Michael Prescott's Blog

The bonfire

Last night, reading some notes I wrote last year, I noticed one in which I jotted down the idea that information can exist only in consciousness - so if information is the essence of the cosmos, then the cosmos must exist in consciousness. In other words, the information "2 + 2 = 4" can exist only in some mind. If the physical universe is organized around information - such as the gravitational coupling constant, the strong nuclear force coupling constant, the weak nuclear force coupling constant, and the electromagnetic coupling constant, among many other relationships - then it seems logically inescapable that the universe exists in consciousness.

Of course, it might be argued that these various constants do not exist as information until they are observed by us. Thus, as information, they exist only in our own minds. But this argument overlooks the fact that these constants are not arbitrary, but rather appear to be very precisely fine-tuned to produce a functioning, stable, complex universe. They are like ground rules laid down with a great deal of care, much like the instructions in a recipe. As such, they really do constitute information, no less than a recipe or a formula or a set of blueprints.

Again, one might quibble that the universe is a product of consciousness, rather than being in consciousness, just as a meal is the product of a recipe or a house is the product of a blueprint. But in this case, I wonder if the distinction is even meaningful. For someone to build a table, the thought of the table must first exist in consciousness. Then the thought is translated into physical form. The resulting table could not have come into existence apart from consciousness, and it only has a function, meaning, and identity within consciousness. So basically, the table is conceived within consciousness and, in its capacity as a table, it exists and functions only within consciousness.

The physical universe seemingly begins as a conception -- a mental conception -- and it has meaning, function, and identity only when viewed from the perspective of consciousness. Without consciousness, then, there could be no universe because there would be no organizing ideas (such as the constants mentioned above) and no purpose (teleology). In Aristotelian terms, there would be no formal cause and no final cause.

The long and short of it is that it doesn't matter very much if the universe is seen as pure Idea or as the manifestation or implementation of Idea in physical terms. The distinction is largely academic, although it is the issue at the heart of the debate between idealism and dualism. Either way, the universe begins with and embodies an idea (or set of ideas), and can be understood and appreciated only in terms of that idea(s). What matters is that Idea as such logically precedes the universe, and consciousness logically precedes (or at least it is coeval with) Idea.

At this point, the million-dollar question becomes: What is the relationship between this cosmic consciousness and our own? Are they one and the same? Or are our own minds a small offshoot of a larger whole? Or is there no connection at all, and do we merely flatter ourselves in imagining that there is?

I don't pretend to really know, but consider the following image as one possible illustration. Picture a blazing bonfire lighting a dark night. A procession of people pass by, each one holding a candle to the bonfire and tapping its flame. Each candle now burns with a light of its own, a much dimmer light, of which the bonfire is the ultimate source.

Cosmic consciousness is the bonfire that illuminates the physical world. Each individual consciousness is a candle lit from that bonfire, tapping that flame.

A possible weakness of this image is that it seems to suggest that the bonfire and the candles are separate from each other, when mystics and others who have pondered these matters deeply will tell us that all consciousness is ultimately connected or even indivisible. But this difficulty may be more apparent than real.

Here it may be relevant to glance at the "problem of universals" (perhaps more accurately characterized as the "problem of properties"). This old philosophical conundrum asks whether the same property observed in two different places is really the same thing or two different things. For instance, if we observe the property of whiteness in a picket fence and in a sheet of typing paper, is the whiteness the same in each case, or different? It is possible to argue that the property is always the same. In this particular case, we could argue that the fire of the candle is logically indistinguishable from the fire of the bonfire. They are actually the same fire, merely observed in two different places (or in two different respects).

As a side note, the quantum physicists' idea of non-locality may be useful in suggesting how two properties can actually be one and the same, even when apparently separated by space; in a non-local universe, space and separation are an illusion (or at least they are not an aspect of fundamental reality).

We could say, then, that the property (or quality) of consciousness is always the same, and that its apparent dispersal among many separate entities is no more real than the apparent dispersal of whiteness among the various entities possessing that property.

So what are we left with? The universe is organized around information; information exists only within consciousness; so the universe is logically dependent on consciousness to exist. Our own consciousness may be thought of as a small flame lit from a larger fire, but just as the property of fire is the same in all cases, so the property of consciousness is always and everywhere the same.

A man in full

Though I hesitate to link to this, because I fear it may make some people's heads explode a la David Cronenberg's Scanners, I'll do it anyway. It's the last installment of a five-part interview with Tom Wolfe, whose Bonfire of the Vanities is the definitive American novel of the 1980s. Wolfe is a national treasure, always refreshingly unpretentious and optimistic, and never more so than when he sums up his thoughts on the next 800 years (!) of "American centuries."

