Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
AVICII - THE NIGHTS
Last edited:
Music Selections
- Thread starter Joe Mahmood
- Start date
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
SHINEDOWN - HUMAN RADIO
LETTING REALITY SPEAK FOR ITSELF
Everyone who has tackled the problem of consciousness feels that they have reality on their side. Yet if you look more closely, no theoretical model can tell us what's real. Radar can tell you when it's raining, but only can tell that rain is wet - experience is the only judge. It's remarkable that the nuclear inferno inside a star can be reduced to 0s and 1s, but the concepts of zero and one are human. Without us, they wouldn't exist.
In fact, there is no information anywhere in nature without a human being who understands the concept of information. With information theory severely undermined, the most common fallback is to say, "We can wait for a better theory someday. Meanwhile, there's new brain research emerging every day. It will tell us the story eventually." But this kind of certainty is based on a very shaky assumption, that Brain = Mind.
The entire field of neuroscience is based on this assumption. Undoubtedly there is activity in the brain when a person is alive and conscious, while death brings the cessation of this activity. But imagine a world where all music comes through radios. If the radios break down, the music dies. Yet this event wouldn't prove that radios are the source of music. They transmit it, which is a big difference from their being Mozart or Bach. The same could be true of the brain. It could simply be the transmitting device that brings us our thoughts and feelings. No matter how powerful brain scans ever become, there's no proof that neural activity creates the mind.
The problem with Brain = Mind is twofold. First, there's the assumption that the mind is an epiphenomenon, in other words, a secondary effect. If you light a bonfire, the primary phenomenon is combustion; the secondary phenomenon is the heat that the fire gives off. Heat is an epiphenomenon. In brain research, it's assumed that the physical activity inside neurons is the primary phenomenon; the subjective sense of thinking, feeling, and sensing is secondary. Mind becomes an epiphenomenon. Yet it's fairly obvious that being aware of who you are, where you are, and what the world looks like - everything that comes with mind - is just as likely to be primary. Music came before radios, and this fact isn't undermined by studying how radios work down to their atoms and molecules.
The second problem with Brian = Mind is that we have no way to see nature accurately. It's hard to grasp just how complete our blindness to reality is. The narrator in Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin is a nameless young man who has arrived in Germany during the rise of Hitler. Instead of showing us how appalled he is, Isherwood wants us to make our own judgements, because only then will we believe in the horror of what the narrator sees. The young man begins his tale by saying,
"I am a camera with it's shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."
But a camera is exactly what the human brain isn't, or the human mind. We are participants in reality, which makes us totally involved. Quantum physics is famous for bringing the observer into the whole problem of doing science, and equally famous for not solving what the observer's role is.
The practice of science didn't grind to a halt waiting for the solution, and therefore a fallback position has been adopted: leave the observer out. For some physicists, this means "leave the observer out for the time being," while for others, the vast majority, it means "leave the observer out all the time - it's not as if he really matters." But reality begin with "I am," minus the camera. Every person wakes up in the morning to face the world through first-party consciousness. It's an inescapable fact.
With two strikes against it, Brain = Mind should be seriously doubted. Ironically, however, the mind needs the brain and can't do without it, so far as we know. Like the imaginary world where radios are the only way to access music, our world has no access to the mind except through the human brain. In his memoirs, psychiatrist David Viscot reported a life-changing incident that happened to him in a hospital when he was in training. He walked into a patient's room just as the patient died, and in that instant he saw a light leave the body, for all the world like the soul or spirit departing.
The fact that he had seen such a thing - which isn't uncommon among hospice workers - shook Viscott's beliefs to their core. His worldview couldn't account for such a phenomenon, and he knew that his medical colleagues wouldn't believe him. If they had a soul, that didn't mean they believed in souls. Likewise, even if your brain is just a receiving device for the mind, you can still argue that the brain is the mind. (Another proof that your belief system is more powerful than reality.)
Excerpts from YOU ARE THE UNIVERSE - Discovering Your Cosmic Self And Why It Matters, by Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Menas C. Kafatos, PH.D.
https://www.deepakchopra.com/
https://www.menaskafatos.com/
LETTING REALITY SPEAK FOR ITSELF
Everyone who has tackled the problem of consciousness feels that they have reality on their side. Yet if you look more closely, no theoretical model can tell us what's real. Radar can tell you when it's raining, but only can tell that rain is wet - experience is the only judge. It's remarkable that the nuclear inferno inside a star can be reduced to 0s and 1s, but the concepts of zero and one are human. Without us, they wouldn't exist.
In fact, there is no information anywhere in nature without a human being who understands the concept of information. With information theory severely undermined, the most common fallback is to say, "We can wait for a better theory someday. Meanwhile, there's new brain research emerging every day. It will tell us the story eventually." But this kind of certainty is based on a very shaky assumption, that Brain = Mind.
The entire field of neuroscience is based on this assumption. Undoubtedly there is activity in the brain when a person is alive and conscious, while death brings the cessation of this activity. But imagine a world where all music comes through radios. If the radios break down, the music dies. Yet this event wouldn't prove that radios are the source of music. They transmit it, which is a big difference from their being Mozart or Bach. The same could be true of the brain. It could simply be the transmitting device that brings us our thoughts and feelings. No matter how powerful brain scans ever become, there's no proof that neural activity creates the mind.
The problem with Brain = Mind is twofold. First, there's the assumption that the mind is an epiphenomenon, in other words, a secondary effect. If you light a bonfire, the primary phenomenon is combustion; the secondary phenomenon is the heat that the fire gives off. Heat is an epiphenomenon. In brain research, it's assumed that the physical activity inside neurons is the primary phenomenon; the subjective sense of thinking, feeling, and sensing is secondary. Mind becomes an epiphenomenon. Yet it's fairly obvious that being aware of who you are, where you are, and what the world looks like - everything that comes with mind - is just as likely to be primary. Music came before radios, and this fact isn't undermined by studying how radios work down to their atoms and molecules.
The second problem with Brian = Mind is that we have no way to see nature accurately. It's hard to grasp just how complete our blindness to reality is. The narrator in Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin is a nameless young man who has arrived in Germany during the rise of Hitler. Instead of showing us how appalled he is, Isherwood wants us to make our own judgements, because only then will we believe in the horror of what the narrator sees. The young man begins his tale by saying,
"I am a camera with it's shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."
