News: Climate science, capitalism and government, etc.

Utilities oppose clean air regulations until government 

incentivizes them to support regulations

Capitalism really does work when one understands that profits are everything. The NYT writes:

With Federal Aid on the Table, Utilities Shift to Embrace Climate Goals

As billions in government subsidies were at stake, the electric utility industry shed its opposition to clean-air regulation and put its lobbying muscle behind passing President Biden’s climate bill.

Just two years ago, DTE Energy, a Michigan-based electric utility, was still enmeshed in a court fight with federal regulators over emissions from a coal-burning power plant on the western shore of Lake Erie that ranks as one of the nation’s largest sources of climate-changing air pollution.

But in September, Gerard M. Anderson, who led DTE for the last decade, was on the South Lawn of the White House alongside hundreds of other supporters of President Biden, giving a standing ovation to the president for his success in pushing a climate change package through Congress — a law that will help accelerate the closure of the very same coal-burning behemoth, known as DTE Monroe, that his company had been fighting to protect.

Mr. Anderson’s position reflects a fundamental shift among major electric utilities nationwide as they deploy their considerable clout in Washington: After years of taking steps like backing dark-money groups to sue the government to block tighter air pollution rules, DTE and a growing number of other utilities have joined forces to speed the transition away from fossil fuels.  

Their new stance is driven less by evolving ideology than the changing economics of renewable energy, fueled in part by the sheer amount of money the federal government is putting on the table to encourage utilities to move more quickly to cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy like solar and wind.

The priorities of most (~90% ?) big businesses cannot be much clearer than this. Profit talks and everything else walks. 

Despite Republican Party ideology vilification of, and vehement opposition to, Biden’s attempt to deal with climate change, businesses go for the cash. Ideology, hate of government and everything else be damned. Profit is king. Everything else is worthless peasantry. The government hater wing of the fascist GOP, i.e., the entire GOP leadership, must hate news like this. One can bet that Faux News won’t be mentioning this inconvenient little development.

A bit of bipartisanship about same-sex marriage happened!

The NYT writes:

The Senate passed landmark legislation on Tuesday to mandate federal recognition for same-sex marriages, as a lame-duck Congress mustered a notable moment of bipartisanship before Democrats were to lose their unified control of Capitol Hill.

The 61-to-36 vote put the bill on track to become law in the final weeks before Republicans assume the majority in the House of Representatives at the start of the new Congress in January.

The bill would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to same-sex couples. It prohibits states from denying the validity of an out-of-state marriage based on sex, race or ethnicity. But in a condition that Republican backers insisted upon, it would guarantee that religious organizations would not be required to provide any goods or services for the celebration of any marriage, and could not lose tax-exempt status or other benefits for refusing to recognize same-sex unions.

Notice the Republicans protected Christianity and its precious tax-exempt status. That is kleptocratic theocracy in action. Christian nationalist churches remain free to discriminate as much as their bigoted black little hearts desire. But on balance, this is still good news. 

One step at a time. One fight at a time.

Time for cognitive biology!: Fostering prosocial behavior

Some research suggests that getting people to think about the future can foster prosocial behavior. A recent social science paper comments:

Previous studies suggest a link between future thinking and prosocial behaviors. However, this association is not fully understood at state and trait level. The present study tested whether a brief future thinking induction promoted helping behavior in an unrelated task. In addition, the relation between mental time travel and prosocial behaviors in daily life was tested with questionnaire data. Forty-eight participants filled in questionnaires and were asked to think about the future for one minute or to name animals for one minute (control condition) before playing the Zurich Prosocial Game (a measure of helping behavior). Results revealed that participants in the future thinking condition helped significantly more than participants in the control condition. Moreover, questionnaire data showed that dispositional and positive orientation toward the future and the past was significantly associated with self-reported prosocial behaviors. The present findings suggest that thinking about the future in general has positive transfer effects on subsequent prosocial behavior and that people who think more about the past or future in a positive way engage more in prosocial behavior.

Anecdotal reports have linked future thinking to increase in prosocial behavior or conflict resolution, even in international conflicts. One example is the Camp David Accords stating the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt in 1978. After several days of negotiations without an agreement at Camp David, the American president Jimmy Carter introduced grandchildren to the discussion. This was a turning point in the negotiation. Later that day, Begin, Sadat and Carter signed the Camp David Accord. It is possible that evoking grandchildren shifted the focus from the present to the future, thereby increasing the willingness for compromise and conflict resolution.

Evolutionary considerations also argue that mental time travel may guide decision-making and lead to cooperative behaviors by bypassing opportunistic motivation, impulsive choices, and the effects of time discounting. In particular, it has been suggested that episodic future thinking [the ability to imagine oneself vividly in a specific future event] might foster prosocial intentions as well as behaviors. Several studies have provided evidence establishing the link between episodic future thinking and prosocial intentions.

If this is true, it suggests that climate news reporting should usually mention plausible future scenarios such as adverse effects of climate change on species extinction and on the next and future generations. 

Time for physics! α - the Fine Structure Constant: ~1/137

Don't try to understand all of this ~16 minute video. For a thought experiment, instead try to follow the gist of the reasoning. Just go with the flow and don't sweat the details. The line of thought reveals some of the limits of human understanding and some of what physics and mathematics are grappling with. 

News bits 'n whatnot

A lot of people are slow to see reality

The NYT writes:

Jewish Allies Call Trump’s Dinner With 

Antisemites a Breaking Point

Supporters who looked past the former president’s admirers in bigoted corners of the far right, and his own use of antisemitic tropes, now are drawing a line. “He legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters,” says one. “And this scares me.”  

But last week, Mr. Trump dined at his Palm Beach palace, Mar-a-Lago, with the performer Kanye West, who had already been denounced for making antisemitic statements, and with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and Holocaust denier, granting the antisemitic fringe a place of honor at his table. Now, even some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters say they can no longer ignore the abetting of bigotry by the nominal leader of the Republican Party.

“I am a child of survivors. I have become very frightened for my people,” Morton Klein, head of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, said on Monday, referring to his parents’ survival of the Holocaust. “Donald Trump is not an antisemite. He loves Israel. He loves Jews. But he mainstreams, he legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters. And this scares me.”

Seriously? Really? It took this long and something this blatant to scare another self-deluded radical right right winger? This is what scares me about people who can delude themselves into believing they are pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties while supporting a bigoted fascist who is blatantly anti-democracy and anti-civil liberties.

