NextUs: How Thoughts Persist

Art Cockfield

Saturday Club, Nov. 1, 2010

Bottom line …

Your thoughts exist outside your brain and are connected to an invisible network that makes a permanent record of every conscious thought you have and every choice you make

Overview

• Thoughts exist outside your brain (recent brain research and notions of quantum consciousness)

• Thoughts are recorded (imprinted) on a universal hard-drive (called the noösphere)

• What are some of the religious, philosophical, social implications of these views?

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

fMRI provides ‘video’ of brain stimulation

Monks meditating …

• fMRI shows prefrontal cortex active

• senior monks’ brain structure appears more receptive to meditation

Can thoughts be measured?

• fMRI information decoded: Kay et al., Nature (2008)

So what are thoughts?

• Research still primitive due to complexity of brain (trillions of synapses on billions of neurons)

• Thought can have an impact on material world (brain structure)

• Thoughts decoded information emitting from brain function

• Thoughts can be measured• Consciousness may occur at the quantum level,

which leads us to next part …

Quantum effects in biological processes:

a. Fleming et al., Nature (2007): photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria

b. Tejero et al., Journal of American Chemical Society (2007): facilitate molecular reactions within green tea

c. Turin, Physical Review Letters (2007): human smell receptors

Quantum consciousness?

• Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind (1989)

• Stuart Hameroff, Director of Center for Consciousness Studies at U. of Arizona:

anesthetics interrupt quantum process within part of brain’s neurons called microtubules

• Ideas still speculative and experimentally unproven, but perhaps thoughts are a kind of quantum information emitted by brain

Part 2: where do thoughts end up?

• From Newton to Einstein:

Are time and space real?

• Insights from quantum mechanics • Tiniest bits of ‘matter’ are not matter, but really a

strange form of energy that appears indivisible; sub-atomic particles have no meaning in isolation but only in relation with everything else

• John Wheeler: universe is “at bottom … an immaterial source.”

The universe is constituted by quantum bits of information

• David Bohm: the universe is a hologram

• Seth Lloyd, Programming the Universe (2006)

• Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality (2010)

What is different about human thoughts?

• Sentience and conscious thoughts versus other kinds of thoughts

• Gives rise to notions of ‘universal consciousness’

• Vladimir Vernadky’s and Pierre de Chadrin’s noösphere

Imprinting on noösphere?

• All information exchanges from beginning to end of time stored somewhere in universe

• Information exchange between our minds and rest of universe recorded in noösphere

• Process: speculate that neural synapses firing serve as kind of transmitter and receiver that interacts with noösphere

Part 3: Implications?

• One view: none!

• “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (1977)

• Too speculative …

Another view: “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”

Consistent with major religions

• Ancients ‘truths’ increasingly supported by science

• Early philosophers from Aristotle to Spinoza conceived of God as the natural universe

• Also support in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and others

• Common theme: an immaterial realm flows through our bodies and our minds, and binds us all together

• Anti-‘New Atheists’ (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris)

Mind and matter?

• Is the physical brain alone responsible for our mind and consciousness, or is something else that is immaterial also involved?

• Answer: no real separation between mind and immaterial realm

• Alistair sleeps well tonight

Where are we going when we die?

• Existence of soul: permanent imprinting on noösphere

• Choices and actions lead to reward or punishment? We are what we do (existentialism)? Heaven or Hell?