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Post by Deleted on May 13, 2018 19:02:14 GMT -5
There is no life or death, therefore no cat. Did I pass? Nope. Hmmm. I give up.
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Post by zendancer on May 13, 2018 19:03:49 GMT -5
Schrodinger's cat experiment is a jab at CI. These mind twisting paradoxical QM dilemmas remind me of Zen koans. "There is no quantum object independent of the observation of it". See now, that's the end of the line of a particular position for the science of Physics. As long as everyone assumed that the objects we experience could be defined in terms of their own, independent reality, reality could be said to be physical. This meant that the sciences of chemistry and biology each rested on a solid foundation, and could trace back their statements about the nature of reality to the truth of the reality of the fundamental building blocks: chemistry is the science of how atoms form molecules and how those molecules interact, and biology is the science of how chemicals form cells, organs and organisms. The lay-secular assumption in the West was -- and still is -- that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain. Not all the scientists at Copenhagen in 1927 were secular. Einstein wasn't. But relating the CI to the question of consciousness as time went on afterward was a natural progression of thought given the obvious implications. Neurology is, after all, that branch of biology dedicated to a particular organ and a particular class of cells that comprise it. "What observes?" is obvious self-inquiry. Sometimes it gets done collectively. My apologies for the repetition, but the one single most striking quote by Heisenberg on the issue to me is: "It may be said that classical physics is just that idealization in which we can speak about parts of the world without any reference to ourselves". The CI was a clue to the collective cultural movement of self-inquiry about the limits of objectivity. "Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall ..." I would put it like this, "There is no quantum object (or any other object) independent of the imagining of it." Physicists assume that they observe independently-existing things, like rocks or trees. They don't. All thingness is imaginary. We can point to what they observe with the phrase "a field of being" or "what is" or ________________________.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 13, 2018 20:03:44 GMT -5
"There is no quantum object independent of the observation of it". See now, that's the end of the line of a particular position for the science of Physics. As long as everyone assumed that the objects we experience could be defined in terms of their own, independent reality, reality could be said to be physical. This meant that the sciences of chemistry and biology each rested on a solid foundation, and could trace back their statements about the nature of reality to the truth of the reality of the fundamental building blocks: chemistry is the science of how atoms form molecules and how those molecules interact, and biology is the science of how chemicals form cells, organs and organisms. The lay-secular assumption in the West was -- and still is -- that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain. Not all the scientists at Copenhagen in 1927 were secular. Einstein wasn't. But relating the CI to the question of consciousness as time went on afterward was a natural progression of thought given the obvious implications. Neurology is, after all, that branch of biology dedicated to a particular organ and a particular class of cells that comprise it. "What observes?" is obvious self-inquiry. Sometimes it gets done collectively. My apologies for the repetition, but the one single most striking quote by Heisenberg on the issue to me is: "It may be said that classical physics is just that idealization in which we can speak about parts of the world without any reference to ourselves". The CI was a clue to the collective cultural movement of self-inquiry about the limits of objectivity. "Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall ..." I would put it like this, "There is no quantum object (or any other object) independent of the imagining of it." Physicists assume that they observe independently-existing things, like rocks or trees. They don't. All thingness is imaginary. We can point to what they observe with the phrase "a field of being" or "what is" or ________________________. Is that to say rocks and trees don't exist?