But a camera is exactly what the human brain isn't, or the human mind. We are participants in reality, which makes us totally involved. Quantum physics is famous for bringing the observer into the whole problem of doing science, and equally famous for not solving what the observer's role is.
The practice of science didn't grind to a halt waiting for the solution, and therefore a fallback position has been adopted: leave the observer out. For some physicists, this means "leave the observer out for the time being," while for others, the vast majority, it means "leave the observer out all the time - it's not as if he really matters." But reality begin with "I am," minus the camera. Every person wakes up in the morning to face the world through first-party consciousness. It's an inescapable fact.
With two strikes against it, Brain = Mind should be seriously doubted. Ironically, however, the mind needs the brain and can't do without it, so far as we know. Like the imaginary world where radios are the only way to access music, our world has no access to the mind except through the human brain. In his memoirs, psychiatrist David Viscot reported a life-changing incident that happened to him in a hospital when he was in training. He walked into a patient's room just as the patient died, and in that instant he saw a light leave the body, for all the world like the soul or spirit departing.
The fact that he had seen such a thing - which isn't uncommon among hospice workers - shook Viscott's beliefs to their core. His worldview couldn't account for such a phenomenon, and he knew that his medical colleagues wouldn't believe him. If they had a soul, that didn't mean they believed in souls. Likewise, even if your brain is just a receiving device for the mind, you can still argue that the brain is the mind. (Another proof that your belief system is more powerful than reality.)
Excerpts from YOU ARE THE UNIVERSE - Discovering Your Cosmic Self And Why It Matters, by Deepak Chopra, M.D. and Menas C. Kafatos, PH.D.
https://www.deepakchopra.com/
https://www.menaskafatos.com/
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
LUDOVICO EINAUDI - ELEGY FOR THE ARCTIC
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
MAITRE GIMS FT. SIA - JE TE PARDONNE ( I FORGIVE YOU)
WORMHOLE
The simplest example of an Einstein-Rosen bridge is the looking glass from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On one side of the looking glass is the countryside of Oxford, England. On the other side is the fantasy world of Wonderland, to which Alice is instantly transported when she puts her finger through the glass.
Wormholes are a favorite plot device in the movies. Han Solo sends the Millennium Falcon through hyperspace by propelling it through a wormhole. The refrigerator that Sigourney Weaver's character opens in Ghostbusters is a wormhole through which she peers at an entire universe. In C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the wardrobe is the wormhole connecting the English countryside to Narnia.
WORMHOLE were discovered by analyzing the mathematics of black holes, which are collapsed giant star whose gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape. Their escape velocity is the speed of light. In the past, black holes were thought to be stationary and to have infinite gravity, called a singularity. But all the black holes that have been recorded in space are spinning quite rapidly. In 1963, physicist Roy Kerr discovered that a spinning black hole, if it was moving fast enough, would not necessarily collapse to a pinpoint but to a spinning ring. The ring is stable because centrifugal force prevent it from collapsing. So where does everything that falls into a black hole go? Physicists do not yet know. But one possibility is that matter can emerge from the other side through what is called a white hole. Scientists have looked for white holes, which would release matter rather than swallow it up, but have not found any so far.
If you approached the spinning ring of a black hole, you would witness incredible distortions of space and time. You might see light beams captured billions of years ago by the wormhole's gravity. You might even meet copies of yourself. Your atoms might be stretched by tidal forces in a disturbing and lethal process called spaghettification.
If you entered the ring itself, you might be expelled through a white hole in a parallel universe on the other side. Imagine taking two sheets of paper, held parallel to each other, then drilling a hole through them with a pencil to connect them. If you traveled along the pencil, you would pass between two parallel universes. However, if you passed through the ring a second time, you would arrive at another universe. Each time you went into the ring, you would reach a different universe, the same way that entering an elevator allows you to move between different floors of an apartment building, except in this case you could never return to the same floor.
Gravity would be finite as you entered the ring, so you would not necessarily be crushed to death. However, if the ring was not spinning fast enough, it could still collapse on you and kill you. But it may be possible to stabilize the ring artificially by adding something called negative matter or negative energy. A stable wormhole is therefore a balancing act, and the key is to maintain the right mixture of positive and negative energy. You need lots of positive energy to naturally create the gateway between universes, as with a black hole. But you also need to create negative matter or energy artificially to keep the gateway open and prevent a collapse.
Negative matter is quite different from antimatter and has never been detected in nature. Negative matter has bizarre antigravitational properties, meaning that it would fall up, rather than down. (By contrast, antimatter is theorized to fall down, not up.) If it existed on the Earth billions of years ago, it would have been repelled by the matter of the planet and and would have floated into outer space. Perhaps that's why we haven't found any.
Although physicists have seen no evidence of negative matter, negative energy has actually been created in the laboratory. This keeps alive the hope of science fiction fans who dream of one day traveling through wormholes to distant stars. However, the amount of negative energy that has been created in the laboratory is minuscule, far too small to drive a starship. To create enough negative energy to stabilize a wormhole would require an extremely advanced technology, which we will discuss in more detail in chapter 13. So for the foreseeable future, hyperdrive wormhole starships are beyond our capability.
But recently there has been some excitement generated by another means to warp space-time.
Excerpts extracted from THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY by Michio Kaku.
https://mkaku.org/
WORMHOLE
The simplest example of an Einstein-Rosen bridge is the looking glass from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On one side of the looking glass is the countryside of Oxford, England. On the other side is the fantasy world of Wonderland, to which Alice is instantly transported when she puts her finger through the glass.
Wormholes are a favorite plot device in the movies. Han Solo sends the Millennium Falcon through hyperspace by propelling it through a wormhole. The refrigerator that Sigourney Weaver's character opens in Ghostbusters is a wormhole through which she peers at an entire universe. In C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the wardrobe is the wormhole connecting the English countryside to Narnia.
