cubical room. each of its four square walls and the ceiling and floor has its inner surface coated with a mirror. hence, all light within the cubical room reflects inward to the cube’s center. the room is the ego. it thus acts by protecting whoever sits inside of it from the ‘out there,’ and, because of the mirrors, it also acts as a focusing device. in so doing, the ego provides a kind of theater in the mind that keeps us entertained by t his continuing reflected lightshow. the mirrors aren’t quite perfect, so that light from ‘out there’ gets in and mixes with the internal reflections. hence, we are able to compare the information from ‘out there’ with the lightshow going on ‘in here.’
“this lightshow holds our minds in our bodies in much the same way as we become glued to our seats when we are captivated by a good movie. although we are only witnesses to life’s passage, we experience that passage as participants. we see ourselves, not as images on a screen, but as real selves each inside of his or her own private world – our bodies.
“why does this happen? it seems to me that god requires a great number of focal centers in order to awaken fro the illusory trap of material existence. each center appears as a single self with the ego providing a surface of surrounding ‘mirrors’ producing the focusing, as i discussed above and in chapter 9. in other words, god has become trapped in spacetime, fully aware that he or show would become so trapped and willing to have it happen. this is the great sacrifice talked about in ancient teaching. in order to make a physical world that would remain robust, god had to become a part of it.
“what i have discovered through the theories of quantum physics, parallel universes, the special theory of relativity, and the general theory of relativity has allowed me to understand how god becomes so self-trapped. in order to change possibilities of life into actualities, the mind of god must anchor itself in specetime and appear as individual minds within bodies. put simply, by so doing, god pins her or his mind in time and appears as conscious bodies in space.
“the world of matter may be an illusion, no doubt, according to many spiritual beliefs. but it certainly seems real to all of us who have apparently not remembered this sacrifice of god. as such, the illusion appears as the ongoing ‘movie’ that connects objective time and subjective mind. this entrapment of the mind of god not only stabilizes the universe (without mind in the universe nothing material would ever appear, according to quantum physics), but it also enables mind to experience itself as ‘other’ beings. it provides a common awareness of the physical world, and it gives us a sense of objective time and space. time becomes what we agree it is through common experiences.
“let me now look at how time travel is possible through surrender of the ego: ego and time-boundedness are connected. what we think we are, and what we truly are, are not the same things. what we think we are is greatly influenced by the egoistic reflections of the mind. what we are remains as the mind of god. the ego forms as a boundary separating the ‘out there’ from the ‘in here.’ it does so as an evolutionary attempt to protect life. as life evolves, oder schemes of protection are no longer needed (although ti is not entirely clear which schemes should be dropped) and, by changing our self-imposed boundaries, we can excape from the spacetime matrix that binds the mind.
“time is intimately related to mind and thought and, as we saw in chapters 8 and 9, to possibility and probability; hence, time is as real as thought. however, we all have access to that timeless, spaceless realm where time itself is created. time is a projection of mind, and by changing our ego structures – the way we think about our roles as individuals in the world – we can defeat our ego-conditioning and become aware of our ability to time travel.
“this escape from ego-boundedness and consequent possibility of time travel provides great and singular benefits. identified with our bodies, which are limited in space and time, we sentient beings have lost the experience (if it can be called that) of residing in timeless, spaceless eternity (now being investigated by physicists studying superstring theory and quantum physics, although they may not think of it in this manner). time travel frees us from such limitations. this freedom typically occurs when we practice any spiritual discipline that alters the relation between body and mind, especially body yoga and mind yoga. it allows us to move through time and to improve our quality of life by revisiting past errors and learning to forgive ourselves and others. it gives a fresh, life-affirming quality to everyday existence. perhaps (and maybe most important for some), it teaches us to slow our body’s aging processes.” p188-90
“different cultures have different time concepts and hence view time differently. both native americans and australian aboriginal people view time as a duality – a linear time that you and i are familiar with, plus a circular or sacred time. with the discovery of curved time in the general theory of relativity, we may be seeing reconciliation between the two views. curved time comes about through gravity – the force that holds the earth together and all objects together. we can think of gravity, as well as matter and energy, as a sacred part of nature. i see this as a strong indication that physics and spirituality are indeed realizing the same truth.
“ancient spiritual wisdom also suggests it is possible t make time speed up or slow down by using the mind. these interesting possibilities can be considered from the views both of physics and of ancient wisdom. in chapter 8, we discussed the idea of using the mind to time travel in connection with the focusing and defocusing of mind. slowing down occurs when slow focusing is initiated, while speeding up occurs when rapid focusing takes place.
“if you look again at figures 9.2 through 9.5, you will see how i depicted, through the use of blurs and focal points, the idea that any sequence represents either the growing control or the loss of control of an object. habitual behavior occurs when the degree of uncertainty, both before and after an actual perception of reality, is minimized and hardly changes. in such a state, a person gains control over some aspect of her life. that control was illustrated by the amount of blurriness shown in the figures.
“what i didn’t tell you there was that this theory as shown in these figures also illustrates the degrees of certainty one has concerning who is in control moreover, it points to ancient wisdom (as i think the deceased spiritual teacher krishnamurti used to mention years ago) suggesting that the observer and the observed are one. the blurred pictures show the spread of ego over different possible universes, as well as the uncertainty of position of an object in space. the greater the blur, the less the egoistic control. in other words, blurring also represents surrendering the ego. you can think of each little sphere in any blur of spheres as a separate ego in a parallel universe. the more parallel universes present, the greater the blur and the less presence of ego in any single universe.
“hence, defocusing actually meaas entering parallel universes, but with less grasp or control in any one universe. focusing, on the other hand, not only provides certainty, it also provides a stable ego able to ascertain that certainty in a universe. uncertainty not only indicates unknowing of a position of an object in spacetime, it also indicates a letting go of the ego by spreading it out over parallel universes. the greater the number of parallel universes, the greater the uncertainty, according the quantum physics, and the lesser the ability for an ego to gain control.
“although it may seem difficult to believe, i time travel everyday. i do so by simply gaining or surrendering control of my ego in holding onto or letting go of fixed ideas i have about myself and others. letting go of my ego allows me to defocus and to move backward in time. gaining control of my ego allows me to go forward in time. in this way, we can practice and naturally realize time travel in our everyday lives. it all depends on the intention of the observer.
“let me give you some examples. first, we need to emphasize that time is not just ‘out there,’ even though we observe objective processes as if they occur ‘in time/out there.’ remember, time is created by the mind. as i mentioned at the start of this chapter, so are rate changes in its flow. the intervals of time we objectively mark as actual experiences appear as punctuations of consciousness. when many such punctuation (focal ) points occur, we count them and mark them as ‘time’s passing.’ in this manner, we acquire a ‘sense of time.’ if, say, a hundred such focal points occur that through habit we believe take a hundred seconds of objective time, we would afterward think that the same amount of time has passed, regardless of how much the clock-on-the-wall time has advanced.
“for example, if i experience a hundred ‘second-units’ in one objective second, as when i experience myself moving consciously and rapidly (as athletes typically experience in such sports as downhill skiing), time around me seems to stand still. in this case, i am experiencing a tightening of my ego – perhaps greater concern for my safety – which speeds time up. people w ho suffer automobile accidents often have this experience of ‘time-speeding.’ notice that i refer here to the sensation i have of speeding, not to the objective amount of clock-on-the-wall time, which for me has slowed down. people who have ‘out-of-body’ (oob) experiences also feel a tightening of the ego’s hold on the mind. as a result, they have the sensation of experiencing many subjective events while little objective time has actually passed. i realize that this statement may seem counter to what you may have thought takes place in an oob experience; i.e., that in such a state, one is surrendering the ego. actually, however, the very opposite occurs, in which the centers of focus shift from the whole body to the brain. hence, the ego contracts even more, an the information received is even more illusory than in a normal state of consciousness.
“on the other hand, when i experience a hundred ‘second units’ in slow meditation, time around me seems to speed up, and i experience ‘time-slowing’ relative to the clock on the wall. i also experience time-slowing – which means i age less rapidly, even though the clock says i have aged normally – when i am creative and writing, as i am accustomed to do every day. typically, i may engage in writing for a period of hours that actually appears to me to take only minutes. artists often experience this ‘time-slowing’ when engaged in creative activity. here a surrendering of the ego occurs, and i seem to lose any sense of who it is that is doing the creating. people who act as channels know very well what this experience is all about. in a very real sense, to me creative activity not only takes me out of my ego, it allows my access to parallel universes where i can pick up lots of new information.
“hence, i am able to time travel at different rates into the future and into parallel universes depending on the degree of loosening or tightening of my ego.
“but what about going back in time? according to quantum-physics principles, what we think of as the ‘real’ past is also alterable and not fixed. this is certainly one of the strangest ideas to come out of quantum physics, yet we know from the uncertainty principle that the past cannot be absolutely pinned down and that consequently, one can change it by remembering it differently…
“consequently, in certain experiments it is possible actually to change our reconstruction of past sequences of events by changes we make in the present or future observations. such changes not only alter our memories, they also alter what we can legitimately reconstruct as the history of the events leading up to the present or future change. does the ‘real’ history change?while i may say it does according to my theory presented here, and others may say it doesn’t because of their beliefs, how could we prove it either way?” p190-194
“consider the reexamination of your own thoughts. in accordance with the uncertainty principle, such an examination can alter your past recollection and the past as well. (of course, what we mean by the past depends on more than one person’s point of view.) what seems clear from this conjecture is that not only can a change in the future or the present alter your memory of the past, it can also alter your own participation in that newly remembered past. that’s what physics tells me can happen, at least, in spite of its seeming science-fiction-like appearance.
“ber with me a moment longer. remember that unfocusing appears as a loosening of the ego’s hold in the universe. consequently, in the parallel-universes way of thinking, this relaxation allows the mind access to other universes where different pasts could have taken place. as we may imagine, our memories play a much larger role in traveling back in time to parallel universes than they do in traveling forward to future ones. time travel to past parallel universes may afford us the opportunity to alter former unfavorable situations in the direction of something more desirable for all those we encounter. to be sure, if they haven’t made the trip with us, they will not change in spite of our efforts. but what we wish for others we seen in the past will alter our memories of them, and certainly we will change.
“however, i am saying more than would the theory of cognitive therapy, which posits that, while we cannot change the past, we can change our interpretation of it and thus its effect on us. if my speculation about time travel to parallel universes is correct, we can alter not only our memories of the past but even our participation in it as we reconnect a new past parallel universe with our present universe.” p194-5
“does this mean that we can all simply change t he past by wishing it to be so? not at all. what happened in the above story would indeed be a shift in time between parallel universes. if it occurred, we would say we became confused and had a memory lapse. according to quantum physics, such a shift is possible. what’s more, the history that develops in a shift from one universe to another will be logically consistent, and we will experience it to be the only universe there is.
“certainly, messing around in the past seems to be something we should avoid if we don’t know what the consequences are likely to be. however, if events in our present can alter history, then the past that you remember is continually changing, whether or not we actually realize it. the past as recorded in history books, for example, will always be subject to the writer’s recall, imagination, and rationalization. what is written as history is not the ‘real’ past, which even in the memories of those that experienced it is subject to change.” p196
“we may say that the historian has simply reinterpreted history, but that the ‘real’ history, which may be unknown, has not changed. although that statement certainly makes common sense, it is ultimately unprovable because, according to quantum physics, there is no such thing as the ‘real’ history: the past cannot be pinned down, even though we commonly refer to it as if it was.
“in fact, different versions of the past may be the cause of many troubles in our world today. can you think of any current world conflict that hasn’t resulted because of diverse accountings of the participants’ ‘common’ past? i cannot. perhaps the realization that the past will always be changeable, and that even our memory of it can change, will give us a greater ability to be tolerant of other views.
“i know it is nearly unthinkable, and perhaps seems even ridiculous, to entertain such notions, but the past is not fixed in spite of our present memories. each time a switch takes place reconnecting a new past parallel universe with the present universe, history changes as we remember it, and we emerge in the new parallel universe with memories now consistent with it. certainly such shifts are indeed usually very tiny, but parallel universes are closer to us than we might imagine. the key to accepting this concept is in releasing our hold on the idea that there is only one past back there in time.
“thus, our own personal history of our growing-up years, our past friends, where we lived, and so on, appears quite fixed in our minds. if it were to change even slightly, though a shift to a parallel universe, the new memory would be just as fixed in our ‘newly’ made-up mind, and we would have no memory of the way it was. these ‘blind’ shifts would not be remembered at all. we may thus be holding at this very moment alternative memories of our parallel self, all the while thinking that we have held these memories all our life. indeed this is strange business, but quantum physics says it’s so.
“however, for big changes to be made in the past involving parallel universes, my research suggests that many people would be needed. it works like a hologram: the more area of the hologram being illumined, the stronger the ‘signal,’ and the greater and more real becomes the image. smaller changes – individual changes – can be accomplished individually or in a small group.
“for example, think of the common practice of gathering in worship. if (hopefully) egos are surrendered, each participant has the opportunity to use his or her mind to time travel. many people in worship tend to remember past transgressions. but is this actually time travel? for example, in the jewish religion, the day called yom kippur is a day of remembrance and forgiveness. if what i am proposing is accurate, during their practice in such a gathering the worshipers can travel back in time to their ancient roots. regardless, it would help the world if such a practice was more in the way of forgiving than simply of remembering, particularly if those holding that memory were continuing to hold a grudge. certainly, participants in worship find benefit in their practice if they do surrender their egos. if they forgive, they will change the world. and if i am correct, they will also have time traveled.
“on the other hand, iyengar hatha yoga practitioners tell me that body memory often works as a detriment to growth and change. your memories act as the chains felt by the prisoners of plato’s cave. you may be holding a particular posture incorrectly for long periods of time because your body holds a memory that prevents you from a fuller extension. using time-travel techniques – loosening the egoistic concerns (such as ‘i won’t do this because i will look foolish’ or ‘i’m afraid’) – could help you speed up the learning process just by changing your past beliefs and forgiving yourself. simply stop putting yourself down for past errors of judgment and realize that a particular memory may have served you well in your past but no longer needs to be a chain holding you there.
“in this light, a group that attempts to practice worship without really letting go of the ego will not time travel and as a consequence will not receive any benefit thereby, simply because no one in the group will have succeeded in the voyage. fear and unforgivingness only result in a replay of the old movie we cannot let go of.” p197-8
“the key ingredient here is realization of the sacred aspect of time travel: give up your ego, enter the sacred timeless realm, and forgive. such is the path to true freedom.
“as we become more aware of just what time travel really is, and we learn that the old model of linear time inevitably marching on no longer holds in our now post-einsteinian and post-quantum physics world, the question of how and why time travel improves our lives will become more and more evident. the crucial step is in understanding our own egos, why we have created them, and how we can control and let go of them. not learning how and when to tighten and loosen our egos has a price; it robs us from our happiness.” p199
“the longing for positive change or spiritual change is really a waking up from the grand illusion brought on by our belief in linear, ever-increasing time. from a timeless or spiritual base of understanding, nothing really changes. there is a flow without time’s presence, so that each of us realizes we aren’t really separate beings limited by space and time, but a one-being, continuous and eternal. this realization came to me from my understanding of the physics of our universe as much as it came from my own spiritual realization.
“we can all learn to reverse time, certainly for short intervals, by letting go of past fixations that tend to make us automatically predict the future. these ’cause/effect’ relations project the normal flow of time we tend to objectify and hold as the only way that time can go. i hasten to add that some past fixations, such as good motor-vehicle driving habits, should not be let go of! we need them to be able to predict the other driver’s behavior, for example. usually this keeps us safe. but some fixations we have learned through habitual behavior do not help us at all, and by letting them go we are actually turning our internal clocks backward. for example, if you have a bad habit that you continue to support, think of it as something that ages you unnecessarily. breaking that habit will not only stop unnecessary aging but will reverse your internal clock, making you younger.” p199-200
“time travel, according to mind yoga, temporarily relieves the mind of god from the activity of focusing and enables god to expand across time. thus time travel defines our relationship with god.
is reincarnation a viable idea in light of time traveling? if reincarnation means that each of us returns intact with the same ego, i think it is unlikely. my view posits that consciousness or mind itself is not unique to individual or even human bodies, but is universal and nonlocal. individual consciousness is a necessary distortion of the mind of god needed for creature survival in much the same way that we need our projection mechanisms in order to make decisions about the future, or even to see that an object is ‘out there.’ we know that mental projection distors reality or creates an illusion of it, yet we are still dependent on it for our survival. from the time-traveling perspective offered here, we see that ego surrender allows new possibilities to arise. what may seem surprising is that as far as physics is concerned we can reincarnate in the past as well as the future. in this light, consider that buddhists believe in a form of reincarnation different from individual consciousness survival. they tend to see reincarnation as a process, which propagates tendencies through time rather than actual personalities. from their vision of a timeless-deathless realm in which no one is born and no one ever dies, i suggest that reincarnatation in the past is just as likely as reincarnation in the future.
“we have seen that time travel is intimately tied to modern physics, and that temporal concepts of physics coincide with sacred vision. time travel involves a change in ego structure – meaning a change in an individual’s mind as it relates to spacetime. by loosening the ego’s boundaries, one experiences oneself at several times simultaneously. this is the natural arena of sub-spacetime – the world of the soul and of god. in ancient times, we might have called this ‘heaven.’
“realize that we are all participating in an awe-inspiring journey given to us by our temporarily forgetting who we really are – the mind of god. that concept may sound pretentious, but it has become and remains my faith.” p200-1
“i related the teachings of the bhagavad-gita to our western view of time and discussed the conflicts felt by arjuna when he is confronted with having to go into battle against loved ones. krishna tells arjuna that he is time and that from his point of view the battle is already over and the outcomes determined. krishna appears to arjuna in many forms, as if krishna was showing himself as a possibility-wave.
“krishna explains the reason we are caught in time. he, krishna, created desire, and we express this desire in terms of the physical realm and in so doing become captured by it. while desire for a material universe ultimately ‘creates’ the universe, the fundamental desire in individuals, whether they remember it or not, is the yearning to be krishna. so krishna gives every sentient form the ability to focus and defocus possibility-waves and thus the means for evolution, happiness, and sadness, which arise from the probability-curves we each generate in our attempts to master the physical world.
