Craig:

References?

All I can offer is oral history and my unusually reliable memory!

Such oral history as I learned and remembered was learned at my Granny's knee.

Aboriginal belief, is ostensibly, the oldest spiritualist belief system on earth?

Perhaps if you Goggle, Aboriginal beliefs, and have a decade or two to troll through it, you may be able to find out what Aboriginals believe?

It would be a useful activity, and possibly earn a PHD!?

It's time someone as clever as you did something of that order as opposed to relying on aging memory and oral history.

Which is where we learned of acupuncture, meditation and some efficacious herbal medicine; i.e., we got aspirin from willow bark and native american herbal remedies.

And ibuprofen comes from the monkey puzzle vine. In fact most medicine comes from similar older sources/native remedies/older knowledge?

In any event, are you willing to engage in my experiment/spare 10 minutes a day for thirty days?

In my experience those who quite deliberately send their healing thoughts from an exclusively focused mind to others, may be the ones that receive the greatest feel good benefit!

Find a quiet spot, sit upright in a chair; and then just focus your mind on seeing an elderly man, with most of his hair and a long full gray beard, you know as Rhrosty, getting completely well and having a couple of his dreams manifest as reality.

Not for nothing is it writ large what we wish for others, (good or bad) is what all too often becomes our own reality; so there could be a personal payoff!? And my heartfelt wish for you; and all other participants!

NASA seems to have come up with a new version of creation of the universe, which is described as a projection of dark matter and that projection becoming the known universe.

It certainly seems a little more realistic than something from nothing?
Cheers, Rhrosty.

Hi McCackie,
A bulk system may contain so many interactions that it is effectively impossible to ANALYSE discretely, so we have developed probabilistic methods to do so, such as Bayes theorem, Hamilton's models of energetics and so on. However, every single part of that system is not acting according to a probability, or driven by the Hamiltonian, it is acting entirely according to the effects of its own interactions with other parts of the system.

Think of it this way - a crowd of people can be expected to behave in certain ways as a crowd and sometimes, the expectation breaks down and the crowd starts to behave like a mob for no reason apparent to the outside observer. That's your buttefly effect in action; the system of humans that form that crowd goes from being relatively stable to being chaotic in a very brief period. The thing is, that there was some form of trigger event that affected individual people within that crowd. They experienced the events deterministically and if some of them happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then perhaps the outcome for them was pretty bad. Whether they get trampled depends on whether they trip, which depends on whether they manage to lift their feet over the kerb, which depends on whether they see it, whether they have enough room to lift their legs and so on.

Chaos theory is just a bulk analysis technique for systems in which there are a large number of factors that interact to produce emergent outcomes, it is not describing an empirical reality at the reductionist level. Quantum mechanics has been somewhat similar, but is now moving toward a more comprehensive approach and determinism is part of that.

Just had a look at the Quantum Mechanics article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics
and it appears that I'm right. According to that article atleast the Copenhagen Interpretation is still the most widely accepted among physicts (see under the section: Philosophical implications - second paragraph). Same as it was taught to me over twenty years ago.

In otherwords, it is still the prevalent view of physics that the world is fundamentally non-deterministic (ie:what may happens, happens by chance).

By-the-way, I remember there being some school of philosphical thought who argue that it is the indeterministic nature of QM that allows free will. If I remember the argument, loosely they say that free-will requires two parts: the free part and the will part. The free part is the options to choose from, supplied the QM randomness while the will part is the mind "choosing" one of the options. When I read about this idea, at the time many years ago, I wasn't really impressed by it-- but still maybe there is something in it :)

Graham Preston seems on the right track but with a tired old argument that achieves little. In reality, classical determinism seems based on euclidean geometry and school level algebra. "Thinkabit" notwithstanding, modern developments in mathematics have completely destroyed this determinism without the need for recourse to quantum theory. Try Melanie Mitchell: "Complexity".

Determinism does work in small local areas ie structural design of bridges etc. but fades away as one expands the study area - either inwardly or outwardly. Perhaps the greatest deterministic fallacy in science has been the railway engineer, Herbert Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest". Darwin's theory of evolution is not SoF, it is the non-deterministic "Natural Selection". Its nice to see that modern biologists are moving away from SoF but still can't completely rid themselves of using the ill-defined determinist idea of "fitness". E.O. Wilson in his recent "The Social Conquest of the Earth" starts out without recourse to SoF but later starts to slip back occasionally into using "fitness".

Thanks Thinkabit. And looking at the interaction of energy and matter, leads one to Einstein's unified field theory, where he postulates that everything in the known universe is merely transformed energy, given energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just transformed.

Thus we get gold from hydrogen via repeated transformations inside a series of born again stars, and possibly in as many steps as the periodic table.

Given we are also part of this unified field of energy, and have waves of energy traveling between one synapse and another, whenever we think a thought.

Could it be when enough of us tune in to a particular wave pattern or thought form at a particular time; we can change or alter reality, just by applying enough focused energy to a part of it, i.e., Rhrosty's state of health?

To my knowledge aboriginals have long believed they could sing (will) a person back to good health.

Others like Ian Gawler believe they can do the same with deep practiced meditation and very focused visualization, that seems to defy reality.

Australian Ian Gawler, a vet with a Doctor wife, is grounded in conventional medicine and traditional science.

And when left with nothing to lose, months to live and no remedy from conventional western medicine, when diagnosed with very advanced and deadly cancer; gave meditation a try.

And as far as I'm aware, is still in remission and touring quarter of a century later; and explaining the powerful medical benefits of mediation stripped of all religious dogma, along with positive repetitive visualization; plus the benefits of a vegan diet.

This and many other unexplained spontaneous remissions tell me, there is no such thing as a predetermined future, and even where we think the outcome is known, (terminally ill) can still alter it to our liking.

Which supports the saying, what the mind of man can conceive and believe, the mind of man can achieve!

And thanks folks, some of you must have sent some healing thoughts, given I'm feeling a little better and seem to have more energy.

Keep up the good work!
Rhrosty.

Hi Amanzi, "determinism" simply refers to the idea that every effect has some cause. It's not a complex idea but the implications are profound.

thinkabit, the Copenhagen interpretation was and remains a convenient way to avoid the problem of observation that Schrodinger shows up so clearly with his famous cat.

"Weak" measurements of quantum phenomena are showing that there is a real problem with the idea of indeterminacy as expressed within the Copenhagen interpretation.