Michael Prescott's Blog

A spirited debate

I haven't posted anything about the David Thompson controversy in quite some time, and I really don't want to get drawn into the endless (and largely pointless) debate all over again. But ...

Despite my reservations about reopening  a can of ectoplasmic worms, I do think this editorial by Simon Forsyth on The Psychic Times Web site is worth linking to. In it, Forsyth compares an audio recording of an allegedly materialized Alan Crossley with a video of the actual Crossley, showing clearly that there is no similarity between the two voices. He also proffers an interesting challenge to Victor Zammit and David Thompson, backed up by a promise to pay a thousand pounds to charity if the challenge can be met.

As I say, I am weary of this argument, but this article - especially the thousand-pound challenge - seemed newsworthy enough to justify a link. It will be even more newsworthy if Mr. Thompson and his investigators take up the challenge. I hope they will.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

A map of the world

Here is a very simple model I've been thinking about in an attempt to conceptualize different orders of consciousness. (Click image to enlarge.) The diagram is, of course, very crude, though it looked a little better before TypePad made me convert it to a JPEG file.

The large silver oval represents Cosmic Consciousness, a.k.a. the Ground of Being or the Mind of God. Every other level of consciousness exists within Cosmic Consciousness, and Cosmic Consciousness provides a shared environment in which these lower-level consciousnesses can function and interact.

Within the silver oval of Cosmic Consciousness, we find a blue circle labeled Personal Self. This is the totality of our own personal, individual identity, including (A) the mind limited by the restrictions of the physical brain and nervous system, (B) the unconscious, and (C) any past-life identities that may be accessible. (These could have been depicted as part of the unconscious, but some children, at least, seem to have conscious recall of these past lives. Adults seem to require hypnotic regression or some other alteration of normal consciousness to access the memories.) Only three past-life identities have been indicated, but of course the actual number could be much greater.

The unconscious is drawn as intersecting with the mind/brain because the mind/brain draws on the unconscious for inspiration. The unconscious occupies the boundary between the Personal Self and the surrounding environment of Cosmic Consciousness, in as much as there seems to be some exchange of information between the two. Pyschic impressions, premonitions, Jungian archetypes, etc. seem to bubble up from our unconscious; presumably their source is Cosmic Consciousness itself, or other minds operating in the matrix of Cosmic Consciousness.

At the top of the Personal Self, also at the boundary of Cosmic Consciousness, there is the Higher Self, a.k.a. the "Being of Light" (D). People who undergo peak experiences of a mystical nature, including people who experience full-fledged NDEs, apparently encounter this Higher Self directly. Although they may call it God (and sometime visualize it in terms of a particular deity, like Jesus), the Higher Self they encounter seems to be an expanded version of their own consciousness. It is in touch with Cosmic Consciousness but (at least in my model) distinguishable from it. The Higher Self or Being of Light typically introduces the "life review" in NDEs and functions as a wise, compassionate, attentive witness to the review, often reinforcing the lessons that need to be learned.

Elsewhere inside the silver oval of Cosmic Consciousness, we have other Personal Selves (E). These are the Selves of other people or any other conscious beings. Presumably there are billions of these, but the drawing represents them with only three blue circles. They are, of course, no less important than the Personal Self represented in the center of the diagram, and are drawn much smaller only to simplify the diagram and save space.

If this model were rendered in 3D, perhaps the Personal Self and the past-life identities would be depicted as separate circles all connected  by lines, like those ball-and-stick models of molecules, to suggest that the so-called "past lives" actually exist simultaneously with the so-called present life in a timeless reality. As it is, the drawing represents a snapshot in time.

There's nothing really new here, but sometimes visualizing an idea can make it a little clearer and point up areas where it needs to be rethought.

Relativity

Marcel Cairo has put up a thoughtful piece on the newly discovered Albert Einstein letter in which the great physicist dismisses belief in God as a childish superstition.

I agree with Marcel that Einstein's view should come as no surprise, given his previously known statements on the subject.

I might add that Einstein seems to have doubted the existence of an individual soul also, opting instead for a sense of mystical oneness with all creation, as exemplified in this famous quote:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Two cheers for the ego!

With all my focus on the problems caused by an overemphasis on the ego, sometimes I lose sight of the fact that the ego is a healthy and necessary stage of personal development. In fact, we need an ego if we're going to avoid becoming doormats in life. Perhaps some phenomenally advanced souls can tolerate being walked all over, but for the rest of us, the ability to stand up for ourselves when appropriate is essential. And if the Gospels are to be trusted, even Jesus placed a limit on how much crap he was will willing to take!

With that mind, I went Web surfing for information on assertiveness, and found this page, which includes, among other things, a list of the "ten assertive rights of an individual." Some of these rights are predictable enough, but others struck me as a little surprising. For instance:

Assertive Right  #2: I have the right to offer neither reason nor excuse to justify my behavior.

That's kind of interesting, don't you think? How many times are we called on to justify some opinion or action, not because the questioner genuinely wants more information, but because he or she is trying to intimidate us into backing down? 

