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https://www.princeton.edu/~pea...
"The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality."

Disclaimer: I worked in a joint program with them when I was managing the PU robotics lab in the 1980s. The program was funded in part by the McDonnell Foundation (of McDonnell-Douglas) in part because supposedly strange unexplainable things happened in fighter cockpits especially to pilots under stress in emergency situations. Rather that give the money just to the PEAR lab, it was decided to give the money to a group of labs that would work together somehow exploring aspects of human consciousness (or something like that, not saying how effective all that was). Dean Radin is the researcher who connected the groups back then and has been active in parapsychology work since: http://www.deanradin.com/

Another person active in this field of consciousness studies is Charles Tart (unrelated to PU, but interesting in the field).
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/...

Related items at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell) which include mention of Dean Radin and Charles Tart:
http://www.noetic.org/search/?...

Mainstream science has been apparently useful, even if it is more the tinkerers and engineers who actually invent and bring to production useful things. But ultimately, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we don't very much understand the nature of consciousness or the deeper nature of reality, which together, as much as we think we know about them, still form a "great mystery" (a term some Native Americans used for God and such). And, no, mapping a few or even many neural pathways or having a chemical analysis of brain neuro-transmitters does not equate to understanding the mystery of consciousness. As Charles Tart points out, there is a step where many otherwise good scientists move from apparently solid ground in their specialties to claiming fallacious things like "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" and so create essentially a new religion of "Scientistic Materialism".
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/a...
"His [Tart's] and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual. This hurts people, it pressures them to reject vital aspects of their being."

Anyway, mass compulsory schooling in "classrooms" (intended by 1920s eugenicists to segregate people by social class so they interbreed and stratify, see Gatto) is also in general another way of hurting people:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. ... Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility an

Great point. I was in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution, and also have written several computers simulations, and I have known about Fredkin's "the universe is a simulation" ideas since the 1980s. As I said before in some Slashdot posts, if you are serious about scientific skepticism, you have to admit is is possible we live in a simulation that has only been running for 6000 (or whatever) simulated years, and was started either from a check pointed version or started from some hand-crafted parameters and data files. Creators of such hand-crafted environments might perhaps be assisted by guided evolutionary processes like used in our PlantStudio 3D software or EvoJazz musical software, where a user picks from a set of variations over and over again to craft something (and originally inspired by Richard Dawkins "Blind Watchmaker" software). Using such tools may muddy the waters of what a "generation" means though, and it also seems likely organisms evolved together to produce their complex interrelationships in ecological webs.

In any case, the universe might be a simulation. It might even just be a game we stepped into for an afternoon, with artificial memories implanted as in some Star Trek Holodeck scenarios. And we may not know until it is over (if then, if our consciousness persists). And even then, how many levels of nesting and branching are they in a multiverse of universes? Maybe C.S. Lewis was right, when characters feel at the end of the Narnia novels that a better heaven even closer to "God" somehow remains "ever inward, ever upward"? Still, does God have a God? And so on? If so, do they all agree on what morality should be in a consistent way? Or is it just turtles some or all the way up and we need to make a morality that promotes life and community? Or is it just exactly the way some specific version of the Christian Bible say, and the fossil record and geological record is a test of faith?

Anyway, I hope considering the universe is a simulation helps more people move beyond a purely materialistic and "scientistic" view of the universe. There are so many interesting questions ignored, denied, or belittled by "materialistic scientism" (to use Charles Tart's phrasing).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://www.noetic.org/search/?...

All that said, on a practical basis we can see evolutionary processes happening all around us (like with the flu virus mutating every year or bacteria become antibiotic resistant over time). As I said above, even if the universe was designed and only running for 6000 simulated years, evolutionary processes may have been be part of tools used to help make it. The fossil record may indeed have been placed there as a test of faith, and yet, would such a god be worthy of worship except out of fear? So, on a practical basis, we have to work with a lot of assumptions about a vast universe in age, extent, and complexity where evolutionary processes are important -- while at the same time honoring the mystery of it all, especially the mystery of consciousness we dwell in every second.

The universe might also have been run for a long time up to a check point (like getting Linux set up nicely in VirtualBox) and then might just be run endlessly from that checkpoint. I'm not sure how "old" that would make this current run of the universe simulation then if the run was started only 6000 simulated years ago, but the check pointed version it was started from was let run for 14 billion simulated years before that?

Anyway, just various interesting speculations on the great mystery which probably is way beyond human-brain-sized comprehending. It is the height of hubris to think we really can understand the universe of universes in

http://noetic.org/discussions/open/227/ ??

"People do not want to admit that death==nonexistence so they make-up imaginary 'trips' to some other place (heaven, hell, Elysian Fields, space, whatever). In reality Sally Ride's personality dissolved into nothingness at the moment her brain's neurons broke connection with one another when they were deprived of oxygen."

