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Re:Supernatural;Testability;life/death

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Posted by Richard Ruquist on March 18, 2002 15:14:03 UTC

Dear Yasir:

Thank you for your insightful remarks and questions.

Regarding the supernatural, I view that world as just a part (major part) of our universe and subject to all the physical laws therein, probably including some as yet undiscovered. I use the word 'supernatural' because the properties of that world are what have been attributed to the supernatural in the past, and also by a curious coincidence, that world has the same properties as a superfluid, if it contains an axion fluid, as I expect. BTW, I guess thatI am a materialist, rather than a dualist or platonist, as I believe that everything in the universe is within the physics realm, whether or not we ever discover it.

Regarding testability, evidence for a information carrying medium in which our consciousness can travel has already been investigated by the Stanford Research Institute and publihed in the Proceeding of the IEEE. Unfortunately the conservatives that control science in the USA prevented further studies. The study was of remote human viewing, otherwise know as out of body experience OBE or astral projection. The SRA results were positive. However, these tests are too subjective to be included in the field of physics. More definitive tests must await experimental discovery of what constitutes dark matter. However, bottomline it is testable today.

Regarding life after death, I was an athesist until I learned about OBE. That was before the SRA experiments. I first learned of this phenomena from people who had experienced it. Then I read a number of books that described the experience. That was my first indication that life after death was possible and that a supernatural may exist. If your consciousness or some part of it can travel outside of your body, then an invisible medium must exist to support the consciousness. From that big step it is a small step to hypothesize that consciousness (not life) may survive physical death of a human. Since that time, some thirty years ago, I have endeavoured to understand if such a medium could exist and to look for evidence of it in science. If you do not consider the possibility of consciousness survival, we have to agree to disagree. But I would like to hear your reasoning.

Reread your post to see if I had covered it all.

I am not a strict reductionist as there is ample evidence of emergent solutions that cannot be reduced to a set of axioms. Life, energy and force can be defined and understood on the basis of math and experiments, but we may never have a really fundamental understanding of such concepts. Consciousness is not understood at all except at the completely subjective level.

I prefer the quantum approach to consciousness on a completely intuitive level. It just strikes me as correct. My most intuitive belief is that quantum waves are inherently consciousness, and quantum waves of any type can communicate with each other, via an emergent solution mechanism.

Closer to know physics, I do not believe that particles exist- its all fields or quantum waves. For example, EM fields are the quantum waves of photons. Photons exist for fleeting times on the order of Planck times when light and electrons interact. The EM fields collapse to interact with the electron quantum waves, which also collapse to the Planck scale, where both types of quantum waves become a unified field and can therefore exchange energy and force. So all physical interaction happens at the Planck level for just instants of time, and are otherwise waves or fields, which then exist for almost all the time.

Physicists come in three types:
1.Dualists who think both particles and waves exist at the same time
2.Particlists like Feymann who think only particles (or strings) exist. However, anti-particles coming back from the future are required for Feymann's Quantum Electrodynamics
3.Wavists who think that particles do not exist except as a mathematical approximation. But they need a wave collapse theory which does not exist to explain physics.

My training was in Electromagnatic Field theory so I am being true to my roots.

Regards,

Richard

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