If I were to believe in LoA ...

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

But it has never been tested in a double-blind experiment, or anything close.

Nonsense. There are thousands of experiments studying, in one way or another, how thoughts or beliefs or intentions in themselves affect some aspect of reality. I have listed many before.

The experiments have related to children's IQ; rate of healing of broken bones; results of a random event generator; changes in muscular strength in participants visualising gym workouts; experiments with hypnosis in pain control; behavioural finance studies; distance healing experiments; ability of thoughts to alter the molecular structure of water; placebo effect on patients taking dummy pills; ability of meditators to alter the lifespan and development rate of fruit fly larvae etc etc.

The list goes on and on.

[moonrambler]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

But it has never been tested in a double-blind experiment, or anything close.

Of course one of the primary reasons this type of experiment was ever created is that researchers know thoughts affect reality.

In drug trials, it's a problem even with placebo-controlled groups, because as long as the people know what type of drug it is, a certain percentage of them will start having side effects. A certain percentage of people taking placebos in chemotherapy drug trials will start throwing up and their hair will fall out. That's why the stats have to show significance, where maybe only 5 percent of the placebo group has this happen but 40 percent of the medication group.

I've been doing a lot of writing about side effects of drugs, and have been looking at summaries of the clinical trials required before approval. They get some seriously weird results even in placebo-controlled double-blind experiments. For instance, in a study where 50 percent of the medication group experienced headaches while taking the drug, that's a pretty clear indicator that the drug has a side effect of headaches. However, once in a blue moon, the placebo group will show up with 40 percent getting headaches, so they have to discount headaches as a side effect.

Meanwhile, the researchers must be going WTF? If the placebo group had no idea what the actual side effects were, how come 40 percent of them showed up with headaches?

I'm not a drug manufacturer, so I always want the unanswered questions answered. I want to know how we can use these results to our health advantage. If 85 percent of people in the medication group get well, and 15 percent in the placebo group get well, I want to know about that 15 percent.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

Nonsense. There are thousands of experiments studying, in one way or another, how thoughts or beliefs or intentions in themselves affect some aspect of reality. I have listed many before.

You can believe what you want. It's helpful to recognize the difference between fact and belief.

LOA seems to say that your thoughts manifest realities. So, if I manifest an ipod, I will get an ipod, if I manifest a parking space, I get a parking space, etc, etc. No only is it claimed this CAN work, it is claimed further than this is a fundamental aspect of the world.

You will cite some study showing that mental exercises will help in healing, or try to demonstrate some conclusion about quantum mechanics that will have little if any support among physicists. Tiller claims mental activity slightly changed the PH balance of water. That's about as dramatic as it gets, and Tiller isn't a reliable source.

Even if everything you add up is true (and it is usually disputable, often in the particulars, and almost always as to the conclusion), there is no objective evidence anyone can manifest a parking space, or money. It is a belief, like the Virgin Mary appearing on a slice of toast.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by moonrambler

In drug trials, it's a problem even with placebo-controlled groups, because as long as the people know what type of drug it is, a certain percentage of them will start having side effects.

Placebos are interesting. People will respond more favorably to placebos if they thing it is an expensive drug than a cheap drug.

Is there a mental aspect to healing? Apparently so. Do we understand everything about the effect of mental attitudes on the ability of the body to mend itself? No.

That's why placebos are used in medical reseach.

But in the end, the drug works better than the placebo.

This is a microcosm of the debate on "science" on this board. The placebo can perhaps have dramatic effects on a small portion of the population, both for good or ill. The drug will have an effect on everyone. The exception is interesting, but shouldn't invalidate the more general experience.

I'd like to know more about placebos as well, but I won't discount the greater conclusion: there is no evidence that healing is entirely or even mostly mental, hence the approval of drugs, rather than placebos.

[moonrambler]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

But in the end, the drug works better than the placebo.

