Steve3007 wrote: ↑March 10th, 2020, 4:07 am
arjand wrote:Are there philosophers that have predicted the existence, or addressed the essence of Neutrinos?
You mean before they were predicted by the conservation laws and symmetries of physics and detected by experiments with such things as underground tanks of cleaning fluid? If that's what you mean, you'd presumably be thinking of them as somehow representing some kind of philosophical paradigm, and not just thinking of those specifics of theoretical and experimental physics. For example, Democritus and others supposedly predicted the concept of atoms - the concept of an indivisible building block of Nature as opposed to Nature as a continuum. The fact that the thing we came to label "atom" turned out to be divisible after all doesn't affect that paradigm. I don't see neutrinos as representing a paradigm in that sense.
As it appears, considering its abundance, the particles may be an important part of reality. I wonder if the particles may have been predicted by a theory which could provide a clue for its role in Nature / reality, and thereby potentially for an explanation of consciousness and life.
Neutrinos can instantly switch between 3 known types which is named Flavor-Switching: electron, muon and tau.
The mass of the muon flavor is 200x greater while the tau flavor has 3000x more mass than the electron flavor. It means that the particle can interact with the visible world on its own terms.
“It’s like throwing vanilla ice cream a long distance and seeing some of it turn into chocolate,” says physicist Chang Kee Jung of New York’s Stony Brook University.
In the cited experiment in the OP the researchers discovered that despite traveling over 450 miles, the neutrinos did not assume any identity. The particles instead would remain in a superposition to be more than one thing at a time (i.e. energized / non-energized), or could momentarily and instantly assume whatever identity was expedient in interacting with the matter they were passing through, while flying at the speed of light.
It may be a clue that the particle may be involved in consciousness and life.
True nature of consciousness: Solving the biggest mystery of our mind
Philosophers have described consciousness as the “ghost in the machine”. Even scientific ideas about consciousness often have an aura of the metaphysical. Many scientists describe it as an illusion, while others see it as so fundamental that it doesn’t have an explanation. Always at the centre of the riddle lies its non-physicality.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... your-mind/
Consciousness is a property of the universe that is filtered by the brain
According to the decades-long research of Dr. Peter Fenwick (Cambridge, UK), a highly regarded neuropsychologist who has been studying the human brain, consciousness, and the phenomenon of near death experience (NDE) for 50 years consciousness cannot be an emergent property of the brain and its metabolism. Despite initially being highly incredulous of NDEs and related phenomena, Fenwick now believes his extensive research suggests that consciousness persists after death. In fact, Fenwick believes that consciousness actually exists independently and outside of the brain as an inherent property of the universe itself like dark matter and dark energy or gravity.
In Fenwick’s view, the brain does not create or produce consciousness; rather, it filters it. As odd as this idea might seem at first, there are some analogies that bring the concept into sharper focus. For example, the eye filters and interprets only a very small sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum and the ear registers only a narrow range of sonic frequencies. Similarly, according to Fenwick, the brain filters and perceives only a tiny part of the cosmos’ intrinsic “consciousness.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/bl ... -the-brain