This reminds me of the Indian scouts that Col. Custer used to track down tribes the scouts hated so that Custer could slaughter them. Later after the main event slaughter was complete, the scout tribes got what was coming to them. 

So, a question pops right up. How stupid and/or deluded are some people? Apparently, pretty stupid and/or deluded. Look at how Mr Recently Scared rationalized Trump’s antisemitism into a false reality, i.e., He loves Israel. He loves Jews. That is nonsense. Trump loves Trump. Stupid, deluded, both and/or something(s) else, Mr Scared is Custer’s Indian scout who still doesn’t get it.

Stolen election hardball in Arizona

The AP writes:

GOP-controlled Arizona county refuses to certify election

State Elections Director Kori Lorick wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs is required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and will have to exclude Cochise County’s votes if they aren’t received in time.

That would threaten to flip the victor in at least two close races — a U.S. House seat and state schools chief — from a Republican to a Democrat.

As usual, there is no evidence of widespread vote or voter fraud in Cochise County. That inconvenient fact does not matter. What matters is subverting those elections based on lies about vote and/or voter fraud or irregularities.

So, a question pops right up. How ignorant, stupid and/or deluded are some people who still cannot see blatant Republican Party fascism and its hostility to elections and other targeted civil liberties? Elections and voting are civil liberties. Stupid, deluded, ignorant and/or something(s) else, most rank and file Republican voters are Indian scouts who still don’t get it. If the fascist beast they support gains enough power, it will turn on them sooner or later.

From the crumbling rule of law files:

Rut roh!! Be afraid: The Supreme Court is at it again 

The NYT writes:

Supreme Court Seems Poised to Limit Public Corruption Cases

The fraud convictions of Joseph Percoco, a former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Louis Ciminelli, a contractor in Buffalo, appeared likely to be overturned.

The Supreme Court, which has become increasingly skeptical of federal prosecutions of public corruption in state government, seemed poised on Monday to hand prosecutors two more defeats.

The question in the first case, Percoco v. United States, No. 21-1158, was whether Mr. Percoco could be prosecuted under a federal law that makes it a crime to deprive the government of “honest services” for conduct that took place after he resigned his government position to run the governor’s 2014 re-election campaign.

Yaakov M. Roth, a lawyer for Mr. Percoco, said the law applies only to people who exercise the authority of the government, a power he said his client had lacked when he received the payments.

“What he did have, like many lobbyists and donors and interest groups and others, was influence — in his case, influence drawn from years of public service, from a close relationship to the Cuomo family and from his senior campaign role,” Mr. Roth said. “But none of that creates a fiduciary duty to the public.”

Justice Clarence Thomas asked whether an official could resign for an afternoon, just long enough to take a bribe. Mr. Roth responded that such a bribe would very likely be in exchange for government action after the official’s return, which he said would be covered by the law.

“The State of New York doesn’t seem to be upset about this arrangement,” Thomas said of the payments to Mr. Percoco, adding, “It seems as though we are using a federal law to impose ethical standards on state activity.”

Once again, the hard core pro-corruption capitalism that the Christofascist Republican Party leadership supports is on public display for all to see. What the Christofascists on the Supreme Court are aiming for in this case is severance of federal law enforcement reach into state corruption. The underlying truth is that it is easier to corrupt a state government and state law enforcement than it is to corrupt their federal counterparts. 

This is why Republican brass knuckles capitalist elites are so hell-bent on shifting as much power  as possible from the federal government and law enforcement to the states. That opens the door to more corruption with less danger for the criminals and bent politicians and bureaucrats. In turn, more corruption amounts to more wealth and power for the capitalists.

The Republicans have been chipping away at anti-corruption laws for years. This is just another step on the fascist Republican road to legalizing blatant corruption in government.

Big businesses hate labor unions

Vice writes:

Federal Judge Orders Amazon to Stop Firing People for Organizing

A cease-and-desist order filed against the company demands it stop retaliating against unionizing workers.

A federal judge filed a cease-and-desist order against Amazon on Friday, demanding that the company stop firing its employees for participating in union organizing.

Once again, brass knuckles capitalism shows its true colors. The rule of law does not matter much. Profits matter.

Federal judges and judicial independence; Radical right RINO hunting

Unaccountable federal judges 

A NYT opinion piece discusses judicial independence and how it can be two-edged sword, one edge pro-democracy, the other anti-democracy. The author, Jamelle Bouie, raises two interesting questions about lifetime tenure for federal judges. Bouie writes:

The most striking detail in the recent investigation by The New York Times into another potential Supreme Court breach is not the evidence that Justice Samuel Alito or his wife may have leaked information to conservative friends in 2014 about the outcome of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which extended “religious liberty” to the actions of family-owned corporations.

No, the most striking detail is the extent to which a number of Republican justices, Alito included, appear to have been the targets of a sophisticated and well-funded influence operation designed to notch as many legal and constitutional victories for moneyed and conservative interests as the justices were willing to give.

The framers of the Constitution wanted an independent judiciary — strong enough to resist corruption as well as the influence of public opinion. As such, federal judges enjoy tenure during “good behavior.” Barring impeachment and conviction, they cannot be removed.  

My colleagues in the newsroom, Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker, describe a kind of revolving door, where wealthy donors to conservative causes invite justices to meals, vacation homes and private clubs; where they contribute money to the Supreme Court Historical Society for the purpose of meeting with and influencing the justices; and where the former head of one such influence operation, Faith and Action, went as far as to purchase a building across the street from the court so that he could cultivate the people who worked there.

But what if lifetime tenure, rather than leading judges away from temptation, makes it easier to tempt them? In an era in which the Supreme Court is as powerful as it has ever been — and which, not coincidentally, the wealthiest Americans have an almost unbreakable grip on our politics — what if lifetime tenure, rather than raising the barriers to corruption, makes it easier to influence the court by giving interested parties the time and space to operate? And beyond the question of undue influence, what if lifetime tenure works too well to sever the court from the public, rendering it both unaccountable and dangerous to the popular foundations of American government?

No modern radical right Republican federal judge would admit to being influenced by rich and powerful people. They all vehemently deny it. But those people are skilled liars. And probably significantly self-deceived. Rich and powerful people are who federal judges tend to socialize with and listen to. America's political system is widely known as a pay-to-play system.[1] To get influence, i.e., to play, one can pay with cash or with whatever perks that power can afford. 