This is a microcosm of the debate on "science" on this board. The placebo can perhaps have dramatic effects on a small portion of the population, both for good or ill. The drug will have an effect on everyone. The exception is interesting, but shouldn't invalidate the more general experience.

I'd like to know more about placebos as well, but I won't discount the greater conclusion: there is no evidence that healing is entirely or even mostly mental, hence the approval of drugs, rather than placebos.

See, to me, this is where I get really jazzed by looking at the placebo effect, and I don't see the entire picture as a case of drugs working better than placebos. That may be an illusion. I think we don't know enough, but the money for research is with the drug companies. What are the characteristics of the 15 percent who get well taking a placebo? Couldn't we develop those characteristics in a larger population?

We can't say there's "no" evidence that healing is entirely or even mostly mental. There certainly is some evidence for that.

However, I know what you mean about the validity of the drug trials. If a person comes down with strep throat, somebody could spike his coffee with penicillin 4x a day, and no doubt he'd get well. He wouldn't even have to know he's taking a drug or a placebo or anything at all. Penicillin works, and not just because somebody believes it works. It worked before anybody believed it worked.

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by moonrambler

We can't say there's "no" evidence that healing is entirely or even mostly mental. There certainly is some evidence for that.

I was trying to avoid listing studies etc etc because as you know, I've already done so much of that in the past. But here may be a good example that I have cited before.

Harvard Gazette: Hypnosis helps healing

This is a study from Harvard Medical School. Here people with similar types of injuries are divided into two groups. Both groups are given similar conventional treatment. One group is additionally given audio tapes of "positive thoughts" about healing faster. They are asked to listen to these tapes a couple of times a week.

So the final outcome is - the people who listened to those thoughts healed significantly faster. We're talking about surgical wounds and broken ankles.

That's from Harvard.

There are actually all kinds of scientific studies out there, examining different aspects of how consciousness affects & influences aspects of our physical reality. It's quite fascinating.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

I was trying to avoid listing studies etc etc because as you know, I've already done so much of that in the past.

None convincing.

From the link you just gave:

This report, of course, doesn't prove conclusively that hypnosis will accelerate the healing of wounds. The biggest limitation of the study involves the small number of patients, which makes it difficult to generalize the results to other types of wounds. Then there is the possible effect of expectation, the belief of some patients that hypnotism will work. It's the same effect seen when people who take a sugar pill for a backache do as well as people who take medicine. It's going to require more studies involving many more people to get the majority of doctors to shout hurrah instead of hooey.

But even if the study were, on it's own terms, compelling, it does nothing to prove LOA. Zip.

The idea that attitudes can help in healing is not terribly controversial. The brain is connected to the rest of the body, and moods create chemical reactions.

This is lightyears away from an idea that manifesting an ipod will get me an ipod. The two ideas aren't even remotely related. You're standing on thin, nearly nonexistence evidence, and launching into a leap of faith of thousands of miles.

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by moonrambler

However, I know what you mean about the validity of the drug trials. If a person comes down with strep throat, somebody could spike his coffee with penicillin 4x a day, and no doubt he'd get well. He wouldn't even have to know he's taking a drug or a placebo or anything at all. Penicillin works, and not just because somebody believes it works. It worked before anybody believed it worked.

Heheh, I'm being a little mischevious here, but you see, if someone spiked his coffee with penicillin 4x a dat, then according to LOA principles, that too would be an event that he manifested.

From the LOA perspective, nocebos are often more interesting than placebos. Nocebos are the flip side of placebos - here, by the mere belief that something is bad for you, you cause adverse effects in yourself. Just one example -- if I place a "death curse" on you, you could believe it so much that indeed, you rapidly die thereafter.

This year, there was an interesting article in New Scientist (quite an established, respected science journal) which examined some of this stuff. Link is here:

The science of voodoo: When mind attacks body - health - 13 May 2009 - New Scientist

I'll provide an excerpt:

Late one night in a small Alabama cemetery, Vance Vanders had a run-in with the local witch doctor, who wafted a bottle of unpleasant-smelling liquid in front of his face, and told him he was about to die and that no one could save him.

