That's our first time. Let's try it again by the end of the week.

Recent research indicates that the FEELING of choice comes AFTER you've acted.

Trippy stuff: http://www.plastic.com/article.html?...1121313;cmt=15

You are all basing your imput on your physical ability of perception. We are not capable of perceiving the universe for what it is. Until we evolve past the 5 basic Neanderthal senses these questions will go unanswered.

This is a timely thread for me. Lately I've been doing affirmations daily in an attempt to steer my subconscious to a successful future. Mostly I focus on getting more sign ups.

Someone said they talk to their stats. Well that might just work. Anyone do crazy stuff like that? Have you noticed changes?

My opinion now, TheFly = Cool

FireHorse, I'm with ya man. =]

Deisel... Yes, I spent many years studying physics (particularly String Theory) and began to discover that science was quantifying and proving the very old and simple teachings which simply say that consciousness creates reality. The world you experience is the result of your thoughts and beliefs. I'm not going to go into what that's meant or done for me because it'll sound hokey but once I chose to accept it I found rather amazing things happening.

In any case if ya'll want some interesting reading on the topic at hand... I always take bits and peices from each thing I read and look for the common truths they share...


Holographic Universe:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...13569?v=glance

Seth Speaks
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...lance&n=507846

Elegant Universe
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/se...843628-6413569

And this one which might be a stretch for some close-minded people but you try the techniques in it and they flat out work and you find yourself saying I guess it aint so weird after all:

Creating Money
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...843628-6413569


One of the unfortunate things about some good truthful teachings is that they come from people who have let go of pretense and thus have problems communicating to the "normal" world of people who are still so wrapped up in thinking their brain/mind is who they are, that the lessons get dismissed as new age fluff. This is why I had to go the route of science first... my ego-center wouldn't let me believe anything till I saw some numbers. =]

I can't possibly be the last one to have anything to say on this topic. That's just... not proper. =]

Mark,

I studied physics and didn't find that.

I suspect to get blind-sided any moment now with "you're close minded" but then rest assured I'll fight back with "it sounds hokey!"

Anyway, there are enough philosophical and religious beliefs in the world's history than anything science discovers will be similar enough in appearances to something else and these coincidences will turn larger than life.

A good example is saying the Greeks discovered atoms because Leucippus conjectured that all matter was made of small indivisible bodies. Leucippus didn't have a damned clue. It was a lucky guess.

Some people see this coincidence as "amazing" but I think it nothing of the sort.

I might buy into that in my own experience if I had gone into scientific research with a preconceived idea of what I wanted to prove. But instead I was just trying to see where it led me. One thing I will say is that there is never a time I hold any belief of mine as absolute. So what I think I "get" today I leave room for the fact that I may be totally mistaken.

But this is what I do know: I'm here. I want to enjoy life and be happy. I have discovered some things and hold some current notions that have led me to view the world in the way I do and to try to create my reality in the way I do and these thoughts and beliefs are making a much better quality of life for me. So if they're wrong... well I guess I'll eventually find out. But for now life has been getting better and better... experimental evidence in my own life is suggesting that what I'm learning and believing has some validity and I'm not hurting anyone else along the way.

Is there a better method to be had?

Mark, I'm curious. What preconceived notions did you not have before studying physics? I mean, did you read Tao of Physics before or after studying physics? In what way did you study strings theory?

You mean you studied string theory with a serious study of quantum field theory or you read descriptions of string theory by big name authors? Not that I knock the latter - as an undergrad I studied no quantum field theory and really don't know much about it. Hell, who wants to do that for FUN? ;-)

Let's be fair. Give me some reading assignments from the web on the subject matter you are discussing (you know, the hokey stuff) so we are on common ground and I know what you mean.

I am taking off for the night but back tomorrow to come play. See ya then, old friend. :-)

Right then I should expand my explanation considering that it is indeed not possible to have NO preconceived notions. My point was that I wasn't going into it trying to prove a belief but rather to try and find one that made any sense.

As to your question on the Tao of Physics... I own a copy but haven't read it in full as of yet. I don't recall when I looked at it last but it was somewhere around when I ran into the "laymen" writings on String Theory such as Elegant Universe.

