Michael Prescott's Blog

The “ideal ineptitude” of supposed ETs in UFO and alien abduction phenomena

This is a guest post by Matt Rouge, who has previously contributed posts on capital-S Skepticism, the Western myth, and "the burden of Mystery." And now, here's Matt! 

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Thank you, Michael, for the opportunity to contribute to your blog again!

I was very happy to see Michael’s three excellent posts on UFOs recently. I had been wanting to discuss the relationship between UFO phenomena and Afterlife phenomena, as well as make the argument I’m going to make in this post.

Phenomena are separate from their interpretations. That is, it’s possible to acknowledge UFO sightings and alien abduction experiences as genuine phenomena (i.e., not wholly due to the Skeptical go-to trifecta of fraud, hallucination, and error) without signing onto any particular explanation.

I don’t believe UFOs are actual “nuts and bolts” spacecraft, nor do I believe that the entities experienced in so-called alien abductions are actual physical beings like us. I want to make it clear, however, that I am not a Skeptic with respect to the phenomena themselves. I think that at least the best cases are paranormal in origin and cannot be explained under the current scientific paradigm.

Today I’d like to take a look at a short paper from 1990 by Jacque Vallée: Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Object. Vallée is perhaps the most prominent opponent of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, or ETH,¹ and Michael has discussed his work in the above-mentioned posts. I’m going to paraphrase his arguments, comment on them briefly, and then lay out a new argument that I think adds something to the overall argument against the ETH.

Valée’s five arguments

1. There are so many UFO sightings that earth would have to be ETs’ Grand Central Station.

This, I think, is Vallée’s most devastating argument. Even if we counted only the most solid cases, earth would be overrun with ETs coming and going to a degree that is truly unrealistic.

2.It’s too big a coincidence that ETs are humanoid, can breathe our air, etc.

This is the only argument out of the five that I really don’t buy. I think it’s possible that convergent evolution could result in many species being bipedal and humanoid, and it may be that oxygen is the gas that supports life on most planets. Further, there are reports of ETs, such as Mantis ETs, that don’t look very human at all.

3. The ETs in alien abduction reports are using really bad and primitive science.

This is another killer argument in my view. Abducting people is a supremely inefficient way to get DNA and other biological samples.

4. UFOs are an old phenomenon in a modern guise.

Michael talked about this argument in this post. I find it pretty compelling.

5. UFOs do not behave like normal physical objects.

And Michael talked about this argument in this post. Again, compelling.

Arguments #1 and #3 tie into the argument I will make, which is this:

The ETs in UFO and alien abduction reports are “ideally inept”: they give themselves away just enough to tease us with their presence yet never collectively convince us of it.

Let’s take a look at both phenomena, and I’ll explain what I mean further.

 

A saucer lands on the DC mall in 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still

 

UFO phenomena

ETs are supposedly advanced, with technology thousands if not millions of years ahead of our own. Combined with the discipline required, one would think, to explore the stars, this technology should allow them to be seen only to the degree they wish to be seen.

Thus, the idea that they are just—whoops—accidentally being seen strains credulity.

One perhaps may object that ETs don’t actually care about being seen from afar. But where does their caring begin and end? If they didn’t care at all, then they would be landing anywhere and everywhere and being photographed and videoed all the time. OK, maybe they don’t mind being seen from afar but do mind being seen up close.

In that case, we are still left needing to explain such coincidentally perfect fine-tuning. Do all the ETs who are nonchalant about being seen from a distance have a program in place to prevent all of the thousands (per Vallée’s #1 argument above) of spacecraft visiting Earth each year from being photographed, videoed, captured on radar, etc., to an excessive degree?

Vallée points out in his paper that it would be easier for ETs to send probes to get their work done. Further, Ray Kurzweil observes: “A computational-based superintelligence of the late twenty-first century here on earth will be microscopic in size. Thus an intelligent delegation from another planet is not likely to use a spaceship of the size that is common in today’s science fiction, as there would be no reason to transport such large organisms and equipment.”²

OK, but maybe the ETs are sending probes to earth, which they intend to be seen by humans to such a fine-tuned degree. They are not sending microscopic probes but instead large objects that make lights in the sky,³ are visible sometimes on radar, and are from time to time seen up close by people. But they never make the proverbial landing on the White House lawn, and they never, say, descend into Manhattan and get seen and videoed by thousands of people all at the same time. In other words, plausible deniability is always maintained.

Alien abductions

In his paper, Valée observes, “The means of permanently erasing the memory of the victims through the use of appropriate drugs are also available in the current pharmacopeia.”

True. As a medical interpreter helping Japanese people, I’ve observed patients coming out of sedation/anesthesia perhaps around 50 times. Today’s anesthesiologists and their technology are very good. The doctors always use a drug that induces amnesia—and it works. People wake up and are usually surprised that the procedure or surgery is over already, and they certainly don’t remember anything about what happened during it.

Again, it strains credulity to suppose that the ETs intend for abductees not to remember their experiences and have technology in place to induce amnesia, but—whoops—quite a large number of people end up remembering anyway.

Plausible deniability is an issue here too. ETs that abduct humans are clearly ethically challenged—so why don’t they just kill their catches or keep them for experimentation over the long term? If we suppose that only a fraction of abductees remember their experiences (i.e., when ET amnesia technology fails), and if we consider that thousands of people have reported abduction experiences, then it stands to reason that the actual number of abductees is quite large indeed, perhaps numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands. If only a small fraction of this total were never to be returned, then that would entail a substantial number of disappearances requiring explanation. Yet this problem does not seem to exist.