Back home, Vanders took to his bed and began to deteriorate. Some weeks later, emaciated and near death, he was admitted to the local hospital, where doctors were unable to find a cause for his symptoms or slow his decline. Only then did his wife tell one of the doctors, Drayton Doherty, of the hex.

Doherty thought long and hard. The next morning, he called Vanders's family to his bedside. He told them that the previous night he had lured the witch doctor back to the cemetery, where he had choked him against a tree until he explained how the curse worked. The medicine man had, he said, rubbed lizard eggs into Vanders's stomach, which had hatched inside his body. One reptile remained, which was eating Vanders from the inside out.

Great ceremony
Doherty then summoned a nurse who had, by prior arrangement, filled a large syringe with a powerful emetic. With great ceremony, he inspected the instrument and injected its contents into Vanders' arm. A few minutes later, Vanders began to gag and vomit uncontrollably. In the midst of it all, unnoticed by everyone in the room, Doherty produced his pièce de résistance - a green lizard he had stashed in his black bag. "Look what has come out of you Vance," he cried. "The voodoo curse is lifted."

Vanders did a double take, lurched backwards to the head of the bed, then drifted into a deep sleep. When he woke next day he was alert and ravenous. He quickly regained his strength and was discharged a week later.

The facts of this case from 80 years ago were corroborated by four medical professionals. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Vanders survived. There are numerous documented instances from many parts of the globe of people dying after being cursed.

With no medical records and no autopsy results, there's no way to be sure exactly how these people met their end. The common thread in these cases, however, is that a respected figure puts a curse on someone, perhaps by chanting or pointing a bone at them. Soon afterwards, the victim dies, apparently of natural causes.

Voodoo nouveau

You might think this sort of thing is increasingly rare, and limited to remote tribes. But according to Clifton Meador, a doctor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, who has documented cases like Vanders, the curse has taken on a new form.

Take Sam Shoeman, who was diagnosed with end-stage liver cancer in the 1970s and given just months to live. Shoeman duly died in the allotted time frame - yet the autopsy revealed that his doctors had got it wrong. The tumour was tiny and had not spread. "He didn't die from cancer, but from believing he was dying of cancer," says Meador. "If everyone treats you as if you are dying, you buy into it. Everything in your whole being becomes about dying."

These are highly dramatic examples, but the interesting question is that if these are genuine phenomena, they must be also operating everyday at more mundane levels in our lives.

Eg you are told that eating a certain type of diet, or not exercising in a certain way, will be bad for you, and you believe it. Or you are told that this kind of career is very hectic, and if you take it up, you'll just have to pay the price of stress like everyone else in this career does. Or you are told from young by your parents that you just aren't a very bright person (unlike your elder sister) and you're always going to struggle to get through life.

And you believe the above .....

What do you think the effects will be?

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

This is lightyears away from an idea that manifesting an ipod will get me an ipod.

I agree. Then again, I haven't seen any scientific study proving that this is not possible.

Well then, until scientists get around to doing studies like that, I guess maybe one alternative is for the ordinary guy in the street is to try his own experiments of those sorts.

[Acting Like Godot]

See, there's a practical point here which I believe that I did recently try to explain.

In the end, theories are just theories, yakking is just yakking, philosophy is just philosophy. The real question is - what are you going to do about it? (If anything).

Nobody necessarily needs to believe in any specific, particular model of mind or reality, to start working on improving their own lives. And everyone can work on improving their own lives, by changing the ways they think.

What exactly are the kinds of changes that they should make? Well, it's up to them. Everyone has different circumstances. For some, it could be at a basic level of altering their thoughts to instil some good daily habits or eradicate some bad ones.

(Nor does he have to wait for a peer-reviewed scientific paper to be published on his desired or undesired habits).

For others, it could be at a much more advanced level.

My belief - because that has been my experience - is that the person who diligently explores how he can improve his life by changing his thoughts ..... will keep discovering deeper & deeper truths about the amazing nature of his mind and its relationship to his reality.

Doesn't matter whether you start by meditation. Or hypnosis. Or prayer. Or NLP. Or regular, quiet contemplation. Or conventional goal-setting. The important thing is to get started, and keep going.

Then reality will just keep getting better and better.

It has, for me.

(Ipods, Ipods. Who cares about a stupid Ipod? I've done things like manifested a quarter of a million of dollars out of thin air in one lump sum; healed an ICU patient within hours leaving her doctors perplexed etc etc, older forummers already know about it, plus a whole lot of other things much bigger than an Ipod. Bah ....)

[joelr]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

try to demonstrate some conclusion about quantum mechanics that will have little if any support among physicists.

No, the conclusions and support are much stronger than you acknowledge.

From the online encylopedia:

"Several of the founders of quantum physics were interested in the link between quantum mechanics and mysticism, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner and Erwin Schrödinger. They felt that quantum mechanics required a subtle reexamining of the role of conscious experience in the physical world"

Not proof. But we're not looking for proof, just confirming the fact that quantum mechanics have caused world class (3 of those listed are the 3 top scientists involved with quantum mechanics) scientists to acknowledge the connection, study it and incorporate it into their own ideas.
If you read further (you won't) you can discover these men became mystics AFTER working with QM. It was the behavior of reality on the subatomic scale that led them to this.

I know you're not looking for facts, I only write this for me. Or anyone who may be interested on the subject. I pick up a lot of knowledge here.

[Acting Like Godot]

Oh, there are many other such physicists. I previously listed some of them here:

Advanced LOA proof and practice.

Ahh, the things they say.

"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." - Bernard d'Espagnat.


"In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it." - Martin Rees.


"[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts." - Werner Heisenberg.


"It [is] not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness." - Eugene Wigner



"Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it." - Pascual Jordan




"Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness.

Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in consciousness."

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by joelr

"Several of the founders of quantum physics were interested in the link between quantum mechanics and mysticism, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner and Erwin Schrödinger. They felt that quantum mechanics required a subtle reexamining of the role of conscious experience in the physical world"

"Subtle."

Tell me, then, exactly, what Bohr, Heisenberg, et al, believed. I thought it was the Copehagen interpretation. If so, are you saying that the Copenhagen interpretation leads you to believe that you can manifest parking spaces?

I know you're not looking for facts,

I'm looking for complete facts, not a vague statement in wikiepdia.

[Acting Like Godot]

Joelr, I am a little surprised you didn't mention David Bohm. You know, the Nobel-prize winning physicist who over a period of 21 years regularly picked the brains of Indian spiritual guru K Krishnamurti, in order to learn more about physical reality.

You can read about Bohm's Implicate and Explicate Order here:

Implicate and Explicate Order according to David Bohm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'll just give you a little excerpt:

In proposing this new notion of order, Bohm explicitly challenged a number of tenets that are fundamental to much scientific work. The tenets challenged by Bohm include:

........ That there is ultimately a sustainable distinction between reality and thought, and that there is a corresponding distinction between the observer and observed in an experiment or any other situation (other than a distinction between relatively separate entities valid in the sense of explicate order).

Heheh. So you see, for Bohm, the truest picture of reality (the most "objective", if you like) is that there is no sustainable distinction between reality and thought; and there is no corresponding distinction between observer and observed, in an experiment or in any other situation.

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

I'm looking for complete facts

Then you have to get some books and do some serious reading for yourself.

What did you expect, that Internet forummers have the time to reproduce a few hundred pages of text for you?

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." - Bernard d'Espagnat.

What does D'Espagnat believe?

