There is an epistemic relationship between Quantum physics and extra-sensory perception (ESP). The discovery and illumination gotten from the study of particle physics and the understanding of quantum physics brings to light a great resolution of the content of reality within the confines of the seen and unseen or from the mental and extra-mental. This paper posits that the inherent controversy in trying to comprehend the workings of “paranormal” acts such as telepathy and psychokinesis imbued by critics of paranormal phenomena can be resolved by an understanding of quantum physics and the uncertainty principle. The underlying position of this work is that everything in the universe, whether in the realm of the physical or the metaphysical are made up of energy and vibrations manifested in various forms. These forms include our bodies, minds, thoughts and in the elements. And uncertainties are parts and parcels of realities in both quantum mechanics and ESP.
There is an epistemic relationship between Quantum physics and extra-sensory perception (ESP). The discovery and illumination gotten from the study of particle physics and the understanding of quantum physics brings to light a great resolution of the content of reality within the confines of the seen and unseen or from the mental and extra-mental. This paper posits that the inherent controversy in trying to comprehend the workings of “paranormal” acts such as telepathy and psychokinesis imbued by critics of paranormal phenomena can be resolved by an understanding of quantum physics and the uncertainty principle. The underlying position of this work is that everything in the universe, whether in the realm of the physical or the metaphysical are made up of energy and vibrations manifested in various forms. These forms include our bodies, minds, thoughts and in the elements. And uncertainties are parts and parcels of realities in both quantum mechanics and ESP.
The possibility that information can be acquired at a distance without the use of the ordinary senses, that is by “extrasensory perception” (ESP), is not easily accommodated by conventional neuroscientific assumptions or by traditional theories underlying our understanding of perception and cognition. The lack of theoretical support has marginalized the study of ESP, but experiments investigating these phenomena have been conducted since the mid-19th century, and the empirical database has been slowly accumulating. Today, using modern experimental methods and meta-analytical techniques, a persuasive case can be made that, neuroscience assumptions notwithstanding, ESP does exist. We justify this conclusion through discussion of one class of homogeneous experiments reported in 108 publications and conducted from 1974 through 2008 by laboratories around the world. Subsets of these data have been subjected to six meta-analyses, and each shows significantly positive effects. The overall results now provide unambiguous evidence for an independently repeatable ESP effect. This indicates that traditional cognitive and neuroscience models, which are largely based on classical physical concepts, are incomplete. We speculate that more comprehensive models will require new principles based on a more comprehensive physics. The current candidate is quantum mechanics.
Although quantum physics has led to the most accurate predictions to date about the nature of matter and the universe, a metaphysical interpretation of its non-deterministic and subjective nature still remains an ongoing debate. In this work, we will review the nature of the debate and propose a new way to address the controversies about the non-deterministic and subjective nature of quantum physics. In our previous work, we have shown that everything is made of information, energy and matter. We propose to define spirit or soul as the content of information, spiritual heart as the receiver of information, and mind as the processor of information. In this paper, we show that the intrinsic uncertain and non-deterministic nature of quantum physics can be explained by the insights from these definitions. Information relates to the possibilities and potentialities of an object. Information is intrinsically uncertain and non-deterministic. Since quantum physics is the fundamental physics theory describing the information, energy and matter of everything, quantum physics has intrinsic an uncertain and non-deterministic nature. We further demonstrate that the process of quantum measurement can be interpreted as the role played by soul, spiritual heart and mind in the manifestation of physical phenomena. We conclude that our insight that everything is made of information, energy and matter and the definition of soul, spiritual heart and mind provides a simple metaphysical interpretation of quantum physics. They can help us understand and resolve the two controversies about quantum physics.
Metaphysics, as discipline dealing with the most fundamental aspects of reality, studies the essence of entities, leaving to particular sciences the study of empirical, specific, changeable and unstable aspects. In this sense metaphysics is close to ontology, tackling problems as the existence of God, the being in himself, the immortality of consciousness, the origin and meaning of the universe. Speculative physics pushes its interest to metaphysical questions too, both at atechnical (mathematical) level, and at the level of thought (in relation to philosophy). In recentyears interesting concepts and ideas have been considered and developed, involving the latest unified quantum-relativistic theories and the consequences on reality deriving from them.The search for a meaning of life, one of Anscombe’s themes, finds ferment in the search for meaning about the existence of our universe in itself and as a possible part of a multiverse containing it.The problem of measurement in quantum mechanics appears from the application of themathematical formalism to macroscopic situations and the central position of the observer in this process has produced a deviation towards a metaphysical subjectivism. There are controversial aspects about the role of consciousness in the process of reducing the wave function of quantum mechanics. This narrows the field of validity of some fundamental principles during the interaction between microsystems and macrosystems, with consequent diversification of thedefinition of the ontological state of consciousness and reality. (Local) holism has often been linked to Wittgenstein. From Wittgenstein’s answers to the paradoxes of communication and conceptual relativism, a tension emerges in his vision of linguistic games and in his mental experiments, traditionally interpreted in contrasting ways. This tension can be better understoodthrough some reflections by Wittgenstein on Einstein and his theory of relativity.
Introduction We saw in Part I that in addition to explaining consciousness there is another hard problem for the modern scientific worldview – understanding what quantum physics is telling us about reality. And if anything this one is harder. In philosophy of mind there is at least consensus enough for an orthodox position to exist (materialism), and a widespread expectation that it will be vindicated by future neuroscience. By contrast, in philosophy of physics all sides understand that quantum theory is compatible with a variety of metaphysical interpretations, and have little hope that new empirical discoveries will settle the matter. But both problems are “hard” in the sense that, despite tremendous intellectual effort over many decades, no clear progress has been made toward solving them. The basic idea of quantum consciousness theory is that bringing the two problems into contact may be the key to solving both (though I will be addressing only the mind–body problem in what follows). That this could be a novel idea attests to the fact that their philosophical discussions have evolved quite separately. While philosophers of physics have long been interested in the role of consciousness in the measurement process, they have engaged little with the mind–body problem per se; and philosophers of mind have been almost unanimous in dismissing the suggestion that consciousness has anything interesting to do with quantum physics. Social scientists might echo such skepticism, wondering how adding the problem of interpreting quantum theory to the problem of consciousness will help them . Besides piling up jargon and arcane debates, in moving to the sub-atomic level we are now even farther removed from the human world, and seemingly poised to engage in the most vulgar reductionism. Yet, naïvely one might expect the two problems to be related, for two reasons. The first is the intriguing analogies mentioned in Chapter 1 between the mental and quantum domains.
The cognitive frame in which most neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behavior is conducted contains the assumption that brain mechanisms per se fully suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This assumption stems from the idea that the brain is made up entirely of material particles and fields, and that all causal mechanisms must therefore be formulated solely in terms of properties of these elements. One consequence of this stance is that psychological terms having intrinsic mentalistic and/or experiential content (terms such as "feeling," "knowing," and "effort") have not been included as primary causal factors in neuropsychological research: insofar as properties are not described in material terms they are deemed irrelevant to the causal mechanisms underlying brain function. However, the origin of this demand that experiential realities be excluded from the causal base is a theory of nature that has been known for more that three quarters of a century to be fundamentally incorrect. It is explained here why it is consequently scientifically unwarranted to assume that material factors alone can in principle explain all causal mechanisms relevant to neuroscience. More importantly, it is explained how a key quantum effect can be introduced into brain dynamics in a simple and practical way that provides a rationally coherent, causally formulated, physics-based way of understanding and using the psychological and physical data derived from the growing set of studies of the capacity of directed attention and mental effort to systematically alter brain function.
Abstract Physics has a somewhat uneasy relationship to the mind. On the one hand, minds are part of the natural universe and although much of physics is concerned with the non-minded parts of reality, recently a set of problems has emerged in physics that has placed a special focus on observers. In quantum mechanics, the contrast between what the deterministic dynamics yields and what the observer sees is at the forefront of the theory’s difficulties. In the controversies surrounding time, questions about whether the relativistic image of time can account for the subjective experience of passage and flow have been central. In general, reconciling the manifest image of the world with the image presented by science requires at least some tacit understanding of how minds work. And because the evidence for our theories ultimately comes from experience, eventually we have to be able to bring the mind itself firmly under the scope of our physical theories. On the other hand, there is a set of philosophical controversies about the relationship between the mental and the physical that many people believe physics would do well to steer clear of. This chapter argues for a division between the aspects of the mind that physics must cope with and those that it can ignore. I argue the most difficult unresolved questions about the mind can be ignored without affecting progress in physics.