WORMHOLE were discovered by analyzing the mathematics of black holes, which are collapsed giant star whose gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape. Their escape velocity is the speed of light. In the past, black holes were thought to be stationary and to have infinite gravity, called a singularity. But all the black holes that have been recorded in space are spinning quite rapidly. In 1963, physicist Roy Kerr discovered that a spinning black hole, if it was moving fast enough, would not necessarily collapse to a pinpoint but to a spinning ring. The ring is stable because centrifugal force prevent it from collapsing. So where does everything that falls into a black hole go? Physicists do not yet know. But one possibility is that matter can emerge from the other side through what is called a white hole. Scientists have looked for white holes, which would release matter rather than swallow it up, but have not found any so far.
If you approached the spinning ring of a black hole, you would witness incredible distortions of space and time. You might see light beams captured billions of years ago by the wormhole's gravity. You might even meet copies of yourself. Your atoms might be stretched by tidal forces in a disturbing and lethal process called spaghettification.
If you entered the ring itself, you might be expelled through a white hole in a parallel universe on the other side. Imagine taking two sheets of paper, held parallel to each other, then drilling a hole through them with a pencil to connect them. If you traveled along the pencil, you would pass between two parallel universes. However, if you passed through the ring a second time, you would arrive at another universe. Each time you went into the ring, you would reach a different universe, the same way that entering an elevator allows you to move between different floors of an apartment building, except in this case you could never return to the same floor.
Gravity would be finite as you entered the ring, so you would not necessarily be crushed to death. However, if the ring was not spinning fast enough, it could still collapse on you and kill you. But it may be possible to stabilize the ring artificially by adding something called negative matter or negative energy. A stable wormhole is therefore a balancing act, and the key is to maintain the right mixture of positive and negative energy. You need lots of positive energy to naturally create the gateway between universes, as with a black hole. But you also need to create negative matter or energy artificially to keep the gateway open and prevent a collapse.
Negative matter is quite different from antimatter and has never been detected in nature. Negative matter has bizarre antigravitational properties, meaning that it would fall up, rather than down. (By contrast, antimatter is theorized to fall down, not up.) If it existed on the Earth billions of years ago, it would have been repelled by the matter of the planet and and would have floated into outer space. Perhaps that's why we haven't found any.
Although physicists have seen no evidence of negative matter, negative energy has actually been created in the laboratory. This keeps alive the hope of science fiction fans who dream of one day traveling through wormholes to distant stars. However, the amount of negative energy that has been created in the laboratory is minuscule, far too small to drive a starship. To create enough negative energy to stabilize a wormhole would require an extremely advanced technology, which we will discuss in more detail in chapter 13. So for the foreseeable future, hyperdrive wormhole starships are beyond our capability.
But recently there has been some excitement generated by another means to warp space-time.
Excerpts extracted from THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY by Michio Kaku.
https://mkaku.org/
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
MUMFORD & SONS - BELIEVE
ECHOES
Coincidence experiences can sneak up like ghosts, insinuating themselves into the thought process and surreptitiously shifting you to a different place altogether. These strange and eerie reverberations can be bewildering and disconcerting. But they can also bring comfort, as was the case with the wife of American science writer Michael Shermer, founder of the The Skeptics Society. Though naturally inclined to believe that coincidences are simply chance events, Michael admits he was nonplussed by what happened.
The event took place on 25 June 2014, the day Michael married Jennifer Graf, from Kiln, Germany. Jennifer treasured an old Philips transistor radio left to her by her beloved grandfather Walter, but despite Michael's attempts at 'percussive maintenance' it had stopped working and languished uselessly in a dark drawer in their bedroom.
The wedding ceremony was conducted in Michael and Jennifer's home, where they said their vows and exchanged rings surrounded by family and friends. Far from her childhood home in Germany, Jennifer felt a twinge of sadness and whispered to Michael that she wished her grandfather had been there to give her away.
Moments later, the newlyweds heard music playing from somewhere in the house. They traced the sound to their bedroom. Jennifer opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, from which a romantic love song was drifting.
Though as devout a sceptic as her new husband, Jennifer exclaimed: 'My grandfather is here with us. I am not alone.'
Michael says that later that night they fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from the radio. The following day it stopped working and has remained silent ever since.
As a scientist, Michael says he knows that the cause was probably some sort of electrical anomaly and that the laws of probability allow for such strange coincidences. But adds: 'I have to admit; it rocked me back on my heels and shook my scepticism to its core. I savoured the experience more than the explanation.'
Michael might also savour the following stories, involving strange echoes from the past.
Extracted from BEYOND COINCIDENCE by Martin Plimmer and Brian King
It’s inexplicable: A broken radio plays soothing music at just the right time
By Wray Herbert
Jan. 27, 2018 at 4:06 a.m. GMT+8
Wray Herbert is the author of "On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits."
Midway into this ambitious, erudite volume, science historian and professional skeptic Michael Shermer relates this intriguing personal story: In 2014, his fiancee (now wife) Jennifer Graf had moved to California from Germany, bringing with her a Philips transistor radio, a gift from her late and beloved grandfather, Walter. Walter had been a surrogate father to Graf, and she had fond memories of listening to music with him, but the radio wasn't working. She and Shermer switched out the batteries, tried various stations and otherwise fiddled with the machine, but in frustration ended up tossing it into a desk drawer in the bedroom.
Months later, following a small wedding ceremony at their home, Graf was feeling melancholy and disconnected from her family. The newlyweds took a quiet moment together, away from the group, and at that precise moment music started wafting from the bedroom. They followed the sound, which was a love song, and traced it to the desk drawer, indeed to the "broken" radio. It was, Shermer recalls in his book "Heavens on Earth," a "spine-tingling experience."
And it gets better. The radio could have been tuned to any station, or to no station at all, but it was playing just the kind of emotionally comforting music the couple needed at that moment. The radio continued to broadcast similar music all evening, then went silent. It has remained silent since, despite Shermer's efforts to revive it.
What are we to make of Shermer's "spine-tingling experience?" What does Shermer make of it, long after the fact? He is a trained scientist and, more important, a devoted skeptic who has built a career debunking any and all claims of the paranormal. Yet by his own account he has difficulty dismissing this extraordinary experience as a psychic anomaly. The physics of the radio suddenly playing might be easily explained — a change in humidity, a speck of dust, whatever — but the timing and emotional significance of the experience are uncanny, and indeed impossible to explain with the scientific insights available to us now.