See the two-edged sword here? When Republican politicians choose morally rotted, radical right and Christian nationalist judges, why believe in their moral rectitude or their reading of the US Constitution? They are called by God himself to fix what is broken in America. They have their morals and infallible, God given Christian Sharia laws. They don't care about our morals or secular laws. 

Radicalism and violence

The NYT editorial board published an interesting argument in an essay, How a Faction of the Republican Party Enables Political Violence:

On Oct. 12, 2018, a crowd of Proud Boys arrived at the Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan. They had come to the Upper East Side club from around the country for a speech by the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes. It was a high point for the Proud Boys — which until that point had been known best as an all-male right-wing street-fighting group — in their embrace by mainstream politics.

The Metropolitan Republican Club is an emblem of the Republican establishment. It was founded in 1902 by supporters of Theodore Roosevelt, and it’s where New York City Republicans such as Fiorello La Guardia and Rudy Giuliani announced their campaigns. But the presidency of Donald Trump whipped a faction of the Metropolitan Republican Club into “an ecstatic frenzy,” said John William Schiffbauer, a Republican consultant who used to work for the state G.O.P. on the second floor of the club.

Republicans at the New York club have not distanced themselves from the Proud Boys. Soon after the incident, a candidate named Ian Reilly, who, former club members say, had a lead role in planning the speech, won the next club presidency. He did so in part by recruiting followers of far-right figures, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, to pack the club’s ranks at the last minute. A similar group of men repeated the strategy at the New York Young Republicans Club, filling it with far-right members, too.

Many moderate Republicans have quit the clubs in disgust. Looking back, Mr. Schiffbauer said, Oct. 12, 2018, was a “proto” Jan. 6. 

In conflicts like this one — not all of them played out so publicly — there is a fight underway for the soul of the Republican Party. On one side are Mr. Trump and his followers, including extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. On the other side stand those in the party who remain committed to the principle that politics, even the most contentious politics, must operate within the constraints of peaceful democracy. It is vital that this pro-democracy faction win out over the extremists and push the fringes back to the fringes.

It has happened before. The Republican Party successfully drove the paranoid extremists of the John Birch Society out of public life in the 1960s. Party leaders could do so again for the current crop of conspiracy peddlers. .... A healthy democracy requires both political parties to be fully committed to the rule of law and not to entertain or even tacitly encourage violence or violent speech. A large faction of one party in our country fails that test, and that has consequences for all of us.

It is impossible to fully untangle the relationship between conspiracy theories and violence. But what Americans do know should sound alarms: A survey this year found that some 18 million Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and that force is justified to return him to power. Of those 18 million, eight million own guns, and one million either belong to a paramilitary group or know someone who does. That’s alarming because violent people who belong to communities, online or offline, where violence is widely accepted are more likely to act. A portion of the G.O.P. has become such a community.

It is unclear to me how powerful “moderate Republicans” in the GOP might be. One does not hear much from them. Most of the Republicans in congress voted to protect Trump and they currently treat the 1/6 coup attempt as no big deal and not worth investigating. The RNC still calls the 1/6 coup attempt “legitimate political discourse.” Radicalized, extremist Republican theocrats control the Supreme Court and in a few weeks they will control the House. 

The NYT’s Editorial Board may misapprehend the weakness of moderate Republicans and the strength of the radical extremists. The moderates have been RINO hunted out of power, influence and/or the party. Sure, there are some moderates left, just like there are some atheists, gays, pro-abortionists and people who support some gun regulations. But their presence in the party is insignificant. 

It’s a safe bet that most of the Nazis (~99.9% ?)  

don’t support Biden or democrats generally[2]

Footnotes: 

1. Wikipedia on pay-to-play in politics:

While the direct exchange of campaign contributions for contracts is the most visible form of pay-to-play, the greater concern is the central role of money in politics, and its skewing of both the composition and the policies of government. Thus, those who can pay the price of admission, such as to a $1000/plate dinner or $25,000 “”breakout session”, gain access to power and/or its spoils, to the exclusion of those who cannot or will not pay: “giving certain people advantages that other[s] don't have because they donated to your campaign.” Good-government advocates consider this an outrage because “political fundraising should have no relationship to policy recommendations.”

But as we all know, political fundraising has a direct relationship to actual policy.

2. The Guardian wrote in 2016:

American Nazi Party leader sees 'a real opportunity' 

with a Trump presidency

Chairman Rocky Suhayda says on radio show that a Donald Trump presidency could give American Nazis the chance to build a ‘pro-white’ political caucus 

“It doesn’t have to be anti, like the movement’s been for decades, so much as it has to be pro-white. It’s kinda hard to go and call us bigots, if we don’t go around and act like a bigot. That’s what the movement should contemplate. All right.”

On what human sense are sensing: We simulate reality

What we sense really isn't exactly reality. The brain-mind has to create illusions and narratives to explain things that are very probably not fully understandable because they far too complex for probably any form of life to comprehend. An article by Discover Magazine goes into this for a general audience: 

How Quantum Mechanics Lets Us See, Smell and Touch

How much of the quantum world can we experience in our daily lives? And what sort of information can our senses glean about the true nature of reality? After all, as the origin of the theory itself makes clear, quantum phenomena can lie just under our noses. In fact, they may be taking place right inside our noses.

The Quantum Schnozz

What’s going on in your nose when you wake up and smell the coffee, or the slice of bread browning in your non-lethal toaster? For such an in-your-face sensory organ, the nose is poorly understood. No less a luminary than Enrico Fermi, who built the world’s first nuclear reactor, once remarked to a friend while frying onions that it would be nice to understand how our sense of smell works.

So you’re lying in bed, and someone has thoughtfully brewed some freshly ground Sumatran dark roast. Molecules from the elixir waft through the air. Your inhalations draw some of these molecules into a cavity between your eyes just above the roof of your mouth. The molecules stick to a layer of mucus on the upper surface of the cavity, embedded with olfactory neurons. Dangling from the brain like the tentacles of a jellyfish, olfactory neurons are the only part of the central nervous system constantly exposed to the outside world.

What happens next isn’t quite clear. We know the molecules bind to some of the 400 different receptors on the surface of the olfactory neurons; we don’t know exactly how that contact creates our sense of smell. Why is smell such a difficult sense to understand?

“In part, it’s the difficulty of setting up experiments to probe what’s going on inside the olfactory receptors of the nose,” says Andrew Horsfield, a materials scientist at Imperial College London.