“let’s consider the nature of desire a little farther. the gita talks about action and introduces the idea of an ‘actionless’ action. the difference is subtle. normal action can do great good or evil and, since it is always accompanied by the ego-self, is concerned with the ‘fruits’ of the action. in this case, ‘fruit’ refers to the transformation from possibility-wave to probability-curve – a process that we saw depended on the pattern of collapses or focuses as i called them. on the other hand, actionless action works at the level of possibility-waves, and appears as selfless action when its consequences finally manifest. hence, actionless action has an effect over a greater time period, even though its immediate consequences may appear at local times and places.” p203-4
“indian philosophy regards the timeless realm as more real than the manifested realm confined by time and space and says the task of conscious beings is to discover that timelessness and give up any hold one has on the time-space-matter universe. it reassures us that in spite of our common experiences, needs for survival, and fear of death, our basic nature is not subject to life and death. however, we cannot realize this truth so long as we remain consumed with life’s ever-present dualities. the key insight comes when we are able to detach ourselves from these everyday concerns. difficult as this task may be, it is the same difficulty posed by time travel itself, for freeing oneself from life’s dualities also constitutes a necessary step in time travel. in brief, the key to traveling through time is to free yourself from your everyday concerns.” p205
“we discovered that the seemingly ever-forward flowing movement of time is changed in the brain and begin to see that consciousness and time are therefore intimately related and, indeed, may be the same thing.” p206
“a quantum computer – a device that uses qubits, or number possibilities, rather than numbers. by putting the quantum computer into a special state, the possibility-wave of the person inside the device could be shifted in time either forward or backward, thus producing counterfactual realities – a future that would have been improbable or a past that had not taken place.” p207
“we saw how possibility, probability, and time are related. we looked at what possibility-waves accomplish and why they are necessary. we discovered that they operate in a sub-spacetime reality and connect to spacetime reality through a simple mathematical operation called squaring, which changes these waves into probability-curves. the ability to square affects everything that manifests, including those who carry out the operations. i showed how the results of the squaring process depend critically on superposition – the overlapping of two or more possibility-waves. these waves can add together producing a new possibility-wave. when the new waves is squared, it produces a very different probability-curve from the one produced by squaring the possibility-waves first, before making up the sum. consequently, the squared new probability-curve gives rise to new behavior.
“i introduced several examples based on gambling house practices to clarify just how this process of squaring and then adding, or adding and then squaring, works. we looked carefully into the question of when squaring should occur, either before we add possibility-waves or after. the answer gave insights into habit formation and thus ways to alter our behavior by changing the structure of events in time. we saw that waves going backward in time mix with or modulate waves coming forward in time. the mix appears as a probability-curve. hence, we learned that probability at any instance, although normally statistically independent from the past or future, does in fact depend on the past or on future expectation. perhaps this explains why people often feel they are either luckier or unluckier than others.
“in chapter 9, we looked at how the notion of time arises and investigated mind yoga as a means for time travel. we saw how habit and probability are deeply connected and how consciousness itself comes into the mix, acting as a time machine – either speeding the flow of time or slowing it down. we saw how freeing the mind from the body – paradoxically, by engaging it more consciously with the body – enables the person’s self-concept to dissolve. the ‘i’ or ego-self alters possibility-waves, producing probabilities for real events in the mind. the sequential order of these probabilities produces time order. dissolution of self-boundaries enables the experience of time travel. as the time traveler/yogi’s body awareness changes, a quantum-physics state of consciousness arises, projecting the mind into a future or past time state. we examined the function of sub-spacetime in this process – an imaginal realm in modern physics similar to plato’s world of ideals. it appears that the existence of this realm provides a ‘solid’ ground of being for the physical world we are able to measure and sense.
“after this brief examination of the role of sub-spacetime, i suggested that its existence has a connection to spirituality. the reason for this suggestion is the following: modern physics, particularly quantum physics and the general theory of relativity, tell us that time is not as our classical physic heritage would imply. in light of what we are learning now, time travel becomes more than a possibility; it becomes a necessity. an old adage in physics says that whatever is not forbidden becomes compulsory. in the last decade or so, there has been a big change in the scientific attitude toward time travel. originally, the burden was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. now the burden of proof has shifted to p roving there is a law forbidding it. it now seems that time travel may be an essential requirement in physics’ expanding menu of remarkable phenomena.” p208-9
“consciousness acts or has an effect on physical matter by making choices that then become manifest. it now appears that such an action cannot simply take place mechanically. implied now is a ‘chooser,’ or subject, who affects the brain and nervous system. some physicists, such as stapp, believe that this chooser arises in the brain through past conditioning. penrose believes the action of choosing takes place nonalgorithmically – that is, not through the action of any mathematical formula or any computer-like process. i suggest that this chooser/observer does not exist in spacetime and is not material, which suggests that it is a spiritual essence or being residing outside of spacetime.
“the choices that the chooser chooses show as possibility-waves existing in a sub-spacetime realm. they move about in this ream oblivious of both space and time, existing in several places simultaneously and even in the past and future at the same moment. attempting to describe how things can exist side-by-side in the future, the past, and in several places at once seems to push language to its limits.
“when consciousness acts, possibility-waves traveling backward through time modulate waves traveling forward through time. this modulation results in teh squaring process that yields a probability-curve that makes sense in our physical world. the probability-curve provides us with opportunities to control our lives, for they enable us to develop habits of behavior and expectations for future success in any endeavors we pursue. without this squaring action, the world would remain in a timeless, spaceless state of ever-changing possibilities, with nothing ever manifesting at all. strange as it may seem, there would be no consciousness of any object appearing anywhere or anytime. indeed, there would be no time nor space wherein anything physical could appear.
“the squaring procedure results in a pattern of possibility-waves moving across periods of time, thereby producing the past and future as well as the present. this pattern, stretching over time through its multiple reflection, gives rise to self-consciousness and creates within spacetime the ego structure, which allows individual evolutionary behavior, survival, and spiritual awareness. hence the ego structure or self-concept exists as a pattern in spacetime.” p210
“i believe that just as time travel is now emerging as a mainstream concept in our world, the sub-spacetime will also emerge as mainstream in the near future.
“because we are embodied and thus limited by space and time, we sentient beings have lost the experience (if it can be called that) of residing in the timeless-spaceless realm. even bringing up the concept boggles the ind and raises hackles of suspicion and skepticism. for centuries, spiritual practices, including meditation and various forms of ritual, have been utilized to break free of these limitations – to join us with our predecessors who have so acted in the past and to link us with those in the future who will continue the tradition. spiritual teachers, realizing this difficulty of seeing beyond the everyday reality of space an time, ask us to practice techniques known experientially to assist one in this endeavor. paradoxically, even though i call it an ‘endeavor,’ the techniques are really designed to break out of the endeavoring that has become habitual to us.
“[dalai lama] ‘my daily practice is preparation for death through meditation – to make a separation of the body and consciousness. unless you reach the deepest sub-consciousness, you cannot separate this body and mind. when you reach this deepest state, then they can separate. then i go deeper, deeper, deeper, to the deepest which is the clear light. sometimes i joke: in 24 hours i experience death and rebirth seven times. then when the actual death happens, this practice becomes very useful.’
“like death and deep meditation, the mind yoga form of time travel frees one from space-time limitation for the periods when the time travel is projected. in other words, while the rest of us hold on to our timekeeping in the usual manner on earth – and the mu mesons hold on to their timekeeping while they speed through the universe possibly at so near lightspeed that they may ride for years of our time but less than a microsecond of theirs, and while distant parts of our universe rush away from us at so near lightspeed that in an hour for us millions of years pass for them – we in meditation are free of time altogether.
“this respite from the space-time continuum allows us to move backward in time and revisit past ‘errors.’ it enables us to forgive ourselves and others because we see that the other is nothing more than the self. it offers a fresh, new life-affirming quality to everyday existence. perhaps most importantly, while engaged in this kind of travel you slow your body’s aging processes, simply because the mind has relaxed its concern with creating an objective world arising from probability-curves. by using meditation and yoga techniques, though it may not seem to be so, you are freeing yourself from time. with practice, as ramana maharshi showed us, you will be able to ‘see’ into the past or future as well as beyond your immediate spatial region. ultimately, as maharshi indicated, the key to time travel seems to be in surrendering egoistic patterns. traveling into the future may, in this way, hold the possibility of a truly more peaceful world.” p209-12
“qubits are the ‘maybe’s’ of a quantum computer. they are to a quantum computer as bits are to an ordinary computer. a quantum computer allows users to play with arrows that never get completely thrown one way or the other while the computer computes. in fact, a computation is nothing more than a program that tells these arrows how to change their positions form one inbetween direction to another.
“even though quantum computers work this way, ‘maybe’s’ are never seen in the ‘real’ world – all we see are the realities of 0 or 1. hence – and this is where the quantum world enters the real world – when we attempt to find out in which direction the arrow points, we usually find that it is pointing either to the right or up, as shown in figure a.3.
“for this reason, quantum computers work best without us looking in on them and when their qubits move around in ‘maybe’ positions. since there are an infinite number of maybe’s possible, the number of computational possibilities for quantum computers becomes well beyond the scope of any classical computer.” p218
7 lessons of relativity
so now i need the lessons to be taught on level 2. these are basically how to invalidate classical physics, how to cheat on all the games played with classical physics so that the house wins. basically, i’m trying to show how relativity invalidates newtonian physics.
so, all the games of skill can be won by the house by changing the gravitational constant, etc. and statistics (while not a branch of relativity) can be used in card-counting and other forms of cheating. so now i have to round up seven principles of relativity that will fit into carnival rides and arcade games.
Some predictions of general relativity differ significantly from those of classical physics, especially concerning the passage of time, the geometry of space, the motion of bodies in free fall, and the propagation of light. Examples of such differences include gravitational time dilation, gravitational lensing, the gravitational redshift of light, and the gravitational time delay.
it implies the existence of black holes
the result of transporting spacetime vectors that can denote a particle’s velocity (time-like vectors) will vary with the particle’s trajectory; mathematically speaking, the Newtonian connection is not integrable. From this, one can deduce that spacetime is curved.
there are no global inertial frames. Instead there are approximate inertial frames moving alongside freely falling particles.
processes close to a massive body run more slowly when compared with processes taking place farther away; this effect is known as gravitational time dilation.
processes close to a massive body run more slowly when compared with processes taking place farther away; this effect is known as gravitational time dilation. Closely related to light deflection is the gravitational time delay (or Shapiro effect), the phenomenon that light signals take longer to move through a gravitational field than they would in the absence of that field.
and more
as a space engineer you have been given the task of creating an “artificial gravity field” in this space station so that Alice and her comrades can work in a normal gravity environment like on Earth. How will you do it? Simple: make the big tin can rotate on its axis! Just like in the notorious “spinning cylinder” amusement park ride in which you go round and round and the floor drops out from beneath you
The two facts are “time dilation” and “length contraction”, which led him to warped time and warped space, respectively.
and another
Einstein’s relativity does not replace Newton’s universal gravitation, it merely modifies and partially supercedes aspects which proved inconsistent with developments in electromagnetic theory.
and another
This perspective on the world also includes something else that is very important. It includes the idea that only the present exists, the past is gone and the future is not out there yet. Philosophers call this outlook presentism. But then along came Einstein with special relativity in 1905 and it gave scientists an idea that most of them still cannot accept called the blockworld (and sometimes called the block universe). Special relativity says there is no such thing as “now” (except in our minds) and that the past, present and future all have to be out there at once as a kind of solid block of everything that “just is”.
The blockworld model shows us the universe is a package deal. The universe had to pop up all at once. The past, present and future must all be there, the past, present and future must all have popped up at once. The universe is not something that began at the Big Bang and then evolved as the matter moved out from the explosion. As for the Big Bang itself you might say that the Big Bang at the “beginning” of space and time is just a tiny fraction of what was created, it is merely a sort of fireworks display that is “celebrating” all the creation from there out to infinity. So if you sat back and watched creation by this God-like being from the proper perspective what you would see is, first, nothing at all. Then instantly a whole universe would appear. You’d see everything in the universe across all of space and time. At the far left of the universe you could see the Big Bang. A little bit to the right of the Big Bang you would start to find stars and galaxies. A little bit farther to the right you would start to find planets. Say one of those planets is Earth-like and then at some point to the right you would find simple cells, a bit farther to the right you would find more complex living things and a bit farther to the right you would find people. But all these things came into existence at once, they did not develop one after the other.
Consider for instance an amusement park ride like the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyworld. When you get on the ride at the beginning in what we could call the present, the rest of the ride is still out there in front of you “in the future”. Everything in the future exists as something just as real as the place where you are starting out in the present even though you can’t see it yet. As you move through the ride you only see one place at a time. You only see “the present”. You experience what you call “now”. But the future is still out there in front of you and it is still just as real as where you are in the present and even the past where you started the ride is just as real as the present or the future. When you finally reach the end of the ride all of the past is still there and it is just as real as the now that you are experiencing “now”. And the whole ride is completely unchanged, it is still a sort of frozen block of everything.
The same applies to reading a book. The whole story was prepared by the author in advance. The beginning, middle and end all exist at once. It is a frozen block that “just is”. As you read page by page your consciousness moves through the book and where you are reading now is “the present”. What you’ve already read is still there in “the past” and “the future” is still there ahead of you.
To briefly summarize the ideas so far, all these years people have been using the perspective of presentism. This perspective works pretty well for most things but modern physics has found the new, better blockworld perspective and this perspective explains things better.
In modern times many people have come to believe in the evolution of life by chance. In evolution by chance chemistry just naturally produced some organic compounds that by chance evolved into a living cell. Afterwards chance mutations in the DNA of the single living cell produced more complex living things. The blockworld kills this idea in a single stroke because there is no such thing as chance.
and another
The student activity sheets for use on the day of the visit feature self-explanatory notes and are designed so that students can complete the activities while queuing/moving around the Park. You may wish to suggest that students take pictures of the rides and the Park to enhance their studies.
Students will benefit from prior knowledge of:
• the relationship between speed, distance and time.
• the effect of forces on speed and the direction of objects.
• the ways in which friction affects motion.
• energy transfer and the Law of Conservation of Energy.
It is also helpful if students have previously learned to use formula triangles and have used line graphs.Scientific thinking
– Using scientific ideas and models to explain phenomena and developing them creatively to generate and test theories.
– Critically analysing and evaluating evidence from observations and experiments.
• Energy, electricity and forces
– Energy can be transferred usefully, stored or dissipated, but cannot be created or destroyed.
– Forces are interactions between objects and can affect their shape and motion.Schemes of Work
• Forces and their effects
• Gravity and space
• Speeding upEnergy, electricity and radiations
– Energy transfers can be measured.
the idea i’m trying to express on level 2 is that all the things we know about classical mechanics change when we move to another system of physics. and i’m talking about metaphorically. i’m talking about inside a video game, when it’s all a matter of trickery to begin with. just that on level 2 all the tricks of level 1 are exposed and a new system comes into play.
so while the roller coaster is a ride where you can change the forces – change the track – on level 2 you can bend forces, dilate time, use black holes to control the ride. workers on level 2 operate the spinning ride where the floor drops out and you have artificial gravity, while the players on level 1 can only move around squashed against the wall and launch themselves into the gravity pit faster or slower, stuff like that.
***
now, about cheating on games, presumably using statistics as well as weighted balls. this one’s about cheating in online games
SOME PUBLICLY KNOWN CHEATS
CHEATING BY COLLUSION
CHEATING BY ABUSING PROCEDURE OR POLICY
CHEATING RELATED WITH VIRTUAL ASSETS
CHEATING BY COMPROMISING PASSWORDS
CHEATING BY DENYING SERVICE FROM PEER PLAYERS
CHEATING DUE TO LACK OF SECRECY
CHEATING DUE TO LACK OF AUTHENTICATION
CHEATING RELATED WITH INTERNAL MISUSE
CHEATING BY SOCIAL ENGINEERING
CHEATING BY MODIFYING GAME SOFTWARE OR DATA
Object Correlation
Objects Exposure
CHEATING BY EXPLOITING BUG OR DESIGN FLAWcategories for online cheating:
1. Reflex Augmentation: Exploiting a computer program to replace human reaction to produce superior results
2. Authoritative Clients: Exploiting compromised clients to send modified commands to the other honest clients who will blindly accept them
3. Information Exposure: Exploiting access or visibility to hidden information by compromising client software
4. Compromised Servers : Modifying server configurations to get unfair advantages
5. Bugs and Design Loopholes: Exploiting bugs or design flaws in game software
6. Environmental Weaknesses: Exploiting particular hardware or operating conditionsESP cheats try to provide the player with visual enhancements to better enable the player to correlate between two objects. One such ESP cheat is improved or new radar and map for a game. Many games run a full copy of the game on each client, i.e. the client knows where all the other objects are. When the objects are positioned a place the player is meant to see them, they are shown on the screen. A modification might add a minimap or similar on the screen showing where all the other objects are at any time, like it’s done for Counter Strike and Warcraft III [17,14].
Another variant of ESP is “glow” [17]. Glow ESP helps a player see enemies better. Either the whole object is changed to a color that is light or “glowing”, or only the sides of the objects are “glowing”. This makes it easer to distinguish friend from foe or spot objects in dark areas.
The goal for these cheats is to show something to the player that he shouldn’t be able to see. This can be done be removing objects or making it possible to see objects meant to be hidden behind other objects.
Removed objects
In some games certain groups of objects clouds the visibility of other objects – and they are meant to. In Counter Strike smoke grenades release clouds of smoke that are very opaque, making them hard to see
through. Cheats remove these clouds [17]. Warcraft III uses something called fog of war. This is visible as a layer over the terrain that only lets the player view the contour of the landscape below. Some cheats remove this, giving the player the opportunity to explore the whole map without moving objects around to remove the fog of war [14].Transparent objects
This kind of cheat is often known as wall hack [17]. The following group of cheats are also known as wall hack, but this is probably the one most players think of when a wall hack is mentioned, i.e. the ability to see
through walls. Sometimes these cheats makes all walls in a map 50% transparent [17]. In other words, it is possible to make some group of objects more or less transparent, making objects behind them visible.Changed object layers
This method aims at showing objects a player wants to see without modifying objects like walls. A cheater can put some objects that are located behind others in front of those hiding them, making them visible. A solution might be to put all objects of a certain kind in front of any other object. This might – like in Counter Strike [17] – be a player model, enabling a player to know where other players are located. This wall hack is more efficient than ‘transparent objects’ because the cheater now only sees what is important and not everything else behind the wall. Seeing everything can limit ones ability to navigate on the map.
Textual information
Text can be shown about an object to reveal details about it not visually easy to spot for humans [17]. This might be items a player is carrying or the players’ health or strength. It is possible to make the text visible on top of other objects, e.g. a player model. Further it’s possible to show the text on top of other objects, in effect creating a wall hack with only the text visible through walls. This has the effect that the player models are located where they should, but the cheater will get an early warning when text is shown on a wall but no player model is visible, i.e. the player model is behind the wall.
