Right, there is nothing there, and I’m happy to summarily dismiss Internet articles that ask, “But, but what if magic?” without any evidence or even basic understanding of what we do know about the universe.
Buuuut… doesn’t neuroscience tell us that we never see those material properties of the brain, because everything we see is a construction of the brain, we never see the real matter only a secondary effect in consciousness ?
Why do we even make a mind/matter distinction when all we have is a mental construction of matter ?
I am not a physicist, but you don’t need to be to see that this is 100% woo. I amused myself briefly by trying to see if any of it could be construed to make the slightest amount of sense. It doesn’t.
The first one seems to say that we store information in our brains. Yes, skills and memories are the result of complex physiological and neurological processes involving encoding, organization, storage, and retrieval. There is no “spiritual quantum field” and no ghosts, goblins, or magic involved. That whole paragraph is pure psychobabble.
The second one uses the term “phase encoding” in a perplexing way, though perhaps with reference to the CNS it actually means something (though certainly not what is being implied there). Or maybe they meant “phase modulation”. Phase encoding is a term mainly used in MRI technology, where the frequency encoding (the frequency changes in the magnetic flux resulting from an RF pulse directed at the specimen inside a magnetic field) in combination with the phase encoding (the degree to which the changes become out of phase) yield the information that can be mathematically processed to produce an image. As stated, the paragraph is basically a word salad with zero meaning that tries to make some kind of linkage between the human CNS and “extremely puzzling and wondrous phenomena in the quantum world” (presumably, things like like superposition and wave-particle duality) based on nothing whatsoever.
The third one looks like a rehash of the old “mind-body problem”, which (a) has nothing whatsoever to do with either molecular or nuclear binding energy, (b) has nothing to do with quantum mechanics, and (c) is not actually a “problem” at all. One may as well wonder with amazement how the pure logic of a computer program can interact with the physical world like your monitor and your mouse and operate your printer or control industrial robots. It’s a mystery! Must be all due to spiritual quantum fields! 
Is why he never wrote any good porn. A few less lasers and isotopes and a bit more hot, thrusting ejaculations would have livened his books up.
But there is no such thing as Leprechauns. There is such thing as quantum mechanics and the field is still wide open.
I agree with this. There is a big difference between ‘you need better evidence’ and ‘it doesnt exist’.
Many of the replies in this thread could have been made 100 years ago about the General Theory of Relativity. Every so often someone makes a discovery that shatters current paradigms. The establishment fights to hold on to the older paradigms.
Again I am not arguing that the article is truth. But some bright people seem to think there might be something to it.
In fact did Asimov ever write any smut ? I read a bunch of his books and never saw anything really wank worthy. Maybe the spirit of the sixties didn’t really resonate with him.
Are you Leo Blooms sock?? 
I have no idea but it sounds great.
Larry Niven, though, he did drop in a bit of inter species nookie but sadly didn’t get into the details, which could have been most entertaining.
That is a bland generality that one hears a lot in all kinds of Internet science debates. The general theme is that “science could be wrong”, “Galileo was right and ‘the establishment’ was wrong”, etc. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and if scientific conclusions based on a large body of different lines of evidence are to be disproved, then one requires at least a credible hypothesis with some substantiating evidence to even begin the argument. Without that, it’s just empty words and a waste of time.
Nor is your assertion correct in comparing some of the replies in this thread (I cite mine specifically) to what might have been said 100 years ago about GR. The worst that a skeptic might have said is that it’s a revolutionary theory and there is (as there was at the time) only weak evidence to support it, but they would have to admit that it’s mathematically consistent and there is no evidence to refute it.
But what I’m saying here is that the quotes in the OP are not a “revolutionary theory” – they’re actually even worse than wild claims with zero evidence because they are, as I tried to indicate in my previous comments, more like a word salad of random buzzwords that don’t even mean anything.