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Post by laughter on May 13, 2018 21:38:06 GMT -5
"There is no quantum object independent of the observation of it". See now, that's the end of the line of a particular position for the science of Physics. As long as everyone assumed that the objects we experience could be defined in terms of their own, independent reality, reality could be said to be physical. This meant that the sciences of chemistry and biology each rested on a solid foundation, and could trace back their statements about the nature of reality to the truth of the reality of the fundamental building blocks: chemistry is the science of how atoms form molecules and how those molecules interact, and biology is the science of how chemicals form cells, organs and organisms. The lay-secular assumption in the West was -- and still is -- that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain. Not all the scientists at Copenhagen in 1927 were secular. Einstein wasn't. But relating the CI to the question of consciousness as time went on afterward was a natural progression of thought given the obvious implications. Neurology is, after all, that branch of biology dedicated to a particular organ and a particular class of cells that comprise it. "What observes?" is obvious self-inquiry. Sometimes it gets done collectively. My apologies for the repetition, but the one single most striking quote by Heisenberg on the issue to me is: "It may be said that classical physics is just that idealization in which we can speak about parts of the world without any reference to ourselves". The CI was a clue to the collective cultural movement of self-inquiry about the limits of objectivity. "Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall ..." I would put it like this, "There is no quantum object (or any other object) independent of the imagining of it." Physicists assume that they observe independently-existing things, like rocks or trees. They don't. All thingness is imaginary. We can point to what they observe with the phrase "a field of being" or "what is" or ________________________. Yes, this is simpler, more to the point, less involved with the machinations of mind. It's where one can wind up if they stop looking for an intellectually consistent model of reality. But as you alluded to the other day, the history of how the culture resulted in QM -- and then beyond -- is fascinating in it's own right. Generally speaking, there's so much to marvel at if it's not taken for granted, and relatively speaking, I feel very lucky to be able to read about and be illuminated by it.
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Post by laughter on May 13, 2018 21:40:12 GMT -5
"There is no quantum object independent of the observation of it". See now, that's the end of the line of a particular position for the science of Physics. As long as everyone assumed that the objects we experience could be defined in terms of their own, independent reality, reality could be said to be physical. This meant that the sciences of chemistry and biology each rested on a solid foundation, and could trace back their statements about the nature of reality to the truth of the reality of the fundamental building blocks: chemistry is the science of how atoms form molecules and how those molecules interact, and biology is the science of how chemicals form cells, organs and organisms. The lay-secular assumption in the West was -- and still is -- that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain. Not all the scientists at Copenhagen in 1927 were secular. Einstein wasn't. But relating the CI to the question of consciousness as time went on afterward was a natural progression of thought given the obvious implications. Neurology is, after all, that branch of biology dedicated to a particular organ and a particular class of cells that comprise it. "What observes?" is obvious self-inquiry. Sometimes it gets done collectively. My apologies for the repetition, but the one single most striking quote by Heisenberg on the issue to me is: "It may be said that classical physics is just that idealization in which we can speak about parts of the world without any reference to ourselves". The CI was a clue to the collective cultural movement of self-inquiry about the limits of objectivity. "Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall ..." CI and the question of consciousness are mutually exclusive. The way I understand it, the CI is a bright line that stops where the Physics stops. So it invites speculation about consciousness by implication.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 13, 2018 21:45:51 GMT -5
CI and the question of consciousness are mutually exclusive. The way I understand it, the CI is a bright line that stops where the Physics stops. So it invites speculation about consciousness by implication. Yes, but at that point you have departed from CI. IOW, your sentence one excludes sentence two (as far as CI is concerned). Bohr was smart enough to be ambiguous enough not to say more than can be said.