Cheaters often find their targets easy prey because data can bee seen in clear text, either between the client and server or internally in the machine under the cheaters control. An approach to reduce this threat is encrypting important data kept in memory or sent between the client and server or between the game engine and a modification (Mod).
There are many encryption schemes useful for online games, like the Advanced Encryption Algorithm [28]. However, such cryptographic algorithms might be to resource consuming. Another solution that might be sufficient is using XOR for important values. That would make it more difficult to e.g. search for known values in memory e.g. for a paused game. Each new patch for a game could include a new XOR key to make a cheaters life more difficult.
Pritchard [1] suggest another kind of “encryption”, known as security through obscurity. By dynamically changing the command syntax, hackers will have more trouble finding the desired data in memory. Such solutions are not popular in the academic world, but from a practical approach, everything that increase the pain of the attacker at a low cost for the defender has some clear advantages.
In order to beat the cheaters, some kind of disciplinary punishment is needed. If cheating doesn’t result in anything negative for the cheater, they will likely continue cheating. One such punishment is disabling the user account associated with the cheat. At the same time, those offended by the cheat should have some possibility of restoring e.g. something that was taken from them.
here’s the precis of the bible of cheating with statistics
- The sample with a built-in bias : the origin of the statistics problems – the sample.
- The well-chosen average: how not qualifying an average can change the meaning of the data.
Arithmetic average / mean – sum of quantities / number of quantities
Median – the middle point of the data which separates the data, the midpoint when data is sorted
Mode – the data point that occurs the most in a given set of data- This chapter is about how the sample data is picked up in a way to prove the results
- This little chapter is about errors in measurement. There are two measures for measuring error – Probable Error and Standard Error.
- How to manipulate a graph so that it shows an inflated / deflated picture
- This one is an interesting trick. The trick here is use some sort of symbol – a money bag, a factory symbol things like that on the graph. So, when measuring the growth of, say the factory, increase the size of the factory image – and increase it across all the dimensions. Given that the reader is seeing this on a graph, the other dimensions are forgotten and the large money bag gives the impression that there is a much larger difference than 1:3 !
- The semi-attached figure: And what is the idea – very simple. If you can’t prove what you want to prove, prove something else and demonstrate that they both are the same!
- Post-hoc analysis. The cause and effect problem. You have the effect and then you go around shopping for a cause that you want to portray.
- How to statisticulate: to manipulate readers by using statistics.
- How to talk back to a statistic.
there’s bunches more, but i’ve got to tend to my cooking upstairs, so i’m going to close.
7 facets of classical physics
i need to reduce the field of classical mechanics to 7 lessons.
Classical mechanics describes the motion of macroscopic objects, from projectiles to parts of machinery, as well as astronomical objects, such as spacecraft, planets, stars, and galaxies. Besides this, many specializations within the subject deal with gases, liquids, solids, and other specific sub-topics.
from another source:
DISPLACEMENT, VELOCITY, & ACCELERATION
[2.5] THE THIRD LAW / MOMENTUM IN ACTION
[4.1] ROTATIONAL MOTION / ANGULAR VELOCITY
[4.2] FUNDAMENTAL QUANTITIES / CENTER OF MASS
[4.3] TORQUE, MOMENT OF INERTIA, & THE SECOND LAW OF MOTION
[4.7] CONSERVATION OF ANGULAR MOMENTUM
physics of solids, liquids, thermal, sound and light
here’s from another source:
Classical physics is a branch of physics in which matter and energy are two separate concepts. Based primarily on Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic radiation, classical physics is generally divided into several different areas. These areas include mechanics (looking at motion, objects and the forces that act on them), dynamics, hydrodynamics, statics, optics, thermodynamics (studying energy and heat) and acoustics, as well as the studies of the phenomena surrounding magnetism and electricity. The laws of conservation of mass, conservation of energy and conservation of momentum are also very important to classical physics.
and another:
Physics I is a first-year physics course which introduces students to classical mechanics. Topics include: space and time; straight-line kinematics; motion in a plane; forces and equilibrium; experimental basis of Newton’s laws; particle dynamics; universal gravitation; collisions and conservation laws; work and potential energy; vibrational motion; conservative forces; inertial forces and non-inertial frames; central force motions; rigid bodies and rotational dynamics.
and another:
Rigid body·Rigid body dynamics·Euler’s equations (rigid body dynamics)·Motion·Newton’s laws of motion·Newton’s law of universal gravitation·Euler’s laws of motion·Equations of motion·Inertial frame of reference·Non-inertial reference frame·Rotating reference frame·Fictitious force·Linear motion·Mechanics of planar particle motion·Displacement (vector)·Relative velocity·Friction·Simple harmonic motion·Harmonic oscillator·Vibration·Damping·Damping ratio·Rotational motion·Circular motion·Uniform circular motion·Non-uniform circular motion·Centripetal force·Centrifugal force·Centrifugal force (rotating reference frame)·Reactive centrifugal force·Coriolis force·Pendulum·Rotational speed·Angular acceleration·Angular velocity·Angular frequency·Angular displacement
and another:
1-D Kinematics
The motion of objects in one-dimension are described using words, diagrams, numbers, graphs, and equations.
Newton’s Laws
Newton’s three laws of motion are explained and their application to the analysis of the motion of objects in one dimension is discussed.
Vectors – Motion and Forces in Two Dimensions
Vector principles and operations are introduced and combined with kinematic principles and Newton’s laws to describe, explain and analyze the motion of objects in two dimensions. Applications include riverboat problems, projectiles, inclined planes, and static equilibrium.
Momentum and Its Conservation
The impulse-momentum change theorem and the law of conservation of momentum are introduced, explained and applied to the analysis of collisions of objects.
Work, Energy, and Power
Concepts of work, kinetic energy and potential energy are discussed; these concepts are combined with the work-energy theorem to provide a convenient means of analyzing an object or system of objects moving between an initial and final state.
Circular Motion and Satellite Motion
Newton’s laws of motion and kinematic principles are applied to describe and explain the motion of objects moving in circles; specific applications are made to roller coasters and athletics. Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation is then presented and utilized to explain the circular and elliptical motion of planets and satellites.
Thermal Physics
The distinction between heat and temperature is thoroughly explained. Methods of heat transfer are explained. The mathematics associated with temperature changes and phase changes is discussed; its application to the science of calorimetry is presented.
Static Electricity
Basic principles of electrostatics are introduced in order to explain how objects become charged and to describe the effect of those charges on other objects in the neighboring surroundings. Charging methods, electric field lines and the importance of lightning rods on homes are among the topics discussed in this unit.
Current Electricity
The flow of charge through electric circuits is discussed in detail. The variables which cause and hinder the rate of charge flow are explained and the mathematical application of electrical principles to series, parallel and combination circuits is presented.
Waves
The nature, properties and behaviors of waves are discussed and illustrated; the unique nature of a standing wave is introduced and explained.
Sound Waves and Music
The nature of sound as a longitudinal, mechanical pressure wave is explained and the properties of sound are discussed. Wave principles of resonance and standing waves are applied in an effort to analyze the physics of musical instruments.
Light Waves and Color
The behavior of light waves is introduced and discussed; polarization, color, diffraction and interference are introduced as supporting evidence of the wave nature of light. Color perception is discussed in detail.
Reflection and the Ray Model of Light
The ray nature of light is used to explain how light reflects off of planar and curved surfaces to produce both real and virtual images; the nature of the images produced by plane mirrors, concave mirrors, and convex mirrors is thoroughly illustrated.
Refraction and the Ray Model of Light
The ray nature of light is used to explain how light refracts at planar and curved surfaces; Snell’s law and refraction principles are used to explain a variety of real-world phenomena; refraction principles are combined with ray diagrams to explain why lenses produce images of objects.
euler’s laws
newton’s laws of motion (can we illustrate all three in one experiment?)
linear motion, vectors
relative velocity
friction
harmonic motion (spring, pendumum)
rotational / angular motion
centrifugal / centripetal force
***
roller coaster – The conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy is what drives the roller coaster, and all of the kinetic energy you need for the ride is present once the coaster descends the first hill
carousel – circular motion, linear motion
bumper cars – the law of action-reaction, the drivers feel a change in their motion and become aware of their inertia. The type of collision, velocity of the cars, and mass of the individual drivers all come into play in bumper car collisions.
free fall – In the first part of the ride, force is applied to the car to lift it to the top of the free-fall tower. After a brief period in which the riders are suspended in the air, the car suddenly drops and begins to accelerate toward the ground under the influence of the earth’s gravity.
pendulum – Feelings of weightlessness are not due to a decrease in forces of gravitation; people do not feel forces of gravity. What you feel is the force of a seat (or other external object) pushing on your body with a force to counteract gravity’s downward pull. The motion of an object in a circle requires that there be a force directed toward the center of the circle (sometimes called a “centripetal force”). This means that at the bottom of the circular swing, there must be an upward force (since the circle’s center is upward). Gravitational forces are always directed downward upon a rider’s body; thus, gravitational forces cannot meet this centripetal force requirement. The seat must supply the centripetal force, pushing upwards on the rider with a force greater than gravity’s downward pull.
***
arcade games
Riverboat Simulator
Explore concepts of relative velocity by investigating the motion of a boat across a river in the presence of a current. Alter the boat speed and heading, the river width and current speed; explore the effect of these changes upon the time to cross the river and the distance traveled downstream.
View: Animation || Activity Sheet
Projectile Simulator
Investigate the nature of a projectile using this projectile simulator. Alter the launch height, launch speed and launch angle and explore the effect of such alterations on the time of flight, range, and overall trajectory.
View: Animation || Activity Sheet
Hit the Target
Practice your skill at solving horizontally-launched projectile problems by seeing if you can hit a target. Three types of problems are presented with randomly generated numbers.
View: Animation || Activity Sheet || Data Sheet
Race Track
Test your understanding of the relationship between the net force and the resulting motion as you attempt to guide a car around an oval race track in the least number of moves. Watch your speed on the curves and you’ll be a winner.
View: Animation
Uniform Circular Motion
Analyze the motion of an object moving in a circle at a constant speed and investigate the directional nature of velocity and acceleration and the effect of speed and radius upon the acceleration.
View: Animation || Activity Sheet
Gravitation
Learn about the concept of universal gravitation as you explore the variables which effect the force of gravity between an object and a planet.
View: Animation || Activity Sheet
Orbital Motion
Investigate the elliptical motion of a satellite orbiting a central body and the nature of the velocity and force vectors. Alter the eccentricity of the orbit and view the effect upon the shape of the ellipse.
View: Animation || Activity Sheet
Standing Wave Patterns
Explore the standing wave patterns for a stringed instruments. Alter the length of the string, the amplitude of the wave pattern and the harmonic number. View the length-wavelength-frequency relationships.
View: Animation
Beat Patterns
Investigate the wave patterns associated with beats by combining two waves of similar frequency. Observe the wave patterns for the individual waves and observe the resulting beat pattern which is formed.
View: Animation
a strange comment
not a comment on my post. i found this while searching for references to qubinary.
Posted Monday 5th April 2010 16:07 GMT
To Groom or BGroomed, that is the Question and the Analysts’ Abiding Dilemma →
In Microsoft slings mud at Google Chrome
It is rotten Phorm, chaps, and not at all cricket. Although it is a Tricky Dicky of a Googley, that’s for sure.
I trust all here on El Reg, garnering whatever they are here to gather, do realise that whatever is found out, and publicly reported or privately exploited, about what is going on in this New Real Virtual Medium, is long ago developed and enriched to the nth degree and in IT Command and Control of Special Executive Officialdom with Immaculately Resourced Assets, thus 42 Ensure CyberIntelAIgent Security Systems Operating Software dDelivers Drivers and Hardware to Virtual AIMachinery InfraStructures.
What you have, and which you can Selfishly and Foolishly Deny until such Times as your Primitive Brains Mature and Engage with the Textual Pictures IT is Receiving and Processing Remotely to Present Tomorrow, the Futures Revealed and Dismissed as Alien and Foreign Today, is a Simply Complex QuBinary Machine in Absolute Control of your Earthly Existence with Global Operating Device Phormats Leading Artificially IntelAIgent Methodologies with Progressive Tautologies.
Or would you like to Disagree and Transparently Share a Phormed View which would reveal what else would be leading you on it’s Merry War Dance in Support of Death and Destruction and which Sad/Mad/Glad/Bad/Rad/Fad Beings make it and IT all Possible for You to Suffer and Enjoy in your Apathy and Ignorance.
Go on …… Take and Make an Educated Guess for Free …… Exercise your Brain with Thoughtful Imagination and then Ponder on the Placement of Better Beta Ideas for the Future, for Media and IT to Present as an Acceptable and Accepted Virtual Reality ….. with Great Game Master Pilot Leads Forging with AIR&dD, Pioneering CyberIntelAIgent Flight with Magical Mystery Turing Paths.
the power of the spoken word
this is so important my jaw dropped when i saw it. who controls the language controls all.
What if We Occupied Language?
December 21, 2011, 8:00 pm
By H. SAMY ALIMThe Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
When I flew out from the San Francisco airport last October, we crossed above the ports that Occupy Oakland helped shut down, and arrived in Germany to be met by traffic caused by Occupy Berlin protestors. But the movement has not only transformed public space, it has transformed the public discourse as well.
Occupy.
It is now nearly impossible to hear the word and not think of the Occupy movement.
Even as distinguished an expert as the lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer admitted as much this week: “occupy, ” he said, is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.
It has already succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate, taking phrases like “debt-ceiling” and “budget crisis” out of the limelight and putting terms like “inequality” and “greed” squarely in the center. This discursive shift has made it more difficult for Washington to continue to promote the spurious reasons for the financial meltdown and the unequal outcomes it has exposed and further produced.
To most, the irony of a progressive social movement using the term “occupy” to reshape how Americans think about issues of democracy and equality has been clear. After all, it is generally nations, armies and police who occupy, usually by force. And in this, the United States has been a leader. The American government is just now after nine years ending its overt occupation of Iraq, is still entrenched in Afghanistan and is maintaining troops on the ground in dozens of countries worldwide. All this is not to obscure the fact that the United States as we know it came into being by way of an occupation — a gradual and devastatingly violent one that all but extinguished entire Native American populations across thousands of miles of land.
Dread Scott and Kyle Goen
Yet in a very short time, this movement has dramatically changed how we think about occupation. In early September, “occupy” signaled on-going military incursions. Now it signifies progressive political protest. It’s no longer primarily about force of military power; instead it signifies standing up to injustice, inequality and abuse of power. It’s no longer about simply occupying a space; it’s about transforming that space.
In this sense, Occupy Wall Street has occupied language, has made “occupy” its own. And, importantly, people from diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages have participated in this linguistic occupation — it is distinct from the history of forcible occupation in that it is built to accommodate all, not just the most powerful or violent.
As Geoff Nunberg, the long-time chair of the usage panel for American Heritage Dictionary, and others have explained, the earliest usage of occupy in English that was linked to protest can be traced to English media descriptions of Italian demonstrations in the 1920s, in which workers “occupied” factories until their demands were met. This is a far cry from some of its earlier meanings. In fact, The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “occupy” once meant “to have sexual intercourse with.” One could imagine what a phrase like “Occupy Wall Street” might have meant back then.
In October, Zimmer, who is also the chair of the American Dialect Society’s New Word Committee, noted on NPR’s “On the Media” that the meaning of occupy has changed dramatically since its arrival into the English language in the 14th century. “It’s almost always been used as a transitive verb,” Zimmer said. “That’s a verb that takes an object, so you occupy a place or a space. But then it became used as a rallying cry, without an object, just to mean to take part in what are now called the Occupy protests. It’s being used as a modifier — Occupy protest, Occupy movement. So it’s this very flexible word now that’s filling many grammatical slots in the language.”
What if we transformed the meaning of occupy yet again? Specifically, what if we thought of Occupy Language as more than the language of the Occupy movement, and began to think about it as a movement in and of itself? What kinds of issues would Occupy Language address? What would taking language back from its self-appointed “masters” look like? We might start by looking at these questions from the perspective of race and discrimination, and answer with how to foster fairness and equality in that realm.
Orlando Arenas, Ernesto Yerena, Ricardo Lopez, Sandra Castro
Occupy Language might draw inspiration from both the way that the Occupy movement has reshaped definitions of “occupy,” which teaches us that we give words meaning and that discourses are not immutable, and from the way indigenous movements have contested its use, which teaches us to be ever-mindful about how language both empowers and oppresses, unifies and isolates.
For starters, Occupy Language might first look inward. In a recent interview, Julian Padilla of the People of Color Working Group pushed the Occupy movement to examine its linguistic choices:
To occupy means to hold space, and I think a group of anti-capitalists holding space on Wall Street is powerful, but I do wish the NYC movement would change its name to “‘decolonise Wall Street”’ to take into account history, indigenous critiques, people of colour and imperialism… Occupying space is not inherently bad, it’s all about who and how and why. When white colonizers occupy land, they don’t just sleep there over night, they steal and destroy. When indigenous people occupied Alcatraz Island it was (an act of) protest.
This linguistic change can remind Americans that a majority of the 99 percent has benefited from the occupation of native territories.
Occupy Language might also support the campaign to stop the media from using the word “illegal” to refer to “undocumented” immigrants. From the campaign’s perspective, only inanimate objects and actions are labeled illegal in English; therefore the use of “illegals” to refer to human beings is dehumanizing. The New York Times style book currently asks writers to avoid terms like “illegal alien” and “undocumented,” but says nothing about “illegals.” Yet The Times’ standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, did recently weigh in on this, saying that the term “illegals” has an “unnecessarily pejorative tone” and that “it’s wise to steer clear.”
Pejorative, discriminatory language can have real life consequences. In this case, activists worry about the coincidence of the rise in the use of the term “illegals” and the spike in hate crimes against all Latinos. As difficult as it might be to prove causation here, the National Institute for Latino Policy reports that the F.B.I.’s annual Hate Crime Statistics show that Latinos comprised two thirds of the victims of ethnically motivated hate crimes in 2010. When someone is repeatedly described as something, language has quietly paved the way for violent action.
Melanie Cervantes
But Occupy Language should concern itself with more than just the words we use; it should also work towards eliminating language-based racism and discrimination. In the legal system, CNN recently reported that the U.S. Justice Department alleges that Arizona’s infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other offenses, has discriminated against “Latino inmates with limited English by punishing them and denying critical services.” In education, as linguistic anthropologist Ana Celia Zentella notes, hostility towards those who speak “English with an accent” (Asians, Latinos, and African Americans) continues to be a problem. In housing, The National Fair Housing Alliance has long recognized “accents” as playing a significant role in housing discrimination. On the job market, language-based discrimination intersects with issues of race, ethnicity, class and national origin to make it more difficult for well-qualified applicants with an “accent” to receive equal opportunities.