Shermer devotes considerable space to this personal story, as I have here, because it encapsulates the human condition. Ever since the earliest humans became aware of their mortality, they — we — have been striving to make sense of the big chill and what comes after. Death is undeniable, yet unknowable, a mystery that eludes our intellect, so we must come up with ways to make it all meaningful, something more than nothingness. This dilemma leads inevitably to explanations — beliefs — that include immortality, the soul, resurrection and, most important here, heaven.
Consider the vocabulary we humans have invented for heaven: the afterlife, Arcadia, dreamland, Eden, Elysium, hereafter, kingdom come, paradise, land of milk and honey, nirvana, Shangri-La, Zion. By any other name, Shermer writes, heaven is "the empyrean residence of gods and other preternatural essences — angels, demons, ghosts, souls — that have, to append a few common idioms, transcended, crossed over, passed through, passed away, given up the ghost, or gone the way of all flesh from the here and now into the hereafter." The belief that death is not final is overwhelmingly popular: Since the 1990s, the Gallup polling organization has consistently found that about 3 in 4 Americans believe in heaven of some kind. A survey of people in 23 countries found that more than half of respondents believe in an afterlife. So pervasive is this conviction that even a third of agnostics and atheists proclaim belief in an afterlife.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...c4fcc8-d480-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html
29th October 2020
I am one of those who do not believe that the religion doctrinaires performed by individuals will gain God's favours. I believe that matters of the conscience is important and most importantly what lies within our hearts is the top priority that would be reviewed by God.
I believe too that prayers offered to decease loved ones would be received by them without any barriers or any doubts. As a saying goes, "I will always be in your heart."
If you want to see the devil, see yourselves in the mirror.
We are all here to do good deeds to one another. We have forgotten to live up to that main purpose of our existence here because of greed. One day our sojourn on earth will end and our souls will return to the unseen realm.
I believe truth lies within the unseen realm. I am looking and researching for that truth in the unseen dimension now, I guess until my last breath.
2nd November 2020
During my life time when I was in Indonesia from August 1992 to December 1995, I had met and spoken to many Spirits through someone who was very close and dear to me. To make the story short, it was until I reached Bali and decided to live there permanently, I had encountered Spirits who were all Christians through that same person who was very close and dear to me. These Christian Spirits, especially a White Boy Spirits, taught many things about Love and how to love too through our daily conversation. I felt their strong Love for me and I had loved them too. They were like a 'human' family to me though they were Spirits.
They told me not to tell that person about them that they used her mind and physical body to communicate with me. Besides communication they also spend time together in outside activities too like swimming, eating, travelling etcs. If I told about them they said they would never come and meet me again. However, I did tell her about them and she just laughed at me. She said I was talking nonsense. She totally could not recall about it and what she had actually done while the Spirits were with her.
However, to make the story short, the Christian Spirits still came to meet me. They said if I had mentioned about them again they would be unable to meet me. They said they have Churches and Bibles in their world too. They have Spirits from other Faiths in their world too. I think this much I can say and I have contemplated many times to narrate about the first hand experiences with the Christian Spirits in the past. Of all the places, Bali a dominantly Hindu province in Indonesia, I had encountered those Christian Spirits. If I did narrate about it many would think I am crazy. That is the reason I did not proceed.
So after I came back to Singapore a few years later I wrote a full manuscript about my life in Indonesia and Bali. That manuscript is still with me. That was after I had gone a soul searching journey about Religions, God, our souls and the world of Hereafter/Spirits Realm for a personal reason, to make sense about my life and the Spirit world while I was in Indonesia, especially Bali.
Back then I was still a faithful Muslim.
That is all I want to say.
Always,
Joe
ECHOES
Coincidence experiences can sneak up like ghosts, insinuating themselves into the thought process and surreptitiously shifting you to a different place altogether. These strange and eerie reverberations can be bewildering and disconcerting. But they can also bring comfort, as was the case with the wife of American science writer Michael Shermer, founder of the The Skeptics Society. Though naturally inclined to believe that coincidences are simply chance events, Michael admits he was nonplussed by what happened.
The event took place on 25 June 2014, the day Michael married Jennifer Graf, from Kiln, Germany. Jennifer treasured an old Philips transistor radio left to her by her beloved grandfather Walter, but despite Michael's attempts at 'percussive maintenance' it had stopped working and languished uselessly in a dark drawer in their bedroom.
The wedding ceremony was conducted in Michael and Jennifer's home, where they said their vows and exchanged rings surrounded by family and friends. Far from her childhood home in Germany, Jennifer felt a twinge of sadness and whispered to Michael that she wished her grandfather had been there to give her away.
Moments later, the newlyweds heard music playing from somewhere in the house. They traced the sound to their bedroom. Jennifer opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, from which a romantic love song was drifting.
Though as devout a sceptic as her new husband, Jennifer exclaimed: 'My grandfather is here with us. I am not alone.'
Michael says that later that night they fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from the radio. The following day it stopped working and has remained silent ever since.
As a scientist, Michael says he knows that the cause was probably some sort of electrical anomaly and that the laws of probability allow for such strange coincidences. But adds: 'I have to admit; it rocked me back on my heels and shook my scepticism to its core. I savoured the experience more than the explanation.'
Michael might also savour the following stories, involving strange echoes from the past.
Extracted from BEYOND COINCIDENCE by Martin Plimmer and Brian King
It’s inexplicable: A broken radio plays soothing music at just the right time
By Wray Herbert
Jan. 27, 2018 at 4:06 a.m. GMT+8
Wray Herbert is the author of "On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits."
Midway into this ambitious, erudite volume, science historian and professional skeptic Michael Shermer relates this intriguing personal story: In 2014, his fiancee (now wife) Jennifer Graf had moved to California from Germany, bringing with her a Philips transistor radio, a gift from her late and beloved grandfather, Walter. Walter had been a surrogate father to Graf, and she had fond memories of listening to music with him, but the radio wasn't working. She and Shermer switched out the batteries, tried various stations and otherwise fiddled with the machine, but in frustration ended up tossing it into a desk drawer in the bedroom.