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Post by laughter on May 13, 2018 22:23:31 GMT -5
"There is no quantum object independent of the observation of it". See now, that's the end of the line of a particular position for the science of Physics. As long as everyone assumed that the objects we experience could be defined in terms of their own, independent reality, reality could be said to be physical. This meant that the sciences of chemistry and biology each rested on a solid foundation, and could trace back their statements about the nature of reality to the truth of the reality of the fundamental building blocks: chemistry is the science of how atoms form molecules and how those molecules interact, and biology is the science of how chemicals form cells, organs and organisms. The lay-secular assumption in the West was -- and still is -- that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain. Not all the scientists at Copenhagen in 1927 were secular. Einstein wasn't. But relating the CI to the question of consciousness as time went on afterward was a natural progression of thought given the obvious implications. Neurology is, after all, that branch of biology dedicated to a particular organ and a particular class of cells that comprise it. "What observes?" is obvious self-inquiry. Sometimes it gets done collectively. My apologies for the repetition, but the one single most striking quote by Heisenberg on the issue to me is: "It may be said that classical physics is just that idealization in which we can speak about parts of the world without any reference to ourselves". The CI was a clue to the collective cultural movement of self-inquiry about the limits of objectivity. "Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall ..." I believe Schroedinger studied Indian philosophy. The prevalent notion is that objects exist apart from consciousness, but in observing events the photons needed for the observation, impact the results. Most are reluctant to take the step you outline. So in observing the photons going through the one slit, we affect the outcome of the double slit experiment. Einstein proposed that paired particles contained the quantum data of their partners which Bell disproved. I think he was reluctant to discard objects. I might have heard that about Erwin before. When you win a Nobel you have to design a coat of arms, and Bohr had a yin-yang symbol in one of his quadrants. Heisenberg devotes the better part of a chapter writing about how the meaning of the CI beyond Physics will eventually come from various sources concerned with subjective state, and as I recall he mentioned both Western psychology and Buddhism both, specifically. So this is the what we might call the "classical measurement problem": in order to gain information from a system you have to exchange energy with it and that inevitably distorts the information you want to gain. Stick a thermometer in the ocean and the effect is negligible, but at small scales it's not. I've read ZD mention in passing before that the problem is recognized in fields other than physical measurement. Notice how this isn't specific to effects that are stochastic or that don't involve wave/particle duality? The measurement problem is great motivation for considering the uncertainty principle, but the two are very different, and that's because of the underlying mathematics of QM. And neither the classical measurement problem nor the uncertainty principle are the same the issue of the "Quantum Observer", presented most directly by the double-slit. I'll refrain from getting all wonky beyond making those distinctions, unless you want me to wonk-out about 'em that is. From what I've read about what motivated Einstein's objections it was primarily the loss of a deterministic clockwork Universe in terms of LaPlace. He also was of course smart enough to recognize from the get-go that QM wasn't, in the form it emerged (or even now) reconcilable with General Relativity. GR reflects what's been described as Einstein's existential perspective in this regard. "There is no quantum object independent of the observation of it" suffers from the ambiguity of qualitative expression. People might not like what the math implies, but they can't really fight it, either. One of the weirdest things about QM is what the word "Quantum" refers to directly. When an electron changes state in an atom it doesn't transition continuously from one state to another. The atom dances to a strobe light. While Heisenberg's matrix mechanics obsoleted Bohr's "solar-system" atomic model, it's still possible to associate the different energy levels with a distance of the electron from the nucleus in the different states -- it's just that the idea of the electron following a well-defined orbital path doesn't apply. So in terms of a classical metaphor, it would be as if every pitch was a strike, because the ball would leave the pitcher's hand and then suddenly materialize in the catcher's mitt. Without following the arc from the mound to the plate.
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 13, 2018 23:55:10 GMT -5
