Transcript NextUs: Discovering our True Nature

NextUs:
How Thoughts Persist
Art Cockfield
Saturday Club, Nov. 1, 2010
Bottom line …
Your thoughts exist outside your brain and
are connected to an invisible network that
makes a permanent record of every
conscious thought you have and every
choice you make
Overview
• Thoughts exist outside your brain (recent
brain research and notions of quantum
consciousness)
• Thoughts are recorded (imprinted) on a
universal hard-drive (called the
noösphere)
• What are some of the religious,
philosophical, social implications of these
views?
Functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI)
fMRI provides ‘video’ of brain
stimulation
Monks meditating …
• fMRI shows prefrontal cortex active
• senior monks’ brain structure appears
more receptive to meditation
Can thoughts be measured?
• fMRI information decoded: Kay et al.,
Nature (2008)
So what are thoughts?
• Research still primitive due to complexity of
brain (trillions of synapses on billions of
neurons)
• Thought can have an impact on material world
(brain structure)
• Thoughts decoded information emitting from
brain function
• Thoughts can be measured
• Consciousness may occur at the quantum level,
which leads us to next part …
Quantum effects in biological
processes:
a. Fleming et al., Nature (2007):
photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria
b. Tejero et al., Journal of American
Chemical Society (2007): facilitate
molecular reactions within green tea
c. Turin, Physical Review Letters (2007):
human smell receptors
Quantum consciousness?
• Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind
(1989)
• Stuart Hameroff, Director of Center for
Consciousness Studies at U. of Arizona:
anesthetics interrupt quantum process within
part of brain’s neurons called microtubules
• Ideas still speculative and experimentally
unproven, but perhaps thoughts are a kind of
quantum information emitted by brain
Part 2: where do thoughts end up?
• From Newton to Einstein:
Are time and space real?
• Insights from quantum mechanics
• Tiniest bits of ‘matter’ are not matter, but really a
strange form of energy that appears indivisible;
sub-atomic particles have no meaning in
isolation but only in relation with everything else
• John Wheeler: universe is “at bottom … an
immaterial source.”
The universe is constituted by
quantum bits of information
• David Bohm: the universe is a hologram
• Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe
(2006)
• Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality (2010)
What is different about human
thoughts?
• Sentience and conscious thoughts versus other
kinds of thoughts
• Gives rise to notions of ‘universal
consciousness’
• Vladimir Vernadky’s and Pierre de Chadrin’s
noösphere
Imprinting on noösphere?
• All information exchanges from beginning to end of time
stored somewhere in universe
• Information exchange between our minds and rest of
universe recorded in noösphere
• Process: speculate that neural synapses firing serve as
kind of transmitter and receiver that interacts with
noösphere
Part 3: Implications?
• One view: none!
• “The more the universe seems
comprehensible, the more it seems
pointless.” Steven Weinberg, The First
Three Minutes (1977)
• Too speculative …
Another view: “Luminous beings
are we, not this crude matter.”
Consistent with major religions
• Ancients ‘truths’ increasingly supported by
science
• Early philosophers from Aristotle to Spinoza
conceived of God as the natural universe
• Also support in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity
and others
• Common theme: an immaterial realm flows
through our bodies and our minds, and binds us
all together
• Anti-‘New Atheists’ (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris)
Mind and matter?
• Is the physical brain alone responsible for our mind and
consciousness, or is something else that is immaterial
also involved?
• Answer: no real separation between mind and immaterial
realm
• Alistair sleeps well tonight
Where are we going when we die?
• Existence of soul: permanent imprinting on noösphere
• Choices and actions lead to reward or punishment? We
are what we do (existentialism)? Heaven or Hell?