The words quoted above distill the common secular conception of death. If we decline the traditional religious reassurances of an afterlife, or their fuzzy new age equivalents, and instead take the hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death, then we likely end up with Gonzalez-Cruzzi. Rejecting visions of reunions with loved ones or of crossing over into the light, we anticipate the opposite: darkness, silence, an engulfing emptiness. But we would be wrong.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics predicts the formation of distinct parallel worlds as a result, of a quantum mechanical measurement. Communication among these parallel worlds would experimentally rule out alternatives to this interpretation. A possible procedure for “interworld” exchange of information and energy, using only state of the art quantum optical equipement, is described. A single ion is isolated from its environment in an ion trap. Then a quantum mechanical measurement with two discrete outcomes is performed on another system, (...) resulting in the formation of two parallel worlds. Depending on the outcome of this measurement the ion is excited from only one of the parallel worlds before the ion decoheres through its interaction with the environment. A detection of this excitation in the other parallel world is direct evidence for the many-worlds interpretation. This method could have important practical applications in physics and beyond. (shrink)

This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.

The ability to anticipate the future is of great benefit to any organism. Whenever such a foreseeing takes place, it typically happens because an organism has been able to learn about some regularity in the past and then uses this information to expect some happenings in the future. Modern human beings have perfected this capacity far beyond any other animal by getting to know the laws by which nature operates. But it is still based on past experience that even human (...) beings are able to say something about the future. So every form of anticipation of the future relies on inductive reasoning based on knowledge of causal processes in the past. Both these processes and the processes by which we learn to anticipate the future are common in the sense that it is always an earlier cause that brings about a later effect. The ability to anticipate depends on the fact that our cognitive faculties only work on information that stems from the past. Had it been possible for us to receive reliable information about the future, the ability of anticipation might not have existed or might have been less faulty than it sometimes is. (shrink)

Sometimes also called retro causation. A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the idea that the temporal order of cause and effect is a mere contingent feature (...) and that there may be cases where the cause is causally prior to its effect but where the temporal order of the cause and effect is reversed with respect to normal causation, i.e. there may be cases where the effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause. (shrink)

This paper is an overview of recent discussions concerning the mind–body problem that have been taking place at the interface between philosophy and neuroscience. In it I focus on phenomenal consciousness or “qualia”, which I distinguish from various related issues (sections 1-2). I then discuss various influential skeptical arguments that question the possibility of reductive explanations of qualia in physicalist terms: knowledge arguments, conceivability arguments, the argument from multiple realizability and the explanatory gap argument. None of the arguments is found (...) entirely convincing (section 3). It does not necessarily follow that reductive physicalism is the only option, but it is defensible. However, constant conceptual and methodological reflection is required alongside ongoing research, to keep such a view free from dogmatism and naivety (section 4). (shrink)