^^ His point is that scientists wouldn't take this as a serious suggestion at all. It doesn't matter the discipline because scientists can tell when there's conjecture without any backing evidence. But neither you nor DD is wrong here, there's no need to fight, treat it as a thought exercise/experiment if treating it as fact would disgust you for whatever reason, and treat it as serious musings on a little-known topic – biophotons – if you prefer it that way.
Or you know, just keep bickering like humans do. I'm not trying to chastise either one of you, just to be specific, so as to keep from people jumping on *me*, I'm just saying.
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See, the is why this is a fun thread, whether you view it as honest speculation or thought experiment. No matter which point you take, it doesn't really matter, because you have an exchange of ideas, which is the most important point is say.
Thanks for the time you sacrificed to illuminate the topic from a scientist's POV. That is exactly what my intentions were when opening the thread : The chance to get to listen to more
knowledgeable BLers. Anyway I wanted to comment your points earlier, but primarily I had no time due to having to work again and secondarily I was somewhat upstaged by your enormous block of clarifications.
I will answer a few points briefly and come back later on, when I had the chance to involve a broader range of references and can back up or disprove the claims with researched knowledge.
I've been lucky to be exposed to scientific concepts at a very young age, and it fascinated me, so I've kept up with journals and current events to a probably abnormal degree. But then on the other hands hate math, suck at it, suck at sports, etc. We all have our areas of hobby and such, different for each person. So lets get to the meat of it then...
Hmm, sounds like you are pretty convinced, that the whole psychedelic experience happens inside our brains by dampening the neuronal stimuli in some and accelerate them in other places and that the perceived hightened probability of learning something about life is totally subjective and actually a result of randomness. That would correlate with the global scientific view, that nothing happens out of purpose, but because nature works "opportunistically" by taking chances non deterministically, that pop up randomly. I fail to see anything amazing in that scenario :D Also the workflow of a NDA is difficult to imagine for me. It stays an abstract model.
It's not that I rule out all non-measured things or ideas, I just have a certain way of looking at the world and assigning probability to things. I don't think the chances of learning about yourself or learning something useful through tripping is necessarily random, as we all have to exist within our current state of being, which is predicated upon our past states of being. So what I mean by that is that how you're feeling, what you're thinking about, who you're thinking about, all of these things will influence your experience, so that if you have a problem and you hope to solve it, you'd have a non-random chance of solving it – in either direction. So if you're in a state conducive to making a breakthrough on that topic then the likelyhood would be more than random chance would suggest, if you're still utterly conflicted your chances would be less than sheer random statistics would indicate.
Lets get back to the concept of believing that our consciousness has a biochemical foundation, and only a biochemical foundation. You bring up the tripping mind, and neurons, so an apt subject for me to counter with is consciousness. We have really not any idea how you go from neurons, to groups of linked neurons, to large groups that may demonstrate electrically synchronized activity, to the regions of the brain, to consciousness. We may understand the interrelations between a given set of those things, but the further you separate them the less well understood the relationship, ie neurons to groups of neurons we can sort of know but neurons to consciousness we haven't a clue. And so I would suggest that the brain gives rise to consciousness, and consciousness depends on having a working brain to be conscious with, but consciousness may well be much more than the sum of its parts. That's mysterious, and pretty much uncharted waters. Could there be physical vibrations transmitted along axons and dendrites, or quantum effects? I've seen speculative papers about both, but it really is just speculation.
As an interesting aside, the actual physical vibrations moving along linked chains of neurons was posited in the context of understanding how anaesthetic gasses work. The theory was that they are nonpolar enough to get into the lipid membrane of a cell, neurons included, and then having those molecules of anaesthetic in the membrane, which bahaves sort of like a liquid, albeit very thin and wrapped around into the shape of a sphere, would serve to decrease the 'viscosity' of the membranes. And as we all know sounds (which are resonant vibrations in the air, compare to resonant vibrations of the outer surface of a neuron) travel farther with less loss of volume when they move through solids as compared to liquids or gasses, and so reducing the viscosity would make it 'more liquid', decreasing the efficiency at which the vibrations propagate. Totally an off the wall idea, but fascinating nonetheless, since most traditional a aesthetics still don't have an established method of action.
As for near death experiences, the 'oh it's just you being starved of oxygen and random neurons firing as they die' bit is bullshit. There's more than that going on, because people have been revived up to half an hour later and their brains were active the entire time. There's a fellow who's name I do not know who had a wonderful piece about this on NPR a while back, Fresh Air (stupid name, annoying host) I believe. And so his thought is that the tissues in the brain actually survive for quote a while after death, and only begin to lose function irreversibly after like an hour. So a NDE could be your experience of that hour.
