Quote:
Originally posted by Beestie
EVEN IF there is a physical component to thought that can be directed, the idea that it can be clarified and directed with such focus and precision so as to influence the behaviour of a diode/ electrical circuit in a consistently singular direction is nothing short of laughable.
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This is the bit (har har) that troubled me too when I read about the research. Even if I could go in and fiddle with the electrons coursing through the circuit, I would still not know how to get 0's as opposed to 1's. So there is no force that can explain it, at least not a force like magnetism or gravity.
So perhaps the weirdness is an artifact of another layer of reality, outside scientific laws (I probably lost many people with that one). Many very smart people have considered the possibility that reality is created out of our consciousness. This is how prayer could work, without god. This is how the placebo effect could work. Incidentally, are there any theories on how the placebo effect works? It seems like similar problem.
Take the stock market. It plunges because we imagine it plunging. Our fear makes it crash. We start to feel better about our prospects, it goes back up. How we imagine the economy is a huge influence on how the economy actually goes. Perhaps reality works in a similar way.
I think there is room for both physics and metaphysics. If you ask enough questions, you will get to a point where science runs out of answers. How can we ever understand where this all came from, before the beginning? God, quantum foam, scalar fields, it all gets equally preposterous at a certain point.