In the face of such widespread language-based discrimination, Occupy Language can be a critical, progressive linguistic movement that exposes how language is used as a means of social, political and economic control. By occupying language, we can expose how educational, political, and social institutions use language to further marginalize oppressed groups; resist colonizing language practices that elevate certain languages over others; resist attempts to define people with terms rooted in negative stereotypes; and begin to reshape the public discourse about our communities, and about the central role of language in racism and discrimination.
As the global Occupy movement has shown, words can move entire nations of people — even the world — to action. Occupy Language, as a movement, should speak to the power of language to transform how we think about the past, how we act in the present, and how we envision the future.
The illustrations for this post are part of a collection of Occupy movement posters at the site Occuprint.
H. Samy Alim directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL) at Stanford University. His forthcoming book, “Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S.,” written with Geneva Smitherman, examines the racial politics of the Obama presidency through a linguistic lens.
reprogramming your brain
this is very important. i’m reposting the whole thing. thanks lifehacker.
How to Hack Your Brain
You are not who you think you are. Your personality and identity is significantly more malleable than you realize. With a few simple tricks, you can exploit your brain’s innate functionality to change just about anything about yourself. Here’s how.
You Are Not Necessarily the Person You Think You Are
You are not who you are, but rather the product of many influences. The saying “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” exists for a reason: the longer you’ve been the person you think you are, the harder it becomes to change. The thing is, you can dramatically change who you are. It’s actually not so much that it’s difficult to change, but that you’ve developed patterns and habits that make it easier to do things the way you do them. Trying something in a new way can feel very awkward, it will be generally less efficient by virtue of being something new to you, and it often lacks excitement for you when it involves giving up the comfort associated with yourway.
That’s not to say you aren’t born with some inherent abilities, but most of what you consider part of your identity is a product of influence. While we don’t know the exact ratio of nature to nurture, there is undoubtedly a combination of both that makes us who we are. We have a tendency to think that change is difficult, but it’s really just a matter of changing your influence. You’re probably familiar with Stockholm syndrome-the term used to describe how hostage victims tend to develop positive feelings towards their captors. Stockholm syndrome isn’t a kind of brainwashing by the captor; instead, the victim adapts to the poor situation he or she is in. If most people can adapt to something as awful as being kidnapped, most people can adapt to smaller positive changes in their own lives. You can even make enormous changes if you’re willing to put in the work and you provide yourself with the proper influences. We’re going to look at how to do that on high and low levels, from priming your brain to manipulating your own emotions, and also look at how your environment and the people you know shape your life.
Most of these methods won’t make you feel comfortable, and, at times, they may sound a bit crazy, but it is possible to “hack” your own brain. Here are just a few ways to do it.
Priming Your Brain
Priming is a ridiculously simple technique because all it involves is talking to yourself. On the dull end of the spectrum, it’s similar to self-affirmation. On the crazier end of the spectrum, it bears some similarities with neuro-linguistic programming. Priming your brain involves reciting a given set of words that are designed to alter your mindset. It is notbrainwashing and it cannot make you do anything you don’t want to do. What it can accomplish, however, is putting you into a state of mind that will be more useful to you with a given situation or task.
Before we get into the specifics of how to prime your brain, let’s talk about how and why it works. If you were to say the word mustardout loud, and then you were to see a portion of the word later, you’d be reminded of mustard. For example, if you were to say “I must have this” you might be reminded of mustard because of the word must. If you were hungry and liked mustard, you may even want some. It’s the same phenomenon that compels you to buy a particular brand of shampoo that you saw on television even if you 1) don’t remember seeing the commercial, and 2) couldn’t care less what kind of shampoo you use. This is essentially how priming works, and it’s all thanks to your memory.
While you’re not going to remember everything you say, that doesn’t mean what you say is gone forever. While everything stored in your recent memory may not be immediately accessible, all you really need to bring something up is a trigger word. This is conceptually similar to using acronyms as a memory tool (e.g. Roy G. Biv) but isn’t designed to help you actually remember anything. Instead, the goal is to place common words that, when apart, have no real specific value, but when together, have an associative value that make you think of happy things, sad things, specific people, or ambition. If any of those common words come up again later in the day, you’ll immediately associate that word with the associative value of the group. Here’s an example:
- drive
- do
- go
- make
- objective
- important
- create
- commitment
- purpose
- enthusiasm
- eager
- motivation
This is a list of words synonymous with or related to ambition. It’s designed to be read aloud to put you in a more ambitious mindset, focusing your thoughts and priming your brain to react ambitiously when these words, or portions of these words, come up later in your day.
Another exercise involves taking a shorter list of priming words and making a sentence with it. Here’s an example:
- the
- smiled
- looked
- girl
- and
These words can form the sentence “the girl looked and smiled,” which should bring to mind pleasant associations for most people. Constructing sentences out of word lists (which you can create yourself) can help put you in the right mindset.
These two methods can be used to prime your brain. They are not magic tricks that will instantly make you feel happy, ambitious, or whatever, but they can help to provide you with the mindset you need to better accomplish your daily tasks.
For more reading on priming, and a look at some really interesting studies, don’t forget to check out the references for this article.
Using Your Emotions
If you’ve ever found yourself making out-of-character decisions based on your emotional state—such as binging on ice cream after a breakup—you know how easily your feelings can overtake your actions. Rather than letting your emotions lead you towards poor judgment and irrational behavior, however, you can learn to compensate for different emotional states and to fabricate emotions to alter your mood. In order to do that you need to, simply put, get in touch with your feelings. The idea isn’t so much to cry into a pillow about your wasted childhood, but understand what you’re feeling when you’re feeling it, what the root cause is, and what you can do about it. We’re going to take a look at how you can dissect your emotional state to use it to your advantage, and also look at how you can fabricate emotion to change how you’re feeling.
Take an Acting Class
You can’t really control your emotions if you don’t understand them, and one of the best ways to understand them is to take an acting class. To some this may sound fun, and to others this may sound like hell. Love it or hate it, acting lessons are one of the best ways to explore how and why you feel certain things. Your goal should be to find a class that will make you uncomfortable every time you go. In my experience, any class teaching the Meisner technique is very effective if you put a lot of effort into the exercises. It can be slow, tedious, and uncomfortable, but it’s capable of bringing out emotion you might not realize you had.
Make Yourself Uncomfortable
Your emotions aren’t in full force if you’re not really doing anything, so you need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations in order to bring them out. This doesn’t mean you should make yourself feel horrible, but that you should go out and do things that you might resist because you’re worried about the downsides. Meeting new people is something that makes most people uncomfortable, and it’s a great place to start, especially if it’s a first date. Try new things that scare you. If you notice you’re glued to the couch and don’t want to get up, do the opposite. Spend time with people you don’t like. Go to a movie you’re sure you’ll hate. Your experiences won’t always be pleasant, but they should incite emotion that you can later analyze and better understand.
Keep Track of How You Feel
Like an abbreviated diary, every time you have an emotional reaction to something, write it down. You don’t need much detail, but just a sentence or two noting the emotion you’re experiencing and the (possible) cause. For example, I get extremely irritable when I’m hungry. I will lose my temper far more easily when I’m hungry, so whenever I notice myself thinking irrational (and sometimes hateful) things, I always remind myself that I’m just hungry, I’ll eat in a minute, and the “asshole” who accidentally missed the garbage can and didn’t notice is mostly a result of my frustrated stomach. Until I started to pay attention, I never really noticed that I was a jerk whenever I was hungry. Instead, I just thought I was a jerk. This is a simple example, but the point is this: pay attention to how you feel and the other issues currently present, and you’ll find it much easier to manage your negative emotions.
Emote in Front of the Mirror
Fabricating emotion is difficult. Once you understand your emotions you’ll find it a bit easier, but it helps to be able to recall how it feels, physically, to emote. We all know how to smile, for example, but you can probably count more fake smiles in family photographs than you can real ones. If you don’t know how to create an authentic smile (also known as the Duchenne smile), it will be very obvious to everyone around you.
The easiest way to learn to fake expressions is to practice them in the mirror. You can try them out to see what you look like and you’ll immediately know if they’re passable or not. You’ll also note that it feels physically different to create an authentic-looking emotion than it does to create a fake-looking emotion. For example, an authentic smile shows more in the eyes than it does in your mouth. When someone smiles a true smile, their eyes wrinkle (creating “crows feet”) because a new musicle—the orbicularis oculi muscle—is used. You’ll come to remember this feeling and be able to replicate it away from the mirror after a little practice.
It’s not necessarily easy to emote in front of the mirror, but that’s not as hard as you think. If your goal is simply to learn to smile better, you’ll get there if you just stare at yourself for awhile. Eventually it will get so ridiculous that you’ll have to laugh. If you’re less patient, you can try to make yourself laugh by making strange faces or just being ridiculous. If you’re comfortable, have a friend over to help. For other emotions, you simply need to find a source of that emotion and bring it into play in front of the mirror. If you’ve employed any of the previously discussed techniques, you may already have a reserve. Alternatively, watch a movie that makes you laugh or cry and do it by the mirror. (Yes, this is absolutely a strange thing to do, but it’ll work.) If you’re interested in anger, you should have no problem getting there by just complaining to yourself or to a friend on the phone.
Emoting in front of the mirror is going to be strange and awkward at first, but after a few tries you’ll get the hang of it and be able to create authentic expressions on demand. These expressions do surface from genuine emotion, so repeating them can actually make you feel happier/sadder/angrier/etc. through repetition. If you need to change your mood and your mindset, the ability to fake it ‘til you make it is very, very useful.
Consider Your Health
Anything you do is much easier if you’re healthy—and that goes for mental as well as physical health. These methods won’t be terribly helpful if you’re seriously depressed. If you’re not sleeping, eating well, and/or getting a reasonable amount of physical activity in each day, you’re going to find them difficult as well. You can do pretty much everything better if you take care of your mind and your body, so don’t look at anything you’ve read here as a panacea for the problems in your life. Everything here assumes that you take reasonably good care of yourself and generally start your day in a good place. If you’re not feeling good on most days, you need to take care of those problems before you decide to start playing mind tricks with yourself. Always be healthy first.
References:You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
modeling crowds
when you treat pedestrians like large molecules with wills, you can predict them sort of.
Where the cognitive approach falls down is in the most packed environments. “At low densities, behaviour is cognitive and strategic,” says Mr Moussaid. “At high density, it’s about mass movement and physical pressures.” At a certain point crowds can shift from a controlled flow to a stop-and-go pattern, as people are forced to shorten their stride length and occasionally halt to avoid collisions. This kind of movement can develop into something much more frightening, known as crowd turbulence, when people can no longer keep a space between themselves and others. The physical forces that are imparted from one body to another when that happens are both chaotic and powerful: if someone falls over, others will be unable to avoid them.
Working out precisely how and when these transitions happen is tough. Bringing a real-life situation under control once a stop-and-go pattern has started is equally hard. So the trick is to ensure that serious crowding is avoided in the first place. From big events such as the London Olympics to the design of new railway stations, engineering firms now routinely simulate the movement of people to try to spot areas where crowding is likely to occur.
A typical project involves using off-the-shelf software programs to identify potential bottlenecks in a particular environment, such as a stadium or a Tube station. These models specify the entry and exit points at a location and then use “routing algorithms” that send people to their destinations. Even a one-off event like the Olympics has plenty of data on pedestrian movement to draw on, from past games to other set-piece gatherings such as, say, city-centre carnivals, which enable some basic assumptions about how people will flow.
Once potential points of congestion are identified, more sophisticated models can then be used to go down to a finer level of detail. This second stage allows planners to change architectural designs for new locations and identify when to intervene in existing ones.
a 114% efficient solar cell
Scientists report first solar cell producing more electrons in photocurrent than solar photons entering cell
December 15, 2011
(PhysOrg.com) — Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have reported the first solar cell that produces a photocurrent that has an external quantum efficiency greater than 100 percent when photoexcited with photons from the high energy region of the solar spectrum.
The external quantum efficiency for photocurrent, usually expressed as a percentage, is the number of electrons flowing per second in the external circuit of a solar cell divided by the number of photons per second of a specific energy (or wavelength) that enter the solar cell. None of the solar cells to date exhibit external photocurrent quantum efficiencies above 100 percent at any wavelength in the solar spectrum.
The external quantum efficiency reached a peak value of 114 percent. The newly reported work marks a promising step toward developing Next Generation Solar Cells for both solar electricity and solar fuels that will be competitive with, or perhaps less costly than, energy from fossil or nuclear fuels.
Multiple Exciton Generation is key to making it possible
A paper on the breakthrough appears in the Dec. 16 issue of Science Magazine. Titled “Peak External Photocurrent Quantum Efficiency Exceeding 100 percent via MEG in a Quantum Dot Solar Cell,” it is co-authored by NREL scientists Octavi E. Semonin, Joseph M. Luther, Sukgeun Choi, Hsiang-Yu Chen, Jianbo Gao, Arthur J. Nozikand Matthew C. Beard. The research was supported by the Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the DOE Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Semonin and Nozik are also affiliated with the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The mechanism for producing a quantum efficiency above 100 percent with solar photons is based on a process called Multiple Exciton Generation (MEG), whereby a single absorbed photon of appropriately high energy can produce more than one electron-hole pair per absorbed photon.
NREL scientist Arthur J. Nozik first predicted in a 2001 publication that MEG would be more efficient in semiconductor quantum dots than in bulk semiconductors. Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconductor, with sizes in the nanometer (nm) range of 1-20 nm, where 1 nm equals one-billionth of a meter. At this small size, semiconductors exhibit dramatic effects because of quantum physics, such as:
• rapidly increasing bandgap with decreasing quantum dot size,
• formation of correlated electron-hole pairs (called excitons) at room temperature,
• enhanced coupling of electronic particles (electrons and positive holes) through Coulombic forces,
• and enhancement of the MEG process.
Quantum dots confine the charges and harvest excess energy
Quantum dots, by confining charge carriers within their tiny volumes, can harvest excess energy that otherwise would be lost as heat – and therefore greatly increase the efficiency of converting photons into usable free energy.
The researchers achieved the 114 percent external quantum efficiency with a layered cell consisting of antireflection-coated glass with a thin layer of a transparent conductor, a nanostructured zinc oxide layer, a quantum dot layer of lead selenide treated with ethanedithol and hydrazine, and a thin layer of gold for the top electrode.
In a 2006 publication, NREL scientists Mark Hanna and Arthur J. Nozik showed that ideal MEG in solar cells based on quantum dots could increase the theoretical thermodynamic power conversion efficiency of solar cells by about 35 percent relative to today’s conventional solar cells. Furthermore, the fabrication of Quantum Dot Solar Cells is also amenable to inexpensive, high-throughput roll-to-roll manufacturing.
Such potentially highly efficient cells, coupled with their low cost per unit area, are called Third (or Next) Generation Solar Cells. Present day commercial photovoltaic solar cells are based on bulk semiconductors, such as silicon, cadmium telluride, or copper indium gallium (di)selenide; or on multi-junction tandem cells drawn from the third and fifth (and also in some cases fourth) columns of the Periodic Table of Elements. All of these cells are referred to as First- or Second-Generation Solar Cells.
First experiment to show 100-percent-plus in operating solar cells
MEG, also referred to as Carrier Multiplication (CM), was first demonstrated experimentally in colloidal solutions of quantum dots in 2004 by Richard Schaller and Victor Klimov of the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since then, many researchers around the world, including teams at NREL, have confirmed MEG in many different semiconductor quantum dots. However, nearly all of these positive MEG results, with a few exceptions, were based on ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopic measurements of isolated quantum dots dispersed as particles in liquid colloidal solutions.
The new results published in Science by the NREL research team is the first report of MEG manifested as an external photocurrent quantum yield greater than 100 percent measured in operating quantum dot solar cells at low light intensity; these cells showed significant power conversion efficiencies (defined as the total power generated divided by the input power) as high as 4.5 percent with simulated sunlight. While these solar cells are un-optimized and thus exhibit relatively low power conversion efficiency (which is a product of the photocurrent and photovoltage), the demonstration of MEG in the photocurrent of a solar cell has important implications because it opens new and unexplored approaches to improve solar cell efficiencies.
Another important aspect of the new results is that they agree with the previous time-resolved spectroscopic measurements of MEG and hence validate these earlier MEG results. Excellent agreement follows when the external quantum efficiency is corrected for the number of photons that are actually absorbed in the photoactive regions of the cell. In this case, the determined quantum yield is called the internal quantum efficiency. The internal quantum efficiency is greater than the external quantum efficiency because a significant fraction of the incident photons are lost through reflection and absorption in non-photocurrent producing regions of the cell. A peak internal quantum yield of 130% was found taking these reflection and absorption losses into account.
More information: Peak External Photocurrent Quantum Efficiency Exceeding 100% via MEG in a Quantum Dot Solar Cell, Science 16 December 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6062 pp. 1530-1533. DOI: 10.1126/science.1209845
ABSTRACT
Multiple exciton generation (MEG) is a process that can occur in semiconductor nanocrystals, or quantum dots (QDs), whereby absorption of a photon bearing at least twice the bandgap energy produces two or more electron-hole pairs. Here, we report on photocurrent enhancement arising from MEG in lead selenide (PbSe) QD-based solar cells, as manifested by an external quantum efficiency (the spectrally resolved ratio of collected charge carriers to incident photons) that peaked at 114 ± 1% in the best device measured. The associated internal quantum efficiency (corrected for reflection and absorption losses) was 130%. We compare our results with transient absorption measurements of MEG in isolated PbSe QDs and find reasonable agreement. Our findings demonstrate that MEG charge carriers can be collected in suitably designed QD solar cells, providing ample incentive to better understand MEG within isolated and coupled QDs as a research path to enhancing the efficiency of solar light harvesting technologies.
Provided by National Renewable Energy Laboratory
micro-macro entanglement
Quantum cats are hard to see
International team of researchers explain the difficulty of detecting quantum effects
Public release date: 16-Dec-2011
Are there parallel universes? And how will we know? This is one of many fascinations people hold about quantum physics. Researchers from the universities of Calgary and Waterloo in Canada and the University of Geneva in Switzerland have published a paper this week in Physical Review Letters explaining why we don’t usually see the physical effects of quantum mechanics.
“Quantum physics works fantastically well on small scales but when it comes to larger scales, it is nearly impossible to count photons very well. We have demonstrated that this makes it hard to see these effects in our daily life,” says Dr. Christoph Simon, who teaches in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary and is one of the lead authors of the paper entitled: Coarse-graining makes it hard to see micro-macro entanglement.
