Anyone read or (currently reading) "Quantum revelation" (not revolution!)?

[triron]

This book explores relationship between science (quantum mechanics), reality, and consciousness.

[byronius]

1. No but that stuff is startling. John Gribbin has a book about it as well.

The idea that consciousness is non-local, and that it resolves reality from a cloud of probability into an actual thing --

It's spooky. Scares most people. Head trippish.

But it has a basis in hard science, repeatable experiments, solid fact.

Weird.

[qazplm135]

3. well we can't even define consciousness yet

or that's even a real thing (hard to define something is real if you can't define it at all).

[hunter]

4. We can't even define "time" yet.

Time is clearly NOT some peculiar fourth dimension, t, tacked onto the familiar x,y,z Cartesian space.

I think time is what makes quantum physics weird, not "consciousness," whatever that is.

Humans don't have any unique ability to resolve reality.

If we did, how about dogs? How about frogs? How about plants? How about fungi? How about bacteria? How about archaea? How about computers?

Nope, the universe goes about its usual business with or without human observers. The same sorts of quantum physics experiments we carefully set up as human beings are happening everywhere throughout the universe, randomly, without conscious observers.

Earth is not the center of the universe, no more, no less than anywhere else, with or without humans.

What we know about the universe is plenty wonderful and awesome as it is. Attributing special powers to ourselves (or some proxy for ourselves such as "consciousness" ) takes away from that, turns everything back into the boring old mechanistic universe of Newton with some god, or we ourselves as proxies, turning the crank.

[qazplm135]

5. well in an infinite universe

technically everywhere is the center.

We don't know enough to know if humans are special or not. We don't know if we have a unique ability to resolve reality, heck we don't even know if our reality is "real" or a simulation. (Although my money personally is on real).

Do we have special powers? Probably not, but then again, any living creature might have those "powers" in observation and collapse of reality...or any particle (In Soviet Russia, computer monitor views you). Maybe the moon really is only there when one of us is looking at it and otherwise it's smeared across the heavens in probability states.

Quantum physics makes reality "weird." We are part of reality, as is out consciousness, whatever that is...so it's all kinda weird as a result. If by weird one means, what one would expect only looking at macro-reality.

[triron]

6. Seems absurd is suggest consciousness is not real. It's all we seem to know really exists.

How do you know there is anything else except maybe an amorphous probability field
whatever that is?

[qazplm135]

8. ok then define it

what is consciousness, and how does it work?

If you can accurately do either of those things, sign yourself up for a Nobel because you would be the first human to do it.

[struggle4progress]

2. I stay away from the philosophical abracadabra shizz

"Science" is a project that aims at providing better and better partial maps of the world

The "goodness" of a map is its ability to help us calculate accurately the outcomes of experiments --- including experiments not yet don

The conceptual apparatus of such a map always includes some philosophical views, I suppose, but while these might be interesting, their primary use will be to suggest other maps we could try to use, that might be better

There is no good way to make sense of notions such as "reality" or "consciousness" --- "reality", at any moment, is limited to the experiments you do and their outcomes, together with whatever maps you have that enable you to accurately calculate the experimental outcomes; and the reliable experimental content of "consciousness" seems very limited still

[triron]

7. But everything you mentions comes from thought and being conscious of the thought,

else how could you have and share these ideas? What is science other than a product of intellectual
(including intuition) thought? It is a shifting and evolving paradigm.