Pramana

Krishna showing Yasoda the universe in his mouth.

Hello friends and readers. It is HOT here, how about you? A steamy 111 degrees. Thanks for air conditioning. Other than being hot it has been a very informative day. Do you have those days where the information just pours in? Because I am on vacation from school I have the luxury of time. Today it has been largely associated with Quantum thought and theory etc. . .

Pramana

The concept is derived from the Sanskrit root, prama (प्रमा) which means “correct notion, true knowledge, basis, foundation, accurate notion”. Thus, the concept Pramana implies that which is a “means of acquiring prama or certain, correct, true knowledge” (Wiki).

First up a cool documentary, “We are living in a simulation” very scientific, yet entertaining.

Next quantum food for thought an article, “How does quantum physics work, you may ask, what is it, and where does it come from?”

Also another article, “Scientist Now Believe the Universe Itself Maybe Conscious

 

Namaste

 

To Be

BUtterfly

CockatoosWeb

Hunt Slonem

“To be, or not to be- that is the question” obviously William Shakespeare, it is a really good question, and a philosophical one at that. Isn’t this just a grand game? I think in fact it is, and thinking of it as such has shifted my perception, has shifted my reality. The question of existence, and of consciousness is the one most of us endlessly ponder, and ain’t it fun? I recently saw this video.

” Elon Musk has said that there is only a “one in billions” chance that we’re not living in a computer simulation.” Source 

“To die- to sleep.
To sleep- perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”

The guy on Facebook that runs a group called, Philosophy and Physics, is the group that keeps me supplied with all this great food for thought. We were chatting on the nature of reality. I suggested there are infinite realities, and today he messaged me a video link and said this was his belief on reality, I thought to myself, it is Alan Watts, and it was. Nothing You Can Do, Alan Watts.

Relating to my last post, Merging, and timeline shifts, I won’t go so far as saying that but strange things are popping up, some very good things. Just yesterday I was imagining J.K. Rowling had written the sequel to The Harry Potter saga. Today, I discover she has, more or less, Harry Potter and The Cursed Child. What? What? How did I not know this? I am on the internet everyday, I am a member of Pottermore. I am really sort of gobsmacked that I did not know.

One other major thing that I will just hold onto because it is of cosmic relevance, and I want to hold the vision. Please join me in seeing the Earth we desire today, in joy, in peace, in harmony.

Shakespeare is in my future. I guess that is no big surprise. I have registered for all but one class. Mr. Shakespeare, Transborder Chicano Literature, and Child and Adolescent. Then once I get my fingerprint card, I will get put in the iTeach class, which will be in a public high school.

In the meanwhile I am creating my existence. If I am a character in a game, the character has become sentient.

Namaste

Sindy

 

Hamlet

William Shakespeare

Act III, Scene I

 

Paintings by

Hunt Slonem

Merging

ELIZABETH BLAYLOCK

oil_sketch___flowers_dancing_in_the_wind_6c185db0f143a8814f0cb271162b1e76

I wanted to share this guys personal opinions based on his perceptions of what they call, The Mandela Effect, or Merging of Two Parallel Realities. We could just dismiss this out of hand, however such things are being discussed in Quantum Theory so why not? My blogging friend Cynthia Sue Larson, physicist, writes extensively on the topic. One article I recall she talked about this theory, at RealityShifters Blog, lots of good reading there, and her video here. Back to this guy I am going to share, he talks of this world being even slightly geographically different than he recalls. Ponder it like a story, there was some resonance in it for me, who is still reading lots of Quantum Theory articles. lol

The Mandela Effect, or Merging of Two Parallel Realities

By Carlos Tavares

Happy Saturday! I am going to Comicon tomorrow! Excited as a kid going to the State Fair.

