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Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Reality And Time


26th May 2005, 11:30 PM #1

Aleksander Samarin
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 6

Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Reality and Time
September 2003
by Professor Alek Samarin

When I see a person (and even perceive an object by touch, smell, etc.), I seem to recognise various manifestations of a human being, but in reality I perceive a cloud of atoms and sub-atomic particles, which in themselves only come into being as a result of our consciousness, as, for example, seen by a theoretical physicist David Bohm [Ref. Quantum Implications in Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order, Edited by Hiley and Peat, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1987 ; also Ref. Karl Pribram “Languages of the Brain”, Wadsworth Publishing, Calif., 1977].

Also quoting from Carlos Castaneda: ”Tales of Power”, Simon & Schuster, N.Y., 1974, page 100: “We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description [and I would call it a deception – A.S.] that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime”.

And another quotation from Michael Talbot: “The Holographic Universe”, Grafton Books, London, 1991, (page 46) : “ One of Bohm’s most startling assertions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world…”, and (page 47): “The constant and flowing exchange between the two orders explains how particles, such as electron in the positronium atom, can shape-shift from one kind of particle to another…” “..It also explains how a quantum can manifest as either a particle or a wave…”, and (page 54): “For Pribram, this synthesis made him realize that the objective world does not exist, at least not in the way we are accustomed to believing. What is ‘out there’ is a vast ocean of waves and frequencies, and reality looks concrete to us only because our brains are able to take this holographic blur and convert it into sticks and stones and other familiar objects that make up our world…. , (page 55): “According to Pribram this does not mean that there aren’t china cups and grains of beach sand out there. It simply means that a china cup has two very different aspects to its reality. When it is filtered through the lens of our brain it manifests as a cup. But if we could get rid of our lenses, we’d experience it as an interference pattern. Which one is real and which is illusion? ‘Both are real to me’, says Pribram, ’or, if you want to say, neither of them are real'”.

Time is an integral part of the stationary Time-Space Continuum. What we perceive as a “movement of time” is in reality a movement of various physical, mental etc. processes in time (or more correctly in the Time-Space). We perceive this movement in a form of a swinging pendulum of a grandfather clock, or as the vibration of atoms in a caesium atomic clock, in the planetary movements or in the firing of nerve impulses and in the extremely complex processes occurring in our brain.

This is how our notion or our illusion of what we perceive as the “rate of flow of time” is created. Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel in his book: ”Man, the Unknown”, Penguin Books, N.Y., 1948, distinguishes manifestations of time as physical, inner, intrinsic, physiological and psychological. It is, of course, not the time which is altered, but the various courses of events which move through the stationary time at different rates. This phenomenon is particularly dramatic in the so called Near Death Experiences, such as reported by Drs. E. Kubler-Ross, R.A. Moody and K. Ring, among many others. In the state of clinical death, the condition which Germans call scheintod, some patients apparently experience total recall of their entire lives in, as they describe it, “an instant”. Quoting from Kenneth Ring, “Life at Death - a Scientific Iinvestigations of the Near-Death Experiences”, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, N.Y., 1980, (page 245): “In this state, there is no time, there is an immediate perception of the past, present and future as if on the present moment”. To me it is apparent, that it is not the ‘rate of flow of time’ that has changed, but the ‘rate of a person’s mental progression through time’.

Thus, in the Time-Space Continuum we move through time, just as we move through space, but of course in one direction only. The past, the time which we have journeyed through no longer exists for us. It is in deaths hands. The future may or may not happen, as we ourselves may no longer exist, without any precognition as to when and how it is likely to happen. But happen it surely will. And the present, that instant moment of transition from the not yet existing (and possibly not ever existing) future to the non-existing past only manifests itself as a fiction. For as soon as we can think of this illusive, ever sliding from the future into the past moment, by stating: “Now!” - it is already gone, lost forever in the past. That, which we are attempting to catch as “present” is always instantly disappearing in the “past”. It is apparent to me, that in reality there exists neither the past, nor the future for us, and the present is intangible, illusive, continuously melting into the past. People say: “time goes”. But in reality “Time stays – we go”!