The marriage of quantum physics and meta physics...

I have to take a break...if you are just jumping in the thought starts on page 3 with " The Scaffolds of Consciousness"

I'll try and finish this tonight...food for thought
Birds

Prettybirds wrote:

I have to take a break...if you are just jumping in the thought starts on page 3 with " The Scaffolds of Consciousness"

I'll try and finish this tonight...food for thought
Birds

great! i might join in tomorrow..

Continuation...

But it's not just the consciousness of higher animals that is affected by the gas. Anesthesia can also stop the movement of paramecia, amoebae, and green slime molds, all of which rely on cytoskeleton for their oozing-forward motion. Hameroff knew electrons acting alone could possibly account for something as co-ordinated as a paramecium moving to catch it's prey, let alone conscious thought. Somehow, he theorized, the oscillating electrons must cooperate in a larger signaling and communicating network. To find a plausible mechanism. Hameroff looked to a theory of computation known as cellular automation theory.
A cellular automation computer is a software program that sets up a grid of squares or cells (the spreadsheet kind). Each cell has a definite number of neighbors and has a formula of sorts embedded in it.
The formula is called a transition rule. At discrete time intervals, a kind of musical chairs occurs. Every cell must check out the status of all its neighbors and then change states, either on or off, according to its transition rule.. A rule may state, ' If four of my neighbors are on then I'll be on too, otherwise I'll be off.' At each tick of the computers clock, the cells check out their neighbors and change on or off accordingly. It helps to think of the on squares as white and the off squares as black.

Amazingly, simple rules and a clock regulating the action lead to recognizable patterns of white and black developing and moving across the grid, in the same way that ; The wave' can propagate through a crowded stadium of strangers. With more complex rules, a cellular automaton in three dimensions could simulate the formation of a snowflake, mollusk shell, or galaxy. In fact, John von Neumann, know as the father of modern computing, suggested in the 1950s that such a lattice could be programmed to solve any problem. Learning this, Hameroff wondered, could microtubules be doing something like the wave on their latticework of tublin? Could they somehow be computing?

Hi, Lavender

The illustrator fast forwards the computer animation to a functioning array of microtubules. For this demonstration, he's slit the soda straw of a microtubule lengthwise and unfurled it flat into a rectangular array. Each C shaped tublin is resting in spoon formation with its neighbors, so that the state of each dimer ( whether its electron is up or down in the pocket) could be affected by the electrostatic state of its six neighbors. He hits play and an excited vibration begins in a patch of the array at one corner and ripples across the array like the energy of a wave moving through the water. But it doesn't stop there.
Hameroff believes that a microtubule can catch the oscillation of its neighbor- that is, a set of proteins vibrating in one microtubule could start another set vibrating in exactly the same way, like a tuning fork starting to vibrate in response to another in the same room. This 'catching' oscillation, says Hameroff, may be possible because of a very unusual set of qualities that make microtubules the perfect substrate for quantum coherence.
" Coherence" is a hyper-organizing that imparts a strange and often wonderful quality to ordinary matter. When the crystals in a laser rod are pumped with enough energy for instance, they will all of a sudden vibrate in lock step fashion, and give off coherent laser light. Or when the linked electrons in a metal take on identical quantum characteristics, they become nearly frictionless conductors ( superconductivity). In supermagnets, microdipoles align, and in superfluids like helium, quantum synchronized atoms create a friction-free fluid. But, super conductors, supermagnets, and superfluids typically require temperatures near absolute zero to dampen thermal noise and bring their particles into alignment. The question is, can coherence happen in biological materials at body like temperatures?

In the 1970s, Herbert Frohlich of the University of Liverpool postulated that electrons trapped in the hydrophobic pocket of a protein like tubulin could oscillate, causing the protein to change shape in a predictable way. Further, he predicted that these electrons would oscillate coherently if they were in a uniform electromagnetic field ( such as the walls of a microtubules) and were pumped with enough energy ( provided by the severing of molecules like ATP or GTP). At some point, a set of proteins could reach a critical level of excitation and all of a sudden align in lockstep.
Applied to the microtubule, Hameroff postulated that the pattern of oscillation could either travel in waves, rippling across the lattice, or jump to nearby microtubules.These traveling shape changes could allow signals to be carried throughout the neuron-signals that could direct, for instance, the movement of cilia or even the regulation of synaptic strengths. But how far could this coherence reach? Perhaps outside the neurons walls?
Consciousness, a brain wide phenomenon, cannot be isolated to a neuron or two. In order to explain the 'unified sense of self' microtubules would need a way of coordinating their actions across large distances in the brain. To explain unity of self, Hameroff wandered even farther into the labyrinth of quantum mechanics.