Ultimately, I think that biochemistry is the basis for everything that underlies consciousness, but what I'm trying to say is that whether you have a bunch of molecules of a drug, or a lack of proper oxygen from heart failure, those simple changes are just fed back upon and fed forward upon by layer after layer of complexity. Think about it I figure, if the simple presence of a single type of drug stimulating some receptors can make you trip, there must be SO much going on as a result, not even a linear easy to explain result either, of that simple change, to explain the complexity of a psychedelic state.
I also believe that there seems to be some sort of creative force in the universe that prompts complex systems to be even more complex. This wouldn't take the form of an intelligent designer/God, and I don't think it is even an actual distinct force, like gravity or the strong nuclear force. Instead I think it to be best described as a consequence of the actual fundamental forces, which are mathematically speaking set in such a way as to make life possible. True, believing that complexity tends toward further complexity or that consciousness is a result of 'more than the sum of its constituents' isn't belief in paranormal or otherwise dubious activity, but it's as far as I'd go. To tie in to the first thing I mentioned, it is about probability in my mind. The things I bring up just now are probable to be, paranormal things not so much.
To summarize what you yourself have written about me, yes, I am a rationalist. And no that's not a sneaky sideswipe, like implying if I'm rational then you're irrational, I'm talking about the philosophical standpoint that I inhabit.
I did not want to steer the discussion into that esoteric realm anyway. Just because I want to discuss the possibility that humans could communicate with other beings - let's be specific and talk about plants instead of surroundings - by reading parts of their DNA, that are transfered by emitted photons, does not mean, that I believe that magical elves are behind the curtain to manipulate our behaviour. Plants do that constantly, please see the references :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCYQHA-nNzI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isE7e0UhMGI (as mentioned the presentation is awkward)
You know, I debated bringing up the elves, because I was concerned that it might appear that I was putting words/concepts in your mouth/mind. And second I didn't want to try and paint you in an absurdist light to the various members of the forum that take the more rational side of things. But I decided to keep it in, because if anybody bothered to read your post I was quoting they'd see for the elves that you never mentioned anything about that. So just to be clear, I was speaking in general terms about a type of individual given to belief in this sort of thing, DMT elves and such, not about you personally, but I clearly bungled the delivery of that impersonal, more generally-oriented sentiment.
If you take a piece of extracted DNA and put it into a photomultiplier, you can observe, that it also emits photons constantly. Cells communicate via photons. Can't it be, that we, or our cells respectively, just dismiss signs of plants all the time, because our consciousness is self-centered in the ordinary state ?
It's really funny how much stuff plants do that people assume they can't, like the chemical warfare that goes in in the root systems of two plants of two species, usually the viciously invasive type, to stunt the growth of the 'enemy' due to insufficient nutrient uptake from a poisoned, resulting in too small of a root system for the losing side. Or like chemotaxis, the characteristic of moving towards or away from a *directional* chemical cue. In this case it's a choker vine that will reliably – when hatched from the seed – grow in such a way that the tip of the sprout, which points at like a 45 degree angle from vertical, goes in circles due to anisotropic cell growth. This circling allows it to 'smell' what plants are around it, and in this case it loves tomato plants and will then, after twenty turns or so, begin to grow. The growth is greater on one side of the vine than the other though, so that it ends up leaning... towards the tomato plant, which it then attaches to and 'eats' via nutrient absorption in the stranglehold it forms. And this behavior – seeking out a *directionally oriented* chemical signal – is ridiculously reliable. It will hardly if ever end up growing towards the less desirable victim. And plenty of other plants use this form of chemotaxis, with motive power being a result of one side of the plant's stem growing faster than the other so as to lean, all across the plant kingdom.
Hell, tobacco plants can even send out a signal to the predators of the few bugs that can safely eat tobacco plant leaves, to call in those predators to come kill those caterpillars that are eating the tobacco plant in turn.
As for signaling, biophotons are referred to as such because they're so weak and they are emitted in low enough quantities that we must use instruments sensitive enough to detect single photons. I can't speak to how strong the evidence is for cells within the same organism to communicate via biophotons, but between two different animals, or even between two widely separated cells in the same animal, I think there will just be too much stuff that can block, reflect, or otherwise are that's any signal.