I believe Schroedinger studied Indian philosophy. The prevalent notion is that objects exist apart from consciousness, but in observing events the photons needed for the observation, impact the results. Most are reluctant to take the step you outline. So in observing the photons going through the one slit, we affect the outcome of the double slit experiment. Einstein proposed that paired particles contained the quantum data of their partners which Bell disproved. I think he was reluctant to discard objects. I might have heard that about Erwin before. When you win a Nobel you have to design a coat of arms, and Bohr had a yin-yang symbol in one of his quadrants. Heisenberg devotes the better part of a chapter writing about how the meaning of the CI beyond Physics will eventually come from various sources concerned with subjective state, and as I recall he mentioned both Western psychology and Buddhism both, specifically. So this is the what we might call the "classical measurement problem": in order to gain information from a system you have to exchange energy with it and that inevitably distorts the information you want to gain. Stick a thermometer in the ocean and the effect is negligible, but at small scales it's not. I've read ZD mention in passing before that the problem is recognized in fields other than physical measurement. Notice how this isn't specific to effects that are stochastic or that don't involve wave/particle duality? The measurement problem is great motivation for considering the uncertainty principle, but the two are very different, and that's because of the underlying mathematics of QM. And neither the classical measurement problem nor the uncertainty principle are the same the issue of the "Quantum Observer", presented most directly by the double-slit. I'll refrain from getting all wonky beyond making those distinctions, unless you want me to wonk-out about 'em that is. From what I've read about what motivated Einstein's objections it was primarily the loss of a deterministic clockwork Universe in terms of LaPlace. He also was of course smart enough to recognize from the get-go that QM wasn't, in the form it emerged (or even now) reconcilable with General Relativity. GR reflects what's been described as Einstein's existential perspective in this regard. "There is no quantum object independent of the observation of it" suffers from the ambiguity of qualitative expression. People might not like what the math implies, but they can't really fight it, either. One of the weirdest things about QM is what the word "Quantum" refers to directly. When an electron changes state in an atom it doesn't transition continuously from one state to another. The atom dances to a strobe light. While Heisenberg's matrix mechanics obsoleted Bohr's "solar-system" atomic model, it's still possible to associate the different energy levels with a distance of the electron from the nucleus in the different states -- it's just that the idea of the electron following a well-defined orbital path doesn't apply. So in terms of a classical metaphor, it would be as if every pitch was a strike, because the ball would leave the pitcher's hand and then suddenly materialize in the catcher's mitt. Without following the arc from the mound to the plate. There is a curious phemomenon in the double-slit experiment that shows the "observer" (which can be merely observing apparatus/mechanism) can change the results of the experiment even without direct influence. You can put a camera at either slit A or slit B, and you get a bullet pattern at the target showing a particle went through slit A or B. But sometimes the camera is watching slit B, but the particle went through slit A. The question is, how did the particle know there was a camera at slit B? And you are right about the definition of quantum, a jump occurs without the traversing of time or space. But there is also something curious here in relation to ND. The meaning of quantum (of energy) is a *chunk*, a discrete packet (meaning *it* stops and starts, meaning there is a boundary, of energy [this is shown in Einstein's 1905 photo-electric effect paper, his quantum paper, mentioned elsewhere]. Many physicists today consider that even time and space us quantized, that is, time and space are discontinuous. (ZD can chew on that a while).
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Post by zendancer on May 14, 2018 8:39:58 GMT -5
I would put it like this, "There is no quantum object (or any other object) independent of the imagining of it." Physicists assume that they observe independently-existing things, like rocks or trees. They don't. All thingness is imaginary. We can point to what they observe with the phrase "a field of being" or "what is" or ________________________. Is that to say rocks and trees don't exist? Not in the way that most people imagine. To "exist" is to come forth from; from what? From _____________________, which is infinite and unbounded. The surface of an automobile appears distinct and well-defined, but it's really not. It's disintegrating right in front of our eyes, but at a very slow rate. We call it "oxidation." If we came back and looked at the automobile 100,000 years from, it wouldn't look anything like it does today. In this sense every "thing" that we imagine as independently-existing is actually an aspect of a dynamic process that is changing every nanosecond. We are culturally conditioned to imagine that we are human beings distinguished and defined by the surface of the body's skin, but if we look closely, there is nothing distinct or remotely stable at the surface of the skin. There is only one thingless-thing here, and THAT has no boundaries. A major aspect of waking up from the concensus trance state is discovering that what we call "reality" is aware and unbounded, and that we are one-with THAT. Zen has numerous koans that are used to expose the illusion of thingness. Here are a few examples: 1. A ZM holds up a Zen stick and asks, "What is this?" If you answer, "It's a stick" or "It's reality" or "It's not a stick" or "It's a form of matter," you will be sent back to your meditation cushion to contemplate the issue further. 2. A ZM holds up a Zen stick in front of your face and asks, "Does this exist or not?" If you answer either yes or no, you'll be sent away to meditate some more. 3. If you begin to take parts and pieces off of a car, when does it cease to be a car? When we look, we see ______________________. We can imagine _______________ in an infinite number of ways. Most humans imagine that they see trees, rocks, automobiles, etc, and they imagine that those things independently exist and that they are observers observing those things. Non-dual traditions encourage people to penetrate the illusion of thingness and the illusion of a separate observer and to discover what is prior to the imagining of those things.