As part of his exploration, he read a book by Roger Penrose called ' The Emperor's New Mind ', in which Penrose found quantum theory a thoroughly plausible explanation for how thoughts can appear to be magically distributed or 'floating above the brain', and yet still anchored in matter. According to Penrose, if we could find the biological player in this quantum dance, we might be able to explain the unified sense of self.
Quantum mechanics applies to the very small things in our world, the substructure that underlies the visible world.. In the early decades of the century, when quantum physics was first taking shape as a theory, it completely upended our ideas of physical reality. Newtonian laws were not completely banished, they still apply to our visible world, but they were no longer the end all to be all. Newton hadd no idea of how wierd the world of tiny could be.

Need to break for awhile but the next chapter brings into play super positioning and quantum knowing....be back soon

Birds

Continuation...

Two relevant legs of the quantum theory are the ' super position of states' and 'quantum knowing'. The theory of superposition says that atoms are in many possible states simultaneously. They are searching among the various alternative energy states ( an effect Michael Conrad called 'quantum scanning'), and they don't 'choose' a state until they collide with matter or are observed. The famous arguement in support of this is proided by the double slit experiment, in which a low intensity beam of photons was projected onto a screen wall with two verticle slits. Behind the wall is a screen. Because the intensity is low and the photon stream 'dilute',each photon should pass through either one slit or the other. Instead, the pattern on the screen behind suggests that each photon passes through both slits at once. The bizarre but oft-replicated experiment seems to suggest that a photon can be in two places simultaneously.
Quantum theory says the photon is not just in two places but in many others as well. Scientists decided the best way to talk about a photon's location would be to imagine a three-dimensional graph of all possible states. This is called state space, and the wae function is a way of characterizing all the possible states that the photon may be in.
Amazingly, when a particle comes into contact with matter, - the molecules on the screen in the famous Two Slit experiment, for instance - the wave function collapses to a single point, and the photon is forced to choose a single state to be in. When we observe something, we don't see all it's possible states - we see only one. We force it to be only one through the act of observing it or measuring it.

Michael Conrad has suggested that biological molecules exploit this freedom to shuffle the deck of many possibilities and explore possible solutions to, for instance, the problem of the shape based docking. In his view, enzymes are physically flopping around just before docking and an electron tries out many different bonds, searching for a minimum energy configuration. Penrose postulated that our creative minds may play with possibility space in the same way - trying out dozens of different options simultaneously until one emerges as a conscious thought - a decision about what state to be in.

The second quantum theory that seems to relate to 'mind' is quantum knowing. This states that movements of atoms, electrons, or other quantum particles may, under certain instances, be synchronized at great distances. As Hameroff writes ' the greatest surprise to emerge from quantum theory is quantum inseperability or non-locality which implies that all objects once interacted are in some sense still connected!! Erwin Schrodinger, one of the inventors of quantum mechanics, observed in 1935 that when two quantum systems interact, their wave functions become 'phase entangled'. Consequently, when one systems wave is collapsed, the other systems wave function, no matter how far away, collapses too.
Talk about a truly interconnected world!! Naturally, quantum knowing has been applied to many theories of cognition, including the holographic model of consciousness. Quantum knowing says that once two particle have been entangled quantumly, been part of the same quantum wavr function, they are always related in some way. They know what their coherent relative is doing. In a sense, they are their co-relate particle. This means the same coherence that causes patternsto oscillate in synchrony inside the microtubule may cause coherence to occur in quantum relatives clear across the brain
(across brains) without the need for neurons to be touching. Perhaps this same quantum knowing may account for such 'supernatural' phenomena as Jungian collective conscious, Hege's world spirit, and the strange esp you feel with a loed one who is miles away.

Last one...

At the time he wrote 'Emperor', Penrose had the quantum arguments for consciousness worked out, but knew of no biological mechanism in the brain that would be capable of such quantum effects. He speculated that quantum effects in the brain would require a structure that was 1) small enough to be drien by quantum effects 2) seperated from the thermal hubbub of the rest of the brain. When Hameroff read these words, he found himself talking back to the pages. Tublin proteins were small enough to host the quantum effects Penrose so beautifully described, and the hydro-phobic cages inside the fibrils would indeed be a safe haven from the rest of the brain! He was ecstatic. "Penrose had handed me the quantum argument I had been searching for, and I believed I was holding the biological missing piece that he needed."
Hameroff wrote to Penrose and asked to come and see him. At a famous two hour mindmeld at Penrose's Oxford office, the two exchanged the missing pieces of the conceptual locket each had been carrying around. A few weeks later, Penrose stood up at a meeting and postulated that the microtubule may be the physical seat of consciousness.

Great food for thought!!!!!!!!!!!!

Birds

Prettybirds wrote:

I suppose that explains my interest in super positioning, by theory contained potential is kinetic and super positioning is all possibility contained in an atom, can they be one and the same. Can you describe the process of super positioning in terms of kinetic energy?

I may not understand exactly your questions, or how you are thinking of these topics. so my comments may be oversimplified or off the mark, but here they are. I would say the reverse: kinetic energy contained is potential energy. Once it is let loose, it is kinetic, the energy of motion. Superposition is an idea from quantum mechanics. It describes what happens on very small scales, where quantities like energy and momentum must be handled statistically, as probabilities. It is thus a way of describing or handling observable properties rather than a property in and of itself. One can thus describe kinetic energy as a superposition of possible states. These ideas are not one and the same, but can go hand in hand in the right context.