The conventional explanation for how smell works seems straightforward: The receptors accept very specific shapes of molecules. They’re like locks, which can be opened only by the right keys.

But there’s a fundamental problem with the lock-and-key model: “You can have molecules of wildly different shape and composition, which all give you the same odor perception,” says Horsfield. It seems that something more than shape must be involved, but what?

A controversial alternative to the lock-and-key model suggests our sense of smell arises not just from the shape of molecules, but also from the manner in which those molecules vibrate.

Feeling Your Way

Now back to that cup of coffee. The cup feels substantial, a solid chunk of matter firmly in contact with the skin of your hand. But that’s an illusion: We never really touch anything, at least not in the sense of two solid slabs of matter coming together.[1] More than 99.9999999999 percent of an atom consists of empty space, with nearly all its stuff concentrated in the nucleus.

When you exert pressure against the cup with your hand, the seeming solidity comes from the resistance of electrons in the cup. Electrons themselves don’t have any volume at all — they’re just fleeting, zero-dimensional flecks of negative electric charge that surround atoms and molecules like clouds. And the laws of quantum mechanics limit them to specific energy levels around atoms and molecules. As your hand grasps the cup, it forces electrons from one level to another, and that requires energy from the hand’s muscles, which the brain interprets as touching something solid.

Our sense of touch, then, arises from an exceedingly complex interaction between electrons around the molecules of our bodies and those of the objects we encounter. From that information, our brain creates the illusion that we possess solid bodies moving through a world filled with other solid objects. Touch doesn’t give us an accurate sense of reality. And it may be that none of our perceptions match what’s really out there. Donald Hoffman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, believes that our senses and brain evolved to hide the true nature of reality, not to reveal it.

“My idea is that reality, whatever it is, is too complicated and would take us too much time and energy [to process],” he says.

Hoffman likens the picture our brain constructs of the world to the graphical interface on a computer screen. All the colorful icons on the screen — the trash can, the mouse pointer, the file folders — bear no resemblance at all to what’s really going on inside the computer. They’re abstractions, simplifications that allow us to interact with complex electronics.

In Hoffman’s view, evolution has shaped our brains to operate in much the same way, as a graphical interface that doesn’t reproduce the world with any sort of fidelity. Evolution doesn’t favor the development of accurate perceptions; it rewards ones that enhance survival. Or as Hoffman puts it, “Fitness beats truth.”  

So while one organism might construct a more accurate representation of reality, that representation doesn’t enhance its survivability. Hoffman’s studies have led him to a remarkable conclusion: “To the extent that we’re tuned to fitness, we will not be tuned to reality. You can’t do both.”  

As Hoffman’s work shows, we haven’t yet come to grips with the full meaning of quantum theory and what it says about the nature of reality. Planck himself struggled for most of his life to understand the theory he helped launch, and always believed in an objective universe that exists independently of us [I believe that too]. He once wrote about why he decided to go into physics against the advice of his mentor: “The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.” Maybe it will take another century, and another revolution, to prove whether he was right, or as mistaken as Professor von Jolly.

The article is long and this is only about half of it. But I hope that one can get some feel for how complicated the concept of reality and human perceptions of it are. 

Footnote:

1. I have a quibble with the argument that we do not touch a solid thing. That feels wrong to me. When our hand picks up a rock or other solid thing, there is very close contact. Atoms or molecules of both are coming up against each other and a few diffuse into each other. Atoms of solid gold and other metals in contact with each other diffuse into each. Measured diffusion rates for metals was being published long ago, e.g., this 1950 paper, The diffusion rates of some metals in copper, silver, and gold. An 1896 paper commented: "The diffusion of molten and solid metals has long demanded investigation, their molecular mobility being of great interest in relation to the constitution of matter, and its results of much industrial importance." 

Just because atoms and molecules are mostly empty space, does not mean that atoms and molecules do not interact at the atomic level when they come in contact with each other. If the mixing of atoms and molecules of two different solids, liquids or gases does not constitute touching, then I don't understand what touching means. 

Acknowledgment: Thanks to ulTRAX for bringing this article to my attention.

Thoughts about near death experiences

CONTEXT

This is one of those topics where the human brain-mind likes to run wild. Most humans dislike ambiguity and incomplete stories. In the face of ambiguity, incomplete facts and contradictory narratives, complexity and the like, the human mind tends to fill in gaps, sanitize contradictions to tidy up cognitive dissonance and simplify complexity. We unconsciously often or usually do things to make the world seem to be safer for self-esteem, self, family and tribe interests and moral authority. Often times the reality our brain-minds create significantly diverges from actual reality, whatever that might be. 

Now, on to the main event:

On near death experiences (NDEs)

(Twilight zone music tinkling 

gently in background)

In 2014, one of the first papers that tried to prove that NDEs were real world experiences (objective realities) separate from brain activity (a non-physical mental event, e.g., activity of an immaterial soul) rather than experiences generated by the brain-mind. That was called the AWARE study. One expert, Steve Novella at Neurologica blog, commented that the study failed. Novella discusses a second attempt, the AWARE II study, to generate evidence to support or refute the objective reality of NDEs:

The notion of near death experiences have fascinated people for a long time. The notion is that some people report profound experiences after waking up from a cardiac arrest – their heart stopped, they received CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation], they were eventually recovered and lived to tell the tale. About 20% of people in this situation will report some unusual experience. .... Of course the NDE narrative took on a life of it’s own, but eventually researchers started at least collecting some empirical quantifiable data. The details of the reported NDEs are actually quite variable, and often culture-specific. There are some common elements, however, notably the sense of being out of one’s body or floating.

The primary purpose of a research study like this is to distinguish among various alternative hypotheses. In the case of NDEs there are two main hypotheses. One is that NDEs represents brain activity that occurs sometime between the person having CPR and when they ultimately wake up and tell their story. The other is that NDEs represent a genuine non-physical mental event that happens close to death but independent of the body. AWARE did not provide any evidence to distinguish these hypotheses.

Since then Parnia has been working on AWARE II, with some tightened protocols. One is that they only use subjects who underwent CPR in a hospital, to control for the quality of the CPR. We only have preliminary reports of the data so far, which has not undergone peer-review or been published. The results will be presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2022 taking place in Chicago on November 6. We do have some details from interviews with Parnia, however.

“A key finding was the discovery of spikes of brain activity, including so-called gamma, delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves up to an hour into CPR.”