Namaste

(More than a word, a state of being)

Sindy

Paintings by

Elizabeth Blaylock

Masterful Creator’s

Fan Ming11694134_1023050091052100_7866489009170934731_nfantasy-fairy-images-art-fairies-53061639

Believer 

We are all master creator’s! Whether we own it, or not, it is true. It is truly empowering, on every level. I am going to digress a minute. Around the 2012, December 21, Maya Calendar hoopla, there were high energies flowing, for myself, when divinely guided to leave Los Angeles, prior to the date by 2 years, I did. The extraordinary odyssey that followed is good evidence to listen to your guides. I diverged from diverging, on the 12/21/2012, there was a mixture of excitement, and trepidation. The event was much hyped, and some may say it was anticlimactic, however I feel there was a shift that occurred, and there is no doubt in my mind. I used my own powers of creation to visualize the kind of timeline I wanted to exist in. I meditated a lot, I prayed a lot. Fortunately I was able to leave the south shortly after that date and come back west where I am home. My point is I believe that I am indeed seeing my dreams unfold. This is politics which I do not normally engage in as I have not believed in the system for some time now, however, I do believe in us! We the people are waking up. We the people are owning our power. I am speaking briefly about Bernie Sanders, US presidential candidate, as Bernie says, “What is important here is the grassroots movement” I paraphrased. I have seen endless videos of people supporting talking about “love” and humanity. Unity! It is the movement he inspired that makes me smile. We are Masterful Creator’s and we need to own it all.

That is just part of it. In my own goals, I am looking at turning coal into diamonds, in every way. This week I got some coal, at first this displeased me, my first reaction was fear. Isn’t that natural? lol It shouldn’t be, but right away I received guidance, I hear from my guides, “Practice what you preach. This is an opportunity,” and since that is what I have been personally working on, Quantum Thought, I agreed. I felt better, fear dissipated immediately. I really do believe 100% that when “stuff” happens, or their is an appearance of an obstacle, that we ourselves (higher self) put it there. We cannot see what master alchemist we are with out the raw base materials in which to transform. So anyway current coal is a work in progress.

On a wonderful synchronous note, after the above, I opened an email from Matt K, and Julie D.  This is what it said.

A Message to All Innocent Hearts,

 The difference between a lightworker and a victim has nothing to do with the situations faced, but how one responds to the circumstances at hand. A lightworker uses their world of experiences to become the change they wish to see, while a victim is hurt by the actions of a world, while waiting for the change they have yet to become. On a spiritual level, a victim is a lightworker in training.

 

Smile, laugh, give great thanks for your life.

Positive videos

Visualization TV

Namaste

Be Blessed

Sindy

Awakening Reflections

Mermaids

The Air That I Breathe

Barbara Franken at Me, My Magnificent Self, has issued a challenge,  This is a follow up to a challenge two years ago where we were invited to write about our awakening experiences. Barbara created an e-book from the posts, and ask for an update. Thank you Barbara.

~~~

The Angel

Guarded by an Angel mild:

Witless woe was ne’er beguiled!

And I wept both night and day,

And he wiped my tears away;

And I wept both day and night,

And hid from him my heart’s delight.

So he took his wings, and fled;

Then the morn blushed rosy red.

I dried my tears, and armed my fears

With ten-thousand shields and spears.

Soon my Angel came again;

I was armed, he came in vain;

For the time of youth was fled,

And grey hairs were on my head.

William Blake

~

February Challenge…

Inspiring Others by Our Own Awakening Experience

Things are moving rapidly in the realms of creation, and manifestation. Its rather incredible.The awakening, not only of myself, but the world, which has exponentially accelerated in the last two years, or since we last visited our “Awakening Stories.” In my exploration of Quantum Thinking, I have come to realize that we can in fact create, do, be, whatever we choose to do, be, do, be, do. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. The incident of joking with my sister regarding going back in time to break Thoreau’s legs, as I was forced to read the long essay, “Walking,” and subsequently the next day injuring my knee so I couldn’t walk. It was a very powerful, and transcendent lesson. In Quantum Mind there is no time, no joke. I learned from the injury on so many levels. I learned something I now call “Practical Gratitude.” We all know that Gratitude, is a key, key element in manifesting our hearts desires within the realm of our life purpose (manifesting the good stuff, happiness). I first of all gave mad respect to that small ligament that when working allowed me to do so much, like, walk, get up from a chair, get, out of the bed, cross my legs, bend my knee. . .the list goes on. Gratitude indeed, and more respect for my body, and grateful when I am healing. As we all can be in the process of healing, it is a process. Healing physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

As we continue to unwind the trappings of illusion, undefining ourselves, and our world, and allowing expansion from our heart center. . . things are just getting better, and better. If must, we deny the obvious negative, unless of course that is your desire, then by all means keep it. However more, and more I am seeing, and experiencing a cosmic expansion. I believe that we are in fact emerging from our chrysalis, damp, and new ready to explore the world in our new being. With wet wings I stretch them out to dry in the sun, and at the first breeze I take off into the sky, above the trees.

Life has its challenges, and I feel that is part of the game, and why we are here, to spiritually, physically, and emotionally transform with alchemical processes. We are amazing, life and creation is amazing. Love yourself everyday, and say thank you for something. I love you.

Namaste

Sindy

Tomorrows post in challenge:

Laurie’s Notes

Quantum Phase

portal woods

Reclining Buddha

waterfallenchanted

This article looked very familiar to me, but I searched and I haven’t posted it. I will link related post at the bottom. Enjoy.

