01 December 2017

Notes - Words, words, words



       Mid-morning. Jill arrives this morning for house cleaning.  You will be running errands most of the morning, maybe taking in a movie you did not see last weekend. - Amorella

       1757 hours. I discovered two articles on consciousness and quantum science. The first is 'out there' a bit but it is the lead in to open up the thinking from the U.K.

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End of Heaven? Quantum science says you ALWAYS have existed and ALWAYS will exist
YOU and your consciousness existed before you were even BORN, according to a well-respected doctor who specialises in biological and medical chemistry.
By Sean Martin
PUBLISHED: 06:32, Fri, Jul 14, 2017 | UPDATED: 07:59, Fri, Jul 14, 2017

Scientists are still baffled by consciousness and questions about why we have it and how we have it constantly arising remain unanswered.
One theory is that consciousness is created on a quantum, sub-atomic scale through energy which is constantly contained in the universe.
The theory is based on Einstein’s famous quote, when he said: “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”
Dr David Hamilton said all consciousness is and always has been in the universe through quantum particles, and when you are born, it is channelled into a physical being.
Writing for website Heal Your Life, Dr Hamilton said: “I believe that each of us exists before we are born on earth.”
He added: “Each of us is pure consciousness, currently focused in a physical dimension. 
“Science would typically say that life is random, ultimately stemming from the random birth of subatomic particles, but I don’t quite agree with that.
“Mainstream science says that consciousness must be a side-effect of brain chemistry. 
“But I believe that the brain merely affects consciousness, much in the same way that the quality of wiring in a TV affects the signal processing and thus the quality of picture you get. 
“The TV does not create the program, and nor does the brain create consciousness.
“Consciousness is something fundamental to nature - it is stitched into the very fabric of reality.”
Consciousness transcends time and space, he said. 
He added: “If you start with the assumption that you exist as pure consciousness, then you must have existed before you were born. 
“Really, you are everywhere and everywhere!”
Dr Robert Lanza shares a similar theory.
He believes our minds exist through energy which is contained in our bodies and is released once our physical beings cease in a process he calls ‘biocentrism’.
As such, when our physical bodies die, the energy of our consciousness could continue on a quantum level.
Dr Lanza says that “there are an infinite number of universes, and everything that could possibly happen occurs in some universe”.
As a result, he theorises that the consciousness continues to exist in a parallel universe.
Dr Lanza points to the uncertainty principle – a 1927 theory from German physicist Werner Heisenberg which says that the velocity and position of an object can be measured at the same time.
The scientist stated in an article he penned for Huffington Post: “Consider the uncertainty principle, one of the most famous and important aspects of quantum mechanics. Experiments confirm it’s built into the fabric of reality, but it only makes sense from a bio-centric perspective.”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/828324/Human-consciousness-universe-quantum-theory

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       1800 hours. The above is interesting but another article refutes the concept at least as far as the uncertainty principle goes, but does not rule out the idea from other perspectives.


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Human Soul Found? Quantum Theory of Consciousness Supports Science AND Religion

Posted by clnMichelle  May 23, 2017  in Afterlife & Reincarnation, Dying, NDE, & OBE, Quantum Physics, Reality's Edge . . .

From Inquisitir dot com
Has the human soul been found by science? A controversial quantum theory of consciousness called “Orch OR” (which stands for “orchestrated objective reduction”) recently had a review, and the scientists supporting this idea are claiming the recent discovery of quantum vibrations in “microtubules” inside brain neurons corroborates their beliefs.
In a related report by the Inquisitr, Stephen Hawking fears the Terminator movies may actually come true, but to this day, the “lowly” human brain still beats out supercomputers on multiple fronts. Louis Del Monte, the author of The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, also believes an AI singularity event will occur by 2045, but so far, computer AI can't even pass the Turing test.
In most religions, the totality of being human is divided into three parts; mind, soul, and body. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other religions typically equate the mind to the physical human brain, which works in conjunction with an immaterial human soul. What has had philosophers and scientists arguing for thousands of years is exactly how this process functions from a mechanical viewpoint. When it comes to the philosophy of the mind, dualism and physicalism have competed for the beliefs of scientists, with the latter claiming that all which exists in our world, including consciousness, is physical.
On the side of physicalism, some scientists claim the soul or consciousness can be reduced to mere computations conducted within the neural networks in the human brain, which means all consciousness can be explained by algorithms. Other scientists believe that quantum processes attributed to the human soul work in partnership with the observable neurological processes to produce the experience of human consciousness, although one is not completely dependent on the other to function. Essentially, these scientists claim the human brain is a quantum computer, and the informational state of qubits are influenced by the human soul.
One such scientist is Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology and the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. He and Sir Roger Penrose, mathematical physicist at the Mathematical Institute and Wadham College and University of Oxford, believe overall brain function derives from quantum level microtubule vibrations.
“The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review, according to Science Daily.“This opens a potential Pandora’s Box, but our theory accommodates both these views…
Selected and edited from - Inquisitir dot com
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       1808 hours. This second article is more focused on consciousness.in terms of the soul and quantum theory.
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February 4, 2015

