Dear Brian,

I would like to make three comments on your recent paper, entitled: "String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal", physics/0312012 [Ref. 1].

1. To explain the idea of shared mental bubbles, you suggested an *analogy* based on the Mössbauer effect in which the recoil from decaying nucleus is being transmitted to the crystal "as a whole rather than generating activity in the vicinity of the decay". Such kind of holistic, seemingly "non-local" effects are well-known in contemporary physics, as explained by Giuseppe Vitiello [Ref. 2]. However, once we look at the real brain composed of nearly 100 billion neurons and 60 trillion synapses, it is not at all clear (i) how we could detect/measure the bootstrapping effect, and (ii) what kind of mediator could possibly facilitate it. I am not aware of anything in the human brain that could even remotely resemble phonons or Nambu-Goldstone boson [Ref. 2], hence possibly explain the ubiquitous phenomenon of binding,

http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Bushara.html#PS

2. You also mentioned the question posed ten years ago by Steven Weinberg: what possible physical signal could move distant objects and yet have no effect on scientific instruments?

I believe the answer should be sought in the self-acting ability of the human brain, which is the genuine physical imprint of the human mind on its brain,

http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Beauregard.html

We just need a better understanding of the nature of gravity,

http://members.aon.at/chakalov/Montesinos.html

BTW Steven Weinberg wrote me a few months ago that he doesn't have time to read my email, but I hope he is at least interested in the nature of gravity. Just follow the URL above.

3. One last comment. You wrote: "No funding from counter-innovative sources was involved with the preparation of this paper." I don't know what you imply by 'counter-innovative sources', but I think this term tallies to all bureaucrats in the scientific establishment, who live in total socialism and do not care, simply because their pay check is secured. They are watching our tough live like some tourists from another planet, much like that TV commercial "Watchin' da game, ... havin' a Bud...".

I hope some of these Bud guys will read this email. I will include it in my forthcoming CD ROM "Physics of Human Intention".

I also hope you remember our first meeting on November 14, 1998, at the SMN Meeting in the Institute of Psychiatry in London. I still cannot understand how come nobody showed any interest in my proposal in the past five years. Not even after 9/11. This is a mystery which I will probably never understand.

Regards,

Dimi
http://members.aon.at/chakalov
http://members.aon.at/chakalov/white_paper.html
--
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.  The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe,

http://members.aon.at/chakalov/faq.html

Pritie amzanig huh?
 

References

[Ref. 1] Brian D. Josephson, String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal, Tue, 2 Dec 2003 23:15:12 GMT,
http://arxiv.org/html/physics/0312012

"While it is commonly taken that the informational processes involved are mediated by ordinary physical means, it is not a logical necessity that this should be the case.  Some informational processes in an organism are specialised to the nature and circumstances of the organism concerned, but some have a more abstract and universal character, and so could be mediated by a quite different system with which individual organisms would interact.
...

"We need to add another piece of detail to our model.  In order that it can model individual thought, we suppose that individual life forms can perturb the background state so as to create a localised 'thought bubble', tied to the individual concerned.  This suggests that the vacuum state involved is close to a phase transition, so that an appropriate perturbation can create a domain with a different kind of order to that of the vacuum.

"Assuming the validity of the scenario that has been described, the picture proposed can be adapted to account for the phenomena we set out to explain, namely telepathy or ESP.  In the first, the grounds for the existence of such a process can be taken to be the advantages that might be conferred in certain situations if two life forms could in some way share their mental states (there could also be accompanying disadvantages, the significance of which will become clear later).  It is natural to postulate, in this case, that a shared 'mental bubble', whose contents are available to both life-forms, is involved.  We assume, as would need to be assumed generally in the model, that the state of this bubble plays the role of information that is meaningful in the context and, by virtue of this, usable by the connected systems.

"The physics involved in the 'sharing' that has to be assumed in the above can be clarified by means of an analogy based on the Mössbauer effect, which is a phenomenon involving the decay of radioactive nuclei embedded in a crystal (Mössbauer 1961).  In a certain fraction of cases, depending on parameters such as the decay energy and the temperature, the recoil from such a decaying nucleus is in effect transmitted to the crystal as a whole rather than generating activity in the vicinity of the decay.  These 'no local recoil' processes involve a certain subset of all possible final states of the system, for which, as quantum mechanics allows, the state of the lattice vibrational system (phonons) is unchanged by the decay. This somewhat esoteric possibility suggests a mechanism, dependent on analogous constraints upon the possible states of the thought bubble, that could fit our requirement of a system state being shared by two individuals as in the ESP situation.
...

"A related problem is the one raised by Weinberg (1993), who asks what possible physical signal could move distant objects and yet have no effect on scientific instruments?
...

"Susskind's arguments suggest that reality may be much more complex than has normally been assumed. Further changes in fundamental science (which may include consideration of the influence of life) may be required to address this complexity.  Since our proposals (such as thought bubbles emerging from some kind of background) do not involve the precise details of string theory, they may survive any such changes that fundamental science may undergo.
...

"No funding from counter-innovative sources was involved with the preparation of this paper."
 

[Ref. 2] Giuseppe Vitiello, Structure and Function,
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9609014