And then you also have the issue that is all the other emitted EM stuff as noise to your signal, for example from thermal emission in the infrared. On the other hand bio photons are typically in the visible part of the spectrum (to our eyes at least, other animals can see much more of the spectrum, or an equal fraction of the whole spectrum but centered on a different frequency from our vision) and the ultraviolet range, so that makes the frequency and thus wavelength at least somewhat different, making it easier to pick out that signal, though I don't think it anywhere near would make up for the two problems I just mentioned.
It is in a sense distrust, as you do not believe anything, that goes on beyond the boundaries of human/mechanical perception and therefore is not measurable, yet.
Not at all. I just feel that if you make an extraordinary claim, such as that there are phenomena that are unusual within the context of the world as we understand it, then the burden of proof of evidence or plausible explanation is on you, the person making those claims. Again I don't mean you personally, I'm speaking in general terms. That's not distrust, it's just asking for an explanation if an unusual claim is made, even an explanation that is theoretical will do, like with dark energy. We know something's there, making the universe expand faster, and we have pretty much no idea what specifically it is, though there are theories. But if somebody had said 'there is an invisible form of energy that makes up nigh on 75% of the mass/energy (they can interconvert) in the universe and is making he universe expand faster and faster, but I don't have any evidence, I won't have any evidence, and I can't even posit a theory as to what's going on', then that's not a real claim, it's just somebody talking. So we had to go and get the theoretical stuff in the form of calculations of the total energy density of the universe and the experimental evidence by studying redshifts. As a result, what sounds like a total crackpot idea has turned out to be a valid claim. A better explanation may come along, but that's natural, that's how science works.
religion = faith in the unknown
Except that religion in its organized form is the opposite, it is faith in the written word that is usually divinely inspired and lays out perfectly clearly what form the universe takes, with gods and angels or spirits or bodhisattvas. So there's no unknown there. The most extreme form of not being unknown is the statement that not only is there an afterlife, we actually know what form it will take. Death will be each of our ultimate adventures, whatever if may be like, but nobody's come back, so you take it on faith, faith in the known fate of a man or woman upon their death.
science = distrust in the unknown
And again, the opposite is true. Science positively *revels* in the unknown! Science is a process, not a thing, but if you had to condense the *purpose* for that process, essentially it is to be fearless in the face of the unknown, so as to allow us to study the unknown to make unknown into known! If science had some primordial fear of the unknown within it, nobody would theorize or hypothesize and we'd know nothing about pretty much anything, because if you cannot confront the fact that there is infinitely more that you don't know than there is stuff you do know, then you can't take the next step of choosing some problem that has no answer – where the answer is unknown – to make predictive guesses about it. And as I mentioned above, being wrong is inherently as much a part of science as being probably right (notice I say probably right, not right with no qualifiers, because science doesn't speak in absolutes, only probabilities). The process is all about *dis*proving your own hypotheses, so that when one of them stands up to that scrutiny you can then say that you may have found out a new thing about the world, which will deserve further study.
Any conceptualization of science as somehow being afraid of or even containing a fear of the unknown demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of what science is, why we so it, and what the purpose of it is. I'm gonna assume you're just playing devil's advocate here, because you seem like a bright, knowledgable fellow, and this sort of misconception, especially to this degree, would be rather peculiar to go along with those traits. Understand, I mean no offense if you do believe science fears the unknown, I'd just be really surprised.
If it is measurable, scientists put their trust in it, but : After quantum physicist there is the problem of the observer manipulating the outcome of an experiment.
Let's say I am a jealous person and set up my neighbor to spy my wife, so that he can tell me, when she cheated me. Who says, that he isn't the betrayer himself ?
Who says, that experiments do not cheat the observer ?
Nobody. Cheating requires deception, deception requires intent, and the universe and the things within it that are not alive cannot intend. If I step back from the literal meaning, it seems you're asking how you can do science when the acts of scientific analysis itself may perturb the outcome. You control for that perturbation just like you control for any other variable, and you try to design clean experiments where the perturbation won't happen in the first place.
The quantum difficulties with observation are limited to the quantum world, which regards very small things. The boundary for maximum size to display quantum effects is fuzzy, and likely not something that can be definitively pinned down since different materials in different shapes and quantities under different conditions will behave differently as far as showing quantum effects or not.
But anyway, yeah, an example of how quantum physics doesn't apply to macro scale objects (though it may act upon their constituents, see superposition of electrons in photosynthesis) is the uncertainty principle. Now, it is important to differentiate between the uncertainty principle, which states that the precision of measurement of position and momentum are inversely proportional, is often confused with observation of a quantum system altering that system, which is called the observer effect, which is what you were referencing. The two are related though, as I'll get to in a moment.