As Wolfe puts it, "Be happy."   

Windbridge redux

FYI: My blog post "Words, Words, Words," a list of recommended titles on evidence for the afterlife, has been reprinted in the Windbridge Institute's newsletter, Winds of Change. If you'd like to take a look at the newsletter, please click here and then open the PDF file linked on that page.

The tree

My last post has inspired many interesting and helpful comments, one of which spurred me to a burst of poetic eloquence. I like it, so I'm putting it up as a separate blog entry. Be warned that, because of a sinus infection, I am currently taking prescription cough medicine laced with codeine; thus, what follows may be only the ravings of a fatigued and drug-addled brain.

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My best guess - which is only a guess - is that Mind does give rise to the physical cosmos, and that in some mysterious way our own individual minds are minuscule offshoots of this larger Mind.

Here's an image: There is a tree deeply rooted in good soil, with a profusion of leaves on its branches. Soil, roots, trunk, branches, and leaves are all one system, and when the leaves drop off they will return to the soil as nutrients. The soil is Universal Consciousness, the ground of being. The roots the means of translating the soil's stored energy into the form of a growing tree (i.e., translating Mind into physicality). The tree trunk and branches are the physical world. The leaves are our own individual consciousnesses, separate from each other, but grouped together, and fed by the same root system that supports the whole tree. And our ultimate fate is to drop from the branch, lose our form, rejoin the soil, and merge with the ground of being.

The trouble with idealism

I sort of want to be an idealist. Philosophically speaking, that is. I certainly don't want to be a materialist, and idealism is the main alternative to materialism (though dualism and neutral monism are other options).

The problem I have with idealism, though, is that it doesn't quite make sense to me. It doesn't quite click into place. According to idealism, consciousness creates the world. All the physical things around us, even our own bodies, are actually manifestations of consciousness.

This means, of course, that our brains are created by consciousness. After all, brains are part of the physical world, and idealism ascribes all of the physical world to consciousness.

But here's the rub. Clearly our own particular consciousness is tied to our own particular brain in very obvious ways. We see only through our own eyes, smell only through our own noses. We cannot see what someone in China is seeing, and he can't see what we see.

Our brains, then, seem to constrain our consciousness. They provide sharp limits to what we can know and perceive. These limits may not be absolute; remote viewers apparently can see places that their physical eyes have not gazed on; but such exceptions are rare and still controversial. For most of us, most of the time, our consciousness functions in lockstep with our brain.

But if the brain is only an illusion created by consciousness, then how can this be?

How can a mere appearance (the brain) constrain a fundamental reality (consciousness)? How can an object within consciousness constrain and delimit consciousness itself?

If this is too abstract, consider a slightly more "scientific" version of this idea. Karl Pribram and David Bohm developed the theory that the physical world is a holographic illusion projected out of a substrate of wave patterns. Only the wave patterns are real; everything else is appearance, a mere image. What projects this complex illusion? What makes wave patterns look like tables and chairs and palm trees and Sno-Cones? Well, it's the brain, we're told. The brain is the projector that transforms the wave-pattern substrate into the illusion of physical reality.

But wait. The brain is itself a physical object - which means, according to the theory, that it's a holographic illusion. So do we have one holographic illusion (the brain) projecting the rest of reality as a holographic illusion?

In actual holography, the image may be unreal (in the sense that it is only the appearance of the object portrayed), but the projecting beam of laser light that reconstructs the image is quite real. But in the holographic brain theory, we seem to have unreal brains producing (how?) an equally unreal cosmos.

In either case - whether the purely philosophical argument or the somewhat more scientific argument offered by Pribram and Bohm - there seems to be a fallacy at the heart of the story. Essentially, it's circular reasoning (or begging the question). There doesn't seem to be any place to start, which means there is no solid ground to stand on. Or at least that's how it's always seemed to me.

Any thoughts?

Awesomely cool

There's no other way to describe this BBC report on a regenerative powder that apparently can regrow missing fingertips - and potentially much more.

Watch the video (it's slightly graphic), read the article, and be amazed.

HT: HotAir.

Free stuff!

Greg Taylor of The Daily Grail points us to an interesting development: the complete archives of the Journal of Scientific Exploration are now available online in PDF form.

