Hi Mattias, (I sold your book at one of your first presentations in the Netherlands (Jan 2023) with Karen M. Hamaker-Zondag.
I recommend this book 'Act of Consciousness' from Adamus St. Germain (channeled), (my little 'bible')
"Life is an act, we act like humans and therefore we experience like humans with a litany of limitations, shortcomings and dramas that mask our underlying angelic consciousness. It is an unnatural act that we have come to accept as reality."
I’ve been working on a new way to make sense of the double-slit contradictions, and it finally came together today. If this interests you, I’d really appreciate any feedback:
"Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both," is the epilogue of Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics (1975), where he explores the parallels between eastern spirituality/mysticism (including buddhism, taoism, and hinduism) and modern science, especially quantum physics and relativity.
This is a great article! However, I think you may be neglecting to mention a big piece when it comes to why many of the greatest physicists long believed consciousness collapses the wave function, and that was the von Neumann chain. As I understand it, Einstein was bothered by takes like those of von Neumann (who, it's worth noting, was considered the "smartest man who ever lived" at the time https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/maniac-book-benjamin-labatut-john-von-neumann/675443/), and that's why he sought to find a flaw in Quantum Theory with his EPR paper (but, of course, the weirdness he thought was a refutation was confirmed by Bell and subsequent experiments just as you've so adeptly described).
Here's an excerpt from page 238 in "Quantum Enigma" by Rosenblum and Kuttner:
"In his 1932 treatment, 'The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics', John von Neumann rigorously displayed quantum theory's inevitable encounter with consciousness. Von Neumann considered an idealized quantum measurement starting with a microscopic object in a superposition state and ending with the observer. A Geiger counter, for example, completely isolated from the rest of the world, contacts a quantum system, say, an atom simultaneously in two boxes. The Geiger counter is set to fire if the atom is in the bottom box, and to remain unfired if the atom is in the top box. Von Neumann showed that the isolated Geiger counter, a physical object governed by quantum mechanics, would entangle with the atom in both boxes. It would thus be in superposition state with the atom. It would thus be simultaneously in the fired and unfired state. (We saw this situation in the case of Schrodinger's cat.)
Should a second device, also isolated, contact the Geiger counter--say an electronic instrument indicating whether or not the Geiger counter has fired--it joins the superposition state wavefunction, indicating both situations simultaneously. Von Neumann showed that no physical system obeying the laws of physics (i.e. quantum theory) could collapse a superposition state wavefunction to yield a particular result. However, we know that the observer at the end point of the von Neumann chain always sees a particular result, a fired or not fired Geiger counter, not a superposition. Von Neumann showed that for all practical purposes the wavefunction could be *considered* collapsed at any macroscopic stage of the measurement chain where an interference demonstration becomes essentially impossible. Nevertheless, he concluded that, strictly speaking, collapse takes place only at the "Ich", the same word Freud used for the Ego, the conscious mind."
In other words: While you can arbitrarily choose some physical point along the chain at which to consider collapse to have occurred, the laws of physics never actually predicate collapse at any point of purely physical interaction, because all physical objects (including those of measurement devices) are in theory defined by the pre-collapse wavefunction at all times. And yet, human observers only ever see collapsed entities.
If you really want to pursue the relationship of consciousness and reality to its logical conclusion, I highly recommend Chris Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU). Langan (who may be of particular interest to you as a psychologist, having one of the world's highest ever measured IQs) shows that reality is self-modeling, which is model-theoretic talk for self-valid interpretation, i.e. consciousness. In order to nontrivially model itself from within, reality needs localized subsystems like us to carry it out, which is why we are so critical to collapsing the wave function.
The best place to start with is probably his 2002 paper, "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory"
Thank you for the clear explanation of these two visions and what the evidence shows. I have never seen it better explained than here.
The problem reminds me of how memory appears to work: as something that is constructed, build up, at the moment we consciously connect with fragments of perceptions, emotions, meanings and former knowledge.
According to Rudolf Steiner it is a conscious, creative action. Isn't that somehow alike?
