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A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water.
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Interview with Jason Silva by Frank Rose Maybe that was what got us talking about Inception, Christopher Nolan’s metaphysical action flick, which came out two years ago and won’t let go. From there it was inevitable that we’d slide into The Matrix, eXistenZ, and other movies that seek to limn the parameters of reality. Eventually we had to go, but we ended up continuing the conversation online. What follows is an edited transcript in which we question everything, including those bricks on the wall.
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The simulation assumption is ancient, though, and shows how integrated this transcendent view of virtual reality is with spiritual beliefs, especially Gnostic and Eastern religious beliefs. The Hindus called virtual reality, Maya, and believed that it, too, had internal, external, and transcendent qualities. Maya was a veil of consciousness between Brahman and Atman (dual aspects of the unitary godhead), as well as the projected external world. So, are current virtual reality technologies just tools to discover and transcend the programmed reality? VIRTUAL REALITY: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=virtual%20reality
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THE problem of the self - what it is that makes you you - has exercised philosophers and theologians for millennia. Today it is also a hotly contested scientific question, and the science is confirming what the Buddha, Scottish philosopher David Hume and many other thinkers maintained: that there is no concrete identity at the core of our being, and that our sense of self is an illusion spun from narratives we construct about our lives. NEUROSCIENCE: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?tag=neuroscience
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The topic of “Life after death” raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.
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Mystics in all ages and cultures describe the self as infinite, stable and ever-present phenomena. Modern physics describe the world as a self-moving, self-designing pattern, an undivided wholeness, a dance. We, as a society, relate to the self mostly as an individual, unique, time bound form. Our common sense, as individuals and society, hasn't caught up with this picture and it still based on long-held biases and stories. The Earth is clearly round but we still act as if it was flat... We live at the dawn of a scientific revolution, every day brings new findings from a wide range of scientific disciplines about what it means to be human. Modern science now gives us the detailed descriptions of the mechanisms our brain needs to construct what we call the self. Could it be this illusionary image of ourselves as separate beings that is keeping us in this perpetual state of anxiety, scarcity, fear, dissatisfaction and leading us, as a society, at this very delicate point in evolution?
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Rockstar physicist Brian Cox uses quantum mechanics to illustrate one of the deepest truths of existence.
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The Hard Problem of consciousness lies centrally to the Mind-Body Problem, concerning itself with the metaphysics (ontology) of mind. That is to ask ‘What is our understanding of the mind’s nature and what are the implications for its relationship with the physical world?’ This question traditionally leads to two distinct lines of thought; Dualism versus Materialism.
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It’s been put together by Quinton Deeley from our research group at the Institute of Psychiatry and brings together cognitive neuroscientists, anthropologists, religious studies scholars, psychologists and psychiatrists to discuss different ways of understanding ‘revelatory experiences’.
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What I would really like to know is this: Can the fundamental insight—the destructive, creative virtue of simplicity—be transposed from the realm of scientific explanation into culture or onto the level of conscious experience? What kind of formal simplicity would make our culture a deeper, more beautiful culture? And what is an elegant mind?
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An Emory University neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.
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Upheavals in the outer world are secondary, in the long sweep of history, to inner revolutions. We may be on the verge of such a one.
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Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves.
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From
bigthink
More about FREE WILL: http://www.scoop.it/t/science-news?q=free+will
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But what does it mean in a world where cognitive scientists can see brain function on an fMRI scan, capture the visual data, and reassemble it into videos using quantitative modeling? Now that physicists have the god-like power to accelerate tiny particles of matter and throw them at each other just to see what happens, is metaphysical philosophy dead?
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Do giant living planets like Mogo and Pandora have any place in reality?
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From
fqxi
To we who live in the twenty first century, whose lives are enmeshed in various information processors, the eventual plausibility of the Matrix does not appear as radical as it once did. One by one, the photos we view and the mail we send, have been converted to digital form. Common questions, such as, “How many megabytes does that song take up?" reflect a society that is becoming increasingly accepting of the idea that the observable qualities of every object can be represented by bits, and physical processes by how they manipulate these bits. Some scientists have even gone as far as to speculate we could live within a giant information processor, a giant ‘Matrix’, programmed to simulate the laws of physics we know.
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New theory doesn’t limit consciousness to the brain... Tononi intuited a powerful new theory of consciousness, a theory based on the flow of information. He and others believe that mathematics — in particular, a set of equations describing how bits of data move through the brain — is the key to explaining how the mind knits together an experience
Jared Broker's comment,
September 26, 2013 11:27 AM
I like the model of a pervasive field of consciousness where the brain is a tuner - receiver. We have the power to change our "consciousness tool".
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In the beginning was the Sound. The big bang. From that event more than 13 billion years ago, science tells us, the universe rapidly expanded and cooled enough that its white noise of energy could change into subatomic particles. Those particles later joined to form atoms, and those atoms combined to form molecules, eventually leading to the emergence of life. Biochemists are researching what harmonious chemical conditions might have led to the emergence of life.
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But there is also a serious question about human life and the nature of reality. What actually happens when that sperm and ovum get together to make a zygote? Is it just one step of many in an enormously complex chemical reaction that ultimately gives rise to a new person, who is at heart just a complex chemical reaction him-or-herself? Or is it the moment when an immaterial soul, distinct from the material body, first comes into being? Question like this matter — but as a society we hardly ever discuss them, at least not in any serious and open way. As a result, different sides talk past each other, trying to squeeze metaphysical stances into political boxes.
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As is slowly becoming apparent, work from embodied/embedded cognitive science, strongly suggests that to properly understand cognition, studying the “naked” brain will not suffice. Thus, adopting the metaphysics of reductionism as a theoretical cornerstone of one’s framework, is most likely to lead to problems down the line. I think, that the only way for psychiatry to develop is to firstly abandon neurobiological reductionism and embrace an alternative, more holistic metaphysics. Once this is done, then better sense can be made of psychopharmacology and neuroimaging technologies. Until then, I think they will simply continue to mislead the public.
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The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that purportedly inanimate, non-living objects—for example, planets, water, proteins, and DNA—are animate, that is, alive. With its broad explanatory power, applicable to all areas of science and medicine, this novel paradigm aims to catalyze a veritable renaissance.
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Indeed, the Universe, as science has revealed it, bears little resemblance to the description of Divine creation in various Scriptures.
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From
ieet
“Humans are the stuff of the cosmos examining itself”Carl Sagan... For those of you who are not familiar with this fascinating project, and should you think to yourself: What the heck is a “Blue Brain,” here’s a very short introduction: It is an attempt to create a virtual brain in a supercomputer by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain, no less, and therefore not simply an artificial neural network, but a biologically realistic model of neurons. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project, is a professor and brilliant neuroscientist with dual South African – Israeli citizenship, now working at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Later on in this article, you will find an interview with Markram, but first let me tell you about my personal Odyssey. I am an atheist, - and “militant ” at that, - but like scores of fellow atheist, I am having certain scruples. As far as considering the belief in supernatural beings to be bordering on the idiotic, I am fine. Also, I totally and emphatically reject the notion that atheism in any way equals immorality. [ In fact, if you will excuse my French, it makes my hemorrhoids itch to learn from The Skeptic’s Dictionary, that according to Article IX, Sec. 2, of the Tennessee constitution, “No Atheist shall hold a civil office.” Ok, - I can’t imagine this article has any practical implications in this day and age. Anyone out there to tell me otherwise. ] Via Wildcat2030
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