How To Get Amazing Deep Sleep |

btw... the first link above says 'sleep', but it's also for diet and weight loss; a couple of years ago I lost 50 lbs in about 7 mos to get under 200 (I'm 6'3")
just by drinking coffee and eating dark choc until 2 oclock, the eating whatever over the next 4 hours... and I'm still under 200.

And the link in 8 is a quick eye exercise that werks for 75 percent of people... your brain uses a lot of neurons every day to position and balance the body... which isn't helpful when you are trying to go to sleep.

The eye trick tells those neurons to shut down.

ok... #11 is way too long

Here's a short, intelligent discussion about the mind-body conundrum of consciousness that takes us to quantum field theory where there might be an answer... by a couple of MIT guys.

Apparently getting the problem over to QM is fundamental step to understanding:

Why you don't really exist | Sam Harris, Roger Penrose, Sophie Scott

The Institute of Art and Ideas

"Donald Hoffman: Nothing Exists Until It is Perceived

Cognitive neuroscientist Donald Hoffman shares a mind-bending insight: reality as we know it may just be a data structure inside consciousness " not the other way around.

This radically different perspective could transform how we understand ourselves, the universe, and the very nature of existence."

Physics: the universe as a hologram

#20

Yep, and that's Penrose again.

also:

the universe not a simulation... using Godel

Then there's:

Consciousness existed before life | Stuart Hameroff argues that consciousness predates life, originating in the quantum states of microtubules within cells.

Stuart Hameroff is an American anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his studies of consciousness and his controversial claim, alongside Sir Roger Penrose, that consciousness originates from quantum states in neural microtubules.
(see #12 for the apparent importance of quantum fields to understanding consciousness)

"A quantum microtubule substrate of consciousness is experimentally supported and solves the binding and epiphenomenalism problems Open Access
Michael C Wiest Author Notes

There are 2 kinds of reality...

The Quantum Brain in 90 Seconds

Was Penrose Right? NEW EVIDENCE For Quantum Effects In The Brain

PBS Space Time

"CPU inventor and physicist Federico Faggin, together with Prof. Giacomo Mauro D'Ariano, proposes that consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain, but a fundamental aspect of reality itself: quantum fields are conscious and have free will.

In this theory, our physical body is a quantum-classical machine,' operated by free will decisions of quantum fields.

Faggin calls the theory 'Quantum Information Panpsychism' (QIP) and claims that it can give us testable predictions in the near future.

If the theory is correct, it not only will be the most accurate theory of consciousness, it will also solve mysteries around the interpretation of quantum mechanics."

It would come from quantum fields, possibly located in microtubules, per the several posts above.

In #27, the evolutionist view of how that could happen is presented; which involves primordial soup somehow devoping feefees; pleasure and pain as motivators.

#26 gives another option.

developing

I watched a display while my wife's brain filled up with blood, and the doctor told me that she would not survive... she later told me she was following a dark tunnel towards a distant light, that opened to a marvelous, joyous place, where her deceased aunts and others welcomeed her.

She didn't want to leave, but they told her that she couldn't stay because she had something to do back here. (have our daughter, I think)

She, for all purposees, didn't have a functioning brain, but she was very conscious.

Of course, an untold number of people have had similar experiences.

But whatever the mechanisms, quantum fields or brain placisity of atoms... whenever I see a car go by, my first assumption is not that it is the result of billions of years of a mindless process.

Unless it's one of those really ugly Teslas.

+
"Quantum fields are generally considered the fundamental, omnipresent, and continuous "fabric" of the universe, existing throughout all space and time.

While they are not eternal in the sense of having no beginning"as they likely originated with the Big Bang"they are persistent, underlying entities from which particles constantly emerge and vanish."

- We ARE the Universe. We are star dust. - Donner

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the Garden

We are stardust, we are golden
We are caught in the devil's bargain

Genesis 2:7, which says, "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground". This concept is reinforced in Genesis 3:19, stating, "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return".

hmmm...

Genesis And Science: More Aligned Than You Think?

- There will be nothing to contain it.

Unless it is contained as consciousness within a quantum field, which fields are all the rage in physics now, having provided solutions for other problems... particularly early on this bandwagon being Penrose, who did the maths and got the Nobel along with Hawking for the BBT.

