Nightrain1 said:
Ned Block bring up a recent well-known experiment, which proves that two particles from a common source can and do exhibit a kind of non-physical communication at a distance.
This is 'quantum entanglement', a physical property of some particle pairs (and once derided by Einstein as 'spooky action at a distance').
When the polarity of one particle is changed, the polarity of the other particle changes immediately, no matter what the distance. This means faster than the speed of light! How?
It is very weird - it's actually that when the spin of one particle is
measured (the spins are unknown at first), the spin of the other particle always turns out to be the opposite, instantaneously. The general consensus is that it doesn't break the ban on faster-than-light
communication because no information can be transmitted this way (because you can never know which particle will spin which way until you actually measure it).
As for the 'how?', nobody knows, but it has been proved that it's not because the spins of the particles are preset at the start. It's a big mystery, but it does really happen, and it's already being used to encrypt communications so nobody can eavesdrop.
I know that this and other Quantum Physics experiments don't necessarily prove the existence of consciousness, God, or of a spiritual world in which we all survive death. However, what other explanation is being offered by science for our own consciousness? Evolution? Now, there's a stretch!
I agree that we don't have to prove the existence of consciousness - the big question is how does it work? There's plenty of good research that is building up showing how different aspects of consciousness are mediated by different areas of the brain, and some of the links between them, but the 'sense of self' remains obscure.
Douglas Hofstadter of '
Godel, Escher, Bach' fame has written a very readable treatment in '
I Am A Strange Loop'.
Evolution (by natural selection) can give a plausible explanation of how consciousness might arise, by proposing that a sense of self has a survival advantage, but not much more than that. There are plenty of speculative ideas about how a sense of self might develop this way, but the jury's still out.
It's likely that we can't really scientifically prove or disprove the existence of God or a spiritual world in which we all survive death - unless someone can propose a well-controlled reproducible experiment to do so, which hasn't happened yet. Some things are always going to be down to personal judgement and experience - which are different for all of us.
oint it pleases you to assume (or not)
