Are quantum events required for consciousness in a very special sense, far beyond the general sense that quantum events are part of all physical systems? What would it take for quantum events, on such a micro-scale, to be relevant for brain function, which operates at the much higher level of neurons and brain circuits? What would it mean?

To assume that the laws of physics are supreme is to remain within the confines of this Humean world. Physical laws assert what are supposedly eternal regularities, but there is nothing necessary about them: we can have no guarantee that the law that holds today will hold tomorrow or, for that matter, that it isn’t just a local effect applying only to our observable part of the universe, and that different laws may apply elsewhere.

For Nancy Cartwright this is all the wrong way about. For her, the world presented by the laws of physics is largely a fiction. The world in which we live, unlike that inside the laboratory, is a messy, unpredictable place, marked by discontinuities and fractures. The regularities promised by physics are rarely apparent. It is a more dangerous – in some ways a more interesting place – than the supposedly absolute and eternal laws of physics would suggest. There is a lack of fit between the laws and reality as we know it: to find the regularities promised you need to look hard and deep and under certain special conditions; you need, ideally, to be in a laboratory.

If not much that happens in nature is, in fact, as orderly and regular as we have been led to believe by physics, then we must expect even less order when we enter the world of the human sciences. Hence, if the economist attempts to lay down laws, he or she is well-advised to equip them with ceteris paribus conditions – that is, if he proposes that “taxes increase prices” he will protect his hide by informing us that they will only do so if other things are equal. But other things rarely are equal. All kinds of countervailing trends may be at work, as well as quite unexpected events – a run on the dollar, an oil bonanza, a devaluation of the currency – so that it is possible that a tax increase, far from raising prices, may be followed by a fall in prices.

Does this mean that the ‘law’ in this case is wrong? Not at all. In explaining why the law failed to apply on this particular occasion the economist will have recourse to counterfactuals: that is, he will explain that the tax increase would have caused a rise in prices if x or y or z had not occurred. In which case, one may think, it is not much of a law, if it cannot guarantee that the cause will give rise to the effect. However, Cartwright argues that this situation is scarcely peculiar to laws of economics; it applies equally to the laws of physics.

Crop circles aren't restricted to the megalith-infested plains of the United Kingdom - here's one that showed up in Italy on the solstice over the weekend. But rather than being a message from aliens, or manifestations of earth energy interacting with the powers of the Sun, this one seems to be of human origin: Italian circle-maker Francesco Grassi has claimed it as his work (along with his team of Paolo Attivissimo, Marco Morocutti, Simone Angioni, Antonio Ghidoni, Davide Dal Pos, Alessandra Pandolfi), and has titled the crop glyph the "LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions) Clock" (LENR is another name for the controversial science of 'cold fusion'). We posted another circle created by Grassi and his team around this time last year.

Regardless of Grassi's claim, the decoding effort has begun in earnest at Crop Circle Connector. Jump on in if you like trying to decode ciphers.

Building off the landmark experiments of Benjamin Libet, researchers at the University of California-Davis measured the brain activity of a handful of undergraduates as each made choices to look left or right when prompted by images on a screen. A bunch of controls ensured the only thing directing their gaze was their own arbitrary choice.
The researchers wanted to determine if what they call “ongoing spontaneous variability” in neural signaling—basically, the brain’s background noise—influenced the students’ decisions. This excess signaling has been dismissed as inconsequential, but recently scientists have begun to speculate that it could actually be hugely important. “Neural noise is simply that the brain is always firing even in the absence of input or responses, and this random firing may even be the carrier upon which our consciousness rides, in the same way that radio-static is used to carry a radio station,” says Jesse Bengson, the study’s lead author, in an email.

The study’s result: Fluctuations in brain static actually predicted the direction in which students chose to look. This sounds just as fatalistic as thoughts existing before we think them, but really it’s just the opposite. These constant fluctuations exist apart from the normal causal chain of thoughts, so they seem to allow spontaneous bits to disrupt our otherwise-inevitable cognitive marches toward particular actions and open up other possibilities.

Sci is correct and has won the debate.

I first encountered Ken Wilber’s phenomenal philosophical genius while reading ReVision Journal some seventeen years ago. I marveled at how he modeled and brilliantly articulated the evolution of consciousness from slime to Godhead in writings on the Spectrum of Consciousness, the Atman Project and Up from Eden. The range and depth of his thinking, the clarity and originality of his insights, definately put Ken in another league. Maybe a league of one, the world’s greatest philosopher. Perhaps selfishly, I wondered what special insights he could bring to contemporary artists. Could he help us circumnavigate through bullshit art criticism and give us the swords of critical thinking that could slay the Jabberwocky of “flatland Modernism” and the Hydra of Post-Modernity, and could his philosophy help put Art on the track to real Spirit?

Around this time, back in 1981, my wife Allyson answered the telephone one day and said, “It’s Ken Wilber! He wants to talk to you.” A rush of excitement and a big gulp, “Uh hello?” I said, and Ken replied, “Hi, I really like your work and would love to see some more of it.” So we invited him to our loft studio in downtown Boston...

A: Ken, I’ve been talking with some artist friends who consider their art as their spiritual practice. I’ve been wondering to what degree we could consider art as a legitimate spiritual practice?

K: There are developmental stages to what I call the spectrum of consciousness — art can come from any of these stages. Piaget did psychological experiments with children and determined that there is a sequence to the unfolding of higher values. He showed that compassion and “fairness” is a quality not so present in a four year old child because they cannot project themselves into the role of the other–at around age seven the brain/mind has the capacity to exchange self for other. The human mind can potentially develop through emotional, rational, psychic and spiritual modes of awareness. The higher spiritual stages are also progressive and unfold with spiritual practice.

So art can express any of these stages or levels of awareness, from sensorimotor reflections of the world of matter, to the feelings and ideas of the ego-self, to the sociocentric or worldcentric self. But this is still not transformative spiritual art. A spiritual art must transform the artist and the viewer. In order for art to be transformative, it has to undo you.