Comments by TamHunt
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Posted on May 7 at 8:56 p.m.
Eckermann, I'll keep reading but the blog author already lost me with this statement:
"The problem is that when actual real astronomers such as myself are confronted with plasma cosmology, we have a hard time doing anything other than shaking our heads sadly, because it's so amazingly wrong, so patently silly if you know anything, that it's difficult even to know how to begin saying that it's wrong."
Plasma cosmology was first proposed by Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfven, who won his Nobel Prize for work in magnetohydrodynamics and later went on to apply these concepts to cosmology, both near and far. I think that qualifies him as an "actual real astronomer" type and should allow people to not dismiss plasma cosmology as "silly."
Posted on April 5 at 3:37 p.m.
PK, imagine that the universe is a single web of cause and effect. In fact, this is what the universe consists of, and nothing more. What I am suggesting is that mind is very much part of that causal web. So crowds focused on a single event like the burning of the Man will have an impact on that web, small but measurable through the impact on single quantum events like those produced by RNGs. And that's the really short answer. This is different from mainstream physics because mainstream physics suggests that the electromagnetic effects of human minds are insufficient to have any impact beyond the scalp. This new evidence from RNG experiments suggests that there is some additional cause and effect relationship at work.
Posted on April 2 at 11:17 p.m.
FWIW, @ 14noscams, while I don't think it's a big problem to call EM-induced action at a distance telekinesis, it is definitely confusing in this context because other commenters are right that I'm making a very different claim - that mind may impact matter through non-EM causal pathways, or using EM pathways in ways that are new to science.
Posted on April 2 at 11:16 p.m.
PK, first, the evidence should come first, regardless of whether we have a theory to explain it yet. This is of course a long debate in the philosophy of science and Einstein famously stated that it is the theory that determines what facts can be gathered - but his point was to be careful about being blinkered by extant theories.
That said, I think Dean's ideas may be in the ballpark but my personal hypothesis about these phenomena is that mass focus on a single event becomes a dynamic attractor for all mass/energy/mind in the vicinity of the crowd-focused event.
This idea is built upon the panpsychist notion that all matter has some associated mind and vice versa, though it is extremely rudimentary in most cases. At the level of individual quantum events, which is what RNGs are supposed to produce, we get randomness because the level of mind in these quantum events is so rudimentary that in the aggregate all the choices of each quantum event balances out to an even number of zeros and ones. So rather than chance at the quantum level, in the panpsychist conception of reality we have "choice not chance." But because these choices are so habit-based, due to their occurrence so low on the scale of mind, they may as well be called chance.
However, when a crowd of high level minds (like human minds) focuses on the same macro event, like the burning of the Man, there is apparently a small bias introduced into the local causal web that constitutes reality (each element of reality is interconnected with all other entities, but proximity is of course a large factor in that chain of interconnectedness).
It's akin to a form of persuasion, but a serendipitous persuasion in the case of crowd events. Similar experiments have been run with individuals focused on RNGs, trying to bias the outcomes one way or the other. So this is explicitly a type of persuasion. The evidence of an impact in these experiments is not as strong as it is for crowd events, but the fact that it works at all suggests that mind is causally impactful. And if the panpsychist notion of mind is accurate, all of reality is a smooth continuum of mind, all interconnected in some way in the vast web that constitutes reality.
So why would we see bias toward more zeros or more ones? I don't know, but I suspect that the initial bias of the crowd focus creates a positive feedback loop that could go either toward more ones or more zeros, and that the initial bias is entirely contingent on reaching the required threshold for a measurable signal.
Anyway, while this is clearly a very speculative framework, it is at least coherent and consistent. As always, I appreciate your feedback.
Posted on March 29 at 4:08 p.m.
Haha, Bill, same response as for PK: now why don't you address the EVIDENCE I've presented?
Posted on March 29 at 3:07 p.m.
haha, PK, now why don't you address the merits of my article? :) I'd love to hear your thoughts on the EVIDENCE.
Posted on March 27 at 9:49 a.m.
Great piece Robert.
Botany, last I checked the House is controlled by Republicans and the Senate is not filibuster-proof. Ergo: not much of Obama's agenda is getting through Congress nowadays.
That said, I don't know what Obama's anti-hunger agenda is. Robert, can you shed some light?
Posted on March 16 at 3:04 p.m.
Interesting - I read Kapstein's book a few years ago and found it quite good.
Posted on March 15 at 9:32 a.m.
pk, I think you'd enjoy Koch's book so check it out. I don't think Koch himself would suggest that he's worked out any detailed reconciliation of science and spirituality, but he's open enough to recognize that today's science is lacking in terms of providing spiritual succor in many ways.
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Posted on May 7 at 9:11 p.m.
And after reading through the rest of the blog post you linked to I'm not at all convinced. He makes sociological and psychological points questioning why on earth some fringe crazies would want to knock mainstream cosmology. And then he states that mainstream cosmology is highly adequate, thank you very much. But as I've discussed in my various articles on cosmology, relativity theory and the philosophy time there are rather large problems with mainstream cosmology that probably require some serious re-thinking. And that's why I'm devoting some time and space to examining various alternatives, including plasma cosmology.
On Is Gravity the Whole Story?