Human Soul Found? Quantum Theory Of Consciousness ‘Orch OR’ Claims Both Science And Religion Are True


         Has the human soul been found by science? A controversial quantum theory of consciousness called “Orch OR” (which stands for “orchestrated objective reduction”) recently had a review, and the scientists supporting this idea are claiming the recent discovery of quantum vibrations in “microtubules” inside brain neurons corroborates their beliefs. 

[First part below is from previous article but clarifies with more details - rho]

In a related report by the Inquisitr, Stephen Hawking fears the Terminator movies may actually come true, but to this day, the “lowly” human brain still beats out supercomputers on multiple fronts. Louis Del Monte, the author of The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, also believes an AI singularity event will occur by 2045, but so far, computer AI can’t even pass the Turing test.

In most religions, the totality of being human is divided into three parts; mind, soul, and body. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other religions typically equate the mind to the physical human brain, which works in conjunction with an immaterial human soul. What has had philosophers and scientists arguing for thousands of years is exactly how this process functions from a mechanical viewpoint. When it comes to the philosophy of the mind, dualism and physicalism have competed for the beliefs of scientists, with the latter claiming that all which exists in our world, including consciousness, is physical.
On the side of physicalism, some scientists claim the soul or consciousness can be reduced to mere computations conducted within the neural networks in the human brain, which means all consciousness can be explained by algorithms. Other scientists believe that quantum processes attributed to the human soul work in partnership with the observable neurological processes to produce the experience of human consciousness, although one is not completely dependent on the other to function.
Essentially, these scientists claim the human brain is a quantum computer, and the informational state of qubits are influenced by the human soul.
One such scientist is Stuart Hameroff, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology and the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. He and Sir Roger Penrose, mathematical physicist at the Mathematical Institute and Wadham College and University of Oxford, believe overall brain function derives from quantum level microtubule vibrations.
“The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?” ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review, according to Science Daily. “This opens a potential Pandora’s Box, but our theory accommodates both these views, suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, ‘proto-conscious’ quantum structure of reality.”

In other words, they believe they’ve found scientific evidence for the human soul. They claim six testable prediction published in 1998 have been fulfilled, and none have been falsified. As an example, they cite the “recent discovery of warm temperature quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons,” which is a big deal since man-made quantum computers typically require icy conditions in order to function at all. In addition, they point to research which “suggests that anesthesia, which selectively erases consciousness while sparing non-conscious brain activities, acts via microtubules in brain neurons.” From a practical medical perspective, they also believe “treating brain microtubule vibrations could benefit a host of mental, neurological, and cognitive conditions.”
From a religious perspective, Hameroff believes their Orch OR theory could also account for near death experiences, out of body experiences, and even the afterlife.
“The connection to space–time geometry also raises the intriguing possibility that Orch OR allows consciousness apart from the brain and body, distributed and entangled in space–time geometry,” Hameroff says according to Popular Mechanics. When he spoke to the Huffington Post he also claimed, “It’s possible that the quantum information can can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”

Skeptics have long attributed near death experiences to physical phenomena such as the brain being deprive of oxygen, not the human soul or any interaction with God or the afterlife. To put these claims in perspective, last year, even Skeptic magazine’s Michael Shermer wrote about a possible after-death communication from his grandfather-in-law. Other skeptics also tend to be committed materialists until they have their own experience.

One such skeptic was Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, whose neurons in his cerebral cortex were stunned to complete inactivity for seven days during a near-fatal bout of meningitis.
“I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death,” says Alexander in a Newsweek article. “In the fall of 2008,… I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death…. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.”

