Is Conciousness only available in Three-Dimensions?

[pelastration]

In order for us to have a thought, nerve impulses have to travel along axons, neurotransmitters have to be generated and absorbed at synapses, and other physical events have to take place.

A well known experiment shows that our brains start reacting to an unexpected event about half a second before we become consciously aware of it.

And what about ESP? Non-locality.
Of course people who have never experienced ESP will deny it.
But I assure you: It's real.
ESP is non-local information entering into consciousness.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Well sorry Pelastration, you're a good guy but I can't accept your assurance. We all have vague premonitions and so on, but there's nothing that can't be explained by coincidence in a population pushing 300 million.

 

[pelastration]

I am a good guy? You make an assumption selfAdjoint or is it ESP you are developing?

Look, we can discuss years and years about ESP. But I want to get out of all the semantics involved.

ESP, People are quite emotional about that. I have the impression that some people - needing to hid something or a lot - prefer a world with no non-local information transfer.

So Yes against No.
The proof of Yes is difficult since it's a unique personal experience that must be formulated in a repeatable way before it is accepted by 'science'.
The No-sayers position is an exaggerated claim to it must be extreme repeatable just like checking the boiling point of water.
Statistics can give some insight in some repeatable tests like the Zener cards. But that's only a part of ESP. (online tests: http://www.psiexplorer.com/online.htm

There are enough well-controlled examples that surpasses the normal coincidence.
What about Edgar Cayce: http://www.edgarcayce.org/edgar-cayce1.html.
Are you going to claim from behind your computer desk that Cayce was a fraud, or that his non-local information gathered during a type of trance was average?
You have also people like Peter Hurkos and Gerard Croiset who - for example - located bodies of missing people and helped police (and get police awards).
These were lucky guesses?

No, they had the gift of tuning their mind to resonate with real non-local events of the past and bring that information on their conscious level. They had 'results'. Able to perform this means that there is a hidden causal layer of communication below the visual and observable systems. There are specific case-related vibrations which are distributed and can be captured by 'observers' which have the correct tuned 'measurement systems'.
Claiming that they had also 'non-results' is unfair since we accept that a Microsoft computer has a lot of HD-crashes, but for these guys faults were not allowed.
When you google on this you will find people who tell most information was already published, or like Randi which attack people like Hurkos in a very selective way by telling that they can do similar tricks ... but did Randi ever repeated 'tricks' like finding missing bodies? No. And that makes the difference.

Finally statistics are not reality, it's a way to look for certain patterns. It's a passive analytic tool. It has nothing to do with concepts.

ESP is just a embedded property we all have, but some people are better than other. Just like Carl Lewis was a better athlete than others (due his genetic structure/body and ... exercises /training!) Without training he wouldn't been that successful.
A metaphor? Compare humans with a car with a driver and inside a radio. Some driver found that radio, others didn't (even deny it)
Some people have discovered that radio and after some time - checking and testing the buttons and getting first some background mesh - they fine-tuned and are able to capture radio stations with music and information. Sometimes that radio information is a voice telling: "On that spot is a traffic jam!". When that driver tells the non-believers that there is a traffic jam on that spot they will call him crazy. When the traffic jam really happens the non-believers will call it 'luck' or ''coincidence'. When the traffic jam disappeared in the mean time (which can happen) they will laugh with him. Of course the non-believers will never try to find the inside radio or try the buttons.

My conclusion: Like the radio in that car we all have inside of us various oscillation levels which are interconnected with other non-local events. The vibration transfer goes over a medium, an oscillation conducting system which in my opinion are layers of oscillating membranes which interfere with and influence each other. The various membranes are however just local restructures of the basic M-Brane like you can see on my webpage: http://www.mu6.com/holon_creation.html.

To close the circle: This engineering concept - which answers all non-local questions - goes just a step further than the AJL-approach on triangulation. Triangulations are the simplified mathematical expression of a smooth surface. A triangulation approach includes imo a type of non-breakable surface (connected by stress).
When AJL would - instead of just reshaping the outer surface - start to make interact that surface with itself (self-penetrating, which I call pelastration) you get local discrete zones which interact dynamically (surfaces pressed on each other).
Other people - like Louis Kauffmanhttp://www.math.uic.edu/~kauffman prefer to create such interaction with real knots. This summer I will meet him in Cambridge were I am invited by the David Bohm/Basil Hiley people of the London Birkbeck University to present my "wacky" theory on the ANPA meeting (July 31-Aug. 5). Would be nice to meet there also some UK-based PF members like Marcus and Olias.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Like you, I am not going to argue. You must know that there are counters to all the cass you mentioned - Cayce, Hurkos, etc. You should post this material on the Skeptic forum, and I am sure you would get some response.