Just to throw a (humorous!) spanner in the works, I've been hit & hurt by things that I didn't see coming, & nor did anyone else. Is it only around ME that certain things DO exist when I'm not looking at them, or do other people also experience this? Or is it that God, being Omnipresent, is looking at all things all the time, & that's why the Moon & things that hit me do actually exist all the time, in spite of Bohr being right? But at this point, all my mental trip-switches have now blown, so I'm going to go make coffee, lol
Yes indeed, and what about the invisible and bad goblins which swipe your socks in the washing macine >so that you always have odd numbers. Then of course as soon as you discard that odd sock the the globlins return its partner. You can't see these gobilns but you can hear them at night laughing. I'm going to catch all of them and after that they won't exist no matter where you look, Bell's theorem upgraded by New Zealander who studied physics at high school.
Sorry I did get lost in your article (my fault) but I am still curious. . My twin sister and I have discussed the point that a puzzle made by my sister, can then be more easily made by myself, but whether a different physical copy of that puzzle in another part of the world could also be more easily made by another person as well. Is the information conveyed between my twin and I, or in the pieces of the puzzle or on the ether (for want of a better way of describing it). Just a curious thought. I have heard that many discoveries, ideas or realisations occur in the world at the same time without direct communication. Is this quantum physics.
In my youth I read a fascinating article about Rupert Sheldrake (yes, a scientist) who postulated that the "morphogenetic fields", or "morphic resonance", that connect all living things on Earth can explain what you describe, e.g. "that many discoveries, ideas or realisations occur in the world at the same time without direct communication";
or that an Olympic record, once reached by someone, is then regularly surpassed by others in the following years. Sheldrake suggests that all living things are biologically related and interacting with each other, especially those of the same species. Information on these theories can be found, which have been criticized a lot of course.
But, here is my little personal story:
A few years ago, in an attempt to correct our problem of many groundhogs eating our entire country garden, we acquired a special self-closing cage: attracted by food, the groundhog entered the cage, was trapped without being harmed, and then we moved him by transporting the cage 5-10 km away to release him into the wild.
Everything worked well that summer, although the groundhogs did not appreciate this imprisonment, even temporarily.
But, after a few weeks, the groundhogs stopped entering the cage completely...
Well, we thought that the word must have "happened", the local groundhogs had learned to avoid the cage.
We know that the groundhog does not live more than 6 years in the wild.
Today, more than 18 years after this experience, no groundhog has ever entered this same cage again, tempting food or not.
Mystery.
Is it the effect of the groundhog "morphogenetic field"? Or has the genetic code of ALL groundhogs changed as a result of this story?
Yes I can go with you there. If we see men and children dying in these terrible wars > Their wives and children never welcome them back home .They are gone forever and only the sudffering remains .
The Big L's "blathering" approach in a dialogue with Stevie Wonder after invading four White Russians might look something like this:
L: It's all based on the assumption that there is such a thing as the same time.
S: I'd just call.
L: But that's absurd if X,Y,Z requires time and vice versa.
S: I can't see.
L: Therefore I can never measure or observe what you do.
S: I feel you.
Und die Moral von der Geschichte: Man muss kein Einstein sein, aber man darf nicht blind sein, um das Sprichwort “Die Wahrheit liegt im Auge des Betrachters” als wahr anzusehen.
But my question is, did you see the satanic rituals while you were at CERN? 😂
Seriously though, as an energy healer who teaches and practices distant healing, the only way that I can explain it to people is by using quantum entanglement theory.
Perhaps science will eventually catch up to be able to explain our multidimensional aspects. In the meantime, the conversation is good, and we need to keep talking!
Hi Mattias, (I sold your book at one of your first presentations in the Netherlands (Jan 2023) with Karen M. Hamaker-Zondag.
I recommend this book 'Act of Consciousness' from Adamus St. Germain (channeled), (my little 'bible')
"Life is an act, we act like humans and therefore we experience like humans with a litany of limitations, shortcomings and dramas that mask our underlying angelic consciousness. It is an unnatural act that we have come to accept as reality."
Bell said: ‘I don’t know any conception of locality which works with quantum mechanics.’
61 years later: Found it.
Nonlocality lives in substrate. Particles couple locally. Pineal reads non-local information via crystal transduction.
