Michael Prescott's Blog

Help!

Dear Abby,

Lately I have been obsessed with quantum physics. I've been reading books and Web articles on the subject, trying to understand paradoxes like the two-slit experiment and the delayed choice experiment, in the hope that I can find some theory of the universe that will tie it all together. But it's not working! Nothing makes sense.

The key question is how the quantum wave function collapses - how a quantum object like a photon can make the transition from a wave to a particle. As a wave, it exists as a set of possibilities. As a particle, it exists as a distinct entity. When it makes the transition from wave to article, it becomes "real." If everything existed only as quantum waves, there would be no reality, only infinite possibilities. Reality enters the picture only when the wave collapses. But how does it collapse? How does reality become real?

Most physicists seem to think that the observer is the key ingredient in the puzzle. When no one is watching the photon, it is a wave function. When someone does watch, it is a particle. The observer somehow brings reality into existence. The simple act of observation converts possibility into actuality. But by what means?

At first I thought some form of interactionist dualism would work. Mind works directly on matter - say, by affecting the flow of electrochemical impulses in the brain. This idea is popular in some circles right now. But while this might explain the collapse of the wave function with regard to thoughts - with various possible thoughts collapsing into one actual thought - it doesn't explain the collapse of the wave function with regard to outside events. It doesn't get us very far.

Unless we assume that there are no outside events. Maybe everything that happens is purely mental. Make the universe subjective; say it's all an idea in the mind of God or a consensus in the collective consciousness of humanity. That's called monistic idealism, and it's popular, too.

But (sigh) there are problems. If the transcendent mind (God or Cosmic Consciousness or what have you) collapses the wave function, then the wave function should collapse instantly at every moment, because there's never a moment when God isn't looking. So we have to say that only the mind mediated by the physical brain can cause the collapse. But the brain is a material object. If no material objects can exist until the brain actualizes them, and if the brain itself is a material object, then how did the whole process get started? It's possible to talk about "tangled hierarchies," but this doesn't seem very clear.

Also there's the problem of cosmogenesis. If a physical brain is necessary to create the material world, and if for the first 15 billion years of the history of the universe there were no creatures with brains, then how did all of that history happen? We have to say that the universe didn't actually exist until the possibility of a brain became immanent, and then the whole 15 billion year past just snapped into existence. This stretches credibility, don't you think?

And what about near death experiences? Some people may not take them seriously, but I do. If someone can still perceive physical reality while having an NDE, then reality can be perceived without the mediation of the brain. But in this case the brain isn't necessary to collapse the wave function, right?

So then I heard about decoherence theory, which says that the observer isn't really necessary to collapse the wave function, after all. The photon simply becomes "entangled" with its environment, and as a result of this entanglement, the wave function collapses automatically. No one has to be watching. This interested me because it seemed to be a way out of my difficulties. I was so excited that I got up in the middle if the night and started Googling "quantum decoherence." I was reading about this stuff on my computer at 4:30 in the morning!

But the more I read, the more depressed I became. Because it turns out that quantum decoherence theory doesn't really explain how the wave function collapses. It can't explain how a set of possibilities (the wave function) becomes an actuality (the particle). It doesn't explain reality at all!

It sure seems as if the mind of an observer is necessary to create reality as we know it. But how? Is reality subjective, or is it independent of the mind but influenced by it? Or is there some other explanation? I'm at the end of my string, Abby. Please help!

Desperately,

Freaked Out By Physics

*  *  *

Dear Freaked,

The effort you've made to understand ultimate reality is honorable, but it is doomed to fail. Essentially you are trying to reduce reality to an explanation that can be grasped and communicated in words. This means reducing it to terms that the left hemisphere of your brain can handle. But reality is too big and complex and mysterious to be reducible to the dimensions of the limited mind-brain.

Even quantum physicists don't understand reality - they only know how to do the math and carry out the experiments. They leave the philosophizing to others, or they come up with the philosophical approaches you mentioned, all of which are deficient in some respect.

The only people who can make some claim to understand reality are very advanced mystics who have transcended the mind-brain and grasped the nature of existence directly. But even they can't reduce their discoveries to words in any satisfactory way.

What, then, is the solution? Forget theory, and experience reality directly. Shut off the stream of words in your mind and just be.

And practice patience. All will be clear eventually, but it may take many lifetimes and many stages of personal evolution. Everything is on schedule and cannot be rushed.

Now get some sleep.

Love,

Abby

Ego trap

Yesterday, Bill O'Reilly interviewed Richard Dawkins on The O'Reilly Factor. The interview frustrated me because O'Reilly had obviously done no preparation for the exchange, merely bringing up weak arguments that Dawkins could easily knock down. Furthermore, Dawkins was, I felt, somewhat dishonest in some of his answers. He casually included the origin of life among things that science understands, when in fact the origin of life remains a mystery. He also presented himself as a genial, tolerant moderate, giving no hint of his more extreme pronouncements -- for instance, that raising a child in a religious faith is a worse crime than sexually abusing that child. ("Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests," Dawkins has said, "deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.")

Frankly, I thought that even I could have done better against Dawkins than O'Reilly did, and as a result I found myself feeling irritated and contentious. In my head I marshaled the points I would have raised -- the cosmic "fine-tuning" that made a habitable universe possible; the general cultural decline that seems to be accompanying the rise of Dawkins's brand of militant secularism; the large number of scientific figures from Newton to Darwin who were raised in religious households without, apparently, forfeiting the ability to think critically -- such forfeiture being an inevitable consequence of a religious upbringing in Dawkins's view.

I was still rehearsing this multi-pronged plan of attack long after the interview (and the show) had ended. And then I realized I was being a dope.

None of my arguments would convince or even perplex Dawkins, who has heard them all and, no doubt, has ready answers available. I would not be satisfied with his answers, so I would not be convinced either. We would simply be talking past each other. I would be trying to score points, and so would he, and neither of us would accomplish anything substantive. Those audience members predisposed to agree with Dawkins would say he "won," while those predisposed to agree with me would say I "won." Everyone's prejudices would be reinforced, and nothing would be learned or gained.

When you look at it that way, the whole thing is just a game -- a silly, childish game of one-upmanship. To participate in this game is to waste one's time. I felt embarrassed to have been caught up in it, even in a fantasy. And I felt a little sad for Richard Dawkins, who has devoted so many years to the relentless pursuit of points scored in this ongoing, never-ending debate. I felt sad for him, not because I think his position is incorrect (although I do), but because single-minded proselytizing for any position is ultimately no more than an ego trip -- or maybe I should say, an ego trap.

I'm starting to think that one of the worst features of human nature is our tendency to want to be "right." In extreme form, this leads to the Right Man syndrome, which in Dawkins's case included his decision to sign a petition to make it illegal to teach religion to children. After much criticism, he withdrew his support for the petition, claiming he hadn't read it carefully enough. Even with the retraction, his true opinions on this issue remain somewhat elusive, and it is hard to escape the feeling that Dawkins really would like to make religion a thought-crime. The Right Man often feels the need to impose draconian measures on those who dissent from his worldview.   

Outlawing religion is an extreme position, but even in its more benign form, the Right Man syndrome encages the mind in a prison of dogma, rendering creative thought difficult, if not impossible. It feeds the ego and starves the soul. It makes us petty, vindictive, stubborn, narrowminded, and often dishonest (because we prefer to shade the truth rather than admit to any defect in our position). It encourages demagoguery, moral blindness, and abuse of power. It breeds stress, conflict, anger, self-righteousness, and endless, pointless feuds. The Hatfields and the McCoys were pikers compared to the militant atheists and the equally militant religionists, who have been quarreling for centuries with no end in sight.

Maybe we all need to be a little less sure of ourselves and less desperate to be right all the time. You know the saying, "Less attitude, more gratitude"? I'd like to propose a new one along similar lines: "Don't debate -- appreciate."

Super-psi me!

One of the most important mediums in history was Mrs. Leonora Piper of Boston, who was studied for twenty years by William James, Richard Hodgson, and other luminaries in the field of psychic research. Her mediumship raised important questions about her "controls," the guiding spirits who served as intermediaries between the living and the deceased - gatekeepers to the Beyond.

Mrs. Piper's most famous control was a Frenchman named Dr. Phinuit. The good doctor presented himself as a departed spirit eager to assist in Mrs. Piper's work. But troubles quickly arose. Phinuit was able to give little evidence of his authenticity. Although supposedly French, he could speak only in a few words of that language. Although he claimed to be a physician, he didn't know much about medicine. When pressed on his personal history, he was notoriously vague and inaccurate about the details. Laborious research failed to turn up any evidence of a French physician by that name living in the appropriate place and time.

Most researchers concluded that the Phinuit was a product of Mrs. Piper's unconscious mind, a co-personality split off from the mainstream of her personality in order to facilitate her mediumistic work. Not a few researchers went further, saying that if Phinuit was only a co-personality, an aspect of the medium's hidden mind, then so were the spirits who allegedly communicated through her. The idea was that, just as the mind is able to create a personality that calls itself Phinuit and has a distinctive voice and personal background, so the mind can create or re-create the personality of a departed loved one. Therefore, according to this theory, Mrs. Piper was not communicating with the deceased at all; she was manufacturing simulacra of the deceased in her own unconscious mind.

