A quantum of solace

Interesting news from November 30 about a new experiment testing quantum entanglement (nonlocality). It's increasingly hard to deny that a particle can directly influence its entangled partner regardless of distance. 

Regular readers know that I think the Virtual Reality Interpretation of quantum mechanics looks promising as a way of making sense of all this.

Caveat: I'm not a physicist, so my opinion may be entirely worthless. 

Comments

[Art]

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer
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I remember recently reading in one of my books(don't remember which one) that materialist-skeptics are stuck in the old Newtonian physics way of thinking. They haven't really wrapped their minds around the New Physics and what the implications are for our Universe. Or as Niels Bohr said, "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."

[GregL]

""Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."

Like pixels on a VR screen.

GregL

[Art]

Which I believe has everything to do with "why we are here." The soul is here simply to experience what it is like to live in a 3 dimensional + 1 time universe, what time and space look and feel like, what it feels like to be inside or inhabit a physical body, to be separate.

People who have NDEs routinely say that time and space didn't seem to exist in the other side and that the feelings of oneness and connectedness were overwhelming. Another common statment is "I literally felt like I was everywhere in the Universe at once."

We are here simply to learn the things that can't be learned in heaven; and that our souls will use this information to help "make" or conjure up whatever kind of reality they might wish to inhabit after they cross back over into the holographic Implicate Spiritual Universe.

[a]

>> People who have NDEs routinely say that time and space didn't seem to exist <<

And yet they describe events taking place - one after the other. E.g. firt they leave their bodies, then they go to the other side, then they are greeted by dead relatives or friends, then they have a life review, then they're told to return.

I grant (and enjoy the observation) that time and space work differently in afterlife realms.

But it's false to say that there is no time at all.

[realpc]

On a higher dimensional level, time is something different from what we experience here. We can't imagine it, and if we experience the higher levels we can't express the experience in our language.

[a]

Realpc, I agree.

Time is different in afterlife realms.

Without time there would be no change. Without change there wouldn't be any events.

But there *are* events taking place in afterlife realms, at least according to NDErs and mediums.

[Art]

Suffice it to say, the physics of the other side is very different than this side.

"I was told that before we're born, we have to take an oath that we will pretend time and space are real so we can come here and advance our spirit. If you don't promise, you can't be born." (from Jeanie Dicus' near-death experience, 1974)

"Space and time are illusions that hold us to our physical realm; out there all is present simultaneously." (from Beverly Brodsky's near-death experience, 1970)

"During this experience, time had no meaning. Time was an irrelevant notion. It felt like eternity. I felt like I was there an eternity." (from Grace Bubulka's near-death experience, 1988?)

"I didn't know if I had been in that light for a minute of a day or a hundred years." (from Jayne Smith's near-death experience, 1965?)

"Earthly time had no meaning for me anymore. There was no concept of "before" or "after." Everything - past, present, future - existed simultaneously." (from Kimberly Sharp's near-death experience, date unknown)

"Time could also be contracted, I found. Centuries would condense into seconds. Millenniums would shrink into moments. The entire civilization that I was part of passed by in the blink of an eye." (from John Star's near-death experience, date unknown)

"Time and space, as we know them, exist only on the Earth realm. When you leave the Earth realm, you leave such constraints." (from P.M.H Atwater's Beyond the Light)

" ... time is an illusion. The phenomena from which we deduce its existence are real, but we interpret them wrongly…" (from Julian Barbour 1999)
http://near-death.com/experiences/articles004.html

"At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously."
http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.html

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein

"There is no distance here. So time does not exist." - excerpt from Mark H's NDE, http://www.nderf.org/mark_h%27s_nde.htm

"I cannot possibly put into words that any human language has that feeling. I was ev- erything, I was nothing. I was everywhere, I was nowhere. I was everywhen, I wasn't. My intellect had expanded to contain every thing, time, place, and even being that was, is, or ever would be! I was unique yet I was the tiniest part of the whole." - excerpt from Mark Horton's NDE, http://www.mindspring.com/~scottr/nde/markh.html

[RabbitDawg]

I love the way Mr. Rhodes phrases some of his articles as "for liberal arts majors".
It's such a polite way of saying "This is for you folks that can't calculate your way out of a wet paper bag".
Folks like me:-)LOL

[GregL]

"Time is different in afterlife realms.
Without time there would be no change. Without change there wouldn't be any events."

