Stone and the Physics Forums

Continued from Heartstone 009

An on-going conversation with cooperative networks of conscious particles through the focal point of Heartstone.

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Stone and Heartstone

Stone

On Wednesday, June 21, a young man we connected with on a Maui farm stopped by to visit us in central California on his way to a new job.

He told us that as he was leaving, he kept feeling an urge to bring a large stone which had been for sometime at his grand-parents house. He almost left without it, but went back and got the stone to bring it with him. He knew nothing of my conversations with Heartstone.

During the beautiful visit with Sage, he saw Heartstone and went to his car to bring the one he calls 'Stone.' He gave Stone to us as a gift. Already I feel a connection with Stone, and the connection between it and Heartstone. They now sit together on the drum stand in the gazebo where I do much of my inner work.

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Objectivity

Though total objectivity is currently impossible in human experience, science aims to be as free from bias and personal perspective as possible.

In alignment with that aim, yet with no background in science, I devised a way to play with objectifying my experiments with the consciousness of a stone, if not yet to test it scientifically.

My method was to use a finger pulse meter which measure heartbeats per minute while conversing with Heartstone, to see if my requested heartbeats per minute could be reached over agreement and cooperation with nets of conscious particles. The idea was to see if the nets can have influence on a biological organism in a way that can be measured. 

According to the Mayo Clinic,

A normal resting heart rate for adults ranges from 60 to 100 beats a minute. Generally, a lower heart rate at rest implies more efficient heart function and better cardiovascular fitness. For example, a well-trained athlete might have a normal resting heart rate closer to 40 beats a minute.

My first reading started at 82 bpm, and did not go below 75 until I requested of Heartstone to initiate requests of my bio-nets to lower my bpm to 69. The reading went as low as 72. I continued, but started doubting the procedure and grew impatient. Just as I was about to turn off the meter, the reading went to 69.

It raised my eyebrows, but I did not consider it conclusive. It might have been an ordinary happening, and coincidental that the number matched my telepathic request.

On another day, I experimented again, and requested a bpm of 56. Similarly to the earlier test, the numbers were in a much higher range at the start. I questioned how honest the first test was since I practiced deep breathing between readings. It came to me that the nets were guiding the breathing, which I could neither confirm nor deny. Again, just before I turned off the meter, the end reading of 56 matched my request. Still I doubted this would pass as a scientific method, or proof of anything.

In a subsequent conversation with Heartstone, I mentioned the experiment. Heartstone responded, 'Find the unanswered questions of quantum physics, and converse with us about them.'

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Physics Forums

It took me a few days to gain the courage to take this step, but I did, and joined the Physics Forums.

They do not permit speculation, so I do not express my ideas on the forums, but only ask questions. Admin on the forums gave me a link to a Wikipedia article (Unsolved Problems in Physics.) It was exactly what I had envisioned, as a list of unanswered questions, and is now published as a blog post.

We will see where this leads....

So far, the Physics Forums have not provided clear answers to my questions, but have referred me to resources which end up being irrelevant to my search.

However, in this exercise, as often is the case, I have found that the purpose of making one connection is to link me to something else. Over PF, I found an article on NAUTILUS which speaks directly to the core issue, the central question, 'Is matter conscious?':

From the article,

Is Matter Conscious?
Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics.

'Physics tells us that matter is made of particles and fields, which have properties such as mass, charge, and spin. Physics may not yet have discovered all the fundamental properties of matter, but it is getting closer.

Yet there is reason to believe that there must be more to matter than what physics tells us. Broadly speaking, physics tells us what fundamental particles do or how they relate to other things, but nothing about how they are in themselves, independently of other things.'

Although I have been careful to follow their guidelines, The Physics Forums keep blocking my questions. The last Alert was:

This is not a valid source for discussion here; it [NAUTILUS] is not a textbook or peer-reviewed paper. You can find lots of opinions about matter and consciousness, but without some kind of experimental testability, they're philosophy, not physics, and this is a physics forum.

I am looking for a way to make these questions testable, and getting nowhere with people of science. There is not even reasonable discussion of the subject, such as leading me to ways to test ideas.

What next?

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There are, at this writing, 230 comments on the article, 'Is Matter Conscious?'

The first is this:

zarzuelazen 27
Well, there are 2 different ideas mixed into this essay, one idea very good, the other just confused 'window-dressing' IMHO. The really good idea is panpsychism, the idea that consciousness might be a fundamental property of reality, present to some degree everywhere in the physical world.

But the other idea (drawing a distinction between consciousness as intrinsic/hardware and physics as relational/software) is saying nothing at all substantive, and really just adds a lot of unnecessary confusion. I don't think there's any such distinction, and if you think about it carefully, it's just another form of 'dualism' (property dualism) that's crept in through the backdoor. The hard-problem/easy-problem distinction is invalid in my view, because it adds nothing at all to the explanation - Science is a fundamental unity, where phenomenon that were once thought to be separate are always later found to be unified. So there's no basis at all for thinking that there's any sort of hard-easy problem distinction. it's 'window dressing' or 'word salad' and I think we should cut it away. Panpsychism really does imply that there simply can't be any real distinction between mind and matter.

A lot of the confusion arises, in my view, from thinking of consciousness as a static 'thing' or 'stuff' , whereas in fact it's a *process*- Consciousness is not in space, it's in TIME - and there IS a branch of physics that is especially designed to deal with the flow of time - it's THERMODYNAMICS. Thermodynamics specifically deals with the flows of information, energy and entropy through a system, and the emergence of THE ARROW OF TIME. When you think of consciousness as a thermodynamic property that is a manifestation of the arrow of time, you will see that there is no 'hard problem' - consciousness can in fact be explained as a material process after all! The key is to realize that consciousness doesn't extend through space, CONSCIOUSNESS EXTENDS THROUGH TIME.

So consciousness is something like 'information' (math) and 'fields (physics). It's a thermodynamic property in exactly the same class as these other two properties, and likely, it is indeed ubiquitous, just as panpsychism postulates. It's the flow of time itself!

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This is interesting to me because when I looked at the list of unsolved problems of physics, the first that caught my attention was the first of the list:

Arrow of time (e.g. entropy's arrow of time)
Why does time have a direction? .... Is there a single possible past? Is the present moment physically distinct from the past and future, or is it merely an emergent property of consciousness?

Perhaps rather than a flow of time it is an unfolding of time. And yes, I resonate with the present moment being an emergent property of consciousness.

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