That’s interesting, and if anything supports the brain activity hypothesis. Reports that people are having NDEs while having no brain activity are not supported by data, for two reasons. The first is that there is no confirmation of when the memories formed. They could have formed anytime during the recovery period until the patient was fully awake. That is the reason Parnia wants to tie the experiences to the emergency room during CPR, to eliminate the possibility that the memories formed later. But he was unable to do that in AWARE and so far there is no mention of that in AWARE II. But you would have to couple evidence that the memories formed during CPR with convincing evidence for lack of brain activity at the same time. Finding spikes of brain activity during CPR would be strike two for the hypothesis that NDEs represent mental activity separate from brain activity.

A 2018 research paper described NDEs like this:

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are complex experiential episodes that occur in association with death or the perception that it is impending (Moody, 1975; Greyson, 1983). Prospective studies with cardiac arrest patients indicate that the incidence of NDEs vary between 2–18% depending on what criteria are used to determine them (Parnia et al., 2001; Van Lommel et al., 2001; Schwaninger et al., 2002; Greyson, 2003). Although there is no universally accepted definition of the NDE, common features include feelings of inner-peace, out-of-body experiences, traveling through a dark region or ‘void’ (commonly associated with a tunnel), visions of a bright light, entering into an unearthly ‘other realm’ and communicating with sentient ‘beings’ (Moody, 1975; Ring, 1980; Greyson, 1983; Martial et al., 2017).

Not surprisingly, some people are looking for, and want to find, a spiritual or supernatural explanation. A 2019 research paper, Near-Death Experiences are Not Evidence for Either Atheism or Theism, comments:

The failure to secure replicable positive results in near-death experience (NDE) target-identification experiments does not establish the nonexistence of any spiritual realms, but it does serve to substantially challenge positive arguments in favor of the existence of spiritual realms from NDE reports. For if veridical paranormal perception occurs during out-of-body experiences (OBEs) or NDEs, why the failure to find it in all of the controlled experiments that have been undertaken to document it thus far? Various explanations can be put forward, but in the absence of ad hoc maneuvering, the hallucination hypothesis predicts only one set of possible results: the results actually found. Until the time that properly controlled NDE target-identification experiments yield replicable positive results, they will take their place as historical curiosities akin to similarly unsuccessful direct tests of survival after death. While some eagerly await the results of the follow-up AWARE II study (which is recruiting subjects until 2020), at the moment the unsuccessful history of comparably easier-to-implement research into the paranormality of non-near-death OBEs does not bode well for those results.

Despite the inconclusive data, some people firmly believe that NDEs are true spiritual experiences that reflect actual reality instead of something the brain-mind created. The lead researcher on the AWARE and AWARE II studies, Sam Parnia, seems to be one of those people. Novella comments:

There are no reports of any evidence arising from AWARE II that places the experience in the ER, such as subjects reporting what was on the cards placed on high shelves. Parnia has reverted to characterizing the experiences themselves. He says:

“These lucid experiences cannot be considered a trick of a disordered or dying brain, but rather a unique human experience that emerges on the brink of death,” says Parnia.

But why? What does he even mean by a “trick of a dying brain”? Wouldn’t what is being reported be consistent with partial brain function during reduced perfusion from CPR? I get the sense that Parnia is desperate to interpret his results as finding something new and unique, but I’m just not seeing it. It also seems like an example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. The original intent of the AWARE studies was to demonstrate that NDE memories are formed during CPR and are not the result of brain activity. He has proven neither – there is no evidence from AWARE or reported so far from AWARE II that links the memories to the time of the CPR. Further, it seems there is evidence of brain activity during CPR.

In summary, it is reasonable to believe that NDEs are just what a stressed brain-mind sometimes generates. Evidence available so far indicates that NDEs do not to arise from a soul or other spiritual source, but since such things are supernatural, by definition, humans can never detect or characterize them. I suppose there could be a non-supernatural source of NDEs that science eventually comes to detect, characterize and at least partly understand. Then we will probably come to a better state of understanding. 

Democrats messaging seems to be gearing up; It's overdue

The Daily Beast writes: 

Democrats Are Ready for GOP to Make Hunter Biden the New Benghazi

It’s not Hunter Biden’s scalp they want. Rather, the House GOP caucus is poised to launch a two-year crusade to tarnish President Joe Biden’s character—and lower his poll numbers—just like they did with Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi hearings prior to her 2016 candidacy.

But things are different this time around—Democrats aren’t going to assume that voters can see through the partisan bluster, and are mounting a war room operation outside the White House. The Congressional Integrity Project (CIP)(a pointed moniker, to be sure) will try to fend off the Republican barrage, and go on the offensive in the information war.

“This is a battle over narratives, and we believe we can win that war,” says [Leslie Dach, senior adviser to the CIP]. “They’re (the GOP) saying it in plain English, they’re trying to hurt Joe Biden. It’s the Trump playbook of personal attacks.”

Kentucky Republican Jim Comer, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, didn’t waste any time saying the quiet part out loud. Once the razor-thin GOP majority was confirmed, he said at a press conference, “I want to be clear, this is an investigation of Joe Biden, that is where the committee will focus in this next Congress.” 

Hunter Biden provides the cover for an investigation into “whether the president is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars,” said Comer.

That kind of admission cost Kevin McCarthy the speakership in 2015 when he told Fox News that the House Select Committee on Benghazi was created to lower Hillary Clinton’s polls. His forthrightness was widely seen as a gaffe. Until McCarthy let the truth slip, Republicans insisted the long-running investigation had nothing to do with politics. Rep. Jim Jordan (one of the most bombastic GOP members) had his moment more recently when he said Trump would be the candidate again, “and we need to make sure that he wins.” 

“I think the American people see the hypocrisy, but we’ll be showing it to them,” says Dach, who oversaw the Democrats’ successful messaging on health care that is credited with winning the House in 2018 and 2020. “There’s a simple story to tell, and you have to tell it every day.”  

Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he left at a Delaware computer shop and never returned to retrieve, has become the centerpiece of conspiracy theories about how he was ripping off the taxpayers and trading on his father’s name. The details are murky but like Hillary and Benghazi, it is a scandal that keeps on giving. The difference is that this time around, Democrats won’t be on their heels playing defense. They’re preparing to punch back.