As for your theory, I'll believe it when it produces checkable results, just like any theory (like AJL, for that matter - they have produced Monte Carlo simulations showing they deduce 4-dimensional spacetime from their assumptions.).

As fo being a good guy, I have observed you for a long time, since you first came on Superstringtheory.com, and where others with personal theories were abrasive and stuck up, you were always glad to help and discuss. So that's what I call a good guy. We can disagree as gentlemen.

 

[Olias]

[\QUOTE]This summer I will meet him in Cambridge were I am invited by the David Bohm/Basil Hiley people of the London Birkbeck University to present my "wacky" theory on the ANPA meeting (July 31-Aug. 5). Would be nice to meet there also some UK-based PF members like Marcus and Olias.[/QUOTE]

Just PM me with the dates, and if I am available I might just take you up on that, be great.

 

[sol2]

I don't know if any of you remember something about experiments done with pigeons in Utrech(?) we talked about this on the superstringtheory board? Memory is failing I think here

How such sensing could be done, from a migration point of view. How could such pathways be remembered? Something about the bills?

So sensing the nature of momentum let's say in a magnetic field ( Gauss discription of coordinates) felt?

 

[Olias]

I don't know if any of you remember something about experiments done with pigeons in Utrech(?) we talked about this on the superstringtheory board? Memory is failing I think here

How such sensing could be done, from a migration point of view. How could such pathways be remembered? Something about the bills?

So sensing the nature of momentum let's say in a magnetic field ( Gauss discription of coordinates) felt?

Memory lines?

I have given up on trying to retrieve SST threads, most if the Really interesting ones have disappeared..including the one your trying to think of?

 

[sol2]

Memory lines?

I have given up on trying to retrieve SST threads, most if the Really interesting ones have disappeared..including the one your trying to think of?

I notice this with the pelastrian view and how dynamical that view is. To show the Kaufman link just demonstrates the abiltiy of such dynamics.

Getting the feel of the orbital pattern of Mercury as a Daisey:)

Or even the vacuum:) and last but not least, Geometrodynamics. I know Dirk really like that one:)

 

[pelastration]

This summer I will meet him in Cambridge were I am invited by the David Bohm/Basil Hiley people of the London Birkbeck University to present my "wacky" theory on the ANPA meeting (July 31-Aug. 5). Would be nice to meet there also some UK-based PF members like Marcus and Olias.

Just PM me with the dates, and if I am available I might just take you up on that, be great.

OK Olias, I will PM you that info in a couple of hours. Indeed would be great. Probably Hiley is also there. I believe John Baez said in a post to be also in Cambridge (UK) this summer, but don't think he will go to the ANPA.

 

[pelastration]

I notice this with the pelastrian view and how dynamical that view is. To show the Kaufman link just demonstrates the abiltiy of such dynamics.

Getting the feel of the orbital pattern of Mercury as a Daisey:)

Or even the vacuum:) and last but not least, Geometrodynamics. I know Dirk really like that one:)

Thanks Sol.
Indeed the Geometrodynamics is a nice one.
If you replace the term 'matter' by 'restructured gravity' in that text you can also see nice things. :shy:

 

[Les Sleeth]

We all have vague premonitions and so on, but there's nothing that can't be explained by coincidence in a population pushing 300 million.

I myself, even though convinced of the possibility of ESP, am not convinced by any of the studies. However . . .

I posted the following in the Debunking area, what do you think?



I am now watching another episode of "Psychic Detectives" that's featured on the "Court TV" channel. I will declare my original opinion now, which was that before this series, I was mostly skeptical. If you've watched shows they feature there, such as Forensic Files, Body of Evidence, The System, etc. then you know the approach to solving crimes is based on science and logic. In fact, that is why I like those shows.

When cases have stumped detectives every normal way, sometimes they rely on psychics to help them (in such a case, a detective might say "what have we to lose?").

Now, if this were most any other channel than the Court TV channel, I'd be thinking this is either an attempt to entertain a naive audience or an attempt to push psychic stuff. But the otherwise conservative programming of Court TV makes me take these shows more seriously.

If it is not some conspiracy at Court TV to make fools of us all, then it appears the psychic-assisted cases they profile are remarkable (some more than others). I know about the techniques used by fakes to get info from people in order to convince them a "psychic" is for real. But in that case, the person being surreptitiously debriefed is in possession of the info the fake is drawing out of him/her. In these Court TV cases, no one knows the answer. A radical skeptic will say the psychic just guessed right or noticed clues the detectives had missed; but statistically the guess theory is contradicted by the successes of some of the psychics, while noticing new clues doesn't appear what happens when I watch the show.

For example, in a program a couple of weeks ago was woman who'd just started meditating. During her meditation, she kept having disturbing visions. I forget now what they exactly were, but one was she saw a number on a the hull of a boat, and that a man had died in the water. For some reason she was able to associate the event with a state (Florida, I think) which was hundreds of miles from her home. She did research in old newspapers and found an incident which seemed like what she'd been seeing.

After contacting the detective assigned to the case, the psychic went to a pier where she felt the man had died. The detective had already had divers search that site, and they had found nothing. But she said she "felt" it so strongly, it made them look again, and sure enough they discovered the man's car had gone off the pier and his body inside the car. Later they found out a ship had been docked there with the exact number on it the woman had seen!

The other cases profiled on the show were just as remarkable.

 

[sol2]

The emotive consequence of any experience is always a powerful force for consideration. Look a the impact in our own lives. ON a mental level, thought constructions might seem divorced from the event?

You might as well debunk any "thought construction" used in trying to understand the self.

What kind of "alien language" would you have if you were trying to support humanist values?

This raises important questions about the bee's dance?

In this Edge talk, Marc D. Hauser reflects on attempts to answer this question, from Noam Chomsky's insights to the dance of the honey bee.

But we know relatively little about how the circuitry of the brain represents the consonants and vowels. The chasm between the neurosciences today and understanding representations like language is very wide. It's a delusion that we are going to get close to that any time soon. We've gotten almost nowhere in how the bee's brain represents the simplicity of the dance language. Although any good biologist, after several hours of observation, can predict accurately where the bee is going, we currently have no understanding of how the brain actually performs that computation.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0369.html?m%3D3

http://www.edge.org/images/marcus200.jpg
Gary Marcus

For a long time the fields of biology and psychology have been quite separate, and only in the last few years people have started thinking about brain imaging and about how the brain and mind relate. But they haven't really thought that much about another part of biology: developmental biology. Brain imaging tells you something about how the brain works, but that doesn't tell you anything about how the brain gets to be the way that it is. Of course, we also have the human genome sequence and have made enormous advances in genetics and related fields, and what I've been trying to do in the last few years is to relate all of the advances in biology to what people have been finding out in cognitive development and language acquisition.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/marcus03/marcus_index.html

If you waded through all the mental constructions we have, or move deeper into the realizations our emotive experiences, then what pure source of cognitive development would we talk about in the relationship of mathematics? That insight that materializes from complex information and data to concievable holographical paradigmal pursuates, of our predecessors?

A keen eye I'd say

 

[pelastration]

Sol referred to Brain Imaging.

Here some new findings:

Brain has 'early warning system'

The researchers scanned people's brains to monitor activity

University College London experts have shown how the brain subconsciously remembers details around past dangers.

Writing in Nature, they say blocking this system could help treat pain by interrupting such a brain process.

Researchers said volunteers could not recall details of a test which had led to them getting a mild electric shock.

But activity in the brain revealed that they had correctly logged the data by using a series of complicated computations.

More on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3791357.stm

 

[Olias]

The emotive consequence of any experience is always a powerful force for consideration. Look a the impact in our own lives. ON a mental level, thought constructions might seem divorced from the event?

A keen eye I'd say

One of my earliest insights into the mind and its role in comprehnsive analytic self awarenes was to come up with this original thinking: During some deep conversation with some friends, the question of:Do you believe in Life after Death, and what is the experience that many people have of seeing a White Light at the end of a dark tunnel, the near Death experience.

The above experience leaves a deep impression on those who have experienced it, many asert that the experience is Religeous, with many 'seeing' loved ones who had passed away previous, clearly visable at the end of a tunnel. The conversation lead many to state that their belief was that it was some form of 'after-life' comunication by those beloved departed, the overall consensus was along this line of thinking.

Then I was asked what do I believe?

My answer was that I believe that the experience of the moment of birth, the information gathered during the the actual process, from the Womb (dark) out into the new environment filled with light, the transition from one 'phase of being' to another which is Life. The people who have near Death experiences are actually being 'replayed' the moment of Life, or 'Before life' experence event as the primordial Event.

