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possibly a new step in human understanding of reality

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Bluelighter
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Aug 30, 2010
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Hey.

I've been following this guy and his friends on the internet for years now. They announced this new project they've been working on quite some time ago and it's finally going to be released in a few days. So I find this might be the right time to share this with Bluelighters and my personal favorite sub-forum.

Basically he says he's going to answer a lot of questions humans have about consciousness, reality, origin of the universe, unifying quantum mechanics with relativity etc.

There's lots of information about it on this page here.
A tiny teaser of the documentary.
An interview video about it released just today.


Now I have no clue really, what's gonna come out, but I am hoping it will kick as much ass as they believe it will. ;)
And the last interview video gave me more reason to hope for 'something special'.

EDIT:
The url to the documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o
Url to a recorded stream of the author trying to explain the video in laymans terms: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/12221835
 
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Before I checked the links, I was actually predicting this was a post about Thomas Campbell's theory of everything.

Anyway, this is awesome. Can't wait til it's released. =D
And from a WoW player - Whoda thunk it?
 
Just a little update from the guy who's working on the documentary (twitter):
reese015

Working like a maniac. Making sure you guys don't have to wait one hour longer than necessary. Current estimate: Monday.

:)
 
from the website said:
And here's what I can say about what it IS:
it's a two-chapter documentary: 1: 'God' is in The Neurons / 2: The Grand Scheme of Things
the first chapter deals with neuroscience and addresses core self-development issues from an angle you've probably never seen or read about before
the second chapter deals with the unification of quantum mechanics and relativity
the second chapter is very physics-oriented but is related to the first in the sense that it has certain philosophical, but not mystical, implications
the two-part documentary will be released in one go, the first chapter is pretty much finished, I'm currently working on the second chapter
future small expansion videos may be added to explore certain topics that are only briefly mentioned in the documentary
an incredible amount of effort has gone into putting ALL the information in the documentary, meaning: pretty much any future videos/post/expansions we will make can be derived from the main documentary, it's all in there, in a sense
it's fucking awesome

"it's fucking awesome"?
okay, if he says so.
 
I think that the second chapter dealing with the unification of quantum mechanics and relativity will make or break it; if this succeeds it will generate a lot of genuine scientific interest, if it fails it will show the whole work up for being another fantasy theory.
 
this looks really interesting.

i'm especially looking forward to him explaining how, given decoherence time at physiological temperatures is so much faster than any processes that take place in the brain, quantum theory has anything whatsover to do with neurons.
 
I watched that video and that was really interesting. The first part made more sense because I am am not a quantam physisist, however, i can't help but think people have already known a lot of this information. Anyways, I thank you for the link, im sharing it with my friends to see what they think.
 
I watched that video and that was really interesting. The first part made more sense because I am am not a quantam physisist, however, i can't help but think people have already known a lot of this information. Anyways, I thank you for the link, im sharing it with my friends to see what they think.
Yes. A lot of this has been already known and is meant as an introduction, I guess.
But the new stuff is and will be very important, if it all gets verified by notable physicists. :)
 
if it all gets verified by notable physicists. :)

this cannot happen until a researech paper is published. until they put a paper on the arXiv (i've checked), or better, have it accepted to a respected journal, it will not be taken as a serious attempt at a contribution to science. until its made to look like a serious attempt, no notable physicist will waste their time considering it.

i am watching this now. all i can say is that C= hf is most likely a category error. without the derivation its hard to say what he started with as his mathematical definition of consciousness. as i said in my previous post jokingly, but will now seirously reiterate, due to the timescales involved, the likelihood of quantum process playing a meaningful role in our brains is very very small. his inference about the brain being made of quantum things and therefore the brain being quantum is fallacious- i mean why then, aren't beds and cars quantum also??? not only is it fallacious, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding about quantum mechanics.

i can't watch the rest of it now, i'm sorry but i can't help feel like this is a purposely dishonest documentary. i will try to pick it up again but if you're after actual science, this is not the documentary for you.
 
I only watched the brain science part so far, but I must say that all of this stuff is readily available in popular neuro/cognitive science books. Also I expected from the title that they would cover the neuroscience of mysticism, and was disappointed that they didn't. "God is in the neurons"? What does that mean? There were some other statements made that I thought were confusing and ambiguous.

The implication that an understanding of brain science can be used to improve control of behavior and quality of life is a point that needs to be made more often, but it's hardly a revolutionary idea.
 