~~~

Quantum Phase: Time, Parallel Realities, and the Brain

By Brendan D. Murphy, Guest

Waking Times

The eminent physicist and co-founder of string theory, Michio Kaku, has actually said:

“[I]f you have a radio in your living room… and you have all frequencies in your living room; BBC, Radio Moscow, ABC, but your radio is tuned to one frequency — you’re decohered from all the other frequencies. You’re only coherent [wave phase and amplitude in alignment; either exactly or in whole number ratios] with one frequency. We now believe that the universe is vibrating and that there are vibrations of other universes right in this room. There are the universes of dinosaurs because the comet didn’t hit 65 million years ago; the wave function of aliens from outer space looking at the rubble of an earth that already was destroyed — all in your living room, except we have decohered from them. We’re no longer in tune with them, we don’t vibrate with them…[P]robably there are other parallel universes in your living room and believe it or not this is called modern physics…get used to it. This is the modern interpretation of the quantum theory, that many worlds represents reality.”[i]

Not long ago, almost anyone who uttered such a sentiment would have been dismissed by many as “New Age-y,” “flaky,” and so on, but it is no longer feasible to use such convenient rationalizations with physicists of Kaku’s credibility speaking as a clairvoyant or mystic might. In fact, identical sentiments have been put forth by theosophists a century and more ago in describing the astral plane, which interpenetrates the physical plane without either realm’s inhabitants being aware of the other, “whose senses are normally capable of responding to the undulations of their world only.”[ii]

In 1953, Aldous Huxley, having experimented with ingesting hallucinogens such as mescaline, psilocybin, and LSD, suggested that the function of the brain, nervous system, and sense organs is primarily eliminative rather than productive, operating as a “reducing valve” that protects us from being overwhelmed and confused by a mass of useless and irrelevant knowledge, leaving only the tiny selection likely to be practically useful.[iii] The eminent psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who has researched the effects of LSD on consciousness extensively, has expressed agreement with this “reducing valve” way of looking at the brain.[iv] By the time of publication of his book The Holotropic Mind in 1993, Grof had completed some 24,000 altered state sessions with clients and patients—no small body of evidence to substantiate his view. In 1983, Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD (and experimented with it on himself), expressed the view that LSD, by altering the brain’s chemistry, tunes it to other wavelengths from its usual one, thus allowing other realities to enter into one’s awareness.[v]

Intuitives have long used the terms vibration and frequency to describe what they see and feel, but only now is it becoming quite apparent how prescient their vernacular actually was even before the advent of quantum physics. This is the dialect of modern physics, not the old physics that described a “dead,” meaningless world of inert, “solid” matter with only empty space in between, and that featured merely epiphenomenal consciousness. Cybernetician David Foster wrote in a letter to Colin Wilson that the universe is a structure of waves and vibrations, the inner content of which is “meaning,” with man being a micro-system of the same essential vibratory nature within the meaningful universal wave system. He went on to add that the mind is a radio set that can “tune in” to thousands of different vibrations in the aether.[vi]

Such “tuning in” yields what we myopically call ESP. Think of it this way: two people with the same quantum phase have a phase difference of zero, and are therefore completely real to each other. To be able to shake hands or interact solidly, we must have the same quantum phase, the same “time-dependent phase factor,” meaning we share the same moment in time. If our quantum phases are altered with respect to each other, our interaction will be less tangible.[vii] One of us may perceive the other as being “ghostly”; the interaction may appear to be “paranormal” — get the idea?