Things to do on Jersey when you're dead

For two years during the early part of his long exile from France, Victor Hugo engaged in regular séances using a planchette – a forerunner of the Ouija board, which worked by tapping out words one letter at a time. Two small tables were employed, a three-legged table perched atop a four-legged one. The tilting of the tables produced the taps. Hugo and his family and friends, exiled to the Isle of Jersey (and later the Isle of Guernsey) would gather in the evenings and coax messages from the Beyond. Hundreds of messages were received, and the material appears to have had a profound effect on Hugo's thinking and on the writing of Les Miserables, in which he was presently engaged.

This intriguing corner of the great novelist's life is exceptionally well documented in Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World, by John Chambers. Chambers, the first person to translate the séance transcripts into English (in an earlier edition of this book), does a fine job of evoking the atmosphere of the exiles' home away from home, their bitter homesickness and burgeoning fascination with the occult. His book is unusually well written for a study of this kind, laced with keen character sketches and absorbing sidelights on William Blake, James Merrill, and Kabbalah. He presents the facts without undue speculation and lets his readers draw their own conclusions.

The first question to ask is, naturally: Were these phenomena really paranormal? Nearly always, Victor's elder son Charles – who seemed to have the most natural mediumistic ability – would be one of the two persons operating the planchette. Charles' constant participation has led some critics to suggest that he unconsciously fabricated the messages to please his domineering father. But some of the messages were tapped out in languages of which Charles was ignorant – Hungarian and English, for instance. And in some cases (e.g. the January 22, 1854 séance, described on p. 113 of Chambers' book), Charles did not operate the planchette.

Other apparently paranormal events that took place in conjunction with the séances cast additional doubt on the skeptical view. When dogs throughout the area began barking in the night, the planchette told them sternly to shut their mouths – and they did. Strange singing was heard in different parts of the house when Hugo's son was ill. A communicator calling itself the Lady in White arranged for a rendezvous at three AM; no one was bold enough to keep the date, but at three AM the Hugos' doorbell inexplicably rang.

Some of the spirits' statements are intriguing and possibly prescient. Distance, we are told, is illusory, and the entire universe can be found in – and reconstructed from – its smallest part. These ideas remind John Chambers of Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe, which explores the cosmology of David Bohm.

But for the most part, the communications are rather banal. Nothing of evidential value was produced, and the sitters don’t appear to have pressed the spirits for proof of identity. When the spirits did make factual claims about their earthly lives, these claims were often wrong. The great Carthaginian general Hannibal, purportedly speaking through the planchette, described the city of Carthage as a vast expanse of six thousand temples on streets three hundred feet wide. This grandiose portrayal does not tally with any historical or archaeological findings. (On the other hand, when "Shakespeare" insisted that he had not died on April 23, 1616, we might wonder if it was the shade of Edward De Vere that the sitters were hearing from ... But the channeled Shakespearean drama produced by the sitters, though highly interesting and creative, does not bear any resemblance to the earthly Bard's work.)

Then there is the case of the Lion of Androcles. At times the sitters heard from the spirit of this beast, famous in folklore for having spared Androcles in the arena. It is, of course, quite unlikely that this folktale was based on fact, and even more unlikely that the noted lion was communicating with the Jersey exiles from beyond the grave. But what makes the Lion especially relevant is an incident that occurred on April 25, 1854. The Lion-persona, tapping out a lengthy poem, suddenly stopped after writing the lines

They raise against the saints their sacrilegious paw

And bury their blood-stained claws in the liv–.

A pause followed after which the Lion rewrote the last two lines, which apparently dissatisfied him. But in the interim, Victor Hugo wrote his own ending to the stanza, and showed his work only to one person (who, like Hugo, was not operating the planchette). Hugo's lines read:

They ripped open the saints dying in the mire

And their hideous claws enlarged the wound

In the side of Jesus Christ.

We are told that "almost immediately" after Hugo had written these words, the tapping recommenced, and the planchette spelled out

Their paws ripped open the martyrs here and there in the mire

And Jesus Christ slipped their claws into his wounds,

For a gift of nails to the gibbet.

The close similarity of the two verses suggests that the planchette operators – or the planchette itself – picked up the imagery from Hugo's own mind. But since the planchette operators had not seen Hugo's lines, the message must have been communicated via telepathy or via some even more mysteriously influence.

In the final analysis, if we view the sessions as spirit communications, they are unconvincing and unsatisfying. But if we view them as Consciousness interacting with itself – Consciousness creating a kind of feedback loop between the sitters on the one hand and the planchette on the other – then things get more interesting. To read excerpts from the transcripts is like reading an inner dialogue carried out at the unconscious level between Hugo and himself (with occasional contributions from other members of the party). The sessions perhaps can be best understood as the externalization of the unconscious, a breakdown of the seemingly solid barrier between objective and subjective experience. The stream of consciousness running through the deeper channels of Hugo's mind seems to have been objectified, brought out into the open. In a deep sense, Hugo was talking to himself.