Fair enough. Perhaps the ETs don’t disappear humans. But they seem to be taking care not to get “caught” in many other ways as well. While abductees do report physical traces of their ordeals, such as small wounds and scars and small metal implants, and perhaps these are indeed genuine phenomena in their own right, to my knowledge there have been no reports of limbs amputated, organs removed, or surgeries performed that leave major scars, sutures, etc. That is, there is nothing to compel us to believe that someone with medical skill and technology was involved in the abductee’s ordeal. Further, to my knowledge, no recovered implants have ever consisted of undeniable extraterrestrial technology. Plausible deniability is always maintained.

 

In Forbidden Planet (1956), humans are piloting the saucer

 

Plausible deniability—or simple inability?

Thus, in their “ideal ineptitude,” the supposed ETs give us glimpses of themselves that are always just this side of the line of plausible deniability. Many different species are reportedly involved, and the circumstances of their appearance can vary considerably, but they always maintain iron discipline in order to, well, just tease us.

By “plausible deniability,” I do not mean that the phenomena themselves can or should be denied. In our Skeptical age, however, they mostly are denied—or at least swept under the rug by the media and other elites.⁴ Rather, the phenomena are not strong enough to instantly compel consideration by the global populace, as would happen with a landing on the White House lawn or something similar. Nor are the phenomena distinct (e.g., detailed video of ETs walking out of a landed craft) or permanent (e.g., artifacts left behind) enough as to give a prima facie indication of their physical origin.⁵

Thus, I think we are left with two possibilities: either the ETs continually screw up just so, which is not plausible,⁶ or the two phenomena of UFOs and alien abduction have a cause (and not necessarily the same cause) that prevents anything more from happening than what actually does. In other words, they or it are unable to do more.

I think the latter possibility is the truth. In a future guest post, I would like to explore what I think may actually be the cause of the phenomena in question.

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¹On the other side of the debate, one of the major proponents of the ETH today is Richard Dolan, who has a great YouTube channel. Although I don’t ultimately agree with his conclusions, he is an immensely knowledgeable, intelligent, and entertaining speaker, so I encourage you to check out his videos.

²Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Viking Press, 1999.

³Just as we do not put big honking lights on our warplanes just for fun, there is no technologically plausible reason for ETs to have craft that light up like Christmas trees in the night sky.

⁴By “elites” I do not mean anything particularly conspiratorial. I merely mean that those with the power to shape our worldview, such as prominent members of the media, scientists, teachers, public intellectuals, etc., collectively prefer not to examine the phenomena and incorporate them into a revised worldview. I don’t think it is much different than the reaction of elites in the 17th century to heliocentrism. Needless to say, such elites are equally in denial about the psi and Afterlife phenomena that Michael regularly discusses on this blog.

⁵I’m well aware of claims that the government is in possession of crashed spacecraft, ET bodies, and so on. I will certainly believe if I can see the evidence. (Contrary to Skeptics, I am willing to change my views when I see proof.)

⁶“Screwing up” (i.e., committing errors or causing accidents) is by definition a lack of control on the part of the entity screwing up. Just as it would be implausible to suggest that, say, losing control on the freeway could cause damage to the vehicle but never a serious injury or fatality, it is likewise implausible to suggest that UFOs could accidentally be seen in the sky but never be captured at close range on video, or that alien abductions could result in undesired memory recall but never any extreme physical evidence.

The Devil made them do it

Lately I happened to read Washington Irving's famous story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," about Ichabod Crane and his terrifying steeplechase with the Headless Horsemen. It's a very well written and amusing story, well worth a look. Ichabod, who is depicted in less than flattering terms, is said to be "a perfect master of Cotton Mather's 'History of New England Witchcraft'." I was sufficiently intrigued to buy a digital version of one of Mather's many books on the subject and read it myself.

This particular book is known today as On Witchcraft, though the original title was Wonders of the Invisible World. Its relevance to the subject matter of this blog is twofold: First, it illuminates the attitude of the Puritan settlers of New England toward all manner of things that might be termed "paranormal" today. To be brief, that attitude was one of sheer superstitious terror and fanatical rejection. Second, it includes a fairly detailed and apparently well-attested account of what would now be called a "crisis apparition." This account has little or nothing to do with the main themes of the book, and seems to be included only because Mather found it so interesting.

Of course, it should be noted that Mather's book is crowded with strange portents and inexplicable occurrences, including the case of a bird that began speaking in a human voice and urging people to read Paul's letter to the Colossians and another case in which a cat (said to be a witch in feline form) attacked a man in his bed and was driven off only by his fervent appeals to the Holy Trinity. In other words, we can hardly take Mather as a wholly reliable narrator. Nevertheless, the crisis apparition story has a level of detail that makes it, to me, more credible than some of the other accounts.

Cotton Mather

Let's set the stage by looking at attitudes in New England circa 1692. This was at the tail end of the notorious witch hysteria that gripped Salem, Massachusetts, and surrounding villages, resulting ultimately in the execution of 19 people and two dogs. (The dogs were apparently guilty of witchcraft, as well.) Many others were arrested and held in prison for months, facing the very real possibility of death, only to be released when the tumult finally died down.

It was in this atmosphere that Cotton Mather took it upon himself to write a book defending the witch trials, which were beginning to attract criticism from people who felt the whole matter had gone too far. He was only 29 at the time, but had already made a name for himself after graduating from Harvard at 15 and following in the footsteps of his famous father, Increase Mather, by becoming a noted preacher. Though as far as we know he had no direct involvement in the trials themselves, he did have access to court records, and he knew many of the principals involved.