And no, I do not think less of you for your lack of conventional education. I have little patience with willful ignorance, but you do not display this. Learning is learning, however it is obtained. I sometimes think that conventional education is far from the most efficient way to learn. It is unfortunate that alternative forms of education are so readily discounted in modern society.

Prettybirds wrote:

Perhaps the reason I feel so spiritual about science is because most people of the modern world, the movers and the shakers, well, they listen to science. Not religion, politics or even love can effect popular thought like science. While a person might not always agree with a theory, they will believe the proof when science figures it out.

I wish this were the case. Unfortunately, people seem to respond to alarmist emotional arguments much more readily than to well-supported scientific ones. Politicians are no exception, and if they themselves understand the scientific reality, they often ignore or even bury it in favor of the emotional arguments that they know will sway the masses and get them reelected. Science has demonstrated many things that are routinely ignored by society at large, including usually our leadership: everything from the harmful effects of smoking, bad diet, etc. to the environmental impact of fossil fuels. Scientific reasoning in other fields has shown the cost effectiveness of early childhood education vs. later incarceration; of preventative care vs. emergency room visits; even the steep toll of finance charges in rent-to-own schemes and longer term mortgages, but people don't support the alternatives that would maximize benefit to themselves and others. No, we do not listen to science nearly enough, and we are rarely willing to follow its sage advice, either individually or as a society.

Prettybirds wrote:

Without understanding the story, I can see how you have struggled with the sacrifices and criticism, the cost. What ever it was, which ever way the cost materialized, take solace in the fact that few are capable of walking your way.

There may be equally few ways I am capable of walking. I am by no means one of the greatest scientists in the world. My contributions are surely minor in the grand scheme of things. I long ago came to understand, however, that if I was put on earth to do any one thing, it was what I am doing. There is a fulfillment in that which I would be unlikely to find elsewhere, however successful I might be. I hope I have not given you a negative impression of my background, or how I reached my current situation. I have no complaints, really, and would not have had things any other way. Hardships that occurred would have happened regardless of my ultimate vocation, and sacrifices made along the way were mine to make, and well worth it. In many respects, it is a great comfort to be in my current occupation and position. My daily life is free from many of the distractions and other influences I might otherwise find very trying. I feel free to be myself, and appreciated for who I am.

Hi Romana, I'm struggling to express myself, thank-you so much for the encouragement.

To me science is a blending of all scientific fronts from physics to medicine. It is true that in any given moment of time you can easily hear and see the current fads. They are usually quite loud in many ways. Like a wave, they spread out over humanity and almost seem to engulf them. This is true. That is the nature of a fad, to be short lived and brilliant.
It is the quiet moments to which I refer...1000s of years spent quietly working in the background to build a true foundation for humanity. (I am not blind however to the opposite reaction of destruction that also must walk the path but I am in acceptance of it and so just shoulder it and do my best.)
Birth control...
Pain killer...
Quantum physics...
Biomimicry...
Clocks...
Architecture...
These are all quiet long lasting benefits of science....

The monk, he spends his whole life trying to conceptualize through meditation and make a physical difference...mostly they have been limited to dealing with pain, controlling various body organs like heart and thyroid...I find that the only organic difference they make has to do with things that they can fully conceptualize.
For instance, if you can only imagine the process that you wish to control, it takes a lot of trial and error to get it right. Perhaps too much and leaves you not accomplishing it in your lifetime. To me, it is of ultimate importance to fully understand that which I want to effect a change on. If a monk could actually conceptualize in their minds eye what Hameroff is talking about, that monk's ability to effect change on the structure would be unparalleled. Science is what gives us our picture, our understanding...

Birds

Thank-you...so kinetic and potential are different kinds of energy. Potential comes first and kinetic upon release which is secondary. So super positioning is potential and quantum knowing is kinetic?

Warmth and well wishes my new friend...
Birds

I feel so dumb sometimes...is the movement of the dimer that holds the hydrophobic pocket actually exhibit potential or kinetic energy. I would want a first to think kinetic because of movement which equals a release. Perhaps...as in the docking reference, while flopping around it is in a state of kinetic release but after docking it is captured and so now potential...did I have it backwards again in last message?

Kinetic first,,,potential secondary....this makes much more sense!!!

Get this....

The electron that is oscillating in that hydrophobic pocket is in a kinetic state, when invaded by an anesthesia molecule it is trapped and thus turned into potential. Isn't it interesting that its potential is realized when our consciousness is supposedly gone?

dig it.

output like there's no tomorrow!

compelled: much appreciated

Did I get it yet, please feel free to be complicated when you have to be in your explanation....

Love you too Lavender....

Romana, has science ever figured out how to measure how much matter gets sucked into a black hole?