The A Priori Case for the Paranormal? [Resources]

But as I'll get into in my next post there are a variety of ways of looking at QM that are friendly to the possibility of Survival and/or Psi.

So we already have thread on how the quantum fathers themselves actually influenced a lot of supposed "New Age" ideas linking QM to Consciousness, but I figure a few select quotes from physicists might be of value here:

"Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter..."
  -James Jean

“The universe is of the nature of a thought or sensation in a universal Mind… To put the conclusion crudely – the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by ‘mind’ I do not exactly mean mind and by ‘stuff’ I do not at all mean stuff. Still this is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds; but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness… It is the physical aspects of the world that we have to explain.”

– Sir Arthur Eddington

“The only acceptable point of view appears to be the one that recognises both sides of reality – the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical – as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously. It would be most satisfactory of all if physis [physical nature] and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.”

– Wolfgang Pauli

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”


– Max Planck

“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

– Erwin Schrödinger

"Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the ma- terialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.”


– Richard Conn Henry

“It is not matter that creates an illusion of consciousness, but consciousness that creates an illusion of matter.”

– Bernard Haisch

“Thought and matter have a great similarity of order. In a way, nature is alive, as Whitehead would say, all the way to the depths. And intelligent. Thus it is both mental and material, as we are.”

– David Bohm

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GM: In a sense, do we create that particle?

BH: That’s a very interesting question. Do we create what we see? Maybe we do. I know people say, “Oh, it’s all subjective.” But there are only certain things you can do with it. You can’t magic things up. You can reorder things. You can rearrange things when you are making your reality. We’re rearranging the processes. We are part of the process.

GM: Because you shouldn’t think of it in terms of a mechanistic motion of particles?

BH: Yes, it’s nothing like that. It’s not mechanism. It organicism. It’s organic. Nature is more organic than we think it is. And then you can understand why life arose, because if nature is organic, it has the possibility of life in it.

 
- Interview with Basil Hiley

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Note that our approach represents a generalization of von Neumann’s idea to formulate QM as a theory of evolving objective universe interacting with human consciousness, see [9]. In theories with global time, the conflict with relativity can be a voided if one postulates that the label is not the same as a clock reading and that a clock reading depends on the clock trajectory. On the other hand, it is clear that is related to the age of the universe. Since always increases, then the time travel will be impossible within our framework.

 - Aleksandar Mikovic , Temporal Platonic Metaphysics

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Another important aspect of QM is it forced scientists and philosophers to confront the possibility that even the aspects of reality measurable by physics may be indeterministic. This then raises up the question of Causality, which I'll get into in the next post.