This thing didn’t let me edit the last post, so I’m redoing it as a new post:
Anyway, back at the ranch… something tells me that this argument isn’t going to be resoved anytime soon. My .02 worth, for what it’s worth. Spirituality has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. But spirituality involves very intense human experiences, and it’s natural to want to take these several steps further, into the realm of things that can (or can’t) be scientifically proven. There’s nothing wrong with that desire– it’s very human too! The problem is that it just doesn’t work out for other things (like, well, the dead contacting the living), and I’m afraid that’s the case with QM too. But it’s okay that it doesn’t-- more than okay! That doesn’t invalidate the fact that people have intense spiritual experiences, and that the experiences are real. The whole phenomenon reminds me of a story about a Zen buddhist monk… this is paraphrasing for sure, so if anyone remembers this more clearly, please feel free to tell it better…
So the acolyte was bragging about his Zen master, who could supposedly levitate 12 feet off the ground, time travel to different past ages, cure diseases across space, etc. etc.,… and he asked this other Zen master… let’s call him Za-zen… “Okay, what kind of miracles can you do?” The acolyte expected to hear a list of wonderful, amazing, impressive, supernatural miracles. Well, Za-zen said, “My miracles are that when I feel hungry, I eat, and when I feel thirsty, I drink.”
While I personally wouldn’t consider a miracle, this simply isn’t enough for some people. I prefer Douglas Adams version, as it addresses this reason overpowering need to be special:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” – Albert Einstein
Yes, you are right. The intensity of the desire makes a lot of difference.
What I and others notice about QM, and I am sure it will be denied here.
Entanglement is very like connectedness, a spiritual principle.
The observer changes the observed is very much like your thoughts create your reality. Multiple dimensions is very much like the spiritual dimensions.
But the whole is not yet known, not sure it can be known. While the beginners are sure of their knowledge being all there is, so they stagnate for now.
Of course it will be denied, because it’s not true. You are misinterpreting concepts you don’t understand. QM concepts only happen at quantum levels. Any attempt to apply those concepts at macro levels fails because these concepts no longer apply.
Originally Posted by SmashTheState
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” – Albert Einstein
Mysterious != credulous. If every little thing becomes mysterious then you’re doing something wrong.
Well, that entire thing was supposed to be in quotes,so let’s just pretend that it was.
I think that there may be several different ways of looking at this particular issue. For instance, I couldn’t figure out how to get both posts in quotes. Now, that isn’t particularly mysterious; I just don’t know exactly why I couldn’t do it. It’s impossible to know precisely what Einstein meant by the word “mysterious” without seeing the quote in context, and without being sure that it’s in the original language (was this English or German to begin with?) But I don’t think he meant “mysterious” as in “the cause is impossible to find out”. Instead, I would guess that it was more along the lines of “a thing, person, concept, and/or idea that is capable of inducing a mystical or heightened experience of reality”. By that standard, there doesn’t seem to be a lot that’s beautiful about a stupid minor detail such as the exact reason why something didn’t end up in quotes!
The idea behind something like popularized mindfulness, however (the kind of thing you’d find in one of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s books), is that it should be able to fit Einstein’s definition (if the second definition is what Einstein really did mean), because even the most ordinary activities should be able to lead us into a heightened and mystical awareness of ourselves and the world around us. Now, Kabat-Zinn annoys me, and he quotes Deepak Chopra way too much, but I do have to admit that he’s brought the Buddhist concept of mindfulness to a much larger audience. The idea is that ordinary life is enough. We don’t need to find fairies at the bottom of the garden. We don’t need to go around proving that the dead speak to the living, or that there’s telepathy, or telekinesis, or whatever. We don’t have to prove that there are mystical experiences, because we all know there are-- people have them. Example:
I was at work yesterday, and I was picking up paper clips with a magnet,and thinking about how astonishing magnets are… also watering the bamboo plants, and pondering photosynthesis, and walking around, and thinking about how gravity works, and talking to my co-worker, and watching people walk down the concourse towards their flights, and thinking about amazing jet propulsion… and thinking about how I had been convinced I was going to die last week from the kidney stones!! In the hospital bed with an IV in my arm! I never EVER thought I was going to be up and walking around again, I just could not picture it… and yet here I was, experiencing the miracle of ordinary life. It’s not mysterious-- it’s mystical, and if I had to bet, I think that’s what Einstein meant.
Of course not, lekatt. :rolleyes: You need to remember before denying what you’ve said that it’s all preserved here for reference.
Here are three quotes from this thread where you stated or implied that “math you don’t understand (referring to Quantum Mechanics) somehow reinforces non-scientific spiritualism.”
And here are some quotes from another thread that sure look to me like you’re saying “spirits of dead people are pushing around the pointer on the Ouija board.”
I agree with this. BUT Einstein didn’t mean to shut off your brain and believe any woo woo crap you happen to find. He meant to look at the universe with a sense of childlike wonder.