No wonder, then, that the tables mostly told him what he wanted to hear. The tables reported that Hugo's archenemy Napoleon III would die in two years – when actually the dictator lived another two decades. The discarnate Shakespeare opined that French was superior to English. Other spirits verified Hugo's theory of a cycle of reincarnation that proceeds through the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, and his idea of the universe as a vast darkness, with only the shining stars retaining God's pure light.

The strengths and weaknesses of the communicators matched Hugo's own talents. The spirits were good at improvising poetry and long, eloquent monologues; so was Hugo. The spirits were useless at composing music, even when Mozart himself ostensibly spoke through the planchette. Hugo had no musical training.

The appearance of so many famous names among the spirits – Aeschylus, Plato, Galileo, Shakespeare, even Jesus – also makes sense in terms of Hugo's psychology. No one ever accused Victor Hugo of being humble. His self-regard bordered on megalomania. Who would seek him out, if not the spirits of world-historical heroes like himself? Nothing less would do.

And what of the more abstract or surreal entities, such as Civilization, Death, and Idea, or Balaam's Ass and the Lion of Androcles? In the highly intellectual atmosphere of Hugo's salon, large abstract concepts and mythological or folkloric imagery must have been part of everyday conversation. It was how these people talked, part of their mental furniture. And Hugo had a particular fascination – part sentimental, part mystical – with the idea that animals are ensouled, and was especially fond of the Lion of Androcles tale.

How about the most consistent, overarching motif to appear in the communications – that the earth is a prison, a penal colony for wayward souls? It matches up quite closely with the gloomy outlook of the dispirited, homesick exiles, persecuted by a dictator, stranded among fellow outcasts on a tiny outcrop of rock. All the more reason to believe that the tilting tables were reflecting the sitters' own ideas and feelings back at them. Perhaps the isolation of their exile, and the intense emotions it stirred up, actually made it easier for the sitters to access the unconscious mind, or universal consciousness itself.

Whatever the explanation, Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World is a superb contribution to literary history and to the study of the paranormal. I recommend it highly.

The sliding scale

Here's something I'm just noodling on. I don't know if it has any validity. Much of what follows isn't very polished - it's just a slightly cleaned up version of some notes I scribbled to myself. As such, it's repetitious and disorganized. But maybe it will strike a chord with someone.

I was thinking about a series of séances in which Victor Hugo participated while he was exiled on the Isle of Jersey. The subject came up because I'm in the middle of reading a very interesting book about these séances, Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World, by John Chambers. Despite the title, the book does not insist that these communications really came from spirits. They may have been mental projections of the sitters, especially of Hugo himself. Little evidential material was obtained, and when tests were applied, the spirits usually failed. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the séances were the result of conscious fraud. They continued over two years, during which time a variety of people handled the planchette (a precursor of the Ouija board), obtaining many messages. No money was involved, and only friends and family participated.

The séances, then, seem to have been on the up-and-up ... but how to account for the bizarre messages that came through, many of them from historical figures liker Hannibal and Shakespeare, or from entities calling themselves "Death" or "Civilization"? Was it all some kind of psychic projection on the part of the sitters? Were real spirits involved sporadically? Mischievous entities? How to make sense of all this?

Musing on this question, I found myself thinking of some excerpts I'd just read from the book Consciousness Is All, by Peter Francis Dziuban. It occurred to me that the problem might be easier to address if I adopted, at least provisionally, the idea that consciousness is the ground of being - that ultimately there is only one consciousness, and that everything that is specific and individual, whether trees and houses and mountains or thoughts and personalities, is ultimately an expression or manifestation of this great consciousness.

Now, in this case, hard-and-fast distinctions perhaps become more difficult to maintain. After all, the ultimate hard-and-fast distinction is that between consciousness and external reality. But if there is no clearcut line of demarcation between consciousness and external reality - if external reality emerges from consciousness - then not only is that fundamental distinction blurred, but many other distinctions may be blurred, as well.

The idea that ultimately there is only one consciousness may get some support from science. According to most interpretations of quantum physics, the observer affects the quantum phenomenon that is observed. But no two observers of the same event ever get different results; their observations always agree. Why is this? Perhaps the simplest explanation is that, in reality, there are not two observers, but only one. One consciousness, one observation, and therefore no possibility of disagreement.