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Post by Deleted on May 14, 2018 9:16:23 GMT -5
Is that to say rocks and trees don't exist? Not in the way that most people imagine. To "exist" is to come forth from; from what? From _____________________, which is infinite and unbounded. The surface of an automobile appears distinct and well-defined, but it's really not. It's disintegrating right in front of our eyes, but at a very slow rate. We call it "oxidation." If we came back and looked at the automobile 100,000 years from, it wouldn't look anything like it does today. In this sense every "thing" that we imagine as independently-existing is actually an aspect of a dynamic process that is changing every nanosecond. We are culturally conditioned to imagine that we are human beings distinguished and defined by the surface of the body's skin, but if we look closely, there is nothing distinct or remotely stable at the surface of the skin. There is only one thingless-thing here, and THAT has no boundaries. A major aspect of waking up from the concensus trance state is discovering that what we call "reality" is aware and unbounded, and that we are one-with THAT. Zen has numerous koans that are used to expose the illusion of thingness. Here are a few examples: 1. A ZM holds up a Zen stick and asks, "What is this?" If you answer, "It's a stick" or "It's reality" or "It's not a stick" or "It's a form of matter," you will be sent back to your meditation cushion to contemplate the issue further. 2. A ZM holds up a Zen stick in front of your face and asks, "Does this exist or not?" If you answer either yes or no, you'll be sent away to meditate some more. 3. If you begin to take parts and pieces off of a car, when does it cease to be a car? When we look, we see ______________________. We can imagine _______________ in an infinite number of ways. Most humans imagine that they see trees, rocks, automobiles, etc, and they imagine that those things independently exist and that they are observers observing those things. Non-dual traditions encourage people to penetrate the illusion of thingness and the illusion of a separate observer and to discover what is prior to the imagining of those things. I like what you said and no disrespect intended -- Laughter knows what's coming next -- if this is true, why do you duck when the rock comes toward your head. Is it that the body doesn't quite believe what your head says?
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 14, 2018 10:54:32 GMT -5
Is that to say rocks and trees don't exist? Not in the way that most people imagine. To "exist" is to come forth from; from what? From _____________________, which is infinite and unbounded. The surface of an automobile appears distinct and well-defined, but it's really not. It's disintegrating right in front of our eyes, but at a very slow rate. We call it "oxidation." If we came back and looked at the automobile 100,000 years from, it wouldn't look anything like it does today. In this sense every "thing" that we imagine as independently-existing is actually an aspect of a dynamic process that is changing every nanosecond. We are culturally conditioned to imagine that we are human beings distinguished and defined by the surface of the body's skin, but if we look closely, there is nothing distinct or remotely stable at the surface of the skin. There is only one thingless-thing here, and THAT has no boundaries. A major aspect of waking up from the concensus trance state is discovering that what we call "reality" is aware and unbounded, and that we are one-with THAT. Zen has numerous koans that are used to expose the illusion of thingness. Here are a few examples: 1. A ZM holds up a Zen stick and asks, "What is this?" If you answer, "It's a stick" or "It's reality" or "It's not a stick" or "It's a form of matter," you will be sent back to your meditation cushion to contemplate the issue further. 2. A ZM holds up a Zen stick in front of your face and asks, "Does this exist or not?" If you answer either yes or no, you'll be sent away to meditate some more. 3. If you begin to take parts and pieces off of a car, when does it cease to be a car? When we look, we see ______________________. We can imagine _______________ in an infinite number of ways. Most humans imagine that they see trees, rocks, automobiles, etc, and they imagine that those things independently exist and that they are observers observing those things. Non-dual traditions encourage people to penetrate the illusion of thingness and the illusion of a separate observer and to discover what is prior to the imagining of those things. OK. When I was a kid we used to see 'dust devils' periodically, several a summer, just a small tornado, about 5 ft across, 8-10 ft tall. The red dot on Jupiter is just a storm, a storm that has lasted hundreds of years. It takes a whole universe to *make* a human being. And in one sense, we are just fertilizer. I used to do tree work. Sometimes we would argue when a tree branch was dead. Some would say, when you cut it off. But most branches, if you put in sandy soil, would live, and root, and eventually you could replant it. Willow trees are especially easy to root.