Many Christians have come forward in recent years claiming to have experienced heaven and met God. Of course, Hameroff’s personal beliefs are very much different from traditional religions in regards to the nature of the human soul. He believes “consciousness, or its immediate precursor proto-consciousness, has been in the universe all along, perhaps from the Big Bang.”

What do you think about this quantum theory of consciousness? Do you think science will be able to prove the existence of the human soul?

https://www.inquisitr.com/1812664/human-soul-found-quantum-theory-consciousness-science-religion-true/

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         2026 hours. A bit more down earth, the third article on the science of quantum consciousness is from a quite reputable magazine, Atlantic.

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Atlantic Magazine

Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness?

A new approach to a once-farfetched theory is making it plausible that the brain functions like a quantum computer.
SCIENCE
The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain—which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer.
             
As recently as 10 years ago, Fisher’s hypothesis would have been dismissed by many as nonsense. Physicists have been burned by this sort of thing before, most notably in 1989, when Roger Penrose proposed that mysterious protein structures called “microtubules” played a role in human consciousness by exploiting quantum effects. Few researchers believe such a hypothesis plausible. Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California, San Diego, memorably opined that one might as well invoke “pixie dust in the synapses” to explain human cognition.

Fisher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. To build an operating quantum computer, you need to connect qubits—quantum bits of information—in a process called entanglement. But entangled qubits exist in a fragile state. They must be carefully shielded from any noise in the surrounding environment. Just one photon bumping into your qubit would be enough to make the entire system “decohere,” destroying the entanglement and wiping out the quantum properties of the system. It’s challenging enough to do quantum processing in a carefully controlled laboratory environment, never mind the warm, wet, complicated mess that is human biology, where maintaining coherence for sufficiently long periods of time is well-nigh impossible.

Over the past decade, however, growing evidence suggests that certain biological systems might employ quantum mechanics. In photosynthesis, for example, quantum effects help plants turn sunlight into fuel. Scientists have also proposed that migratory birds have a “quantum compass” enabling them to exploit Earth’s magnetic fields for navigation, or that the human sense of smell could be rooted in quantum mechanics.

Fisher’s notion of quantum processing in the brain broadly fits into this emerging field of quantum biology. Call it quantum neuroscience. He has developed a complicated hypothesis, incorporating nuclear and quantum physics, organic chemistry, neuroscience and biology. While his ideas have met with plenty of justifiable skepticism, some researchers are starting to pay attention. “Those who read his paper (as I hope many will) are bound to conclude: This old guy’s not so crazy,” wrote John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, after Fisher gave a talk there. “He may be on to something. At least he’s raising some very interesting questions.”

Senthil Todadri, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fisher’s longtime friend and colleague, is skeptical, but he thinks that Fisher has rephrased the central question—is quantum processing happening in the brain?—in such a way that it lays out a road map to test the hypothesis rigorously. “The general assumption has been that of course there is no quantum information processing that’s possible in the brain,” Todadri said. “He makes the case that there’s precisely one loophole. So the next step is to see if that loophole can be closed.” Indeed, Fisher has begun to bring together a team to do laboratory tests to answer this question once and for all.

Fisher belongs to something of a physics dynasty: His father, Michael E. Fisher,  is a prominent physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, whose work in statistical physics has garnered numerous honors and awards over the course of his career. His brother, Daniel Fisher, is an applied physicist at Stanford University who specializes in evolutionary dynamics. Matthew Fisher has followed in their footsteps, carving out a highly successful physics career. He shared the prestigious Oliver E. Buckley Prize in 2015 for his research on quantum phase transitions.

So what drove him to move away from mainstream physics and toward the controversial and notoriously messy interface of biology, chemistry, neuroscience and quantum physics? His own struggles with clinical depression.

Fisher vividly remembers that February 1986 day when he woke up feeling numb and jet-lagged, as if he hadn’t slept in a week. “I felt like I had been drugged,” he said. Extra sleep didn’t help. Adjusting his diet and exercise regime proved futile, and blood tests showed nothing amiss. But his condition persisted for two full years. “It felt like a migraine headache over my entire body every waking minute,” he said. It got so bad he contemplated suicide, although the birth of his first daughter gave him a reason to keep fighting through the fog of depression.

Eventually he found a psychiatrist who prescribed a tricyclic antidepressant, and within three weeks his mental state started to lift. “The metaphorical fog that had so enshrouded me that I couldn’t even see the sun—that cloud was a little less dense, and I saw there was a light behind it,” Fisher said. Within nine months he felt reborn, despite some significant side effects from the medication, including soaring blood pressure. He later switched to Prozac and has continuously monitored and tweaked his specific drug regimen ever since.

His experience convinced him that the drugs worked. But Fisher was surprised to discover that neuroscientists understand little about the precise mechanisms behind how they work. That aroused his curiosity, and given his expertise in quantum mechanics, he found himself pondering the possibility of quantum processing in the brain. Five years ago he threw himself into learning more about the subject, drawing on his own experience with antidepressants as a starting point.

Since nearly all psychiatric medications are complicated molecules, he focused on one of the most simple, lithium, which is just one atom—a spherical cow, so to speak, that would be an easier model to study than Prozac, for instance. The analogy is particularly appropriate because a lithium atom is a sphere of electrons surrounding the nucleus, Fisher said. He zeroed in on the fact that the lithium available by prescription from your local pharmacy is mostly a common isotope called lithium-7. Would a different isotope, like the much more rare lithium-6, produce the same results? In theory it should, since the two isotopes are chemically identical. They differ only in the number of neutrons in the nucleus.

When Fisher searched the literature, he found that an experiment comparing the effects of lithium-6 and lithium-7 had been done. In 1986, scientists at Cornell University examined the effects of the two isotopes on the behavior of rats. Pregnant rats were separated into three groups: One group was given lithium-7, one group was given the isotope lithium-6, and the third served as the control group. Once the pups were born, the mother rats that received lithium-6 showed much stronger maternal behaviors, such as grooming, nursing and nest-building, than the rats in either the lithium-7 or control groups.

This floored Fisher. Not only should the chemistry of the two isotopes be the same, the slight difference in atomic mass largely washes out in the watery environment of the body. So what could account for the differences in behavior those researchers observed?

Fisher believes the secret might lie in the nuclear spin, which is a quantum property that affects how long each atom can remain coherent—that is, isolated from its environment. The lower the spin, the less the nucleus interacts with electric and magnetic fields, and the less quickly it decoheres.

Because lithium-7 and lithium-6 have different numbers of neutrons, they also have different spins. As a result, lithium-7 decoheres too quickly for the purposes of quantum cognition, while lithium-6 can remain entangled longer. . . ..


Fisher had found two substances, alike in all important respects save for quantum spin, and found that they could have very different effects on behavior. For Fisher, this was a tantalizing hint that quantum processes might indeed play a functional role in cognitive processing.

That said, going from an intriguing hypothesis to actually demonstrating that quantum processing plays a role in the brain is a daunting challenge. The brain would need some mechanism for storing quantum information in qubits for sufficiently long times. There must be a mechanism for entangling multiple qubits, and that entanglement must then have some chemically feasible means of influencing how neurons fire in some way. There must also be some means of transporting quantum information stored in the qubits throughout the brain.

This is a tall order. Over the course of his five-year quest, Fisher has identified just one credible candidate for storing quantum information in the brain: phosphorus atoms, which are the only common biological element other than hydrogen with a spin of one-half, a low number that makes possible longer coherence times. Phosphorus can’t make a stable qubit on its own, but its coherence time can be extended further, according to Fisher, if you bind phosphorus with calcium ions to form clusters.

In 1975, Aaron Posner, a Cornell University scientist, noticed  an odd clustering of calcium and phosphorous atoms in his X-rays of bone. He made drawings of the structure of those clusters: nine calcium atoms and six phosphorous atoms, later called “Posner molecules” in his honor. The clusters popped up again in the 2000s, when scientists simulating bone growth in artificial fluid noticed  them floating in the fluid. Subsequent experiments found evidence of the clusters in the body. Fisher thinks that Posner molecules could serve as a natural qubit in the brain as well.

That’s the big picture scenario, but the devil is in the details that Fisher has spent the past few years hammering out. The process starts in the cell with a chemical compound called pyrophosphate. It is made of two phosphates bonded together—each composed of a phosphorus atom surrounded by multiple oxygen atoms with zero spin. The interaction between the spins of the phosphates causes them to become entangled. They can pair up in four different ways: Three of the configurations add up to a total spin of one (a “triplet” state that is only weakly entangled), but the fourth possibility produces a zero spin, or “singlet” state of maximum entanglement, which is crucial for quantum computing.