Months later, following a small wedding ceremony at their home, Graf was feeling melancholy and disconnected from her family. The newlyweds took a quiet moment together, away from the group, and at that precise moment music started wafting from the bedroom. They followed the sound, which was a love song, and traced it to the desk drawer, indeed to the "broken" radio. It was, Shermer recalls in his book "Heavens on Earth," a "spine-tingling experience."
And it gets better. The radio could have been tuned to any station, or to no station at all, but it was playing just the kind of emotionally comforting music the couple needed at that moment. The radio continued to broadcast similar music all evening, then went silent. It has remained silent since, despite Shermer's efforts to revive it.
What are we to make of Shermer's "spine-tingling experience?" What does Shermer make of it, long after the fact? He is a trained scientist and, more important, a devoted skeptic who has built a career debunking any and all claims of the paranormal. Yet by his own account he has difficulty dismissing this extraordinary experience as a psychic anomaly. The physics of the radio suddenly playing might be easily explained — a change in humidity, a speck of dust, whatever — but the timing and emotional significance of the experience are uncanny, and indeed impossible to explain with the scientific insights available to us now.
Shermer devotes considerable space to this personal story, as I have here, because it encapsulates the human condition. Ever since the earliest humans became aware of their mortality, they — we — have been striving to make sense of the big chill and what comes after. Death is undeniable, yet unknowable, a mystery that eludes our intellect, so we must come up with ways to make it all meaningful, something more than nothingness. This dilemma leads inevitably to explanations — beliefs — that include immortality, the soul, resurrection and, most important here, heaven.
Consider the vocabulary we humans have invented for heaven: the afterlife, Arcadia, dreamland, Eden, Elysium, hereafter, kingdom come, paradise, land of milk and honey, nirvana, Shangri-La, Zion. By any other name, Shermer writes, heaven is "the empyrean residence of gods and other preternatural essences — angels, demons, ghosts, souls — that have, to append a few common idioms, transcended, crossed over, passed through, passed away, given up the ghost, or gone the way of all flesh from the here and now into the hereafter." The belief that death is not final is overwhelmingly popular: Since the 1990s, the Gallup polling organization has consistently found that about 3 in 4 Americans believe in heaven of some kind. A survey of people in 23 countries found that more than half of respondents believe in an afterlife. So pervasive is this conviction that even a third of agnostics and atheists proclaim belief in an afterlife.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...c4fcc8-d480-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html
29th October 2020
I am one of those who do not believe that the religion doctrinaires performed by individuals will gain God's favours. I believe that matters of the conscience is important and most importantly what lies within our hearts is the top priority that would be reviewed by God.
I believe too that prayers offered to decease loved ones would be received by them without any barriers or any doubts. As a saying goes, "I will always be in your heart."
If you want to see the devil, see yourselves in the mirror.
We are all here to do good deeds to one another. We have forgotten to live up to that main purpose of our existence here because of greed. One day our sojourn on earth will end and our souls will return to the unseen realm.
I believe truth lies within the unseen realm. I am looking and researching for that truth in the unseen dimension now, I guess until my last breath.
2nd November 2020
During my life time when I was in Indonesia from August 1992 to December 1995, I had met and spoken to many Spirits through someone who was very close and dear to me. To make the story short, it was until I reached Bali and decided to live there permanently, I had encountered Spirits who were all Christians through that same person who was very close and dear to me. These Christian Spirits, especially a White Boy Spirits, taught many things about Love and how to love too through our daily conversation. I felt their strong Love for me and I had loved them too. They were like a 'human' family to me though they were Spirits.
They told me not to tell that person about them that they used her mind and physical body to communicate with me. Besides communication they also spend time together in outside activities too like swimming, eating, travelling etcs. If I told about them they said they would never come and meet me again. However, I did tell her about them and she just laughed at me. She said I was talking nonsense. She totally could not recall about it and what she had actually done while the Spirits were with her.
However, to make the story short, the Christian Spirits still came to meet me. They said if I had mentioned about them again they would be unable to meet me. They said they have Churches and Bibles in their world too. They have Spirits from other Faiths in their world too. I think this much I can say and I have contemplated many times to narrate about the first hand experiences with the Christian Spirits in the past. Of all the places, Bali a dominantly Hindu province in Indonesia, I had encountered those Christian Spirits. If I did narrate about it many would think I am crazy. That is the reason I did not proceed.
So after I came back to Singapore a few years later I wrote a full manuscript about my life in Indonesia and Bali. That manuscript is still with me. That was after I had gone a soul searching journey about Religions, God, our souls and the world of Hereafter/Spirits Realm for a personal reason, to make sense about my life and the Spirit world while I was in Indonesia, especially Bali.
Back then I was still a faithful Muslim.
That is all I want to say.
Always,
Joe
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
SNOW PATROL - OPEN YOUR EYES
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
ROBIN SCHULZ FT. ALIDA - IN YOUR EYES
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
BRANDI CARLILE - THE STORY
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
PEARL JAM - UNTHOUGHT KNOWN
13th December 2020
RENE DESCARTES, THE INFINITE AND GOD
Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a great French philosopher, mathematician and physicist considered to be the father of modern philosophy and one of the most prominent names of the scientific revolution. He used the mathematical method in an attempt to end the Aristotelian syllogism used throughout the Middle Ages as a model.
Descartes proposed the existence of three substances. Our thinking substance (res cogitans) is the first and represents the first truth or certainty, the famous cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am," an essential element of Western rationalism. Universal and methodical doubt leads to the subject to knowledge of the existence of this reality. The fundamental attribute of this substance is thought or consciousness.
The second substance is the infinite (infinite res) or divine: God. For Descartes, the thinking self is not perfect, but possesses the idea of perfection. His line of reasoning was as follows: knowledge of idea of the idea of perfection, beyond my own imperfection, cannot come from myself, because I am imperfect and what I see is imperfect; rather it must come from a being that is more perfect than I, the creator of this innate idea. The res infinite is an uncreated substance, that thinks and that is the cause of all created beings. God is an eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent substance. The main attribute of this substance is obviously infinity.