It is during such moments of high stressful moments, maybe due to illness, dangerous accidents, where the mind takes over during the crises and its a sort of natural 'Protection of Consciousness' the mind gives to the person in danger, be it a recognized danger or one where it may not be mentally vivid such as illness or high emotional dramatic events.

We may not be conscious of the moment of birth, but it happened and its recorded somewhere in the early forming Brain, it may be that the Unconscious part of the Brain's hardware, sometimes throws the data to the forefront of one's mind, mixed with conscious memory lines, ie of loved ones, actual events one has participtaed in, or even scrappy the family pooch, all entangled into the conscious data gathering part of the Brain.

Interpretation is in the mind of the Beholder?

 

[sol2]

One of my earliest insights into the mind and its role in comprehnsive analytic self awarenes was to come up with this original thinking: During some deep conversation with some friends, the question of:Do you believe in Life after Death, and what is the experience that many people have of seeing a White Light at the end of a dark tunnel, the near Death experience.

I like the openness of what can be brought forth when many minds engaged a problem. A lot of times boucing off one another, you get to see where we might have been mistaken and quickly brought correction to a issue.

Joao was a good point in relation to Michael Duff? Solvay meetings and thought experiments?

About inherent patterns being imprinted on the scheme of things, well, even in string/lqg they are still trying to understanding the meaning to life? Some are trying extremely hard, and being quite creative about it:)

Mandalas as you know are very important to me, and my reference to liminocentric structures speaks I think to the issue you have expounded upon. Its embedded in consicousness, and string/lqg are trying to define themselves? Greene understood this I think although we have not heard much from him here

 

[Sven Tingblad]

Hello everyone, I'm new here. I think I have a defintion of consciousness, but first here's a disclaimer: my only experience with theoretical physics has been from a few books and the internet; so I only have a basic understanding of string theory and physics in general. That said, I think consciousness is the ability to have a concept of a concept, in which you can theoretically keep having concepts of the previous concepts infinitely. For instance, my antivirus program has an extremely basic concept of a computer virus. By that, I mean that it can recognize a virus. But if it could backtrack and recognize that it can recognize a virus, then I think it has achieved consciousness. It could then maybe recognize that it can recognize a virus, ad infinitum. Animals probably are consciousness; they certainly have concepts of gestures and smells, and they probably have sufficiently advanced areas of the brain such as sound reconition to actively think about the meaning, or concept, of a sound. So a consequence of this would be that senses and reactions are not prerequisites for consciousness; the only parts that must exist are ever-increasing levels of concepts. Well, that's just my wacky idea, so feel free to support or discourage it. All feedback is welcome. Thanks.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I think they idea you are expressing here is recursion. Look it up and tell me if you agree.

Chomsky has recently suggested that recursion, all by itself, makes the difference between a species having language capability and not. That would mesh nicely with your definition.

 

[Sven Tingblad]

I found an article on recursion at I found an article on recursion at http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Recursion. I don't pretend to understand the half of it; but I think that's what I'm talking about.

However, I disagree with his statement that animals don't have recursion. Humans have or have the potential to have unlimited recursion, by which I mean they can be recursive about anything. They can have a concept of a concept of everything, e.g., language itself, consciousness, and sights. Animals probably have much more limited recursion; they cannot have a recursive understanding of just anything. However, they probably have a recursive understanding of a few things. For instance, whenever I stand near the cabinet with the dog treats and make eye contact with my dog, she will usually look back at my eyes. If I make eye contact long enough, she will think that I'm going to give her a bone and she will run to me, jump up and down, and wag her tail. She will even look from me to the cabinet and back to me. I think this is far too complicated to be done without recursion, or active thought that if she does a specific action then I will give her a treat. The recursive part comes in when she might think about what action to do. When she wants me to rub her stomach, she'll sit in front of me, raise one of her front paws, put it back down (probably because it's uncomfortable for her), and repeat. Maybe she's just trying to get my attention; maybe she thinks that she is imitating a belly rub and expects me to recognize this gesture and respond. If any of you have a dog, or any pet for that matter, you know the weird things they do that convince you your pet's either psychic or extremely intelligent.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I think the kind of animal thinking you describe doesn't really need recursion. It could just be implemented by a lookup table; there are few enough separate stimuli and responses that that would be feasible (for evolution, of course, heh heh).

We do a certain amount of that too. Apparently we really do have a "grandma cell" which fires if we are looking at her face or a picture of it. Given circa 10^5 acquaintances for even a glad-handing politician (or a classical Chinese scholar's inventory of characters) you could get to such a cell with say 17 yes-no questions, easily implemented in a neural network.

But recursion is a different beast. Recursion is generality, new concepts for old, instantiating the dots in 1,2,3,...

 

[Blossom Morphine]

Fascinating to think about, isn't it? I can only guess at your question. But here's another question I thought of while I was pondering your own: Can the thought process affect the dimensions around us? One could say that our thoughts affect everything around us: the surrounding environment such as forests, cities, and everyday object like combs and even people, in that we think about them and when we act upon those thoughts, we affect them, and thus thought inderectly affected them. We thought about flying and soon our thought led to the creation of a flying machine and soon affected the skies. We thought about warmth even in winter and thoughts evetually led to a fuel source, and soon to fire, and soon to heaters. We longed for ways to stop illnesses and thought soon led to medicines. If thought can affect even our own environment and biology, although inderectly, can it also affect those dimensions if we were ever to fins a way to get there? Would our thoughts find a way to affect that dimesnion directly since it would be a higher dimension?

And relation to your question, perhaps thought must be strong enough to keep the conciousness, and the mind that creates that thought must be exposed long enought to the idea of that dimension to keep the consciousness. It reminds me of a story of a frong who lived in a dark, damp well all it life and had no concept of an outer world. One day, by accident, it hopped out of its well and saw the world around it: trees, lakes, grass, and being it never knew existed such a deer and cats. In that moment, in an attempt to process it all, it's mind simply exploded. It could not handl the info.

Perhaps if a person could shape their conciousnes in such a way so as to bring that dimension in terms the person could understand, then conciousness could be kept. What does anyone else think?

 

[sol2]

Platos Cave

Some might find Werner Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy quite interesting?

If we had understood the euclidean world, and this is all we knew, how much more, have we been enlightened when it has come to the dynamical nature of GR and the recognition of the curvature?

A whole new set of thinking arises from hyperdimensional recognitions and here dimension would have to encompasss the new carrier (the graviton ) as significant, in the continuing discription of what dimension might mean.

Because we look to the developing artistic renditions of thoughtful artist in regard to dienson it has become quite fashionable to see(image?) the furthest reaches on this topic. How do they get there without Gauss?

In the famous simile of the cave Plato compares men to prisoners in a cave who are bound and can look in only one direction. They have a fire behind them and see on a wall the shadows of themselves and of objects behind them. Since they see nothing but the shadows, they regard those shadows as real and are not aware of the objects. Finally one of the prisoners escapes and comes from the cave into the light of the sun. For the first time he sees real things and realizes that he had been deceived hitherto by the shadows. For the first time he knows the truth and thinks only with sorrow of his long life in the darkness. The real philosopher is the prisoner who has escaped from the cave into the light of truth, he is the one who possesses real knowledge. This immediate connection with truth or, we may in the Christian sense say, with God is the new reality that has begun to become stronger than the reality of the world as perceived by our senses. The immediate connection with God happens within the human soul, not in the world, and this was the problem that occupied human thought more than anything else in the two thousand years following Plato. In this period the eyes of the philosophers were directed toward the human soul and its relation to God, to the problems of ethics, and to the interpretation of the revelation but not to the outer world. It was only in the time of the Italian Renaissance that again a gradual change of the human mind could be seen, which resulted finally in a revival of the interest in nature.

The Allegory of the Cave

And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/platoscave.html

http://www.vrc.iastate.edu/magritte.gif
Betrayal of Images" by Rene Magritte. 1929 painting on which is written "This is not a Pipe"

The light behind, in the analogy of Plato's cave, sets up the thinking in how issues from the source[the fire]( and here it might be referred to the fifth dimension)shines in its radiation. How is form realized?

http://wc0.worldcrossing.com/WebX?14@246.WPi7cqXekXB.9@.1dde8852/10

This perspective on the allegory of the cave, to dimension, seemed relevant to me.

 

[Pet Zepi]

No and, in fact, to limit one's Self to only three dimensions could, more or less, be counted as, merely, another form of one-dimensional thinking.

Every thought is geometric. Begins at point A. (But atomic structure is spherical, yes? Hypothetically speaking?)

The key to time is clocking...and the networks that arise, as a result.
Pick your own point A...and, then, agree with another...on a point of lesser or greater value. A point...of entry, so to speak.

(This is where Freemasonry and Sympathetic Magic come into play.)

Physics is not my bag. I'm merely an artist.

;)