Naturally, for this to work, the unconscious mind must have very robust psychic powers. It must be able to look into the mind of the sitter and pull out whatever memories are necessary to reconstruct the sitter's departed loved one. In some cases, it has to do more. The unconscious mind must range beyond the séance room to find information held in the minds of other people perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles away, or information preserved in documents unknown to any living person. Perhaps the unconscious mind must even be able to link up with some source of infinite knowledge -- Cosmic Consciousness, the Collective Unconscious, the Akashic Records, or whatever we might call it. In other words, the medium's unconscious mind must be equipped with super-ESP, a.ka. super-psi.

So here we have the million-dollar question. If, as seems likely, Phinuit was a creation of Mrs. Piper's own mind, can we conclude that the spirits Phinuit helped bring through were equally illusory?

I don't think so. There's a very basic point here that is sometimes not sufficiently acknowledged. If Phinuit were manufactured in exactly the same way as all the other spirits that Mrs. Piper brought through, then we should expect no particular differences between Phinuit and the other spirits. But in fact, we see tremendous differences. The other spirits, in contrast to Phinuit, were able to give convincing accounts of themselves, including details of their earthly lives that could be checked and verified. The fact that Phinuit was unable to do this indicates, to me, that he was a fundamentally different type of entity from the departed loved ones who came through at the séances.

Moreover, the super-psi hypothesis suffers from an obvious defect. If Mrs. Piper's unconscious mind was in touch with a source of infinite knowledge, as required by super-psi, then why did she not use this source of infinite knowledge to flesh out her portrait of Phinuit? Why did she not make Phinuit speak fluent French? Surely the knowledge of how to speak French is part of any infinite store of wisdom that the unconscious mind can allegedly tap into. Why did she not provide Phinuit with a working knowledge of medical science? Why did she not simply take some real person right out of the historical record to serve as the template for her control - someone whose identity could be verified? If her unconscious mind was in touch with unlimited information, then it should have been easy for her to find an appropriate real-life person from some past era and re-create that person.

But this is not, apparently, what was done. Instead her subconscious mind created a fictional persona that could not speak French, did not know much about medicine, and could not provide verifiable details about his earthly existence. The very deficiencies of Phinuit that led researchers to believe he was only a co-personality, split off from the main branch of Mrs. Piper's mind, should also have led them to conclude that Mrs. Piper had no capacity for super-psi. After all, if she did have such a capacity, why fail to use it in the creation of her control spirit, the most important of all the spiritual entities she brought through?

A similar argument, of course, can be made with regard to Mrs. Piper's other spirit controls, such as Rector and Imperator - but not her control George Pellew, who convinced many researchers that he was a genuine departed spirit.

The argument can also be extended to the famous case of Patience Worth, a personality that spoke through an ordinary housewife named Pearl Curran. While in touch with the Patience Worth personality, Pearl Curran was able to produce an impressive quantity of literature, including lengthy novels that were critically praised in her day. Yet when efforts were made to track down the real-life Patience Worth, no conclusive evidence that she had existed could be found. And Patience, like Phinuit, was not very convincing when speaking of her personal background.

For these reasons, many investigators have speculated that Patience Worth was a co-personality generated by Pearl Curran's subconscious and that the resulting literary output was made possible by super-psi - in this case, the ability of the unconscious mind to tap into a database of literary and historical information and use it creatively.

But as with Phinuit, we encounter an obvious problem: if Pearl Curran's super-psi was prodigious enough to generate book-length works of fiction containing accurate historical facts and obscure vocabulary from past eras, why did it fail her in the creation of Patience Worth herself? Surely a faculty capable of reconstructing the life of Jesus in minute detail, something Patience Worth accomplishes in her book The Sorry Tale, would be capable of reconstructing Patience's own life.

As I look at it, there are two hypotheses that are more plausible than the super-psi hypothesis in regard to Patience Worth. The first is that Patience was a real spirit, a departed human being, who left no traceable record of her earthly life, or who used a symbolic name for some unknown reason. The second hypothesis is that Patience was a co-personality generated by Pearl Curran's unconscious mind, and that once this co-personality existed, it served as a doorway through which one or more actual spirits could communicate pseudonymously.

The bottom line is that the inability of both Dr. Phinuit and Patience Worth to produce evidence proving their own identities is not a point in favor of the super-psi hypothesis. Rather, it is a point against the super-psi hypothesis. If super-psi were a real phenomenon, and if it had been used to produce Phinuit and Patience, then those two personalities should have been far better able to speak up for themselves than they were.

Update, April 23: I've been informed that I was too hard on Phinuit, who was able to speak French in some sittings, though not in others, and who did display medical knowledge consistent with the training of a physician at the time. (See the comments thread.) Even so, I think most of the investigators at the time concluded that Phinuit was a co-personality of Mrs. Piper, rather than an independent entity. Whether or not this conclusion was justified or merely reflects their own bias is an open question. I'll try to read up on Phinuit and return to this subject when I know more.

Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering, the name Phinuit was pronounced Fin-wee or, sometimes, Fin-nee.

This morning hour

Mika Waltari was an internationally popular author in his day, but has been undeservedly forgotten since then. Best known for his historical novels, he often explored the theme of man's search for spiritual meaning.

In The Dark Angel (1953), he tells the story of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 through the diary of his hero, John Angelos. One scene in this book struck me as particularly memorable. It occurs after a hard night spent repelling the Turkish host besieging the city walls.

This morning hour was engraved unforgettably in my heart. Heaven and earth and all their colors, the soot and the blood -- all was unutterably beautiful in my sight just then, while the blank eyes of the dead around me stared into vacancy.

Equally unreal, equally incredible and of just such unearthly beauty had the world about me appeared once before. It was in Ferrara when I was sickening for the plague, though still unaware of it. The light of the cloudy November day pressed in through the painted windows of the chapel, censers exhaled their bitter scent of purifying herbs and the quill pens rasped as always; yet as I sat there everything slid far away and only a rushing sound filled my ears. I saw everything more clearly, more truly than before. I saw Emperor John's grudging face in shifting hues of sulphur-yellow and green as he sat with a black and white dog at his feet, on a throne which had been made exactly the same height as the throne of Pope Eugenius. I saw the Bessarion's big, beaming face alter and become insensitive and cold. And the Latin and Greek words ringing through the greenish light of the chapel receded and sounded as meaningless as the baying of distant hounds.

In that hour I experienced God for the first time -- as I was sickening for the plague.

In a lightning flash of truth I now sensed that that moment had contained this moment within itself, as bark contains the wood. Had I been more percipient I might even then have experienced and seen what I saw today. Both occurred within me and within eternity at one and the same instant. Thus are moments of clear vision contained in one another, and the sequence of time between them is but illusion. Weeks, months, years, are measures invented by man; they have nothing to do with true time, God's time.

In this hour I knew also that I should be born into the world again in accordance with God's inscrutable purpose. And when this happens I shall bear this hour in my heart still, contained in the visions of my new life. Again I shall behold the headless corpses on the ruined walls that tremble in the firing of the great gun. The little yellow flowers will gleam out amid soot and blood, and the Guacchardi brothers in bloody armor will play merrily at ball with the heads of the enemy.

But this experience awoke neither ecstasy nor even joy within me, only unspeakable woe that I am and shall be only a man -- a spark blown by the winds of God from one darkness into another. More keenly than my bodily pain and weariness I was aware of my heart's longing for the ineffable repose of oblivion. But there is no oblivion.

The unskeptical skeptic

Skeptics pride themselves on their hardheaded, hard-nosed realism. Unlike gullible "believers," the strong-minded skeptics will accept no claims without rigorous analysis and will advance no theories or prognostications unless they are sure of their facts. They are cautious, methodical, serious, sober, and implacably committed to the rules of rational discourse and logical thought.

Or at least, so they like to think, and so they would have us believe.

But take the case of Susan Blackmore, the most prominent media skeptic in England, who has embraced the global warming crusade with an apocalyptic fervor that would make the Club of Rome proud.

"The archbishop was right about climate change on the Today programme this morning," she wrote in an opinion piece posted on The Guardian's Web site on  March 28, 2006.

In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet simply cannot take much more. As Jim Lovelock points out in his "Revenge of Gaia," she has a fever, and we are the bug that's causing it. The carrying capacity of the earth is possibly a billion or two; it's certainly far lower than the current plague of humans.

I know this. The science has been building up for years and is now clear. When sea levels rise further millions will drown, when the deserts grow bigger millions will starve, when the glaciers end their present flood of excess melt water vast cities will become uninhabitable almost overnight. Then what?

Britain looks set to be one of the few places on earth that might remain habitable for some time. If the Gulf stream switches off our climate will cool, offsetting the general warming. We may still have drinking water, be able to grow crops, and lose only a few of our finest cities to the floods. As an island nation we might be able to protect and rehouse our own flood refugees. But what about everyone else? The world will be awash with eco-refugees, desperate to get to anywhere with land and fresh water. What do we do?

Well, there's some sober analysis for you.

Whatever anybody thinks about global warming, a theory that is largely based on the dubious premise that computer models can accurately predict long-range climate changes, one thing is certain: the evidence for catastrophic global warming in the near future is far, far less compelling than the evidence for telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and even life after death -- all subjects that Blackmore has made a career of disparaging.

Observe that she does not say she worries that such a scenario might come about, or that there is some evidence supporting this scenario and other evidence suggesting otherwise. No, she writes bluntly, "I know this. The science has been building up for years and is now clear." And what does "the science" so irrefutably tell us? "Sea levels [will] rise ... millions will drown ... the deserts [will] grow bigger ... millions will starve ... the glaciers [will] end ... vast cities will become uninhabitable almost overnight."

That's quite a series of predictions to base on "the science." Personally, I doubt there are more than a handful of respected climatologists who would publicly, and in writing, endorse the particulars of Blackmore's end-of-the-world scenario.

But Blackmore has no time to back up her allegations with such trivialities as evidence and facts. She's in a hurry to get to the real point of her column -- laying out the ethical alternatives that we face in the ultimate lifeboat scenario.

If we save our own nation by protecting our borders and doing our utmost to feed and protect our own citizens then we will have to watch the suffering of the billions dying elsewhere....

If we take the unselfish route and try to save everyone the outcome is likely to be horrific conflict in the fight over resources, and continuing devastation of the planet until most, or all, of humanity is dead.

If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilisation and of everything we have achieved.

Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population - weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example - a prospect that does not look at all easy from here.

At this point we appear to be in the realm of science fiction -- specifically florid, overwrought 1950s science-fiction along the lines of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in which the handful of really valuable and worthwhile people survive a global catastrophe and come down from their mountaintop at the end to rebuild the world, or maybe the George Pal movie When Worlds Collide, in which humanity's best and brightest are selected to man a rocket ship that will serve as their escape vehicle from a doomed Earth.

Incidentally, I would guess that in Blackmore's scenario, parapsychology-denying archskeptics who've logged a lot of BBC airtime would rate pretty highly among the chosen elites whose lives would be spared for the good of all mankind. Nothing new about that -- the fantasy of the end of the world, in which only oneself and one's best friends survive, is a common enough narcissistic preoccupation.

But to return to the main point: Blackmore's cool, clear-eyed, objective analysis. Which in this case consists of predicting (Plan A) "the suffering of the billions dying elsewhere," or (Plan B) "the continuing devastation of the planet until most, or all, of humanity is dead," or (Plan C) "the destruction of civilisation and of everything we have achieved," or (Plan D, our best-case scenario) '"a drastically reduced population" made possible by ruthlessly weeding out everyone less vital to our common welfare than the above-mentioned, all-important BBC commentators. 

"Indeed," Blackmore concludes soberly, "none of these choices looks easy,

but if we fail to make any decisions then I believe the most likely outcome is that we in the rich west will go on trying to salve our consciences by giving aid to the poorer parts of the world until we realise, far too late, that Gaia is going to chuck us all off whatever we do, and nothing can be saved at all.

So there you have it. Science, in the person of great Britain's premier media skeptic, has spoken. Either surrender to the remorseless logic of Blackmore's argument and choose one of the endgame scenarios she's so thoughtfully laid out for you, or prepare yourself for Gaia's unceremonious eviction of the human race.

Such doomsday alarmism is common in every era, whether the purported threat is overpopulation, energy depletion, nuclear war, an impending ice age, global warming, or the Second Coming. There's nothing new about it, or even particularly interesting. What is a little interesting is to see how really serious and thoughtful and cautious and rigorous and methodical and logical and rational and analytical this famed superskeptic turns out to be.

Answer: not very.

And that leads us to a question worth pondering. Could it be that the skeptics' incessant declarations of intellectual seriousness are only so much bluster and self-serving bombast, and that they are actually quite shallow people with little or no understanding of the scientific method or even of logical thought? Could it be that they are mere poseurs, arrogant, ignorant wannabes whose top priority is wangling an invitation to A-list parties or securing a quote in the local newspaper, and who formulate their opinions on the basis of whatever media speculation or ballyhooed junk science happens to be prevalent at the moment? Could the skeptical fraternity (and its few sorority sisters) be, in fact, every bit as prone to bias, to shoddy thinking and indefensible leaps of logic, as any of the deluded "believers" they despise?

Is it possible that the skeptical Emperor wears no clothes?

Say it ain't so, Sue!

Stem cell cure?

I've been skeptical of embryonic stem cell therapies (as opposed to treatments involving adult or umbilical cord stem cells), but now there's a report from Australia claiming that a paraplegic woman has regained the ability to walk after several injections of embryonic stem cells.

If the therapy pans out, it will open up a new door of opportunity for victims of paralysis and greatly change the politics of the embryonic stem cell debate.

I say "if" it pans out, because the doctor supervising this work has been unusually secretive about her methods and is apparently proceeding with treatment of humans even though there have not been the customary trials.

Also, the main drawback to embryonic stem cell treatment is the frequent growth of teratomas (tumors), and it is probably too soon to say if such tumors will develop in this case.

Finally, there has been a great deal of unwarranted hype in this area, as described by Pamela Winnick in her excellent book A Jealous God, so a certain degree of skepticism is still warranted.

Let's hope the treatment does work.  Despite my earlier doubts, this is one instance where I'd be only too glad to be proved wrong.

Immaterial world

Okay, so I'm thinking about reality. What it is. What we can say about it. (In the following, I'm heavily influenced by Arthur Ellison's book Science and the Paranormal, as discussed in an earlier post.)

Reality is normally predictable, yet paranormal phenomena are possible. So there are "rules," but they can be bent or broken. This suggests two possibilities - that there is an objective external world that can be directly influenced by the mind, or that the world is subjective but relatively stable because of a consensus among observers or because of habitual thought forms.

Consider this second model. Consciousness is all that exists. In its pure undifferentiated state it can be called Collective Consciousness, Cosmic Consciousness, or Higher Consciousness (among many other things).

This Cosmic Consciousness buds into individual selves. These selves are not entirely separate from the larger field of consciousness (they can't be, because ultimately Cosmic Consciousness includes everything that is), but they have no direct knowledge of this connection; they believe they are separate.

These selves "perceive reality" (i.e. have mental experiences) in ways that largely overlap because the selves tend to manifest reality in the same habitual, conditioned manner, and because the ultimate source of these events, the ground of being, is Collective or Cosmic Consciousness. Where mental experiences overlap we have a shared reality, a consensus reality. It is not an illusion; it is real, because consciousness is real and these events arise out of consciousness.

A few selves are creative enough to construct a new reality and thus perform "paranormal" feats. They can, perhaps, perform levitations or healings that are inexplicable according to the conventionally agreed-upon "rules." Phenomena (mental experiences) of this kind seem bizarre because they don't fit most selves' established guidelines of how things are supposed to behave. But they open up new horizons, new possibilities, and allow other creative selves to test the boundaries of the "rules."

Although this model of reality is far from entirely clear, it would seem to offer resolutions to make vexing problems of philosophy and science.

For one thing, the mind-body problem ceases to be an issue. Everything is Mind.

The problem of universals, also known as the problem of properties, can be resolved by saying that any given property - say, whiteness - exists only as an idea ... and so does everything else. It is therefore no more or less real than any other existent.

How about the mathematical elegance of the cosmos? If the universe is a reflection of Mind, then we would expect it to "look more like a great thought than a great machine," as James Jeans put it.

The anthropic principle and cosmic coincidences? The universe either is brought into being by observers or is trending toward self-awareness via living beings. Either way, it must be "fine-tuned" to produce and sustain life.

The irreducible complexity of some biological systems, as argued by Michael Behe? These biological systems, like everything else that exists, are brought into existence by Mind. Just as some thoughts are irreducible to simpler components, so are some of these "physical" processes (which are only mental events).

The fact-value dichotomy? Values are properties of Mind ... and so are facts. Everything is a property of Mind.

A holographic universe? The originator of this theory, David Bohm, has said that the substrate of reality, the equivalent of the holographic plate, is (or can be seen as) consciousness. In this view, consciousness acts as both the ground of being (the holographic plate) and the means by which being manifests (the beam of focused light passing through the plate).

The famous double slit experiment in physics? Electrons, photons, etc. are all properties of Mind and therefore behave intelligently.

The delayed choice experiment? Same answer.

Nonlocality? If everything is part of Mind, there can be no separation, and distance is an illusion. What is the distance between two thoughts?

Schrodinger's cat? The cat does not exist apart from consciousness. If we were to assume there is no consciousness observing the cat in the box then the cat does not even exist in the box. It is not alive and dead. It is not anything. So there is no paradox. On the other hand, if we assume the cat is conscious, or that it is observed by a cosmic Mind, then the decay of the isotope (and its consequences) is also being observed. So there still is no paradox. 

I realize that this philosophical approach - monistic idealism, I believe it's called - has drawbacks and ambiguities. Still, it does seem at first glance like the most elegant solution to a wide range of problems.

The tomb

Looks like the "Jesus tomb" people are now engaged in a modified dignified climbdown.

No surprise. This was one of the silliest, most overhyped nonstories to come alone in quite a while.

A world of ideas

Here's an excerpt from Science and the Paranormal: Altered States of Reality, by the late Arthur J. Ellison.

The book, published posthumously, is well worth reading, even though it was left slightly unfinished at the author's death and could have benefited from tighter editing. Ellison, a professor of engineering, spent many decades investigating the paranormal, and he came to some fascinating conclusions.

In this excerpt from Chapter 6, pages 81-86 (2002 Floris Books edition), he talks about the ultimate nature of reality and concludes that what we call physical phenomena are really only "mental events."

It is quite well-known that the quantum physicists tell us that the world we experience depends for its meaning and reality on our perception of it. Before we observe something it is a cloud of possibilities. When we observe it we (in their language) 'collapse the wave function,' which is a measure of probability, and there is then something definite 'out there' to observe. Numerous experiments have shown that. In effect the physical objects that 'normal scientists' consider they are describing have had their wave functions collapsed billions of times. The more a wave function is collapsed by all of us observers in a particular way to produce a particular object, the higher the likelihood that the same effect will be produced next time. So the normal physical world has permanence and stability. However, many experiences are not so consistent. The same result does not occur every time. These phenomena we call paranormal. A strong belief, an expectation amounting almost to certainty, raises the probability that the wave function will collapse in that way and lead to the experience believed in. So we have our apparently normal physical world, fairly consistently the same day by day.

It is clear that since the advent of quantum mechanics the physical world has today lost its old permanence, consistency and solidity, certainly in the minds of most physicists.... So far as I can see, normal realism is now hardly applicable. I would have thought that classical idealism -- or perhaps I really should say, mentalism -- would be rather nearer to a workable philosophical basis. That is the view that the world consists of ideas, thoughts -- and nothing else. Of course I would not dream of being dogmatic about any of this. Some physicists consider that neither realism nor idealism would quite fit, but maybe something in between. I think something semi-permanent and, as it were, given, like thought forms metaphorically set in concrete, would fill the bill.

We considered earlier that there is no way of proving that there is anything 'out there' at all. No philosopher would disagree with that. And one of those rather illusory objects which superficially appears to be 'out there,' is our own physical body with its five senses, with which we think we are observing everything....

All these data so briefly just reviewed [earlier in the book] ... plus my reading of Eastern philosophy... have shown me that an enormous number of people, many in the East, believe that the physical universe is not at all like it seems to be and that the only reality is thought -- consciousness. They call it a maya -- which roughly translates as an illusion. However, the objects of this physical world have had their wave functions collapsed so many times that they have a sort of permanence. One way of expressing it is that we have a set of stable thought forms, which almost amounts to realism as far as so far as most people are concerned. It is surely clear that all we each have for certain are our thoughts and that science is just the building of mental models patterning and ordering these mental experiences....

I often wonder whether the physical world we think we know so well is the result of thousands of years of belief and conditioning of humanity (and perhaps other influences -- it surely needed a start of some kind). In other words, by and large it has been created by us, and given consistency and solidity by our all believing in it most of the time. The clues that show some of us that it is not quite as we were told are all the facts of the so-called paranormal. A different belief -- really a different knowledge and expectation -- is needed to melt that thought form set in concrete and make it ideoplastic again....

Those firmly held beliefs are not just superficial -- they are held in the personal and collective unconscious and operate almost all the time. The times when they do not operate we call paranormal -- or a state of 'altered consciousness.' Every hypnotist knows that if the conscious rational critical mind can be temporarily removed from the picture by putting the subject into a trance, then the objects and laws of the physical world can be drastically altered by just telling the personal unconscious mind -- which is incredibly trustful, helpful and believing -- that things are different. In other words, the physical world can be altered for them by changing the belief -- or rather knowledge-structure. Objects, including other human bodies, can be added to or removed from the surroundings, or levitated in contradiction to the so-called law of gravity, and so on....