Anyway as you probably know, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the more precisely we measure the momentum of a particle, the correspondingly less precise our measurements of its position become, and vice versa. So the more we know about one of those factors for a particle the less is possible to know about the other aspect of that particle. Obviously this doesn't translate to the macroscale world: when I got a speeding ticket this spring in Virginia doing 117 mph, the cop very well knew both my position and momentum with precise accuracy. But this isn't possible when quantum effects come into play.
What this has to do with the observer principle is that one of the primary ways to measure one of those properties of a particle is to hit it with an electron that is at a specific frequency/wavelength. That will bump the particle up into one of the higher energy states, either from it's ground state or from some level above that if its already somewhat excited. Energy levels are discrete, they are quantized, they have set levels and a particle can occupy any of those levels as appropriate but not any state in between.
So when it gets bumped up an energy level, it becomes excited, and then releases a new photon in the process of ridding itself of that energy. We then read that photons properties to be able to extrapolate the properties of the particle we are measuring.
But just as superposition (taking multiple paths at once to find the optimum path, at which point the wave function of the particle collapses and it takes that best path, as seen in electrons formed from the energy photosynthetically captured from a photon in a plant cell's chloroplast) and the uncertainty principle do not apply to the macroscale world, so the observer effect also fails to directly translate. Generally when we work in the macroscale, the amount of energy put into a target by the billions of photons hitting it to illuminate it, perhaps for optical microscopy, is minimal. It's real, but the amount is so small relative to the amount of energy/momentum (momentum is a function of mass, which is interchangeable with energy, as shown by E=MC^2) in the target itself that the effect is so small as to not be statistically significant.
Finally, from a philosophical perspective, we must realize that we are imperfect beings with less than ideal tools in a chaotic and messy universe. Accordingly, there's always going to be some complexity that vexes you as a scientist, like observer bias. But we make do with what we have, and we design our experiments and the scientifically-based processes (like synthetic chemistry) that stem from them in such a way as to minimize the imperfections; if we waited for the development of a truly perfect method/system/instrument/experiment we would never get anything done and would just waste away waiting from now until the heat death of the universe (or the ripping apart of atoms due to runaway inflation/dark energy, whichever comes first, or possibly proton decay to halve the number of protons several billion times over, if protons do indeed decay... or all three!)
Sorry, that was offtopic. Because if I believed in the stuff I just mentioned, this discussion would be finished :D
Thanks for bringing that up. The question would be, what is the frequency of the oscillation, the photons have ?
Well like I mentioned earlier in this post, from looking around the net to learn more about biophotons, they seem to be emitted in the visible light and ultraviolet fractions of the EM spectrum. So assuming it was in the visible light portion instead of ultraviolet we actually could theoretically detect them, contrary to my initial assumption that they might come out as terahertz or radio or some other part of the spectrum that's invisible to our eyes.
Sorry for being abrupt. Let's dismiss the assumption, that the photons oscillate in frequencies of visible light. In the reference they told, that the transfer speed of the photons equals that of light, but it does not mean, that the wavelength/frequency is in the range of light. I suggest, that the wavelength is far too small to be seen. In my speculation, the visuals you get with psychedelics have nothing to do with the emitted DNA-photons. Let's also say, that the brain (i.e. the sum of its cells), our mind, does not have to interprete it correctly. It just reads it, and due to the similiarity with the internal DNA, it gets read, as it would be one of the own cells and in that way visions/imaginations are possible. Whether these visions are valuable or just random gibberish is written in another book.
Okay let's define surroundings = plants, because that is the hypothesis, that Jeremy Narby tried to underline. Actually I meant exactly : "Is it possible, that the human brain is capable of parsing, understanding the DNA of plants subconsciously in certain states?"
Well, in order for it to reach the brain, whether or not its consciously understood or simply just read and processed as noise to our conscious mind (perhaps then being stored as memory that is only available to the unconscious part, which then becomes more accessible on psychedelics), it has to hit by some sort of opsin-like protein, a light-sensitive pigment basically, which is what happens when ordinary photons hit a rod or cone cell in one of our eyes. This has to happen because in order for the brain to receive the message, regardless of what it does with it, it needs input from somewhere via a nerve. And so again it's convenient for this conjecture that biophotons are in the visible or ultraviolet bands, since some of them at least will be visible light, though the problems with the paucity and low intensity of the photons remains.