Sir Roger Penrose: "The Big Bang was not a beginning of the Universe"

- Are you proposing that the Quantum Field itself is conscious or has some place in it where our consciousness is contained intact?

That's the premise of most of the above references; that consciousness resides in quantum fields (there are infinite numbers of those apparently) which reside in the brain in microtubules... which until recently were thought to be too 'wet' to contain them.

see the PBS link in #31

- by shifting to parallel universes

Hammeroff gives other options than that in #28.

#55 is NW

howsomever :)

"Dr Sharon Dirckx, Cambridge-trained brain-imaging scientist and some time Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics speaker, for a wide-ranging conversation on the mind, meaning and what makes us human.

Sharon reflects on her journey from biochemistry into fMRI research, including work on addiction, and explains why consciousness remains a "hard problem" for purely material accounts of the mind.

They explore the language of "soul", what Christians do (and don't) mean by it, and why near-death experiences raise provocative questions about whether we are more than our brains."

"Sure. And actually you don't need to leave clinical neuroscience to make that
observation. Um, one of the reasons being things like near-death experiences
that have arisen um, with the arrival of resuscitation
capabilities.

So, people who have had gone into cardiac arrest have
been able to be resuscitated from a a state of essentially being dead. you know, their heart has stopped and once
your heart has stopped for more than about 3, four, five minutes, you know,
your brain stops functioning as well.

And and people um have been resuscitated
and said that actually when they were clinically dead, they were in fact vividly conscious.

Um so that that would
be an interesting data set that that is an interesting data set to look at that we now have sort of 50 to 60 years of
data that perhaps in its early stages you could take to be a bit more anecdotal
but we have actually several decades of of um publications in things like the
Journal of Near-Death Studies and the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences.

And they're taken seriously now in a way that they weren't perhaps a couple of
decades ago. Yes. and you have um academic papers being written on them and you also have
um people who have changed their views on the mind body relationship based on
their own near-death experience.

So we could take someone like Eban Alexander who was a former Harvard neurosurgeon and used to be a strict physicist that um you know if you don't have a functioning neoortex you can't be
conscious

until um and in fact his patients after
he'd operated on them would come and tell him they'd had NDEs and he would kind of dismiss it until he himself
developed a severe bacterial menitis at the age of 54 went into a coma His family were told to put their affairs in order. He was not expected to survive and yet extraordinarily he did and he
made a full recovery and recounts an extremely vivid conscious experience.

Um that is so vivid that it's very hard to explain. Yeah. And the one of the
go-tos often is that it's residual brain activity. And of course we can't rule
that out. I mean all we can say is there's no detectable activity in the brain using the current technologies
that we have but but at the same time the kinds of experience that people report
don't seem to be consistent with a brain in its last seconds of life you know
just kind of petering out these are there's a disproportionality
to the kinds of things people are reporting and what's happening in the brain.

Um and of course the fact that
someone would change their mind, change their viewpoint to a view arguably that
is considered much less popular amongst Harvard neurosurgeons
um than the predominant physicalist view that you are your brain.

Um prompts you
to ask well why would you do that unless you actually believed what happened to you was very genuine. It's amazing it happened
to him right after spending so many years working on it. Exactly. So I think it's fascinating.

I don't see it as a proof that we have a soul. I don't see it as a proof that there's a heaven or even that God
exists. But if we are just our brains, data like this makes no sense.

And all you need is one genuine instance of someone having an out-of body authentic near-death experience to really bring strong challenge to the view that you are just your brain.

from the above link, starting about 18 mins in

"Professor Alexander is not just another born-again believer. He is a top-tier neurosurgeon, a Harvard graduate who devoted his career to understanding the human brain.

For years, he explained to patients, colleagues, and students that near-death experiences were nothing more than neural breakdowns under stress - a kind of "short circuit."

Then, in November 2008, his own system crashed. And he discovered something entirely different.

Alexander contracted a rare and deadly form of meningitis. Within four hours, he slipped into a deep coma, and his brain simply shut down.

EEG readings showed that his neocortex - the outermost and most advanced part of the brain's cortex, responsible for consciousness, emotions, thinking, and language" ceased functioning entirely."

excerpt from his story which is here: