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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Bird navigation, plant photosynthesis and the human sense of smell all represent ways living things appear to exploit the oddities of quantum physics, scientists are finding.
Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics dealing with the strange behaviour of very tiny things like elementary particles and atoms, and is extremely different from the physics that humans experience every day.
‘Down at that level, everything is pretty darn weird,’ Seth Lloyd said before giving a lecture about quantum aspects of biology Wednesday evening in Waterloo, Ont.
‘Electrons can be in two places in once, or five places at once, or a thousand places at once. And then there are these funky quantum effects like ‘entanglement,’ where two different systems can have more information about each other than they have any right to have under classical mechanics,’ said Lloyd, a professor of quantum mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
‘When things get bigger, certainly on the scale of human beings or even at the scale of bacteria, then this kind of quantum weirdness tends to go away.’
Sensor, solar cell lessons
It has only been in the past three or four years that scientists have started figuring out how quantum mechanics is exploited by animals, […]
Stephan: It's just a hypothesis at this point, but this line of inquiry is a logical next step in quantum biological research.
Thanks to Damien Broderick, PhD.
A new theoretical model suggests that quantum entanglement helps prevent the molecules of life from breaking apart.
There was a time, not so long ago, when biologists swore black and blue that quantum mechanics could play no role in the hot, wet systems of life.
Since then, the discipline of quantum biology has emerged as one of the most exciting new fields in science. It’s beginning to look as if quantum effects are crucial in a number of biological processes, such as photosynthesis and avian navigation which we’ve looked at here and here.
Now a group of physicists say that the weird laws of quantum mechanics may be more important for life than biologists could ever have imagined. Their new idea is that DNA is held together by quantum entanglement.
That’s worth picking apart in more detail. Entanglement is the weird quantum process in which a single wavefunction describes two separate objects. When this happens, these objects effectively share the same existence, no matter how far apart they might be.
The question that Elisabeth Rieper at the National University of Singapore and a couple of buddies have asked is what role might entanglement play in DNA. To find out, they’ve constructed a simplified theoretical model […]
STUART HAMEROFF, PHD, and DEEPAK CHOPRA, MD, - San Francisco Chronicle
Stephan: I thought I had sent this out several days ago, but apparently not. This is a good summation of where we are in research concerning consciousness and quantum mechanics. Materialism is beginning to be revealed as the equivalent of Creationism. Deeply believed but wrong.
The soul has never lacked for believers, including around 90% of the American public, according to pollsters. But science has remained aloof, basically for two reasons. First, the soul has been assumed to be a matter of personal belief, not objective knowledge. Second, science deals in visible, concrete things using objective data. But since the era of quantum physics began over a century ago, invisible things and fleeting events have entered science, so subtle that the realm from which they emerge is almost a matter of faith.
Now some scientists are willing to venture into the once forbidden territory of the soul, attempting to extract a theory that will allow for its existence. Redefined by the new field of quantum biology, the soul could be the link that connects individuals to the universe, a dynamic connection that could explain how consciousness came about, and why the cosmos itself seems to mirror our own intelligence and creativity. Below are components of an argument for a secular soul based on quantum physics and biology.
Consciousness and the Soul
The concept of life after death, or more specifically conscious awareness after bodily death, is generally referred to in the context of the ‘soul’; it is a […]
Jon Lipman, Lee Fergusson, Anna Bonshek, Institute for Vedic Architecture, Maharishi International University, Fairfield, IA, | Professor, Maharishi Vedic Research Institute, Gold Coast, AU-QLD, Australia | Professor, Maharishi Vedic Research Institute, Gold Coast, AU-QLD, Australia - Global Advances in Health and Medicine
Stephan: I have spent much of my life studying the nature of consciousness, particularly the unconscious and nonlocal aspects. And one of the things it has taught me is how influenced we are by a whole range of subtle processes. And once you can identify such an influence you can figure out how to work with it. One is how we are positioned relative to the earth's geomagnetic field. Not just personally but socially through our architecture. Feng Shu is one approach, the Maharishi Vastu Architecture is another less well-known one. How influential can this be? I couldn't find a good popular article on this, so here is the peer-reviewed research paper. I am publishing it, because you can use this information to your own benefit.
Abstract
Background and objectives
The evolution of healthcare from 18th-century reductionism to 21st-century postgenomic holism has been described in terms of systems medicine, and the impact of the built environment on human health is the focus of investigation and development, leading to the new specialty of evidence-based, therapeutic architecture. The traditional system of Vāstu architecture—a design paradigm for buildings which is proposed to promote mental and physical health—has been applied and studied in the West in the last 20 years, and features elements absent from other approaches. This review critically evaluates the theory and research of a well-developed, standardized form of Vāstu—Maharishi Vastu® architecture (MVA). MVA’s principles include development of the architect’s consciousness, universal recommendations for building orientation, siting, and dimensions; placement of key functions; and occupants’ head direction when sleeping or performing tasks. The effects of isolated Vāstu elements included in MVA are presented. However, the full value of MVA, documented as a systematic, globally applicable practice, is in the effect of its complete package, and thus this review of MVA includes evaluating the experience of living and […]
Christof Koch, Chief Scientist of both the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and The Tiny Blue Dot Foundation - MIT Press Reader
Stephan: If you read me regularly, or have read any of my books or papers you know that I strongly believe that the experimental data confirms what Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics told us almost a century ago: Consciousness is causal and fundamental spacetime, and everything in it, arises from consciousness not consciousness from spacetime. Materialism, in my view, is a dying paradigm, not because it is wrong, simply because it is inadequate because it does not recognize the causal and fundamental nature of consciousness. Paradigms change because so many anomalies arise that cannot be explained by the old paradigm that a new one that does incorporate those anomalies arises. This article published by MIT is one sign that consciousness is slowly being recognized for what it is.
Honey bees can recognize faces, communicate the location and quality of food sources to their sisters via the waggle dance, and navigate complex mazes with the help of cues they store in short-term memory. Credit: Boba Jaglicic/Unsplash
What is common between the delectable taste of a favorite food, the sharp sting of an infected tooth, the fullness after a heavy meal, the slow passage of time while waiting, the willing of a deliberate act, and the mixture of vitality, tinged with anxiety, just before a competitive event?
All are distinct experiences. What cuts across each is that all are subjective states, and all are consciously felt. Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive, with many claiming that it cannot be defined at all, yet defining it is actually straightforward. Here goes: Consciousness is experience.
That’s it. Consciousness is any experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted. Some distinguish awareness from consciousness; I don’t find this distinction helpful and so I use these two words interchangeably. I also do not distinguish between feeling and experience, although […]