Who says they aren't? All matter is.
You probably just don't get what they are really trying to tell you, but this might help:

that is fair enough. yes all matter is fundamentally quantum, but when you consider it en masse, i.e. in a brain/bed, it so frequently interacts with its other particles, you can view this as being measured by other particles, that the 'quantumness,' i.e. off diagonals in the density matrix, are washed out, rendering their behaviour and correlations with other matter classical. so for all practical and most philosophical purposes, these are classical objects.

i have now watched the rest and find the following misrepresentations:

re reference frames:
a reference frame is just any set of coordinates!!! einsteins principle states that physics must not be tied to a priviledged reference frame. you can use the eigenvalues of an operator to derive a 'quantum' of whatever that operator represents (e.g. position), and then use this to derive a reference frame but this is just one possible choice. he goes on to say this 'priviledged reference frame' and its consequences for the nature of time is reflected in a wavefunction: as time is a complete mess in quantum theory, no one really knows how to interpret it, it cannot be the case that anything about time itself is reflected in a wavefunction- where the probability amplitudes live.

things 'interpreted as vectors' which not interpreted as such by working physicists: mass, matter, antimatter, time, distance (a scalar, different from position, wavefunctions can be written in terms of the position operator).


conservation properties in physics are derived from assumptions about space time, i.e. isotropy, homogeneity, without these assumptions they are not implied by the sums of vectors. see Noethers theorems.

the heisenberg uncertainty principle is not a consequence what he says happens when travelling at c, they cannot be because what he says is false. the uncertainty principle is just a mathematical fact about non commuting operators. due to this, the version he is talking about, i.e. time/energy uncertainty, is a fudge that physicists don't quite know how to interpret as they don't even have an opertor for time!!!

i'm not trying very hard so there's probably more. i should say, i didn't watch this/start reading this thread just to tear it to shreds. i am really interested in this stuff, as should be obvious, and was hoping for an intellectual honest, coherent argument.
 
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the attitude... i don't know whether to laugh or to cry. atheneism? international press release? my god

from a serious scientific or philosophical perspective this whole thing is swiss cheese floating in thin air.

its foundational thought is certainly not original. though i completely disagree with this on an ontological level (i personally think it's inherently impossible to quantize consciousness, but i'm not gonna get into that), should you want to see what a serious work that goes along the exact same ('groundbreaking') line of thought looks like, take a look at this http://www.noeticadvancedstudies.us/Amoroso12.pdf
it predates 'atheneism' by almost 14 years and actually has (somewhat of) an idea what it is talking about. didn't make much of a splash though
-understandably, in my opinion-

this guy should really get some experience with genuine science or philosophy before assuming he's the next Einstein and Levinas all in one.

[edit] to add one to chinup's list: (and by now i am really embarrased to have given this any of my time at all; though i can't say that i didn't see that coming) in the ustream vlog at around 6.30 minutes into it, he talks about antimatter; most notably he asks "where is it? its the biggest unsolved problem in physics" well, here it is http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12158718, alongside its numerous artificial creations in particle accelerators. there has even been a Nobel Prize in physics awarded for the experimental discovery of an antimatter particle.

at first i thought; okay, he meant 'dark matter', but actually, no, he really doesn't
ouch!


a reaction by 'Kimo' on the site said:
I want to be with you on any of this, really, but I'm having too hard a time shaking the embarrassed feeling that I'm watching someone who learned martial arts from internet videos imitate kung-fu movie sequences in front of their bedroom mirror while talking about kicking the ass of skilled martial artists.
and that's formulated rather beningly.
 
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in the ustream vlog at around 6.30 minutes into it, he talks about antimatter; most notably he asks "where is it? its the biggest unsolved problem in physics"...
I'm pretty sure he was referring to the fact, that there is unexpectedly so little anti-matter found in the Universe. According to current physics there should be much more of it present (for all matter, equal amount of anti-matter?). He actually talks about this in-depth in this same video. Not sure if you watched it all or you just missed it?
 