Ancient wisdom wasn’t metaphorical: https://open.substack.com/pub/nwlehmann90/p/your-third-eye-is-a-quantum-detector
I’ve been working on a new way to make sense of the double-slit contradictions, and it finally came together today. If this interests you, I’d really appreciate any feedback:
https://substack.com/@ryanlaneuctit/note/p-178911402?r=62kent
.. bureaucrats prove existence .. artists play in it .. {we are not what we see .. we are the ones who are seeing} ..
Wow. Terrific. What a wonderfull world.
"Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but man needs both," is the epilogue of Fritjof Capra's book The Tao of Physics (1975), where he explores the parallels between eastern spirituality/mysticism (including buddhism, taoism, and hinduism) and modern science, especially quantum physics and relativity.
Hi Dr. Desmet,
This is a great article! However, I think you may be neglecting to mention a big piece when it comes to why many of the greatest physicists long believed consciousness collapses the wave function, and that was the von Neumann chain. As I understand it, Einstein was bothered by takes like those of von Neumann (who, it's worth noting, was considered the "smartest man who ever lived" at the time https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/11/maniac-book-benjamin-labatut-john-von-neumann/675443/), and that's why he sought to find a flaw in Quantum Theory with his EPR paper (but, of course, the weirdness he thought was a refutation was confirmed by Bell and subsequent experiments just as you've so adeptly described).
Here's an excerpt from page 238 in "Quantum Enigma" by Rosenblum and Kuttner:
"In his 1932 treatment, 'The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics', John von Neumann rigorously displayed quantum theory's inevitable encounter with consciousness. Von Neumann considered an idealized quantum measurement starting with a microscopic object in a superposition state and ending with the observer. A Geiger counter, for example, completely isolated from the rest of the world, contacts a quantum system, say, an atom simultaneously in two boxes. The Geiger counter is set to fire if the atom is in the bottom box, and to remain unfired if the atom is in the top box. Von Neumann showed that the isolated Geiger counter, a physical object governed by quantum mechanics, would entangle with the atom in both boxes. It would thus be in superposition state with the atom. It would thus be simultaneously in the fired and unfired state. (We saw this situation in the case of Schrodinger's cat.)
Should a second device, also isolated, contact the Geiger counter--say an electronic instrument indicating whether or not the Geiger counter has fired--it joins the superposition state wavefunction, indicating both situations simultaneously. Von Neumann showed that no physical system obeying the laws of physics (i.e. quantum theory) could collapse a superposition state wavefunction to yield a particular result. However, we know that the observer at the end point of the von Neumann chain always sees a particular result, a fired or not fired Geiger counter, not a superposition. Von Neumann showed that for all practical purposes the wavefunction could be *considered* collapsed at any macroscopic stage of the measurement chain where an interference demonstration becomes essentially impossible. Nevertheless, he concluded that, strictly speaking, collapse takes place only at the "Ich", the same word Freud used for the Ego, the conscious mind."
In other words: While you can arbitrarily choose some physical point along the chain at which to consider collapse to have occurred, the laws of physics never actually predicate collapse at any point of purely physical interaction, because all physical objects (including those of measurement devices) are in theory defined by the pre-collapse wavefunction at all times. And yet, human observers only ever see collapsed entities.
If you really want to pursue the relationship of consciousness and reality to its logical conclusion, I highly recommend Chris Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU). Langan (who may be of particular interest to you as a psychologist, having one of the world's highest ever measured IQs) shows that reality is self-modeling, which is model-theoretic talk for self-valid interpretation, i.e. consciousness. In order to nontrivially model itself from within, reality needs localized subsystems like us to carry it out, which is why we are so critical to collapsing the wave function.
The best place to start with is probably his 2002 paper, "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory"
http://knowledgebase.ctmu.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Langan_CTMU_0929021-1.pdf
Langan also has a column here on Substack: https://chrislangan.substack.com/
God bless!
A solipsist would, of course, say no.
Thank you for the clear explanation of these two visions and what the evidence shows. I have never seen it better explained than here.
The problem reminds me of how memory appears to work: as something that is constructed, build up, at the moment we consciously connect with fragments of perceptions, emotions, meanings and former knowledge.
