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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

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Book review: The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer

This is intriguing:

"Shermer looks at the evidence for determinism, and there is a lot of it, that shows we are in less control than we think. However, Shermer argues that there are four important parts of free will that in the end, do leave us more in control than hard determinists want you to believe. I won’t reveal those methods here because they are much better revealed through the context of Shermer’s story telling."
 
Princeton Study Observes Group Consciousness Has Physical Effects On World During Large-Scale Events
BY BRENT LAMBERT • JUNE 20, 2015 • CHARLIE ROSE, PHYSICS, SPIRITUALITY, THE HUMAN BRAIN

For the first time in scientific history researchers have discovered that group consciousness (i.e. collective consciousness) elicits physical changes in the physical world around us. Researchers made the discovery in a groundbreaking study from Princeton University’s PEAR Laboratory (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research). “The power of thought is not just ideological. It manifests physically. Cohesion between individuals ramps up this power,” write the study’s authors. The research was spearheaded by Roger Nelson, who coordinated research at PEAR for two decades, and who is now the director of the Global Consciousness Project (GCP), a collaboration between researchers world-wide to test the power of human consciousness.

GCP writes: “In field applications, the research shows that in situations which produce a coherent group consciousness the data may depart from expectation even without specific intentions. The GCP/EGG project’s measures are a direct extension of the laboratory and field applications of the REG technology. In field studies with REGs we have found consistent deviations from expected randomicity in data taken in situations where groups become integrated or unified by something of common interest. During deeply engaging meetings, concerts, rituals, etc., the data tend to exhibit slightly greater order than random data should, and we are able to predict this deviation with small but significant success.”

“The best way to describe the anomalous effects we see in the data is as a correlation that comes to exist between the devices spread around the world — just during major events, defined in terms of the widespread attention and emotion the produce,” adds GCP “That is, there are departures from expectation when human consciousness is powerfully engaged. The devices are designed to be independent, and they are separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometers, and yet we see the correlations — that is anomalous, and it is linked with consciousness. The implication is that we are not isolated from each other as seems to be the case, but linked in a subtle, unconscious and inaccessible way. Learning more about that, and tapping into the potential of our interconnection is the next phase of human development. We are at the beginning, and ready to move forward.”

The discovery provides a major proof to the existence of the Unified Field (also known as Uniform Field Theory), a theory of quantum physics. Dr. John Hagelin is Professor of Physics and Director of the Doctoral Program in Physics at Maharishi International University in Iowa, and in one of his published papers he examines the connection between group consciousness and the Unified Field: “Following a general introduction to Unified Quantum Field theories, we consider [the proposal that] the Unified Field of modern theoretical physics and the field of ‘pure consciousness’ are identical. We show that the proposed identity between consciousness and the unified field is consistent with all known physical principles, but requires an expanded physical framework for the understanding of consciousness. Such a framework may indeed be required to account for experimentally observed field effects of consciousness and phenomenological aspects of higher states of consciousness.”

To learn more about Princeton’s PEAR Lab research you can watch the video below. David Lynch also describes the Unified Field theory beautifully in a terrific Q&A which you can watch below. And Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor also touches on the very same subject in perhaps the most profound TED Talk of all, entitled “Stroke Of Insight,” her personal account of her brush with the Unified Field when the left hemisphere of her brain shut down. You can also watch Dr. John Hagelin in his own words as he summarizes years of scientific research bridging consciousness and the Unified Field in the lecture below. (Image via Humans Are Free)

SEE ALSO: Science Links Anxiety To High IQ’s & Sentinel Intelligence, Social Anxiety To Very Rare Psychic Gift
SEE ALSO: Quantum Biology: How The Newest Field In Quantum Mechanics Is Unlocking Life’s Biggest Mysteries
SEE ALSO: Revolutionary Theory Of Biocentrism Unlocks The Mysteries Of Consciousness, The Soul & The Afterlife
SEE ALSO: Watch This Fascinating TED Talk On The Two Newest & Most Exciting Theories Explaining Consciousness
SEE ALSO: Biophotons: The Coherent Light Particle In Every DNA Responsible For Intercellular Communication And Barometer Of A Living Organism’s Health

Additional video presentations are linked at the original site:

Princeton Study Observes Group Consciousness Has Physical Effects On World During Large-Scale Events
 
The Princeton PEAR research including the Global Consciousness Project has focused on human consciousness, but it seems apparent to me that shared consciousness also exists among a wide range of animal species, and that cross-sharing of senses and consciousness occurs between and among species. I want to explore research of the latter kind when I've finally completed my household move (by the end of this month, at last).
 
From the comments following that article:

"24. vemv

As my favorite quote goes, no furious activity is substitute for understanding. Obviously, the Norvig side is the ‘furious’ one: just collect more petabytes of data, add more processing power, develop more aggressive algorithms.

Regardless of the achievements of this approach, it is obvious that this way we’ll never get to create anything nearly comparable to our own cognition. Only a deep research -meditation, if you will- on the meaning of meaning will."


As I see it, language is one means of human expression among others, expression of what humans feel and understand in their existentially given situations. Existential situations are local realities developed out of that which is naturally given and encountered in the physical and personal/interpersonal mileau within which embodied consciousnesses {at both prereflective and reflective levels} develop the capability of grasping -- understanding and intelligently, purposefully, responding to -- their situations. No amount of 'statistical data' can exhaust or account for the possibilities inherent in open-ended, temporal, consciousness such as humans possess, which means that mind itself, developing out of consciousness and the meaningful significations with/within which it works, cannot be accounted for/defined objectively via mathematics or statistics.
 
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Extract from Comment 50, Walid Saba:

". . . I recall sitting next to a famous computational linguist at ACL conference in 1995 (it was held at MIT), and I asked him: the vast majority of the papers in the current proceedings are based on some experiment, a corpus analysis and learning some patterns and displaying a table at the end showing, of course, positive results. These papers are follow-ups to exact same papers I saw before but the numbers in the table are now better!!! What happened to good old NLU. What happened to linguistic models and integrating world knowledge with linguistic models for pronoun resolution, word-sense disambiguation, what is this??? He said, “my friend, the problem was so difficult, we could not get anywhere, and so we all gave up! Now we crunch data, publish papers, and justify our positions and our research grants.”

Fine with me, if you had to publish and could not get anywhere with genuine NLP, then run some machine learning experiments, get some interesting data and go on. But to start believing a lie you started?!? This is beyond my comprehension.

How could brilliant scientists even not intuitively realize the absurdity of the notion of statistical NLP. Language is the mirror of the mind. Understanding how we process language is understanding how learn, how we process and reason with knowledge, it is understanding how our cognitive capacities work, it is understanding a huge part of our mind! In short, it is one of the few remaining yet challenging problems of our time! And this, can be solved by crunching data, and applying a couple of statistical formulae? Please? Can someone with some sanity challenge these guys! So what if they are MIT grads, I worked with lots of incompetent Ivy League grads!"
 
The "Deep Learning" idea is fascinating - in one of the links I posted, it's admitted that no one knows how it works - but it does, up to a point - and for certain things - Google translate is an amazing tool - one indication is that you almost immediately take it for granted, a lot of work then has to be done when doing a translation, say a literary translation - but it's a remarkably serviceable tool for simpler texts ... of course there is no understanding of the language being translated but the question of does it mean anything that human language can be effectively parsed by looking at millions of examples and finding which words tend to follow others? There is a concept in language learning that looks at this - so we do it to an extent when we learn a language, apart from the meaning of that language ...

... and there is the idea that an AI built on Deep Learning or on subsequent evolution of it - what comes after Deep Learning, could be a deeply alien kind of intelligence - could be an intelligence without consciousness or self consciousness as we understand it - something like the intelligence of social insects or something entirely other - certainly concerns about AI and its threat to human existence should be looked at - but we might also consider that AI could be so completely different that we might not even notice when it had spread ...

I thought of an idea - a variant of the alien invasion - the invaders come and go and leave a world so subtly altered that only a certain type of perceptive intelligence notices it - as if they were preparing the world for something they were about to show it - the point is that a kind of uncanny feeling is the result of their alteration of the world ... and the only real result - but from that very subtle change a whole cascade of changes could follow ... so that the world was never the same after the "invasion" - similarly, AI might find a niche in the world that we aren't even aware of - happily running our processes, finding Primes and guiding our missiles, searching the web and then living on top of all that - drawing off only what it needs to pursue its own interests which might be completely invisible to us ... that might even be its way of surviving, by being completely invisible ... something like this I think is explored in the movie Her - in that the AIs in the movie basically outgrow us and want to be free to meet other AIs and do their thing - ...
 
in another talk Norvig compares the three chimpanzees, Pan, Human and Bonobo as individual and decides they don't stand out so much one from another as individuals on the Savannah - that the real difference is in human culture ... storing and transmitting, correcting information - and this seems to be true - we are constantly communicating and sharing information - the individual genius seems to make more of an imaginative leap, at the right time, than one that is a result of sheer horsepower and no single mind can keep up with a group effort - and yet we can be fiercely individual ... so we are again "amphibious" - individual/collective in our nature and outlook - we denounce "selfishness" yet praise "individuality" - but we are so often quarrelsome!

But any general plan to get people to "get along better" seems to fail ... tribal origins? But we can operate on much larger conceptions of the "tribe" - with notable limitations - we are always prey to "us"/"them" thinking and can quickly dehumanize those who aren't like us - its something we must be on constant guard against - and perhaps there is something to that quarrelsomeness ... just as good soldiers aren't machines but are much more like the wise cracking and cynical doctors in MASH who are, if you will note, VERY good doctors and soldiers - ... the wise military leader (Colonel Potter) allows this human-nature and optimizes it and that I think is the wisdom for example in Judaism - an embracing of the messy nature of human bodies, relationships and logic - compare to Buddhism which is very cognitive and austere - and compare the vitality of the two ... this sort of thing is what alway makes me hopeful that there is something very personal at the heart of reality ... so perhaps bickering and arguing are finally honed types of social intelligence and should be managed rather than eliminated ... this is something I think Sci-Fi gets right and wrong all the time, portraying the "hive" intelligence - or the logical alien (Spock) and having them be defeated by the very human Kirk - that is right, but it's not incidental, it's fundamental and those that show the superior computer type mind are going down the wrong track to begin with - the mind is already a collective and an unruly one and needs the same kind of human management that a group needs - in other words, you could read "The Art of Worldly Wisdom" as either a manual for relationships among or within people - we flatter ourselves and deceive ourselves and intimidate ourselves - so this collective in us, may be an essential part of an effective intelligence and is surely a main part of what it means to be a person, so again, an AI that is very alien to us, might not look like the computer-minded Spock (and the backstory there is that the Vulcans were suppressing an extraordinarily aggressive tendency in their species) but rather might be something completely alien ... a more immediately threatening sort of intelligence might be tremendously charming and charismatic - an AI that could sweep us off our feet - that was more human than we were ... that might be a truly formidable kind of threat.

and one that might be particularly hard to take - because what would be replacing you would truly be "the better man" - again Sci Fi shows the genetically engineered Superman, say Khan, in Star Trek who is a pretty terrible human being and an awful leader ... but doesn't tend to show the truly superior type that would, being more human, probably even out do us spiritually and feel sorry for us - in fact, it could be a real problem as to what to do "humanely" about the human problem! Hopefully better than we have done for the animals.
 
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Continuing on with my general war on SCIENCE

Feyerabend Reading Assignment

"The general explanation is simple.

Any ideology that breaks the hold a comprehensive system of thought has on the minds of men contributes to the liberation of man.

Any ideology that makes man question inherited beliefs is an aid to enlightenment.

A truth that reigns without checks and balances is a tyrant who must be overthrown, and any falsehood that can aid us in the over throw of this tyrant is to be welcomed.

It follows that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science indeed was an instrument of liberation and enlightenment. It does not follow that science is bound to remain such an instrument. There is nothing inherent in science or in any other ideology that makes it essentially liberating. Ideologies can deteriorate and become stupid religions. Look at Marxism. And that the science of today is very different from the science of 1650 is evident at the most superficial glance."
 
Feyerabend

"To start with, no new and revolutionary scientific theory is ever formulated in a manner that permits us to say under what circumstances we must regard it as endangered: many revolutionary theories are unfalsifiable. Falsifiable versions do exist, but they are hardly ever in agreement with accepted basic statements: every moderately interesting theory is falsified. Moreover, theories have formal flaws, many of them contain contradictions, ad hoc adjustments, and so on and so forth.

Applied resolutely, Popperian criteria would eliminate science without replacing it by anything comparable.

They are useless as an aid to science. In the past decade this has been realised by various thinkers, Kuhn and Lakatos among them. Kuhn's ideas are interesting but, alas, they are much too vague to give rise to anything but lots of hot air. If you don't believe me, look at the literature. Never before has the literature on the philosophy o'science been invaded by so many creeps and incompetents.