It’s well known that quantum systems are fragile. When a photon interacts with its environment, even just a tiny bit, the superposition is destroyed. Superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum physics that says that systems can exist in all their possible states simultaneously. But when measured, only the result of one of the states is given.
This effect is known as decoherence, and it has been studied intensively over the last few decades. The idea of decoherence as a thought experiment was raised by Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, in his famous cat paradox: a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time.
But, according to the authors of this study, it turns out that decoherence is not the only reason why quantum effects are hard to see. Seeing quantum effects requires extremely precise measurements. Simon and his team studied a concrete example for such a “cat” by using a particular quantum state involving a large number of photons.
“We show that in order to see the quantum nature of this state, one has to be able to count the number of photons in it perfectly,” says Simon. “This becomes more and more difficult as the total number of photons is increased. Distinguishing one photon from two photons is within reach of current technology, but distinguishing a million photons from a million plus one is not.”
act 3
back in the real world, the game hits and people love it. tho it has no corporate backing, it goes viral. music and fashions change and a distinctive culture grows up right away. as the game grows, so do the boy’s ambitions. he is both pope and king of this new quantum universe. funny quantum things start happening in the real world. the press picks up on it. the right picks up on it. there is an outcry. quantum physics is demonized. laws are passed, or brushed off and creatively applied. demonstrations happen. there is police brutality. more people gather. the boy feels dissed when the dominant culture brands him a devil. the girl is focused on seeing the game to a position of self-sufficiency (critical mass) and doesn’t care, but the boy is looking to the future, and decides that he needs to take control of everything because of the threat from the dominant culture.
inside the game, lots of players are learning social movement and resistance skills, and more players are working their way to level ! and going off to create their own worlds and recruit their own players. the outcry grows shriller and more frantic. the repressions grow more brutal. the crowds grow and grow. quantum effects become more frequent. more laws, more crowds, more riots, more disappearances.
the boy is approached by the other side and decides they can be used for his own ends, and cuts them in. people use the skills they have been learning playing the game to change the standing of the people. the dominant culture falls back in confusion, but come back with more force and repression, isolating the rebels and cutting off vital supply chains.
they start to dictate policy, the boy changes things in the game, altering rules and missions, twisting the lessons, identifying and capturing certain types of players. he discovers the sabotage the replacement programmer inserted into the game and confronts him. they join forces, blame the engine programmer for the sabotage and call into question the intent and purpose of the quantum kernel.
the girl stands up to him and throws him out, but she is too weak and disorganized, and he returns with backup, leading the call for the kernel’s confiscation because of its vast power, only to try and steal it himself, and in a struggle over a decoherence bomb, sets it off and destroys the original kernel.
the dominant culture is poised to deal the final blow to the resistance, cutting off all outlets, all communications, all supplies, all power, so there is no more game except on individual computers running on batteries or solar, because the internet itself has been shut down.
then a miracle happens. the quantum effects keep happening in the real world. the game’s internal communications structures are still intact, and people are still using the quantum skills they’ve developed, and still coming out in force. but the perception of the masses has changed, and the powers of the dominant culture suddenly shatter because they’re emperor’s new clothes. so the remains of the dominant culture squeeze itself into their gated communities and fight among themselves for limited resources while the new dominant culture enshrines the new institutions it has developed in response to the repression of the old order., and people quietly create the world they want to live in house by house.
and the story closes by letting the reader choose the ending.
the game: level !n
level !n
players leave level ! when a master gives them their final quest, a three-parter.
players use their quantum skills to create a world with npcs and quests on the horizontal level.
players go thru all the levels helping create other level ! players, intervening in gameplay disguised as npcs.
players go into the real, nongame world and spread quantum thinking, acting as a virus.
the game: level !
level !
not everyone makes it to this level. and of those who do, the creation of a custom heaven is the end of the game. however, masters show themselves to anyone with sufficient mastery of quantum skills, no matter which side they played on in the horizontal level.
this isn’t the fog level introduction to the horizontal level. that was the pale shadow of this one. this level looks like heaven. it begins like fog, but players quickly sculpt it to whatever environment they choose, using their formidable quantum skills. everything is done with quantum skills at this level.
this is the metalevel. the masters live here. they are npcs of ultimate power and wisdom, and welcome players with promises of real and urgent work to be done.
first there is a review of each player’s progress thru the game. the early lessons from levels 1 and 2 are discussed. then the player observes from the clouds the antarctica they have been playing thru, identify themselves in their most crucial moments, watch their development and see how it fits with the growth of other players. masters and players discuss the lessons learned, and make recommendations and choices of lessons still to learn.
this is a training school for adepts. players are here to learn the mastery of quantum rules – advanced quantum magic. communication and storytelling and tv presence. rhetoric and cointelpro and psych speak.. rehistory. the masters teach them how to increase and broaden their game skills into the nongame world as fully realized quantum agents.
quantum lens
delayed choice experiments, when you set the parameters after the test is run
A new ‘lens’ for looking at quantum behavior
December 14, 2011
(PhysOrg.com) — In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers Daniel Terno (Macquarie University, Australia) and Radu Ionicioiu (Institute of Quantum Computing, Canada) provide a new perspective on fundamental notions of quantum physics.
Terno and Radu proposed taking a new approach to understanding wave-particle duality – a cornerstone phenomenon of quantum mechanics.
At the heart of quantum theory is the idea that objects in the quantum world will sometimes behave like particles, and other times behave like waves. This ability to combine exclusive properties is called a quantum superposition and is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics.
Duality has been the foundation of many ongoing debates in the physics community, the most famous of which was between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Ultimately the issue physicists face is that you can’t observe both wave-like and particle-like properties with a single apparatus.
Terno and Ionicioiu have tried to tackle this issue by asking – what if when performing experiments, parts of the apparatus are absent and present at the same time. What the researchers propose is that you can select the property being tested (wave or particle) even after the test is performed.
Known as a delayed-choice experiment, the photon in this experiment shows a “morphing” between “particle” and “wave,” supporting the conclusion that these properties are not inherent, but merely a reflection on how we “look” at it.
“Unlike the traditional approach, in this quantum-controlled experiment a single set-up is used to measure complementary behaviors, and they are revealed by matching the data about a photon with the data about the apparatus. What we find is that behavior is in the eye of the observer, ” Terno summarizes.
The intriguing results have caught the attention of science writers around the world, including French journalist Michael Schirber. Schirber recently wrote that this new thought experiment “demonstrates with logical precision the futility of trying to label the photon as a particle or a wave”.
Terno says the thought experiment was designed for exactly this purpose, to look at an old question through a new lens. “We tried to shed some light by looking at the problem from a novel perspective,” says Terno. “It was a perfect testing ground for our new tools. Once you get them, you’ll start to apply them to more and more problems, and this is what we are going to do next.”
Provided by Macquarie University
quantum weapons
quantum technology is already here.
The spookytechnologies make use of mostly
sidestepped quantum phenomena that emerge from
the formal theory but still perplex us. These surround
the nature of the universe itself, how it is
interconnected, and how the quantum world becomes
the classical world. Measurement is one example. In
contrast to a classical object (like watching an apple
fall), a quantum object becomes fundamentally altered
after observation. When exactly does the universe
stop acting quantum ( “decoherence”) and start
behaving classically? Through exquisite control can
we make a system stay “quantum coherent” far into
classical territory? A dramatic natural example is
superconductivity, a quantum many-body
phenomenon where long-range phase coherence
allows practically zero electric current resistance at
temperatures well above absolute zero.
The king of spooky quantumness is quantum
entanglement. As physicists define it,
“entanglement” refers to a peculiar quality of the
known universe whereby quantum objects in certain
situations cannot be described separately, even
though they may be separated in space. In other
words, if an atom in London is entangled with an
atom in Tokyo, they are still one quantum system,
which can only be understood together. Entanglement
is a multi-object generalization of quantum
superposition, another astounding quantum trait,
where a particle can exist in two states at once (here
and there, up and down). Both properties have been
experimentally confirmed.
Spookytechnology covers more than quantum
computers. Comparatively simple cryptographic
systems based on quantum entanglement have already
achieved practical deployment. Beyond information
technology, specialized hardware devices or systems
based on quantum coherent control or entanglement
are also in development. Consider the case of what
some call “quantum imaging.” An example where
the super-saturated “quantum” becomes a detriment,
“quantum imaging” can refer to new ideas for
entanglement-based sub-wavelength imaging and
lithography. Yet magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
departments across the world have been called
“quantum imaging” groups long before the advent of
entanglement-based design ideas. MRI has always
been quantum, involving the manipulation of spins
in the body, which are purely quantum aspects of
atomic nuclei or electrons. These quantum
possibilities weren’t dreamed of when nuclear
magnetic resonance was conceived.
But quantum
physics will never become intuitive, even if it
becomes commonplace. If we put 1995 as the “this
can be done” moment for spookytechnology, that
would put a 2010-15 time frame to mainstream
industry penetration. The scope and depth of these
historical and scientific developments should not go
unrecognized. Spookytechnology will find its place
in the increasingly dense line of major technological
revolutions began with the industrial revolution in
the eighteenth century: quantum, info, bio, nano,
spooky.
quantum radar
Embodiments of systems and methods for radar systems using entangled quantum particles, referred to as quantum radar, are disclosed herein. Entangled beams allow the absorption spectrum and the resolution limit of quantum radar systems to be selected independently of one another. Thus, while classical radar systems must compromise between range and resolution, quantum radar systems can simultaneously achieve the low attenuation/high range associated with a long wave length and the high resolution associated with a short wave length.
theological entanglement
what does quantum religion look like?
Theological entanglement is a way of reflecting on our relationships—all of our relationships, at once, together. When we do this, we get to such an impossibly infinite place that, I think, we resort to God language. The metaphors of the divine, of a love that permeates all things instantaneously, an embrace that holds everything everywhere in its mindfulness, a spirit (even a holy ghost) that has the character of spooky action at a distance is a metaphor by which can gather our very mysterious interdependencies (as creatures) on each other.
We are constituted, in every moment, by our relations. Some of them we compose, but they comprise the conditions in which we are composed. Theological entanglement is a form of what’s called “relational theology.” Entanglement is meant to give a more physical, and spooky edge to our interconnectedness. This isn’t just about the apophasis of an infinite God, but about the element of unknowability in all of us—as creatures made in the image of the unknowable. It looks, even from the vantage point of quantum indeterminacy, that every creature has an element of the unknowable or unpredictable to it. For every electron, you’re unable to measure (simultaneously) its location and its momentum.
The universe that is showing itself in various fields, (not just quantum physics, but the fractals of chaos theory, for example) is a universe far more appealing to theology than was the universe of the past 300 to 400 years—made up of bits of dead, impenetrable matter, interacting predictably in a mega-machine.
It’s possible to avoid God-talk for long stretches of time. Any canny Christian can do that, in order to make friends and influence people. Or just to get relief from bad clichés. But, at a certain point, one has to face up to the profundity and brilliance of the conceptual work that was done in the Western world for more than 1500 years, when it was dominated by the discipline of theology.
But we don’t want to reduce post-Christian criticisms of Christian idolatries to mere anti-faith, either. It wouldn’t do justice to the depths of the agnostic and atheist traditions which are, themselves, deeply prophetic traditions. Still, I think it’s important to stay mindful of God-tropes. Being mindful of these metaphors doesn’t necessarily cause us to believe in them. But we might find that the whole language of belief falls short of what’s meant by faith, anyhow—faith has never been a matter of little bits of knowledge parading as certainty.
quantum activism
i love it.
Quantum Activism is the idea of transforming ourselves and our societies in accordance with the transforming messages of quantum physics and the new paradigm.
So what are these transforming messages of quantum physics? First, consciousness is the ground of all being, and all objects of our experiences (of sensing, thinking, feeling, and intuition) are quantum possibilities for consciousness to choose from.
Second, if we choose what is known, what is conditioned in us from prior experiences, we are choosing from our ego-consciousness. But if we choose what is unknown, what is unmanifest in our prior experiences, we are choosing from what traditions call God-consciousness (in scientific language we call it quantum consciousness). Choosing from God-consciousness requires quantum leaps (movement from point A to point B without going through intermediate steps), nonlocality (signalless communication), and tangled hierarchy (causal relationships of circularity) (read my recent book God is not Dead).
God is not dead! The existence of God has been verified by much scientific evidence.
In the third message of quantum physics, the evolution of consciousness (read my most recent book Creative Evolution)is taking us toward a greater and greater capacity for processing the meaning of our lives and the world around us. The immediate future of evolution is promising to take us from our current preoccupation with the rational mind to an intuitive mind that values the archetypes; such as good, beauty, truth, justice, and love. And gives us the ability to process the meaning of our lives through these archetypes.
So the goal of the quantum activist is to explore quantum possibilities and manifest these archetypes—good, beauty, truth, justice, and love—in his or her life as far as one can go. The means a quantum activist uses to achieve this goal are threefold—right thinking, right living, and right livelihood.
Right thinking consists of understanding the paradigm shift from a user’s point of view and helping others in our environment to do so. Right living consists of walking the talk, manifesting our understanding in how we live, becoming guiding examples for others in our environment. As such it takes a lot of quantum leaps, openness to nonlocality, and the desire to change hierarchical relationships into tangled ones. And right livelihood consists of earning our living in a way that is congruent with our modes of thinking and living and helping our entire society to achieve this congruence.
and from somewhere else
Mystics, contrary to religionists, are always saying that reality is not two things — God and the world — but one thing, consciousness. It is a monistic view of reality based on consciousness that mystics claim to directly intuit.
The problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monistic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. And then, quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics.
So now we have science within consciousness, a new paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness that is gradually replacing the old materialist science. Why? Not only because you can’t understand quantum physics without this new metaphysics but also because the new paradigm resolves many other paradoxes of the old paradigm and explains much anomalous data.” ~Dr Amit Goswami
author’s note: antarctica map
another map. this time with rivers. so many things to consider when making a world. like where are the people going to live? if you were designing a world, where would you put the population centers? on the first map i made a stab at it, but you’ve got to look at the elevations and the rivers and how deep the ports are going to be, and whether the land is going to rise or sink and whether your area will silt up or flood.
all these various parts of antarctica will be drastically different from each other, even tho they’ll all be subject to long dark winters, and the most temperate part of the place will be the northern fringes, especially the peninsula.
so even tho everyone except the plains tribes will fish and farm and raise ruminant animals and build houses of wood, they’ll all have pretty much the same resources. except for there’s coal in transantarctica, and oil and gas in the inner part of the ross sea and amery bay.
i haven’t yet found names for the seas around adelie, or the inner sea, and indeed haven’t come up with a name for the inner ross sea. these will come as i consult more maps, or better yet make things up.
some thoughts on the process of writing this.
i’ve only been at it officially for about 3 weeks, and i’ve done tons of research in all the various topics this story will address – antarctica, the occupy movement, quantum physics, video gaming. it’s exhausting, but i bound out of bed in the morning just thinking about it. and it’s all coming together, but what a mass of details i have to master in order to write about it with any kind of sense at all.
the stuff i’m putting up on this blog about the plot is basically my first thoughts. you’re actually seeing some of this as it comes out of my head (author’s notes) and you’re seeing the plot as it gets worked out. but this is such a strange story that it can’t really be presented straightforward.
it’s a quantum story, and everything happens at once.
it’s more important to follow the principles of quantum mechanics in building the story than it is to follow a timeline, because in quantum physics there is no time. it all happens simultaneously, and it’s our focus that determines the apparent time stream.
so, for instance, in the game.
the game is giving me fits. because it’s a massively multiple game, for millions of simultaneous players around the globe, and there are very few rules about what you can and can’t do in the game. the only limitations are within you the player. so i’m having to construct a video game.
i don’t even play video games anymore. i stopped with leisure suit larry and jazz jackrabbit and myst. so i had to learn about game programming. and game level design.
that’s why i love the library. and internet search engines.
back to the game. i’m in the middle of constructing the game document, the written description of the game and all its salient points. but this game isn’t one long tunnel to the end that can be described by ‘and then, you…’ because at each turn you can do fucking anything you like. there is no one path, or one right answer, or even a best path or answer. because the outcome of the game depends entirely on you the player. and you can spend all the time you want playing your own version of the game, and never once address the game’s actual purpose.
the game’s actual purpose is to teach you the player how to function in a quantum world, how to master the art of quantum thinking, and how to create the world you want to have.
which is a tall order, i know. but not impossible. in fact, it’s quantumly inevitable.
up until yesterday i was going to have the tester play the game. in the beginning i was going to have ‘people’ play the game, but i realized that it wouldn’t be consistent enough unless it was one character. one guy playing from start to finish. but i can’t do that, because there are so many possibilities for the game that to track one would only give you the barest idea of the potential of the game.
and then there’s the interaction between the boy and the girl. the two who had the quantum experience that started it all. i need for their relationship to develop thru the whole story, and can’t take that much time off to have some third party play the game without them.
so they have to be playing the game. both of them in there making unique decisions, having an entirely different game experience, learning different things. that way i can have more experience and more choices and two branching paths.
and i will need others playing the game, filling other roles, showcasing other possibilities, developing other skills and other versions of the game.
so i’ve got to have a passel of characters.
boy
girl
kernel programmer
replacement programmer
them
that’s all i have so far. them is rather nebulous, but at this point everybody is an npc to me, because i’m just laying them out. when it comes time to write them they’ll become people. their states will be chosen by being observed, and they’ll appear as they are in the story.
i could do it that way. just materialize them into the story. but it won’t make sense, so i’ll give them backstories and real pivotal roles in the story. because there are so many damn crises that it’s not funny.
the talents are developed by playing over and over, until thinking quantum becomes a habit. but in the story, we only need to play the game once, because it’s a quantum game. the act of the boy and girl playing the game is the same thing, quantumly, as the universe of players playing a million times each.
and that’s where it gets mystical.
how the hell can i write this? it’s already too complex and it’s only going to get more entangled as i figure it out and the pieces fall together.
but i can’t stop because the pieces are falling together. the whole thing makes sense, and each part enriches the other, so i know i’m on the right track. and my little voice is jumping up and down.
antarctica and a video game
quantum physics and the occupy movement
what have they got in common?
the links between quantum physics and the occupy movement are obvious to me. horizontal organization and bottom up politics is very like quantum physics, but at the moment i’m having trouble saying why. it’s very obvious in my head, however. that’s the challenge. how to make all this into a simple fairy tale, how to find the places where all these things intersect and describe that.
okay, time for dinner. i just wanted to set down some of the process i’m in now. i’m still trying to work thru the game and describe it, just taking one path and following it, even tho that’s against the spirit of quantum mechanics (multiple paths), just to get it written down so i can go on to the next part, which is the reaction of the outside world to the game, the actual action, and the real crisis. but i’ve got to get thru scene 2 before i move to scene 3 or there’ll be hell to pay.
and it’s not like the scenes will be run one after the other, either. there won’t be a break to go play the game and then come back to the real world. the three scenes will be all tangled up, as is quantum mechanics, and it’ll take a better storyteller than i to put it together.
which is why i’m letting the fairies write this one.
quantum art
artists are at a great place right now – being able to visualize what a quantum world looks like, creating the logo.