Since general relativity inevitably comes up in threads like this (along with quantum mechanics, which I’ll save for another time), let me point out that it was not a morality tale about free-thinking independent discovers versus a hidebound scientific orthodoxy. Einstein developed special relativity to explain the experimental evidence that the speed of light remained constant in any sort of intertial frame. It wasn’t the only such theory at the time, nor was it invented ex nihilo by Einstein; it built on the work of other scientists, including Lorentz, and it built on some of the ideas and experiments in what was then the somewhat new field of electromagnetism. After its publication, it was extensively tested and verified, and it’s an unavoidable part of (relativistic) quantum mechanics and other areas of physics.
General relativity was developed later as an extension of special relativity to explain certain apparent paradoxes in it (for example, the Ehrenfest paradox) and to incorporate gravity into the theory. As in the special case, Einstein was not the only scientist with a general theory of relativity (the mathematician Hilbert came up with something similar contemporaneously); the theory was developed from and according to experimental evidence; and it’s been consistently tested and verified experimentally afterward.
My point is that science isn’t just guessing. It’s the process of using experimental evidence, mathematical theory, and rigor to make quantifiable, falsifiable predictions about the universe. Anything else is just making shit up.
This. Running back to some claim about the “establishment” not being able to handle new ideas, or preaching about “keeping an open mind,” doesn’t make up for the complete lack of any data or evidence or even coherent theory behind the claims made in that article.
Quantum mechanics (as opposed to particle physics in general) was developed in the 1920s and early 1930s. If you’re going to indulge in woo, at least use something more current.
Yes, but there’s real quantum mechanics in physics where it has a solid theoretical foundation, and then there’s the interpretation of quantum mechanics adopted by popular culture. Quantum mechanics in popular culture is largely an outgrowth of attempts to explain weird quantum behavior in familiar intuitive terms using imperfect analogies. Some of the resulting perceptions of counter-intuitive behavior are often a lot like leprechauns, because anything we don’t understand is to some degree implicitly relegated to the realm of “magic”. But that doesn’t mean that either leprechauns, magic, or the claims in the OP are credible.
The blanket invocation of quantum mechanics by pseudo-scientific quackery is a little like the same magical connotation of “radio” in the early 20th century.
Thank you. I didn’t open the thread with the first title. But the second one attracted me.
Sir, I urge you to keep an open mind until all the evidence has been gathered. The field of Leprechaunology too is wide open.
The point I’m making is whenever I’m asked to keep an open mind what follows from the speaker is rarely evidence. Evidence doesn’t demand any persuasive techniques to convince.
Not unless you count his limericks.
On that note, WRT non-materialist neuroscience:
So yeah, it can be ignored? I try to make a habit of ignoring things until they get proven to be true-ish, thus I still ignore String Theory but have started to pay more attention to Dark Matter.
Or as Wolfgang Pauli would’ve put it, ‘This isn’t right. It’s not even wrong.’
Sorry to be stupid but I still don’t get why physicists talk about matter when psychologists say what we see is a construction of the brain.
So all those experiments on matter are just phenomena of consciousness.
And so with the brain itself. And matter.
So what’s this materialist neuroscience if we never actually experience or see matter ?
How do you prove that there is a non-conscious matter somewhere out there beyond our conscious awareness ?
Isn’t that an unfalsifiable proposition, and therefore not scientific ?
I know, right? Curse you, afterlife!!!
Yep. Well…if it’s calling itself real science and gives a quick summary that I can actually follow. Fiction I can run with it, and if it’s full of baffling maths, I’ll at least look to someone who understands that shit to say if it’s fake or not. But…if it can be summed up in one more or less coherent sentence…
If you want to discuss the existence or non-existence of reality I suggest you start a new thread or dig up one of the old ones. You’ll find that most people acknowledge there is no way to scientifically prove the existence of matter, or yesterday, or anything at all really, including the existence of anything at all outside my field of view, or even things in my field of view, but that absolutely everything worth thinking about becomes more fun to think about if one pragmatically and axiomatically accept the existence of the world we observe. Or basically, we haven’t moved beyond Samuel Johnson: