Thoughts?

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: Yea but being a witch is so much more fun than using boring old google. :evil:

Hmm I try and leave things like sorcery where they belong - in children's fairytales - until the day their utility can be shown.

As for the OP, I'm neither an anatomist nor a specialist in computer technology, but I would like a citation where brains are referred to as quantum computers in something like, say, medicine, where people actually pick their words with care and mean what they say through them.
Now, strictly speaking all ever so marginally verifiable records seem to indicate that all of our individual knowledge and experience vanishes irrevocably as the brain's biochemical activity ceases. It's not even a step function, but appears to be rather continuous. Provided the brain survives to an extent where third parties can still interface with it, the more damage it suffers, the more of its undamaged form is lost. This goes for all things ranging from memory, to pattern recognition, capacities for language or artistic expression, range of emotions; pretty much anything we attribute to the brain can be damaged or broken in proportion to the damage the brain suffers. To suppose then that when it finally dies completely, it is reassembled into a whole again on some kind of cosmic hard drive to be accessed by a reincarnation is in my humble opinion somewhat... unwarranted.

But as is (probably falsely) attributed to Aristotle to have said, it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it, and so in an attempt to pretend being one, I shall grant a hypothetical for the sake of the discussion and focus instead on a far more relevant problem with the proposition.

Let's suppose that there is this cosmic stem of minds, the Force, as you put it, from whence we all spawned to live out our lifetimes and return to it upon our demise. Let's say that miscommunication between this hub and an individual tentacle in form of the machine that is the human is a cause of a non-empty subset of severe mental illnesses and disorders. What would you then propose be this further study like, that would allow us to access the hub more effectively and reliably? Surely, chanting codes or praying to it or even taking two hours out of our day to meditate on it guarantees us nothing of the sort. So how would we actually study this thing, if it was there? How would we even know that it is there if all we are witnessing is people with various kinds of chemical imbalances or physical trauma? Would a hypothetical world with the cosmic cloud drive look any different in a practical sense from a hypothetical world without?
This is in my opinion the only relevant and the single most devastating problem of the idea. I wouldn't dare preempting your response, but I suspect nonetheless that we are talking about something essentially unfalsifiable. As such I suspect this is something inaccessible, something we cannot make any use for. In a world where communication is as fast as it has become, in a world interconnected by a net, a web, if you will, as wide as all of the world, why would we spend so much as a penny of our wealth or as a second of our time researching what would at best grant us only what we already have, and most likely just be a dead end resource drain?

You can always trust Gisteron to end a conversation with science ....

What he says is true, it's only a theory. No reasonable scientific evidence has been found to support this notion. Our understanding of quantum mechanics is still relatively low as of now, so the possibility cannot yet be ruled out. For now it's something that you either believe or you don't.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/489998

I think the point I was making was that I'm not sure in what way it is falsifiable or useful. Sure, I also said that given what we know it makes little sense, but a far more pressing issue is whether it even can make any. It's not a theory one way or the other, since that actually would require evidence, but I for one wasn't asking for evidence, only for a way of approaching the question. You know, that studying you mentioned in the OP and have now replaced with just either believing or not.

As for our understanding of quantum mechanics, low though it might be, we know enough for there to be an entire class' worth of teaching material accessible enough to be presented to undergraduates. And that's not even all of it. For MSc. degree students I am counting as many as five different quantum physics classes, and these are only the ones with the word "quantum" right there in the name. I'm not even including any derivative classes like solid state physics, nuclear physics, superconductors, laser and plasma physics and so on and of course only limiting myself to physics, not counting anything in quantum chemistry or computer science. Little though we know, we know enough for there to be books about it, and no "possibility" doesn't need to be ruled out if there is no indication that there is the possibility.

Huffington Post is not a medical or computer engineering journal, the article doesn't link or refer to or cite anything that is (or anything at all, really), and the author himself seems to be as much an authority on brain anatomy or computer technology as either of us.

So, what kind of proper study (to put it in your original words) do you propose there could be that would help us access this hypothetical cosmic hub mind and how do we know that we do when we do?

I heard a person speculate, and I am paraphrasing… the brain is part of the physical body. Neurons fire and store memories and knowledge; chemical reactions are physical reactions to how the soul interprets experiences and the brain physically stores that information. So if you jump out of a plane the chemical reaction in the brain is a physical reaction to the perceived experience. The soul is a spiritual connection to God.

He went on a while and I really don’t remember it all word for word. But the gist I got from it was that our bodies are vessels where the soul, spirit, experiences existence. And that the soul was connected to or a part of a much larger, greater whole. Like in the story of the blind men and the elephant, I might be the glimpse of the elephant’s leg and you might be a glimpse of the trunk.

I know this is vague and doesn’t explain it very well. But that is probably because I don’t understand the concept well enough to accurately articulate it.

steamboat28 wrote:

Kyrin Wyldstar wrote: Yea but being a witch is so much more fun than using boring old google. :evil:

¡Porque!

Duh!!!

hahahhahahha :woohoo: :laugh:

An article from a Real professor of Physics and Astronomy.

http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/is_the_brain_a_quantum_device

Wescli Wardest wrote: I heard a person speculate, and I am paraphrasing… the brain is part of the physical body. Neurons fire and store memories and knowledge; chemical reactions are physical reactions to how the soul interprets experiences and the brain physically stores that information. So if you jump out of a plane the chemical reaction in the brain is a physical reaction to the perceived experience. The soul is a spiritual connection to God.

He went on a while and I really don’t remember it all word for word. But the gist I got from it was that our bodies are vessels where the soul, spirit, experiences existence. And that the soul was connected to or a part of a much larger, greater whole.

If this were actually the case how does the immaterial interact with the material? There is no definable mechanism that allows “mind/soul” to interact with body. There is no doubt that we "perceive" a separation between the mind and the body but how does the soul cause the body to interpret or otherwise "store" the experience? Maybe the Midichlorians?

“Midichlorians are microscopic life forms that exist in all of us. They are in a symbiotic relationship with us and life could not exist without them. They constantly speak to us and tell us the will of the force.”

As of now I agree with Gisteron that if such a universal "cloud drive" were to exist, I don't see how we could study it directly or ever confirm its existence while we are a part of it. It would be like the every individual spider of Googlebot knowing all of the information ever accessed by Google. If every individual could access the collective wisdom and experiences of the universe, there would be no need for individuals. One "god" would be enough to have every experience possible.

More on Googlebot, for those interested...

I do think we are currently trying very hard to create a practical working version of the "cloud drive" you hint at. We already have to some extent with the world wide web and actual cloud drives. Just in the past 25 years my access to music has gone from 30 or so CDs in my collection to billions of songs available online. While these drives and servers may not record our actual experiences, they can record our written explanations of our experiences for future generations to study and compare to their own.

Maybe someday we will discover a way to upload the brain's memories to a drive or server that everyone else can access, but I would have to ask why we would want that? Most of the fun in life comes from discovering something new and experiencing it for yourself. I go to a Metallica concert for the unique opportunity to experience their music live, in that venue, in that moment, with those people. That's not the same as watching a video of it on YouTube. I'll stick with making my own memories and cherishing them as mine alone.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1209795/Reincarnated-Our-son-World-War-II-pilot-come-life.html