bombus

I wonder if any of these 'particles' exist at all. I have wondered whether they may actually be the absence of something - a 'gap' or twist in the virtual field.

I'm sure I once heard someone at CERN saying that electrons have an infinitiely small radius (although their wavelength is measurable).

Maybe they are more like reflections than actual 'things'.

Does this make any sense? I'd be suprised if this thought is original...

No, the experiments proved the aether didn't exist because a consequence of the existence of the aether that should have been there wasn't. IOW, the aether was falsified.

I disagree. The experiment attempted to find 'suggested' effects of the aether and failed to detect any. However, the expts pre-supposed what the aether is. if the aether is more like pixels on a computer screen (for example) within which reality occurs, it's effects would be undetectable. That I think is kinda what Einstein was alluding to in his quote.

Feeling the rocks only allows you to detect the radiation (and increased motion of the molecules and atoms of the rock). That most of the heat is radiated into space is irrelevant. It still has less capacity to do work (greater entropy) than the radiation that was absorbed by the rock.

Meanwhile, in plants some of the radiation absorbed made sugar, which is a decrease in entropy.

You said "eventually" and "far more quickly". You can't have both

Yes I can. eventually means a few years or maybe centuries, and this is far quicker than reflected photons travelling through space for billions of years.

The sugar can remain AS SUGAR for years! Meanwhile, the rock radiates its infrared within a few seconds or hours.

years but not billions of them.

Also consider what happens when the sugar is burned. Some of that energy is used to make high energy phosphate bonds which are then used to synthesize proteins and nucleic acids -- reducing entropy. It is not until those compounds are broken down that entropy is finally equal to what the rock did within a few seconds or hours!

So no, life is a way of locally decreasing entropy.

I refer you to the answers above

Life does NOT = evolution. Or evolution does NOT = life. Evolution happens to populations of living organisms. Therefore you cannot say that evolution = chemical reactions. Evolution also happens to other populations.

You said that that the theory only applied to chemicals. Life is chemicals.

Hey, have you got a reasonably good link to what pansychism is supposed to mean? I'd be interested if it involves matter/energy holding 'conscious' properties, in an 'unconscious' way.

Try this too. It's from wikipedia, but for the more obscure subjects it's usually quite reliable IMO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

I don’t know if it pertains to the subject but somewhere I read that the pattern to a Siamese cat for instance is due to differentiation temperature wise if memory serves impacting certain chemicals really.

 

I would doubt that save for natural selection there is no real universal mechanism to why certain species display certain phenotypic characters overall.

 

As for the movement of energy in a terrestrial or aquatic or etc type of ecosystem some of the more standard though biologically speaking can be found in the following websites.

 

http://www.bioedonline.org/slides/slide01.cfm?q=%22ecology%22&dpg=10

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_chain

To be honest, I'm talking more metaphysically. I suppose what I am trying to say is that the reality we exist within is due to infinitely complex patterns occurring within spacetime. After the big bang matter and anti matter cancelled each other out, leaving a tiny amount of matter left - but actually hardly anything at all. Reality is a 'wafer thin' ripple in perhaps nothing. I'm also being flippant and as has been said above, my comment has no real place in this discussion.

To add to the above, reality is an incredibly complex mathematical structure, and that is what ultimately determines the patterns of tiger stripes...

Originally Posted by bombus View Post

What scientific theory is that? There isn't one. Penrose's microtubule hypothesis is falsified by this paper.

No it does not!

The neocortex, thalamus, and interconnecting loops

And how are those structures controlled?

To answer B) Classical theory suggests that every action in the universe was pre-ordained at the Big Bang.

No, it doesn't, it suggests classical systems are deterministic. Obviously quantum effects played a huge part in the Big Bang and explain the non-uniformity of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

Free Will and deterministic universe do not go well together!

Thusly free will cannot really exist.

Why?

Because it means that any state is predetermined by an earlier state.

QM suggests that this is not the case, so free will is possible.