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Post by zendancer on May 14, 2018 11:54:59 GMT -5
Not in the way that most people imagine. To "exist" is to come forth from; from what? From _____________________, which is infinite and unbounded. The surface of an automobile appears distinct and well-defined, but it's really not. It's disintegrating right in front of our eyes, but at a very slow rate. We call it "oxidation." If we came back and looked at the automobile 100,000 years from, it wouldn't look anything like it does today. In this sense every "thing" that we imagine as independently-existing is actually an aspect of a dynamic process that is changing every nanosecond. We are culturally conditioned to imagine that we are human beings distinguished and defined by the surface of the body's skin, but if we look closely, there is nothing distinct or remotely stable at the surface of the skin. There is only one thingless-thing here, and THAT has no boundaries. A major aspect of waking up from the concensus trance state is discovering that what we call "reality" is aware and unbounded, and that we are one-with THAT. Zen has numerous koans that are used to expose the illusion of thingness. Here are a few examples: 1. A ZM holds up a Zen stick and asks, "What is this?" If you answer, "It's a stick" or "It's reality" or "It's not a stick" or "It's a form of matter," you will be sent back to your meditation cushion to contemplate the issue further. 2. A ZM holds up a Zen stick in front of your face and asks, "Does this exist or not?" If you answer either yes or no, you'll be sent away to meditate some more. 3. If you begin to take parts and pieces off of a car, when does it cease to be a car? When we look, we see ______________________. We can imagine _______________ in an infinite number of ways. Most humans imagine that they see trees, rocks, automobiles, etc, and they imagine that those things independently exist and that they are observers observing those things. Non-dual traditions encourage people to penetrate the illusion of thingness and the illusion of a separate observer and to discover what is prior to the imagining of those things. I like what you said and no disrespect intended -- Laughter knows what's coming next -- if this is true, why do you duck when the rock comes toward your head. Is it that the body doesn't quite believe what your head says? No, no. Just the opposite. The body understands perfectly; it's the head that gets lost in a dream. Nevertheless, you've just asked another great koan: "Why do you duck when a rock comes toward your head?" We could add some other mind-hooks like, "Why does an enlightened woman duck when someone throws a rock at her head?" Haha. If we so much as open our mouth to answer this kind of koan, it will show that we're stuck with intellectual understanding only. Something different is required. Here's a hint for people who are unfamiliar with koans and the issue they deal with: verbal linear mental mind talk is unnecessary for responding to someone who throws something at us. The body knows what to do without the necessity of conscious reflective thought.
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Post by zendancer on May 14, 2018 12:24:13 GMT -5
Not in the way that most people imagine. To "exist" is to come forth from; from what? From _____________________, which is infinite and unbounded. The surface of an automobile appears distinct and well-defined, but it's really not. It's disintegrating right in front of our eyes, but at a very slow rate. We call it "oxidation." If we came back and looked at the automobile 100,000 years from, it wouldn't look anything like it does today. In this sense every "thing" that we imagine as independently-existing is actually an aspect of a dynamic process that is changing every nanosecond. We are culturally conditioned to imagine that we are human beings distinguished and defined by the surface of the body's skin, but if we look closely, there is nothing distinct or remotely stable at the surface of the skin. There is only one thingless-thing here, and THAT has no boundaries. A major aspect of waking up from the concensus trance state is discovering that what we call "reality" is aware and unbounded, and that we are one-with THAT. Zen has numerous koans that are used to expose the illusion of thingness. Here are a few examples: 1. A ZM holds up a Zen stick and asks, "What is this?" If you answer, "It's a stick" or "It's reality" or "It's not a stick" or "It's a form of matter," you will be sent back to your meditation cushion to contemplate the issue further. 