Category Archives: Nature of Reality

Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality

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by ROBERT G. JAHN AND BRENDA J. DUNNE

Abstract
The failure of contemporary scientific theory to correlate and explicate anomalous consciousness-related physical phenomena may trace to inadequate comprehension of the process of information exchange between the mind and its ultimate source. Elevation of the subjective capacities of consciousness to complementary status with the more objective physical senses, along with recognition of the bi-directional capabilities of both categories, allows establishment of resonant channels of communication between the mind and its source environment that can exceed conventional expectations. In this manner, order can be introduced into randomnicity, and self-consistent realities can be extracted from transcendent chaos. The key elements in tuning these channels to amplify such information creation are the physiological and psychological filters imposed upon them, some of which can be enhanced or altered by conscious or unconscious attention. Specifically, such attitudinal tactics as openness to alternative perspectives, utilization of transdisciplinary metaphors, self-sacrificial resonance, tolerance of uncertainty, and replacement of dualistic rigor by mental complementarity can enable experiential realities that are responsive to intention, desire, or need, to an extent consistent with prevailing empirical evidence.

PDF via dailygrail

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South Pole Neutrino Detector Could Yield Evidences of String Theory

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Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of California, Irvine say that scientists might soon have evidence for extra dimensions and other exotic predictions of string theory. Early results from a neutrino detector at the South Pole, called AMANDA, show that ghostlike particles from space could serve as probes to a world beyond our familiar three dimensions, the research team says.

No more than a dozen high-energy neutrinos have been detected so far. However, the current detection rate and energy range indicate that AMANDA’s larger successor, called IceCube, now under construction, could provide the first evidence for string theory and other theories that attempt to build upon our current understanding of the universe.

An article describing this work appears in the current issue of Physical Review Letters. The authors are: Luis Anchordoqui, associate research scientist in the Physics Department at Northeastern University; Haim Goldberg, professor in the Physics Department at Northeastern University; and Jonathan Feng, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of California, Irvine.

PhysOrg

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Is This Life?

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HORDES OF GREEN, SUB-MICROSCOPIC BALLOONS FLOAT in a watery mixture in Jack Szostak’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School. They come in a variety of shapes: spheres, blimps, worms. And as Szostak examines magnified images of them, he can’t help but notice a striking resemblance to bacterial ecosystems, pulsing with that fetid, yet undeniable quality that has eluded definition for generations – life.

But these orbs aren’t alive.

The uncanny resemblance reflects the fact that these ersatz sacs may passably mimic the wrappings of primitive life: cell membranes. But infusing in them the real “stuff” of life requires more work. Lately, Szostak, a professor of genetics, has been putting simple RNA enzymes inside, showing that they can conduct their characteristic activities. Thus some of life’s chemistry is compatible with artificial membranes, he says, something that required a careful tweaking of the membrane chemistry. He has also made the sacs grow spontaneously, and even divide – with help.1 “It’s a simplified model of the situation we’d really like to have,” says Szostak: a growing, dividing, living organism of totally synthetic origins.

But even at present, he says, “These simple membrane systems do pretty fascinating things.”

The Scientist

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Gravity theory dispenses with dark matter

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A modified theory of gravity that incorporates quantum effects can explain a trio of puzzling astronomical observations – including the wayward motion of the Pioneer spacecraft in our solar system, new studies claim.

The work appears to rule out the need to invoke dark matter or another alternative gravity theory called MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics). But other experts caution it has yet to pass the most crucial test – how to account for the afterglow of the big bang.

New Scientist Space via /.

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Dr. Rick Strassman Guest Blogs @ Non-Prophet

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N,N-dimethyltryptamine, abbreviated DMT or N,N-DMT, is a molecule with powerful psychedelic properties. From a chemical structure point of view, it is the simplest of known psychedelics, and is extremely common in the plant and animal kingdoms. DMT formation takes place in human brain, lung, and red blood cells. The gene that synthesizes DMT in humans has been isolated, cloned, and inserted into a virus. Cells in a test tube infected with this virus produce DMT.

We gave a small number of psychedelic drug-experienced, healthy human volunteers DMT in the early- to mid- 1990’s in order to better characterize the effect of this intriguing compound. These were government-approved studies performed with both federal, state, and private funds at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

DMT fairly reliably induced in our volunteers a profoundly altered state of consciousness in which took place a seeming separation of mind from body. Volunteers also reported experiences that share features with mystical and near-death states. Many described the sense of contact with beings variously described as sentient, with whom they communicated. A few described scenes from what they believed was the future; in other words, prophetic visions.
We stopped this research in 1995 for several reasons. They are too complicated to describe here, but I lay them out in detail in my book.