“I think that our scientific knowledge finally bears, not on reality-in-itself – alias ‘the Real’, alias ‘the ground of everything’ – but just on empirical reality, that is, on the picture that, in virtue of its structure and finite intellectual capacities, the human mind is induced to form of reality-in-itself. I even claim that we must drop the view according to which objects, be they elementary or composite, exist by themselves and are at any time at some definite place in space. To state that we see them so because the structure of our senses makes us perceive reality in this form seems to be nearer to the truth. Admittedly this conception of mine is not the one the bulk of the scientists’ community favours but it is quite far from just being my personal one.”

TPM: The Philosophers’ Magazine | Sci-phi: Bernard d’Espagnat

D'Espagnat appears to be a Kantian. Or do you know?

Do you know the substance of any of these works? Or a few quotes pulled out by someone who had their own agenda and repeated and repeated and repeated? Because if you google any one of these quotes, you will find a dozen new age sources quoting the sentence, without source or context, and it requires a bit of digging to find a full description of their views.

I'm happy to learn about and debate D'Espagnat, or any of the other writers. But I doubt you have the interest in actually focusing on any of them, or learning much of anything.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

What did you expect, that Internet forummers have the time to reproduce a few hundred pages of text for you?

I would think that if Heisenberg had a view of the universe that was so influential to you, you would be able to summarize it in a couple paragraphs.

I think you know very little about any of the sources you quoted. There are no hundreds of pages behind your thoughts: my guess is there isn't even a full paragraph. Heisenberg wrote a book on Physics and Philosophy, for example, and it is excerpted on the web. If you understand what Heisenberg was saying, then I'm sure you could point me to a good paragraph, or summarize the thought.

But it's time to circle the wagons: throw out random quotes to give the appearance of an argument, but not look too long at any source.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

Joelr, I am a little surprised you didn't mention David Bohm.

Another Kantian?

Bohm's views bear some similarities to those of Immanuel Kant, according to Wouter Hanegraaff. For example, Kant held that the parts of an organism, such as cells, simultaneously exist to sustain the whole, and depend upon the whole for their own existence and functioning.[citation needed] Kant also proposed that the process of thought plays an active role in organizing knowledge, which implies theoretical insights are instrumental to the process of acquiring factual knowledge.

Kant restricted knowledge to appearances only and denied the existence of knowledge of any "thing in itself," but Bohm believed that theories in science are "forms of insight that arise in our attempts to obtain a perception of a deeper nature of reality as a whole" (Bohm & Hiley, 1993, p. 323). Thus for Bohm the thing in itself is the whole of existence, conceived of not as a collection of parts but as an undivided movement. In this view Bohm is closer to Kant's critic, Arthur Schopenhauer,[citation needed] who identified the thing in itself with the will, an inner metaphysical reality that grounds all outer phenomena. Schopenhauer's will plays a role analogous to that of the implicate order; for example, it is objectified (Bohm might say it is "made explicate") to form physical matter. And Bohm's concept that consciousness and matter share a common ground resembles Schopenhauer's claim that even inanimate objects possess an inward noumenal nature.

David Bohm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Schopenhauer died in 1860. Kant died in 1804.

I wouldn't recommend Schopenhauer: probably the most pessimestic, anti-LOA philosophy you could ever read.

[Acting Like Godot]

Heisenberg? Basically he was famous for his uncertainty principle. In brief, it might be described as follows -

"the more precisely you know the position of a particle, the less precisely you know its momentum".

Doesn't sound very awesome, until you see it in the proper context. An important point to grasp here is that the uncertainty principle is not set out as a limitation of scientists or scientific equipment or current scientific knowledge, or as a description of an as-yet unsolved mathematical puzzele.

The uncertainty principle is stated as a feature of the universe itself.

So let's say, for example, that there is an object, and using the best methods available, you'd like to determine its "objective" reality better. For example, you'd like to describe, in the most precise terms, where the particle is, and where it is going.

Well, you can't.

The better you know where the particle is, the less you know where it is going. The better you know where it is going, the less you know where it is.

To put it another way, the "objective" reality of the particle changes, depending on what you are able to perceive about it. It has no objective reality. (Uhh, sound familiar to you by now?).