As to your question on reading material of the possibly "hokey" nature, check up the thread, I did include links.

As for literature on more detailed scientific and serious scientific explanations of deeper physics issues...

General: http://www.theory.caltech.edu/people/jhs/strings/

Summarial (See bib at end for more detailed material): http://theory.tifr.res.in/~mukhi/Physics/string2.html

Greater detail if a bit dated: http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/hep-th/...06/9706132.pdf

Is this what you were requesting?

Hi Mark :-)

What I was interested in is links to readings on how physics "was quantifying and proving the very old and simple teachings which simply say that consciousness creates reality". The physics stuff I can get kinda fast but I might be a little slow on the other half.

Maybe we should just start woth Q and A ...

What do you mean by consciousness?

How does it create reality?

What does this have to do with physics?

Ultimately, I don't believe in "Free Will".

We do have one choice, however. We can acknowledge nonduality (the idea that all is one-with-God, that the universe is but a multi-faceted expression of God's love, and that God is ultimately in charge. This is also known as "surrender" to God's will.), or we can embrace duality (the notion that we are all separate entities, and that God somehow created something "outside" of Himself: i.e. us & the universe. OR, you can just deny that God exists--this is also duality.). Our lives & our destiny are determined by this one choice.

We are put on a path based on that decision. Ultimately all paths lead to God-realization. How we get there is determined by our initial choice. However, if you think about it, even that decision is influenced by God's grace. So, if we believe in non-duality, we must also acknowledge that even that decision is not up to us.

Conclusion: "Free Will" is an illusion. The only reality is God.

So, hang on to your hats folks. It's going to be a hell of a ride. :drinkup

(P.S. I don't believe in "Hell" either).

Side Note: This will really twist your noodle... If everything is One-with-God, that means nothing exists outside of God, so in fact, everything we encounter is but a manifestation of God. So that hot babe (or stud) you're fucking is really God. Depending on your perspective, this is a real turn-off, or really hot. The basis of Tantric Sex.... Try it, you'll like it. :Graucho


Good luck with your paper.

Okay now you want me to explain 100 years of quantum physics in one post?! LOL. Seriously though... I'd like to answer you as completely and accurately as possible which means I'm going to refer back to notes I took and some of the books I read. I've got baseball all weekend here so I won't be able to do this til Monday. Hopefully I'll be able to find the post by then!

But just as a precursor, the areas that generally came to mind are:

Feynman's every possible path hypothesis with the double slit experiment

The overwhelming experimental evidence showing how you could not follow individual photons or electrons in said experiment because your very awareness of them changed their path to meet your expectation, and

The entire workings of non-locality (especially as it relates to String Theory) and how the most plausible explanation for it centers around all things actually being one (Strings thus being the "DNA of the Universe" carrying the information for the whole in each of it's tiniest parts.)

May I pose this to you... If God is all there is... INFINITY, how can there be anything but an infinite number of options to choose from and express yourself as? Free Will is an illusion only in that you can never really be anything less than All That Is... but so long as you choose to know yourself as less than All That Is and see the individual parts, Free Will is all there is because the parts stretch on for infinity.

This of course begs the question, if I am really God/All That Is, why am I here thinking I'm just a human. My answer is always the very sophomoric analogy that is if your very saliva was the taste of say chocolate, you could not know the pleasure of eating chocolate since that taste was ever present. You must first remove from your experience something before you can recognize it in the first place. Therefore is INFINITY wanted to experience itself, it must create individual consciousnesses that don't remember their own infinity, thus allowing those parts to return to the whole and remember their wholeness exeperientially... To taste the analagous chocolate.

If, as all the major religions assert, God is indeed omnipresent, there cannot, by definition, be any place in which He does not exist. Therefore any place, thing, thought, or state of being that appears to exclude or be separate from Him, must necessarily be illusory. The reality is that God IS there: that He IS the sum and substance of all we encounter, all we experience, all that we think and feel, all that we are.