According to Rudolf Steiner it is a conscious, creative action. Isn't that somehow alike?
What is the purpose of this article?
Just to throw a (humorous!) spanner in the works, I've been hit & hurt by things that I didn't see coming, & nor did anyone else. Is it only around ME that certain things DO exist when I'm not looking at them, or do other people also experience this? Or is it that God, being Omnipresent, is looking at all things all the time, & that's why the Moon & things that hit me do actually exist all the time, in spite of Bohr being right? But at this point, all my mental trip-switches have now blown, so I'm going to go make coffee, lol
Yes indeed, and what about the invisible and bad goblins which swipe your socks in the washing macine >so that you always have odd numbers. Then of course as soon as you discard that odd sock the the globlins return its partner. You can't see these gobilns but you can hear them at night laughing. I'm going to catch all of them and after that they won't exist no matter where you look, Bell's theorem upgraded by New Zealander who studied physics at high school.
Sorry I did get lost in your article (my fault) but I am still curious. . My twin sister and I have discussed the point that a puzzle made by my sister, can then be more easily made by myself, but whether a different physical copy of that puzzle in another part of the world could also be more easily made by another person as well. Is the information conveyed between my twin and I, or in the pieces of the puzzle or on the ether (for want of a better way of describing it). Just a curious thought. I have heard that many discoveries, ideas or realisations occur in the world at the same time without direct communication. Is this quantum physics.
In my youth I read a fascinating article about Rupert Sheldrake (yes, a scientist) who postulated that the "morphogenetic fields", or "morphic resonance", that connect all living things on Earth can explain what you describe, e.g. "that many discoveries, ideas or realisations occur in the world at the same time without direct communication";
or that an Olympic record, once reached by someone, is then regularly surpassed by others in the following years. Sheldrake suggests that all living things are biologically related and interacting with each other, especially those of the same species. Information on these theories can be found, which have been criticized a lot of course.
But, here is my little personal story:
A few years ago, in an attempt to correct our problem of many groundhogs eating our entire country garden, we acquired a special self-closing cage: attracted by food, the groundhog entered the cage, was trapped without being harmed, and then we moved him by transporting the cage 5-10 km away to release him into the wild.
Everything worked well that summer, although the groundhogs did not appreciate this imprisonment, even temporarily.
But, after a few weeks, the groundhogs stopped entering the cage completely...
Well, we thought that the word must have "happened", the local groundhogs had learned to avoid the cage.
We know that the groundhog does not live more than 6 years in the wild.
Today, more than 18 years after this experience, no groundhog has ever entered this same cage again, tempting food or not.
Mystery.
Is it the effect of the groundhog "morphogenetic field"? Or has the genetic code of ALL groundhogs changed as a result of this story?
PS: another mystery is that raccoons don't seem to learn, they keep coming in the cage!
Forgive me, but in the final analysis I have to comment - so what.
You are forgiven.
Yes I can go with you there. If we see men and children dying in these terrible wars > Their wives and children never welcome them back home .They are gone forever and only the sudffering remains .
The Big L's "blathering" approach in a dialogue with Stevie Wonder after invading four White Russians might look something like this:
L: It's all based on the assumption that there is such a thing as the same time.
S: I'd just call.
L: But that's absurd if X,Y,Z requires time and vice versa.
S: I can't see.
L: Therefore I can never measure or observe what you do.
S: I feel you.
Und die Moral von der Geschichte: Man muss kein Einstein sein, aber man darf nicht blind sein, um das Sprichwort “Die Wahrheit liegt im Auge des Betrachters” als wahr anzusehen.
A couple of short videos, 11 minutes and 7 minutes, to watch for a follow up to these ideas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4VuS3TGUsM - Panpsychism in the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3O7Yth-dqM - Max Planck's Universal Mind.
But my question is, did you see the satanic rituals while you were at CERN? 😂
Seriously though, as an energy healer who teaches and practices distant healing, the only way that I can explain it to people is by using quantum entanglement theory.
Perhaps science will eventually catch up to be able to explain our multidimensional aspects. In the meantime, the conversation is good, and we need to keep talking!