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^tbh, i turned it off shortly after that was said. i must have misheard/misinterpreted something in his somewhat broken english. odd.

but okay baryogenesis. i was already thinking that that one went way over the top seeing as anyone who ever watched discovery channel should know that antimatter exists. but to call it the biggest unsolved problem in physics? perhaps not very understood, but the inequality hypothesis is rather well established no? it seems like a rather elegant hypothesis instead of a bulky one that seem to beg for a paradigm shift a la relativity in order to accurately delineate the problem or solve it. but at least i feel better to have given it my time.

but this does not take away from the point that, as it stands now, the whole thing is still swiss cheese. if he is able to produce a fleshed out scientific or even philosophical paper in which he is able to substantially account for the leaps he is making, he should have done so before the documentary in order to for the documantary to have any value at all, given that the documentary claims to be supported by scientific/logical facts. any scientific or philosophical paper's aim is to reduce ambiguity by being as precise as possible, not to thrive on it, in the hopes that people will fill in the gaps on their own. don't sell the hide of the bear before it is shot.

anyway, i'm not a physicist and i'm not gonna pretend that i am one. my main problem with this theory is the unwarranted leap between mind and what is essentially a formula to calculate the energy of a photon, and De Broglie's theory that not only photons, but every particle behaves as such which leads to the Schrödinger equation, i am told. at which point De Broglie becomes obsolete.
here's my pickle (and it applies to quantifing consciousness by means of QM in general): what more has been done then to simply assume, a priori, that mind (as opposed to brain) is a particle? one has, at this point, presupposed that which one was going to prove. in order to apply De Broglie, you still need a particle. and this is left wholly untouched in his theory other then by means of presupposition. this is the assumption that mind actually can be quantified, of which i spoke earlier. i find no evidence or even argument as to why this is so. saying brainwaves and brainparticles may be governed by quantum mechanics in an interaction is all fine and dandy though it appears somewhat of a moot point, as the real problem is the actual reduction of something such as mind to something such as wavelength/frequency or any other physical phenomenon. on a philosophical level, nothing new has been achieved by this theory, as it proceeds from an a priori assumed physical monism. this is called a petitio principii, which is a logical fallacy.

nowhere in this entire story can you speak of a warranted leap to quantize consciousness except by means of an assumtion that is has to be so. why? because the mind is a particle/particle-wavelength duality. where and how does he legitimize what is an ontological statement, namely 'C is' 'this and that' beyond this assumption which does absolutely nothing in terms of explaining subjectivity, which is what consciousness is all about. so i am baffled as to why this is supposed to be a big breakthrough?

saying the frequency (of the brainwaves?) . Plancks constant = consciousness; you still have to provide for what brainwaves have to do with mind. if you intend on using Plancks constant, you need to prove that mind has something to do with the particle/wave duality. saying that all matter is governed by this principle is simply not enough, as mind is in no way necessarily matter. which is something that is just passed over as if it is self-evident. i know quantum mechanics appears a very attractive type of solution to the mind-brain problem due to this paradoxal duality which can as such easily be transposed to the apparent mind-body duality, but it really isn't. neither the properties of a particle, nor a wave can be equated to the properties of the mind.

the common mistake here is indeed the petitio principii in various forms; at the core is the fact that a scientific theory is the mind, and does not directl describe an objective reality, as is often assumed. mathemetic formula's are representations of said reality, but you have to keep in mind that they themselves are not the reality they describe, and at any point, there remains this leap between a perfect mathematical form/formula such as 'a circle' and the approximation thereof that is found in observation.

another such example illustrating this leap is Wittgensteins Big Book thought experiment. you should be able that the formula c=hf does absolutely nothing to alleviate any of these problems. the reaon is the petitio principii i described in the beginning of this post. it never actually touched upon anything that is remotely associated with consciousness; it only deals with 'objects', wheter they be particles or waves. it assumes to be a theory of everything while it doesn not even acknowledge or even appears aware of any of them.

in attempting to describe consciousness in such terms, subjectivity as subjectivity is lost before it ever existed, as a subject is not an object. consider this: any representation of the mind to itself it does so in the manner of a subject-object duality. however, one has not grasped the mind by means of this representation, as it is in the mind, and the mind is viewing it 'from afar'. if the mind is wholly captured in the representation, then what is entertaining the representation? it i somewhat akin to a dog trying to catch its own tail.

now if you subscribe to the assumption that the mind is indeed quantifiable through QM, you are then faced by the interpretation of the paradox of the particle-wave duality. which is hardly a solved problem for exact science. i believe it is currently assumed that it are two ways of looking at the same thing, though not at once. If athene/chiren/whatever his actual name is is to propose a theory of the scope he is envisioning, he cannot simply leave this ambiguity. i haven't found any solution to this in what he says (feel free to point it out to me) one time it appears as if consciousness is the provider of the 'underlying unity' so to speak, at another, consciousness appears to fall victim to it. but this is not my actual argument;

my point is that should consciousness be quantifiable, you cannot take this particle-wave duality in the actual quantification; seeing as the standard intrepetation sees them as two different interpretations of the same thing but not at once you see we are left with a so called 'hard problem' much akin to the mind-brain gap; moreover, it is one that QM itself cannot answer, despite its apparent promises of being able to do so. Should you do choose to take the duality 'as is' into a quantizing of consciousness, you are never going to be able to actually quantize its entirety, and therefor, the mind actuallly remains unquantifiable. but this is not all.