He informs us that,

I have indeed set myself to countermine the whole PLOT of the Devil against New England, in every branch of it, as far as one of my darkness can comprehend such a work of darkness....

We have been advised by some credible Christians yet alive, that a malefactor, accused of witchcraft as well as murder, and executed in this place more than forty years ago, did give notice of an horrible PLOT against the country by WITCHCRAFT, and a foundation of WITCHCRAFT then laid, which if it were not seasonably discovered, would probably blow up, and pull down all the churches in the country. And we have now with horror seen the discovery of such a witchcraft! An army of devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is the center, and after a sword, the first-born of our English settlements: and the houses of the good people there are filled with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants, tormented by invisible hands, with tortures altogether preternatural.

(Note: In all my quotations, I've modernized the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization for easier reading.)

An important theme of Mather's book is that there is not just one devil, but a horde of them – legions, in fact, as the New Testament itself assures us in the story of the man possessed by a "legion" of demons. These evil beings are everywhere; we are cribbed, cabined, and confined by them; they are with us in our homes, in our shops, even in our churches.

When we speak of the Devil, tis a name of a multitude; it means not one individual devil, so potent and scient, as perhaps a Manichee would imagine; but it means a kind, which a multitude belongs unto. Alas, the devils, they swarm about us like the frogs of Egypt, in the most retired of our chambers. Are we at our boards [= dining tables]? There will be devils to tempt us unto sensuality. Are we in our beds? There will be devils to tempt us unto carnality. Are we in our shops? There will be devils to tempt us unto dishonesty. Yea, though we get into the Church of God, there will be devils to haunt us in the very temple itself, and there tempt us to manifold misbehaviors. I am verily persuaded that there are very few human affairs whereinto some devils are not insinuated; there is not so much a journey intended but Satan will have a hand in hindering or furthering of it.

Mather was by no means unusual in holding this view; in New England in that era, almost everyone believed much the same thing. The atmosphere must have been stifling in its superstitious dread and omnipresent paranoia. He invites his readers to imagine that, even as they sit in their pews in church, they are surrounded by hundreds of invisible demons.

Contemporary woodcut of Mather, protected by a magic circle, confronting the Devil  

"That there is a Devil," Mather writes, "is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influences of the Devil. For any to deny the being of a Devil must be from an ignorance or profaneness worse than diabolical." Ergo, disbelief in the Devil proves that one is an agent of the Devil! It is not likely that many people expressed such disbelief publicly, even in the (unlikely) event that they had any private doubts.

Another theme of Mather's book is that New England has been singled out for a no-holds-barred attack by the devil and his minions. Here, in the unspoiled wilderness where a small band of faithful are attempting to build a new Jerusalem, the devil sees his infernal plans most at risk. He has brought his full wrath and his total arsenal of weapons to bear against the hapless New Englanders in a desperate attempt to derail their utopian project. Thus, it is only to be expected that New England will be a hotbed of demonic possession, hexes, pestilence, and other ills. And what do you know? All these things are happening! Crops have failed, cattle have died, winters have been harsh, plagues have devastated whole communities. Now witch covens are being uncovered by the score. It all points to the conclusion that, following the Book of Revelation, we are entering the last days, when our ordeals will be most severe.

Although in his later years, Mather was known for advocating inoculation against disease (an advanced and controversial position for his time), in 1693 he put the blame for illness squarely on the Devil. Here's a look at the state of medical science in New England in the late 17th century:

’Tis the destroyer, or the Devil, that scatters plagues about the world. Pestilential and contagious diseases, ’tis the Devil who does oftentimes invade us with them. ’Tis no uneasy thing for the devil to impregnate the air about us with such malignant salts as meeting with the salt of our microcosm shall immediately cast us into that fermentation and putrefaction which will ultimately dissolve all the vital ties within us; even as an aqua fortis, made with the conjunction of niter and vitriol, corrodes what it seizes upon. And when the devil has raised those arsenical fumes, which become venomous quivers full of terrible arrows, how easily can he shoot the deleterious miasms into those juices or bowels of men’s bodies, which will soon inflame them with a mortal fire! Hence comes such plagues, as that be some of destruction, which within our memory swept away such a throng of people from one English city in one visitation; and hence those infectious fevers, which are but so many disguised plagues among us, causing epidemical desolations.

As you might expect, Mather is suspicious not only of those accused of witchcraft, but also of those who practice other socially marginalized arts.

It was said in Deuteronomy 18 – 10, 11, 12, There shall not be found among you an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer; for all that do these things are an abomination to the Lord, and because of these abominations, the Lord thy God doth drive them out before thee....

Persons who have never made any express contact with apostate spirits yet may act strange things by diabolic aids which they procure by the use of those wicked forms and arts that the Devil first imparted unto his Confederates.… Some of them that have been cried out upon [as] employing evil spirits to hurt our land have been known to be most bloody fortunetellers; and some of them have confessed that when they told fortunes, they would pretend the rules of chiromancy and the like ignorant sciences, but indeed they had no rule (they said) but this, The things were then darted into their minds. Darted! Ye wretches; by whom, I pray? Surely by none but the devils; who, though perhaps they did not exactly foreknow all the thus predicted contingencies, yet having once foretold them, they stood bound in honor now to use their interest, which alas, in this world, is very great, for the accomplishment of their own predictions.