2. A ZM holds up a Zen stick in front of your face and asks, "Does this exist or not?" If you answer either yes or no, you'll be sent away to meditate some more. 3. If you begin to take parts and pieces off of a car, when does it cease to be a car? When we look, we see ______________________. We can imagine _______________ in an infinite number of ways. Most humans imagine that they see trees, rocks, automobiles, etc, and they imagine that those things independently exist and that they are observers observing those things. Non-dual traditions encourage people to penetrate the illusion of thingness and the illusion of a separate observer and to discover what is prior to the imagining of those things. OK. When I was a kid we used to see 'dust devils' periodically, several a summer, just a small tornado, about 5 ft across, 8-10 ft tall. The red dot on Jupiter is just a storm, a storm that has lasted hundreds of years. It takes a whole universe to *make* a human being. And in one sense, we are just fertilizer. I used to do tree work. Sometimes we would argue when a tree branch was dead. Some would say, when you cut it off. But most branches, if you put in sandy soil, would live, and root, and eventually you could replant it. Willow trees are especially easy to root. Exactly. The intellect is like camera that takes static photos (it actually functions more like a graphics generator hooked to a computer). If we look at an oak tree sprouting from an acorn, is the tiny sprout a tree? If not, then when does it become a tree? We have a separate mental image of a sprout, a tiny sapling, a young oak tree, a mature oak tree, an old oak tree, a dead oak tree, a failen oak tree, a rotted oak tree, etc. To capture the truth we'd need a video camera and about a 100 years of film because there's nothing static at all about what an oak tree is. _____________________is really a verb, but we imagine that it's a big noun (a universe) composed on little nouns (stars, planets, people, trees, etc). The idea that things (such as rocks or trees) were composed of smaller things (molecules and atoms) which were composed of smaller things (electrons, protons, neutrons) which were composed of still smaller things (quarks, mesons, pions, etc) finally became exposed as misleading or erroneous when machines got sophisticated enough to do quantum level experiments. QM has led (some? many?) scientists to realize that there's something fundamentally wrong with the basic assumption that there is an objective independently-existing reality composed of things. Does a rock exist? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we can make that distinction if we want to, but no, in the sense that there is nothing (no thing) separate from or within __________________ . When we make distinctions, we should never forget what we've done and thereby lose sight of the underlying unity of __________________. The advantage of becoming relatively free of thought is that the body learns to directly respond to whatever is happening, without having to think about what's happening and without having to think about an entity that is doing the responding. This is what Zen people call the state of "no mind."
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Post by laughter on May 14, 2018 18:38:00 GMT -5
I might have heard that about Erwin before. When you win a Nobel you have to design a coat of arms, and Bohr had a yin-yang symbol in one of his quadrants. Heisenberg devotes the better part of a chapter writing about how the meaning of the CI beyond Physics will eventually come from various sources concerned with subjective state, and as I recall he mentioned both Western psychology and Buddhism both, specifically. So this is the what we might call the "classical measurement problem": in order to gain information from a system you have to exchange energy with it and that inevitably distorts the information you want to gain. Stick a thermometer in the ocean and the effect is negligible, but at small scales it's not. I've read ZD mention in passing before that the problem is recognized in fields other than physical measurement. Notice how this isn't specific to effects that are stochastic or that don't involve wave/particle duality? The measurement problem is great motivation for considering the uncertainty principle, but the two are very different, and that's because of the underlying mathematics of QM. And neither the classical measurement problem nor the uncertainty principle are the same the issue of the "Quantum Observer", presented most directly by the double-slit. I'll refrain from getting all wonky beyond making those distinctions, unless you want me to wonk-out about 'em that is. From what I've read about what motivated Einstein's objections it was primarily the loss of a deterministic clockwork Universe in terms of LaPlace. He also was of course smart enough to recognize from the get-go that QM wasn't, in the form it emerged (or even now) reconcilable with General Relativity. GR reflects what's been described as Einstein's existential perspective in this regard. "There is no quantum object independent of the observation of it" suffers from the ambiguity of qualitative expression. People might not like what the math implies, but they can't really fight it, either. One of the weirdest things about QM is what the word "Quantum" refers to