New Dimensions interview by Michael Toms with Danah Zohar
Program no. 2508, 1994.
https://programs.newdimensions.org/products/quantum-consciousness-with-danah-zohar
[posted with permission, New Dimensions]

...

Danah: I think we're missing something very critical. We now know that the brain is capable of doing three kinds of thinking. One is logical, rational thinking and serial computers duplicate that very well.

Another is associative thinking, you know linking if I feel hungry I think of an apple, or if I see you I think of a friendly person and in fact of Father Christmas 'cause you look a bit like him. So we associate ideas. Now the new parallel processing computers can do this very well. This is neural network theory and how it's related to parallel processing.

Now Artificial Intelligence and the computer lobbies, say that's all there is to consciousness because that's all they can account for with their machines. But we know in fact from our own intuition and experience, and experience of ourselves, and others, that we can also do creative thinking. Human beings come up with new concepts, come up with new categories, come up with new associations. We're constantly reinventing the scenario.

Now this I put down to quantum processes in the brain and this is something that existing computers cannot duplicate. I leave it open that if we one day invent a quantum computer it might be able to, but our existing serial and parallel computers cannot duplicate creativity, new thinking, new ideas and in fact conscious experience. Computers aren't conscious. They don't have a sense of humor, they don't have the sense of sorrow, and they don't relate the way we do. They can only do what's programmed into them.

Michael: Also, it seems to me that, just as you were talking about coming up with the idea of the book out of your anesthetized state, and coming up with insights through the dream process that somehow our consciousness is not just isolated to the brain. It seems that we're somehow in touch with a larger reality and that certainly would be comparable to ... the quantum model, wouldn't it?

Danah: Well I think this is one of THE most exciting things about the quantum model of consciousness because it actually begins to talk about the sort of origins and the modern nature of consciousness, well beyond the human brain.

Quantum physicists describe something they call the quantum vacuum. The vacuum is very badly named because it isn't empty. It's actually a sea of potential, replete with all possibility.

by Prof. Amit Goswami (August 13, 2008)

There was a revolution in physics at the beginning of the last century, consisting of the discovery of quantum physics. The message of quantum physics is this: the world is not made of matter neither is it determined entirely by material causation that we sometimes call upward causation because it rises upward from the building blocks of matter–the elementary particles . There is a source of downward causation in the world. You can call this source consciousness if you like and think of it as the ground of all being.

To be sure, the mathematics of quantum physics is deterministic and based on the upward causation model above, but it predicts objects and their movements not as determined events (as in Newtonian physics) but as possibilities (for which the probabilities can be calculated enabling us to develop a very successful predictive science for large number of objects and/or events). And yet when we look at a quantum object, we don’t experience it as a bundle of possibilities, but as actual localized event much like a Newtonian particle. Moreover, quantum mathematics does not allow us to connect the upward causation-based deterministic theory with experimental data. How do the possibilities of the theory become actualities of experience simply by our looking at them? This is the mysterious “observer effect.”

In QUADRANT March 2000 No. 364 Vol XLIV Number 3 pages 47 - ­56. © Quadrant and E.J. Steele1

E.J. Steele 2

Is it possible for an active scientist to communicate esoteric research findings in plain everyday language? The short answer is no. This may only be possible for stories on more popular topics such as dinosaurs, the "Big Bang" and extraterrestrial life - they readily capture the public's attention and numerous definitions and qualifications are not necessary. Nevertheless I have agreed to do so following a kind request from the editor for a "plain language version of our work re Lamarckianism". While this is difficult, we have already tried to do just this in our recent book Lamarck's Signature .

The proposition that characteristics, both physical and mental, acquired during an individual's lifetime may be passed on genetically to offspring is no doubt part of the popular imagination. As such it should be easily communicable to a wider non-scientific audience. However, such knowledge is often rudimentary and distorted ("the sins of the father" and such) or contaminated with a vague feeling that it does not "smell right" scientifically. One can also hear the more erudite utterances: "Does this not smack of that discredited fellow Lamarck who Darwin showed was wrong?".. and .. "Samuel Butler, George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Koestler were delusional romantics, all brilliant humanists but hopeless scientists." Here I will show that these hopeless romantics were probably right. I will attempt to condense the main features of our work to encourage those interested in the topic to delve further and confront the large body of evidence.

After two decades of research my colleagues and I now have good evidence that the tell-tale signs of "soma-to-germline genetic impact events" have been etched into the very fabric of our chromosomes. This conclusion is quite the opposite to that expected under the ruling neo-Darwinian genetic paradigm based on Weismann's Doctrine. The data have arisen from our research on the molecular genetics of the immune system, the system which allows our body to produce disease-fighting antibodies in the bloodstream. The quality of this evidence is now as strong as our confidence that the origin of craters on the surface of the moon or earth are the impact sites of large cosmic bolides such as comets and asteroids. Thus the molecular genetic evidence derived from the immune systems of higher animals point to "Lamarck's Signature", identified as the imprint of numerous soma-to-germline genetic impact events written into the DNA of our chromosomes encoding antibody genes. Such events which have repeatedly occurred over 400-million years of evolutionary time.

Before I get into this story let me express a special debt of gratitude to my colleague and active collaborator Professor Bob Blanden (of the ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research) whose scientific support and friendship has been unstinting over almost three decades. In recent years Blanden's intellectual input has been both incisive and decisive in the development of our current ideas on how somatic cell-to-germ cell flow of genetic information may be effected.

• 1. This article was posted by Stephen Pirie 9.10am, 5th October, 2008 with permission and content provided by E.J. Steele.
• 2. E.J. Steele, Robert Blanden and Robyn Lindley's book Lamarck's Signature is published by Perseus Books.