I think Anise example was wonderful. But, in hopes of further clearing things up, I’ll give another.
I LOVE Light Emitting Diodes. To me they are priceless, magical jewels. This doesn’t mean I don’t understand how they work or attribute their working to spirits or some such. Electrons run through a diode ( a one way gate essentially) and lose energy while moving between two different pieces of metal. This energy is released as light. The metals used determine how much energy is lost and thus what color the light is.
But that understanding does not in the least diminish the awe I feel. They remain jewels to me.
You just intrepret posts to mean what you want them to mean. No where did I say spirits of dead people are pushing around the pointer. That would be quite impossible.
Did you know that those who know everything and those who know nothing are the same person.
When you quit thinking you know what others are thinking, believing, etc., you will give yourself the chance to grow wise.
Please interpret what you said for me, then. If the board is contacting spirits of dead people, and the pointer is moving around, then how are the spirits not moving the pointer (or causing it to be moved, which is the same thing)?
And I notice you didn’t argue the other point once I pulled up three places where you’d said it. Good. We’ve got one handled.
Thanks, DocCathode! Okay-- I’ve got another one (a set of them, actually.) A bit of background-- they come from my field of research, which is the dissociative disorders (in the context of community mental health, generally speaking.) To put these tales of the distinctly odd in context, they were cited in peer-reviewed medical journals. I’m going to stick to the ones which came straight off the Pubmed search engine. I will warn y’all, they’re going to sound pretty bizarre… strange, but true!
In cases of dissociative identity disorder, it’s common to find significant
changes in visual functioning between alter personalities in the same subject, complete with measurably different visual acuity, refraction, oculomotor status, visual field, color vision, corneal curvature, pupil size, and intraocular pressure (Birnbaum & Thomann, 1996; Miller et al, 1991). In other words, when a client with DiD is functioning as, let’s say, thirty-year-old “Jane”, she might be quite nearsighted and have borderline glaucoma, but not when she’s eight-year-old “Maureen”. This can also be true of weird disturbances of visual perception that would normally be symptoms of retinopathy or maculopathy (such as micropsia, macropsia, teleopsia… everything suddenly seeming extremely small, large, or very far away.) (Michal et al, 2006). But the strangest case I’ve ever read about has GOT to be this one. I’m just going to reprint the abstract from Pubmed, because summarizing it could never do it justice!
We present a patient with dissociative identity disorder (DID) who after 15 years of diagnosed cortical blindness gradually regained sight during psychotherapeutic treatment. At first only a few personality states regained vision, whereas others remained blind. This was confirmed by electrophysiological measurement, in which visual evoked potentials (VEP) were absent in the blind personality states but normal and stable in the seeing states. The switch between these states could happen momentarily. As a neural basis of such psychogenic blindness, we assume a top-down modulation of activity in the primary visual pathway, possibly at the level of the thalamus or the primary visual cortex. Therefore VEPs do not allow distinction of psychogenic blindness from organic disruption of the visual pathway. In summary, psychogenic blindness seems to suppress visual information at an early neural stage (Waldvogel, Ulrich, & Strasburger, 2007).
Okay, that’s officially one of the freakiest things I’ve ever heard of. If the dead really COULD contact the living, I don’t think it would be any more astonishing than the myriad implications of DiD, of which this is only the tiniest scratch upon its surface. The human mind is the greatest source of mystery, and it’s precisely because there is no easy explanation. But the journey towards knowledge is pretty amazing.
+++
Birnbaum, M., & Thomann, K. (1996). Visual function in multiple personality disorder.Journal of the American Optometric Association.67(6), 327-34.
Michal M, Lüchtenberg M, Overbeck G, Fronius M. (2006). Visual distortions and depersonalization-de-realization syndrome. Klin Monatsbl Augenheilkd. 223(4), 279-84.
Miller SD, Blackburn T, Scholes G, White GL, Mamalis N. (1991). Optical differences in multiple personality disorder. A second look. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders, 179(3), 132-135.
Waldvogel B, Ullrich A, Strasburger H. (2007) Sighted and blind in one person: a case report and conclusions on the psychoneurobiology of vision. Nervenarzt,
78(11), 1303-1309.
The board is only a piece of wood, etc. It contacts nothing. I sometimes ignore your assumptions as being to far out to comment on. Assumptions have no place in reality.
Perhaps when you are really interested in learning how it works you will ask politely.
I can’t believe you actually said that! You’ve made a lot of absolutely amazing assumptions in this and other threads. Based on no real evidence whatsoever, you’ve assumed the existence of spirits and demons, the validity of dowsing, and much more. Although, you’re right. They do have no place in reality.
We’ve had this discussion, lekatt, and I can’t get consistent or meaningful answers from you. First you say that Ouija boards are tools for contacting the spirit world and that the movement of the pointer is controlled (directly or indirectly) by the spirits, and then you flat-out deny that you’ve said that.
It’s not mysterious-- it’s mystical, and if I had to bet, I think that’s what Einstein meant.