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From: Anthony Potts <potts@cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Stapp, PK & Physics Today 
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Date: Thu, 2 Nov 1995 15:11:43 GMT
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On 31 Oct 1995, Jack Sarfatti wrote:

> 
> Consciousness is the feedback of brain matter on its own wavefunction
> which violates standard quantum mechanics. As you remove matter
> from the brain the consciousness gets more fuzzy like removing
> pieces of a hologram.

Now Jack, you should really put something like "in my opinion" in a 
statement like this. There are many many physicists who would regard this 
as being a slightly contentious point. To claim that the brain violates 
standard quantum mechanics begs a whole host of questions (such as at 
what point does life start to violate QM, is it at the level of monkeys, 
eukaryotes, prokaryotes, primordial soup). It is also safe to say that 
there have been no widely heralded demonstrations which explicitly show 
the breakdown of QM in the brain, and that if there were, it would be the 
kind of thing which would appear on the evening news, not just in 
scientific journals.

On that point, I am assuming that there are reasons for someone to 
suggest such a model for reality, and that there are experiments which at 
least suggest that something is not quite right, so could you maybe give 
us a brief, lucid precis of an experiment, along with its results, and 
the conclusions of the experimenter (as opposed to a statement by you 
saying "this proves X"). If you cannot, then I would suggest that this 
theory should go along to the publishers of the Penguin Dictionary of 
Curious and Interesting Realities, at least until it has more 
experimental evidence than the existence of fairies at the bottom of the 
garden (of course they haven't been seen, it is in their nature to hide 
whenever you look for them)

Anthony Potts
