Physics of Matter, Mind and Consciousness

Yes, I agree with Dr. Werbos here. I was planning to say essentially the same thing but was too busy. The real issue here was brought up by Brian Josephson and Fotini Pallikari ~ 1993, then by me at Tucson II 1996 on two-way self-organizing "back-action" (implicit in p. 30 & 14.6 of Bohm & Hiley's Undivided Universe) - also of course by Stapp in his Phys Rev A paper on retro-PK, where he was burned at the stake by The Physics Fascists :-), Penrose's OR is not R, and finally clarified by A. Valentini. The issue is SIGNAL LOCALITY vs SIGNAL NONLOCALITY. Micro-quantum theory has SIGNAL LOCALITY i.e. NO CONSCIOUSNESS, NO PRESPONSE, NO REMOTE VIEWING EVER! This is why QUANTUM MIND is a Malapropism - a non-starter. As Basil Hiley says "Consciousness as collapse replaces one mystery by another." Max Tegmark shows that decoherence shuts you down much too fast.

However MACRO-QUANTUM theory comes to the rescue. No decoherence problem there, and we have signal nonlocality in open non-equilibrium systems. The CONSCIOUS MIND is a "More is different" (PW Anderson) EMERGENT MACRO-QUANTUM OPEN NON-EQUILIBRIUM SYSTEM with SIGNAL NONLOCALITY (PRESPONSE) IMMUNE to EVIRONMENTAL DECOHERENCE from "Phase Rigidity". It is similar in some ways to the VACUUM COHERENCE of precision cosmology of dark energy in the accelerating univese which brings us to Hawking's final questions on THE MIND OF GOD at the end of A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME. I will be lecturing on all this in Santa Fe New Mexico April 24, 2005 10:30 AM La Fonda Hotel
http://www.bizspirit.com

Werbos also has a signal nonlocality model whose details I have not studied.


On Jan 3, 2005, at 1:59 PM, Paul J. Werbos, Dr. wrote:


John Cramer's Transactional QM model seems to have an interpretation that comes close to fitting the facts about precognition. This interpretation also appears to fit some recent experimental data better than other QM interpretations. Here is part of the abstract from John Cramer's paper, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

"A new interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, the Transactional Interpretation (TI), is presented. The basic element of TI is the transaction describing a quantum event as an exchange of advanced {backward in time} and retarded {forward in time} waves, as implied by the work of Wheeler and Feynman, Dirac, and others. The TI is explicitly nonlocal and thereby consistent with recent tests of the Bell Inequality, yet is relativistically invariant and fully causal. The TI permits quantum mechanical wave functions to be interpreted as real waves physically present in space rather than as "mathematical representations of knowledge". The TI is shown to provide insight into the complex character of the quantum mechanical state vector and the mechanism associated with its "collapse". The TI also leads in a natural way to justification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle."



Cramer has consistently stated that his Transactional Interpretation yields predictions IDENTICAL to
those of the usual (Copenhagen or many-worlds) versions of quantum theory - and thus that one should
not expect it to allow us to explain phenomena one whit different. In many ways, it really
is an INTERPRETATION -- a set of words muttered as one meditates on the usual Feynman diagrams without
changing anything.

This is different from my Backwards-Time Interpretation or formulation (per 1973 Nuovo Cimento letters
paper and the more recent stuff I put into quant-ph, plus the 2004 cond-mat paper). Constructing
a new flavor of underlying theory is not so easy as holding a benediction over the Feynmann diagrams --
but it really does open the door to new phenomena and possible tests. The words you cite about
backwards light from the stars... are similar to Huw Price's writings, which I see as far closer to the Backwards
Time Interpretation than to Cramer's writings to date; Price's writings on cosmology really do point towards
new possible physical experiments, and can even be translated into more workable technological versions.

But even then... when you try to get into explaining remote viewing stuff... I do not think that
ANY nonspeculative version of quantum theory -- transactional, backwards time, Copenhagen
or many-worlds -- would be enough by itself. More precisely, I do not think
that quantum electrodynamics, in any version of quantum theory, has room for the full
spirit of what has been observed, if you take the empirical writings of folks like Puthoff and Targ
totally seriously. I am not trying to deduce that QED or remote viewing are wrong; rather,
I am saying that full remote viewing would require additional changes in physics
to explain it. (That is a major theme in my q-bio 2003 papers, one of which
was based on my plenary at the very large 1999 conference in Japan which involved
some of the same players as the various Tucson confernces.)

Best of luck, and Happy New Year,

Paul