2005-06-24: Ghost in the Machine

[Robert]

This next chat session will be held on Friday, June 24th at 11:00pm Central Standard Time (CST) also known as (GMT-6). You can use the timezone converter to convert to your local time. Once there, enter the day and time as specified above, then select US/Central in the "From Time Zone" column and your own location in the "To Time Zone" column, then click Convert. Be sure and unclick the "Use Current Date/Time" option. This will give you the time of the chat meeting in your own local time.

Some other areas:

Texas, U.S. - Friday, 11:00pm
California, U.S. - Friday, 9:00pm
Singapore - Saturday, 12:00pm
London - Saturday, 5:00am
Madrid, Spain - Saturday, 6:00am
India - Saturday, 9:30pm
Melbourne, Australia - Saturday, 2:00pm
New Zealand - Saturday, 4:00pm
Sweden - Saturday, 6:00am
Canada, Yukon- Friday, 9:00pm

This will be our seventh official ToeQuest chat meeting. Chat meetings are usually scheduled bi-weekly using alternating times: Fri-11pm, Sat-3pm, Sun-7am (Central Standard Time). Since our community has 549 members from 70 countries, I use this schedule to reach the widest audience possible.
This chat session is a little different from previous chats but will explore a fascinating phenomenon for many. The topic for this chat session is...

Ghost in the Machine

Of course, the ghost is the soul, our consciousness, our very being or essence. A On the one hand is the belief, a doctrine known as dualism, that states that there is a non-material essence that inhabits and animates our bodies and is the source of consciousness, free will, thought, ideas, emotions, etc. Many religions believe that we have a soul that survives the physical death of the body. B On the other hand there is the doctrine of materialism, which states that the mind is not separate from the brain, but that it arises from and is produced by neural activity within the brain. Or, in other words, the mind is what the brain does.

This is signficant to a Theory of Everything, because a Theory of Everything should explain the world we live in, including any non-material aspect of reality. If there is a non-physical soul, this must be included in the explanation a Theory of Everything provides.

As this is central to many religions, this is potentially a contentious topic. I'd like to remind all to be respectful and polite, non-emotional, and go at this with a scientific mind. Members who show disrespect or engage in name calling will be banned from the chat. Members who use this as an opportunity to preach will be banned from the chat.

Please add your pre-chat comments to this thread. If you have any topics you would like to discuss, you might post it here ahead of time. email going out soon.

Regards,
--Robert

[Guille]

I hope I can be there, but it's 6 am and that exact day I'm leaving to Oxford.

[volantis]

I have been working on a paradigm for quantifying consciousness. I have recently written a book, which is now available through Google Print, named Secrets of the Aether. Studies show that emotions are directly quantifiable via skin conductance. I show that the space-time that surrounds us also has conductance. Thus our emotions can influence our environment, and our environment can influence our emotions. Princeton University has an ongoing random number generator project that seems to demonstrate the effect of mass consciousness. Apparently, through the Hall effect in the computer's transistors, the computer picks up conductance signals transmitted to the environment from humans. And more eerily, it seems to show these signals just prior to the actual event occurring.

If you decide to read up on my theory, go to Chapter 12 first. Google limits the number of pages that can be read. It should be somewhere around page 247.

So my view is that our self-image is built from our emotions. What people call the soul is really this self-image. I also see other levels of consciousness within the mind as well, each having their own unit. But to discuss these other levels it is first necessary to understand the physics of the model. Just as time has a reciprocal manifestation as frequency, mass also has reciprocal mass. Without any direct evidence at this time to back it up, I hypothesize that reciprocal mass is directly related to various qualities of the mind. I say that I have no direct evidence, but there is circumstantial evidence through an analysis of physics.

[Andy]

Be online even when you are at Oxford. I'll be there, online. for Guille

[Guille]

Be online even when you are at Oxford. I'll be there, online. for Guille

The chat sessions tarts at 6 am (Spanish time), which is quite early. I will try to get up that early or so. That same day I'm leaving to Oxford but at 2 pm, so I think the chat session will have finished already, after 8 hours.

I might not even go to bed, and jsut be a few hours waiting until the sun rises, then it will be impossible to get to sleep, and the chat will start. It's the longests days these days, here in Spain we have 18 hours of sun.

I'll be there.

[island]

Hi, I've been a non-participating member for a while, and I probably can't make the chat, but here's something to think about:

Consiousness is a practical means to an end, and the problem understanding this is that "free thinkers" separate themselves from nature, like creationists do.