Well, it’s about time. Finally. The Democrats are waking up to the critical importance of ramping up the intensity and aggressiveness of their messaging game. The comment by Dach that “I think the American people see the hypocrisy” indicates to me the Democrats are still are not fully aware of the situation. But at least they understand some critically important things to do, namely, (1) showing and telling Americans the hypocrisy, lies and slanders, and (2) telling it every day over and over and over. 

Golly, maybe the Democrats have finally graduated from the minor league messaging to the majors. 

Hunter’s laptop

The Republican smear machine strikes

News bits: White supremacists at dinner & whatnot

Trump’s dinner party that went awry

NBC News writes:

‘F---ing nightmare’: Trump team does damage control after 

he dines with Ye and white supremacist Nick Fuentes

The former president's campaign claims he didn't know anything about Fuentes, who joined the rapper under fire for his antisemitic remarks

Former President Donald Trump distanced himself Friday from a pre-Thanksgiving dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and white supremacist Nick Fuentes, claiming he didn’t know the identity of the far-right activist who was unexpectedly brought along with the rapper.

“This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about,” Trump said Friday in a statement on his Truth Social platform.

One can wonder, is Trump lying about not knowing who was at his own dinner party? There was this WaPo article entitled Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years.

Yeah, he’s lying. MAGA!!

Election fraud squads are laying goose eggs

while twiddling thumbs

The AP writes:

State-level law enforcement units created after the 2020 presidential election to investigate voter fraud are looking into scattered complaints more than two weeks after the midterms but have provided no indication of systemic problems.

That’s just what election experts had expected and led critics to suggest that the new units were more about politics than rooting out widespread abuses. Most election-related fraud cases already are investigated and prosecuted at the local level.

Florida, Georgia and Virginia created special state-level units after the 2020 election, all pushed by Republican governors, attorneys general or legislatures.

“I am not aware of any significant detection of fraud on Election Day, but that’s not surprising,” said Paul Smith, senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center. “The whole concept of voter impersonation fraud is such a horribly exaggerated problem. It doesn’t change the outcome of the election, it’s a felony, you risk getting put in jail and you have a high possibility of getting caught. It’s a rare phenomena.”

From the shameless irrationality & hypocrisy files:

Election deniers flip flop and now decry voter suppression

Democracy Docket writes in an opinion piece:

In “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe wrote that “a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.” After this year’s midterm elections, I would add that a voting rights advocate is an election denier who lost a close election.

Ever since she lost her election for Arizona governor, Kari Lake has become deeply concerned with, of all things, voter suppression. Over the weekend, her campaign tweeted: “The appropriate amount of voter suppression is 0%.”

Left with no other option, Lake finds herself in the awkward position of blaming her loss on an unusual culprit for election deniers: voter suppression.

If you didn’t know better, you might think Lake was a champion of access to voting, supporter of funding for election officials and advocate for same day voter registration. She is none of those.

To the contrary, Lake has spent the last two years trafficking in election denying lies, bringing litigation to undermine voting rights and encouraging Arizona and other states to restrict, rather than expand, voting access. Though she now criticizes the state for its slow pace of counting ballots, she sued last summer to ban the use of electronic voting machines in Arizona and require that voters fill out paper ballots that are hand counted. Such a hand count would take weeks, if not longer, to complete.

Questions: What planet to these radical right Republican freaks live on? How stupid do they think we are?

Answers: Not Earth, and shockingly stupid.

America's creeping Christian theocracy

Key points are these:

• The radical right, theocratic Christian nationalist (RRTCN) movement holds religious freedom above all other rights

• The RRTCN movement intends to completely eliminate all vestiges of what little is left of the separation of the state from a hyper-aggressive church that wants to control tax revenues as much as possible

• The RRTCN movement employs ruthless but superb dark free speech tactics; for example, it portrays trivial and minor burdens on religious freedom, e.g., legalizing same-sex marriage and having to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding, as horrendous persecution that prevents innocent people from being religious as they desire

• The RRTCN movement is open about its intent to use the superior rights of religious freedom to discriminate against and oppress non-White people, non-heterosexual people, women and non-Christian religions and people 

• The RRTCN movement already has enormously extended the scope of the religious freedom concept from human beings to legal entities like businesses and corporations, thereby enabling religious business owners and executives to oppress and discriminate against unworthy people in the name of their religious freedom

This article summarizes some of how the radical right Supreme Court is quietly but relentlessly forcing most of those key points to integrate into American society, government and business. MSNBC writes:

While [the Supreme Court] claims to be a nonpartisan, neutral arbiter of the law, its conservative majority was deliberately cultivated to expand religious freedom for conservative Christians at the expense of the rights of those deemed less worthy of protection.

The possible revelation of the Hobby Lobby decision — in which the court held that private corporations can demand religious exemptions from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer health plans cover contraceptives — is the second Supreme Court leak in the news this year. The other involved an even greater victory for the religious right: the unsolved mystery of who leaked a draft of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the right to an abortion. Both rulings were penned by Alito.

The Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores already had been the subject of an intense public relations strategy to portray the contraception coverage requirement as a dire threat to the religious freedom of pious business owners. Even before the litigation, the store was a beloved brand in the Bible Belt and beyond. Its billionaire founder, David Green, was long a respected figure and a major donor in the evangelical world. Even without Schenck’s help, Hobby Lobby had already become a poster child for a burgeoning campaign to convince the court to enlarge religious freedom rights for conservative Christians.

When, in 2012, evangelical and Catholic activists attacked the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the notion of corporate religious rights was a novel legal theory. But when the court held oral arguments two years later, it was immediately clear that a majority of the court had embraced this theory. What changed? Hobby Lobby became a landmark Supreme Court decision owing to a well-funded network of lawyers and activists, and their shared ideologies with the justices who were selected for their positions on issues most important to conservative religious groups.

Before landing at the Supreme Court, Hobby Lobby won its case in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in an opinion authored by future Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose nomination was heralded by advocates for this newly expanded religious freedom. The company was represented by Kyle Duncan, a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. That organization’s board members include Leonard Leo, the dark money-backed activist whose list of suggested judicial nominees was adopted by then-President Donald Trump — who nominated Duncan to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

In recent decades, activists on the right have successfully eroded church-state separation with increasing speed. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, decided earlier this year, the court sided with a high school football coach demanding to pray with players on the field after games. These lawyers and activists have opened the door for religious business owners to refuse to serve LGBTQ people, such as 2018’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which the court ruled for a baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding. That door could open wider in the upcoming 303 Creative v. Elenis, which concerns a web designer’s claims that a nondiscrimination law violates her free speech rights. Leo has been open about his hostility to Supreme Court precedent legalizing contraception and same-sex marriage. In a concurrence in Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas echoed that hostility, even criticizing the 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that made anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional.