Randomness in lieu of determinism gives way to free will? Do you consider "free" behavior to be random?

Free will is not random - maybe because of the influence of consciousness. c/f the double slit expt.

You really need to stop using science as the basis of metaphysical statements about consciousness. You're merely confusing yourself.

No I'm not!

This thread is about the brain. The brain is not consciousness! Your brain can be unconscious. Unless you're a reductive materialist you really shouldn't use the two synonymously.

Read about how unconsciousness is produced by anaesthetics. You can find i here:

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/fundamentality.html

QM doesn’t allow that, at least not more than classical mechanics. You’re probably referring to an erroneous interpretation of the uncertainly principle. In reality, observation, both in classical physics and in QM, has some effect on the observed object (it could be argue that it’s always the case in science), but that has nothing to do with QM.

 

 

 

Again, you’re only accepting QM because you want to believe in free will, it doesn’t seem to be based on anything rational. I'm sorry to put so much emphasis on this, but it bugs me. You say it allows us to "get out of this problem". There's no "problem", science doesn't need to justify and prove the existence of all our traditional views, on the contrary! I still fail to see;

 

A) How the behaviour of atoms at the quantum levels can be applied to the behaviour of systems in the brains.

 

B) How QM is different from classical mechanics when it comes to free will.

 

I think it's another example of people trying very hard to justify, at all cost, traditional beliefs (free will) with "hard science", and it's obviously not working very well.

If you wish to believe that free will does not exist, you are welcome to that belief (which is scientifically unprovable either way). I happen to believe that I have free will, and thusly welcome a scientific theory that allows this, rather than one that does not.

I will answer question A) with another question: What are the physical mechanisms within your brain that enable you to control the flow of electrical impulses - to allow you to think freely? The answer is that there are none. So how can you do it?

To answer B) Classical theory suggests that every action in the universe was pre-ordained at the Big Bang. Thusly free will cannot really exist. QM suggests that this is not the case, so free will is possible.

This is nonsense for two reasons. First, you accept a statement just because you don't like a conclusion. Also, there's no way quantum theory could explain free will better than classical physics. I don't understand how you can image that, just because we can't know both the momentum and location of an atom with infinite precision, quantum physics would justify free will.

The issue is whether conscious observation, or maybe just consciousness, can alter 'reality' at the subatomic level. Classical physics makes it impossible for us to think freely, because everything we think is based on what we were thinking beforehand, and everything was determined at the Big Bang. QM and the consciousness issue allow for us to get out of this problem.

I can see the merits of both camps, but if given the choice, like I said earlier, I'm with Penrose and Hameroff.

try here: http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/

If you have some experimental data (not a sketch of the setup, that seems pretty clear) at hand then I'd be interested in taking a look at it.

Try this, it's great!

I successfully predicted the outcome of coin flipping 27 times in a row once.

 

I simply stopped at #27, but I could have kept on going.

 

12 of the flips were done by myself. The remainder were done by one of the previous observers who said that I must have been cheating by having practiced coin flipping beforehand. The remainder of flips were done with me facing away from the newly appointed flipper.

Well, as a scientist I'd have to see the proof of that before I believed it! Mind you, I can crush double-decker buses using only the power of my mind:)

Actually, remember that science was able to DISprove the aether. Look up Michelson-Morely experiments.

Science proved that the aether could not be detected (by scientific investigation), which isn't exactly the same thing. Einstein just ignored it because of this, but never said it didn't exist.

"More careful reflection teaches us, however, that the special theory of relativity does not compel us to deny ether...To deny the ether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical qualities whatever". Albert Einstein

Not necessarily. Remember, we are talking about photons that have been absorbed by the chemicals of the rock, pushing the electrons to a higher energy state. When the electrons fall back, they re-emit photons in the infrared. All you need do is feel that rocks sitting in the sun are warm.

Yes, but most of that heat is reflected into space.