The term “quantum object”, although regularly used in physics, is really an oxymoron. An “object” is something that lives completely in the paradigm of classical physics: It has an independent reality in itself, it behaves deterministically, and it has definite physical properties, such as occupying a well-defined volume in space and time. For the “quantum object” all those seemingly self-evident truths become false: Its reality is one that is relative to the observer, the principle of causality is violated, and other features of materiality such as clear boundaries in space and time, being objectively located or even possessing identity, do not pertain.
Unable to perceive the world on the quantum level without sophisticated technology, our intuition about the nature of reality is shaped by the comparative crudeness of our unaided senses. If we, for example, observe an apple falling from a tree, we naturally assume that the apple has an identity and is one and the same thing before, during, and after the fall. Quantum physics, however, teaches us that there is no real continuity of “objects” around us. The image we perceive as “the apple” is actually the rapid accumulation of an astronomical number of single, indivisible quanta of experience, or events. These quanta of experience are individual little flashes of light that our brain automatically connects into familiar objects that then appear to us as constant.
In the most basic manifestation of entanglement, two twin-like particles share a connection that is deeper than anything thought possible in classical physics. The two particles’ states are tied together as if they were located at the same spot, even though they might be separated by light-years. It has been hypothesized that phenomena showing similar connections between humans, like extrasensory perception, are manifestations of such entanglement.
Quantum physics is the scientific foundation of practically everything we encounter in the world, including the miracle of life. Despite its overwhelming importance and its fundamental status in science, quantum theory remains philosophically extraordinarily problematic. After struggling with it for the last hundred years, we cannot escape the fact that there simply are no consistent mental images we can create to understand the world as it is portrayed in quantum physics. I believe that the advent of quantum physics in the sciences and the rise of modernism in the arts in the early twentieth century represent two facets of the same profound shift in the cultural evolution of humankind. The uneasiness many of us experience when dealing with either illustrates how little we have grappled yet with the consequences of this paradigm shift.
the game: the horizontal level
players go thru the wormholes in groups, to quest. you can visit an unlimited number of worlds in the horizontal level. you can explore and establish trade, or join raiding parties and wreak havok, or anything you like. you learn different physics skills on every world and practice communicating thru the wormholes, including quantum tunneling, clairvoyance, and action at a distance.
one of the skills you learn is the ability to tweak the game conditions in that world. starting at the horizontal level it’s possible to take over and remake a world your way, changing the rules and resetting the quests. a world so altered becomes a new world, with you as god, taking its place in the multiverse of the horizontal level. like other worlds, it is accessible from level 4, and can be cross-linked to other worlds by the players.
eventually you get stranded in an alternative antarctica when your wormhole closes unexpectedly. in this antarctica, the ice has recently melted away and a vast and varied land has emerged. you can go where you want in this new land, and do what you like using your many skills, and there are special challenges you must pass before you exit the level. gameplay is difficult and strenuous, and you must solve problems using quantum tools and working with others to overcome obstacles. faster and more complete change is possible when players build cross-challenge alliances.
the cut scene
as the level begins, you are drifting on the southern ocean. it’s very cold, and you are thankful there’s no wind – it’s as calm as glass thru the drake passage. and this is good because you are adrift on a tiny, leaky raft, with only a few provisions. among the most helpful are a blanket and a stick. it is summer, and the sky stays light all evening. eventually – you’re not sure – but you think you see land far to the south, so you head that way. seabirds appear and follow your raft. so do sharks. as you approach land, the wind picks up, the waves grow rough, and you try to outrun a storm blowing from the west. but your raft breaks apart – too far from shore to swim. the water is cold, and you quickly lose command of your arms and legs, but a passing seal notices you and shepherds you to shore – mostly dead
back to the land
you wake in a crude stone shelter wrapped in seal skins. strange players tend your scrapes, congratulate you on making it to shore alive, and fill you in on where you are and what’s going on.
you’re in an ex glacial valley full of barren rock. a stream trickles down the middle, all that is left of a mile high river of ice. there might still be a glacier or two far inland. a few tufts of grass grow in sheltered areas. penguins nest here, and seals, and there is plentiful fish. there are a few other players; they seem to have come here as refugees from the harsh northlands, seeking survival and a better life. conditions are harsh, there are frequent storms, there isn’t enough to eat, it is cold and dark for six months of the year, and life is short and brutal. it’s the garden spot of the planet at the moment, however, so you get to work making your living.
the grind is survival – hunting and fishing, making things grow. but hunting and fishing are not firstperson shooter skills. in antarctica, the skills you learn are cooperative and quantum. there is always someone who will trade you something you desperately need for anything you have, no matter how pitiful, but you will make a better trade if you are honest and generous. you can trap and kill to find your food, but you will get better quality food if you negotiate with the animals. you can plant seeds if you can find any, but you will get better results if you work to improve the land and coax the fairies to grow things. you can erect massive walls against the storms, but you’ll get better results if you talk to the wind and ask it to go easy on your shelter.
your task is to cooperate with everybody, to learn strength in numbers, and to use your quantum skills to help terraform antarctica. as you practice your skills you gain the power to change the climate, the ocean’s circulation, even the tilt of the poles to bring antarctica to a more temperate latitude. you can leave at any time, and are free to behave any way you want. there are opportunities to cheat and steal if you like, but in this environment the victim usually dies.
alien attack
evil vampire aliens have almost captured the planet and they have to be found and fought wherever they appear in antarctica. the grind is searching and finding clues. finding them takes you all over, gives you essential knowledge about the way things are, and teach you about hunches and intuition. you learn visualization and extrasensory communications skills, as well as the use of force fields and psychic weapons. captured aliens reveal vital information about their mission without being waterboarded, but you can torture them if you want to.
droid life
in a vast gray city there is a vast gray corporation where you are a droid. based on a short interview you are assigned a job title and duties, and are expected to give 110% to the job. the grind is makework. you have bills to pay and mouths to feed at home, and you’re in the hole with all kinds of credit card debt. the wolf is constantly at your door, but you have friends and family who help you find solutions to your problems, and get back at your employers – evil vampire aliens. your quest is to find ways of getting all your work done and still have time to enjoy yourself.
revolution
you are caught in a bleak totalitarian society where the hopeful thing to do is die, but you keep incarnating again in equally bad situations. the evil vampire aliens run everything to benefit themselves, and have so oppressed the people that the death rate is enormous. your grind is to find something to eat and stay away from the forces of evil. you starve to death, are beaten and stabbed and robbed and shot and run over and exploded by practically everybody you meet. teams of riot police with tanks and grenades mow down desperate starving masses in the squares, and players cower in their homes in fear of being turned in to the secret police. your only hope is to join the resistance and defeat the aliens. you learn all about urban nonviolence and the techniques of social movements. you join different workgroups and help create alternative food supply chains, healthcare, education, a new money supply and economics based on a horizontal structure. your challenge is to help recreate society and destroy the power of the evil vampire aliens.
players go thru the wormholes in groups, to quest. you can visit an unlimited number of worlds in the horizontal level. you can explore and establish trade, or join raiding parties and wreak havok, or anything you like. you learn different physics skills on every world and practice communicating thru the wormholes, including quantum tunneling, clairvoyance, and action at a distance.
one of the skills you learn is the ability to tweak the game conditions in that world. starting at the horizontal level it’s possible to take over and remake a world your way, changing the rules and resetting the quests. a world so altered becomes a new world, with you as god, taking its place in the multiverse of the horizontal level. like other worlds, it is accessible from level 4, and can be cross-linked to other worlds by the players.
eventually you get stranded in an alternative antarctica when your wormhole closes unexpectedly. in this antarctica, the ice has recently melted away and a vast and varied land has emerged. you can go where you want in this new land, and do what you like using your many skills, and there are special challenges you must pass before you exit the level. gameplay is difficult and strenuous, and you must solve problems using quantum tools and working with others to overcome obstacles. faster and more complete change is possible when players build cross-challenge alliances.
the cut scene
as the level begins, you are drifting on the southern ocean. it’s very cold, and you are thankful there’s no wind – it’s as calm as glass thru the drake passage. and this is good because you are adrift on a tiny, leaky raft, with only a few provisions. among the most helpful are a blanket and a stick. it is summer, and the sky stays light all evening. eventually – you’re not sure – but you think you see land far to the south, so you head that way. seabirds appear and follow your raft. so do sharks. as you approach land, the wind picks up, the waves grow rough, and you try to outrun a storm blowing from the west. but your raft breaks apart – too far from shore to swim. the water is cold, and you quickly lose command of your arms and legs, but a passing seal notices you and shepherds you to shore – mostly dead.
nano-biotics
but won’t bacteria grow resistant to nanoparticles too?
Forget antibiotics, try nanoparticles instead
03 December 2011FORGET antibiotics, let’s try nanoparticles. That’s according to DARPA, the US military’s research arm, which says that rather than spend money on new antibiotics, which only work until bacterial strains grow resistant, “readily adaptable nanotherapeutics” can fight infection instead.
The agency has called for proposals to find ways to use small interfering RNA (siRNA) to fight bacteria. These scraps of genetic code seek out their mirror image within cells, such as bacteria, and silence them. This stops protein production and leads to cell death.
DARPA is seeking ideas for adaptable nanoparticles that can be “reprogrammed on the fly” by loading up specific siRNA to deal with outbreaks among troops.
As with GPS systems and the internet, this innovation might benefit the military initially, but eventually become a model for mainstream medication.
at room temperature yet
wow this is impressive. quantum universe here we come.
Two Diamonds Linked by Strange Quantum Entanglement
Clara Moskowitz
Live Science
Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:00 CST
© Science/AAAS
The vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds are entangled at room temperature by beaming laser light at them (green). The researchers verified this entanglement by studying the subsequent laser pulses beamed through the system.Scientists have linked two diamonds in a mysterious process called entanglement that is normally only seen on the quantum scale.
Entanglement is so weird that Einstein dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.” It’s a strange effect where one object gets connected to another so that even if they are separated by large distances, an action performed on one will affect the other. Entanglement usually occurs with subatomic particles, and was predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the realm of the very small.
But now physicists have succeeded in entangling two macroscopic diamonds, demonstrating that quantum mechanical effects are not limited to the microscopic scale.
“I think it’s an important step into a new regime of thinking about quantum phenomena,” physicist Ian Walmsley of England’s University of Oxford said.”That is, in this regime of the bigger world, room temperatures, ambient conditions. Although the phenomenon was expected to exist, actually being able to observe it in such a system we think is quite exciting.”
Another study recently used quantum entanglement to teleport bits of light from one place to another. And other researchers have succeeded in entangling macroscopic objects before, but they have generally been under special circumstances, prepared in special ways, and cooled to cryogenic temperatures. In the new achievement, the diamonds were large and not prepared in any special way, the researchers said.
“It’s big enough you can see it,” Walmsley told LiveScience of the diamonds.”They’re sitting on the table, out in plain view. The laboratory isn’t particularly cold or particularly hot, it’s just your everyday room.”
Walmsley, along with a team of physicists led by Oxford graduate student Ka Chung Lee, accomplished this feat by entangling the vibration of two diamond crystals. To do so, the researchers set up an apparatus to send a laser pulse at both diamonds simultaneously. Sometimes, the laser light changed color, to a lower frequency, after hitting the diamonds. That told the scientists it had lost a bit of energy.
Because energy must be conserved in closed systems (where there’s no input of outside energy), the researchers knew that the “lost” energy had been used in some way. In fact, the energy had been converted into vibrational motion for one of the diamonds (albeit motion that is too small to observe visually). However, the scientists had no way of knowing which diamond was vibrating.
Then, the researchers sent a second pulse of laser light through the now-vibrating system. This time, if the light emerged with a color of higher frequency, it meant it had gained the energy back by absorbing it from the diamond, stopping its vibration.
The scientists had set up two separate detectors to measure the laser light – one for each diamond.
If the two diamonds weren’t entangled, the researchers would expect each detector to register a changed laser beam about 50 percent of the time. It’s similar to tossing a coin, where random chance would lead to heads about half the time and tails the other half the time on average.
Instead, because the two diamonds were linked, they found that one detector measured the change every time, and the other detector never fired. The two diamonds, it seemed, were so connected they reacted as a single entity, rather than two individual objects.
The scientists report their results in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Science.
“Recent advances in quantum control techniques have allowed entanglement to be observed for physical systems with increasing complexity and separation distance,” University of Michigan physicist Luming Duan, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an accompanying essay in the same issue of Science.”Lee et al. take an important step in this direction by demonstrating entanglement between oscillation patterns of atoms – phonon modes – of two diamond samples of millimeter size at room temperature, separated by a macroscopic distance of about 15 cm.”
In addition to furthering scientists’ understanding of entanglement, the research could help develop faster computers called photonic processors, relying on quantum effects, said Oxford physicist Michael Sprague, another team member on the project.
“The long-term goal is that if you can harness the power of quantum phenomena, you can potentially do things more efficiently than is currently possible,” Sprague said.
parallel worlds
Prior to many-worlds, reality had always been viewed as a single unfolding history. Many-worlds, however, views reality as a many-branched tree, wherein every possible quantum outcome is realised.
Some versions of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed a process of “collapse” in which an indeterminate quantum system would probabilistically collapse down onto, or select, just one determinate outcome to “explain” this phenomenon of observation. Wavefunction collapse was widely regarded as artificial and ad-hoc, so an alternative interpretation in which the behavior of measurement could be understood from more fundamental physical principles was considered desirable.
Everett’s Ph.D. work provided such an alternative interpretation. Everett noted that for a composite system – for example a subject (the “observer” or measuring apparatus) observing an object (the “observed” system, such as a particle) – the statement that either the observer or the observed has a well-defined state is meaningless; in modern parlance the observer and the observed have become entangled; we can only specify the state of one relative to the other, i.e., the state of the observer and the observed are correlated after the observation is made. This led Everett to derive from the unitary, deterministic dynamics alone (i.e., without assuming wavefunction collapse) the notion of a relativity of states.
The subsequent evolution of each pair of relative subject-object states proceeds with complete indifference as to the presence or absence of the other elements, as if wavefunction collapse has occurred, which has the consequence that later observations are always consistent with the earlier observations. Thus the appearance of the object’s wavefunction’s collapse has emerged from the unitary, deterministic theory itself. (This answered Einstein’s early criticism of quantum theory, that the theory should define what is observed, not for the observables to define the theory).[22] Since the wavefunction appears to have collapsed then, Everett reasoned, there was no need to actually assume that it had collapsed. And so, invoking Occam’s razor, he removed the postulate of wavefunction collapse from the theory.
- MWI removes the observer-dependent role in the quantum measurement process by replacing wavefunction collapse with quantum decoherence. Since the role of the observer lies at the heart of most if not all “quantum paradoxes,” this automatically resolves a number of problems; see for example Schrödinger’s cat thought-experiment, the EPR paradox, von Neumann‘s “boundary problem” and even wave-particle duality. Quantum cosmology also becomes intelligible, since there is no need anymore for an observer outside of the universe.
- MWI is realist, deterministic, local theory, akin to classical physics (including the theory of relativity), at the expense of losing counterfactual definiteness. MWI achieves this by removing wavefunction collapse, which is indeterministic and non-local, from the deterministic and local equations of quantum theory.[48][49]
- MWI (or other, broader multiverse considerations) provides a context for the anthropic principle which may provide an explanation for the fine-tuned universe.[50][51]
- MWI, being a decoherent formulation, is axiomatically more streamlined than the Copenhagen and other collapse interpretations; and thus favoured under certain interpretations of Occam’s razor.[52] Of course there are other decoherent interpretations that also possess this advantage with respect to the collapse interpretations.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, the mathematics of quantum mechanics allows one to predict probabilities for the occurrence of various events. In the many-worlds interpretation, all these events occur simultaneously. What meaning should be given to these probability calculations? And why do we observe, in our history, that the events with a higher computed probability seem to have occurred more often? One answer to these questions is to say that there is a probability measure on the space of all possible universes, where a possible universe is a complete path in the tree of branching universes. This is indeed what the calculations seem to give. Then we should expect to find ourselves in a universe with a relatively high probability rather than a relatively low probability: even though all outcomes of an experiment occur, they do not occur in an equal way. As an interpretation which (like other interpretations) is consistent with the equations, it is hard to find testable predictions of MWI.
Another speculation is that the separate worlds remain weakly coupled (e.g., by gravity) permitting “communication between parallel universes”.
The many-worlds interpretation could be one possible way to resolve the paradoxes [84] that one would expect to arise if time travel turns out to be permitted by physics (permitting closed timelike curves and thus violating causality). Entering the past would itself be a quantum event causing branching, and therefore the timeline accessed by the time traveller simply would be another timeline of many. In that sense, it would make the Novikov self-consistency principle unnecessary.
the quantum world
so what does a quantum world look like? it’s a place where we acknowledge the reality of the quantum world, and redefine ordinary reality to fit.
it’s a world where action at a distance, time travel, and parallel universes are matter of fact.
waves and particles
One way to resolve this seeming paradox of waves without medium is to note that there remains another kind of wave altogether. A wave with which we are all familiar, yet which exists without any medium in the ordinary sense. This is the computer-generated wave. Let us examine a computer-generated sound wave.
The “music” has traveled from the recording studio to yourliving room. Through what medium did the music wave travel? To a degree, you might say that it traveled as electricity through the wires from the keyboard to the computer. But you might just as well say it traveled by truck along the highway to the store. In fact, this “sound wave” never existed as anything more than a digital representation of a hypothetical sound wave which itself never existed. It is, first and last, a string of numbers. Therefore, although it will produce wave like effects when placed in your stereo, this wave never needed any medium other than the computer memory to spread itself all over the music loving world.
Although his system achieved a result that was exactly and perfectly in accord with observed natural processes, to him it was nothing more than calculation. The reason was that, as far as Feynman or anybody else could tell, the underlying process itself was nothing more than calculation.