In Bearden’s model, the “only difference between any two entities in the various worlds is a matter of orthogonal rotation*,” rotation at right angles to the original reference frame/reality. One orthorotation away, the first “hyperspace” in this schema, is the electromagnetic field. Another 90 degree rotation away is the hyperspace occupied by the de Broglie waves. Following this, one more rotation away is a purely mental/virtual world in which 3D objects would be points to us here if seen from our reference frame. According to Bearden, any hyperspace beyond this is only ever three rotational turns away from our frame. Physical phenomena in these frames are mental phenomena with respect to ours — but they are still very real.[viii] This would effectively make the contents of all parallel worlds aspects of our collective unconscious, part of our own psyche.

Intriguingly, Rick Strassman, psychiatrist and researcher into dimethyltryptamine (DMT), following his research into the effects of DMT on human consciousness and the anomalous experiences it produced in test subjects, speculated that parallel universes might be familiar to us, even if the organisms and technologies therein developed along drastically different lines. He believes that reptilian and insect-like beings, and unrecognizable shapes imbued with intelligence should not be unexpected, and nor should highly advanced forms of technology — all of which were reported by his DMT test subjects.[ix]

Holding all of the above firmly in mind, we note those bizarre instances — of which there are documented cases — wherein people have inexplicably found themselves witnessing or even participating in a scene from a “parallel” reality, sometimes what they perceive as the “past.”

For instance, on August 10, 1901, two Oxford professors, Anne Moberly, the principal of St. Hugh’s College, and Eleanor Jourdain, the vice-principal, were wandering, lost, through the garden of the Petit Trianon at Versailles when they were both overcome with sudden feelings of gloom, depression, and unease, though they said nothing of it to one another at the time. Suddenly the scenery seemed somehow abnormal, lifeless, and unreal. Two men in “long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats” suddenly appeared and directed the women to the Petit Trianon. They strolled past an isolated cottage where a woman and a 12- or 13-year-old girl were standing at the doorway, both wearing white kerchiefs fastened under their bodices. Jourdain would later write that “both seemed to pause for an instant, as in a motion picture.”

The two continued on their way and soon reached a pavilion that stood in the middle of an enclosure. A sinister-looking man was sitting outside the pavilion, his face repulsively disfigured by smallpox, wearing a black cloak around his shoulders and a slouch hat — bizarre dress for the period and the weather. He turned to look in their direction though seemed almost to stare through them, not responding to their presence. Still, it was enough to make them feel extremely uncomfortable and the two professors walked on in silent unease until they reached a small terraced country house. A lady was sitting in full view on the lawn with her back to the house, though bizarrely, only one of the pair saw her despite both being keenly on the lookout for someone to ask for directions. The woman, oddly dressed for the period in a summer dress with a long bodice and a very full but short skirt, held a large sheet of paper or cardboard in her hand and seemed to be working at a drawing. She had a pale green fichu or kerchief draped around her shoulders, and a large white hat covered her fair hair. As Moberly and Jourdain continued on, a young man, again oddly dressed, ran up to them and urgently offered them directions towards the Petit Trianon which they eventually located and entered, finding themselves in the midst of a wedding party wherein the participants were dressed in the garb of 1901, their time.

On subsequent trips to the Petit Trianon gardens the women found to their bafflement that a path they had walked down on their initial visit was now blocked by an old stone wall and had been for some time, evidently. Others no longer existed at all. Overall, the layout and dimensions of the grounds and buildings was completely and yet unaccountably different. The kiosk where the disfigured man sat, for instance, was no longer there.

