New Level Of Cosmic Consciousness Truth And Reality

A cut above consciousness is generally regarded as a suitable undergo of consciousness in which aspects of the incentive, such as contemplation, supportive and tension, are enlarged, cultured and exceptional. It is intentional thus to be a excellent level of consciousness family member to not noteworthy consciousness, in the judge that a larger feeling of reasonableness is achieved. In a of time context, excellent consciousness is as a matter of course associated with enhanced power once more one's incentive and atmosphere, take offense and aptly elucidation, and fantastic clandestine mutiny. In a spiritual context, it may also be associated with transcendence, spiritual elucidation, and confederation with the divine.

The conception of excellent consciousness rests on the belief that the unexceptional, not noteworthy mortal party is recently fairly conscious due to the description of the dilettante incentive and the roughly of cut impulses and preoccupations. As a product, most humans are intentional to be knocked out (to reasonableness) even as they go about their essay trade

Basis

Theories Of Everything A Theory Of Everything Must Address Consciousness Says Prof

A new theory of the universe outlined by Wake Forest University medicine prof Robert Lanza, called biocentrism, addresses the implications of failure to include our own consciousness in our understanding of the world:

Neuroscientists have developed theories that might help to explain how separate pieces of information are integrated in the brain and thus succeed in elucidating how different attributes of a single perceived object-such as the shape, color, and smell of a flower-are merged into a coherent whole. These theories reflect some of the important work that is occurring in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, but they are theories of structure and function. They tell us nothing about how the performance of these functions is accompanied by a conscious experience; and yet the difficulty in understanding consciousness lies precisely here, in this gap in our understanding of how a subjective experience emerges from a physical process.

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Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the corner, and yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have no idea how to explain its existence from physical laws. The questions physicists long to ask about nature are bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics can furnish no answers for them.

Lanza argues, essentially, that attempts to understand the universe through physics and chemistry alone are doomed by the quantum mechanical nature of life. Interesting reading!

From what I can tell, most materialists are not so much looking for a way to understand consciousness (self, soul, free will, et cetera) as a way to define it out of existence or effectiveness. The fact that they want their biggest problem to be just dismissed as a myth shows the size of the challenge they face in dealing with it. Go here, here, and here for a few examples.

Check out "The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul" by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary (Harper 2007).

Source: witch-selena.blogspot.com

Deepak Chopra God 2 0 Quantum Flapdoodle

Michael Shermer has this interesting post about Deepak Chopra's quantum God.

In most surveys, nine out of ten Americans respond in the affirmative to the question "Do you believe in God?" The other 10 percent provide a variety of answers, including a favorite among skeptics and atheists: "Which god do you mean?" And then they offer a litany of classical and non-Western deities: Aphrodite, Amon Ra, Apollo, Baal, Brahma, Ganesha, Isis, Mithras, Osiris, Shiva, Thor, Vishnu, Wotan, and Zeus. "We're all atheists of these gods," the stock reply concludes, "but some of us go one god further."

I have debated many theologians who make the traditional arguments for God's existence: the cosmological argument (prime mover, first cause), the teleological argument (the order and design of the universe), the ontological argument (if it is logically possible for God to exist, then God exists), the anthropic argument (the fine-tuned characteristics of nature, making human life possible), the moral argument (awareness of right and wrong), and others. These are all reasons to believe in God only if you already believe. If you do not already believe, these arguments ring hollow, having been refuted over the ages by philosophers from David Hume to Daniel Dennett.

This past spring, however, I participated in a debate with a theologian of a different stripe, the New Age spiritualist Deepak Chopra. His arguments for the existence of a deity take a radically new tack. During our exchange, which was taped by ABC's "Nightline" and viewed by millions, Chopra set out a series of scientific-sounding arguments for the existence of a divine quantum force capable of nonlocal "spooky action at a distance," as Einstein famously described quantum entanglement. Call this new theology God 2.0.

Chopra provided a preview of these arguments in his 2006 book "Life After Death". Consider this passage:

The mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom. Until an observer appears, electrons have no physical identity in the world; there is only the amorphous cloud. In the same way, imagine that there is a cloud of possibilities open to the brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images I could choose from). When the mind gives a signal, one of these possibilities coalesces from the cloud and becomes a thought in the brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron....

Chopra believes that the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) can be linked to certain mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness). This supposition is based on the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.

Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. Penrose and Hameroff conjecture that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave-function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons. This, in turn, triggers the neurons to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave-function collapse can only come about when an atom is "observed" (that is, affected in any way by something else), "mind" may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms to molecules to neurons... and so on.

Shermer discredits this idea as does Murray Gell-Mann:

Chopra's use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls "quantum flapdoodle," which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different types of mathematics....

via Deepak Chopra's God 2.0 Big Questions Online.

It seems our desire to be immortal leads many to speculate that the brain is not responsible, by itself, for our experience of consciousness.

A Model For Quantum Consciousness

"I first read Sir Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind" back when I was in college working on my psychology degree. In the book Penrose reviewed much of the current research surrounding consciousness and concluded that the most reasonable explanation for the bulk of the data was to envision consciousness as a coherent phenomenon related to quantum interactions within the brain. At the time of publication, 1989, he concluded that these quantum effects were possibly unknowable, which would seriously impede any effort to construct a fully conscious form of artificial intelligence.

However, since 1989 incredible strides have been made in terms of mapping brain activity. More recently Penrose and others who support his ideas believe they may have found the point of interaction between neurons and the quantum realm, in the form of tiny structures called microtubules. With the recent fuss over Eben Alexander's "Proof of Heaven", near-death experiences are once more in the news. On a recent television documentary, Penrose colleague Dr. Stuart Hameroff commented on how the quantum microtubule idea could model and explain such experiences.

According to this idea, consciousness is a program for a quantum computer in the brain which can persist in the universe even after death, explaining the perceptions of those who have near-death experiences.

Dr Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology and the Director of the Centre of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, has advanced the quasi-religious theory. It is based on a quantum theory of consciousness he and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose have developed which holds that the essence of our soul is contained inside structures called microtubules within brain cells.

They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR). Thus it is held that our souls are more than the interaction of neurons in the brain. They are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe - and may have existed since the beginning of time.

The article comments on this idea's similarity to certain Buddhist concepts, and in fact it's quite Hermetic and Thelemic as well. One of the primary challenges of applying this model to near-death experiences, though, is how it was worked out in the first place. Microtubules were first implicated as a possible model for consciousness because they are small enough to interact with quantum effects, but also because in patients who are under anesthesia they seem to stop functioning. The problem there is that patients under anesthesia generally report nothing while near-death survivors usually report variations on the familiar account - a tunnel, a light, seeing deceased family members, and so forth. Therefore, for any such model to match the data it would have to account for the differences between the two states. Just showing that microtubule activity stops during those experiences is not enough.

In fact, near-death experiences that include no corroborating information - that is, most of them - are extremely difficult to validate. It would seem like a case such as Eben Alexander's, in which brain activity appears stopped for an extended period of time and the patient nonetheless reports lengthy and detailed visions, is pretty much the best evidence available. This is likely what is fueling sales of Alexander's book, but as it turns out the account wasn't written down right away and thus could have easily become mixed up with all sorts of other memories and so forth. Those circumstances profoundly limit the case's usefulness. At the same time, more common experiences that last for only a few minutes is difficult to measure. What are you going to do, slap a brain scanner on a dying patient as doctors rush to save him or her? Doing so simply is not practical, nor is it in the patient's best interest.

Having followed Penrose's work for many years I do think that the microtubule hypothesis has some promise, but a lot more work needs to be done before it can be treated as in any way definitive. It could potentially explain some magical effects in quantum terms, and furthermore a device that scans microtubule potentials might turn out to be the Holy Grail of mind research, the consciousness measure. In fact, that's the direction I would recommend to researchers such as Hameroff - adapt the technology currently in use to measure microtubule activity and see if readings from it can be related to particular states of consciousness, including those of advanced spiritual practitioners. Don't just recruit Buddhists and study meditative states, recruit practical magicians and measure the states that arise during magical operations.

That sort of data is pretty much what we need to take the model much further. We need to know something more than whether the microtubules are on or off, but how they respond to willed actions, contemplation, and practical ritual operations. A strong correlation between microtubule potentials and state of mind is what it would take to support the hypothesis, and if such a relationship can be identified it means we're a lot closer than most of us generally think to unlocking the mechanism behind magick. Once we can measure what consciousness is doing in a reliable fashion, all that really is left is to relate it to practical magical operations performed against known probabilities. The hope would be that once this is done, we can identify on a neuroanatomical level the precise brain states that correspond to successful magical outcomes.