Here is what I sent them this morning, with a few extra details at the bottom:
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From Pribram to quantum and brain-soul interface
Yesterday, Alex mentioned the traditional debate about whether quantum mechanics tells us anything real or useful about the soul or about consciousness, I was impressed to learn that Alex studied under Stephen Weinberg, who is one of the two or three most accomplished theoretical physicists alive today.
But this morning, as I think about an assumption dream which might well be precognitive, I realize that we might be better off thinking about sensitive or critical systems rather than quantum, in order to better understand (and expand) such experiences. Someone on this list (Alex? Kashyap?) mentioned long ago the importance of "edge of chaos" critical systems in understanding consciousness, and maybe I see that more clearly now than at that time.
To begin with -- it is a very practical issue for me in my life to try to understand how the noosphere ("soul") imprints messages on my brain. The relation between my brain and noosphere is not a one-way thing, nor is it limited to certain states of mind, but in any serious study of psi (whether in third person science as in Dean Radin's activity or in first person approaches as I have taken), it is a central core issue how information gets from a nonmundane level to the consciousness of the brain. (This list has illustrated the social difficulty in learning form each other about that issue. If half the people think they have no mind beyond brain, and the other half think they have no brain consciousness, it is difficult to analyze the connection between the two levels.)
It is clear that dreams are one of the most important mechanisms or vehicles for that communication. Those who prefer to read ancient books over seeing it for themselves should know that Mohammed and many of the prophets in the Judeo-Christian traditions, and shamans from before the perversion of religion by politicians, all have included dreams as one major way in which spirit (I would say noosphere) impresses messages on the brain.
Why are dreams so powerful that way? Very simply, dream time is a time when higher parts of the brain are not locked into narrow specifics of the immediate programmed activities of the mundane self. In a way, it reminds me of old computers where memory and time where committed during the word day and cycles became free at night for other activities off of the urgent needs of the hour. Above all, the stochastic simulation capabilities of the brain (clear in LaBerge's work and mine) set loose a situation where the amount of energy needed to perturb the system to "see" things different from what comes to the eyes is far less than it would be when the eyes and brain are focused energetically on something in front of them.
Many have been attracted to quantum effects AS A WAY for spirit or noosphere to perturb brains efficiently. Indeed, Roger Penrose seemed much more committed to quantum consciousness at Tucson this year than before -- yet his "ORCH" model assumes that gravity is what perturbs condensation of the wave function, and it remains a bit fringey to assume that it has a big effect on the brain. But pervasive "DELIBERATE" stochastic mechanisms, inserted by evolution to make brains more effective in maximizing "telos", are right there in front of us, in our dreams.
For millennia upon millenia, serious spiritual questers have experimented with various types of drugs, which, like dreams, can unleash the stochastic circuitry of the brain (which appears to be designed based on principles like chaos more than like quantum measurement, which reminds me of Walter Freeman). Karl Pribram did think about the question of what LSD might show us about the functioning of the brain (a natural question for anyone with true scientific or first person curiosity about mind and brain). Annie Besant, Ghandhi's spiritual teacher and a mentor of Krishnamurthy, had a little book called "thought forms", where she urged people NOT to use drugs, because the mind will open itself when it is ready, and we need to work on readiness.
In my one and only trip to India, with my wife on a Gate1 tour, we certainly saw Jodhpur, though perhaps it was Islamic mysticism more than Hindu which tried drugs so much. In Udaipur, people showed me an issue of Smithsonian magazine urging us to reconsider the total legal ban on any study let alone use of drugs like psilocybin associated with LSD. They argued that ancient shamans knew how to use psilocybin in particular in a safe and elevating way, and that proper protocols should be developed through research.
At the Tucson conference, I was impressed by what I learned on the fruits of that research. To put it simply -- even psilocybin is worse than I had imagined (when I read the Smithsonian article), but MIT has developed a new system using computers which can prolong the hypnagogic and lucid state in a way which seems totally safe. Skip the drugs 100%, follow up on the MIT stuff. Even psilocybin (like ketamine and LSD) short circuits the primary reinforcement system in a way which should be 100% verboten, but the MIT protocols do not.
Of course, there are even more natural and easier ways to stimulate hypnagogic states. Staring into a camp fire is a classic which i can relate to. Mhy wife reminds me of people who historically used water that way, which I can't relate to... but why not walk to the white water creek near us, and stare at it the way people stare into campfires? But I can remember connecting while staring at Niagara falls and in the place at China where they filmed the movie "Avatar". (The movie is a bit less fictional than one might imagine.)
But no, it's not quantum mechanics. JS Bell, the Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, explains nicely how the usual Bell state cannot be used to move actual information faster than light, even though it "feels" as if it should be possible. There has also been another Fermi paradox about FTL informationn flow, and limited impossibility theorems assuming traditional Copenhagen measurement rules. But current popular theories about measurement were not written on stone tablets, and experiments are certainly within reach which in my mind outweigh what Heisenberg thought he read in the Vedas.
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I am withholding details on new empirical results in quantum optics which are very exciting to me, but not yet ready for a blog post, for many reasons.
In Tucson, I made time to bring my Samsung Galaxy Tab A. On my brief, cryptic notes for Tuesday were: (1) the name Florio for MIT hypnagogic work (one of about seven projects in that group, all on the web);
and (2) empirical results typtophan serotonin DMT pineal for all 3 drugs mentioned above.
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