TimG, “the heart” is a metaphor for a certain mode of our experience (and operating out of the limbic system in the brain and perhaps in collaboration with the cerebellum.) Talking about “the heart” out of context as the blood pumper is just silly, it’s a literalist-naif shtick (like the stereotype alien visitor comedy) and not good skepticism.

I get that “the heart” doesn’t really mean “the heart”, just like when these New Age types talk about “energy” they don’t mean “energy” in the sense we use it in physics. But my point is that they’re using these terms in such a way that they have no well-defined meaning at all.

It’d be one thing if they defined their terms — e.g. “Here we are using the ‘heart’ as a metaphor for mental processes involving the right hemisphere of the brain” or the frontal lobe or whatever. But they don’t. Making precise quantitative claims (e.g. “three percent of the world we understand with our hearts”) without giving equally precise definitions of the terms in those claims is one of the hallmarks of pseudo-scientific bulls***.

BTW pointing out that some odd physical property likely has implications doesn’t mean I support the particular claims or even in kind of a certain person or clique, it’s just that mention of say QM in reference to the mind becomes a spring-board for mention of what good may come of it.

I take this to mean you don’t agree with Karadzik’s metaphysical views, which is good because so far as I can tell they’re nothing but vacuous nonsense. I only asked because you brought up the idea of QM having to do with consciousness in a discussion of Karadzik and his views.

For what it’s worth, I do think the question of whether QM has anything to do with consciousness is an interesting one, as is the question of whether different interpretations of QM can lead to different observable consequences.

But what bothers me is when people say “Well, science doesn’t fully understand X” as a defense of crackpot pseudoscientific “theories”. (I’m not saying this was your intention, just that this is a very common way of defending these viewpoints.) The fact is we have a much better, more quantitatively precise and predictive understanding of the physics of atoms than we do of consciousness, or for that matter turbulent flow or high-temperature superconductors or a whole host of other phenomena.

But even for things we really don’t understand, it doesn’t mean we should take seriously claims that are not based on evidence, or which are simply not stated precisely and coherently.

About as crazy as describing the Srebrenica massacre as “n’t really very nice” and finding the antics of its alleged instigator “extremely amusing”.

And the point is : self congratulatory sneering at the belief systems of others (a major defect here at CV) is rather out of place in an assessment of an unprincipled murdering bastard - or (c.f. Blair) Radovan Karadzic.

Whoops - I forgot that you guys have a selective whimsy bypass.

that is, it only took two posts to pose the deep question: who is worse, karadjic, or bush?

i prefer pieter kok’s “he’s not only a war criminal, but a science criminal!”

and anyone who confuses the war crimes of the B with those of the K should probably look for new work. will you recognize science crimes when you commit them yourself?

Another crazy thing is to characterize the slaughter of thousands of people as “not sharing one’s politics.”

The electron makes sense to me as a expanding shell, or wave. I don’t get the obsession with reducing everything to interactions of particles. Entangled particles exhibiting action at a distance would make more sense if they were two points on the same wave.

The distinction between the head and the heart might better be understood as left and right brained thinking. One analytical, the other existential. I think the relationship between consciousness and the intellect is similar to that between analog and digital. While the intellect focuses on reductionistic distinctions, the consciousness is constantly blurring them into some larger whole. This isn’t always a positive function either, as it would be the basis for cognitive breakdowns, such as ADD, as well as the basis for herd behavior and pack mentality overcoming the individual’s reasoning capacity. So the two sides work in conjunction.

Yes we can make predictions with QM but we really don’t understand e.g. just what sort of “thing” goes through space say when a beta particle (electron) comes out of a nucleus: is it really an expanding shell? You can call that a “philosophical” interpretation since we only worry about what happens when the electron is caught, but really it is a physical interpretation since it asks about “what are electrons”? Ironically, you could in like vein (and this is little appreciated except by aficionados of the history of empiricism etc.) say that the “existence” of fields was just a philosophical interpretation of how particles just act in dependence on what other particles did earlier. That would not explain the energy density etc. we need for conservation, but it can be argued that only actions are actually observed and not their mediations. Also, some things formerly thought as just philosophical distinctions in QM turned out to have actual consequences (Bell theorem) and maybe that wasn’t the last example.

“Forces” aren’t the key issue in consciousness and volition, coordination (where QM has some significance) is. If there is some sort of wholeness in the brain, through which the states of electrons can be coordinated or in effect made more “as one”, then a delicately-tuned pattern of messages would not behave the same as if each part just acted randomly on its own. There could be not only a butterfly effect in the brain, but one that acted all over. Could it be the basis of volition, the sense that an “I” picks out an action and not just how a mess of activity comes together? As I noted in a poster presentation at Tucson 2000: Toward a Science of Consciousness: Without some sort of global authority in the brain, we couldn’t so easily suddenly break off types of action we had been engaged in, if the volitional theories like “pandemonium” (look that up) were valid.

I see. So leaders of weaker states who want to “protect their own people” can feel perfectly justified in taking measures such as the following:

Some of the executions were carried out at night under arc lights, and industrial bulldozers then pushed the bodies into mass graves. According to evidence collected from Bosniaks by French policeman Jean-René Ruez, some were buried alive; he also heard testimony describing Serb forces killing and torturing refugees at will, streets littered with corpses, people committing suicide to avoid having their noses, lips and ears chopped off, and adults being forced to watch the soldiers kill their children.

The people in authority who fomented and facilitated the Rwandan genocide rationalized it in a similar way, and employed similar techniques, including their use of the local media. I take it that we’re to suppose that they weren’t criminals, just African politicians—and that we should passively accept criminality on the part of our politicians if they claim to be “protecting” us.