Home in England searching through historical records, the women concluded that they had perhaps been transported into Queen Marie Antoinette’s actual memory of the day (August 10, 1972) in which the sacking of the Tuileries and the massacre of the Swiss Guards had taken place — which accounted for the agitated manner of the people in the garden and general sense of oppressive gloom — and that the woman seated in the garden was none other than the Queen herself. Moberly later came across a picture of Antoinette drawn by the artist Wertmüller and was able to identify her as the same sketching woman she had seen near the Petit Trianon — even the clothes were the same. The pockmarked and “evil”-looking man by the pavilion, the records suggested, may have been the Queen’s betrayer, Comte de Vaudreuil. [x] Moberly and Jourdain’s descriptions of the layout of the gardens and the outbuildings were unknown by Versailles historians at the time but were later verified by painstaking search and scrutiny of obscure records of Louis XVI’s court, including wages he paid to gardeners and carpenters for specific projects.[xi]

String theorists and cyberneticians rejoice. Probably the most compelling element of this particular report is that people from the scene/period approached the two women and addressed them specifically, demonstrating that they were not merely invisible bystanders, but very much real and perceptible. Thus, the women had essentially been transported back in time; they weren’t just witnessing a scene as outside observers, they were there in the “past.” In a 1957 paper on how the focus of our awareness creates our reality, Hugh Everett described “simple moments in time when it becomes possible to jump from one reality to another by creating a quantum bridge between two already existing possibilities.” One wonders if he had intended to include such possibilities as this time-warping one. Everett called these windows of opportunity “choice points.”[xii] He was, evidently, very much aware of the pluralistic nature of “reality.”

Events such as Moberly and Jourdain’s are familiar even to government-employed remote viewers. As we have seen and will see further, in quantum physics the past, present, and future are not clearly distinguishable from one another and research is ongoing into the effects the future has on the present (you read that correctly). In short, past, present, and future — all of them — exist now. In the words of physicist and string theory exponent Brian Greene, “If you were having a great time at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1999, you still are.” (We will return to this comment again soon.)

From the many-worlds perspective, there is nothing particularly unusual about this event. The occultist might suggest that the women had essentially stepped into an Akashic record of the past. So, were these two women of the 20th century actually there in the 1700s? Taking the view of the many-worlds interpretation, in at least one version, they were (and still are), and perhaps somewhere in that “parallel reality” there exists a record in some long since departed soul’s tattered old diary of the two “oddly dressed” women who seemed out of place in the garden of the Petit Trianon that day as everyone bustled about hastily and on edge. There is no “separate time period,” simply a larger hyperdimensional reality that enfolds all time. If we could step into a hyperframe and see all instants through history frozen in time, we could choose a different one to step into and experience.

Novikov applied the “principle of least action” to time travel, and, in what Strieber refers to as a “brilliant feat of mathematics” showed that the only movements through time satisfying this principle must be those in which the grandfather paradox cannot apply: “time travel will never cause a situation in which one of these paradoxes could take place.”[xiii] If we were to access a particle stream moving faster than light, we could theoretically time-travel. As Einstein’s relativity showed, the faster something moves, the slower its subjective time passes, and if it were to break the light speed threshold, it would then be traveling backwards in time (time would “reverse”). Author Whitley Strieber asked in 1997 if the mind could somehow enable time travel.[xiv] Strieber has had his own Versailles-like experiences, so he already knew the answer. It is “yes.” Government-backed research has validated this notion, as we will see.

Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek says, “We are haunted by the awareness that infinitely many slightly variant copies of ourselves are living out their parallel lives and that every moment more duplicates spring into existence and take up our many alternative futures.”[xv] Max Tegmark of MIT has expressed a virtually identical view.[xvi]

Kaku mentioned in his description of reality something called decoherence, a theory stating that though all these infinite parallel universes are possibilities, our universe’s wave function has decohered from them: it no longer vibrates in unison/in phase with them. It therefore no longer interacts with them. The result is that though we might coexist simultaneously with the wave function of inhabitants of other universes, we are no longer “in tune” with them.[xvii] Nobel laureate Steve Weinberg has also used the radio station in the living room analogy to describe our situation.[xviii] This is a very apt analogy for the reality we find ourselves in. The decoherence interpretation of quantum mechanics leads to multiple universes/many worlds and avoids the postulation of a wave function collapse. For the time being we note that these parallel worlds postulated by the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, or “decohered universes” actually do, in rare circumstances, spill over into this world, so to speak.