As for understanding the DNA of plants via this method, I'm not sure how a biophoton that is discharged from a molecule of DNA would get out of the nucleus, much less out of the cell and out of the plant and then to your eyes. But even if it did, how would you hypothesize that the frequency and thus wavelength combined with the level of energy of the photon encode the data that is the genetic code? Meaning (and no this isn't rhetorical) how would the properties I just mentioned of the biophoton, as well as perhaps the polarization of that photon (though we couldn't collect that information using only our eyes. A mantis shrimp might be able to though!) correspond to the length (how many nucleotides there are), the amounts of the nucleotides (how much A to G to C to T/U depending on whether its DNA or RNA), and the order (how those four nucleotides are arranged in sequence, which determines what amino acid and eventually protein the gene would code for, assuming it is a protein coding gene)?
Thx, you are correct in indicating, that I should not have used the terms synonymously, I will correct the concerning parts. I'm with you, that DNA is primarily just encoded data.
But, who can certainly say that it not also contains an encrypted message ?
We don't actually know what all of the 'no longer considered junk' DNA does. We know it is used to regulate epigenetic expression (how often and how much if a protein is coded, which results from how the gene is expressed) and in some cases we even know specifically what controls expression of what. But on the whole it's still mysterious, especially since there's also another way of regulating epigenetic expression, by adding small functional groups to the DNA of the gene in question (like DNA methylation).
We also have stuff that may debatably be considered actually junk, like pieces of viral genomes that accidentally ended up getting transferred into the nuclear DNA of one of our ancestors. And we may or may not have jumping genes, known as transposons, from non-human sources. We definitely have transposons, but we don't know if any of them come from another organism. We also may or may not have viroids (different from a virus) incorporated in our genome, or genes that got included accidentally from bacteria through DNA repair enzyme or replication enzyme error. But some scientists believe that these various forms of non-human genetic information may have a positive effect on fitness, so it cannot be definitively said either way whether its junk or not. I would expect that in accordance with the complexity of genetics and epigenetics and life in general the truth of the matter will be more nuanced and varied, and it may not be possible to say that the various forms of non-human DNA are all junk as a category at all, with some possibly being useful and some not, and some possibly detrimental, who knows!
As for encrypted info, not likely, as something would have had to encrypted it. You are correct that a hidden message would indeed constitute encryption, where the ordinary genetic info itself is merely encoded, not encrypted.
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I'm dead best tired, haven't slept in 48 hours from stupid fucking insomnia, so I'm gonna call it quits here for now. I'll get to the stuff below tomorrow when I wake up and no longer have a head full of fuzz!
If we assume that the whole DNA-emitting procedure does really happen, but we are not capable to even parse the fractions of DNA in our normal state, let alone interpret them correctly, because the potentially receiving cells of our body are busy with seemingly more important tasks like playing their role the cell colony they are living in, our organism, in order to let it evolve and reproduce one time. In the normal state, their communication is so to say hard-wired for internal tasks like "production of skin-cells", "digestion of food", "reception of sensual input", depending on the localisation and type of the cell. Let's conventionally assume, that the DMT-molecule (or similar) modulates the communication at the serotonine receptors. Can't it be, that certain cells, that are regulated by serotonine levels, go into idle-mode and wait for input instead of doing their ordinary tasks ? Perhaps now they are able to read the messages (photons) of external sources (plant-DNA). In that case, the DNA code is not really encrypted, but you have to either open the box (using a microscope) or modulating your organic parser in order to read it.
The DNA could also be encrypted in another way (attention, bs-meter is very high in the next view sentences). Let's say, if we took the DNA-traces of all species together and would be the owners of a key (I don't know about the texture of it), that we could read a sort of hidden message that tells us something. We cannot disprove, that all the DNA taken together contains an encrypted message, as we do not know the DNA of all species.
Okay sorry again, in the last 15 years, they solved the confusion with the "unknown DNA". Thx for revealing that fact.
I say, we can also achieve it without the ingestion of a chemical, speak of meditative practices, that also modulate the serotonergic system, when exercised thoroughly. As mentioned, I would exclude the cooperation of our eyes of the process of parsing DNA-photons. I am no biochemist/biophysicist, so have not enough clue to test ANY of the theses/options. All I can do is read and spread the word/the questions.
Thanks for your contribution again, I am coming back, when I have news to the topic or when someone replied to the speculations made. Maybe we can open a new thread with shorter/summarized posts, because in the current state it is pretty hard get through in the spare time.
Yeah, it is a great and versatile topic. As mentioned, all the ideas are taken from Narby.
Sorry for orthographic errors, will edit em out later on :D