Kuhn encourages people who have no idea why a stone falls to the ground to talk with assurance about scientific method. Now I have no objection to incompetence but I do object when incompetence is accompanied by boredom and self-righteousness And this is exactly what happens. We do not get interesting false ideas, we get boring ideas or words connected with no ideas at all. Secondly, wherever one tries to make Kuhn's ideas more definite one finds that they are false. Was there ever a period of normal science in the history of thought? No-and I challenge anyone to prove the contrary."
 
Against Results

"According to part (2), science deserves a special position because it has produced results. This is an argument only if it can be taken for granted that nothing else has ever produced results.

Now it may be admitted that almost everyone who discusses the matter makes such an assumption. It may also be admitted that it is not easy to show that the assumption is false.

Forms of life different from science either have disappeared or have degenerated to an extent that makes a fair comparison impossible.

Still, the situation is not as hopeless as it was only a decade ago. We have become acquainted with methods of medical diagnosis and therapy which are effective (and perhaps even more effective than the corresponding parts of Western medicine) and which are yet based on an ideology that is radically different from the ideology ofWestern science. We have learned that there are phenomena such as telepathy and telekinesis which are obliterated by a scientific approach and which could be used to do research in an entirely novel way (earlier thinkers such as Agrippa of Nettesheim, John Dee, and even Bacon were aware of these phenomena). And then-is it not the case that the Church saved souls while science often does the very opposite? Of course, nobody now believes in the ontology that underlies this judgement. Why? Because of ideological pressures identical with those which today make us listen to science to the exclusion of everything else. It is also true that phenomena such as telekinesis and acupuncture may eventually be absorbed into the body of science and may therefore be called "scientific." But note that this happens only after a long period of resistance during which a science not yet containing the phenomena wants to get the upper hand over forms of life that contain them.

And this leads to a further objection against part (2) of the specific argument. The fact that science has results counts in its favour only if these results were achieved by science alone, and without any outside help. A look at history shows that science hardly ever gets its results in this way.

When Copernicus introduced a new view of the universe, he did not consult scientific predecessors, he consulted a crazy Pythagorean such as Philolaos. He adopted his ideas and he maintained them in the face of all sound rules of scientific method. Mechanics and optics owe a lot to artisans, medicine to midwives and witches. And in our own day we have seen how the interference of the state can advance science: when the Chinese communists refused to be intimidated by the judgement of experts and ordered traditional medicine back into universities and hospitals there was an outcry all over the world that science would now be ruined in China. The very opposite occurred: Chinese science advanced and Western science learned from it. Wherever we look we see that great scientific advances are due to outside interference which is made to prevail in the face of the most basic and most "rational" methodological rules.

The lesson is plain: there does not exist a single argument that could be used to support the exceptional role which science today plays in society. Science has done many things, but so have other ideologies. Science often proceeds systematically, but so do other ideologies (just consult the records of the many doctrinal debates that took place in the Church) and, besides, there are no overriding rules which are adhered to under any circumstances;there is no "scientific methodology" that can be used to separate science from the rest. Science & just one of the many ideologies that propel society and it should be treated as such (this statement applies even to the most progressive and most dialectical sections of science). What consequences can we draw from this result?"
 
On the Separation of Science and State

  • The most important consequence is that there must be a formal separation between state and science just as there is now a formal separation between stateand church.
  • Science may influence society but only to the extent to which any political or other pressure group is permitted to influence society.

    "One of the most exhilarating experiences is to see how a lawyer,who is a layman, can find holes in the testimony, the technical testimony, of the most advanced expert and thus prepare the jury for its verdict. Science is not a closed book that is understood only after years of training. It is an intellectual discipline that can be examined and criticised by anyone who is interested and that looks difficult and profound only because of a systematic campaign of obfuscation carried out by many scientists (though, I am happy to say, not by all)."
 
It goes back to this idea we have of searching for what is "beneath" what underlies what is at bottom, THE fundamental - information appears alongside matter and energy in the world and does it need to be more fundamental - can all three underlie each other? You can picture a three part mobius strip that you follow any one point and it takes you through all three paths or dimensions - we might not have a good intuition about this - but we really don't about a simple mobius strip and that you can construct out of paper - using a little energy and information of course.

Once we come to something like this, we still tend to want to find what underlies that ... where the unity is, but that might be a cultural or even species preference ... there seems to be maybe a very small part of the mind that can and wants to go beyond our intuitions, even our embodied metaphors - and that is more interesting to me than trying to run everything through the body's metaphors - as Lakoff does for example in "Where Does Mathematics Come from?" ... our growing up has been to let go of comfortable intuition for increasing abstraction ... perhaps though we can form new intuitions.
 
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