lol… i REALLY need some sleep…
I don’t know what to say about the OP’s psychedelic trip, but as for the evidence of reincarnation, I offer the case of Shanti Devi, probably the best-known and most researched case.
FTR, I believe this is the GQ thread that should have been linked in the OP.
Get back with us in a couple of days, I don’t think you’re finished trip’n yet…
No, but seriously the other day I dreamed I was a WWII B52 bomber. Note I said I was a B52 bomber and not that I was in one. (No drugs were involved) Anyway, at 33 up untill now I never would have thought it possible that I could be an inanimate object in my dreams. I just wouldn’t believe my mind would be able to translate something like that, but low and behold it did… along with minor details such as the sensation of the wind flowing over my wings ect…
So your assertation that the details were too complicated to have been made up is a strawman at best.
That is unless of course I was a B52 bomber in a past life.
i’ve slept… let me try to explain this…
- reality is non-local, seperate from time
- our perception of time is the wavefunction collapsing
- before the wavefunction collapses “what is” is a quantum state
- long-term memories are determined by synaptic morphology
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so, since reality is unaffacted by time the only thing that prevents us from understanding existance in totality is our attachment to the perception of ourselves as something different from the energy that forms us and everything else. the past only exists because our minds are finely tuned machines that filter all of reality that has ever existed so that we can understand it based on who we are now. drugs, sleep, divine influence and many other things can interfere with this process and allow some information through that isn’t totally relevent to our current incarnation but is nontheless related, past lives included.
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our subconscious that exists in a quantum state analyzes the information and transmits it to the rest of the brain, triggering whatever process that alters the shape of our synapses to form long term memories.
Ah.
Well, that makes it perfectly clear. Why didn’t you say so before?
What difference does your having slept make if reality has nothing to do with time?
If drugs give you insight, maybe fatigue does also. One wonders how much insight you might gain if you took a lethal dose of something…
I not only agree with Brutus, but also very much admire the way he phrased things.
Trinopus
Cite? There is nothing that I am aware of that would indicate that your statement is correct.
Huh? That doesn’t even make any sense. Perception of time is poorly understood, true, but there is no basis at all to claim that it has anything to do with collapsing wavefunctions.
Since you have not shown that this is the case, none of your conclusions that are based on this assumption are valid.
Or, to look at it from a different angle, drugs cause you to trip, and make your brain do wacky things, like have vivid hallucinations that are not in any way connected to one’s supposed past lives.
Yet another baseless assertion. Even worse, while I recognize every word you used, the resulting sentence is utter nonsense.
I’m trying to be gentle, but you honestly do not understand quantum mechanics well enough to even begin to use it correctly. Hell, I don’t understand QM very well, either, but it’s obvious to me that you’re just throwing around a bunch of scientific-sounding words that don’t fit together properly.
You partook of a psychedelic substance, and the result is that you had a particularly vivid trip. However, it is foolish to take the contents of that trip at face value.
our subconscious exists in a quantum state because, as another person in the other thread pointed out, everything exists in a quantum state. the brain exists on an extremely “small”, quantum level, correct?
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time at the point before the wavefunction collapses is irrelevant, it does not yet exist. the mind has a basic understanding of reality on a quantum level and the present is just our mind relating the quantum state to our physical existance.
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is this not what physics is saying? my understanding of it has only occurred recently, so if i am wrong it would not surprise me. what specifically is the problem with my interpretation?
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don’t worry, my feelings don’t hurt easily… i’m not an optimist…
NO! Not Victor Zammit! That guy is nuts, plain and simple. He believes in EVP (the dead talking through tape recorders), James Van Praag (creepy dude) and, gak, Sylvia Browne!
He does have a million dollar prize for anyone who can prove the afterlife doesn’t exist. After you win it, you can claim my prize for proving Santa Clause doesn’t exist (he’s magic and invisble, you know - but you can hear a faint ‘ho, ho, ho’ if I set my coffee machine next to a radio and tune into AM 599.)
There is NO concrete evidence for reincarnation. Just anecdotes.
Nope. The brain is about two pounds of stiff, bloody lard.
Individual neurons are also far too large to be subject to quantum uncertainty. That only kicks in when you’re talking about objects with the mass of protons. Only a very few molecules exhibit quantum behaviors. Living cells are as foreign to quantum effects as bowling balls are.
You’re using specific technical terms. Improperly.
Now go and ionize your books, and be sure to oxidize your thoughts. Some of your ideas are electrically charged, and others are undergoing torsion. The history of science vibrates at 909 Hz, and what you are proposing has a low melting temperature.
Trinopus
Wrong: The subatomic particles which make up the atoms - which make up the molecules which make up the cells which make up the human brain - are on a quantum level. The behavior of the human brain, a macro system, is not dictated by quantum physics, but classical physics.
You fail to grasp the concept of four-dimensional space-time as predicted by Einsteinian physics. By definition, time has existed for at least as long as the universe. Time existed before a specific event occurs, whether its a wavefunction collapsing, or a kitty dying in a box.
I give up. Let’s just say that your understanding of physics has yet to occur.
I don’t want to get into a huge debate here on quantum mechanics and reincarnation, but Question, some books and papers you might want to check out by Ian Stevenson http://www.childpastlives.org/stevenson.htm and Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff at http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu/hameroff/
Anyway, the Penrose and Hameroff’s theory on how quantum mechanics effects the brain is based at the protein level, specifically with the tubulin proteins that make up microtubules in cells. Basically (this is a paraphrase and may be incorrect), they believe that since quantum effects such as hydrogen bonds and London forces effect the shape of tubulin, which effects the shape of neurons, that quantum effects may have an influence on the macromolecular processes of brains as a whole. Nancy Woolf of UCLA (not sure if she’s still there) wrote a paper on how changes of shape in the synaptic elements of neurons due to these quantum effects may have something to do with our coding of memory.
I’m not sure how the science stacks up in most people’s minds (I know Penrose’s books are rather contentious, and Ian Stevenson has been called everything from a fraud to a genius), but it’s interesting reading nonetheless and worth a glance. Anyway, there are some other theories as well, such as the holographic theory (which is essentially an interpretation of quantum mechanics) proposed by David Bohm (his Implicate and Explicate Order Theory) and used by Karl Pribram (a neuroscientist from Stanford, I believe) to help explain certain experimental results that seem to indicate a top-down, feed-forward mechanism that changes the behavior of neurons at earlier levels of sensory processing. Michael Talbot has an infamous book called The Holographic Universe, which is interesting, but IMO the argumentation is weak. Anyway, good luck with all that (and sorry for the long post without real substantive information).
semantics. time is our perception of the wavefunction collapsing. change, interaction whatever you want to call it that’s what it is. regardless, time is a concept created by the human mind…
ahh, thank you for answering my question 
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this thread should be moved to GQ…
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i wonder what the affect of psychedelics would be…
i have another idea, about enlightenment …
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enlightenment is riding the wave of consciousness… staying on top… your mind has to be clear and you have to act without thinking… this is the key: NEVER DOUBT … quit second guessing things … just let everything flow … that is my theory of enlightenment … try it …
hesitation, taking time to think about something, prevents the wavefunction collapse. you can experience the most vibrant reality if you force your mind to continually make choices without thinking because your decisions determine the outcome of the quantum state.
The wavefunction of what collapsing? Every subatomic particle has its own wavefunction, and that wavefunction will collapse when it interacts with another wavefunction.
There is no basis for that statement. Nothing that we know about time would suggest that it has to be observed to exist.
The wavefunction of what? Besides which, thinking has nothing at all to do with collapsing wavefunction. It all has to do with interaction (i.e. measurement).