It's interesting that the so-called fortunetellers "confessed" that they didn't actually use any esoteric methods, but simply allowed relevant thoughts to enter their minds. In other words, they received psychic impressions, while the crystal ball, tarot cards, or whatever items they pretended to employ were merely props. I suspect that this is still true today; there is no power in crystals or cards and no meaning in the random distribution of creases on someone's palm, but concentrating on such things may free a sensitive mind to receive impressions via psi. Of course, to the Reverend Mather, it's all the work of that old trickster, the Devil.

1892 lithograph imaginatively representing a Salem witch trial 

And what a monster the Devil is. Or at least, what a monster he became in people's minds, leading them to acts of self-destruction and the destruction of their loved ones. At the height of the witch hysteria, neighbors were accusing neighbors, prominent pastors and their wives were accused of consorting with demonic powers, and family members across New England were informing on each other. Children, the most suggestible of persons, confessed to their own heinous crimes while implicating their parents:

It would break an heart of stone to have seen what I have lately seen; even poor children of several ages, even from seven to twenty, more or less, confessing their familiarity with devils; but at the same time, in doleful bitter lamentations that made a little portraiture of hell itself, expostulating with their execrable parents for devoting them to the devil in their infancy and so entailing of devilism upon them!

All of it was enough to make a good Christian desire an end to earthly life. Despite the promise of better times to come, the 29-year-old Mather had a morbid preoccupation with the sweet release of death.

For, though when we call to mind that the Devil’s time is now but short, it may almost make us wish to live unto the end of it.… Yet when we bear in mind that the Devil’s wrath is now most great, it would make one willing to be out of the way.… We should not be inordinately loath to die at such a time. In a word, the times are so bad that we may well count it as good a time to die in as ever we saw.

This, then, was the world of Cotton Mather. It's a depressing place, and we should be glad to have left it behind. After all the above, it may be hard to take anything that Mather says very seriously. Clearly, despite his academic achievements and undoubted brilliance in some areas, he was led by his unbending theological dogmas to believe in all manner of superstition.

Accordingly, we should take his account of a possible crisis apparition with due skepticism. But since his report is similar in many ways to better attested and more recent accounts of the same type, and since it was recorded long before the idea of crisis apparitions was formalized by the Society for Psychical Research, it's at least worth considering, if only for its historical interest.

Here is the relevant passage in full:

It was on 2 May in the year 1687 that a most ingenious, accomplished and well-disposed gentleman, Mr. Joseph Beacon by name, about 5 o’clock in the morning, as he lay, whether sleeping or waking he could not say (but judged the latter of them), had a view of his brother then at London, although he was now himself at our Boston, distanced from him a thousand leagues. This his brother appeared unto him, in the morning about 5 o’clock at Boston, having on him a Bengal gown, which he usually wore, with a napkin tied about his head; his countenance was very pale, ghastly, deadly, and he had a bloody wound on one side of his forehead. Brother! says the frightened Joseph. Brother! answered the apparition. Said Joseph, What’s the matter, brother? How came you here! The apparition replied, Brother, I have been most barbarously and injuriously butchered by a debauched drunken fellow to whom I never did any wrong in my life. Whereupon he gave a particular description of the murderer, adding, Brother, this fellow, changing his name, is attempting to come over on to New England in Foy or Wild [transatlantic passenger ships]; I would pray you on the first arrival of either of these to get an order from the governor to seize the person whom I have now described; and then do you indict him for the murder of your brother: I’ll stand by you and prove the indictment. And so he vanished. Mr. Beacon was extremely astonished at what he had seen and heard; and the people of the family not only observed an extraordinary alteration upon him for the week following, but have also given me under their hands a full testimony that he then gave them an account of this apparition.

All this while, Mr. Beacon had no advice of anything amiss attending his brother then in England; but about the latter end of June following, he understood by the common ways of communication that the April before, his brother, going in haste by night to call a coach for a lady, met a fellow then in drink, with his doxy [= female companion, trollop, wench] in his hand: some way or other the fellow thought himself affronted with the hasty passage of this Beacon, and immediately ran into the fireside of a neighboring tavern, from whence he fetched out a fire-fork, wherewith he grievously wounded Beacon in the skull; even in that very part where the apparition showed his wound. Of this wound he languished until he died on 2 May, about five of the clock in the morning at London. The murderer it seems was endeavoring to escape, as the apparition affirmed, but the friends of the deceased Beacon seized him; and prosecuting him at law, he found the help of such friends as brought him off without the loss of his life; since which, there has been no more heard of the business.

This history I received of Mr. Joseph Beacon himself, who a little before his own pious and hopeful death, which followed not long after, gave me the story written and signed with his own hand, and attested with the circumstances I have already mentioned.

Book recap: The Simulation Hypothesis

This isn't so much a book review as a summary of The Simulation Hypothesis, by Rizwan Virk. I'd highlighted a lot of text in the ebook, so I decided to reproduce many of these highlights as a general indication of what the book is about. 

I may do an actual review in the future. For now, I'll just say that I found the book brisk and readable, and despite occasional lapses of grammar, the main ideas are presented clearly.The author's treatment of the evolution of video games was particularly interesting. His analysis of spiritual and paranormal topics (religion, NDEs, UFOs) was less compelling and seemed somewhat less well informed, but at least he is open to these possibilities. One area of possible confusion is that at some points he speaks of downloading consciousness into an avatar, but at other points he refers to the entire physical world, including the avatar, as being rendered on the "screen" of consciousness. There appears to be an inconsistency here.