The third is the extended substance (res extensa), represent by material things. This substance is a fundamental attribute of extension, and contains a triple dimension: shape, position and movement. According to Descartes, the soul is defined by thought and the body is defined by extension, so they are two separate things. Consequently, it is the soul that perceives and suffers the passions (desires, sadness, anger etc.) and the body is reduced, thus, to a machine governed by the laws of physics.
According to Descartes, the idea of infinity has been imposed by a nature that is higher than human, and can only come from this nature being infinite, so he interprets that the existence of infinity confirms the existence of God.
Extracted from SECRETS OF INFINITY by Editor: Antonio Lamua
13th December 2020
RENE DESCARTES, THE INFINITE AND GOD
Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a great French philosopher, mathematician and physicist considered to be the father of modern philosophy and one of the most prominent names of the scientific revolution. He used the mathematical method in an attempt to end the Aristotelian syllogism used throughout the Middle Ages as a model.
Descartes proposed the existence of three substances. Our thinking substance (res cogitans) is the first and represents the first truth or certainty, the famous cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am," an essential element of Western rationalism. Universal and methodical doubt leads to the subject to knowledge of the existence of this reality. The fundamental attribute of this substance is thought or consciousness.
The second substance is the infinite (infinite res) or divine: God. For Descartes, the thinking self is not perfect, but possesses the idea of perfection. His line of reasoning was as follows: knowledge of idea of the idea of perfection, beyond my own imperfection, cannot come from myself, because I am imperfect and what I see is imperfect; rather it must come from a being that is more perfect than I, the creator of this innate idea. The res infinite is an uncreated substance, that thinks and that is the cause of all created beings. God is an eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent substance. The main attribute of this substance is obviously infinity.
The third is the extended substance (res extensa), represent by material things. This substance is a fundamental attribute of extension, and contains a triple dimension: shape, position and movement. According to Descartes, the soul is defined by thought and the body is defined by extension, so they are two separate things. Consequently, it is the soul that perceives and suffers the passions (desires, sadness, anger etc.) and the body is reduced, thus, to a machine governed by the laws of physics.
According to Descartes, the idea of infinity has been imposed by a nature that is higher than human, and can only come from this nature being infinite, so he interprets that the existence of infinity confirms the existence of God.
Extracted from SECRETS OF INFINITY by Editor: Antonio Lamua
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
HAND OF THE TRIBE - MOONWALK
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
LUMINEERS - HO HEY
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
PHILLIPS PHILLIPS - HOME
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
PLACEBO - RUNNING UP THAT HILL
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
BILLY PRESTON - MY SWEET LORD
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
THE CHIFFONS - HE'S SO FINE
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
SAVAGE GARDEN - TO THE MOON & BACK
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
THE ALAN PARSONS PROJECT - EYE IN THE SKY
ALAN PARSONS - SIRIUS / EYE IN THE SKY
ALAN PARSONS - SIRIUS / EYE IN THE SKY
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
STEFFANY GRETZINGER & BOBBY STRAND - CONFIDENT
https://youtu.be/r32B_vLqC-Y
************************************************************************************************
16th December 2020
CONFIDENT SONG LYRICS
You're always moving in the unseen
The breath You exhale sustaining me
Before I call, You know my need
You're always going before me
I'm confident Your faithfulness will see me through
My soul can rest, my righteousness is found in You
With every moment left, in every borrowed breath, let this be true
That all my heart, for all my life, belongs to You
Your laughter scatters my enemies
You give me joy for my mourning
You lift my head so I can see
All of heaven surrounding me
I'm confident Your faithfulness will see me through
My soul can rest, my righteousness is found in You
With every moment left, in every borrowed breath, let this be true
That all my heart, for all my life, belongs to You
I won't win this battle with the strength in my own hands
You're the mountain-mover and only You can
I won't build my life on sinking sand
You're my hope forever, the rock where I stand
I won't win this battle with the strength in my own hands
You're the mountain-mover and only You can
I won't build my life on sinking sand
You're my hope forever, the rock where I stand!
The rock where I stand!
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand
I'm confident Your faithfulness will see me through
My soul can rest, my righteousness is found in You
With every moment left, in every borrowed breath, let this be true
That all my heart, for all my life, belongs to You
*******************************************************************************************
3rd November 2020
Reductionism is an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things. It can also be described as the philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. Thus, it is the belief that everything that exists is made from a small number of basic substances that behave in regular ways, and is therefore in some respects comparable to Atomism.
https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_reductionism.html
*******************************************************************************************************
3rd November 2020
The question of free will is related ultimately to questions of a reductionist philosophy. Free will describes the inability to make any meaningful reduction in most cases to an atomistic view of the world. So it makes sense to create a narrative in which we have free will because that is what it looks like on the level of human involvement in the universe. If things were so obviously deterministic, little variation to small undetectable changes, we wouldn't think that we had free will.
It is striking that Newton, the person who led us to believe in a clockwork deterministic universe, also felt that there was room in the equations for God's intervention. He wrote of his belief that God would sometimes have to reset the universe when things looked like they were going off course. He got into a big fight with his German mathematical rival Gottfried Leibniz, who couldn't see why God wouldn't have set it perfectly from the outset:
Sir Isaac Newton and his followers have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.
Excerpts from WHAT WE CANNOT KNOW by Marcus Du Dautoy
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/find-an-expert/professor-marcus-du-sautoy
*************************************************************************************************
10th December 2020
Quantum physics seemed to be teaching us that at the microscopic level there may be no objective reality; that what we observe is always affected by the presence of the observer. Wolfgang Pauli, the Noble-Prize-winning physicist who first postulated the existence of the neutrino in 1931 (and who was also interested in coincidence, as we shall soon see), said: 'On the atomic level the objective world ceases to exist.'
With science getting weirder and weirder all the time, the claims of ESP (extra-sensory perception) and psychokinesis, collectively known as psi, are starting to sound rather tame. It's almost as though science has decided to take on psi at its own game of fantastic unbelievability and is beating it hands down.
