Ruth Howard's List: spirituality

• Quantum God effect
• Physics is strange with quantum entangled particles being able to influence each other from across the universe. Furthermore all matter exerts a gravitational pull on all other matter, no matter how far away it is. Quantum mechanics seems to indicate that what we think we know about localisation and distinct physical entities operating in space and time may not be really accurate at all. Consider this, one can easily imagine all of us being intimately connected, just as the stars, quantum-bits, and all the matter are connected to each other.
• Let us say for a moment that one is a pantheist. Pantheism is all about the one-ness and unity of everything. Pantheism is the view that the Universe -- including all of Nature on Earth -- and God are identical. Thus all in the Universe is deserving of the deepest kind of reverence. The word derives from the Ancient Greek: p?? (Pan) meaning 'All' and ?e?? (Theos) meaning 'God' -- literally 'All is God!'
• we might all be manifestations of a single consciousness.
• unified collective consciousness
• Are the world wide web and the internet creating some sort of extra layer of a permanently connected and unified global brain, which could be the ultimate technological expression of the underlying sub-conscious will of humanity to embrace unity.
• If I Am You and You are me, how can even the most selfish person or community logically remain separate from the rest of humanity and all sentient beings?
• The Philanthropia, founded in 2005, brings together over   1,000 leading individual and private philanthropists, family offices,   foundations, private banks, non-governmental organisations and   specialist advisors to address complex global challenges such   as countering climate chaos, reducing radical poverty and developing   global leadership for the younger generation through the appliance   of science and technology, leveraging acumen and finance, as well   as encouraging collaboration with a strong commitment to ethics.   Philanthropia emphasises multi-faith spiritual values: introspection,   healthy living and ecology. Philanthropia Targets: Countering   climate chaos and carbon neutrality; Eliminating radical poverty   -- through micro-credit schemes, empowerment of women and more   responsible capitalism; Leadership for the Younger Generation;   and Corporate and social responsibility.

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• MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy.
• This may well happen, but my argument is not about technical, probably temporary, limitations.
• It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.
• While neural activity of a certain kind is a necessary condition for every manifestation of consciousness, from the lightest sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, it is neither a sufficient condition of it, nor, still less, is it identical with it.
• Many features of ordinary consciousness also resist neurological explanation.
• There is nothing in the convergence or coherence of neural pathways that gives us this "merging without mushing", this ability to see things as both whole and separate.
• This concerns the disjunction between the objects of science and the contents of consciousness. Science begins when we escape our subjective, first-person experiences into objective measurement, and reach towards a vantage point the philosopher Thomas Nagel called "the view from nowhere".
• Thus measurement takes us further from experience and the phenomena of subjective consciousness to a realm where things are described in abstract but quantitative terms. To do its work, physical science has to discard "secondary qualities", such as colour, warmth or cold, taste - in short, the basic contents of consciousness. For the physicist then, light is not in itself bright or colourful, it is a mixture of vibrations in an electromagnetic field of different frequencies. The material world, far from being the noisy, colourful, smelly place we live in, is colourless, silent, full of odourless molecules, atoms, particles, whose nature and behaviour is best described mathematically. In short, physical science is about the marginalisation, or even the disappearance, of phenomenal appearance/qualia, the redness of red wine or the smell of a smelly dog.
• Consciousness, on the other hand, is all about phenomenal appearances/qualia.
• There is nothing in physical science that can explain why a physical object such as a brain should ascribe appearances/qualia to material objects that do not intrinsically have them.
• Material objects require consciousness in order to "appear".
• Then their "appearings" will depend on the viewpoint of the conscious observer.
• Our failure to explain consciousness in terms of neural activity inside the brain inside the skull is not due to technical limitations which can be overcome. It is due to the self-contradictory nature of the task, of which the failure to explain "aboutness", the unity and multiplicity of our awareness, the explicit presence of the past, the initiation of actions, the construction of self are just symptoms.

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