Now, if you are talking "reflected", that simply means the photons bounce off the material. Wavelength is unchanged. The chlorophyll of plants is such that it is very good at absorbing at particular wavelengths BUT some photons are reflected -- the ones in the green of the spectrum. Which is why, of course, plants are green.

That's the fallacy. Plants capture photons in the red frequencies and converts them to SUGAR, not heat. A rock either reflects them or absorbs them and re-emits them as heat. Thus the rock goes to increasing entropy more quickly.

Yes, but the sugar is eventually emitted as heat, far more quickly than the reflected infra red photons ever will. Life is a great way of increasing entropy.

Since evolution applies to populations of organisms and Gibb's Free Energy applies to chemical reactions, it would be a mistake to say that evolution lowers GFE.

Life, therefore evolution, is just chemical reactions.

 

Well, I can't pretend to be able to follow it all so I have to trust his conclusions. I'm sure he is correct by saying that the particular issues he is talking about can possibly be explained by classical theory. However, classical theory does not allow for free will (and I find it absurd to think we have no free will). Quantum Thoery at least gives us the 'room for manoevre' for free will to exist. Also, reading the paper suggests to me a lot of 'rounding of edges' has occurred - but that's not to say it is in any way unscholarly.

Concerning the souble-slit experiment with one particle fired at a time...

 

If we put a detection device in one of the slits so that we can detect the presence of the particle or not, can it be setup so that the particle still passes through the slit, or does the detection device essentially block the slit entirely?

This explains it (from wiki, but correct):

Quantum version of experiment

By the 1920s, various other experiments (such as the photoelectric effect) had demonstrated that light interacts with matter only in discrete, "quantum"-sized packets called photons.

If sunlight is replaced with a light source that is capable of producing just one photon at a time, and the screen is sensitive enough to detect a single photon, Young's experiment can, in theory, be performed one photon at a time with identical results.

If either slit is covered, the individual photons hitting the screen, over time, create a pattern with a single peak. But if both slits are left open, the pattern of photons hitting the screen, over time, again becomes a series of light and dark fringes. This result seems to both confirm and contradict the wave theory. On the one hand, the interference pattern confirms that light still behaves much like a wave, even though we send it one particle at a time. On the other hand, each time a photon with a certain energy is emitted, the screen detects a photon with the same energy. Under the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, an individual photon is seen as passing through both slits at once, and interfering with itself, producing the interference pattern.

A remarkable result follows from a variation of the double-slit experiment, in which detectors are placed in each of the two slits, in an attempt to determine which slit the photon passes through on its way to the screen. Placing a detector even in just one of the slits will result in the disappearance of the interference pattern. The detection of a photon involves a physical interaction between the photon and the detector of the sort that physically changes the detector. (If nothing changed in the detector, it would not detect anything.) If two photons of the same frequency were emitted at the same time they would be coherent. If they went through two unobstructed slits then they would remain coherent and arriving at the screen at the same time but laterally displaced from each other they would exhibit interference. However, if one or both of them were to encounter a detector, then they would fall out of step with each other, that is, they would decohere. They would then arrive at the screen at slightly different times and could not interfere because the first to arrive would have already interacted with the screen before the second got there. If only one photon is involved, it must be detected at one or the other detector, and its continued path goes forward only from the slit where it was detected.

The Copenhagen interpretation posits the existence of probability waves which describe the likelihood of finding the particle at a given location. Until the particle is detected at any location along this probability wave, it effectively exists at every point. Thus, when the particle could be passing through either of the two slits, it will actually pass through both, and so an interference pattern results. But if the particle is detected at one of the two slits, then it can no longer be passing through both—its presence must become manifested at one or the other, and so no interference pattern appears.

