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Explicitly non-covid hangout space

Beautiful.

Here’s my offering, maybe a bit more melancholy than yours.

‘and if you go I won’t cry, for the good is gone from the word goodbye’

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A nice video explainer of a current theory of consciousness called Orch OR, first proposed by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. I currently find it the most convincing scientific theory out there. Not least because there is growing scientific evidence piling up to support it…

(@RhisiartGwilym might disagree :slight_smile: )

Damn’ right, P! :smile: At 4.50 he talks about the brain generating the mind! Exactly arse-about-face. That’s when I stopped listening.

As long as the physics theorists go on clinging nostalgically to their materialist infatuation, they’re going to go on proposing these intricate blind-alley hypotheses that lead nowhere.

Bite the bleedin’ bullet, guys! The mind generates the brain! The ultimate foundation and building material of reality is Big Mind: the Larger Consciousness System.

Or to put it more precisely, until some conscious being looks into your skull, then - as Tom Campbell’s familiar mantra puts it: “There is no brain, or any other physical material in there.”

When someone does look - and not until then! - the Larger Consciousness System does what it always does: it sends an information stream to the looker’s mind - the Individuated Unit of Consciousness - (which isn’t in the brain, or even anywhere in this physical-material virtual reality, any more than the LCS is), which rendered information-stream s/he - the looker, the inquiry-sender - interprets as physico-biological nerve material; all of it operating according to the evolved rule-set of this particular virtual reality, which governs which information the LCS selects to send to the looker. Before anyone looks to see, no information about that particular part of this - virtual - reality is sent. NOTHING is rendered! It doesn’t exist. At all. You’re not comprehending this screed of mine with your brain, because - unless you’ve had brain surgery, or a brain-scan - no-one has looked yet, so there’s - literally - nothing in there!! You think with your mind, not your - mostly non-existent - brain.

I know, I know. This has to be batshit-crazy stuff, right? EVERY* time you look into a skull there’s a physical brain in there, right? That proves the basic existence of physical stuff, right, just as Doctor Johnson averred when he kicked the stone? Er - unfortunately not, not according to the basic discoveries of quantum mechanics, to whose nearly-century-old-by-now experimental discoveries these distinguished - but still materialist - physicists are still futilely attempting to apply wholly inappropriate materialist interpretations.

In a nutshell: the younger generation of science theoreticians, who are steadily swinging over in droves away from the philosophical materialism of current orthodoxy back towards philosophical idealism, are getting closer to the truth - admirably laid out in Tom’s epochal Big Theory Of Everything: that this place where we play out our (serial) lives is a universe-sized holodeck, and nothing in it is any more than virtual, because it’s all composed of information streams demanded by the Individuated Units of Consciousness - creatures such as we hom-saps - and rendered to us by Our Mother/Father: the LCS. And only rendered then when some IUOC looks, and demands an answer.

Got that? :laughing:


*And as it happens, even when you look, you don’t always find a brain. Remember those weird discoveries about forty/fifty years back of people of high intellectual achievement who were found - when someone had cause to look - to have virtually no brain-matter at all inside skulls that mostly contained nothing but cerebro-spinal fluid…?

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Hehe - thought it might get a little response :wink:

Actually, do have another bash at it RG. Despite how the early part of the video seems, the conclusion of the video is emphatically not that the brain generates consciousness. Rather it puts forward a mechanism (cryptically known as orch-or) by which a non-physical consciousness interacts with a physical brain to produce thoughts, memories and emotion etc.

The basic idea seems to be that special proteins deep inside microscopically tiny structures called microtubules allow for quantum effects to form coherent patterns that interact and affect each other. Sitting outside and above this physical system, conscious intention acts as a quantum field that can manipulate the patterns in the microtubules, to form the seeds of thoughts or other brain patterns. Interestingly, these microtuble structures do not exist only in brain cells - but in cells throughout the body. This suggests that it might well be possible to have extended brain-like activity in other parts of the body. Also interesting is the fact that chemically disrupting the microtubule action seems to be the mechanism that allows general anaesthetic to work, and the way it might sever the connection between consciousness and the brain.

In the end, Penrose believes that consciousness is fundamentally non-algorithmic, or non-computable. It’s a phenomenon of a totally different flavour - something inherently different to a computer action. This conscious field can nevertheless act on the brain through these microtubule structures to produce the activity we see in the brain…

Or something like that anyway. Perhaps someone smarter than I can explain that better!

I would be interested to look further at how TC’s ideas might connect with this theory. I think there could be a lot of interesting overlap there… Lots to talk about still!

Cheers

I’ll finish it soon, promise. Actually, what you describe might well fit. It sounds like the sort of detailed idea of just how mind and physical creations, like brains, might interact. After all, this is a magnificently beautiful, gloriously intricate creation; this virtual universe. And still getting created and evolved, the more we little organs of Big Mind, we Individuated Units of Consciousness, go on asking questions and looking for answers. Big Mind always obliges with a selection from the probabilities. We are doing its essential work, after all, which it wants and needs us to do. It’s options are just two stark choices: either go on evolving towards low entropy - which translates truly as growing towards harmony and love; or stop doing that, in which case Big Mind and all it contains slides inexorably backwards towards high entropy and ultimate dissolution into chaos. The right choice is a no-brainer - to coin a phrase…! :innocent:

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Palestine will be free from the river to the sea!

Not gonna lie, this made me tear up a bit. Not the usual view from Palestine.

Enjoy

For love songs I’m not sure I can go past Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird but then there are very few Fleetwood Mac songs that I don’t love…

Thanks for sharing Gordon Lightfoot’s Rainy Day People. Had forgotten what a lovely song that is. I used to listen to Gordon Lightfoot a lot when I was a young thing but haven’t listened to his music for years (Fleetwood Mac has not, however suffered the same fate!! :grin:).

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Here is what I really miss in “modern times”

The Strokes - The End Has No End - Enjoy :slight_smile:

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I did. The lyrical nugget comes early on

One by one, ticking time bombs won
It’s not the secrets of the government
That’s keeping you dumb
Oh, it’s the other way around

I’ve always preferred First Impressions Of Planet Earth to their other albums. New Abormal was a definite return to form.