Non-Prophet

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Did Life Come from Another World?

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Most scientists have long assumed that life on Earth is a homegrown phenomenon. According to the conventional hypothesis, the earliest living cells emerged as a result of chemical evolution on our planet billions of years ago in a process called abiogenesis. The alternative possibility—that living cells or their precursors arrived from space—strikes many people as science fiction. Developments over the past decade, however, have given new credibility to the idea that Earth’s biosphere could have arisen from an extraterrestrial seed.

Planetary scientists have learned that early in its history our solar system could have included many worlds with liquid water, the essential ingredient for life as we know it. Recent data from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers corroborate previous suspicions that water has at least intermittently flowed on the Red Planet in the past. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that life existed on Mars long ago and perhaps continues there. Life may have also evolved on Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, which appears to possess liquid water under its icy surface. Saturn’s biggest satellite, Titan, is rich in organic compounds; given the moon’s frigid temperatures, it would be highly surprising to find living forms there, but they cannot be ruled out. Life may have even gained a toehold on torrid Venus. The Venusian surface is probably too hot and under too much atmospheric pressure to be habitable, but the planet could conceivably support microbial life high in its atmosphere. And, most likely, the surface conditions on Venus were not always so harsh. Venus may have once been similar to early Earth.

Moreover, the expanses of interplanetary space are not the forbidding barrier they once seemed. Over the past 20 years scientists have determined that more than 30 meteorites found on Earth originally came from the Martian crust, based on the composition of gases trapped within some of the rocks. Meanwhile biologists have discovered organisms durable enough to survive at least a short journey inside such meteorites. Although no one is suggesting that these particular organisms actually made the trip, they serve as a proof of principle. It is not implausible that life could have arisen on Mars and then come to Earth, or the reverse. Researchers are now intently studying the transport of biological materials between planets to get a better sense of whether it ever occurred. This effort may shed light on some of modern science’s most compelling questions: Where and how did life originate? Are radically different forms of life possible? And how common is life in the universe?

Scientific American

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VirtuSphere: The First Step To The Holodeck

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VirtuSphere provides a mechnical basis for truly immersive virtual reality environments, permitting the user to move about in virtual space by simply walking.

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The device consists of a large hollow sphere which is mounted on a specially designed platform that allows the sphere to rotate freely as the user walks in any direction. The user wears a head-mounted display, which provides the virtual environment. Sensors under the sphere provide subject speed and direction to the computer running the simulation. Users can even ineract with objects in virtual space using a special manipulator.

Technovelgy via Gravity Lens

The Human Evasion and other Celia Green memes

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Human beings are oppressed by their finitude, but can’t bear to think about this for too long, so they attempt not to mind, or to avoid being reminded of it at all. This is achieved through the cultivation of indifference to most of reality and obsessional interest in human society. As a result, when their frustration with being finite surfaces, it is expressed as hostility towards each other, rather than hostility towards the human condition itself.

That is the portrait of human nature running through three of the most neglected philosophical works of this century:
The Human Evasion, The Decline and Fall of Science, and Advice to Clever Children. I have never seen the ideas in these books engaged with, anywhere. They are not even controversial, they are simply unknown, a circumstance quite consistent with the theories of their author, Celia Green. (‘The human race’s favourite method for being in control of facts is to ignore them.’)

One could read these books as a trilogy: the study of a state of mind called ‘sanity’; the elaboration of its social and intellectual consequences; and the development of an alternative. In what follows I will try to provide a sketch of the worldview found in these books, but of course many more points are made than I can reproduce here, and I may have passed over many subtleties.

Sanity is first observed to be unmoved by certain facts which one might call corollaries of ‘the principle of total uncertainty’. As the skeptical philosophers discovered, one cannot be certain of the veridicality of one’s memories and perceptions, or of the accuracy of one’s reasoning. All the regularities of past experience in themselves prove nothing about the future (Hume), and for all we know everything could cease to exist right now. The perceived world might be pure hallucination (Descartes); perhaps yours is the only consciousness.

