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Originally Posted by Melchior  Link me a wiki entry or something and I'll take a look into it.  Currently, I've not seen any scientific findings that support the idea that consciousness is anything other than emergent phenomena, which is essentially the 'base' conclusion for a nondualist such as me, occam's razor and all.  |
It's better to drop parsimony (less is better) when dealing with the physical universe because through experience the logic is not sound. It's regarded as an ok rule of thumb when constructing models but final theories often do not follow that pattern. In fact it slowed the progress of many discoveries, even DNA.
Even an emergent property has no reason to possess the creation
abilities that consciousness holds. If a computer holds information about the position and momentum of a piece of reality (any sub-atomic particle and even now some much larger macroscopic objects containing billions of atoms) nothing changes about it's existence. It is a non-physical piece of potential information. Once consciousness contains the knowledge/thought of this same information the object will become a physical object. Even if the knowledge is gained far into the future, the past event will change to reflect the conscious recognition of this information.
The Newtonian mechanistic era did not call for this, it regarded everything as a seperate machine-like object and these old deterministic beliefs are still in the majority today. They give out the idea that consciousness is just another complex machine.
The LOA implies we send out some type of subtle energy which in turn somehow shapes how events and things happen to us. We can clearly see the possibility of this energy at work in these experiments.
The physicist R. Rhodes gives a great explanation of those findings here:
The Reality Program
He starts out with some background first but you may already know all or some of this stuff? If so then it's a matter of incorporating the results into a statement about consciousness rather than, as many physicists do, just look at it as a strange curiosity not to be pondered on and in turn ridiculed by peers.
Why did Fred Alan Wolf suddenly stop supporting LOA after the media got ahold of it and it became similar to ufos or ghosts in credibility? He was getting too much flack from his contemporaries.