So, the answer can only be that our "separateness" is also an illusion, created for the very reason you stated. When we chose to eat from the "Tree of Knowledge", the choice was really to experience duality in order to gain "knowledge". One can only gain knowledge through experience of duality. When one exists in a state of perfection, it is difficult to truly understand the concept of imperfection. One needs darkness to fully appreciate and understand light, heat to understand cold... ad infinitum. Therefore, the illusion of separateness, "duality" was created for us to gain knowledge/wisdom. When we acquire "wisdom" the illusion/ignorance will dissapear.

How does the sum over paths formulation of quantum mechanics imply that consciousness creates reality"? Are you saying that the particle experiences consciousness because the Universe works in such a way that action is minimized for the trajectory of a particle OR are you saying the human consciousness somehow causes particles to act in this way?

More interestingly (for me anyway), who are the teachers you refer to below and and what specifically did they teach?

"Quantifying and proving the very old and simple teachings which simply say that consciousness creates reality."

Emystic: BOOYAH! How's that for a deep intellectual response?

Colin: What religions DON'T teach you that God is infinite? It's fewer teachings that specifically say consciousness creates reality but only someone not following the idea that God is infinite not through to its logical end would not see this. Let me try to explain...

If God is infinite... there is NOTHING that is not God. If this is true, our very consciousness is indeed God and seperateness, as stated before, is illusory. Therefore that tree over there IS you, your life events ARE you and yet YOU are so much more. Everything being part of the same infinity is thus created by that infinity (it can't be any other way) and therefore you are creating reality.

It's hard to put my thoughts on this into words but I would invite you to take a look at the book, Seth Speaks (I linked it in a previous post) and try some of the things mentioned in there. All I can say is that for my own experience, once I started recognizing that my beliefs and thoughts (my consciousness) create my reality... I started to actively try to create different things and it's worked very well for me. As I looked at things in my life I liked or didn't like I was also able to trace back the beliefs and thoughts that created the situation and begin to change or embrace it if it was something I enjoy.

So anyway... not to leave you last point dangling... the Infinite Paths theory lent itself to the idea that all is one and God is indeed infinite... seeing as INFINITE paths means it includes all paths that are a subset of who you are... and following the same logic that brought me from infinity to creation of reality... that's how I saw that.

Might I add that all these beliefs are predicated on the belief that God is infinite or rather there is an infinite All That Is. If I'm wrong about that... then all this is just nice prose.

Mark,

What's your opinion on Pascal's "proof" for the existence of God aka "Pascal's Wager"?

You got me on that one PimpLink... I am not familiar with that text/theory at all. ANy good link you'd recommend?

I'm off for a bit to see the Series. Catch ya'll back later.

Let me start by stating that I adamantly defend the right of every human being to practice and believe in whatever religion they choose. I am not attempting to start a religious debate with my thoughts here, merely to offer a slightly different perspective. :)

You are assuming that there is a god and that everything stems from and leads back to this god. It's a wonderful theory, but one that I personally do not subscribe to.

God-based religion is a human creation; it was not born along with the universe. I believe that humans have always pondered the unanswerable, and an all-encompassing god figure was a conventient way to tie it all together quite neatly. (It also served the dual purpose of being a wonderful tool with which to control large groups of people and their thought processes, but that's another thread for another time.) Recent discoveries, such as that of atomic particles, have begun to shed light on those unanswerables and, in my view, have served to prove that the single-being theory is way off base.

Prior to the development of god-based religions was what we now refer to as "witchcraft". I won't go into a lengthy discussion or explanation of that belief system here, save to say I practice it myself and am much more comfortable with these beliefs than I am with the idea that I am "controlled" by a god-figure or some arbitrary "book of life".

I have a very scientific background, having studied engineering as an undergraduate. Shocking as this may sound, I don't subscribe to physics as the absolute answer to life's mysteries either. I admire Stephen Hawking and those like him, but my concern lies with the idea that they could be wrong. Everytime I hear a theory about the universe, for instance, I pause to ponder the "what ifs". What if just one of the foundational theories or laws is flawed? Then everything we "know" to be "the truth" is useless because it it based on flawed thinking or an ages-old incorrect calculation. It doesn't keep me up nights (much), but it also keeps me from accepting any theory or conjecture based on the laws of physics.

