Michael Prescott's Blog

The God copout

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of a powerful collective unconscious that might somehow manifest phenomena such as UFOs. But I also said I thought this was kind of a copout. Having thought a little more about it, I wanted to explain why feel that way.

In the prescientific era, people had a ready explanation for any phenomenon they didn't understand: "God did it." (Or "the gods did it.") Thunder during a storm? It was the growling rage of a deity. A rainbow after a storm? God put it there as a sign. Crop failures, pestilence, plague? God was punishing sinners or teaching a painful lesson.

From a certain perspective, this makes sense. God is presumed to have infinite powers; he can accomplish anything; and he is the ultimate creative power behind everything that exists. Therefore it's perfectly logical to credit him (or blame him) for anything that happens that we don't understand.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't get us very far. We never actually learn what causes thunder, rainbows, crop failures, pestilence, and plague. The only way to get real answers is to look for a clearly understandable mechanism – discharges of static electricity; the prismatic effects of water vapor in the air; boll weevils and other parasites; viruses and bacteria; unsanitary conditions, etc. As long as we are content to attribute everything that happens to the inscrutable will of an infinitely powerful and impossibly remote abstraction, we're not going to make much practical progress. The scientific era took off when people stopped being satisfied with the explanation "God did it."

The thing that worries me is that the collective unconscious is quite a bit like God. It is amorphous, hard to define, impossible to see, not amenable to proof, and credited with pretty much any kind of power necessary to accomplish anything we wish to attribute to it. UFOs? Manifestations of the collective unconscious. Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, the Mothman? Manifestations of the collective unconscious. Mediumistic communications, automatic writing, ectoplasmic materializations, poltergeist activity, apparitions, you name it … Manifestations of the collective unconscious.

It's a catchall explanation that actually explains nothing. Moreover, it assumes the existence of a collective unconscious that has powers far beyond anything we ordinarily observe in our own lives. For all the talk about manifesting success in love or finance by mastering the subconscious mind, most people still find love and money the old-fashioned way – by  taking concrete steps to obtain it.

The collective unconscious, much like God, is so ineffable, so all-encompassing, so unapproachable, that no possible mechanism can be imagined by which its actions are carried out. Nobody asks, "Just how exactly did God do it?" The assumption is he can do anything he wants, simply by willing it to be so. Much the same assumption seems to be made about the collective unconscious – that it can shape and mold the world however it wishes.

This requires the world to be pretty malleable, which is not at all how we experience it. In our ordinary experience, the world seems frustratingly solid. We can bang our head against the wall, but the wall stubbornly refuses to dissolve. We can strive to materialize fresh water in the desert, but unless we find an oasis, we'll continue dying of thirst. We can wish for a miracle, but miracles are rare.

We're told, through mediums, that the next plane of existence offers an environment that is considerably more malleable than our present one. Summerland is supposed to be a realm in which mental action largely replaces physical labor, a place where just imagining something is enough to make it so. Maybe so. But the point of this teaching is precisely that Summerland is significantly different from our current experience. It is not just a continuation of what we already know; it's a new kind of experience. If our world were easily remade by pure mental action, whether individual or collective, it would probably be a lot more like Summerland and a lot less like the mess that it is.

So even though the hypothesis of a collective unconscious that manifests UFO phenomena in symbolic and sometimes absurd, dreamlike terms is intriguing, I'm inclined to reject it. I'm not sure it really gets us anywhere. Of course, I'm not sure what other hypothesis works, either. As Yul Brynner might say, "It's a puzzlement."

Opening the door

I’ve been noodling a little more on the subject of UFOs after reading a second book by Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College, and part of a compendium of UFO reports edited by Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record.

What strikes me most strongly about the subject are the many similarities between UFO encounters and certain paranormal phenomena, such as mediumship and channeling, automatic writing, premonitions and prophecy, and even PK and ESP. There seems to be too big an overlap to be merely coincidental. Here are some of the parallels: 