Hobby Lobby was a key inflection point in an ongoing and largely successful right-wing campaign to undermine the separation of church and state and expand recognized religious rights of conservative Christians who claim that abortion, contraception and LGBTQ rights infringe on their religious freedom. Alito’s dinner with Schenck’s emissaries is a symptom of cozy relationships, but the wider activism that shaped the court is a far more significant threat to the court’s willingness to protect the rights of all Americans. Requiring the justices to adhere to a judicial code of conduct to curb conflicts of interest and appearances of partiality would be a welcome reform. But fixing the undemocratic ailments of the Supreme Court will require much more.

In my opinion, the US is well on its way to becoming a Christofascist theocracy. We are not all that far off of that cherished goal of CN elites. What the rank and file knows or is thinking is hard to tell, but most appear to be oblivious to most or all of what is going on here. Mostly clueless seems an apt label.

The RRTCN movement via a series of Supreme Court decisions has neutered the establishment clause.[1] That had been the main obstacle in fusing the Christian church with the federal government. With that gone, nothing but time stands in the way of the radical Republicans who dominate the Supreme Court from converting America from a democratic country with secular law to a kleptocratic Christian theocracy with Christian Sharia law. 

I see no way to stop this Christofascist anti-democratic, anti-secular movement from destroying America as we know it. The RRTCN movement controls the Supreme Court. The clear intent and sacred dogma is to remake the US mostly into some cruel theocratic beast straight out of some time(s) in the past, maybe the Dark Ages, and/or maybe the 1700s or 1800s.

Q: Unreasonable hyperbole or plausible possibility? 

Footnote: 
1. Wikipedia: 

In United States law, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, together with that Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, form the constitutional right of freedom of religion. The relevant constitutional text is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...

The Establishment Clause acts as a double security, prohibiting both religious abuse of government and political control of religion.

Should Cigarettes Be Banned Completely?

Finally, marijuana is becoming legal in more States but still illegal federally. Not in Canada, but then again, Canada is always ahead of the curve.

Yet alcohol is legal despite the grief it causes and ditto for cigarettes.

This idea of banning cigarettes (or all tobacco products) is not a new one, I have heard the suggestion since I was a young lad. Usually the argument doesn't go anywhere.

So one site I found explores the question:

https://soapboxie.com/social-issues/Should-cigarettes-be-banned-Arguments-for-and-against

Some of the reasons FOR the idea:

Cigarettes are the single biggest cause of premature death on the planet.

Nicotine is extremely addictive. The withdrawal symptoms are intense and there is a high rate of people who fail to quit, or relapse. Some people end up spending their entire lives addicted.

Smokers are a heavy burden on health care services, because of the severity and wide range of ailments that cigarettes cause.

1 in 5 deaths in the U.S. each year is caused by smoking.

Secondhand smoke causes around 50,000 deaths each year in the U.S.

Some reasons AGAINST the idea:

People's civil liberties are not negotiable.

Banning cigarettes would create a huge black market that would be exploited by criminals.

Smokers pay more tax than non-smokers due to the high tax on cigarettes, banning cigarettes would mean a reduction in taxation revenue for the government.

The tobacco industry creates thousands of jobs around the world.

SO, what do YOU think?

Tales of mendacity, crackpottery and other radical right politics as usual

Boebert denies that words can cause harm

Vanity Fair writes:

Lauren Boebert Can’t Believe People Are Linking Her 

Anti-LGBTQ+ Rhetoric to the LGBTQ+ Club Shooting

She recently said as much while…going on an anti-trans rant.

While speaking to Ross Kaminsky, a radio host at Colorado’s KOA station, Boebert called it “disgusting” to blame her for what happened over the weekend or accurately note the various ways she’s vilified LGBTQ+ people. “That is completely false,” she said, falsely. “I have never had bad rhetoric towards anyone and their personal preferences as an adult.” Then, because she’s a bigot—and not a very smart one at that—she immediately added: “What I’ve criticized is the sexualization of our children. And I’ve criticized men dressing up as caricatures of women.” .... Boebert, like many on the right, equates allowing gender-affirming medical care for trans youth with child “grooming.” She also believes that drag queens pose a threat to children just by simply existing, and we know this because she’s previously said as much:

On the subject of Drag Queen Story Hour events—during which a drag queen literally just reads stories to kids—Boebert bizarrely suggested that they operate like strip clubs, telling KOA, “We don’t need six-year-old children putting dollar bills in the thongs of grown men shaking and twerking in front of children…That is child abuse.” She added that she would continue to speak out against the “grooming” of children, a term that has been co-opted by the right to describe behavior by LGBTQ+ people they don’t like, rather than the way child molesters lure their victims.

The power of free speech to kill

The NYT writes:

A Lasting Legacy of Covid: Far-Right Platforms Spreading Health Myths

Not long after Randy Watt died of Covid-19, his daughter Danielle sat down at her computer, searching for clues as to why the smart and thoughtful man she knew had refused to get vaccinated. She pulled up Google, typed in a screen name he had used in the past and discovered a secret that stunned her.

Her father, she learned, had a hidden, virtual life on Gab, a far-right social media platform that traffics in Covid misinformation. And there was another surprise as well: As he fought the coronavirus, he told his followers that he was taking ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic infections that experts say has no benefit — and in fact can be dangerous — for patients with Covid-19.  

Around the country, countless Americans are suffering a very particular type of Covid grief — a mixture of anger, sorrow and shame that comes with losing a loved one who has consumed social media falsehoods.

Dark free speech can deceive people. Sometimes they act on their false beliefs and it kills them. It is literally that simple. 

Ye’s campaign for president is gelling nicely

The ex-president is all excited about it 

The Hill writes:

Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, said he asked former President Trump to be his running mate in 2024.

The rapper, in a Twitter video posted on Thursday evening, said he mentioned a campaign during a recent meeting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida, also tweeting a series of “Ye 24” graphics.

“I think the thing that Trump was most perturbed about, me asking him to be my vice president,” Ye said in the video in the Twitter post. “I think that was like lower on the list of things that caught him off-guard.”

Ye went on to say Trump screamed at him during the meeting about a run.