This is similar to the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics provided by Richard Feynman. (Feynman stresses that this is merely a mathematical description, not an attempt to describe some "real" process that we cannot see.) In the path integral formulation, a particle such as a photon takes every possible path through space-time to get from point A to point B. In the double-slit experiment, point A might be the emitter, and point B the screen upon which the interference pattern appears, and a particle takes every possible path; through both slits at once; to get from A to B. When a detector is placed at one of the slits, the situation changes, and we now have a different point B. Point B is now at the detector, and a new path proceeds from the detector to the screen. In this eventuality there is only empty space between (B =) A' and the new terminus B', no double slit in the way, and so an interference pattern no longer appears.

The rest is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_slit#Quantum_version_of_experiment

If QM is more then just a mathematical construct and truly represents a physical reality of the nature around as in something that applies to matter period I would suggest that QM obviously has some impact on some level in the human brain.

I agree with that. I think conciousness itself is intrinsically linked to QM. It's the mechanism that allows free will. I'm with Penrose and Hameroff.

Sickle cell syndrome maybe?

Also cystic fibrosis.

Unfortunately both of these are a disadvantage if you have homologous pairs of the gene (two the same - just having one is an advantage)

Hmmm...

 

Premise A: Consciousness is not a phenomenon unique to humans.

Premise B: The scope of an animals consciousness is a function of what is required for survival in it's environment.

Premise C: Consciousness is an emergent property of life.

 

 

Fire away.

Premise D: Conciousness is a property of spacetime and not unique to living organisms (Pansychism)

In chemistry, instead of talking about entropy, they talk about Gibb's free energy, which is sort of the sum of entropy and enthalpy. The enthalpy is sort of the energy given off when chemicals go to a lower energy state. If you form a crystal, atoms lower entropy when they leave the molten or solution phase to enter the orderred state of the crystal. This is driven by the lowering of enthalpy, since atoms forming crystals will give off energy as they form the crystal lattice. Inthis case, the Gibb's free energy is still lower. It is not in violation of thermodynamics. The final state was able to decrease entropy because it gained from an enthalpy affect.

 

The living state can decrease the entropy of chemicals because the Gibb's free energy is still lowering when this occurs. No violation of thermo. The amount of enthalpy change, due to burning or metabolizing fuel or food, is the big kicker. This max potential can lower entropy, as well as increase enthalpy, on a smaller scale, such as making membrane lipids. But the Gibb's free energy, if we sun it for a celll, is lowering via thermo-law. In terms of evolution, one may say life and evolution both lower GFE.

Great stuff. I like it!

Of course "they exist but cannot be detected" is, from a science standpoint, excrement. It needs to be bagged up and removed from the discussion.

Fine by me.

(Oh ye of little faith)

Should we also stop talking about superstring theory? No, don't answer that one...

Not "better". There is a maximum to entropy and you simply can't do "better" than maximum entropy. As it happens, light hitting a rock is re-radiated at more entropy than life hitting a leaf. Why? Because part of the light hitting the leaf is converted to sugar -- lower entropy.

 

Now, later the sugar will be "burned" by the plant or an animal. At that point the heat radiated will be equal to that the rock did initially.

Surely energy reflected off a rock would be on average of a much higher frequency than energy emitted as heat/infra red radiation by a plant. Photons emitted into deep space may travel for millions of years before being able to hit something and be converted to heat. Life captures many more photons and ultimately turns them to heat far more quickly than a bare rocky planet would.

With you but disagree. This doesn't make life a "very effective way of increasing entropy" but rather a very INeffective way of increasing entropy. Life has to go thru extra steps to get the same increase of entropy.

I refer you to my comment above

And what in the world does "eddies in spacetime" have to do with this subject? What are "eddies in spacetime" anyway? In Einsteinian gravity, those would be stars and planets and other matter.

Aaahhh, well, they exist but cannot be detected. Matter is a result of eddies in the flow of spacetime, just like peacocks tails and tigers stipes are the result of eddies in the flow of eco-energy. I have absolutely no scientific proof of this whatsoever, but science would not be capable of proving it either way anyway. A bit like the ether.

The universe is increasing in entropy, but life represents a local decrease in entropy. In doing thermodynamic calculations you must consider the system and surroundings.