Everybody was so quick to dismiss Einstein's concept of an underlying structure that gave method to nature's madness. What a joke... he never abandoned his belief in his finite universe because it was "closest at hand to General Relativity", and that's a rule that should have carried a lot more weight than it did. I say that because modern physics is over the edge when an increasing vacuum doesn't increase negative pressure, so nobody has a clue what impetus is actually running the show, bringing about "emergent properties"... like consciousness, as a necessity to the ever increasing earnest of the grand-scale thermodynamic process.

Imagine that every banded spiral galaxy that exists in the middle of the relevant spectrum of potential has life on it, and then think of what "self-awareness" might mean if we all become aware of each other simultaneously, in context with the linked photos of large scale stuctured "neurons":

http://photos12.flickr.com/18135101_1ef7723b85_b.jpg

http://photos13.flickr.com/18135102_07a58fd89d_o.jpg

Those structures exist in direct defiance of the copernican cosmological principle, and in support of an anthropic principle as a "biocentric" principle, that is actually a thermodynamic principle that defines the mechanism that constrains the forces of the universe to an almost perfect balance between diametrically opposing runaway tendencies, which produces a grand-scale ecosystematic structure that enables it to evolve with the greatest possible efficiency, in one-direction-only.

The apparent precarious balance that is common to all of the known anthropic coincidences is actually defining the subtly-tipped balance that's common to all ecosystems, so that the universally applicable principle is actually biocentric in nature, extending across the universe and bringing the forces to bear on a specific plane of life ...so that a very fine layer of sentience arises within observed biotopes of inhomogeneity that are observed to exist in the large scale structure of our universe.

... " so that a very fine layer of sentience arises "....

You asked...

[JAK]

This next chat session will be held on Friday, June 24th at 11:00pm Central Standard Time (CST) also known as (GMT-6).

The topic for this chat session is...

Ghost in the Machine

Of course, the ghost is the soul, our consciousness, our very being or essence.
A On the one hand is the belief, a doctrine known as dualism ...
B On the other hand there is the doctrine of materialism, which states that the mind is not separate from the brain
...
Please add your pre-chat comments to this thread. If you have any topics you would like to discuss, you might post it here ahead of time. email going out soon.

Regards,
--Robert

I'm not sure if I can make the chat session or not, but here is what I believe to be a key point in the discussion: communication between the physical brain/body and a "non-physical" ethereal being (spirit, soul, etc.).

For any ethereal being (EB) to have any effect upon a material body, some physical mechanism must be jointly accessible. From the EB side, it must "sense" or perceive what the body is doing. In other words, it must sense/perceive the physical universe. Further, the EB must transmit commands to the brain/body (BB) in order to influence its behavior. From the "body" side, it must have a mechanism by which it receives commands from the EB. Either it senses the EB universe (spiritual world) or the EB has transmuted commands from "ethereal" into a physical transmission so that the BB can receive them.

Thus, (1) a transmission/reception system must exist between the EB (ethereal being) and the BB (brain/body). (2) for a dual universe, information must either (1) be transmuted from the laws of one universe to the laws of the other or (2) utilize a mechanism which co-exists in both universes in order to enable transmission.

Now, if communication/transmission (CT) is possible because it utilizes a facet which exists in both universes, then CT becomes the unification principle of both universes, and dualism is thwarted. CT is the bridge unifying all universes.

My contention is that dualism cannot exist due to the scenario above. If there are two (or more) universes, they cannot communicate.

Now, the only flavor of "dualism" that I can accept is born of set theory. If the physical universe is a subset of a larger universe, then an EB (being part of the superset) can participate in "both" the larger universe and the subset physical universe. Meanwhile, the physical brain/body can only participate in the physical universe - the subset. This resolves the communication problem and defines "duality" as a superset with a subset.

If someone takes an "intersection of sets" to explain dualism, the area of intersection becomes "the bridge" as a unification principle. And CT would occur within the intersection. The difficulty with an intersection is defining what would be inaccessible to the EB. If it perceives all human endeavors, then it accesses all of the physical universe. The only exclusion possibility is if the EB relies upon the brain/body to transmit information about the physical world. Then we would have a scenario like the Mars Rovers. (The Jet Propulsion Lab would represent the EB, and a rover would represent the BB.)

[dipayankar]

Interesting topic you got this time Robert. I hope to be online this time.

[subversion]

I'll be out of town but I'll try to find a computer to get in on the session

[Robert]

There are two possibilities we can explore for today's chat topic:

1. The mind oozes from the brain as a epiphenomenon (I love that word). That is, the mind is not separate from the brain but arises from and is produced by neural activity within the brain.
2. The mind is separate from the brain and is the source of our consciousness. Our minds use our brains to control our body.

But, are there other possibilities?