What could be better than Trump screaming at Ye? Politics can’t get much better than this. One can only wonder what things were higher on the list of Ye things that caught Trump off-guard. Enquiring minds want to know.

Ye and his running mate Stump

The Republican Party’s propaganda Leviathan

closes down election time dark free speech effort

The Guardian writes:

Crime coverage on Fox News halved once US midterms were over

Just a week after elections, number of weekly segments focused on crime slashed in half on Rupert Murdoch’s flagship network

In the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, the message from Fox News was clear: violent crime is surging, cities are dangerous hellscapes and Democrats are responsible.

With the vote over, however, the rightwing news channel appeared to decide things weren’t that bad after all, and decreased its coverage of violent crime by 50% compared with the pre-election average.

One can speculate that a major dark free speech source like Faux News probably caused some people to act in accord with its anti-Democratic Party lies, slanders and crackpottery. Was Faux necessary, but not necessarily sufficient by itself, to hand control of the House over to the fascist Republican Party? Probably.

The toxic propaganda value of Faux to the Republican Party is enormous. For the 2022 elections, Faux was probably worth (i) about $1 billion in air time, and maybe (ii) 1 million votes by people who believed it the divisive lies, slanders and crackpottery Faux spewed in the months before the elections.

Faux News: A cancer on America and the world

Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement

Subtitle: Maybe the brain isn't "classical" after all.

Pretty interesting article on BigThink.  Nicely written and easy for the layperson, such as me, to understand. 😊

Key Takeaways

• Most neuroscientists believe that the brain operates in a classical manner.
• However, if brain processes rely on quantum mechanics, it could explain why our brains are so powerful.
• A team of researchers possibly witnessed entanglement in the brain, perhaps indicating that some of our brain activity, and maybe even consciousness, operates on a quantum level. 

Supercomputers can beat us at chess and perform more calculations per second than the human brain. But there are other tasks our brains perform routinely that computers simply cannot match — interpreting events and situations and using imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Our brains are amazingly powerful computers, using not just neurons but the connections between the neurons to process and interpret information.

And then there is consciousness, neuroscience’s giant question mark. What causes it? How does it arise from a jumbled mass of neurons and synapses? After all, these may be enormously complex, but we are still talking about a wet bag of molecules and electrical impulses. [Emphasis mine!] 😮

Some scientists suspect that quantum processes, including entanglement, might help us explain the brain’s enormous power, and its ability to generate consciousness. Recently, scientists at Trinity College Dublin, using a technique to test for quantum gravity, suggested that entanglement may be at work within our brains. If their results are confirmed, they could be a big step toward understanding how our brain, including consciousness, works. 

Quantum processes in the brain

Amazingly, we have seen some hints that quantum mechanisms are at work in our brains. Some of these mechanisms might help the brain process the world around it through sensory input. There are also certain isotopes in our brain whose spins change how our body and brain react. For example, xenon with a nuclear spin of 1/2 can have anesthetic properties, while xenon with no spin cannot. And various isotopes of lithium with different spins change development and parenting ability in rats.

Despite such intriguing findings, the brain is largely assumed to be a classical system. 

If quantum processes are at work in the brain, it would be difficult to observe how they work and what they do. Indeed, not knowing exactly what we are looking for makes quantum processes very difficult to find. “If the brain uses quantum computation, then those quantum operators may be different from operators known from atomic systems,” Christian Kerskens, a neuroscience researcher at Trinity and one of the authors of the paper, told Big Think. So how can one measure an unknown quantum system, especially when we do not have any equipment to measure the mysterious, unknown interactions? [Emphasis mine.  And good question, IMO.]

Lessons from quantum gravity

Quantum gravity is another example in quantum physics where we do not yet know what we are dealing with.

There are two main realms of physics. There is the physics of the tiny microscopic world — the atoms and photons, particles and waves that interact and behave very unlike the world we see around us. Then there is the realm of gravity, which governs the motion of planets and stars and keeps us humans stuck to Earth. Unifying these realms under an overarching theory is where quantum gravity comes in — it will help scientists understand the underlying forces that govern our universe. [The elusive ToE (Theory of Everything), the Holy Grail of Physics]

Since quantum gravity and quantum processes in the brain are both big unknowns, the researchers at Trinity decided to use the same method other scientists are using to try to understand quantum gravity. 

Taking entanglement to heart [the nitty gritty, feel free to go to skip point]

Using an MRI that can sense entanglement, the scientists looked to see whether proton spins in the brain could interact and become entangled through an unknown intermediary. Similar to the research for quantum gravity, the goal was to understand an unknown system. “The unknown system may interact with known systems like the proton spins [within the brain],” Kerskens explained. “If the unknown system can mediate entanglement to the known system, then, it has been shown, the unknown must be quantum.” 

The researchers scanned 40 subjects with an MRI. Then they watched what happened, and correlated the activity with the patient’s heartbeat.

Bottom of Form

The heartbeat is not just the motion of an organ within our body. Rather, the heart, like many other parts of our body, is engaged in two-way communication with the brain — the organs both send each other signals. We see this when the heart reacts to various phenomena such as pain, attention, and motivation. Additionally, the heartbeat can be tied to short-term memory and aging. 

As the heart beats, it generates a signal called the heartbeat potential, or HEP. With each peak of the HEP, the researchers saw a corresponding spike in the NMR signal, which corresponds to the interactions among proton spins. This signal could be a result of entanglement, and witnessing it might indicate there was indeed a non-classical intermediary.  

“The HEP is an electrophysiological event, like alpha or beta waves,” Kerskens explains. “The HEP is tied to consciousness because it depends on awareness.” Similarly, the signal indicating entanglement was only present during conscious awareness, which was illustrated when two subjects fell asleep during the MRI. When they did, this signal faded and disappeared. 

[→ Skip point]

Seeing entanglement in the brain may show that the brain is not classical, as previously thought, but rather a powerful quantum system. If the results can be confirmed, they could provide some indication that the brain uses quantum processes. This could begin to shed light on how our brain performs the powerful computations it does, and how it manages consciousness. 

All this seems to throw a bit of a monkey-wrench into the idea of our believed “free will,” IMO.  What do you think? 

-Do you believe we have free will? 

-Is (our) consciousness just a "stubborn/persistent illusion" (a la Einstein, re: time's past, present and future)??

https://bigthink.com/hard-science/brain-consciousness-quantum-entanglement/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weeklynewsletter