Remember that in lucid dreaming one is in full consciousness with a full memory and is well aware that the physical body is asleep in bed. Most importantly, one has the normal full critical faculty. In that state I had a good look at myself -- or should I rather say, I had a good look at the body or vehicle with which I seemed to be perceiving the world all around. It was exactly like the one I'm using right now. My breathing was normal, my heart rate was normal, everything else around seemed to be normal -- except that I felt particularly energetic, well and happy. The surroundings were just like the physical world -- perhaps because I wouldn't know how -- yet -- to make them anything different. They might be considered a reflection of my memory store -- of my experiences of the normal physical world. I did wonder whether the world of lucid dreaming is indeed the 'next world,' to which most ordinary people transfer at death. I think it probably is...

Another experiment I did was to see whether gravity was operative. It was not: if I wished I could levitate -- float in the air. I could therefore also jump off cliffs without coming to any harm.... In a lucid dream of one has escaped from the thraldom of the normal physical world and almost anything -- within limits, I feel sure -- is possible. Perhaps the physical world was once -- in the mists of antiquity -- rather like this in some respects.

Some other of the world's cultures do not have the same beliefs about the world that most of us do in the West. They are not all naïve realists as most of us are most of the time. Some of them have, for thousands of years, had some quite different beliefs about what is and is not factual. The aborigines of Australia and their 'dream-time' come to mind as just one example. So far as I know, for these vast periods of time they have believed certain things about the world that, to a realist Westerner, would be considered nonsense. They are true for them -- they 'know' that (very different from just 'believing' it) -- and the result is that more remarkable things are possible in part of their lives. They have knowledge, for example, of what is occurring hundreds of miles away in the absence of what we would call 'normal means of knowing.' Their world is, in some respects, different. One could multiply examples of this sort of thing from various other cultures.

In the East they have different views of the structure of a human being from ours -- taught for thousands of years so that everyone 'knows' and does not just 'believe.' The result is that things appear to be possible that in our Western paradigm are impossible. They have quite different methods of healing that sometimes really do work -- and they are quite different from Western medicine. One thinks of the system of subtle bodies that is taught in the East... One thinks of the chakras, prana and kundalini and other powerful 'forces' we know nothing about in the scientific West.... One thinks of acupuncture and the numerous and varied methods of hatha and raja yoga which traditionally lead to the psychic powers -- or the so-called siddhis -- leading to all sorts of interesting, valuable and intriguing possibilities.... All sorts of things become possible. Often we cannot 'explain' them in terms of Western science -- and why should we be able to do that? We seem to think that Western science is, after long centuries of darkness and ignorance, the real truth about us human beings in the world. One might seriously doubt such an arrogant idea!

Just a couple of notes. The distant viewing capabilities of non-Western people have been observed by many anthroplogists and are discussed in Rupert Sheldrake's The Sense of Being Stared At. Also, as Ellison observes in an endnote, the interpretation of quantum physics that he provides is not universally accepted. (In fact, there is no universally accepted interpretation.) It is, however, accepted by many of top physicists, though they would not necessarily endorse all the inferences Ellison draws from it.

If Ellison's view is correct, then it would seem to hold the solution to many thorny philosophical issues, such as the mind-body problem, the objective-subjective distinction, and the "problem of unversals."

Stemming diabetes

The Times of London reports on a potentially significant development in the battle against diabetes, made possible by the injection of adult stem cells.

Tucked into the article is this somewhat misleading passage:

Previous studies have suggested that stem-cell therapies offer huge potential to treat a variety of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neuron disease. A study by British scientists in November also reported that stem-cell injections could repair organ damage in heart attack victims.

But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells — those acquired from human embryos — is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush.

Why is this misleading? Because it seems to imply that embryonic stem cells, as "the most versatile kind of stem cells," are the most promising avenue of research. In fact, the very versatility of these cells has so far made them less promising than the adult or umbilical cord varieties.

The reason is that embryonic stem cells have a disconcerting tendency to grow in unexpected and uncontrollable ways. Inject embryonic stem cells into a patient, and the cells may start growing into a mass of hair, skin, bone, or teeth. Such tumors (more precisely, teratomas) are a common result of embryonic  stem cell experiments on lab animals - which is one reason why the focus of medical researchers has increasingly shifted to the more stable adult stem cells, such as those used in the diabetes treatment and in the heart attack treatment linked above.

It is also not quite correct to say that embryonic stem cell research is "opposed" by President Bush. Bush's executive order allows federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that uses existing lines of stem cells. It also allows unlimited private or state funding of embryonic stem cell research, with no restrictions on the provenance of the cells. This compromise approach has been simplistically caricatured by the media as a total ban. Bush's actual comments are considerably more nuanced. 

For more on embryonic stem cells and teratomas, see Pamela R. Winnick's excellent book A Jealous God.

Of course, none of these side issues should distract us from what may be a great stride forward in treating diabetes and other illnesses.