Sanity is indifferent or hostile to such considerations, and tends to confuse ‘reality’ with, say, ‘that portion of reality of which humans can conceive’, or even ‘that portion of reality with which humans have the opportunity to interact’. This confusion is held to be a side-effect, so to speak, of a general scheme of reality-evasion, put into practice for psychological reasons – to avoid confronting the frustrations of finitude, which is to say, the frustrations of having limited power and knowledge.

From the Deoxy Archive

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Cymatics: does sound create our universe?

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In 1787, the jurist, musician and physicist Ernst Chladni published Entdeckungen ?ber die Theorie des Klangesor Discoveries Concerning the Theory of Music.In this and other pioneering works, Chladni, who was born in 1756, the same year as Mozart, and died in 1829, the same year as Beethoven, laid the foundations for that discipline within physics that came to be called acoustics, the science of sound. Among Chladni?s successes was finding a way to make visible what sound waves generate. With the help of a violin bow which he drew perpendicularly across the edge of flat plates covered with sand, he produced those patterns and shapes which today go by the term Chladni figures. (see right) What was the significance of this discovery? Chladni demonstrated once and for all that sound actually does affect physical matter and that it has the quality of creating geometric patterns.

from here via The Daily Grail

Michael Hayes has some interesting things to say about Cymatics as well. While all this talk about resonance makes me think of theodynamics.

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Being, Consciousness and Everything by John Richardson

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So …... here we are. How did we get here? What is this situation? What happens next? What can happen? There is body, mind and senses. There is pleasure and pain, feeling good and feeling not so good. There is sky, stars, ocean, fire and wind. There are changes of season, cause and effect. There are moments of great joy, and there is sickness, old age and death. What are all these things … really?


Future Hi

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Alternative Cosmologies and Altered States by Stanislav Grof

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Editors Note:

In Western societies, the dominant paradigm presents a cosmology in which humans, as biological matter, live and die in a universe governed by the laws of physics. In this worldview, there is no room for the possibility of life after death, and different states of consciousness have significance only as pathological deviations from that worldview.

In sharp contrast, the cosmologies of other cultures?ancient and contemporary pre-industrial?have taken for granted the existence of an afterlife. For them, dying is a meaningful part of life, and death is a journey for which the individual can and should prepare. To aid in this, many cultures throughout history have developed experiential “technologies”?techniques and practices intended to train initiates in the art and science of dying and postmortem survival. These experiential “technologies” invariably involve training in altered or non-ordinary states of consciousness throughout the individual?s lifetime.

This fundamental difference between Western and pre-industrial cosmologies and their respective end-of-life technologies has profound consequences for how societies view living, dying, death, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. In this article, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof explores some of the key elements in pre-industrial cosmologies and their emphasis on transformative “technologies” for training in altered states throughout the individual?s lifetime.

Future Hi

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Reality and Consciousness: Turning the Superparadigm Inside Out

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Thomas Kuhn coined the term “paradigm” to refer to the beliefs and assumptions that underlie a particular science. But beneath all our scientific paradigms lies an even deeper and more pervasive assumption. It is the belief in the primacy of the material world. When we fully understand the world of space, time and matter, we will, it is held, be able to account for everything in the cosmos. Being the paradigm behind all our scientific paradigms, this worldview has the status of a “superparadigm”. Eminently successful as this model has been at explaining the world around us, it has very little to say about the non-material world of mind.

This article is an abridgement of Peter Russell’s book From Science to God from Future Hi.

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Sony patent takes first step towards real-life Matrix

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IMAGINE movies and computer games in which you get to smell, taste and perhaps even feel things. That’s the tantalising prospect raised by a patent on a device for transmitting sensory data directly into the human brain – granted to none other than the entertainment giant Sony.

The technique suggested in the patent is entirely non-invasive. It describes a device that fires pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify firing patterns in targeted parts of the brain, creating “sensory experiences” ranging from moving images to tastes and sounds. This could give blind or deaf people the chance to see or hear, the patent claims.

New Scientist

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Are we living in a computer simulation?

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A recent argument by Dr. Nick Bostrom (Department of Philosophy, Yale University) has made modest waves in the media. According to reports, Bostrom believes that we are in fact probably living in a computer simulation.

His reasoning is fairly simple. There will be a time when we are able to simulate sentient life on a large scale. If that is so, then there will be an enormous number of lives which will be simulated in the future. Eventually, it is not too far-fetched to think that this number will be far greater than the number of people who have ever lived.

SoloHQ via Reality Carnival

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