Look at the Narnia-like world of the atom; it's a place so small you can't even see it, a world that from our remote distance seems utterly condensed and claustrophobic, yet the closer you get to its paradoxical and common-sense-defying reality, the wider its wide open spaces are revealed to be. The atom is about a 10,000th of a millimetre across, but 99.99 per cent of its volume is empty space. If we draw an atom to scale, making its nucleus one centimetre in diameter, then its electrons would measure less than the diameter of a hair, and the entire atom's diameter would be greater than 30 football pitches laid end to end. In between - nothing. Scientists believe that in a human body the relationship between so-called mass and space is 200 billion to one. Einstein calculated that if the space between all the atoms in all human beings on Earth were removed, leaving only concentrated matter, you would be left with something about the size of a baseball (though a lot heavier).
If a neutrino, one of Pauli's tiny, chargeless and virtually massless particles that are created by nuclear explosion on distant stars and blow through space in their billions, were able to see as it hurtled towards Earth at the speed of light, it would register our planet only as a patch of barely differentiated haze, through which it would pass like a bullet, not interacting with it at all.
So if this bedrock we believe we stand upon is little more than an illusion, what's left? Energy is left - lots and lots of it. That's something we all know is abundantly packed inside every atom. Physicist Max Planck said: 'Energy is the origin of all matter. Reality, true existence, is not matter, which is visible and perishable, but the invisible, immortal energy - that is truth.'
We are made of atoms, which are made up of tiny packets of electromagnetic force, all of them interrelating and communicating with each other in highly complex ways. These charges elementary particles can transform into each other and carry all the information necessary to explain all of existence. Our bodies are made up of the same stuff as Mount Everest and Pacific Ocean. If you look at us on an atomic scale then and the universe comprise a seamlessly integrated web; it's all energy and information swapping back and forth. As the astronomer James Jeans put it: 'The universe looks less and less like a great machine and more and more like a great thought.'
The question is: whose thought? Aliens? Uri Geller? Albert Einstein said: 'After years of thought, study and contemplation, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one thing in the universe and that is energy - beyond that is a Supreme Intelligence.' It should be pointed out that Einstein's Supreme Intelligence, whom on other occasions he hasn't been shy to call 'God', was nothing like an angel-and-trumpet deity, but something more akin to a perfectly crafted physical law. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, modern science is sufficiently tolerant of transcendental ideas for 40 per cent of American physicists, biologists and mathematicians to declare without embarrassment their belief in God.
Excerpts from BEYOND COINCIDENCE by Martin Plimmer & Brian King
***********************************************************************************
13th January 2021
When Einstein Met Tagore: A Remarkable Meeting of Minds on the Edge of Science and Spirituality
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty.
BY MARIA POPOVA
On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher, musician, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history, exploring the age-old friction between science and religion. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (public library) recounts the historic encounter, amidst a broader discussion of the intellectual renaissance that swept India in the early twentieth century, germinating a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.
The following excerpt from one of Einstein and Tagore’s conversations dances between previously examined definitions of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a masterful meditation on the most fundamental questions of human existence.
EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?
TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the Truth of the Universe is human Truth.
I have taken a scientific fact to explain this — Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.
EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.
TAGORE: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as Truth, we feel it as beauty.
EINSTEIN: This is the purely human conception of the universe.
TAGORE: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it Truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.
EINSTEIN: This is a realization of the human entity.
TAGORE: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.
EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?
TAGORE: No.
EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.
TAGORE: No.
EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.
TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.
EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.
TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?
EINSTEIN: I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.
TAGORE: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth – at least the Truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance – that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called maya or illusion.
EINSTEIN: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.
TAGORE: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore the entire human mind realizes Truth; the Indian or the European mind meet in a common realization.
EINSTEIN: The word species is used in German for all human beings, as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it.
TAGORE: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of Truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.
EINSTEIN: The problem begins whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.
TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.
EINSTEIN: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.
TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.
EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from your point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independently of us.
Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.
TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.
In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.
It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.
EINSTEIN: Then I am more religious than you are!
TAGORE: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being.
Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore is a sublime read in its entirety. Complement it with physicist Lisa Randall on the crucial differences between how art, science, and religion explain the universe, then revisit Einstein’s correspondence with Freud about violence, peace, and human nature, his little-known exchange with W.E.B. DuBois on race and racial justice, and his letter to a little girl in South Africa on whether scientists pray.
Thanks, Natascha
https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-tagore/
************************************************************************************
22nd January 2021
INFINITE WORLDS- A JOURNEY TO PARALLEL UNIVERSES
https://youtu.be/OO4uzgiRHkE
https://youtu.be/r32B_vLqC-Y
************************************************************************************************
16th December 2020
CONFIDENT SONG LYRICS
You're always moving in the unseen
The breath You exhale sustaining me
Before I call, You know my need
You're always going before me
I'm confident Your faithfulness will see me through
My soul can rest, my righteousness is found in You
With every moment left, in every borrowed breath, let this be true
That all my heart, for all my life, belongs to You
Your laughter scatters my enemies
You give me joy for my mourning
You lift my head so I can see
All of heaven surrounding me
I'm confident Your faithfulness will see me through
My soul can rest, my righteousness is found in You
With every moment left, in every borrowed breath, let this be true
That all my heart, for all my life, belongs to You
I won't win this battle with the strength in my own hands
You're the mountain-mover and only You can
I won't build my life on sinking sand
You're my hope forever, the rock where I stand
I won't win this battle with the strength in my own hands
You're the mountain-mover and only You can
I won't build my life on sinking sand
You're my hope forever, the rock where I stand!
The rock where I stand!
All other ground is sinking sand
All other ground is sinking sand
I'm confident Your faithfulness will see me through
My soul can rest, my righteousness is found in You
With every moment left, in every borrowed breath, let this be true
That all my heart, for all my life, belongs to You
*******************************************************************************************
3rd November 2020
Reductionism is an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things. It can also be described as the philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. Thus, it is the belief that everything that exists is made from a small number of basic substances that behave in regular ways, and is therefore in some respects comparable to Atomism.
https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_reductionism.html
*******************************************************************************************************
3rd November 2020
The question of free will is related ultimately to questions of a reductionist philosophy. Free will describes the inability to make any meaningful reduction in most cases to an atomistic view of the world. So it makes sense to create a narrative in which we have free will because that is what it looks like on the level of human involvement in the universe. If things were so obviously deterministic, little variation to small undetectable changes, we wouldn't think that we had free will.