A process that produces a result based on nothing more than calculation is an excellent way to describe the operations of a computer program. The two-step procedure of the Schrodinger equation and the Feynman system may be impossible to duplicate with physical systems, but for the computer it is trivial.Quantum mechanics involves “waves” which cannot be duplicated or even approximated physically; but which easily can be calculated by mathematical formula and stored in memory, creating in effect a static map of the wave shape. This quality of something having the appearance and effect of a wave, but not the nature of a wave, is pervasive in quantum mechanics, and so is fundamental to all things in our universe. It is also an example of how things which are inexplicable in physical terms turn out to be necessary or convenient qualities of computer operations.
At the scientific level, the question is “how?” The conventional way of describing the discrepancy between analysis and observation is to say that the “wave function” is somehow “collapsed” during observation, yielding a “particle” with measurable properties. The mechanism of this transformation is completely unknown and, because the scientifically indispensable act of observation itself changes the result, it appears to be intrinsically and literally unknowable.
At the philosophical level, the question is “why?” Why should our acquisition of knowledge affect something which, to our way of thinking, should exist in whatever form it exists whether or not it is observed? Is there something special about consciousness that relates directly to the things of which we are conscious? If so, why should that be?
As John Gribbin puts it, “nature seems to ‘make the calculation’ and then present us with an observed event.”[2]Both the “how” and the “why” of this process can be addressed through the metaphor of a computer which is programmed to project images to create an experience for the user, who is a conscious being.If we cease to think of the quantum unit as a “thing,” and begin to imagine it as a pixel, that is, as a display of information in graphic (or other sensory) form, it is far easier to conceive of how the uncertainty principle might work. The “properties” we measure are variables which are computed for the purpose of display, which is to say, for the purpose of giving the user knowledge via the interface. A computed variable will display according to the underlying algorithm each time it is computed, and while the algorithm remains stable, the results of a particular calculation can be made to depend on some other factor, including another variable.
Similarly, an electron does not change regardless of whether it is one of the two electrons associated with the helium atom, or one of the ninety-two electrons associated with the uranium atom. You could not, even in principle, tell one from another. The only way in this world to create such identical images is to use the same formula to produce the same image, over and over again whenever a display of the image is called for.In our experience, things move from one end to the other by going through the middle; they get from cold to hot by going through warm; they get from slow to fast by going through medium; and so on. Phenomena move from a lower state to a higher state in a ramp-like fashion — continuously increasing until they reach the higher state. Even if the transition is quick, it still goes through all of the intermediate states before reaching the new, higher state.
In quantum mechanics, however, there is no transition at all.
Similarly, the computer’s “space” is discrete, discontinuous, and digital. If you look closely at a computer monitor, you notice that it consists of millions of tiny dots, nothing more. A beautifully rendered image is made up of these dots.
The theory and architecture of computers lend themselves to a step-by-step approach to any and all problems. It appears that there is no presently conceived computer architecture that would allow anything but such a discrete, digitized time and space, controlled by the computer’s internal clock ticking one operation at a time. Accordingly, it seems that this lack of continuity, so bizarre and puzzling as a feature of our natural world, is an inherent characteristic of a computer simulation.
The essence of a local interaction is direct contact — as basic as a punch in the nose. Body A affects body B locally when it either touches B or touches something else that touches B. A gear train is a typical local mechanism. Motion passes from one gear wheel to another in an unbroken chain. Break the chain by taking out a single gear and the movement cannot continue. Without something there to mediate it, a local interaction cannot cross a gap.
On the other hand, the essence of non locality is unmediated action-at-a-distance. A non-local interaction jumps from body A to body B without touching anything in between. Voodoo injury is an example of a non-local interaction. When a voodoo practitioner sticks a pin in her doll, the distant target is (supposedly) instantly wounded, although nothing actually travels from doll to victim. Believers in voodoo claim that an action here causes an effect there.
The non-locality which appears to be a basic feature of our world also finds an analogy in the same metaphor of a computer simulation. In terms of cosmology, the scientific question is, “How can two particles separated by half a universe be understood as connected such that they interact as though they were right on top of each other?” If we analogize to a computer simulation, the question would be, “How can two pictures at the far corners of the screen be understood as connected such that the distance between them is irrelevant?”
In fact, the measured distance between any two pixels (dots) on the monitor’s display turns out to be entirely irrelevant, since both are merely the products of calculations carried out in the bowels of the computer as directed by the programming. The pixels may be as widely separated as you like, but the programming generating them is forever embedded in the computer’s memory in such a way that — again speaking quite literally — the very concept of separation in space and time of the pixels has no meaning whatsoever for the stored information.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of quantum theory is the relationship of all things to the math, as with the phenomenon of non-locality discussed above, which occurs in nature, so it seems, because that is the way the equations calculate. Even though the mathematical formulas were initially developed to describe the behavior of universe, these formulas turn out to govern the behavior of the universe with an exactitude that defies our concept of mathematics. As Nick Herbert puts it, “Whatever the math does on paper, the quantumstuff does in the outside world.”[7] That is, if the math can be manipulated to produce some absurd result, it will always turn out that the matter and energy around us actually behave in exactly that absurd manner when we look closely enough. It is as though our universe is being produced by the mathematical formulas. The backwards logic implied by quantum mechanics, where the mathematical formalism seems to be more “real” than the things and objects of nature, is unavoidable. In any conceptual conflict between what a mathematical equation can obtain for a result, and what a real object actually could do, the quantum mechanical experimental results always will conform to the mathematical prediction.
Since quantum theory describes the world perfectly — so perfectly that its symbolic, mathematical predictions alwaysprevail over physical insight — the equivalence between quantum symbolism and universal reality must be more than an oddity: it must be the very nature of reality.
This is the point at which we lose our nerve; yet the task for the Western rationalist is to find a mechanical model from our experience corresponding to a “world executed in symbols.”
***
this is from an energy medicine perspective.
A quantum entity has both wave and particle attributes at the same time. It is detected as one or the other according to the experiment that is being conducted. When its “wavefunction” is collapsed, it goes from being everything it can be to taking on specific characteristics. Somehow, quantum entities “know” what questions we are asking of them, and they appear in a way that best answers those questions.
The human body-field is a dynamic network of energy and information. It is rather like a superposition of information about the state of the entire body-field system and its many subsystems. A scan or indirect measurement of the body field captures a “snapshot” of certain parameters of the body-field system at one moment in time and according to the state of the person being scanned at that time.
Influences include emotions, beliefs, memories, diet, the environment, lifestyle, etc. All of this information is encoded in the client’s body-field in its many, many layers. Each scan extracts the information most relevant for that client at that time.
You can’t know everything there is to know about a particle with absolute certainty. When you know about one aspect of a particle, you lose information about other aspects of it.
One could say that the “uncertainty” of the body-field is not due only to inherent quantum features (see Milo Wolff’s Space Resonance Theory), but also to the complexity of environmental influences and the client’s state of consciousness, which is always in flux.
The word “quanta” refers to “packets” of energy. Quantum entities can take on only specific allowable energies.
When they “jump” from one level to another, they do not travel in between! They just appear at the next higher or lower allowable energy level.
The quantum realm is “nonlocal,” meaning that everything is connected. This quantum interconnectedness is called “Quantum entanglement.” If two quantum entities were ever in contact, they are forever connected, no matter how far apart they may eventually be. In terms of information exchange, entangled particles act as a single system, not two separate entities. But no “signal” is being sent between them. The information is not exchanged by any known force, but is shared or correlated instantaneously through the nonlocal field.
***
The assertions made by Chalmers, Wheeler, and others indicate that they believe the most fundamental building block of the universe is not atoms or even quarks, but rather information itself. At first glance this hardly seems possible. How could information, something that seems completely insubstantial, be the material from which all perceivable physical, and phenomenal aspects of our universe arise?
Information is theorized to be comprised of dual aspects, similar to the dual aspects of light, namely wave and particle. Recall that Wheeler stated that information is truly fundamental and has two basic aspects: Physical and Phenomenal. The resulting construct would imply that we live in a world where not only mathematics (Connes and Changeux) but all information is independent and fundamental. This gives rise to the question: “What is the relationship between this construct and the quantum wave nature of physical existence?”
For many years, it has been assumed that the universe exists independently of human perception. Why would scientific minds now alter their perspective? The answer is based on a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics, sheer observation affects the observed – its potentiality collapses. Therefore, if information is fundamental, exists in a duality of nature, and is affected by observation, there is strong evidence that observation itself may cause it to exist – and even if that is not correct, certainly that shared knowledge of existence affects the “probability of trueness”, and the emergence of an information element into what humans recognize as “reality” – a part of our universe.
The similarity of processes which appear to underpin our perceived universe is apparent from microcosm to macrocosm. If, as so many are beginning to say, information is indeed the fundamental “element” in our universe, the scope of what we know today to be “Information Systems” and/or “Information Technology” will change dramatically. Information Systems (IS) professionals could find themselves the ultimate managers of our known universe, manipulating probability-of-trueness levels of information elements to achieve desired results -–perhaps in an extension of our current approach to object oriented technologies.
The pivotal concept here is how to manipulate the “probability of trueness” of any specific element of information. One factor that has been demonstrated to have an effect on the “position” of elements is sheer observation of those elements. It is conceivable that manipulating the frequency and intensity of “observation” is the variable required.
One of the intriguing possibilities that springs to mind with regard to how this might occur is the advent of the internet. It has been theorized by a number of researchers that a “global brain” is under development through the evolving
network of computers connected on the net (Peter Russel, The Global Brain Awakens, McNaughton and Gunn, 1995). This global brain could certainly be viewed as a platform of unprecedented ability for widespread “observation”, bringing elements of information into the awareness of a large population, and rapidly facilitating the movement of elements between “true” and “untrue” probability levels.
As work continues in the inter-related fields of quantum physics, Information Systems, and the study of human thought/consciousness, a number of incredibly profound issues will be presented to humanity. The emerging power of information management may bring with it the ability to alter the very nature of our universe.
we keep making brain cells
this is so important i’m reposting it in its entirety. it’s the key to life.
Law of Attraction and Neuroplasticity
Published June 24, 2008
Recent findings in neuroscience has taken a quantum leap in understanding how the brain works. It is now certain that we are making new brain cells and neural connections in every minute which is very much in line to the thought vibrations approach discussed in the area of the Law of Attraction.
Before the introduction of real time brain scans, it was believed that a process of cell division creates brain cells, called neurogenesis, which begins to slow down in early life and stops when we reach adolescence. The result, according to scientists, is that as we get older we simply base or behaviours on the way we were taught to think in early childhood to the point that our brains become hardwired based on early life sense impressions.
However, the discovery of neuroplasticity changes all this thinking to a much more hopeful view of life. We are creating new brain cells and creating new neural connections all the time. So this goes beyond the findings of neurogenesis that says we stop brain cell production in our teens and that we actually create brain cells and neural connections all the time.
No matter what your age, your brain is perfectly capable of creating new neural pathways which means that every time you have a new thought or experience, your brain is making new neural connections. It would seem that the neural connections form stronger pathways when you have bursts of inspiration. Inspiration is usually a thought mixed with an emotion which is the basis of how the Law of Attraction can be used to create new results and new experiences faster.
If you want to find out more about this fascinating subject, John Assaraf has written about this in his latest book The Anwser which cover aspects in neuro science, Law of Attraction and how to apply this information in building a business.
quantum magic
loads of information here
Implications Of Quantum Consciousness Theory
Deflections caused by consciousness are not caused by force or energy in the conventional sense; but by something more subtle, namely effects within the underlying wave structure out of which matter and energy are manifestations (collapse of the state vector) [5].
To psychically obtain information about a target or to psychically influence events, one has to have one’s brain resonating with aspects of reality interconnecting the brain with the target. The more one’s brain resonates with non-local aspects of reality connecting with a target, the more communication and direct influence one can have on it.
The more fundamentally diverse the potential outcomes of a process targeted are, the more effect one gets from resonating ones brain with it [5]. Also, the more small changes in the system tend to amplify as larger changes in the end result, the more effect one can get. This provides an explanation of why patterns exist within seemingly random events and why successful magic often results in a chain of synchronicities.
For a given subject (performing under optimum conditions and having no difficulty visualizing the nature of the experimental target nor psychological aversions to the target), the magnitudes of the results obtained in tasks to affect the readings on measuring devices (such as magnetometers, radiation detectors, Josephson effect devices, balances, etc.) can be related to one another by calculating the probability of the reading based on the standard physical principles of quantum mechanics [5].
The sporadic nature of psi phenomena can be explained as a matter of outside observers randomizing the process, causing dilution of will data channels and randomizing the results [5]. Thus, the need for secrecy in magical operations.
One can no longer maintain the division between the observer and observed or between consciousness and the physical world. Rather, both observer and observed, along with both consciousness and the material world, are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole indivisible reality [1].
Whatever the subtle level of reality underlying matter and energy, we are that (including our consciousness). If hidden variables exist, we are the hidden variables. It has been theorized that consciousness is an inseparable aspect of this underlying reality. When our awareness connects with the deepest layer of reality interconnecting everything, we may experience the level of consciousness beyond time and form reported by many mystics. It is this non local structure that we share with nature that makes it possible to “attune to nature,” to psychically participate in nature, and to live in accordance with it.
What we are usually aware of (normal waking consciousness) is a relatively superficial movement in the order of things. Behind the things we are aware of in waking consciousness are a vast array of less strongly linked phenomena. This latter realm is commonly called the unconscious (and parts of it the subconscious). The unconscious is not very accurate, since it forms a kind of ground of consciousness [8]. Our awareness can link with this ground of consciousness to gain information and to influence events.
The Gods, Goddesses And Nature Spirits
At this point, I diverge from theory and describe some plausible hypotheses. Consciousness, at a fundamental level, is associated with the continuity of the underlying structures out of which matter and energy manifest. Everything shares this continuous structure; therefore everything has consciousness to some degree (though not necessarily normal waking consciousness).
Quoting from Evan Harris Walker (4): “Consciousness may exist without being associated with either a living system or a data processing system. Indeed, since everything that occurs is ultimately the result of one or more quantum mechanical events, the universe is ‘inhabited’ by an almost unlimited number of rather discrete, conscious, usually non-thinking entities that are responsible for the detailed working of the universe. These conscious entities determine (or exist concurrently with the determination) singly the outcome of each quantum mechanical event, while the Schrodinger equation (to the extent that it is accurate) describes the physical constraint placed on their freedom of action collectively.”
In shamanic and in religious practice, one resonates with other intelligences to get their assistance, inviting them to join in the work at hand. These intelligences can be thought of as consciousness resonance matrices. Some may be localized, as we are (such as other biological intelligences, plant divas, power spot spirits, some deities, etc.); and some may be non localized (spirit animals in the other world, some deities, etc.).
The personalities of the Gods, Goddesses and spirits that many practitioners of religion relate to can also be thought of as consciousness resonance matrices. They can be very non-specific and disperse, or very specific (such as the Orishas and other deities that can manifest in full possession of those who invoke them).
Quantum Mechanics And Magical Ritual
Consider a typical structure of magical ritual and its quantum mechanical explanation:
- Purify one’s mind and one’s surroundings, freeing them of interfering resonances, quieting the static so that one can get a clear and strong resonance on the target desired.
- Achieve a non-localized state of consciousness, often by resonating ones mind with ones inner being, with the Earth, the sky, and ones surroundings.
- Meditate on the elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) representing non-local essences. This helps your mind to resonate powerfully non-locally.
- After reaching out with one’s mind and connecting its resonance pattern intimately with the non-local web of wave patterns connecting everything, invoke deities whose natural function is related to the purpose of your ritual. If successful, this connects your mind to a powerful, established, non-localized, intelligent resonance matrix that (hopefully) joins in the magic.
- Focus on the target of the work, connecting with the target.
- While connected with the target, visualize the end result desired, thus creating a resonant template for the phenomenon one wants to achieve.
- Energize the resonance through dance, drumming, chants, pure channeling of will power, or other means.
- Release the energy into the target while strongly visualizing the target achieved (energizing the resonance in the target).
- Ground, removing ones mind from the direct, resonant link with the target, so that the patterns you have set in motion in the target can continue with minimum interference (to throw a ball, one has to let go).
- Thank and say goodbye to the intelligences one works with, thus disconnecting ones mind further from other resonance matrices.There are other forms of magic, and much more detail to the forms I described. There are also ethical considerations. This paper provides a description of some aspects of the integration of quantum mechanics with magickal thinking, but it does not cover everything.
So What?
To read about theories of magic is like reading about sports. You may pick up a few ideas; but to become proficient, you must participate and play the game. People have been teaching and performing magic for thousands of years, without the benefit of quantum theory. Many magicians have had to separate their scientific training from their magical practice. Now, magical theory has been merged with scientific theory, and more of the mind of those trained in science can resonate with magic. Also, critics of magic can be shown the scientific theory and data validating it, to show that there is more to magic than superstition.
I have not seen any other quantitative scientific theories that explain the results of experiments on psychokinesis, extrasensory perception, and consciousness as accurately as Walker’s theory, or that give as satisfying of an explanation of the synchronicities that I, as a worker of magic and a scientist, have observed from personal experience. This is not to say that these ideas represent ultimate truth, that alternative theories no not exist, or that flaws will not be found and that alternative theories will not replace them. I would welcome hearing from others who have additional information and insight into the applicability and limitations of the theories of modern Physics as applied to the occult.
Multiple Universes?
One interesting hypothesis is that of multiple universes. As I understand it, this hypothesis states that all of the alternative possibilities allowed by quantum mechanics actually occur, but in different universes. Magicians can interpret their magic as moving their awareness between these alternative universes. I have never seen the multiple universe theory set up mathematically in a way that would allow it to be quantitatively tested, using physical measurements (like was done with Mr. Walker’s theory),
It would be interesting to determine if and to what extent the multiple universe hypothesis can be integrated with Mr. Walker’s theory. Consciousness, acting at a gross level, seems to be relativistic – something experienced by observers relative to their frames of reference. Consciousness, at its ultimate level, seems to be subtler than time and location.
When two observers see the same thing, they both may have certain experiences in common, they both may affect the thing observed, and they may report some of the events the same and some differently. Experience may be categorized in a multiple universe mode and/or in a single universe mode. If would be interesting to know which mode is most useful for various purposes.
It is obvious that some people have such a different personal perception of reality as to be seemingly out of touch with the world we experience around them. Their self-world image becomes more important than anything, and they adjust their memories and perceptions to meet whatever emotional needs they have at the time [9]. Delusions of personal reality and the high probability that such realities are real for the person experiencing that reality can result in interesting questions about what is real and what is unreal.
Although the universe may be a seamless whole, most physicists describe it in two different modes, depending on whether things are being observed or not [7]:
- A classical, mechanistic mode for the definite attributes of observation, and
- A statistical, mathematical, quantum mechanical mode for the wave patterns described by quantum mechanics.
David Bohm has begun to develop new terminology that integrates both the process of observation and quantum theory [1].
feynman
Quantum Computation (from Feynman’s suggestion in 1982, that the real world actually operates as a vast computer) A situation where it is possible that the physical theory which may be useful to understand how things happen, may refuse to extend itself to useful engineering applications for the purposes of control. In the history of science and engineering, this may be the first instance of where government cannot use scientific developments for their all too usual purposes of control and genocide. This does not mean that governments will not create nonscience to to excuse their own rather insane and irrational lusts; acting on their own lusts is, after all, what governments do, and so long as they exist, there is no stopping them from their attempted mendacious and genocidal intents. Realities never disuade them from their primitive obsessions.
still not a mistake
repeated testing using a different measurement have returned the same results – neutrinos travel faster than light. too cool.
Repeat experiments offer same result: CERN’s neutrinos still faster than light
Friday 18 November, 2011
Image: jronaldlee via FlickrSCIENTISTS AT the world’s largest physics lab say they have ruled out a possible error which could have distorted their surprising measurements – which indicated that some sub-atomic particles can travel faster than light.
Physicists at CERN were sceptical when measurements by French and Italian researchers appeared to show neutrino particles breaking what Albert Einstein considered to be the ultimate speed barrier – by travelling a fraction faster than light.
Now CERN says more precise testing has confirmed the accuracy of at least one part of the experiment – adding credibility to the earlier findings which had surprised the scientific world.
The Geneva-based body said today that scientists changed the way the neutrino’s departure time was measured and got the same results, “ruling out one potential source of systematic error.”
The result would shatter a fundamental theory of physics – that nothing can travel faster than light itself – which has underpinned modern scientific thinking for over a century.
“A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication [for] physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny,” the president of Italy’s Institute for Nuclear Physics, Fernando Ferroni, said.
OPERA – the collaboration behind the already-famous experiments – said the reruns would not be considered conclusive, and it is thought that the results will not be considered universally reliable unless the test conditions had been replicated in other conditions.
what happens when you die?
here is at least one article, quotes therefrom, addressing this. originally i was looking for chemical processes, but these are interesting too.
In the personal brain/mind complex, consciousness is mediated by
the interaction of electrical impulses and neurotransmitter activated
buffers and filters. Memory is stored hologramically throughout the brain and is retrieved by a process of broad-band neurotransmitter stimulation. Therefore, we can think of the continuity of consciousness, which is based on the density of memory interconnections or the mind’s “temporal bandwidth,” as a self-generating, self-regulating electro-magnetic field potential modulated by the action of conductivity sensitive chemicals in the spark gap of the synapses.Immortality then becomes a simple matter of creating a
non-dissipative structural resonance with that flow of Mind which appears to be the substance of reality itself. The in-between state, the Bardo, is designed to process the un-shareable experiences of a lifetime of “suffering and attachment,” as the Buddhist puts it. Acceptance and self-forgiveness, that is re-membering all the parts of a life, good and bad, leads to a point of shareablity, an increased temporal bandwidth, in which immortality becomes a simple matter of focus. I exist, therefore I exist, or, rather, I am, so that I am.
In the brain, focus is triggered by a complex set of neurotransmitters related to serotonin. As we die, as long we are calm, open-minded and alert, serotonin production, along with dopamine, acetylcholine and other neurotransmitters, spikes sharply. By paying attention to the process of death itself, we can create a feedback loop of positive, transition enhancing neuro-chemicals. This requirement for a good death would seem to be main reason why Hospice care works so well. Good deaths require a minimum of pain and fear, and a maximum of alertness, attention and compassion.
On the same level, a good transition, of any kind, requires the same neuro-physiological changes as death, just not to that extreme. Meditation, of all kinds, begins with learning how to be open and calm and alert, therefore triggering an increased flow of serotonin to the synapse. A good chi-filled diet allows us to hold on to these important
neuro-chemicals longer. Enlightenment itself, in the sense of increased
kundalini/neuro-electric activity in the brain, may in fact be a crystallization of a feedback loop of positive serotonin/melatonin stimulation. Neurologically, this is indeed similar to the light-bulb-in-the-brain effect of DMT.
observerless?
new theory emerging that doesn’t need an observer to collapse wave functions. instead, the wave function collapses when the particle interacts with the measuring device. to me that just means that the measuring device is the observer. but here
Quantum upgrade removes need for spooky observer
QUANTUM mechanics – simultaneously physics’s most successful and most baffling theory – may be in for an upgrade.It faces a challenge from a modified version that would solve a largely ignored puzzle at the heart of the theory: why do subatomic particles never let us catch them in the act of being in many places at once but instead “collapse” into a single position as soon as we observe them?
Unlike most attempts at modification, this latest upgrade is generating special excitement as it meshes with another pillar of physics, Einstein’s special relativity.
It also comes at the same time as a proposed test for such modifications – and a recent plea from a Nobel laureate to stop ignoring the collapse problem.
“Like many physicists, I have used quantum mechanics throughout my working life, cheerfully ignoring the deep questions about its meaning, but with a nagging feeling that this is something I ought to understand,” says Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, who recently posted a blueprint for devising such modifications online.
If the recent refinement holds true, much of the “spookiness” that still surrounds quantum theory would melt away.
When subatomic particles aren’t being measured, they behave very strangely indeed, occupying many positions all at once. These superpositions are represented by a wave function, which can extend out into space. When a measurement is made, however, the wave function collapses and we only ever see the particle in a definite spot, never the blurry wave itself.
How can a particle possibly “know” when it is and isn’t being watched? And why should observation change its behaviour, anyway? The majority of physicists aren’t at all bothered by these unknowns, content in the knowledge that the theory has passed every single experimental test thrown at it. But a small band of rebels, including Weinberg, are very bothered indeed.
Since the 1980s they have wanted to modify quantum mechanics so that wave function collapse doesn’t require an observer. Instead, they argue that collapse happens at random and is simply more likely when a measurement is made. The sticking point was that all attempts to mesh these theories with special relativity had failed.
Recently though, Daniel Bedingham, who splits his time between work in the financial industry and physics research at Imperial College London, has come up with a way to do just that. His theory has its roots in an approach called GRW, named after its 1986 inventors GianCarlo Ghirardi, Alberto Rimini and Tullio Weber.
GRW says that collapses are extremely rare for an individual particle, but that making an actual measurement on a particle forces it to interact with the measuring equipment. The particle becomes intimately linked, or entangled, with the many atoms that make up the measuring equipment.
Because these atoms are numerous, one of their wave functions is bound to collapse during the measuring process. Thanks to entanglement, that triggers the collapse of the rest – including that of the particle being measured. So the particle’s wave function collapses on measurement, without needing any spooky reason for a change dependent on the observer.
In 1989, Philip Pearle of Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, finessed GRW with another theory called continuous spontaneous localisation. CSL attributes the random collapses of GRW to fluctuations in an entity that fills the universe, rather as a force field does, and varies across time and space. When physicists rewrote their equations to make CSL fit with the predictions of special relativity, they hit a speed bump. Unworkable “sharp jerks” emerged in the wave functions that would inject an infinite amount of energy into the universe, something we know wave functions don’t actually do.
Bedingham’s contribution is to come up with a way to make CSL relativistic, which avoids the infinities. Rather than allowing the fluctuating field to act directly on the wave functions, he introduces an intermediary field that smooths out its effects and prevents the sharp jerks.
Unlike a previous relativistic version of CSL, Bedingham’s idea describes not only individual particles but also the forces between them – a must for any theory seeking to replace quantum mechanics.
Bedingham first posted it online in October 2010, following up with a clearer version in March of this year. The idea is creating excitement: Ghirardi for one is now joining forces with Bedingham to probe relativistic collapse models further.
However, quantum mechanics is so elegant that most physicists are still sceptical of modifications. That could change if deviations were to emerge in experiment, says Kurt Jacobs of the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
An experiment that could turn up such deviations is now being proposed by Stefan Nimmrichter of the University of Vienna, Austria, and colleagues.
When two wave functions meet, they can interfere with one another – cancelling out where a peak meets a trough and reinforcing each other where peaks align, like waves in water. Nimmrichter and colleagues propose examining the interference patterns produced when the waves associated with little clouds of atoms are made to interfere with each other (Physical Review A, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.83.043621).
In contrast to existing quantum theory, both the original CSL and Bedingham’s relativistic version of it predict that this interference pattern should be less pronounced or even absent for sufficiently dense clusters of atoms. This is because these entangled clusters are highly likely to undergo spontaneous collapse of their wave functions.
Carrying out this test will require clouds of atoms that are extremely cold and dense – pushing technology to its limits.
“We are working on the implementation of an experiment,” says Markus Arndt, who leads the group at the University of Vienna. “But it is still too premature to define a definite time frame.” Several other groups in Europe are also trying to perform the experiment.
Seeing this effect would constitute the first modification to quantum mechanics since its conception in the 1920s, Pearle says. “It will be an extraordinarily exciting occurrence.”
Embrace many worlds, or shut up
A single subatomic particle is in many places at once, but whenever we look at it, the particle seems to decide on just one position. We never get to see the superposition. One way to explain such a bizarre, observation-dependent “collapse” is to modify quantum mechanics itself (see main story). But a range of interpretations can explain collapse within standard quantum mechanics.
The “many worlds” interpretation is probably the most famous of these and certainly the most mind-bending. It says that every possible position of an object is actually realised, but each in a separate universe: the act of observing causes the universe to split into two or more versions, so an observer only ever sees one position.
For those who find that a bit perplexing, there’s always quantum Darwinism, where measurement causes a kind of natural selection to take place among the many possible states of an object. Certain states are better at imprinting information onto their surroundings, including measuring devices. Thus we tend to see one of these states when making a measurement.
By far the most popular approach, however, is the more prosaic “Shut up and calculate”, which boils down to “It gets the right answers, so why worry about how or why”.
brains good
quantum brains
Brain Rejects Negative Thoughts
By Alex in Science & Tech on Oct 10, 2011 at 4:22 pmGood news: your brain is hardwired for good news
Bad news: your brain is hardwired for good newsWhy don’t people stop smoking even after hearing bazillion public service messages that doing so will give them cancer? Why do people get married even though the rate of divorce is 50%?
Neuroscientists have the answer: it’s because the human brain rejects negative thoughts (and yes, sometimes to the detriment of the brain’s host).
When the news was positive, all people had more activity in the brain’s frontal lobes, which are associated with processing errors. With negative information, the most optimistic people had the least activity in the frontal lobes, while the least optimistic had the most.
It suggests the brain is picking and choosing which evidence to listen to.
Dr Sharot said: “Smoking kills messages don’t work as people think their chances of cancer are low. The divorce rate is 50%, but people don’t think it’s the same for them. There is a very fundamental bias in the brain.”
Dr Chris Chambers, neuroscientist from the University of Cardiff, said: “It’s very cool, a very elegant piece of work and fascinating.
“For me, this work highlights something that is becoming increasingly apparent in neuroscience, that a major part of brain function in decision-making is the testing of predictions against reality – in essence all people are ‘scientists’.
“And despite how sophisticated these neural networks are, it is illuminating to see how the brain sometimes comes up with wrong and overly optimistic answers despite the evidence.”
scalar waves
something to think about
3. A CLOSER LOOK AT SCALAR WAVE-FORMS
These finer scalar wave-forms also have been discovered periodically by other mathematicians, who have been able to calculate new equations especially in harmonics (used in hyperdimensional physics) connecting the wavelengths of matter, gravity and light to each other and how all these lock in and create our expression of time (as it manifests in space) – which has been now discovered to be untapped ‘potential’ energy flowing in hyperspace.
Time flows like a wave-form river in hyperspace in a grid pattern. This consists of interlocking great circles which circle the poles and include a lattice grid of lines that are 30 nautical miles or 55.5 km apart. When scalar beams charge through hyperspace these ‘rivers of time’ get blocked and redirected temporarily.
There is a covert plan underfoot to change the way time is expressed on this planet altogether using hyperdimensional physics and Tesla technology, by splicing earth back onto a now defunct Atlantean timeline in which Lucifer hadn’t fallen from grace. (see my other work on this in the books The Universal Seduction Vols 2 and 3 at the end of this article)
Our present ‘reality’ is expressed in the way time runs around the corridors in hyperspace by the pattern it takes. Other ‘timelines’ exist in a different kind of grid pattern, creating alternative versions of our ‘present’. Multiple versions of reality (or for example 2 April 2004) can be manipulated given the right technology, and people can enter into parallel universes do all sorts of things and then enter back into this one.
One needs a Tesla Zero Time Reference Generator, which can lodge a specific reality into the time at the center of the universe, in which it stays still, acting like an anchor. Both America and the UK govt are able to manipulate and enter into different realities.
The various dimensions each comprise a complex pattern of interlocking wave-forms. Matter has been found to be only one wave of a pulse comprising a positive cycle, while the negative cycle manifests as ‘anti-matter’. The ‘matter’ pulse brings something ‘into’ physical visibility, then it disappears momentarily and returns. But the pulses are so rapid we don’t see something as unmanifest while temporarily dematerializing. Physical time is only measured by the visibility of something’s aging process, or in other words its passage through a journey starting at one measured time-reference point to another.
Different wave-forms only appear to us to be solid because we are comprised of the same matter. If the frequencies governing the time between a matter pulse and an anti-matter pulse are shortened or lengthened with technology, time will go faster or slower in the surrounding space or what it effects. Therefore scalar waves belong to space-time in which anti-matter or hyperspace exists. Time can be altered by harnessed and directed scalar waves (including magnets which give off scalar waves which bend time) because they disrupt the pulse of matter and anti-matter and therefore the rate at which something normally passes through time with its usual smoothness.
An experiment with scalar waves in USA once caused all the clocks and watches in the test neighborhood to go berserk for 4 days, until the flow of time resettled back to its normal flow and they returned as before. This was noted by Frank Golden.
Scalar ‘potentials’ can be created artificially and when focused into a weapon, can do major damage to an object’s location in space-time. That which determines the object’s natural pulse of matter and anti-matter cycle can become stressed when targeted by scalar waves made of artificial potentials, because they are almost always absorbed by the nucleus of an atom, not the electrons in orbit.
Hyperspace can become warped temporarily, although space-time naturally curves around natural vortexes the earth has which form ‘chakras’ to absorb and release universal energies. These are opened and closed in natural cycles according to the positions of the sun and moon in relation to earth. Because scalar waves are finer than gamma waves they can pass through any physical substance undetected. However the damage inflicted can be so powerful that they can dislodge an object right out of time and space and cause it to temporarily disappear away from its normal movement in time. All objects move in time, and they will also move in space if a physical external force activates the object’s own natural internal scalar waves to point in the direction it is sent to causing it to move from A to B depending on how much force is used. Or they are trapped motionless in space by the internal scalar energy within swirling around interlocking into a deadlock, (making it appear still) however the object still moves in time. A beam of scalar energy can cause the timeframe the object resides in to get warped, making it disappear into another reality.
and here’s more
As well as track people by the electrical currents in their bodies, which emanates a particular ‘signature frequency’.
This is possible because everything in the environment gives off scalar waves at right angle rotations off the normal electromagnetic wave. These can be searched for and tracked and are not subject to constraints of time and space. A person’s frequency can be stored on a supercomputer and this can be tracked anywhere. They can be sent subliminal words sent in scalar waves which are so subtle that the person will think they are their own thoughts. Also NSA uses a secret program (developed since the MKULTRA mind control program of the 1950s) what is called “Radiation Intelligence”. Scientific research from this is withheld from the public and there are international intelligence agreements to keep this technology secret. Using this technology the NSA records and decodes individual brain maps of hundreds of thousands of people for national security purposes.
It is also used secretly by the military for a brain-to-computer link. Activity in the speech center of the brain can be translated into the subject’s verbal thoughts and can also show up activity from their visual cortex on a video monitor. NSA operatives can see what the subject is seeing. Visual memory can also be seen and the NSA can place images directly into the visual cortex, bypassing the eyes and the optic nerves.
When a target sleeps secretly images can be installed into the brain during REM sleep for brain-programming purposes. Speech, 3D sound, and subliminal audio can also be sent to the auditory cortex of the brain, bypassing the ears. This “Remote Neural Monitoring” (RNM) can completely alter a subjects perceptions, moods and motor control. Different brainwave frequencies are connected with various parts of the body and when the right frequency to activate a section of the body is sent a person is powerless to stop it. Pain can be induced in mind control victims this way by targeting a section of the body. This has been spoken of by many mind control victims, accompanied by ‘voices in the head’ by the operators cruelly asking if it hurt and all done remotely without any physical contact with the victim. There has been a SIGINT wireless scalar wave brain monitoring network in the US since the 1940s according to John St Clair Akwei.
the ability to photograph thoughts has been mentioned recently in the news.
The frequency the brain areas respond to are from 3 Hz to 50 Hz. For each brain area these are used:
Brain Area: Bioelectric Resonance Frequency: Information Induced Through Modulation.
Motor control cortex: 10 Hz: Motor impulse coordination
Auditory cortex: 15 Hz: Sound which bypasses the ears
Visual cortex: 25 Hz: Images in the brain, bypassing the eyes
Somasensory: 9 Hz: Phantom touch sense
Thought center: 20Hz: Imposed subconscious thoughts
how to communicate mind-to-mind:
In short, ETs communicated with us via modulated radio-waves, between 10,000 and 20,000 cycles below the known electromagnetic-spectrum. In the carrier-wave by amplitude modulation, mixed with frequency modulation. Single band energy, transmission power less than 25 watts. A naturally present wave on earth the brain modulated – a wave that resonates between the earth and the ionosphere. All humans influence the ionosphere in this manner. A reflecting technique involved. The brain modulation consisted of pulses, akin to those known from neuro pulses.
Two humans can use this. Related to something akin to low frequency radar and to ultrasonic techniques but qualified. A mixed electro-acoustic wave function. The electromagnetic-wave induced an ultrasonic transduction in human tissue. The brain radiation has a sonic component to it as well as an electromagnetic component. Electromagnetic-radiation has a sonic component and it’s dependent on the medium through which it travels. The scientist cut through months of work. Now HAARP is slicing up the ionosphere, the world-brain, like a microwave knife, producing long tear incisions destroying the membrane which holds the reservoir of data accumulated by all earth’s history. HAARP has already punched 360 x 30 miles holes in the ionosphere.
here’s something about reaching back to the future / past / present. same source
The Germans were using time reversed waves, which caused a scalar wave to follow back and respond to the source of a received ordinary electromagnetic wave.
my pirate novel 