In VR theory, one of them at least, time in the material plane is measured as one advancement of the "game" and it moves at the speed of light. In the non material plane it is still there, but you can express it as a vibration of consciousness, a whole different scale.

GregL

[Topher Cooper]

It is worth mentioning every once in a while -- there is no influence demonstrated in this experiment. There is only a connection that is inconsistent with "local realism." This produces an illusion of influence when local realism is assumed, and our normal reasoning processes assume local realism -- quite appropriately since at the level at which we experience reality it holds.

To may help to ask a deceptively simple question: what is it that influences what in this experiment? Why the first observation (call it A) influences the second (B), you might say. But thoroughly demonstrated predictions of special relativity say that a different observer would, with exactly the same reasoning and just as correctly, determine that observation B preceded observation A, and so it is B that influences A.

Both views are completely consistent since no information is carried by the connection -- you can't manipulate A in such a way that B indicates that manipulation.

[Michael Prescott]

Perhaps it's more correct to say that a change in the properties of one particle is correlated with a simultaneous change in the properties of the other particle.

This is entirely consistent with the VR model, by the way. In the VR model, the information processor adjusts the properties of both particles simultaneously (i.e., before the "screen" can refresh).

[Alexander1304]

Hi Michael,
Have You ever read/heard about Gerhard D.Wasserman book "Shadow Matter and Psychic Phenomena" on psi/survival?Hi dismisses regular spriritualist notions,but postulates that humans have 2 bodies:one of ordinary matter and another of "shadow matter".He postulates "shadow matter" body after the group of phycisits wrote the article about "shadow matter" in the universe.He thinks that this matter is responsible for all psi-phenomena and he thinks that on the death ordinary brain/body is permanently projected into the shadow matter brain/body.Doesn't look like his vew gained the popularity - I tried to search about his work on the Internet,bit found a little...Interesting review of is work is done by Douglas M.Stokes.(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2320/is_n3_v57/ai_15383549/?tag=content;col1)

Stoked points that there are a lot of abritrary assumptions and ommitted material in Wasserman hypotesis.
To me it seems that Wasserman's ordinary matter is just another variation on "astral/etheric"...Would like to know Your opinion

[Art]

"he thinks that on the death ordinary brain/body is permanently projected into the shadow matter brain/body." - Alexander
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Doesn't sound that much different than the holographic universe theory. This side is simply a holographic projection from a "holographic film" which exists alongside our universe. When our soul or consciousness "exits" the physical body it merges back into the original hologram.

I really like little Daisy Dryden's (age 11) description from her death bed vision described in Sir William Barrett's book Death Bed Visions:

"but she said, "It is all a mistake; there is no river; there is no curtain; there is not even a line that separates this life from the other life." And she stretched out her little hands from the bed, and with a gesture said, "It is here and it is there; I know it is so, for I can see you all, and I see them there at the same time."

http://www.survivalafterdeath.org.uk/books/barrett/dbv/chapter3.htm (don't think link works anymore)
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excerpt from Universe as a hologram:

"A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film. When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears." http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.html

[Topher Cooper]

Perhaps it's more correct to say that a change in the properties of one particle is correlated with a simultaneous change in the properties of the other particle.

Actually its not. Simultaneity is not fundamentally meaningful concept. It is a property that only holds relative to a single observer. Different observers will validly observe different events as simultaneous. Only events occurring at the same location can be judged to be simultaneous by all observers.

The correct statement is that when a light-speed-or-slower signals are received from both events they will be found to be correlated.

I'm afraid that while I am very partial philosophically to the VR hypothesis I don't think that it is terribly informative: everything is consistent with it. It seems to me to be the same kind of "theory" as "God wills it", except that the VR theory is unconstrained by such restrictions as "God is good".