The truth is that many of the things we say and do are hard to "justify" in strictly logical terms. I would rather watch a Ray Harryhausen movie than an Ingmar Bergman flick, but I can't say I could justify this preference through ratiocination. Any justification I came up with would probably be more of an excuse - a pretext  or a rationalization - than a valid reason. But why do I need a reason? What right does anyone have to demand a reason?

This ties in with another item on the list:

Assertive Right  #8: I have the right to be illogical in making decisions.

Refreshing, no? The Web page goes on to explain:

I sometimes employ logic as a reasoning process to assist me in making judgments. However, logic cannot predict what will happen in every situation. Logic is not much help in dealing with wants, motivations, and feelings. Logic generally deals with ''black or white,'' ''all or none,'' and ''yes or no'' issues. Logic and reasoning don't always work well when dealing with the gray areas of the human condition.

Hard to argue with that, though no doubt some bullying rationalistic types would try.

How about this next one? In an age when we are bombarded with demands for our attention and alerted to one "crisis" after another, here's an invigorating thought:

Assertive Right  #10: I have the right to say, ``I don't care.''

Do ya hear that, Save the Children/Whales/Planet? I don't care. I got my own stuff to deal with. Go away and leave me the frack alone. And that goes double for you, Sally Struthers.

There's a lot to be said for being able to stand up for yourself. At the same time, an out-of-control ego can be just as problematic as an underdeveloped one. Marcel Cairo sent me a link to an NPR story on Ayn Rand, which included this comment from a Rand supporter:

[Rand] gives egoists a positive case for why the world should revolve around them and around their efforts. If you are the person who is creating value, if you are the star, the sun really does revolve around you. And not only should it be that way, but that's the moral order of the universe.

Yikes! A philosophy that gives megalomaniacs even more reasons to admire themselves and expect the adulation of others! Just what the world doesn't need. (And what kind of metaphor has the sun revolving around a star, anyway?)

There's a proper balance to be struck here. Probably Aristotle had it right when he talked about the Golden Mean - the middle way between abject submissiveness and overweening arrogance. It's a fine line, sometimes as difficult to walk as a tightrope.

But, hey, no one ever said life was easy. Right?

Update: It turns out that the "Rand supporter" quoted above, Nick Gillespie, is not a Rand fan, after all. This was pointed out to me by Mark in the comments thread. I'm not sure how to interpret Gillespie's remarks - whether he was being sarcastically critical, or whether he does endorse this particular aspect of Rand's thought. Anyway, Rand's philosophy does inculcate this attitude in many of her followers, so I think the basic point is still valid.

Podcast fever - catch it!

Chris Carter, author of the excellent Parapsychology and the Skeptics, was interviewed by Skeptico recently. Here's a link to the podcast and transcript.

Personally, I think Carter pretty much destroyed the interviewer in the last series of exchanges, which concern the open-mindedness (or lack thereof) of media skeptics.

Not that I'm biased or anything.

Thanks for the memory

Jill Price, a woman who remembers every detail of her life from age 14 to the present, has been getting a lot of media attention lately. Now the story has shown up on the political blog Ace of Spades.

What interests me about the Ace of Spades entry is the ridiculous knee-jerk skepticism exhibited by some of the commenters (and, to a lesser extent, Ace himself).

Remember that this woman has been extensively tested, and that she is not the only person who apparently has this condition. So there is every reason to believe that her memory is genuine.

Nevertheless, some self-styled experts immediately cry BS on the story. Ace himself opines,

I have a question about how they've determined her to be "bona fide," though. They determine this, they say, by checking her recall versus the diaries she's kept since a teenager; but that doesn't prove she remembers her life. That proves she's memorized her own diaries ....

Another big offer of proof from her as well as another man who's stepped forward to reveal his gift is the fact that she can remember what day of the week any particular date fell upon. The trouble is ... there's a mathematical formula to determine that ....

So I don't know. It's not so much that I doubt this is possible as I'm just unimpressed by the proof that these people can remember what they say they remember.

Get that? He's unimpressed. But wouldn't the scientists who've studied this and similar cases have already thought of these objections and countered them? Obviously, yes, as could be established merely by reading the USA Today article Ace links to. The article reports:

She was studied by memory experts at University of California-Irvine for six years before they reported the [results] in an esoteric professional journal in 2006....

[Neuroscientist James] McGaugh, with colleagues Elizabeth Parker and Larry Cahill, gave Price a battery of memory and cognitive tests. She'd kept a diary from ages 10 to 34, so the researchers could verify Price's recollections with pages randomly selected from 1,460 diary days, he says.

But that wasn't all. You could give her a date, "and within seconds she'd tell you what day of the week it was, not only what she did but other key events of the day," McGaugh says. Aug. 16, 1977? A Tuesday, Elvis died. May 18, 1980? A Sunday, when Mount St. Helens erupted. She also quickly could come up with the day and date of noted events: the start of the Gulf War, Rodney King's beating, Princess Diana's death (Aug. 30 or 31, 1997, depending on France or U.S. time, she told McGaugh).

In other words, it wasn't all diaries and days of the week. It was memories that could be checked from other sources. A couple of Ace's more informed readers point this out. One writes:

Actually, this woman was featured in a National Geographic cover article about memory a few months back. There are other people with similar conditions, and each time it's been the real deal. Memorizing diaries, for example, wouldn't be enough because she remembers details that wouldn't normally be written down.

To which some idiot responds:

If there is no record of the details, who's to say that they are, in fact, correct?  She could be making up details that fit with the notes in the diaries.

Again, the point is that she remembers details that can be checked from other sources. But the skeptical idiot - let's call him a skeptidiot - has not even bothered to read the USA Today article and, left to his own devices, cannot imagine a team of scientists taking even the most elementary precautions.

In contrast to this idiocy, a clear-headed commenter writes:

Some of the other tests were not based on her diaries.  I believe one of the checks was asking her about concrete events such as when she watched the Very Brady Christmas special.  Since she had watched it 20 years ago she was able to correctly describe when it aired, even to the point of having to correct the doctors since their source material had the dates reversed with another Christmas special (which she had also watched).

That type of recall and the fact her brain is highly overstimulated in a few key areas confirmed her diagnosis. 

Which of course is exactly the kind of common-sense test that any reasonably intelligent person would apply to this case. But since the skeptidiots cannot even think of such tests themselves, they blithely assume that no one else could think of them, either.

Most of the skeptical comments do not even attempt to engage the evidence.

Check if she's ever read Star Wars novels by Michael Stackpole or Timothy Zahn.  Perfect memory is an ability at least two of the characters they use extensively have.

So if she's ever read about a fictional case of this condition, then she must be faking! Does this mean that if I read a book about someone with cancer - Cancer Ward, say - then I can never actually get cancer? Or if I were to read one of these Star Wars books, would I then be able to simulate memories of every event in my lifetime for the past 33 years?  

Someone else snarkily asks:

But does she ever do jack shit worth remembering?

Well, she probably didn't live the kind of deeply fulfilling life exemplified by posting snark on comment threads. But that'll always be the dream.

Quoth another pompous pontificator:

This kind of claim is sooo easy to check - if one is skilled at logic and observation. Pity journalists apparently don't seem to possess those skills in abundance.

Only skeptidiots have those qualities, it seems! They can "check" a claim just by snarking about it.

Then there's the inevitable scientific fundamentalist, for whom life holds no mysteries. He already knows all the answers because he learned them in junior high:

Well I call bulls**t.  Brains just don't work that way.  If they did you'd run out of "space" pretty fast.

Unless, of course, humans actually remember by storing bits using quantum superposition.  And supertiny flying monkeys with pens and notepads.

Ha ha! ROTFLMAO. "Flying monkeys!" Priceless! After all, everybody knows that applying quantum physics to neuroscience is just as silly as theorizing about miniature flying monkeys! We already know that "brains just don't work that way." We know everything. Ain't omniscience grand?

These people really are hopeless. Carefully researched, extensively documented, multiply verified anomalous facts stare them in the face, and rather than revising their worldview, they close their eyes and sing, "La la ... LAAA!" at the the top of their lungs. And if that fails, they crack dumb jokes about them danged wimmin and their nutty, estrogen-stoked behavior (which is what the rest of the thread consists of).

The Internet is often compared to a worldwide nervous system, a planetary brain. Maybe so.

But has anyone tried measuring its IQ?

Dream ticket

Now that Barack Obama has apparently secured the Democratic Party's nomination for president, there has been some speculation about an Obama/Hillary Clinton ticket. Maybe this will happen, maybe it won't. But there has also been speculation - some of it serious, most of it not - about another possible dream ticket that I find much more interesting:

McCain/Clinton.

Is this possible? In the practical world of politics, where the pols and their advisers rarely think outside the box, almost certainly not. But in theory there is no good reason why it couldn't happen. McCain and Hillary agree more than they disagree. Their only major point of contention is how to handle the waning months of the Iraq War - a rapid drawdown of US forces, or perseverance in the Surge for a little longer. That's a major issue, to be sure, but on most other things they are not that far apart. McCain is a relatively liberal Republican; Hillary has remade herself as a centrist Democrat. Their ideological differences are not any greater than those that divided Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980, when they ran together and won overwhelmingly. Hillary has garnered a great deal of respect among conservatives for her gritty, never-say-die style of campaigning. McCain is admired by many liberals for his willingness to confront the GOP establishment. Both senators are experienced, tested, and tough. 

And a McCain/Hillary ticket would be a powerhouse. I believe it would sweep the nation, amass a gigantic tally of Electoral College votes, and help unify the country in a post-partisan administration that would determinedly seek the political center, eschewing the divisive radicalism of the far left and the far right.

Again, it will probably never come to pass. Politicians are not this creative or this bold. They have their party fiefdoms, which they jealously guard.

It would be cool, though. Really cool. It might even get people believing in politics again.

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.