Because Heisenberg was studying reality at a very fundamental level, the ramifications of his uncertainty principle are quite enormous. Essentially it indicates that reality is non-objective and endlessly changes and shifts, according to what you perceive about it.

---------------

If you read "Power, Grace and Freedom", you'll find an explanation of what might happen if you take the uncertainty principle to its full ramifications. Essentially it leads to conclusions like:

(a) distance is an illusion
(b) time is an illusion
(c) solidity is an illusion
(d) you are everywhere and nowhere
(e) you are everything

But of course.

If position and momentum are not truly objective, then it follows that distance, time, solidity etc are all illusions.

Now, please don't ask me to elaborate and reproduce dozens of pages of text from PGF. Go read the book yourself, if you're interested.

-------------------


The uncertainty principle can sometimes be seen as a subset of the observer effect. Now, the observer effect is a bit of a loose term, and shows up in different contexts - not just in physics, but also in areas like psychology and IT and even theatre studies.

But in the realm of hard sciences, the observer effect means that the very act of observation changes something about what you're trying to observe. For example, if you measure the temperature of a container of water with a thermometer, the very act of measurement causes the thermometer to absorb or give some heat to the water (depending on the temperature differential), thereby altering its temperature to what it would not have been, if you had not measured it.

Therefore there is no "objective reality", or if there is, it is essentially unknowable and meaningless. Because your subjective observations are automatically altering reality.

In a more ultimate sense, there is no proof that reality is ever anything other than what you observe it to be. For you can never observe a reality that you did not observe. So that takes us right back to SR.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

Heisenberg? Basically he was famous for his uncertainty principle. In brief, it might be described as follows -

I'm familiar with the uncertainty principle (it's taught in high school, isn't it?). I'm familiar with the Copenhagen interpretation. I'm familiar with Physics and Philosophy - the book the Heisenberg wrote.

I've taken a look at some of the people you quoted. They aren't mystics. They seem to buy into 18th century European metaphysics.

Is that what you're trying to prove? 18th century metaphysics?

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

I wouldn't recommend Schopenhauer: probably the most pessimestic, anti-LOA philosophy you could ever read.

I read a little Schopenhauer before. No, personally I do not agree with your take on him.

His essays provide quite interesting insights into LOA actually. In fact Schopenhauer struck me as somewhat Buddhist (and yet not quite).

My main takeaway from Schopenhauer is that people have "will" - a term which he uses in a way similar to that "desire" or "craving" is used in Buddhism.

In the Schopenhauer framework, "will" ultimately has pessimistic connotations, because "will" leads nowhere fruitful.

Buddhism however is a more profound approach, explaining how "will" (or desire) arises from "attachment", and then explaining how "attachment" arises from "ignorance" -

and "ignorance", in the Buddhist context, means ignorance of the true nature of reality, taking us full circle back to the LOA again.

Anyway I have to run now, be back later .... Bye!

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

Therefore there is no "objective reality", or if there is, it is essentially unknowable and meaningless.

Meaningless? If reality is the cause of perception, it isn't meaningless. Whether it's ultimate nature is knowable is an entirely separate question from whether it has meaning to the perceiver, and whether preception is reliable within its limitations.

It's the same argument, again. Because ultimate reality may be unknowable because of the limitations and structures of our mind and senses (a given), there is no reality.

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

I've taken a look at some of the people you quoted. They aren't mystics.

"Mystic" is a label, and whether a person is a mystic or not, depends on what meaning you attach to it.

I find my wife quite mystifying sometimes too.

David Bohm clearly had an interest in metaphysics, not the European kind, but the Indian kind. His friendship with J Krishnamurti was not a casual one, but a serious one that lasted two decades and led to a lot of serious discussion between the two, many of which are documented in books etc.

(In case you're not familiar with J Krishnamurti, well, let's just say that he was a very, very prominent spiritual teacher in India, and was at one time heralded to be the reincarnation of Buddha - he had to work quite hard to tell people that this wasn't true).

When I first read about Bohm and Krisna, what struck me was that a physicist and a spiritual guru could have so much in common, to talk about. Of course, I know better now.

Physicists and spiritual gurus are frequently interested in each other. The current Dala Lama, for example, is always meeting up with scientists; attending conferences with them; touring their laboratories etc. Examples:

Talking physics with the Dalai Lama - physicsworld.com

The new physics and cosmology ... - Google Books

Buddhism and quantum mechanics have something in common?

The Dalai Lama's SFN DC Talk (this one is not physics, it's a neuroscience conference)

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

I read a little Schopenhauer before. No, personally I do not agree with your take on him.

Regardless, we don't need quantum mechanics to arrive at Schopenhauer.

Will isn't craving in Schopenhauer: it is the fundamental reality of the universe. Anyway.

I don't think you're interested in understanding much of anything.

Quantum physics doesn't have anything to do with manfesting legal possession of an ipod. Quantum physics doesn't have anything to do with when people get in their cars and leave parking lots. Most manifesting doesn't have anything to do with physical reality, anyway: it has to do with influencing people to make things available, not creating or altering the physical objects. I don't even get the connection between manifesting and quantum mechanics - I could understand if you thought manifesting was telepathy, without relating it to properties of matter. Quantum physics, if it leads to any philosophical implications at all, supports something like German idealism - an old set of ideas. German idealism rejects solopsism, and theories of extreme subjectivity. You can probably safely compare Hegel to pantheism, and maybe you could leap to Buddhism.

I'm happy to discuss Schopenhauer, Kant, or anyone else to understand their ideas. But pulling quotes out of context in a blizzard of misinformation is a waste of everyone's time.

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

Quantum physics doesn't have anything to do with manfesting legal possession of an ipod.

But of course it does. Read d'Espagnat again:

"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."

No consciousness, no Ipod.

This follows automatically, at least from CCC theory. No consciousness --> no observation ---> no wave / no particle ----> no matter, no electricity ----> no Ipod.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

No consciousness, no Ipod.

My comment was as to legal possession of the ipod, which is what LOA seems to promise, not the creation of the ipod from scratch.

[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by StAnselm

I don't even get the connection between manifesting and quantum mechanics

Oh, I see your problem.

You need to read about the "Consciousness Causes Collapse" theory and also the Bohm interpretation read with Big Bang theory.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

Oh, I see your problem.

You need to read about the "Consciousness Causes Collapse" theory and also the Bohm interpretation read with Big Bang theory.

No, that isn't my problem.

Manifesting is frequently concerned with altering social relationships, not physical relationships.

If someone wants money, someone else makes money available. If someone wants a house, a deed is signed to the house. These have nothing to do with quantum mechanics, but only with influencing people to do things.

[StAnselm]

Originally Posted by Acting Like Godot

But of course it does. Read d'Espagnat again:

"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment."

I question whether you have an interest in actually understanding d'Espagnat:

Templeton Prize | French Physicist And Philosopher Wins 2009 Templeton Prize

He refers here to a "veiled reality," and says it's a higher reality. That is very Kantian.

The article in which the quote appears is here:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/me...97911_0158.pdf

I haven't had time to read it yet. It must say there is no reality other than what is in my head, and that I can create ipods and cars.

But you might start on page 20 of the pdf, which seems to address the primary point of the caption.

[Acting Like Godot]

I read that before. I read a lot of stuff, which you might gather by now.

Before you read that paper in full, do find out about a certain discovery about quantum entanglement that was made around 1981, two years after that particular essay by d'Espagnat.

Not going to say more, because you seem to be always under the impression that I'm out to mislead you or con you.

It's better that you read for yourself, and draw your own conclusions. Key thing though - to save yourself some time, do find out about the QE experiment, before reading d'Espagnat's paper. (Or at least find out what QE is ....).