directly. When an electron changes state in an atom it doesn't transition continuously from one state to another. The atom dances to a strobe light. While Heisenberg's matrix mechanics obsoleted Bohr's "solar-system" atomic model, it's still possible to associate the different energy levels with a distance of the electron from the nucleus in the different states -- it's just that the idea of the electron following a well-defined orbital path doesn't apply. So in terms of a classical metaphor, it would be as if every pitch was a strike, because the ball would leave the pitcher's hand and then suddenly materialize in the catcher's mitt. Without following the arc from the mound to the plate. There is a curious phemomenon in the double-slit experiment that shows the "observer" (which can be merely observing apparatus/mechanism) can change the results of the experiment even without direct influence. You can put a camera at either slit A or slit B, and you get a bullet pattern at the target showing a particle went through slit A or B. But sometimes the camera is watching slit B, but the particle went through slit A. The question is, how did the particle know there was a camera at slit B? And you are right about the definition of quantum, a jump occurs without the traversing of time or space. But there is also something curious here in relation to ND. The meaning of quantum (of energy) is a *chunk*, a discrete packet (meaning *it* stops and starts, meaning there is a boundary, of energy [this is shown in Einstein's 1905 photo-electric effect paper, his quantum paper, mentioned elsewhere]. Many physicists today consider that even time and space us quantized, that is, time and space are discontinuous. (ZD can chew on that a while). Well, I don't think ZD has to chew on anything, but in fact one of the topics in sophomore Physcis is the Planck time, and as time and space are interchangeable, the complimentary Plank length. So the physical Universe doesn't really have an infinitely small scale as is idealized by the Mandlebrot set. Also, as the speed of light is finite, there's a theoretical limit on the furthest distance we can observe. So the physical world might seem unlimited, but, strictly speaking, the current theories report otherwise. Max Planck is the humble looking gent 2nd from left in the front row. It was Max, along with Dirac, Born and a few others, that took Heisenberg's epiphanic, lucky insight, all under Bohr's coordination, ran with it, and hammered out the first coherent version of QM from it.
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Post by laughter on May 14, 2018 18:44:36 GMT -5
Not in the way that most people imagine. To "exist" is to come forth from; from what? From _____________________, which is infinite and unbounded. The surface of an automobile appears distinct and well-defined, but it's really not. It's disintegrating right in front of our eyes, but at a very slow rate. We call it "oxidation." If we came back and looked at the automobile 100,000 years from, it wouldn't look anything like it does today. In this sense every "thing" that we imagine as independently-existing is actually an aspect of a dynamic process that is changing every nanosecond. We are culturally conditioned to imagine that we are human beings distinguished and defined by the surface of the body's skin, but if we look closely, there is nothing distinct or remotely stable at the surface of the skin. There is only one thingless-thing here, and THAT has no boundaries. A major aspect of waking up from the concensus trance state is discovering that what we call "reality" is aware and unbounded, and that we are one-with THAT. Zen has numerous koans that are used to expose the illusion of thingness. Here are a few examples: 1. A ZM holds up a Zen stick and asks, "What is this?" If you answer, "It's a stick" or "It's reality" or "It's not a stick" or "It's a form of matter," you will be sent back to your meditation cushion to contemplate the issue further. 2. A ZM holds up a Zen stick in front of your face and asks, "Does this exist or not?" If you answer either yes or no, you'll be sent away to meditate some more. 3. If you begin to take parts and pieces off of a car, when does it cease to be a car? When we look, we see ______________________. We can imagine _______________ in an infinite number of ways. Most humans imagine that they see trees, rocks, automobiles, etc, and they imagine that those things independently exist and that they are observers observing those things. Non-dual traditions encourage people to penetrate the illusion of thingness and the illusion of a separate observer and to discover what is prior to the imagining of those things. I like what you said and no disrespect intended -- Laughter knows what's coming next -- if this is true, why do you duck when the rock comes toward your head. Is it that the body doesn't quite believe what your head says? "heh heh".
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