Next, enzymes break apart the entangled phosphates into two free phosphate ions. Crucially, these remain entangled even as they move apart. This process happens much more quickly, Fisher argues, with the singlet state. These ions can then combine in turn with calcium ions and oxygen atoms to become Posner molecules. Neither the calcium nor the oxygen atoms have a nuclear spin, preserving the one-half total spin crucial for lengthening coherence times. So those clusters protect the entangled pairs from outside interference so that they can maintain coherence for much longer periods of time—Fisher roughly estimates it might last for hours, days or even weeks.

In this way, the entanglement can be distributed over fairly long distances in the brain, influencing the release of neurotransmitters and the firing of synapses between neurons—spooky action at work in the brain.

Researchers who work in quantum biology are cautiously intrigued by Fisher’s proposal. Alezandra Olava-Castro,  a physicist at University College London who has worked on quantum photosynthesis, calls it “a well-thought hypothesis. It doesn’t give answers, it opens questions that might then lead to how we could test particular steps in the hypothesis.”
The University of Oxford chemist Peter Hore, who investigates whether migratory birds’ navigational systems make use of quantum effects, concurs. “Here’s a theoretical physicist who is proposing specific molecules, specific mechanics, all the way through to how this could affect brain activity,” he said. “That opens up the possibility of experimental testing.”
Experimental testing is precisely what Fisher is now trying to do. He just spent a sabbatical at Stanford University working with researchers there to replicate the 1986 study with pregnant rats. He acknowledged the preliminary results were disappointing, in that the data didn’t provide much information, but thinks if it’s repeated with a protocol closer to the original 1986 experiment, the results might be more conclusive.

Fisher has applied for funding to conduct further in-depth quantum chemistry experiments. He has cobbled together a small group of scientists from various disciplines at UCSB and the University of California, San Francisco, as collaborators. First and foremost, he would like to investigate whether calcium phosphate really does form stable Posner molecules, and whether the phosphorus nuclear spins of these molecules can be entangled for sufficiently long periods of time.

Even Hore and Olaya-Castro are skeptical of the latter, particularly Fisher’s rough estimate that the coherence could last a day or more. “I think it’s very unlikely, to be honest,” Olaya-Castro said. “The longest time scale relevant for the biochemical activity that’s happening here is the scale of seconds, and that’s too long.” (Neurons can store information for microseconds.) Hore calls the prospect “remote,” pegging the limit at one second at best. “That doesn’t invalidate the whole idea, but I think he would need a different molecule to get long coherence times,” he said. “I don’t think the Posner molecule is it. But I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes.”

Others see no need to invoke quantum processing to explain brain function. “The evidence is building up that we can explain everything interesting about the mind in terms of interactions of neurons,” said Paul Thagard, a neurophilosopher at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, to New Scientist. (Thagard declined our request to comment further.)

Plenty of other aspects of Fisher’s hypothesis also require deeper examination, and he hopes to be able to conduct the experiments to do so. Is the Posner molecule’s structure symmetrical? And how isolated are the nuclear spins?

Most important, what if all those experiments ultimately prove his hypothesis wrong? It might be time to give up on the notion of quantum cognition altogether. “I believe that if phosphorus nuclear spin is not being used for quantum processing, then quantum mechanics is not operative in longtime scales in cognition,” Fisher said. “Ruling that out is important scientifically. It would be good for science to know.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/11/quantum-brain/506768/

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       2125 hours. The above articles show several similar aspects of consciousness not usually considered as science oriented. Some border on metaphysics, which from my point of view, is partially, presently, unknown science.
       Some other articles suggest that consciousness was a reality before the Big Bang; and you wonder if thought also existed before the Big Bang. - Amorella
       2132 hours. If humans have rational thoughts words soon become real. I am reminded of a well-known Biblical quotation:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."  John 1:1

         2138 hours. I do not take the Bible as literal. I am mostly an agnostic. However, this does not mean the Bible does not show certain truths about human nature (whether it is with intent or not). I am enjoying the irony in my head. Where else?

         You asked. The irony comes from the deep in your personal poetry -- the interactions your heartansoulanmind which are not the interactions of your five or perhaps six senses. The humor makes your day. I, the Amorella, see your humor from the inside, or perhaps from a hint of another side. Post, orndorff. Have a good sleep.













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