The theories referred to as "many-worlds" deal with this quite well, and, for the appropriate expanded definition of "local realism", in a locally realistic fashion: the observers of the instruments at both A and B remain (like everything else) in a superimposed state, as does the light-speed signal from A to B. When that signal arrives its states become entangled with the states of B so that the correlation is found in both of B's sub-states. In effect, the signal creates the correlation.

[GregL]

"I'm afraid that while I am very partial philosophically to the VR hypothesis I don't think that it is terribly informative: everything is consistent with it."

Actually, if any of our physical laws were not calculable, this would be inconsistent with VR theory.

[Michael Prescott]

Also, if time and space are not discontinuous, VR theory would be disproved.

[J9]

Omg, there are so many double negatives in the last couple of posts, my head is spinning. Who's inconsistent with the disprovable what now? Lol

[J9]

After rereading, not trying to be negative, by the way. Just laughing at my own ignorance.

[Topher Cooper]

Actually, if any of our physical laws were not calculable, this would be inconsistent with VR theory.

Our definition of computability is interesting because it relates to the outcome of physically realizable systems. There have been extended computability theories that posit systems that are not physically realizable (e.g., a Turing machine in which each step takes half as much time as the step before).

Why should we expect that the meta-reality in which the computations that produce our reality be similarly restricted? Are the rules of that reality the same as ours? If so, not only do we have an issue of infinite regression (the evidence that leads us to hypothesize that our universe it virtual would result in a similar hypothesis by inhabitants of our meta-reality), but laws that are non-computable in our universe could be computed using non-computable characteristics of the meta-reality.

[Topher Cooper]

Also, if time and space are not discontinuous, VR theory would be disproved.

How do we prove that absolute continuity? We could always posit discontinuity at a deeper level of granularity. We might even posit that the program that creates our reality uses adaptive precision (i.e., increasing the precision in any situation where the default granularity is insufficient), an almost universal characteristic of physics simulations.

But lets suppose that there is some subtle argument that proves true continuity. How do we exclude the possibility that the simulation makes use of interpolating functions? Of course in our reality those interpolating functions can only be computed to a finite precision, but why suppose that the meta-reality is similarly limited (see my previous note)?

Even

[GregL]

"Why should we expect that the meta-reality in which the computations that produce our reality be similarly restricted? Are the rules of that reality the same as ours?"

It is our universe that fits the VR hypothesis. As to the "meta reality", "hypotheses non fingo."

[Topher]

It is our universe that fits the VR hypothesis. As to the "meta reality", "hypotheses non fingo."

My point exactly: since we have no way of restricting the properties of the meta-reality's capabilities, we have no way of restricting the properties that it can work into our reality.

But if we restrict the meta-reality to the same capabilities as ours then it will also contain the same characteristics that lead us to hypothesize the VR hypothesis.

(To save some of you from having to look it up: hypotheses non fingo is a high falutin' way (attributed to Newton) of saying: damn if I know)

[GregL]

"But if we restrict the meta-reality to the same capabilities as ours then it will also contain the same characteristics that lead us to hypothesize the VR hypothesis."

Topher, its Turtles all the way down. By the way if you want to get some speculation on the meta reality, you can try reading Tom Campbell's "My Big Toe." He theorizes a binary consciousness behind all VR realities.

GregL

[D L A W]

Tom Campbell's theory connects Quantum Mechanics with Relativity, the unified theory scientists have been searching for, and does it with two assumptions.

[P. M. H. Atwater, L.H.D.]

Thank you for carrying quotes from my previous books. This note is to remind you that my most important book yet on these subjects is due out 3-1-11 from Hampton Roads. It's title is "Near-Death Experiences: The Rest of The Story." It will be very controversial. In the book I finally say what I never dared to say before. Many blessings to each and all.

[GregL]

"Tom Campbell's theory connects Quantum Mechanics with Relativity, the unified theory scientists have been searching for, and does it with two assumptions."

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the two assumptions are a basic primordial conscioussness and evolution.