slides used for q/a with amit goswami, september 1916
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to Amit Goswami
Quantum Physicist and Activist
Could you explain how Von Neumann et al. reached the conclusion that consciousness collapses the wavefunction?
Decoherence studies show that interactions with the “unthinking” environment can rapidly collapse the wavefunction (the outcome of the collapse is still random though). Does decoherence invalidate the consciousness-causes-collapse hypothesis?
Could you explain how you et al. reached the conclusion that consciousness is really one and, when we choose the outcome of a quantum collapse, we do so in a cosmic state of consciousness in which we are all one and the same?
“In the past few years it has become increasingly clear to me that the only view of the brain-mind that is complete and consistent in its explanatory power is this: The brain-mind is an interactive system with both classical and quantum components. These components interact within a basic idealist framework in which consciousness is primary.”
“How can reality be so subjective that each of us observers can choose our own realities from quantum possibilities? How can there be any consensus reality in that case?...
Surprise, surprise. We don't choose in our ordinary state of individual consciousness that we call the ego... Instead, we choose from an unconditioned, objective state of unitive consciousness, the non-ordinary state where we are one, a state we can readily identify with God.”
Parallels with Daniel Kolak’s “Open Individualism?”
Does nonlocal entanglement prove that the consciousness that collapses the wavefunction is one and the same?
Bohm’s fish example: what is the fish and what are the screens?
Wife, Mother-in-Law, or both?
Is God “a person” like the Christian God or an impersonal Deist God?
What is the soul? What happens to us after death?
Is there any conceivable technology that could retrieve and restore to life a soul? Or should we be happy to let it happen spontaneously?