Overall, I liked the book and recommend it to those who are interested in this type of speculation. For the record, I don't believe we are literally in a conspirer simulation, but I think computation serves as a useful model for making sense of many paradoxical phenomena, including the subject matter of parapsychology. 

In any event, here are some key points, arranged by topic and not presented in the order in which they appear in the book. Blank lines between quotes indicate that the quotes are not found together in the book. In some instances they are separated by many pages.

 

 

Excerpts from The Simulation Hypothesis by topic: 

 

The Great Simulation 

By treating the world not as physical (and we’ll see that the physicists have admitted it is not) but rather as information and computation, we might be able to come to a more comprehensive understanding of the natural universe.

Oxford’s Nick Bostrom, in his 2003 paper which popularized the Simulation Argument, refers to a species which is able to build these hyper-realistic simulations is becoming “post-human.” I like to say that such a civilization has passed the “Simulation Point.”

I call this video game the “Great Simulation.”

 

Video game technology 

[A basic "game loop":] 
1. The computer presents the existing state of the game world and your character. 
2. The player issues a command. 
3. The program changes the game state based on this command and other factors. 
4. Repeat

The world [of a video game is] a graphical representation, or a “rendered world,” populated by graphical characters and graphical objects.

The techniques used to graphically represent a large game world and render only a portion of the game world at a time – the portion that the player’s character is observing – [have] significant impact on the simulation hypothesis.... We’ll see there is a direct parallel [between quantum phenomena and] the conditional rendering of video games.

[Games have] the ability to store and track the state of a large number of simultaneous characters (whether a PC or an NPC) and the state of the shared, persistent game world as information. The information, which is the basis of everything that goes on in the virtual world, is stored somewhere outside the rendered world – on cloud servers that are invisible to those inside the world and rendered as needed.

Not only is a virtual world in modern MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games] larger than we can see on one screen, it isn’t fully rendered into pixels until and unless it’s necessary.… Only those places in the world where there is an observer get fully rendered as pixels.
This is ... the basic idea of a rendering engine – it converts from mathematical points to a set of pixels that can be shown to the user in a video game.
Where is the rest of the world if we are rendering only a small part of it at a time? What is it stored as? It is stored as a set of 3D computer models – which by themselves cannot be seen by the player unless they are rendered.

Video games are optimized to render only that which is needed. The rest of the “world” exists in some informational form, so computing resources aren’t expended unless and until they are needed.

Some specific rules that a rendering engine might follow include:
Do not render anything that is obscured, or behind other objects (that the user wouldn’t see)
Adjust the field of view by quickly adjusting the pixels that have already been rendered
Pre-cache the scenes adjacent to the current one (to make them quicker to load)
Calculate/render new pixels only when necessary

The modeling techniques developed for video games are the same models that are used by 3D printers, and once again we see physical objects being reduced to digital information. A table created in Minecraft or Second Life … consists of digital information that is rendered using the basic building blocks of the game (pixels), which persist inside the virtual world as long as the world is running. Can we say any more of the physical world around us?

These [early] games became the first to have well-defined physics engines. This means that they obeyed some (scaled-down) version of Newton’s laws of classical mechanics.

MMORPGs are still rendered on individual computers – as such, a “shared rendered world” doesn’t really exist. Each computer renders what is happening in your scene. If my character is present and yours is present, then both of our CPUs/GPUs will be rendering the scene based on shared information. Where is this information? It is both decentralized and centralized – it is sent from the client machines based upon every choice you make and then synchronized and sent to the other people that are in the same place that you are.

 

Informational patterns in nature 

The cells in your body have been replaced many times – you are literally not the physical person that you were many years ago. There must be some “information”… that defines who you are and tells the cells how to grow. This applies not just to healthy but also to diseased cells; theoretically if all the cells are replaced, then the diseased cell should just disappear on their own. This doesn’t happen because of patterns of information. Even biological entities, at their core, follow a computational structure.

[Stephen] Wolfram, by studying [the] cellular automaton and its similarity to nature, proposed that nature itself might be a collection of computer programs. He referred to these as simple programs and believed that simple programs were a basic building block of all science. Science, then, instead of being the study of physical processes, is really the study of computation and information involving things like recursion, registers for storing information, etc.

In his autobiography, [John] Wheeler summarized three phases of his long career in physics: “Everything is Particles” evolved to “Everything is Fields” which eventually evolved to “Everything is Information”.

 

Reality and illusion 

In many Vedic texts, maya connotes a “magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem.” There is another term that is used in the Hindu Vedas, the lila. [It means "play".] The word play has dual meanings – first that the world is built from a spirit of playfulness and creativity, and second, that what we see can be thought of as being like a stage play …

If maya is a kind of illusion, then what is beyond the illusion? There is, in the Hindu traditions, Brahman, the absolute “real” world beyond form, and in the Buddhist traditions, the dharma, the absolute basis of reality from which all phenomena emanate. While they don’t say exactly what this world is like, there is a resting place for souls between lives, called the bardo.

We are players outside the game (and thus conscious entities) playing characters inside the video game.

 

Running simulations 

Many ... questions in life may be computationally irreducible. This means that we would need to run a computer program through many different steps to figure out where a particular planet might be, or where a particular particle may end up in a turbulent flow of particles, or where a biological population might end up after a number of years.

Sometimes we need to “rewind” our computer simulation and rerun it to see a different set of variables before we know exactly where we will end up.

 

Quantum indeterminacy

At the heart of the matter is QI (or quantum indeterminacy) which means that all outcomes exist until and unless one particular outcome is observed. In the case of quantum bits, this means that the bit has values of both zero and one – until and unless it is observed.