In the proposed quantification of consciousness, it is often assumed that solving this paradox in a definite matter is only a matter of time. Let us assume that somehow, this underlying unity is discovered, and the mind can be actually and fully quantified. regardless of all the problems with qualia or subjectivity that brings. the result of this is rather 'suffocating'; as one is left with a non-functional paradox (ie. a paradox that cannot even sustain itself and implodes unto itself): seeing as the mind proceeds to quantify itself exactly, any abstract, representational formulas is uses (ie. x=... ; e=hf etc.) become, at the very moment they are used in the quantification of itself, constants. any operator is fully defined at this point, and given that this is a full, exact quantification of the consciousness entertaining it, said consciousness cannot escape itself anymore. it iself became a 'constant', an infinite iteration that isn't even an iteration anymore due to the fact that there is nothing by wich any of the iterations can be seperated from eachother any longer. the mind, as mind, implodes into the singularity of its own objectivity, and ceases to be mind/subjectivity. from such a thing, none of our current observations regarding mind can be derived. the fully quantized mind is a non-functional paradox. it doesn't even exist as a paradox, it simply implodes when taken as such.


sorry for the wall of text, i have avoided dense sentences (or at least tried to) in order to explain it clearly.
 
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wow- azzazzz we seem to complement each other quite well, you can do the philosophy and i can do the (really very unsophisticated) physics.

i totally agree with the quantification of consciousness business- its why i originally said that formula looks like a category error. consciousness is a very high level phenomena, nobody would say it IS the fundamental particles making up a neuron, or the neurons themselves. i was very convinced by hoftstadters books- godel escher bach and i am a strange loop, that consciousness is probably a mixture of very high level information processing/abstraction and nifty recursion. in that case, you'd do better quantifying it in a similar way to a computer- i'm not assuming physicalism here, but i am thinking about what the brain actually does and how we best quantify those types of tasks.

the problem with using formulae from quanutm theory, is that the formulae for quantum theory apply to qubits, harmonic oscillators, etc etc. they cannot be picked up and applied wherever you like and retain their validity. no one would question whether a formulae from newtonian mechanics was applicable to a problem about a black hole, its just obviously not. just because 'everything is quantum' on some level doesn't mean we can treat it as such for every purpose. and you had BETTER take into account the fact that individual particles in large systems are constantly interacting with each other. unless were going down the brain as Bose Einstein condensate business, which though looking less unlikely than a decade ago, is still bloody unlikely. and if he's assuming that, which would make the formula slightly more coherent, he should have stated that as a premise really.

there have been several recent discoveries which genuinely have changed our conception of reality, watch this version http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xxgbn to find out about 2- though one of the mentioned discoveries is relatively old now, just not widely known. anyone who wants to know if this athene business should be taken seriously should compare the publication lists of the scientists in the two documentaries.

this is the sad thing: our views of reality have been fundamentally changed very recently, the implications of this are still in the very early days of being worked out. there is currently so much unpopularised material that people would LOVE. why didn't this guy bother to invest the year or so it would take to get the necessary academic background to understand something genuine and publicise that? he'd have then done the world a favour, instead he's done a disservice to anyone who lacks the background to see the obvious problems with his work.
 
Heh. Actually before releasing their own docu they suggested that same episode of Horizon as a nice intro. :)

I am no physics expert and I admit that the second part of the movie was way over my head. I just lack the preliminary knowledge to understand all the theories proposed.
But I believe I got a fraction of it and I'm gonna quote something, that's not my words, but could bring some new clarity to this topic:
"Just as E=mc² and all other basic theoretic mathematical statements in science, C=hf refers to any possible minimum unit of spacetime that makes up your consciousness, just as E=mc² refers to any sort of unit of energy or mass. This just pertains to any quantized unit of spacetime, not to abstract concepts of what consciousness is on either neurological or spiritual levels. And the formula certainly doesn't imply that there is some magical quantized 'consciousness particle', it just creates an obvious starting point for a theory of everything: quantized particles behave in a certain way, the ones that make up our consciousness behave the same way and this has certain implications. That is all."