It is striking that Newton, the person who led us to believe in a clockwork deterministic universe, also felt that there was room in the equations for God's intervention. He wrote of his belief that God would sometimes have to reset the universe when things looked like they were going off course. He got into a big fight with his German mathematical rival Gottfried Leibniz, who couldn't see why God wouldn't have set it perfectly from the outset:
Sir Isaac Newton and his followers have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.
Excerpts from WHAT WE CANNOT KNOW by Marcus Du Dautoy
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/find-an-expert/professor-marcus-du-sautoy
*************************************************************************************************
10th December 2020
Quantum physics seemed to be teaching us that at the microscopic level there may be no objective reality; that what we observe is always affected by the presence of the observer. Wolfgang Pauli, the Noble-Prize-winning physicist who first postulated the existence of the neutrino in 1931 (and who was also interested in coincidence, as we shall soon see), said: 'On the atomic level the objective world ceases to exist.'
With science getting weirder and weirder all the time, the claims of ESP (extra-sensory perception) and psychokinesis, collectively known as psi, are starting to sound rather tame. It's almost as though science has decided to take on psi at its own game of fantastic unbelievability and is beating it hands down.
Look at the Narnia-like world of the atom; it's a place so small you can't even see it, a world that from our remote distance seems utterly condensed and claustrophobic, yet the closer you get to its paradoxical and common-sense-defying reality, the wider its wide open spaces are revealed to be. The atom is about a 10,000th of a millimetre across, but 99.99 per cent of its volume is empty space. If we draw an atom to scale, making its nucleus one centimetre in diameter, then its electrons would measure less than the diameter of a hair, and the entire atom's diameter would be greater than 30 football pitches laid end to end. In between - nothing. Scientists believe that in a human body the relationship between so-called mass and space is 200 billion to one. Einstein calculated that if the space between all the atoms in all human beings on Earth were removed, leaving only concentrated matter, you would be left with something about the size of a baseball (though a lot heavier).
If a neutrino, one of Pauli's tiny, chargeless and virtually massless particles that are created by nuclear explosion on distant stars and blow through space in their billions, were able to see as it hurtled towards Earth at the speed of light, it would register our planet only as a patch of barely differentiated haze, through which it would pass like a bullet, not interacting with it at all.
So if this bedrock we believe we stand upon is little more than an illusion, what's left? Energy is left - lots and lots of it. That's something we all know is abundantly packed inside every atom. Physicist Max Planck said: 'Energy is the origin of all matter. Reality, true existence, is not matter, which is visible and perishable, but the invisible, immortal energy - that is truth.'
We are made of atoms, which are made up of tiny packets of electromagnetic force, all of them interrelating and communicating with each other in highly complex ways. These charges elementary particles can transform into each other and carry all the information necessary to explain all of existence. Our bodies are made up of the same stuff as Mount Everest and Pacific Ocean. If you look at us on an atomic scale then and the universe comprise a seamlessly integrated web; it's all energy and information swapping back and forth. As the astronomer James Jeans put it: 'The universe looks less and less like a great machine and more and more like a great thought.'
The question is: whose thought? Aliens? Uri Geller? Albert Einstein said: 'After years of thought, study and contemplation, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one thing in the universe and that is energy - beyond that is a Supreme Intelligence.' It should be pointed out that Einstein's Supreme Intelligence, whom on other occasions he hasn't been shy to call 'God', was nothing like an angel-and-trumpet deity, but something more akin to a perfectly crafted physical law. According to the Wall Street Journal, however, modern science is sufficiently tolerant of transcendental ideas for 40 per cent of American physicists, biologists and mathematicians to declare without embarrassment their belief in God.
Excerpts from BEYOND COINCIDENCE by Martin Plimmer & Brian King
***********************************************************************************
13th January 2021
When Einstein Met Tagore: A Remarkable Meeting of Minds on the Edge of Science and Spirituality
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty.
BY MARIA POPOVA
On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher, musician, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history, exploring the age-old friction between science and religion. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore (public library) recounts the historic encounter, amidst a broader discussion of the intellectual renaissance that swept India in the early twentieth century, germinating a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.
The following excerpt from one of Einstein and Tagore’s conversations dances between previously examined definitions of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a masterful meditation on the most fundamental questions of human existence.
EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?
TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the Truth of the Universe is human Truth.
I have taken a scientific fact to explain this — Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.
EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.
TAGORE: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as Truth, we feel it as beauty.
EINSTEIN: This is the purely human conception of the universe.
TAGORE: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it Truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.
EINSTEIN: This is a realization of the human entity.
TAGORE: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.
EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?
TAGORE: No.
EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.
TAGORE: No.
EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.
TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.
EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.
TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?
EINSTEIN: I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.
TAGORE: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth – at least the Truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance – that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called maya or illusion.
EINSTEIN: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.
TAGORE: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore the entire human mind realizes Truth; the Indian or the European mind meet in a common realization.
EINSTEIN: The word species is used in German for all human beings, as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it.
TAGORE: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of Truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.
EINSTEIN: The problem begins whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.
TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.
EINSTEIN: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.
TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.
EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from your point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independently of us.
Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.
TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.
In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.
It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.
EINSTEIN: Then I am more religious than you are!
TAGORE: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being.
Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore is a sublime read in its entirety. Complement it with physicist Lisa Randall on the crucial differences between how art, science, and religion explain the universe, then revisit Einstein’s correspondence with Freud about violence, peace, and human nature, his little-known exchange with W.E.B. DuBois on race and racial justice, and his letter to a little girl in South Africa on whether scientists pray.
Thanks, Natascha
https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-tagore/
************************************************************************************
22nd January 2021
INFINITE WORLDS- A JOURNEY TO PARALLEL UNIVERSES
https://youtu.be/OO4uzgiRHkE
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
THE SCORE - STRONGER
Last edited:
Joe Mahmood
Arch-Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2019
- Messages
- 22,231
- Reaction score
- 8,044
KINGS OF LEON - WALLS
Last edited:
Important Forum Advisory Note
This forum is moderated by volunteer moderators who will react only to members' feedback on posts. Moderators are not employees or representatives of HWZ Forums. Forum members and moderators are responsible for their own posts.
Please refer to our Community Guidelines and Standards and Terms and Conditions for more information.