A much better explanation of QI and why it exists – that it is a form of “conditional rendering” for a shared simulated universe.

In quantum physics, this collapse of a probability wave into a single future seems to happen based on conscious observation or measurement. In a video game, the path that any player follows depends on the conscious choice and subsequent rendering of that choice on the player’s own computer (which can be thought of as his or her “machine of consciousness”).

While there may be a master “state” on the server in multiplayer video games, rendering is done on each client machine. This corresponds to the finding in quantum physics that a probability wave collapses to a specific reality only when there is an observer.

There is a computer that is keeping track of all things in our physical world, and it doesn’t have the resources to render every possibility. It only needs to render those things that we, as conscious participants or players of the game, observe.

“Quantum indeterminacy,” says Elon Musk …, “is really an optimization technique.”

 

Many worlds, parallel universes 

[Do] these parallel worlds actually exist or are [they] simply probabilities in a probability tree that is created by whomever or whatever is rendering the world around us[?]

It’s not at all unreasonable to assume that if the universe gets “copied” or “branched” that there are optimizations for accomplishing this – and that what is being copied is actually information and not physical particles.…

If the universe is seen as a virtual world with a game state, then we can envision how multiple probable futures can be generated (as information, not as physical worlds), and then choices can be made through this branching tree of possibilities using some evaluation function.

[Thomas] Campbell posits that there is a “Fundamental Process” that drives evolution of consciousness, biology, and even inanimate objects. The Fundamental Process, as he defines it, is a process that tries out every possibility, through trial and error, and gravitates toward the possibilities that are evaluated as the “most profitable.”

A computational model of the [multiple] universes as information allows for significant compression and optimization, and computation provides a mechanism that might actually be able to produce this kind of result: a giant computer system crunching numbers with the rendering engine that only renders when it’s needed.

 

Quantized space and time 

Time inside video games is quantized, based on the steps of the simulation, which is some multiple of the processing time of basic operations in the CPU (or GPU).

All computer simulations rely on some time clock to control the simulation, and if we are really in a simulation, there should be some evidence of this. If quantized time proves to be correct, that lends even more credence to the idea that there is a clock-speed and minimum distance in the 3D world around us.

Every object would have a 3D representation within [the virtual space we use inside computer programs and simulations] – typically (x, y, z) coordinates – and a fourth coordinate for time, t. If the speed of light is fixed, and the smallest possible pixel is fixed, then the minimum quantum of time would be defined by light traversing the smallest pixel.

The Planck length … is defined as a unitof length equal to 1.616229 (38) x 10 [to the power of -35] meters and is considered the smallest possible length of space that we can reliably measure.

The speed of light seems to be the constant that relates space to time.

If space-time is pixelated, then we can use the constant speed to get a quantized time, a clock-speed of the simulation.

Using the Planck length, which physicists now generally acknowledge as the smallest possible measurable distance of length in our 3D reality, the value T in our equation comes out to a very small number, which is essentially how scientists have come up with the Planck time constant.

 

Quantum entanglement

If two pixels are co-related on the computer screen, then both physical pixels would be getting their value from the same point in memory. If we change the memory value (let’s say its RGB value from red to green), then both pixels should change on the screen from red to [green]. 

Let’s suppose pixels A and B share the same value in memory (in this case they are based off of the same address in memory). If we change the value in memory, then both pixels will automatically change, at least as long as they share the same memory location. If pixel A was to then suddenly start using a different spot in memory, we might say that they are no longer shared – or ... no longer entangled.
In quantum entanglement, it is possible for particles to de-cohere as well, by interacting with the environment, or by simply measuring the quantum state. This can easily explain how pixel B now gets its own value in memory, so that its state can be saved independently from pixel A.

 

Remote viewing

Since the client software is doing rendering based on the position of the virtual camera, it is possible, within the virtual world, to place the camera anywhere in the room!

 

UFOs

If we think of a 3D virtual world as having x, y, z coordinates, then teleporting would be a matter of setting new x, y, z coordinates without having to go through the points in between.

Some UFO researchers contend that UFO sightings have both an objective and a subjective component. When I met Jacques Vallee in 2017, he told me that he had documented cases where several people were together and some of them saw the UFO and others didn’t. This led him to believe that there was a consciousness aspect to UFOs. What could cause one person to see a UFO and another standing right next to them not to see it?
If we go back to the idea that each of us is conscious in a videogame-like simulation, then each of us would have to render the physical world on our own “computer” – in this case, in our own consciousness. A situation where the command is to render the UFO on person A’s consciousness now while not rendering it on person B’s only makes sense in the context of a distributed multiplayer simulation as opposed to a shared physical reality.

Since all the rendering is done on individual computers, it’s possible for one player to see an object in the scene that is not possible to other players, a process we call narrowcasting.

 

Subtle bodies

In many of the Eastern traditions and their new age updates in modern times, there’s the belief that certain subtle bodies, which contain consciousness, actually leave the physical body while we are asleep and that this [is] the same as being afk [away from keyboard].

In the Vedas, the five sheaths (koshas) correspond with the three bodies: the gross body, the subtle body, and the causal body. The gross body (sthula sarira) is the physical body that we all know about. The subtle body (suksma sarira) keeps the physical body alive and transmigrates with the soul across bodies and separates from the physical body at birth. The causal body (karana sarira) is the seed that creates the subtle body and the gross physical body.…
The subtle body is considered a template for the physical body in the Vedic literature.

