Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

Interview at the World Forum of Spirit and Science

First of all, we would like to thank you for receiving us and mainly for your participation in the Legion of Good Will’s 1st World Fórum Spirit and Science, in October 2000, at the ParlaMundi of the LGW. Tell us about how do you feel in coming back to Brazil, launching the new edition of “The Self Aware Universe”, and also about the success of “Physics of the Soul”.

I feel great.  The Brazilian culture has always seemed to me to be open about such things as spirituality, survival after death, and alternative healing techniques that I write about.  It is nice that my belief is vindicated.

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Consciousness and Quantum Physics

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.” Continue reading…

What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Originally released in February 2004 in one theater in Yelm, Washington, What the BLEEP Do We Know!? went on to become the fifth highest grossing documentary in the United States, with ticket sales of $12 Million.

Shunned by all movie distributors, the producers set about distributing and marketing the movie themselves in a “proof of concept” strategy to show theater owners there was indeed a market for spiritually oriented films that catered to audiences’ intelligence, not their lowest common denominator.

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