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IDEAFEED

Your Brain Isn’t a Computer. It’s a Quantum Field.

by DAPHNE MULLER

The irrationality of how we think has long plagued psychology. When someone asks us how we are, we usually respond with “fine” or “good.” But if someone followed up about a specific event — “How did you feel about the big meeting with your boss today?” — suddenly, we refine our “good” or “fine” responses on a spectrum from awful to excellent.

In less than a few sentences, we can contradict ourselves: We’re “good” but feel awful about how the meeting went. How then could we be “good” overall? Bias, experience, knowledge, and context all consciously and unconsciously form a confluence that drives every decision we make and emotion we express. Human behavior is not easy to anticipate, and probability theory often fails in its predictions of it.

Enter quantum cognition: A team of researchers has determined that while our choices and beliefs don’t often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a “quantum” level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy. In quantum physics, examining a particle’s state changes the state of the particle — so too, the “observation effect” influences how we think about the idea we are considering.

The quantum-cognition theory opens the fields of psychology and neuroscience to understanding the mind not as a linear computer, but rather an elegant universe.

In the example of the meeting, if someone asks, “Did it go well?” we immediately think of ways it did. However, if he or she asks, “Were you nervous about the meeting?” we might remember that it was pretty scary to give a presentation in front of a group. The other borrowed concept in quantum cognition is that we cannot hold incompatible ideas in our minds at one time. In other words, decision-making and opinion-forming are a lot like Schrödinger’s cat.

The quantum-cognition theory opens the fields of psychology and neuroscience to understanding the mind not as a linear computer, but rather an elegant universe. But the notion that human thought and existence is richly paradoxical has been around for centuries. Moreover, the more scientists and scholars explore the irrational rationality of our minds, the closer science circles back to the confounding logic at the heart of every religion. Buddhism, for instance, is premised on riddles such as, “Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without it.” And, in Christianity, the paradox that Christ was simultaneously both a flesh-and-blood man and the Son of God is the central metaphor of the faith.

For centuries, religious texts have explored the idea that reality breaks down once we get past our surface perceptions of it; and yet, it is through these ambiguities that we understand more about ourselves and our world. In the Old Testament, the embattled Job pleads with God for an explanation as to why he has endured so much suffering. God then quizzically replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). The question seems nonsensical — why would God ask a person in his creation where he was when God himself created the world? But this paradox is little different from the one in Einstein’s famous challenge to Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”: “God does not play dice with the universe.” As Stephen Hawking counters, “Even God is bound by the uncertainty principle” because if all outcomes were deterministic then God would not be God. His being the universe’s “inveterate gambler” is the unpredictable certainty that creates him.

The mind then, according to quantum cognition, “gambles” with our “uncertain” reason, feelings, and biases to produce competing thoughts, ideas, and opinions. Then we synthesize those competing options to relate to our relatively “certain” realities. By examining our minds at a quantum level, we change them, and by changing them, we change the reality that shapes them.

 

Daphne Muller is a New York City-based writer who has written for Salon, Ms. Magazine, The Huffington Post, and reviewed books for ELLE and Publishers Weekly. Most recently, she completed a novel and screenplay. You can follow her on Instagram @daphonay and on Twitter @DaphneEMuller.

Visit the article, lots of hyperlinks, and a video.

Art:

Visual Alchemy

Whoever I Am

Consciousness State of Matter

purple-tulipsmy-heart-space-waves-hollywood-creation-by-linda-zanini79_painting_time

Indian Yoga Flute

There’s a quiet revolution underway in theoretical physics. For as long as the discipline has existed, physicists have been reluctant to discuss consciousness, considering it a topic for quacks and charlatans. Indeed, the mere mention of the ‘c’ word could ruin careers.

That’s finally beginning to change thanks to a fundamentally new way of thinking about consciousness that is spreading like wildfire through the theoretical physics community. And while the problem of consciousness is far from being solved, it is finally being formulated mathematically as a set of problems that researchers can understand, explore and discuss.