In a simulation, each character has a rendered body. What is this based on? Information about the body (the character) is stored in some non-rendered state, but then a 3D model defines the look, shape, and feel of the character’s physical body. This 3D model isn’t visible to other people in the rendered world, yet exists somewhere in memory or on disk and is indispensable from the actual character/player. The model is usually drawn using polygons and is considered a “mesh” of lines outlining the shape of the character’s body, which is then textured to create the actual character’s rendering in the game world.

 

NDEs and the life review

Like an intelligent screen recording while we are playing a videogame, [the Great Simulation] provides not just a record but an evaluation of the gameplay and help[s] us to keep score in the video game. These recordings are available for us in the afterlife, and “God” reviews than with us give us the “judgment” according to the Western religious traditions.

During what we call [the] death of the character in the simulation, the player starts to wake up in another reality.
What is this other reality? All we can say for sure is that it is outside the rendered world of the shared video game, and there are other conscious beings there.

In fact, the decision to “go back” and continue the life of the character we were just playing is a lot like the crude “insert another quarter now to keep playing!”

 

Angels

Just who are these entities recording our deeds? According to some traditions, these entities might be angels, though they sound a lot like AI that monitors and automatically records our actions and plays them back to us later.

Beings that are not in the rendered world but are watching and influencing us is a good description of what these religions call angels and demons.

As we look to the recording angels, we see that they are as much “functions” as they are “entities” – i.e., they have a specific purpose and rules to follow to achieve that purpose in supporting us through this “testing ground” of life on earth.

 

Reincarnation and karma 

The twin concepts of karma and reincarnation sound a lot like video games in which a player has multiple lives and an ongoing list of “quests” and “achievements.” The accomplishment of one task (or quest) unlocks new quests that get added to the list. This is a lot like the process of creating new karma described in Buddhism.

In Eastern traditions, consciousness is transferred to multiple bodies in a series of incarnations. This is a direct analogy to a single player who plays multiple “roles” or “characters” in a role-playing game.

[The] quest manifest [in a video game] is like a running total and is a subset of all possible quests; it is run by a quest engine.

This [series of quests] builds up experience and levels up our character based on some map or tree of quests and achievements that have been selected for us by our particular karma.

The karma of the player would be lessons or achievements the player may need to accept that “finish” over many lifetimes, while the karma of a given character may need to be resolved during the life of this character.

Q&A with Richard Reichbart

Something a little different this time: an interview with Richard Reichbart, author of the newly released study The Paranormal Surrounds Us (which includes an afterword I was privileged to write).

The book has been put out by McFarland, a well-known and highly respected publishing house specializing in academic titles. Here's the book description from the publisher's sales page: 

Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Joyce, E.M. Forster and Ingmar Bergman all made the paranormal essential to their depiction of humanity. Freud recognized telepathy as an everyday phenomenon. Observations on parapsychological aspects of psychoanalysis also include the findings of the Mesmerists, Jung, Ferenczi and Eisenbud.

Many academicians attribute such psychic discoveries to “poetic license” rather than to accurate understanding of our parapsychological capacities. The author—a practicing psychoanalyst and parapsychologist, and a lawyer familiar with Navajo culture—argues for a fresh appraisal of psi phenomena and their integration into psychoanalytic theory and clinical work, literary studies and anthropology.

In what follows, I ask Richard a few questions about his book, his friendship with Julie Eisenbud, and the psychology of militant skepticism.

Michael Prescott: In your book, you go into some detail about Jule Eisenbud, best known for his study of Ted Serios, who claimed the ability to produce photographs with his mind. Eisenbud has been treated harshly by some skeptics, who’ve impugned his methods and subjected him to ridicule. Can you give us your assessment of Eisenbud’s professionalism?

Richard Reichbart: I came to know Jule Eisenbud in a unique way: I was his analysand. That meant that I saw him five times a week for three years (actually at the beginning for a number of months -- because I was not in the best psychological shape -- it was six times a week). He had an office in Denver, where I first saw him, and then he had an office in his home (where very quickly he began to see me regularly), a pleasant stucco structure with a wall around it, and a Spanish fountain inside, and a side entrance through the wall that led to a small office in the back of the house with a separate entrance, where there was a couch and a chair and a number of small book cases, enclosed by windows on almost all sides. Sometimes, his dog would be present too. After my psychoanalysis, I did meet with him once inside his house (which I had never been in before) with my wife at the time, when he tried to get Serios, who had stopped producing actual pictures, to try to come up with more than blackies — which I mention in my book — but essentially I knew Eisenbud from being his patient on the analytic couch. ["Blackies" was Serios's term for photographs that were exposed but came out completely black. — MP]

Now this is an intimate and revealing way to get to know someone. For one, he was a consummate professional: always punctual beginning and ending a session, always courteous, almost always wearing a sport jacket and a cravat. One gets to know what an analyst is like, even though he does not share the details of his life (which he did not because professionally, analytically that is what was required). For one, he listened; for another, he spoke sympathetically when he spoke, and constructed responses with attention to details. He was in fact tremendously honest, brutally so in the sense that he had no difficulty recognizing the aggression in my or in other's actions and discussing it. For me, who at the time was recovering from the loss of a loved Navajo woman and from an extended emotional break that began at the death of my grandfather two years before, it was an amazing and wonderful experience. I discovered in effect myself. Eisenbud's ability to interpret and to talk about psychoanalytic and parapsychological things was truly amazing. I learned how to think creatively, once again.