In other words, if there is only one consciousness, then its division into separate minds is an illusion - or at least not the final truth.

Getting back to the séances, perhaps we can say that if there is only one consciousness, then Hugo and the spirits are all one. The spirits can be real or can be projections of Hugo's own mind - it makes no difference, or at most it makes only a superficial difference, of secondary importance.

To put it another way, suppose there is a vast field of consciousness that can produce innumerable varieties of manifestations. We cannot discriminate as finely as we might like among these manifestations. So we mix up real spirits with mental projections, and we mix up objective phenomena with subjective. We are hampered by the belief that hard-and-fast distinctions can be drawn, when the actual nature of reality is more like a sliding scale. We believe in hard-and-fast distinctions because we start with the fundamental hard-and-fast distinction between physical reality and consciousness. All our other discriminations follow this pattern.

If we start by saying "consciousness is all," then we can still draw distinctions, but they are more shaded. Since everything is ultimately one, we expect the lines of discrimination to be blurred. We do not expect hard-and-fast distinctions, but subtle shadings.

Instead of the Aristotelian duality of A or non-A, we have a range of possibilities, a spectrum in which each possible state of being blurs into the next, as colors on the color spectrum blur into one another. It is still possible to discriminate, but the categories cannot be so neat.

So we can say Hugo's spirits are mostly mental projections, while Leonora Piper's "control" George Pelham is mostly real (in the sense of apparently having more of an independent existence), and her later "control" Imperator might be somewhere in between. Imperator is more abstract than Pelham, but more independent than Hugo's spirits. Of course this independence is merely relative. All these entities are ultimately manifestations of the one and only consciousness, as is Hugo himself, and Piper, and all the sitters, and all the rest of us.

Similarly, poltergeists may be mental projections in some cases, spirits in others, and a combination in still others. Ditto for apparitions, which may be telepathically received or seen with the senses, and may be astral shells or memory patterns or actual spirits or mere hallucinations. Ditto again for electronic voice phenomena, which may exist on a continuum ranging from imagination to hallucination to psychic projection to spirit contact.

The key advantage of seeing consciousness as the ground of being is that it frees us from the supposition that absolute, hard-and-fast, black-and-white distinctions are normal and inevitable. It gives us the flexibility to say that different phenomena may overlap, and that there is a sliding scale rather than a sharp division. Dualism invites and requires two-sided, bifurcated thinking. Monism or Idealism allows for subtle shading. A particle can be a  wave. A spirit communication can be, in the same sitting, a genuine message and a case of mental projection.

If "consciousness is all," one would actually expect the sitter or the medium to contribute to the phenomena. After all, there is no clearcut dividing line between the consciousness of the sitter and the consciousness of the medium or of the spirit. There are no clearcut dividing lines, period.

And how about synchronicities? Aren't they simply cases where the dividing line between objective and subjective is more obviously blurred than usual? I think of something, and a moment later it appears in my "external" world. But really it appears in my consciousness, just like the thought itself.

Again, this is not to say no distinctions are possible. We can still distinguish between thoughts and objects, and so forth. But the distinctions are gentle, not severe; relative, not absolute; provisional, not final; there is room for ambiguity.

Perhaps the difficulty we encounter in studying the paranormal lies precisely in our habit of thinking dualistically and thereby missing the fine gradations that take us subtly but inexorably from "objective" to "subjective," from "real" to "unreal." Perhaps the scientific method, which is rooted in Aristotelian logic, is not the best way to approach these phenomena or to establish their legitimacy. Perhaps what is needed is a new way of thinking.

Or perhaps not. I'm not sure!

Huh?

I just watched No Country for Old Men. This thing won Best Picture?

I don't get it. I mean, I really don't get it. The story was disjointed and ultimately pointless, the characters were shallow, and the nihilistic tone and slow pace quickly became tedious. The ending, if you can call it an ending, didn't work on any level. In fact, the entire last half hour didn't work.

Pretentious twaddle, though nicely photographed, I will admit.

The only other 2007 Oscar nominee I've seen, Michael Clayton, is far superior in every respect.

Oh, and while we're at it, how the heck did Javier Bardem win a Best Supporting Actor statuette for his one-note, by-the-book performance as an emotionless sociopath?

Is this where we are now, culturally? Have we gone so far down the path of philosophical materialism that we can respond only to empty characters populating an empty landscape and reciting empty dialogue in a film about emptiness? Has the very idea of meaning become such an anathema to the modern soul that we now celebrate only movies that revel in the utter meaninglessness of it all?

I'm depressed.