I believe what they mean by this, is that if this is true, it will become a very important foundation in science, which to build on.
 
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C=hf refers to any possible minimum unit of spacetime that makes up your consciousness,

should he have read any philosophy of mind, starting with Descartes, he'd know that the fundamental impasse between mind and brain is what Descartes described as res extensa (objects) and res cogitans. (of course i'm pretty sure Descartes is just an ancient idiot in this guys eyes bearing absolutely no relevance to anything going on today and that he is way smarter). which means: objects are extended in space and time (literally 'extended things/business'); mind is not extended into spacetime, it is not spatiotemporally located. brian is, mind is not. saying a minimum unit of consciousness is a certain amount of spacetime is a show of your total lack of understanding regarding your subject matter. in order to have a breakthrough in the hard problem of consciousness, that is exactly what you need to explain: how is consciounsness a matter of space and time. you don't simply say it is, because this does not correspond with our observations. tell me where in spacetime exactly is your exerience of the color red? not the color red itself, but your experiencing it. somewhere in the neurons firing? i see neurons firing, but i don't see your experience of the color red. it might very well be that they have something to do with it, certainly, but they are not 'your experience of the color red'. moreover, someone else may experience the same wavespectrum as you did, yet he describes his experience different from yours. he might reproduce the color in a different shade when asked. he may even say he saw green.

the experience of space-time does not equal the spacetime in which the experience took place. where in space-time do you find the concept 'time' or 'space'? (Kant) it is not something you percieve empirically in spacetime, rather, it is the very structure by which you are percieving and as such, it is an a priori requisite for any perception at all. spacetime is a structural aspect of the mind, and not of objective reality. if one even has an inkling of understanding what the theory of relativity actually means it is that in objective reality, our perception that is space-time does not correspond to it, and so when explaining this didactically, we have to refer to such formulations as 'the 'bending' of spacetime by gravity'; 'the compression of space by speed'. it is the exact reason why a perceptual imagination of what relativity means is so difficult: because it does not correspond to the structuralization of spacetime by the mind.

a diffrent, more quantifiable, example of this difference which this formula fails to distinguish is the following observation: when two flashes of light are under x amount (don't remember the exact amount) of millseconds apart, an observer consciously experiences only one flash. which means the smallest unit of conscious experience obviously does not correspond to the amount of protons or energy emitted, which can be manipulated into a much larger degree of seperation then consciousness is capable of. as such, this measurement, as it is proposed as a minimum unit of experience, is again an utterly empty box.

And the formula certainly doesn't imply that there is some magical quantized 'consciousness particle', it just creates an obvious starting point for a theory of everything: quantized particles behave in a certain way, the ones that make up our consciousness behave the same way and this has certain implications. That is all."

now this is just one example where logically speaking, the guy is swaying all over the place. i mean, how can you read over that?
a) there is no (magical) consciousness particle(s)
b) quantized particles behave in a certain way
c) consciousness particle(s) behave the same way.
?????? i thought there weren't any ?

if this guy is not simply decieving himself through his own logical fallacies, he really needs to learn how to describe something in an exact, fleshed-out and disambiguated manner. of course, when one does that, you are actually being critical about an initial idea, which may have sounded very promising, it may even have given you 'the chills' when you thought of it; but you can and will suddenly find yourself into heaps of problems your quick intuitive overview/idea did not see. this is called 'actual, substantial work' only in doing this, over and over again (and you will fail, over and over in the beginning) you will come to cultivate an intuition that actually has some substance to it, and more importantly, you will come to understand your own capacities and limitations. you will come to understand and be genuinely appreciative of the (what you may now think of as 'small') work your collegues have done and are doing. and perhaps the most difficult part of all, is that your failures will cultivate a basic humility, by which you will sharpen your ability to actually listen to your subject matter instead of your own self-absorbed babbeling of how you want or wish things to be. if you are interested in doing genuine research, this is what you have to go through. it is called training and learning to apply any talent you may possess. even naturals, such as Einstein are not exempt from this. and that is the origin, and the intention, of the sentence 'shut up and calculate' of which our beloved Athene is rather contemptuous of.

i must admit that he does show talent to become a cult-leader though =D
 
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