Today, Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sets out the fundamental problems that this new way of thinking raises. He shows how these problems can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. And he explains how thinking about consciousness in this way leads to precise questions about the nature of reality that the scientific process of experiment might help to tease apart.

Tegmark’s approach is to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. “I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,” he says.

He goes on to show how the particular properties of consciousness might arise from the physical laws that govern our universe. And he explains how these properties allow physicists to reason about the conditions under which consciousness arises and how we might exploit it to better understand why the world around us appears as it does.

Interestingly, the new approach to consciousness has come from outside the physics community, principally from neuroscientists such as Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

In 2008, Tononi proposed that a system demonstrating consciousness must have two specific traits. First, the system must be able to store and process large amounts of information. In other words consciousness is essentially a phenomenon of information.

And second, this information must be integrated in a unified whole so that it is impossible to divide into independent parts. That reflects the experience that each instance of consciousness is a unified whole that cannot be decomposed into separate components.

Both of these traits can be specified mathematically allowing physicists like Tegmark to reason about them for the first time. He begins by outlining the basic properties that a conscious system must have.

Given that it is a phenomenon of information, a conscious system must be able to store in a memory and retrieve it efficiently.

It must also be able to to process this data, like a computer but one that is much more flexible and powerful than the silicon-based devices we are familiar with.

Tegmark borrows the term computronium to describe matter that can do this and cites other work showing that today’s computers underperform the theoretical limits of computing by some 38 orders of magnitude.

Clearly, there is so much room for improvement that allows for the performance of conscious systems.

Next, Tegmark discusses perceptronium, defined as the most general substance that feels subjectively self-aware. This substance should not only be able to store and process information but in a way that forms a unified, indivisible whole. That also requires a certain amount of independence in which the information dynamics is determined from within rather than externally.

Finally, Tegmark uses this new way of thinking about consciousness as a lens through which to study one of the fundamental problems of quantum mechanics known as the quantum factorization problem.

This arises because quantum mechanics describes the entire universe using three mathematical entities: an object known as a Hamiltonian that describes the total energy of the system; a density matrix that describes the relationship between all the quantum states in the system; and Schrodinger’s equation which describes how these things change with time.

The problem is that when the entire universe is described in these terms, there are an infinite number of mathematical solutions that include all possible quantum mechanical outcomes and many other even more exotic possibilities.

So the problem is why we perceive the universe as the semi-classical, three dimensional world that is so familiar. When we look at a glass of iced water, we perceive the liquid and the solid ice cubes as independent things even though they are intimately linked as part of the same system. How does this happen? Out of all possible outcomes, why do we perceive this solution?

Tegmark does not have an answer. But what’s fascinating about his approach is that it is formulated using the language of quantum mechanics in a way that allows detailed scientific reasoning. And as a result it throws up all kinds of new problems that physicists will want to dissect in more detail.

Take for example, the idea that the information in a conscious system must be unified. That means the system must contain error-correcting codes that allow any subset of up to half the information to be reconstructed from the rest.

Tegmark points out that any information stored in a special network known as a Hopfield neural net automatically has this error-correcting facility. However, he calculates that a Hopfield net about the size of the human brain with 10^11 neurons, can only store 37 bits of integrated information.

“This leaves us with an integration paradox: why does the information content of our conscious experience appear to be vastly larger than 37 bits?” asks Tegmark.

That’s a question that many scientists might end up pondering in detail. For Tegmark, this paradox suggests that his mathematical formulation of consciousness is missing a vital ingredient. “This strongly implies that the integration principle must be supplemented by at least one additional principle,” he says. Suggestions please in the comments section!

And yet the power of this approach is in the assumption that consciousness does not lie beyond our ken; that there is no “secret sauce” without which it cannot be tamed.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young physicists embarked on a quest to explain a few strange but seemingly small anomalies in our understanding of the universe. In deriving the new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, they ended up changing the way we comprehend the cosmos. These physicists, at least some of them, are now household names.

Could it be that a similar revolution is currently underway at the beginning of the 21st century?

The Physics arXiv Blog

Article (No authorship is given)

 

” Instead of thinking outside of the box, get rid of the box.”

Deepak Chopra

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