PM dynamics: August 2004 Archives

Getting closer. Dr. Oschmann responded to an email query with a lead to The Institute of HeartMath. He recommended this article, The Electricity of Touch (available as a PDF download). Their main accomplishment? "This study represents one of the first successful attempts to directly measure an energy exchange between people."

I also found this press release, which states: "The Institute of HeartMath (IHM) in Boulder Creek, California is a nonprofit research organization that has been studying emotions and the electromagnetic energy generated by emotions and the bodyóspecifically the heartófor over a decade. A recent study conducted by IHM represents one of the first successful attempts to directly measure an energy exchange between people, and provides a testable theory to help explain why we can sense what other people are feeling and why we tend to know when someone is behind us without hearing or seeing them."

Now I'm getting excited! This SQUID technology proves energy can flow in two directions (to/fro) at the same time! Talk about FLOW! :-)

This exchange between Bodavor, Jonathan, and Dan is not contexted, but - besides its reference to Schroedinger's SQUID - it is fascinating in its speculation about leaps of intelligence (I'd say "in subjectivity") being induced (?) by language, and its implications for human evolution.

Everyone keeps referencing a Scientific American article but it keeps coming up "page missing." :-( Here's something from Complexity Digest (which I'd like to add to my rss feed). These folk are also onto Self-Organization.

When I really want to get serious, here's a dissertation, The Nine Lives of Schroedinger's Cat, that "surveys nine different interpretations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics." One of the nine is "the idea that the mind causes collapse", which I was just writing about recently. :-)

In The Truth is Still Out There, the argument between general relativists and quantum theorists about whether or not information can escape or survive the collapse of a black hole is spelled out in terms even I can understand. :-)

NYTimes Op-Ed author, physicist, and social-cyber-scientist (?!!), Paul Ginsparg, challenges the absence of calculations supporting Stephen Hawking's change of mind, suggesting that historical trends show brilliant scientists becoming more speculative as they age, casting doubt on this new theory as the final answer. But what Hawking says is interesting and seems to shift the grounds of debate from either/or to some kind of mutually-compatible middle ground. I think there are potential parallels to group dynamics/discourses. To wit:

"If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognizable state.

"The black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell in, so we can be sure of the past and we can predict the future."

Of course, Hawking is talking about the past and future in cosmic terms, as macro as one can get. But, as the BBC reports, "Whether information is or is not lost has practical and philosophical consequences."

A quantum concept I hadn't come across before is unitarity. This may (in my imagination, at least!) have some parallel (?) to the maintenance of some kind of stable discursive foundation....such that shifts in discourse (from one to another) must occur along a kind of continuum in which the transition points (PMs) don't alter the underlying stable state of, shall we call it, "groupness"...?