I do not belong to that part of humanity that believes that our brains produce our minds. Rather the reverse. If you study my website that should become obvious. As far as I am concerned, that is a well-considered position that has adequately dealt with my fear of death, the great nothing that lies ahead for all of us. So I no longer do have that fear. Which actually comes in handy with this corona crisis. From that perspective, your mind is not inside your brain, I have recently come across three interesting publications, a presentation on YouTube, a research report and a recent book that I would like to highlight here because they confirm and reinforce each other. This coming together of different scientific domains is called consilience.
Dr. Julie Beischel’s presentation at the SSE conference, June 2020
Dr. Julie Beischel is director of the Windbridge Research Center. She has PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and has been studying controversial topics such as mediums with highly scientific methods for many years. She has subjected mediums, individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased, to rigorous testing according to guidelines that every scientific research should always apply, such as double blind tests and the repeatable production of results. In addition, she also has a pleasant dose of dry humor as shown in her presentations.
In June 2019, Julie gave a presentation for the SSE on the subject of the identification we have with our body, which appears to be considerably more tenuous than we think. We part with it at the slightest occasion, as it turns out. In her presentation she discusses the ways in which we can easily lose that orientation, such as the rubber hand illusion, the speed with which our body renews, how much not-self-life lives in us such as our gut bacteria and the recent research by Etzel Cardeña from Lund University which presents very convincing evidence for the reality of PSI. Julie talks about striking (anecdotal) evidence from mediums that show that deceased relatives are still very concerned about their surviving descendants, about a verified and almost comical near-death experience, about a Thai boy who remembers a previous life as a snake who told in verified detail how that snake was killed. In short, you are not your body, it is a temporary avatar used by your real me, the real player, just like a self-chosen user image on websites or in video games.
View Julie Beischel’s presentation:
The Physical World as a Virtual Reality
Brian Whitworth published an interesting paper, The Physical World as a Virtual Reality, in 2007, where he puts excellent arguments forward for the idea that our world of experience is a Virtual Reality (VR). With the VR assumption, many properties of our experiential world can easily be explained that do not correspond very well with the usual assumption of a physical reality.
We view our world as an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists independently has been hard to reconcile for already some time with the goal of assimilating the findings of modern physics with the idea of an objective physical reality. Objective space and time should normally just ‘be’ there, but in our contemporary world, space shrinks and time slows down. Objective things should exist inherently, but in our world electrons are smeared probabilities spreading, tunneling, superimposing, and entangling in physically impossible ways. Cosmology now adds that our universe emerged from nowhere about 14 billion years ago. That is definitely not how an objective reality should behave!
In his paper he examines the possibility, one that is usually rejected out of hand, namely that the physical world is the result of a quantum process and thus virtual. What he proposes is not illogical, unscientific and certainly not incompatible with modern physics. Nor is it a modern idea because its origins date back thousands of years. His proposal is certainly relevant because modern physics has discovered that we actually live in a very strange world.
Consider the following counterintuitive but experimentally confirmed inferences from general relativity:
- Gravity slows down time,
- Gravity curves space,
- Speed slows down time,
- Speed increases the mass,
- The speed of light is an absolute given.
And quantum physics also teaches us from her experiments:
- Teleportation: quantum objects that ‘tunnel’ through a barrier,
- Faster than light communication with entangled particles,
- Creation out of nowhere,
- Multiple existence of particles in different locations (two-slit experiment),
- Physical effects without cause (radioactivity).
Whitworth argues convincingly that a VR not just explains excellently all these strange effects, but should even show them. A Big Bang can be explained for example as booting the VR program ‘Genesis’. Every VR program must have a beginning that, experienced from its inhabitants, seems to come from nowhere. The maximum speed that applies in our universe, on which Einstein based his theory of relativity but did not explain why there should be one, becomes the suddenly understandable consequence of the processor speed of the VR ‘computer’. In his proposal, a VR unites quantum physics and the theory of relativity, something where physicists still not have succeeded in after more than 100 years. At the end of his paper, Whitworth presents a very convincing comparison table comparing the properties that a VR must exhibit with the properties that we encounter in our ‘physical’ world. In other words, our bodies are Avatars. But who controls them?
In short, read his paper with an open mind.
Evolution 2.0
Perry Marshall, computer programmer, businessman and internet marketer, writes Evolution 2.0. He is the opposite of an evolution biologist who wants to explain everything that lives and grows as coming altogether from purely accidenteel mutations, with the occasional favorable one that survives and transfers its properties to his posterity, combined with the Darwinian idea of survival of the best adapted (read mutated) specimen in the population.
Marshall views living organisms, such as the cell, from the programmer’s point of view. He concludes that DNA is code, not a random set of instructions, but a real code that is decoded, executed and if necessary rewritten, by the cell.
He argues using a lot of factual material and applying Claude Shannon’s information theory that DNA code cannot possibly have been created by chance. Coincidence generates noise and noise destroys information. Always and irreparable.
The possibility that the code of DNA plus the reading and decoding mechanism in the cell is generated by random mutations is astronomically small and would be an example of spontaneously decreasing entropy. Something we never perceive.
He says this: if you come across a code that is also interpreted and executed, you need a coder. According to him, that’s the cell. Or the intelligence that controls the cell. For him, the cell is an extremely complex and highly intelligent living being that actively and purposefully adapts to its environment by adapting its DNA. Mutations in the DNA are therefore no coincidences but adaptations of the cell in its DNA in an attempt to withstand the challenges of the environment. He provides an enormous amount of convincing experimental and published evidence for his claim. But then I’m going to wonder where the intelligence that the cell displays resides.
Consilience: Avatars, the world as VR and goal oriented adapting living cells
When I combine those three divergent matters together, the result is to me a fairly complete and logically coinciding picture of reality as we experience it in everyday life. Supported by these three pillars, PSI research, the physical properties that a VR must exhibit and experimental research on heredity, an image emerges of a world that takes place within a highly advanced computer game in which living things serve as avatars for something that is best described as a conscious mind. A game with the aim of development – ie evolution 2.0 – by a continuously challenging environment.
Challenging indeed, but but also with ample provision for fun and beauty would we allow each other the opportunity. Death is only the end of the avatar, not the controller. When the controllers goal has not yet been reached, he just chooses another avatar, which is reincarnation. And what does almost every near-death experiencer, who had left the game stepping back into it because his goal had not yet been reached, tell us? It was mainly about love, selfless love for the other. Without any exception.
Paul J. van Leeuwen graduated in applied physics in Delft TU in 1974. There was little attention to the significance of quantum physics for the view on reality at that time. However, much later in his life he discovered that there is an important and clear connection between quantum physics and consciousness.
What he learned between then and today resulted in a post academic course in quantum physics for non-physicists. A little bit later he decided to put the contents of that course, and more, in a book published in Dutch: Kwantumfysica, Informatie en Bewustzijn – and started a website on the subject. He translated the Dutch version of his book in English, titled: ‘Quantum Physics is NOT Weird’.