In terms of his ethics, which is actually an essential part of a successful analysis, he was as ethical as any man I have ever met. Falsifying things was completely alien to him. He was foremost a psychoanalyst -- even though he dealt in parapsychology,. his profession was to understand things psychoanalytically. His straight psychoanalytic writings are as brilliant as his parapsychological ones. If I had a criticism of him, there were two. The first was (as he subsequently told me) he was a little too harsh with me; he said he regretted it. It took my next analyst to undo aspects of that. And tied into that were two things: a tendency on his part to look too closely for psi connections, so that I sometimes felt that I was a subject of his interest rather than a patient of his; and also I think a tendency to underestimate me — both my psychoanalytic and parapsychological abilities and ambitions. But none of these faults, such as I perceived them, had anything to do with his consummate professionalism. That professionalism I learned from him even before I entered the psychoanalytic profession.

MP: You describe the influence of the paranormal on Tolstoy, Joyce, and other major literary figures. Are these influences acknowledged by mainstream critics or are they downplayed or suppressed? If the latter is true, why do you think this is?

RR: I do not really know the answer to this question, because I am not an academic literary person. I suspect, as I indicate throughtout my writing, that this is not a focus of literary critics, with one or two notable exceptions whom I mention. The foremost of the exceptions is Nicholas Royle, who has attempted to address exactly this issue — the parapsychological understanding of great dramatists and authors — but unfortunately I think that his writing is too opaque. He does not approach literature with a psychoanalytic and/or parapsychological eye. Yet he is a lonely voice in respect to what he has written.

One of the most foremost modern Shakespearean scholars, Stephen Greenblatt, with whom I used to compete in Yale college English classes as an undergraduate, and who has more than enough knowledge of Shakespeare to make an impact if he were so inclined, has avoided parapsychology entirely when speaking of Shakespeare. Rickard, whom I cite in speaking of Joyce, does a masterful job in exploring psi phenomena in Ulysses, but he fails to go the further step that I have taken in connecting Joyce's depiction to actual parapsychological facts. Nabokov recognized the shared psi dreams in Anna Karenina and also in Ulysses, and noted it, but again does not seem to have enough parapsychological knowledge to expand upon his observation. Yellen was a parapsychogist who observed psi events in Shakespeare which I mention. But I do not know that he was an established English professor.

I suspect the answer to your question is that no English department or professor, however talented as some of these are, has made it a point of exploring these things accompanied by a true parapsychological knowledge. I could find no text that did this and would be glad to know if I missed something. But it is frankly a shame.

MP: How does an understanding of paranormal influences on these writers enhance and deepen our appreciation of their books?

RR: I think we look to writers to give us a sense of the world. Our greatest writer, Shakespeare, did just that with parapsychological events in his work, as I have indicated, and others did as well, such as Tolstoy. Great writers provide us a sense of how the world is put together, how we play a part in it. It is a also a shame that we ignore what they tell us, because it adds to the mystery of our lives, it throws a light on what often appears to us as accident, when in fact it may be something else entirely.

MP: Freud is typically seen as hostile to the paranormal. You argue that his attitude was more complex, even conflicted. Can you elaborate?

RR: Freud was constantly intrigued by the paranormal. The problem was he was trying to establish a new science, psychoanalysis, and he did not want to add to that things parapsychological. It is well documented that one of his primary colleagues, Ernest Jones, did everything to discourage him from publishing in this area, for fear that it would hurt psychoanalysis. His other colleague, Ferenczi, on the other hand was constantly pushing Freud to write more in this area, and did a number of psi investigations with a medium or exploring telepathy. The material concerning Freud's ambivalence in this area is actually readily available, including also his discoveries of how to explore psi in psychoanalysis (to say nothing of his letter that if he had to do it all over again, he would become a parapsychologist). It is just that Freud's followers, particularly his American followers, were determined to excise Freud's explorations in this area — or to consign them to Jung whom they all criticized and did not like. The American psychoanalytic establishment has done much to minimize psi.

MP: Books like George Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal argue that the paranormal is marginalized in most societies. Yet some anthropologists report a ready acceptance of psi in cultures that have not been influenced by the West. As the author of a book titled The Paranormal Surrounds Us, do you think the marginalization of psi is a feature of all (or most) cultures, or is this marginalization distinct to Western post-Enlightenment culture?

RR: I think Western culture, as part of its emphasis on rationalism and "scientific" thinking, has so far managed to marginalize any investigation of these phenomena. It began early on. I am not enough of a philosopher to localize this way of thinking, that we are heir to, but in my emphasis on Navajo theories of causality, I am trying to show that other societies put more credence in parapsychological facts than we do.

MP: Doubt about anomalous claims is understandable, but some people go much further and are committed to aggressively debunking every case, often on the basis of incomplete information. An example would be the self-styled “guerrilla skeptics” who populate Wikipedia. As a psychologist, what do you think accounts for militant hostility toward the very idea of the paranormal?

RR: No one wants to think about the aggressive possibilities inherent in psi. That is one aspect of things. The other is a kind of reversal, not unlike siding with the aggressor. My guess is that these people suffered a narcissistic blow as children when they were told that wishes could not bring about events, that one's thoughts could not influence the outside world. And so, with a kind of vengeance, having accepted this, they turn against those who suggest that perhaps, particularly unconsciously, we can influence the world at times. I explore this aspect of things in speaking about how magicians function in the Western world, and how they are unable to recognize that their sleight of hand history comes from a place they never dreamed: from shamans who were trying to elicit psi by convincing people that it was taking place.

MP: Thanks, Richard, for your thoughtful answers. I hope you find a wide and receptive readership for The Paranormal Surrounds Us.