To answer the original question this thread posed, I believe that free will alone dictates our destiny and that each of us has absolute control over our lives, our personal environment, and our future. Granted, free will may be a product of neurons firing, etc., but that physiology does not dictate what the outcome will be. An individual's thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and past experiences may have some degree of influence, but I firmly believe that nothing is set in stone and that we are each free to make our own decisions, thus creating our own destiny. Each of us absorbs the information we choose to absorb via selective filtering and, in some cases, research and this, in turn, starts the free-will ball rolling.

Just my humble :2 cents: Great thread! :)

Doesnt destiny apply to whales?

Personally I am just using the term, "God" because it is common. I actually don't personify any greater being in my own beliefs and just see it more as the All That Is. Even those words do no justice...

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that cane be named is not the eternal name


And all that... =]

Here's the link:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

Okay, but how do you avoid the determinism of your brain operating as a system governed by physical laws?

Well, if we can't perceive the universe the way it really is, then the situation is much worse: we are blind in addition to being bound by universal physical laws.

Something's not a real "discovery" unless you also understand its import.

For example, even if the Vikings reached the new world first, as far as they were concerned they just bumped into some unoccupied land (or if there were occupants, they probably killed them!).

Columbus and the European explorers were true discoverers because they were realizing, "Hey, the Earth isn't flat, it's round! Maybe it's even a sphere!"

If you see a lottery ticket on your desk, it's just a fact. If you realize it's a winner worth $10M, THAT is a discovery!

Swell, but where does Free Will fit in there. You've described a bunch of causes which have had the effect of making you think the way you do. With a different set of causes, you'd think differently. You're a deterministic system.

I started to read one of those references and ran into the expression "extended one-dimensional objects" which strikes me as a bit like talking about a round-square.

I taught logic years ago, and one of the peculiar properties of a contradiction is that "with a contradiction, you can prove anything," which is why people who espouse paradoxical views seem to be able to tie everything together with such ease.

People confuse having a choice with being free. The ultimate question is "can you choose what you choose"? But even so, the whole idea of freedom doesn't make sense from the get go, at least when viewed as the opposite of determinism. We live in a physical universe and whatever happens because of the nature of that universe. Where can there be freedom in there (in the sense of people being responsible for their choices)?

Buddhism, at least in its classical original form, has no God, so there is one major religion which does not assert anything about God whatsoever. Who is the God of Zen? There is none. As Buddhism spread outside the sphere of the Brahmins and into the hands of the uneducated, it got translated into terms they understood, incorporating traditional local deities and so on. But at its heart, there is no God in Buddhism. If you're such a student of religion, I thought you'd already know that.

"Omnipresent"? No, not according to the deists, for example. (This, BTW, is the religion of our Founding Fathers in the US. Deism believes, in a nutshell, that God made the Universe then basically gave it to man and went away in order to give man freedom.)

Freedom is a contradictory concept, because on the one hand it can't exist in a deterministic universe, because in such a universe, you can't do anything other than what you do. On the other hand, imagine a universe that had no determinism. No predictability, then, and where is the freedom in a universe where there is no "connect" between your actions and their results?

Mark, that's being excessively liberal in interpreting something that is really quite simple. Richard Feynman himself was an atheist. You can read this in many interviews with him.

As far as the sum over paths formulation of quantum mechanics - it states that you integrate the action over all space to infinity. As you move away from the path the particle takes, the probabily amplitudes will cancel each other out. You know how in quantum mechanics, there is the wave equation? Well, that is why you are concerned with the probability of the particle being in various places but they cancel out as you move away from the path of the particle.

Just because there is an infinity sign in the integral (integrate over all space) does not imply god. Fields in physics extend to infinity. For example, one can say that the gravitational field of the Sun extends to infinity - though it falls off very fast. If you were on the other side of the galaxy, you could ignore the Sun's gravitational field on solar system x and any projections of the motion of a planet, etc. would be perfect without it. You can still work out the math that way though.