For another perspective, see: http://noetic.org/search/?q=survival
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/tart/
http://physicalismisdead.blogspot.com/2012/05/charles-tart-on-postmortem-survival.html
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=charles+tart
http://www.amazon.com/States-Consciousness-Charles-Tart/dp/0595151965
http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Materialism-Evidence-Paranormal/dp/1572246456
"Charles Tart reconciles the scientific and spiritual worlds by looking at empirical evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena that point toward our spiritual nature, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing.
    Science seems to tell us that we are all meaningless products of blind biological and chemical forces, leading meaningless lives that will eventually end in death. The truth is that unseen forces such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and other phenomena inextricably link us to the spiritual world, and while many skeptics and scientists deny the existence of these spiritual phenomena, the experiences of millions of people indicate that they do take place.
    In this book, copublished with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart presents over fifty years of scientific research conducted at the nation's leading universities that proves humans do have natural spiritual impulses and abilities. The End of Materialism presents an elegant argument for the union of science and spirituality in light of this new evidence, and explains why a truly rational viewpoint must address the reality of a spiritual world. Tart's work marks the beginning of an evidence-based spiritual awakening that will profoundly influence your understanding of the deeper forces at work in our lives."

Sadly, it looks like Sally Ride might have died of sunlight deficiency and vegetable deficiency:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/cancer/pancreatic-cancer/

He also runs a new age religion call the neotic institute:

http://www.noetic.org/about/founder.cfm

... Better yet, on a moon mission.

I seem to recall that The Field mentioned experiences that Edgar Mitchell had while on the Apollo 14 mission (sorry, don't remember specifics). The astronaut later founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences, which studies metaphysical topics...

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

The quantum holography I was referring to is something completely different, where you perform holography with quantum entangled photons. I was afraid you might be referring to something like what you're talking about. As far as I know, the whole quantum uncertainty thing underlying brain function goes back to Sir John Eccles, a Nobel prize winning neurophysiologist who did some very good work, but was a very religious Catholic, IIRC. He desperately wanted to find God in the brain, and I think he was the first one to suggest it might be in some sort of quantum indeterminacy thing. He wrote a book with the philosopher Karl Popper (of "falsifiability" fame) called _The Self and Its Brain_ back in the late 70's where they discuss this. Then Roger Penrose came along and made a rather flawed argument as to why the human brain can do things that no computer can do in principle, and he's really the one these ideas are most commonly associated with now. Stuart Hameroff is a biologist who works on microtubules, and he's another person more directly associated with the whole microtubule hypothesis. A number of people outside of neuroscience believe these ideas, especially physicists who know very little about brain function. However, Penrose's argument suffers from a number of logical flaws (try typing "penrose wrong" into google), and Hameroff's arguments about the mechanism of action of gas anesthetics are laughable in light of huge amounts of ion channel data. Ultimately, no one knows if Penrose and Hameroff are right, as that's an empirical matter. But there's absolutely no experimental evidence or convincing theoretical reason to believe that they ARE right, other than the fact that many people desperately want them to be. And this makes sense--the whole notion that the brain is a mere machine subject to more boring laws of physics is something that threatens many people's self worth. Alternatively, there is decades of evidence supporting more conventional models of brain function. There are, of course, a few interesting anomalies. You will probably like this.

This comes from a Hank Wesselman [ph.d.] book - yet it's about the thing you try to repudate. The above statement comes however from the man who founded this organization [noetic.org] - an Apollo 14 astronaut and theoretical physicist. Theory? Maybe. But I want the proof either way, that is what science is about right?

I find it interesting that you think an astronaut/physicist would have insight into brain function than people who actually study the brain. Maybe we should start founding organizations to tell everyone the truth about how atoms behave and what's in outer space? At any rate, science is not about the "proof either way." When someone comes up with an interesting but highly implausible idea and they want other people to take it seriously, they have to have something more supporting it than "you can't prove it's wrong." Whatever that might be, Penrose, Mitchell (the founder of the organization you mentioned), and all those other people do not have it yet. Maybe they will someday, but I doubt it. The situation is much simpler for all the spoon-benders and mind-readers, who are consistently unable to demonstrate their abilities under controlled conditions.

"Recent changes to quantum theory and current discoveries in neurobiology reveal that the brain organizes information holographically and functions like a massively parallel quantum computer, with the microtubules in the neurons of the brain being the likely quantum hologram receptors. It has been suggested that the quantum hologram is the wave portion of the wave-particle duality for macroscale objects. It has also been proposed that the quantum hologram may tie the phenomenal universe of quantum, micro, macro, and cosmic-sized phenomena together, and that the quantum hologram may be the mechanism through which nature learns"

This comes from a Hank Wesselman [ph.d.] book - yet it's about the thing you try to repudate.

The above statement comes however from the man who founded this organization - an Apollo 14 astronaut and theoretical physicist.

Theory? Maybe. But I want the proof either way, that is what science is about right?