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anewbeginning
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 88
| Posted 3/8/2003 1:26 PM (GMT -6) |   | I recently read Roger Penrose's book "The Large, the Small and the Human Mind". Very interesting read. Anyway, in it he mentions his and Stuart Hammeroff's ideas about "Quantum Consciousness". I was browsing around for more info and came across this reseach on the Universit of Arizona's site. The summary isn't to long so I'll reproduce it here:
Studies by Professor Benjamin Libet at University of California San Francisco in the late 1970's on awake neurosurgery patients suggested that the brain refers information "backwards in time". Simple activities like the sensation of walking (seeing and feeling your feet hit the pavement) may also involve backwards time referral. Vision of your feet hitting pavement should occur well before the sensory feel of your feet touching the pavement because of conduction times and synaptic delays through the long nerves and spinal cord from your feet, yet we perceive seeing and feeling as simultaneous. So, either a) the "fast" visual information is delayed, b) the sight and feel are experienced separately, but remembered as simultaneous, or c) the slow information is referred "backwards in time" (from the near future) to match the fast information. From an evolutionary standpoint, a) "living in the past" would seem disadvantageous, as nonconscious "living in the disjointed present" animals would have a significant advantage. b) implies "Orwellian revisionism" (as Dennett puts it) and suggests that we aren't really conscious in any rational way in the present, that our experience is "edited". But c) seems preposterous. How can information run backwards in time? Penrose first suggested that quantum effects in the brain could explain backwards referral, and that such effects may occur commonly, even routinely. It turns out that in quantum mechanics, quantum information can indeed run backwards, or be time indeterminate. The Aharonov formulation suggests that each quantum state reduction has a dual vector, both forward and backwards in time.
To investigate these possibilities, Dean Radin and Dick Bierman have performed a number of experiments of emotional response in human subjects. The subjects view a computer screen on which appear (at randomly varying intervals) a series of images, some of which are emotionally neutral, and some of which are highly emotional (violent, sexual....). In Radin and Bierman's early studies, skin conductance of a finger was used to measure physiological response They found that subjects responded strongly to emotional images compared to neutral images, and that the emotional response occurred between a fraction of a second to several seconds BEFORE the image appeared! Recently Professor Bierman (University of Amsterdam) repeated these experiments with subjects in an fMRI brain imager and found emotional responses in brain activity up to 4 seconds before the stimuli. Moreover he looked at raw data from other laboratories and found similar emotional responses before stimuli appeared. Professor Bierman presented these findings to the recent Tucson conference.
The presentation is available here:
www.consciousness.arizona.edu/hameroff/New/Time_Flies/Time_Flies.htm
This research seems to reinforce the "block-universe" idea of space-time.
If the human mind can be shown to utilize pre-cognitive abilities, isn't this devastating to the O.V. idea of the future as "not yet existing" ?
Presumably, God's "pre-cognition" would be exponentially greater than man's.
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Matthew Timothy Short
Huh?
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 635
| Posted 3/8/2003 3:32 PM (GMT -6) | | Hey there anewbeginning,
If the human mind does indeed utilize pre-cognitive abilities, which I have no reason to doubt or deny, if the studies suggested are accurate; it does not however, devastate the idea of the future as ‘not yet existing’; for a fraction of a second or so, anyway! And yes, God's ‘pre-cognition’ is in fact, infinitely greater than man's: something to think about, or have you already  ?
O’ if not for the origination of all other existence by the fiat of God, what would I do next?
God is Love,
Tim
2Ti 2:19…Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity... | | Back to Top | | |
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anewbeginning
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 88
| Posted 3/11/2003 2:35 AM (GMT -6) | | Hi Tim:
The pre-cognitive abilities (if that is what is going on) of the subjects in this study seemed to occur up to several seconds prior to the stimuli. This seems to indicate (to me at least) that there is an "accessible" future "out there" somewhere. In order to circumvent paradoxes, this future must be causally linked with the past and present and so, in some sense, be determined. I find the idea uncomfortable but there it is, seemingly demonstrable.
Perhaps the creation of a world such as ours is simply an "all or nothing" affair for a being such as God. Foreknowledge is maybe a misnomer for His abilities. I'm not sure if I'm making sense to you, but perhaps free choices and an existant future aren't mutually exclusive?
Edited by - anewbeginning on 03/11/2003 07:38:39 AM | | Back to Top | | |
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GregBoyd
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 1818
| Posted 3/11/2003 2:07 PM (GMT -6) | | Interesting, odd stuff anewbeginning. Don't know anything about this research, but I'll just think out loud about what you present.
1. To the extent that one is convinced on other grounds that backwards time travel is impossible and/or that the future is not exhautively settled, they will feel presurre to either a) look for flaws in the presented "facts" or b) look for alternatives to the interpretation of the "facts" that don't require backwards time travel and/or the block view of the universe. I myself wouldn't feel compelled to work hard at either until this research becomes streamlined, bugs and errors get worked out, biases get critiqued, etc...