What do you mean "it includes all paths that are a subset of who you are"? If I'm interested in using the sum over paths integral in determining the path of an electron and I need to worry about who I might be or become? HuH?

Also, physics takes many shortcuts including many abstractions - and even though we say that the gravitational field of any object extends to infinity - in reality there is the limiting factor of the edge of the expanding Universe. So these formulations are not even precisely true anyway.
The gravity of the Sun does not extend it's influence to outside of the known universe. They are useful and get the "right answers".

Because of quantum mechanics, modern physics is not deterministic - so we don't need to worry about that - at least for now. People have been very interested in the possibility of hidden variables theory. Maybe there is something deterministic behind the appearant randomness of QM? There is Bell's theorem that shows that "no local hidden-variables theory can make predictions in agreement with those of quantum mechanics." Maybe someone will come along more clever than he and mess it all up.

As best as physics offers us to date, we don't need to be concerned with determinism in the classic sense. That is why i say I don't believe in destiny one bit. I'm not sure I completely believe in free will either as random events may impose themselves on the decision making process.

Colin's words on looking at current understanding of QM as being a good argument against determinism, I am in agreement with.

Your expanded explanation of the Feynman principal is good too and gave me pause to think but where I'm not clear is how one can recognize the existance of infinity and yet not then consider it's implication. In my mind it comes down to this:

Infinity by it's very definition leaves nothing excluded.

So if you believe in the existence of inifinity in any sense you must then consdier yourself part of it and thus the idea that there is an All That Is (or what some people like to call God) is upheld.

Either that or there is no infinity.

So although Colin may have pointed out that I streteched too far on my thoughts with Feynman leading to the concept of an infinity... let us address non locality and the recent discoveries of String Theory particularly how it would explain non-locality. We have experimental evidene for non-locality... it's not just a bunch of theoretical hyperbole at this point.

I'm not sure which reference that was. Modern String Theory speaks about the strings being tiny Planck length objects that exist in 10 or potentially 11 dimensions. I'm not mathematically inclined enough to explain how this works but I do know that is where the theory is at.

With all this heady intellectual conversation going on here I want to ask how many of my fellow conversationalists here have ever considered the possibility that there is consciousness beyond their own intellect and have pursued first hand experiences through meditation? We all (especially those of us who love to think) identify our entire being with our minds but perhaps there is more to us than that...

Here is a debate on the same subject but from a theological perspective > http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showt...?threadid=8869

I meditate. I usually do the "loving kindness" meditation [Vipassana method]. And yes, one insight I got through meditation is that since intellect is part of the illusion of "Self"--its reality can be questioned. I haven't reached the experience of actually realizing that the Intellect itself is an illusion [as taught by the Buddha]. One of the interesting steps of Vipassana is the maelstrom of thoughts stage--you become mindful of the differing and conflicting thoughts that swirl in your mind. The challenge has always been to learn to detach and not to judge.

My experiences with meditation are mostly in the last bunch of months. I did alot with simple breating and relaxion or visualization type meditations before but now I've really been trying to expand my consciousness. I've had some interesting experiences but only one I would say was really far out. As with anything outside the mind, putting words on it does it no justice so I won't even try. But it's been a neat beginning of a journey - which I why I posed the question - to see if it was shared by others here. =]

I believe Goedel's Proof already messed it up: Any logical and internally consistent system can be so construed as to generate contradictions is one way of putting it, I believe. And with a contradiction you can prove anything.

a OR b
b AND not-b (the contradiction)
not-b
Therefor a

Note that the argument also allows you to prove not-a:

not-=a OR b
b AND not-b (the contradiction)
not-b
Therefor not-a


This is why contradictions are pernicious logically.

The problem with free will is that it's a self-contradictory concept. In order for will to mean anything, we need determinism. If we have determinism, we can't be free.

Subatomic particles don't salvage anything in terms fo free will.

Besides, it's pretty clear that even though determinism doesn't reign on the subatomic level, Newton's laws (as later amended Einstein and others) still operate very dependably in the macro world.

Well, I'll grant you a consciousness. Does that make you feel better?