 

The entropy of the system and surroundings must increase, BUT the entropy of the system can decrease. Consider a compressed gas cylinder such that the output goes thru a turbine that in turn runs and electrical motor. Open the cylinder and the expanding gas increases in entropy. However, in the process you get a decrease in entropy in the electric motor.

 

Or think about cleaning the garage. The system is the garage and the system + surroundings is you, the atmosphere, and the garage. As you put items in the garage in order, you are decreasing the entropy of the garage. However, when you consider yourself and the atmosphere, there is an increase in entropy as you convert food to carbon dioxide, water, waste heat, and work. Thus the entropy of the system + surroundings increases.

 

Life is like that. Life itself does not "increase entropy in the universe". Life decreases entropy BUT that decrease is much smaller than the increase in entropy as the universe expands. Therefore the total entropy of the universe (system + surroundings) continues to increase despite the decrease in entropy (system) in living organisms.

 

"First, it must be emphasized that in entropy calculations it is important to distinguish between the system and the surroundings of the system. The system is that part on which we focus our attention. It may be part of a mechanical system, or more chemically, a gas, liquid, solid, or a reaction mixture. The surroundings constitute all other parts that might interact with the system. The surroundings will most frequently consist of heat reservoirs that can add to or subtract heat from the system or mechanical devices which can do work on or accept work from that system. The entropy change, not only of the system but also of the surroundings, will be of interest, and it will be important in all entropy considerations to distinguish these components clearly. The combination of the system and its surroundings correspond to an "isolated system", as suggested in Fig. 7.4, since the process being considered affects nothing outside of the system and its surroundings" pg 191-192. Physical Chemistry by Gordon M. Barrow

Well if we agreed that life uses energy from the system to delay (or even temporarily reverse) the effects of 2nd law of Thermodynamics, it's effect is to increase the overall entropy of the universe. Life captures solar energy and ultimately converts it to heat better than a bare rock would (less reflection, convertion of photons to heat...), so ultimately the universe increases entropy by having life. Thusly, life may be a very effective way of increasing entropy, thus could be just a side effect of the eddies in spacetime of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Still with me?

If that is what Sampson is saying, then it is wrong. Life doesn't "disperse" energy, but concentrates it. Remember, life is a DECREASE in entropy: it is an INCREASE in the energy available to do work.

Life disperses energy. Life increases entropy in the universe. Life is NOT order from disorder.

I disagree. I think you need to distinguish between the process and the entity.

 

Without getting into the details of what life is, the processes of living beings increase entropy. View the body as an engine: it does work and rejects heat. It definitely increases entropy. The being itself, i.e. all of the molecules that comprise it, represents a decrease in entropy. But it took a lot of work to create that being, so the entropy increased elsewhere.

I agree, except that I would argue that life is order from order, not order from disorder.

A result that is statistically significant at the 95% level has a 1 in 20 chance of being a fluke. Well over 20 tests of homeopathy have been done so some of them are bound to "work".

Also, was it a double blind trial ie was the effect measured by someone who didn't know which samples were control samples?

I think the homeopathic part of this is kinda irrelevent. It's the dilution effect on histamines that's the puzzler.

Even being used "loosely", the term is inaccurate. "Purpose" implies a goal, and life does not have the goal of dispersing energy. That simply is a side-effect.

I think you misunderstand what he is saying. He is saying that the reason why life exists at all is due to the fact that it allows energy to be dispersed more effectively. Thusly, life is the side effect (of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics).

bombus, it has less than half its structural strength at 660*C

Thanks for that. Well, if the plane melted, maybe it was hot enough for the girders to soften, but was it hot enough for long enough?

The quote is important untill there are large scale double blind clinical trials that prove it, there are MANY that disprove it.

It's not really the homeopathic medicine argument that's puzzling, it's the histamine solution still working at levels of dilution that should negate its properties.

Statistical anomaly,

That sounds to me like explaining something away in the bad old way us scientists tend to do with anything that doesn't fit!