2. If humans do consistently exercise some sort of pre-cognition by which they experience events just prior to the occurence of those experiences, this doesn't entail that the future is exhaustively settled. There are other interpretations. For example, it may be that the time moves forward in "chuncks." Since we don't have an indisputable definition of "now", we might feel free to suppose that each "now" is given as a "web of occurances" that are experienced one way but actually occur a slightly different way. To use an analogy, I find that when I fast-forward my TeVo, it goes PAST the point it ends up when I press stop. I see a bit into the future of the movie, judged from the perspective of where I am when I start the movie in regular motion (this is hard to explain!). I suspect its because the TeVo moves forward in "loops", so I "loop" a part of the future when I press STOP. Maybe, just because of how we're wired to interact with the objective world, we somehow experience it in "loops."
Applied to your research, it would mean that we have to see each "now" as a tapestry, and our free actdions as part of that tapestry. But this wouldn't entail that the whole of the future is exhaustively settled and/or that the whole of reality is given as a pre-settled tapestry. (It WOULD, however, obviously mean that our understanding of "now" and of how we interact with it would be much more complicated than our phenomenological experience indicates).
3. The facts as you presented them were a bit puzzelling to me. I don't quite see how the material about how our sensations are coordinated in our brain and nervous system relates to the material about pre-cognition. Only the later material possesses any problems to the open view of the future.
Just random, off the cuff, remarks.
Thanks for the interesting, odd material.
Greg
"In Christ...the ONLY THING that matters is faith energized by love." Galatians 5:6 | | Back to Top | | |
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Matthew Timothy Short
Huh?
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 635
| Posted 3/11/2003 3:46 PM (GMT -6) | | Hey anewbeginning,
From the way the experiment appears to be set up, to me, it proves more precisely ‘extra sensory perception’ - by a difference of a fraction of a second to several seconds in participates -think about it?
God is Love,
Tim
2Ti 2:19…Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity... | | Back to Top | | |
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fyodor
Registered Member
Date Joined Dec 2002
Total Posts : 179
| Posted 3/11/2003 5:41 PM (GMT -6) | | Interesting research....Don't know much about Quantum anything (at least not enough to act like I do) My thoughts however....It would be really interesting to see if the same response could be shown when a specific stimulus does not happen....Such as the response occurred a few seconds before one of the "possibilities" for which an actual event did not take place for whatever reason.
Obviously, not the easiest experiment to pull off, but it would be really cool. Proof that the future isn't exhaustively settled. hmmm....
†††"To have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity's claim upon him." – S. Kierkegaard | | Back to Top | | |
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might-be-don
Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 830
| Posted 3/12/2003 1:49 AM (GMT -6) | | I'll not even pretend to understand what you folks are talking about, but could deja vu be some kind of mis-sync of these processes?
peace and love, don
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"No Rules, just Right" Outback Steakhouse | | Back to Top | | |
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anewbeginning
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2002
Total Posts : 88
| Posted 3/12/2003 7:33 AM (GMT -6) | | Hi Doc:
This stuff is definately very bizarre! You make some valid points though.
1. This research is definately novel, and it will be interesting to see if it is further verified, or if it becomes Brain Science's "cold fusion".
2. I have heard of the idea of time progressing in leaps before, but this idea has been investigated and attempts to discern these leaps have failed, thus far, given current technology.
3. The points made at the beginning of the summary are just examples of possible quantum occurences in everyday existence. Because your feet are so far removed (neurally) from your brain, and your eyes are so nearby, you shouldn't experience the sensation of your feet hitting the floor instantaneous with your sight of it happening. But you do! Penrose has suggested that such quantum backward referral is quite common (and useful) in human brains.
Re-reading some of Penrose's book, I think I'm hasty in my jump to determinism from these findings. It doesn't seem Penrose is a determinist, though I can't say for certain.
He shows other strange quantum behaviors that are demonstatable in the macroscopic, among them the ability to use quantum weirdness to obtain real effects from counter-factuals! This seems, at least,to imply "openess".
This is why I wonder if openess and Einstein's interpretation of space really are incompatible. I'm just not sure how to proceed.
Might-be-don, the same though occured to me- just before I read your post! (eerie music do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do) ;)
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rsirkel
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Date Joined May 2002
Total Posts : 183
| Posted 3/12/2003 9:17 AM (GMT -6) | | anewbeginning
I'll throw in my two cents about the supposed backward in time measurement. In quantum mechanics there is what is called non local events or action. We are most familiar with reality consisting of local events within space and time and one that exists and operates in a chronological framework. But Bell's Theorem proves that there is a non local order of our reality. Non local is an unmediated action at a distance not bound to space and time. Experiments with entanglement of photons have resulted in non local results. It links up one location with another without crossing space, without delay.
My guess is that in the experiments you quoted there was non local knowing in the spirits of the observers that communicated that knowing, not from the future but in the now and it was observed in the senses, in space and time. (An inward to outward communicating to the senses instead of outward to inward) God is Spirit. In Him we live and move and have our being. We are designed spirit, soul, and body. I think quantum mechanics or quantum consciousness is just discovering howbeit imperfectly, what man is capable of knowing unaided by the Holy Spirit, of the spirit. We don't understand the details of non local reality but it is happening. One user friendly book is the "Physics of Consciousness" by Evan Harris Walker. It covers the areas of quantum actions in the brain/mind and is fairly recent research though it will bring the reader through the history of physics for our understanding. I hope this has been of some help because in my view quantum mechanics supports the OV.
Ron Sirkel | | Back to Top | | |
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