What is consciousness?

There have been plenty of people that have delved into 'consciousness studies', many of them neurologists, or neuro-psychiatrists such as Peter Fenwick, and Biologists like Rupert Sheldrake (author of "The science delusion - kind of an 'antidote' to Richard Dawkins' 'God delusion', which challenges a lot of the dogma there seems to be within the mainstream modern scientific view, largely thanks to people like Dawkins).

 I was watching some videos on Youtube last night on Near death experiences and it's a fascinating topic, and certainly one way of approaching the big question of what consciousness actually is. Many of the 'materialistic' biologists say that it is a purely brain oriented experience that happens at the moment of death or revival, but there have been some very strange cases where people have been clinically dead undergoing brain surgery and described accurate accounts of details of what went on during their surgery at times when their brain was completely inactive. They have also been able to see from different angles/viewpoints in the room, and 'hear' even while their ears were obstructed.

In that video I discovered Professor Stuart Hameroff who is a professor of Anaesthesiology and director of the Centre for consciousness studies at the University of Arizona, ( interview ) and he, along with Sir Roger Penrose, has some very interesting theories regarding microscopic components of brain cells called 'micro-tubules' which he theorises may connect our brains to the universe on a quantum level.  He has studied near death experiences in depth and suggests that the quantum information held by these micro-tubules may be released on death to the universe at large, but still connected via quantum entanglement so that when someone is revived it is able to re-enter the body.  At least this is my understanding so far of his very complicated theories.  But he is well worth checking out.

 Scientists from Australia and Japan have managed to teleport wave packets of light photons, which is a significant step in the world of Quantum computing. Although this refers to "Quantum teleportation" and shouldn't be confused with the normal use of the word "teleport" as most of us would understand it, this kind of research is at least going down a path that could very much tie in with the theories of Hameroff and Penrose.

 Rupert Sheldrake has spent many years as a biologist and is a strong proponent of a theory called "morphic resonance" where he suggests that consciousness behaves more like a field, like electro-magnetism, and he has conducted a number of experiments on things like "the sense of being stared at" (in his book of the same name) And dogs knowing when their owners are coming home, and other studies of "telepathy". I have wondered if this is true whether there might be an associated "consciousness particle" that might be discovered one day.  Maybe it will be the thing that one day enables us to build the star trek 'transporter'.

There is also the whole area of Remote viewing, which was a method of "psychically" viewing remote situations under double blind conditions which the US military funded through Stanford research institute, (some have claimed they still use it), and the reason they started studying it was because the Soviets had already been doing it for a long time. They found the results to be solid enough that they kept funding it for 20 years. Dr Hal Putoff ran the program and is on youtube, along with some of his viewers such as Ingo Swann and Joe McMoneagle. I also watched a talk on youtube given by David Wilcock where he said there was a chinese study where they put a chinese character in a sealed box with sensors and the remote viewer got the correct character and the sensors detected many thousands of photons in the box at the same time... suggesting that some part of the viewer's consciousness was able to travel to the location.  I'm not sure what he was referring to or how reliable the source, but I have found reference to similar studies described in a book called China's super psychics.

thread on the serious stuff forum.