1. There is often a baffling “personal” connection between UFO sightings and the people who report them. The same individual may report multiple UFO sightings over a period of years. Some people have reported that when they stopped to look at a distant UFO, it quickly approached them. Drivers who flash their headlights at a UFO sometimes see the UFO flash its lights back. Just as poltergeist phenomena are typically associated with a certain individual, or religious manifestations like the Fatima appearances of the Virgin Mary are associated with a core group of people, some UFO cases seem to revolve around a particular person or group.
2. People often report being in a state of altered consciousness during a UFO encounter, and sometimes even prior to it. They report a trancelike state, or numbness and paralysis, or sudden intense emotions like euphoria, peace and love, or crippling fear. Altered consciousness is, of course, a feature of many paranormal experiences, including trance mediumship, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, and crisis apparitions.
3. Some people have premonitions about UFOs. They dream about the encounter one or two nights before it takes place. Or they find themselves unaccountably moved to venture outside and look up at the sky, where they discover a UFO hovering there as if waiting for them.
4. Some people feel they are in communication with the occupants of UFOs. In certain cases they believe that vast knowledge has been transmitted to them in some telepathic fashion, sometimes while they were transfixed by a beam of light from the hovering vessel. In other cases they take up automatic writing or trancelike communicating in order to convey messages from the aliens. This phenomenon has obvious similarities to trance mediumship and “spirit-directed” automatic writing, as well as to reports of a download of universal knowledge during an NDE (often when transfixed by "the Light"). Another parallel is that the content of these communications is often disappointingly trite or nonsensical. Although the recipient of this knowledge believes he has been gifted with deep wisdom about the nature of reality, consciousness, and the future, the actual communications are often extremely unconvincing and even absurd, as is often (though not always) the case with other channeled messages and with some NDE prophecies. 
5. There is a dreamlike quality to many UFO accounts, which is at least superficially similar to the dreamlike narratives often recounted by people who’ve experienced OBEs and NDEs — a magical, fairytale-like quality where events unfold with the baffling logic of a dream. Many of Robert Monroe’s OBEs are of this type.
6. As with most paranormal phenomena, UFO phenomena have proven frustratingly elusive, impossible to nail down. UFOs typically register only dimly and fleetingly on radar, and in some cases they show up very faintly even in time-exposed photos, though witnesses reported the UFO’s lights as very bright. The memories of observers can be vague or contradictory, and are sometimes lost altogether and recovered only under hypnosis – a methodology that may very well introduce false memories. The physical evidence of landings is never conclusive. Critical items of evidence have been known to inexplicably disappear. There is a tricksterish quality to many of the investigations. Even those who accept the validity of many UFO reports are split on the question of whether the observed phenomena are physically real objects or occupy some other category such as thought-forms or holographic projections.
7. One fairly consistent feature of UFO sightings is that they are introduced by a humming, buzzing noise or sensation that has been compared to a swarm of bees. Humming, buzzing, and other vibrations are typically reported at the onset of OBEs and are associated with other changes of consciousness. The whole idea of “raising vibrations” is central to the terminology of spiritualism and mysticism.
8. Finally, UFO sightings tend to come in waves or “flaps.” There is a period of excitement, with many reports coming in from various areas; then the excitement dies down; sometime later, it starts up again. The same pattern is detectable in the progress of the spiritualist movement, which quickly attained astonishing popularity in the mid-19th century, with thousands of people engaged in table-tipping and automatic writing, only to die down for a while and then periodically flare up. This up-and-down trend continued through the 1920s. (Today, spiritualism has largely morphed into other forms like the channeled “higher entities” popular in the 1970s and the fascination with near-death experiences and ghost-hunting today.) The patterns of near hysteria seen in both UFO and spiritualist movements are suggestive of “social manias,” as described by Charles Mackay in his famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. That’s not to say there is no reality underlying either UFOs or spiritualism. Instead, what I’m getting at is that the excitement tends to come and go in repetitive fashion. At key moments, it’s as if a match has been struck to dry tinder, causing a sudden flareup of public interest and high emotion; then the flames are doused and interest subsides. 

It’s hard to account for all these similarities. A skeptic would say that the same psychological aberrations – whether individual or communal – responsible for paranormal and spiritualist beliefs are also responsible for UFO sightings, and therefore the similarities are to be expected. This, of course, discounts all evidence for the reality of both categories of phenomena. Still, there may be some truth in it.

Perhaps there’s a deep well of irrationalism, a collective unconscious, that can be tapped at certain times, and which communicates through confusing symbols: what F.W.H. Myers called “the subliminal self,” which constitutes not only the subconscious but also the superconscious mind – a higher mind to which we are ordinarily denied access.

Suppose certain persons have the ability (usually without realizing it) to focus on or manifest the contents of this subliminal self. Suppose most such manifestations require the energy of many people, just as materializations in a séance room are said to require the combined “ectoplasm” of all the sitters, as well as the medium. I’m not saying there is such a thing as ectoplasm, only that there may be some kind of power or agency that can access the subconscious/superconscious mind and reify part of its contents, at least temporarily.

It may also be the case that more and more people can access this faculty as barriers to belief are broken down. It’s been reported that when Uri Geller came on the scene with his spoon-bending displays, ordinary people who watched him on television suddenly discovered that they, too, could bend spoons. Jack Houck, who for years has hosted “PK parties” where people bring their own cutlery and learn to manipulate it via PK, has said that the energy of a group is needed to, in effect, raise the vibrations in the room, and that the group’s initial skepticism and doubt must be broken down before dramatic effects will take place. Similarly, the spread of spiritualism in the 19th century seems due, in part, to the fact that people really were getting inexplicable results – and the more results people reported, the more likely other people were to get results. As barriers to belief were broken down, the phenomena snowballed.

This does have the appearance of a social mania or mass hysteria, but it could also be seen as the escalating activation of latent powers that are ordinarily unsuspected. (In fact, one might ask whether mass hysteria in general has a paranormal component, a kind of subliminal transference of thoughts and emotions that allows a certain state of mind to spread like wildfire and override rational restraints.)

None of this addresses the actual nature of UFOs and their occupants. Are they, in fact, thought-forms generated by the collective unconscious and manifested as temporary, quasi-real entities that come and go with the speed of thought? If so, it might explain why these sightings seem to keep pace, more or less, with the cultural and technological features of the societies observing them. A raft of UFO sightings in 1897 pretty consistently involved a vessel described in terms of a rigid airship. The first actual rigid airships were not manufactured by the Zeppelin company until 1900, but in 1897 the idea was already  "in the air," so to speak, having been patented and publicized. 

Since 1947, sightings have usually involved spinning saucers, vast triangular craft, and other futuristic machines. The saucer imagery appears to have originated in a misinterpretation: a pilot said the ten unidentified objects he'd seen moved "like a saucer if you skip it across the water." He did not actually say they were saucer-shaped, but the idea caught on, and suddenly people everywhere were seeing "flying saucers." The triangular craft and other shapes seem to owe much to science-fiction illustrations and movies. 

The (relative) regularity in the physical characteristics described any given wave of UFO sightings is perhaps attributable to their common source in the collective unconscious. When rigid airships are the coming thing, people see rigid-airship UFOs. When the saucer imagery has entered the public imagination, people see saucer-shaped UFOs. 

The subliminal self might also shed light on the bizarre, irrational, dreamlike nature of many encounters and the often nonsensical behavior and statements of the “saucer people” themselves. The pseudoscientific ramblings attributed to these purportedly super-advanced spacefarers do not inspire confidence in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. But nonsense, paradox, and nightmarish or dreamlike qualities are characteristic of the unconscious mind.

And then there are the reports of hapless humans coerced into having sex with aliens – or the well-known and often lampooned accounts of abductees forced to submit to rectal probing. Suppressed sexual desires and anxieties (penetration, whether desired or feared) are a generally acknowledged feature of the unconscious mind. If UFO experiences originate in the individual or collective unconscious, it would not be surprising to find sexual overtones in them. Certainly, Freud would have expected no less.

Perhaps the subliminal self has far greater capabilities than we commonly suppose, notably the ability to get in touch with other realities or even to manifest pseudo-realities. Perhaps it takes a certain key individual, who is in some way a generator or facilitator of the phenomena, to get the ball rolling. Then, if other individuals happen to perceive the results, their own belief systems are knocked askew and they are able to contribute to the phenomenon and keep it going or even cause it to escalate. After a while, emotions die down, the mechanism (whatever it might be) is worn out, and the sightings subside – until such time as another portal to the subliminal self, another of "the doors  of perception" (to use Aldous Huxley's phrase) is opened, and another series of sightings is inaugurated.

Is this hypothesis correct? I don't know. The problem is that it attributes so much power to the collective unconscious as to call into question any sort of facts or knowledge we might claim to have. It’s much like the super-psi hypothesis, which attributes vast creative abilities to the unconscious mind, capable of weaving a convincing illusion of contact with the dead, among other things.

Like the super-psi argument, the collective-unconsciousness idea feels like a bit of a copout – an attempt to explain these phenomena by saying they all emerge from an inexhaustible, infinitely powerful, yet unknown recess of the mind. Still, it could be true.

An alternative is that UFOs and their occupants are real, independent existents that are invisible to us under ordinary circumstances, but which become perceptible when we activate our seldom-used ability to perceive other planes of reality.

Or perhaps there is no contradiction between these two possibilities. If we could see things from a higher perspective, like a Flatlander lifted off his sheet of paper and looking down at his world from above, we might see that the same phenomenon can be both a subjective, symbolic thought-form and a real, independent entity in its own right.

Actually, I suspect something like this is probably true. I also suspect that my regular mind, as opposed to my higher-dimensional subliminal self, cannot possibly make sense of it.

Flying high

This will probably not be a very well thought-out post. I'd like to present a few ideas and send then see if there's a way of stitching them together. I'm not sure if it will work.

My inspiration for this train of thought is Passport to Magonia, by Jacques Vallee,  a well-known UFO researcher who served as the model for the character played by Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The book, originally published in 1969, was initially unpopular with both skeptics and "ufologists" alike. In it, Vallee tries to associate modern-day reports of flying saucers and their occupants with much older reports of fairy folk, elves, leprechauns, angels, giants, and other "tall tales." (The subtitle, from Folklore to Flying Saucers, makes this point clear.) He sees all of these various accounts as part of a single phenomenon. As he puts it:

The phenomenon has stable, invariant features, some of which we have tried to identify and label clearly. But we have also had to note carefully the chameleon-like character of the secondary attributes of the sightings: the shapes of the objects, the appearance of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected.

Vallee is clearly dubious of the assumption that flying saucers are actual physical craft that have arrived from another planet, and seems to lean toward a different hypothesis, but though he allows himself a few conjectures, he does not commit to any of them.  After recounting an event that supposedly took place near Tripoli, Libya, on October 23, 1954 at three in the morning — a farmer saw a flying craft shaped like an egg land near him, saw six men in coveralls and gas masks inside, and was hit by an electric shock when he touched the vehicle – Vallee writes:

If it were possible to make three-dimensional holograms with mass, and to project them through time, I would say this is what the farmer saw. And with that theory we could explain many of the apparitions: in numerous UFO cases and in some religious miracles, the beings appeared as three-dimensional images whose feet did not actually touch the ground. But what about the other physical actions, such as the electric shocks?

I'm not sure electric shocks are an insuperable impediment to the hypothesis; who knows what sort of capabilities a time-traveling interdimensional hologram might possess?

Later, Vallee indulges in a different conjecture:

There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the physical and the mental. There is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated, needing no superior intelligence to trigger them. This would explain the fugitivity of UFO manifestations, the alleged contact with friendly occupants, and the fact that the objects appear to keep pace with human technology and to use current symbols. The theory … also, naturally, explains the totality of religious miracles as well as ghosts and other so-called supernatural phenomena.

He does not endorse this conjecture either; he simply mentions it among several other possibilities. It strikes me as reminiscent of the super-psi hypothesis sometimes used to explain mediumship and apparitions.

The most interesting – I might even say disturbing – aspect of the book is the similarity of some of the older reports to the more contemporary UFO sightings. People in past eras reported contact with visitors, sometimes described as dwarfs or "little men," and reported seeing celestial chariots that behave very much like today's "flying saucers."  The sheer strangeness of many of these encounters from earlier centuries is matched by distinctly strange elements of some modern UFO accounts, such as one in which the occupants of a UFO baked a biscuit for their human visitor and let him eat it, or another incident in which a hapless human was brought aboard a UFO and encouraged to have conjugal relations with a not-quite-human female.

Naturally, the more outlandish stories, both past and present, can be dismissed as the products of aberrant psychology, false memories, hoaxes, or urban legends and their premodern equivalents. But perhaps it is a little too easy to simply wave away the strangest stories without further consideration. When dealing with a phenomenon that is not understood, are we really in the position to know which reports are too strange to be believed? Maybe a high degree of strangeness is exactly what we ought to expect.

In any event, Vallee  makes a compelling case that the UFO phenomenon, whatever it may consist of, is not new. The idea of UFOs as products of advanced extraterrestrial technology may be new, and the visitors today may resemble science-fiction aliens rather than leprechauns or fairies, but the basic ingredients of the standard UFO sighting can be found in much earlier reports.

So that's one thing to consider. Now here's something else.

Mediumistic communications over the past century or more have pretty consistently said that departed persons will find themselves in an earthlike environment at least for a time. The nicer neighborhoods are sometimes called Summerland, and they consist of the kind of scenery the person knew on earth, shorn of its imperfections. The explanation usually given is that Summerland is the product of the collective unconscious of the spirits inhabiting it. The scenery is taken from the earthly memories of the inhabitants. The deceased F.W.H. Myers, purportedly speaking through Geraldine Cummins, called Summerland the "Land of the Lotus Eaters," meaning a place in which people were lost in a blissful fantasy. He also called it "the realm of illusion" and said that as the spirit progressed to higher planes, the essential falseness of Summerland would become apparent.

In short, Summerland is a consensus reality created by common elements in the unconscious minds of the deceased. This is why people of different backgrounds and life experiences end up in different environments. Apache warriors of a hundred years ago don't share the same world as NASA astronauts. The Apaches have one set of earthly reminiscences to draw on, while the astronauts have a very different set. With few overlapping values, the two environments are separate and distinct. We might visualize the many different planes as a vast Venn diagram, with many different circles overlapping at different points, but no two circles sharing precisely the same space. At least in the initial phases of afterlife existence (which also includes the less desirable neighborhoods, the so-called hellish worlds that are also products of unconscious thoughts made into thought-forms), the environment is a function of material residing in the unconscious.

On earth, we like to think that there is a clear line of demarcation between the objective and the subjective, and that the world we inhabit is objective even if our experience of it is, by definition, subjective. But this line of demarcation blurs when we examine it closely. Since all experience is and must be subjective, and since we cannot know anything except by experience (either our own direct experience or our experience of learning about it from some other source), it's tempting to say that our reality is purely subjective. And yet there needs to be some distinction between the kind of subjectivity that's classified as hallucinations, madness, or simply imagination and fantasy, and the "normal" experience of everyday life. As a rule of thumb, we tend to assume that if the same experience is shared by multiple people, then it has a high degree of objectivity, while if the experience is purely personal and nobody else is able to access it, then it falls into the realm of subjectivity.

But if so — if what we call objectivity consists essentially of shared experiences — then our "objective reality" becomes something more like a "consensus reality." And in that case, it starts to look more like Summerland, which is also a consensus reality. The difference between our experience and the experience of the Summerlanders would then be only one of degree, not of kind. Their environment would be, in some way, more immediately malleable, more open to the influences of mental action, than our own. We might imagine a succession of planes of reality – perhaps "planes of experience" would be a better term – rising from the earthly level, in which there appears to be a fairly clear distinction between mind and environment, to higher levels, in which that distinction becomes increasingly ambiguous, and perhaps finally to the really rarefied levels, in which there is no such distinction, and consciousness simply is everything there is.

Now, with this in mind, we can look again at Vallee's remarks. He notes that "the shapes of the objects, the appearance of their occupants, their reported statements, vary as a function of the cultural environment into which they are projected." He likens the UFOs and their occupants to hypothetical "three-dimensional holograms with mass, [projected] through time." And he wonders if "there is a medium in which human dreams can be implemented, and this is the mechanism by which UFO events are generated." All of this seems directly relevant to the idea of a consensus reality in which our experience is bounded by parameters set by the contents of the collective unconscious mind.

This notion might be a little clearer if we consider my favorite analogy, the experience of playing a virtual-reality game. Suppose you're playing a game set in the Middle Ages. You are fully immersed in a computer-generated environment that is constructed out of a data set of possibilities. These possibilities include typically medieval features like castles, armored knights, longbows and battle axes, cowled monks and hooded wizards. But because it is a medieval game, the data set does not include such elements as 747 jumbo jets, skyscrapers, cell phones, sunglasses, or machine guns. These options are not part of the package of information that is used to construct this particular reality.

By analogy, the data set of the game corresponds to the collective consciousness of people in any particular era and culture. The game environment itself corresponds to the consensus reality of those people.

Now let's say that a different person is playing a completely different game that is linked in some way to the same computer. This other game takes place in the 21st century. Its data set includes all the things that were not included in the medieval data set (jumbo jets, skyscrapers, etc.).  Ordinarily the person playing this game would be unaware of you and your game, but suppose the other guy has sufficient computer skills to to hack his way into your game as  an uninvited visitor. He will then be able to operate in your medieval environment by projecting an avatar into it (just as you operate in the game world through your avatar).

But what kind of avatar will he project? If he's using the data set of the medieval game, he won't be able to "materialize" in any distinctly 21st-century form. In his own game he might be a pilot flying a Cessna, wearing Ray-Bans and a flight suit, and carrying a semiautomatic pistol. But when projecting himself as an avatar into the Middle Ages environment, he must construct (or have constructed for him) a "physical" appearance out of the available options. There are no Cessnas in the medieval data set, but perhaps the nearest equivalent would be a nautical vessel. There are no Ray-Bans, but there are cowls. There are no flight suits, but there is armor. There are no pistols, but there are magicians' wands.

And so your visitor, appearing in the medieval game, might seem to be a mysterious figure indeed – a cowled man in a suit of shining armor, wielding a magician's wand of great power, and operating a magical sailing ship that flies through the air!  

In short, the intruder could become part of your world only by manifesting himself in terms of the options available – the data set underlying the game, or the  shared contents of the collective consciousness, depending on how you want to look at it. 

As I said, the idea is not really developed. But it's something to think about. 

Deeper than science

Here's a pretty common exchange in debates over parapsychology. Someone will point to a correlation between a brain state and a mental state, using it as evidence that consciousness originates in brain activity. An opponent will respond that correlation is not causation, and that the brain may be functioning only as a mediator of consciousness, which originates elsewhere. At this point the first person will say, "You can make that argument about any neurological evidence I present, no matter how strong the correlation may be. Essentially your position is unfalsifiable. Therefore it doesn't qualify as a scientific hypothesis."

I think this is true. But it's not the devastating refutation it may seem to be.

According to philosopher of science Karl Popper, a scientific theory must be testable and, as such, must be falsifiable in principle. There must be some way of potentially disproving it. This doesn't mean, of course, that it actually will be disproven, only that a test might disprove it.

Fair enough, but notice that this principle applies strictly to scientific theories. Not all viewpoints fall into this category. Among the viewpoints that are excluded are some positions that might be thought of as scientific theories, such as the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. These include the many-worlds hypothesis, the Copenhagen interpretation, David Bohm's "holomovement," and hundreds of others. As far as I know, none of these interpretations is testable or falsifiable. All of them are consistent with the math, and any of them might be true. They are not scientific theories, at least at this stage of their development. They are more like philosophical worldviews.

Similarly, in the example given above, the debate boils down to a difference in worldviews. In our debate, the first person is a philosophical materialist – someone who holds the ultimate basis of reality to be purely material or physical, with consciousness as an emergent property of physical things. The second person is a philosophical dualist – someone who holds that physicality and consciousness are two different kinds of things with equal ontological priority.

There's no way to definitively test either of these propositions empirically, which is why people have been arguing about them since at least the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. Both materialism and dualism are unfalsifiable hypotheses, and so they're not scientific theories. They transcend scientific theories, which are narrower in scope.

Admittedly, among Western intellectuals today, materialism is the default philosophical position, one often unthinkingly assumed to be self-evident – but that doesn't make it true. It simply means that materialism, at this period in history, is more popular than dualism. To this a materialist might say, "The popularity of materialism is no fluke. It's based on the tremendous success of materialist scientific inquiry over the past few centuries." But here we encounter a very common intellectual confusion.

The term materialism can be used in more than one sense. There's philosophical materialism, as described above, and there is also what can be called technical materialism, which is a tool or method of inquiry. Technical materialism makes no assumptions about the ultimate nature of reality. It simply posits that a physical, non-supernatural explanation should be sought first for any phenomenon. For instance, rather than assuming that thunder and lightning are produced by angry gods, a scientist following the rule of technical materialism will discover that the phenomena are caused by electrical discharges. Or again, rather than assuming that diseases are caused by malevolent spirits, a scientist following the rule of technical materialism will discover that microorganisms are responsible.

Technical materialism has been an enormously fruitful method for exploring the physical world. We moderns enjoy a fuller understanding of physical phenomena, and have been gifted with longer lifespans, greater comfort, and more affluence, than any previous generations. But our modern lifestyle is not owed to philosophical materialism, but to technical materialism, two things that are by no means the same. (In fact, it could be argued that much of the downside of modern life — the angst and anomie that characterize many developed societies — is attributable to philosophical materialism, with its rejection of spiritual values and its embrace of an uncaring, meaningless cosmos.) 

Nor is it the case that scientists must be — or historically have been — philosophical materialists. Many have been dualists or, for that matter, philosophical idealists. Isaac Newton, perhaps history's greatest scientist, was a deeply spiritual man who spent a great deal of his time studying the Bible, but he used the method of technical materialism in his scientific work. Albert Einstein had room in his worldview for God, however he understood this concept*; even so, technical materialism was his method in attacking scientific problems. People sometimes opine that such figures were guilty of inconsistency and compartmentalizing, but there's no inconsistency in holding a non-materialistic worldview while using technical materialism as a method. The method is merely a rule of thumb, not a statement about ultimate reality. 

To clarify this point, let's use a metaphor familiar to readers of this blog. We can look at our physical existence as akin to a fully immersive virtual-reality computer game. In that case, an explanation for the things that take place in our environment can be found in the rules of the game. The right policy is to seek to understand these rules as thoroughly as possible. It doesn't follow, however, that the rules of the game equal ultimate reality. As a matter of fact, they don't. The rules of the game are part of the game's programming, the lines of binary code which are the work of minds that exist in an entirely different reality – not the simulated reality we're experiencing when we play the game, but the actual reality that we experience when we take off the VR headset and return to the everyday world.

It might be argued that materialism is still the more parsimonious position. This would be correct only if there were no reason to doubt materialism. But there are philosophical arguments against the proposition that conscious awareness, including qualia, can emerge from mindless physicality, not to mention reams of empirical evidence for paranormal and/or spiritual phenomena that are ruled out of court by the materialist position. Naturally, there are also philosophical arguments against dualism, most commonly the argument that it's impossible for an entirely nonphysical consciousness to interact with the physical world.** And there are empirical arguments against dualism, usually consisting of debunking the claims of parapsychology.

The empirical arguments and evidence on either side cannot be used to conclusively settle the debate, because the same evidence can be interpreted in ways consistent with either worldview. Whether or not one interpretation is more plausible than another is a source of endless controversy, with materialists insisting that any "natural" explanation, no matter how far-fetched, is more plausible than a paranormal or supernatural explanation, while dualists are equally adamant in finding the "natural" explanations frequently ad hoc and hopelessly strained.

In other words, the debate is unresolved, as has been true for thousands of years. Both sides have their talking point. But the one point materialists are not (philosophically) entitled to make is that the opposing position is wrong because it's "unscientific." That's a category error.

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*Einstein: "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive." Quoted here. 

**One possible way of getting around this materialist objection is to turn (again) to our virtual-reality simulation metaphor and say that consciousness does not interact directly with the physical world but rather with the underlying "programming code," which, as information, can be processed by consciousness.

Splinters of truth

I’ve been thinking about various issues relating to postmortem survival and the evolution of consciousness. Well, I guess I’m always sort of thinking about that. But lately I’ve been thinking that I’ve probably gotten off on the wrong track with my focus on information processing and my attempted analogies to computer systems and virtual reality.

All analogies will break down at some point (this is inevitable when comparing qualitatively different things), but in this case the analogies seem to fail pretty quickly. Trying to compare consciousness to a laser beam reading a disk just doesn’t seem to work, because a laser beam is not aware, let alone self-aware. And then what is the render engine (the thing that converts bits of data into a graphical environment)? Is that also consciousness, or is it something else?

If we say that consciousness can choose which data path to follow, then it’s not really like a laser beam (which can’t choose anything); it’s more like the person using the computer, whose choices control the direction of the game. But then the analogy fails in a different way, because we are attempting to explain consciousness by comparing it to the (conscious) computer user - which explains nothing. It's like explaining an orange by comparing it to another orange.

Or if we say there are no free-will choices and the program just plays out inexorably, then what is the role of consciousness? At best it is a merely passive observer. 

Although I think there is some merit in the idea that information is fundamental to reality, it seems to me that extending this idea to computer systems, even as a rough analogy, is not helpful. It obfuscates more than it clarifies. It offers a veneer of "scientific" respectability, while actually being too vague and inherently untestable to be scientific at all  

That’s one thing I’ve been noodling on. Another, related point is that it’s probably a fool's errand to try to understand "how it all works." The Flatland analogy that’s often come up in this blog is relevant here. A Flatlander - a two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional world - might, with great difficulty, be able to grasp the concept of a third dimension, at least in purely mathematical terms. It is doubtful he could visualize it except in the crudest terms. Even if he experienced it directly, as does A. Square in the novel Flatland, he could not express his insights in terms that would be intelligible to less enlightened Flatlanders, nor would he himself retain more than a foggy impression of his experience.

Now imagine the insuperable difficulties faced by a Flatlander trying to grasp the fourth (physical) dimension, or the fifth. 

I think we are in a comparable position. Our brains, constrained by the laws of three physical dimensions plus time, simply aren’t capable of processing the realities of an almost infinitely higher-dimensional system. Even if, like St. Paul, we were taken up to "the third heaven," we would be tongue-tied upon our return. Eyes have not seen what we had seen; ears have not heard what we had heard. The best we could do is relate to it as a dream - Bottom's dream, because it hath no bottom. 

The human mind, limited by the narrow parameters of the human brain, just can’t grasp these mysteries. We can grasp at them, like a baby trying to catch a sunray. But our fists will close on air. Even an episode of "cosmic consciousness," in which the secrets of the universe are seemingly revealed in a blinding epiphany, will last only a short time - minutes or hours - and afterward will leave only a fading, distant glow, an emotional impression, a half-glimpsed, half-remembered "something" that haunts us but eludes description. It is as if we briefly saw the whole picture in a glass, and then the glass shattered, and we are left with only splinters of the truth.

Perhaps the best we can do - this is my third point - is try to imagine a reality in which time does not operate as it does here, and in which the laws of cause and effect are altered in ways that would seem illogical by earthly standards. A tangled hierarchy, in which the end is embedded in the beginning, may be the best way of looking at it. Familiar examples include a Möbius strip, a snake swallowing its own tail, and the famous Escher drawing of two hands sketching each other. 

For our purposes, we can see the evolution of personal consciousness as a tangled hierarchy (also known as a strange loop). At one end of the continuum is the Oversoul or Higher Self, the culmination of personal development, which comprises all the selves that have come before. (Although the term "before" is problematic here.) At the other end of the continuum is the mundane self, the ego-identity that you and I would recognize as "who I am." The paradox is that the Higher Self is informed by and constructed out of the experiences of the various mundane selves that make up its incarnations, and yet at the same time (except there is no "time") the Higher Self chooses those incarnations and watches over them, sometimes providing guidance. 

In our earthly terms, this makes no sense - the hand is drawing itself. But from a higher-dimensional perspective in which every time is now, and the story is both fully told and still unfolding, it can (perhaps) make sense. Not the kind of sense we can truly grasp - like Flatlanders, we are too limited to make it real - our mental equipment would overload and short-circuit long before we were able to achieve real understanding. But vaguely we can discern the outlines. Perhaps.

Does this mean we lose our precious mundane self, our "I", sometime after death? No, because nothing is ever lost. Everything that ever was or ever will be always is, in the eternal now. Does it mean that we surrender our memories of this life when we enter our next incarnation? No, because our multiple incarnations all play out at once; we are alive in the 21st century, and in Ancient Rome, and in a lunar colony, and in the afterlife realm, all at the same time (because there is no time). Does it mean that our Higher Self is subjecting us to suffering that we would not have chosen? No, because the Higher Self is us; as the apotheosis of all our mundane selves, it can choose nothing that we haven’t already chosen.

A man of eighty, looking back on his distant childhood, feels both a sense of continuity with the child he was and a sense of detachment from him; he both is that child, now and forever, and is not that child, whom he has long since left behind. He may feel sorry for some of the suffering the child went through, yet also glad about it, because it made him the man he is. The child would not have wanted to suffer, but the man knows better. And the child and the man are the same. (And yet different.) 

Paradox is the only way to understand it. And yet paradox by its nature is incomprehensible. Which gives us another paradox - we can understand only by the method of not understanding.

A dream that hath no bottom, indeed.

Sally forth

Doing research for a novel, I read up recently on salvia divinorum, a psychoactive plant that is usually smoked or chewed. Known more commonly as salvia or just Sally, the plant is legal in some jurisdictions and has a long history of use in traditional societies. It can be quite dangerous, though. While I don't think it's been directly linked to any deaths, it can bring on terrifying hallucinations with lasting psychological consequences.

Salvia operates on different neural pathways than other hallucinogens and tends to produce chaotic thoughts, visual and tactile synesthesia (you "see" things with your skin), and a profoundly depressing or deeply frightening sense of dissociation.

The nature of these hallucinatory experiences is interesting. What follows are quotes from some people who had bad trips on salvia (as well as a few who found the experience more enlightening than scary).

Many users report out-of-body experiences, often combined with the sense of the body flattening out into a two-dimensional geometrical shape like a plank of wood or a Lego block. (I realize Legos and planks are not really two-dimensional objects, but this is how people describe it.) The sense of ego-identity, of personal existence, can be profoundly undermined. 

My buddy did 40x and said he floated in his chair out of an apartment building, looked back and was floating 20 stories up watching everyone in the building through the walls.

The tv began to flash solid colours and I could feel the sound waves hitting me and bouncing around the room. My head and arms stretched about 7 feet underneath my coffee table and then slowly slid back onto my head. At this point my standing fan and heater were talking to me in a really high pitched voice saying "You're so fucked up" over and over. I started to lift of the couch and fly out the window ... I saw planets and colours I've never seen before. As I came down from it, the feeling was like when you retract a cord back into an appliance it just kinda flys back into its place. Well that was me but to my body. Colours returned back to normal and my body returned. My friend said I sat on that couch for 40 mins not moving an inch besides my jaw and eyes being wide open.

Your soul gets vacuumed out of your body and you find yourself turning into a 2D object that's infinitely huge and twisting into itself and you will feel stuck here for eternity and will leave you doubting your existence for years afterwards. I'm still getting over it 6 years later.

I took a big hit of Salvia and exhaled and instantly went into a "Gold Hue Flipbook". It was basically my life being flipped through rapidly and when my conscious became normal, I slipped out of the 2d plane and was hovering over my body for a brief moment.

I even got to meet Lady Salvia herself, not before I was torn into a million pieces and all that remained was a ball of light. 

External reality can flatten out, twist in on itself, or become cartoonish and unstable. Comparisons are often made to computer programs - glitches, video lags and loops, graphical effects, and pixels. 

My friend's experience with it was his world was "peeling" away ...

Next thing I know my vision is getting saturated, literally like Photoshop effects, and then when I move my head even slightly it's like everything is warping and stretching, like a graphical bug, with pixels not loading, stuff like that. My field of view becomes increasingly chaotic until the vibrating turns into something more like spiraling and then it kind of whirlpools into a point and shatters.

Everything gets depth and becomes pixels, the ground gets depth and becomes pixels and starts moving and carrying [me] around on the pixels, while moving [I try] to look inbetween the pixels into nothing, and [try] to feel in between them ...

I couldn't see anything at all. It was a kaleidoscope so intricate that the pieces were not visible to the naked eye. It was as if a computer took all of its pixels and scrambled them into some random configuration.

My vision seemed to be consistent of pixels like a computer, and all I had to do was turn away ... Turn away and look at the real reality, but I just couldn't.

From the bottom right corner of my vision an invisible hand grabbed this "layer" of reality and ripped it away. It was as if I had no chance to say goodbye, I disappeared into some sort of machine that is responsible for perception. I was part of a segment of reality and it felt as if my life had literally "come to the end of the roll" and I did not exist anymore. It was quite harrowing, yet it retained a very childlike quality.

The last friend I smoked it with had no idea what he was in for, as I don't think I'd informed him enough ... Straight away he seemed distressed and started saying "Whaaat... okay... take it off now dude. I've seen enough. What is this?" Apparently he thought himself an icon in a video game, and he was trapped between planes of reality. He had to make a jump between a clockwork mechanism at the right moment or something 'bad' would happen, and everything seemed fake (classic salvia). He wasn't quite right for about 30 minutes after that. 

The takeaway from the experience is often in line with Roger Ebert's words on the day of his death, "This is all an elaborate hoax." 

It's like nothing exists and all is just ... like fake or something.

This is when I realize that all of reality and everything that I knew to be true was false. I realized that there was someone or something out there that can fuck with everything however they wanted ...  I mean that there was something out there that can do anything it wanted to and it was basically god ... Humans are basically nothing and it can totally fuck with our lives however the hell it wanted to. The "god" can make shit repeat over and over again or maybe put a black hole in the middle of America, etc.

Salvia unzipped myself in half and everyone around me morphed into laughing jokers, causing me to believe that the world had played a giant trick on me and that everything I knew was totally fake. Helpless and terrified.

Breathed out and suddenly, it was as if God pressed stop on my reality. This cruel, heartless, all surrounding, unimaginably powerful God just stopped everything. Suddenly everyone I'd ever known, all the places I'd been, my whole life, had been a lie. It had been just a game, a silly puppet show, and it meant nothing in comparison to the depths of existence beyond my life, way into the infinity of the universe ... I realised I wasn't tripping, this was real. All along my life has been this insane charade which God has now chosen to break down. As I am engulfed in terror at this new reality, the deeper, endless layers of the true reality began folding into my view like the bag of an accordion. A dark, powerful stream of places and perceptions I can't begin to describe, and didn't understand at the time. I shouted out for my partner, who I realised must be part of this fake reality too. My sitter pulled me out of it, and I was back here. Everything seemed fake for a long time after that. The scariest part of this experience was that the Salvia made me believe 100% that I was experiencing the destruction of everything I had ever known.

I was nothing. I was just part of whatever it is that makes up the universe, looking at all the rest of it. I squinted and inspected what I was seeing. Distance didn't matter, everything was too close for it too. I came to the conclusion that all of what I was seeing was a thin layer on my eyeballs, like a TV screen painted onto them ... Everything I was seeing was made of individual, single color pixels, like a TV screen, but the colors weren't limited at all! And they didn't have a definite shape, either. They were all roughly oval. Sort of pill-shaped, but i got more of the impression that they were like plant cells , with thin layers of membrane around each one that kept it binded to the others on the proper sequence. That fascinated me, so I looked harder at it, unable to discern if my eyes were open or closed now, it was as if I was looking at everything on a microscopic level and it was all very alive. When I began trying to concentrate on the cell membranes, the cells would always come unglued, and fall to pieces from each other. All of the cells that had formed together to make something just fell apart like a lot of sand falling to the floor. I didn't know what I was doing to the things that I disintegrated, so I tried to stop, but by then everything was corrupted by my stare, and it started to break apart on a cellular level. Everything was just coming unglued. I recall then that I heard a voice, I suppose it was female, but it really transcended language. it was just really really soothing. She told me in words that aren't words that what I was seeing was the way of things, how the past left to make way for the present.

And what seems like multiple other people's experiences, the only way I can explain it is that it's almost like there are entities that are part of our subconcious mind and the collective unconscious. They are "behind the scenes" in making our objective reality. They are always shifting things to make them seem real and authentic, almost like this reality is just a sinister joke, or some sort of game we all play. 

When the illusory layers of reality are peeled away like pixels dropping off a screen, what remains is the reality "behind the curtain." This can be perceived as a sudden access of universal knowledge, a "cosmic consciousness" experience.   

I closed my eyes that last time I was transported into another dimension where I FINALLY understood life and all of its concepts and a multicolored being came to me and presented himself and explained to me that all we are as humans are tiny pixels working our hardest to play out life for beings above us. He explained to me that his people all understood through psychedelic drugs that they need to work together as pixels to play out our lives and that we needed to do the same for the beings above us. We are all tiny pieces to an indescribably large puzzle, his whole society was a peaceful and enlightened culture and we need to be the same way here in our lives working together to play out peaceful life. 

The whole universe made sense to me at the time then I looked around and I realized I was on top of a pyramid like structure and I looked at my body to see I was made out of a red windowpane LSD type structure, I then spiraled around for a while then I opened my eyes to see my room I felt that I understood every meaning and aspect of life and I sat there for a long time just thinking to myself and trying to remember all of my experiences into salvia land and I was surprised how easily I let go to the experience and didn’t try to hold on to what I thought reality was.

There can be lasting effects, both negative and positive. 

Salvia is the only thing I've done that has so completely shattered my reality and forced me to reassess my entire life and the way I live it.

My old vision of death as simple oblivion has been wiped away, and it's very difficult for me to imagine death as anything other than a new transformation into the conscious energy we were before birth and will return to again. There is a new fear in my mind because of this - fear that there's no way out, fear that I will have to endure all the cosmos ever has in it. Sometimes we crave oblivion, we want rest, we want peace, we want off this spinning sphere for a while. And in those moments of fear I remember the void, the pregnant peace, the infinite expanse of nothing, the utter lack of anything and somehow the foundation of everything. If we can know the void, then we can know peace.

These stories are consistent with the hypothesis that the brain is a filter and transceiver that narrows down and reconstructs a vastly larger reality within manageable, familiar constraints, and that when this function is compromised, our perception of reality will radically (and perhaps disorientingly and terrifyingly) expand, with familiar objects dropping away or being peeled off in layers. The stories are also broadly consistent with the idea that physical reality is analogous to a virtual-reality simulation generated by an information-processing program, and that the subjective experience of each of us is akin to the rendered imagery on the screen of our own personal computer terminal - imagery that can glitch up, get caught in an endless loop, or disappear altogether if the render engine fails. 

Finally, it suggests that there is an overall plan behind the scenes, carried out by higher-level entities who apparently have a certain compassion for us, even though they seem bewilderingly remote.

None of which proves anything, but it does provide more grist for the speculation mill. 

A case of cosmic consciousness

Lately, at bedtime, I've been reading bits and pieces of Richard Maurice Bucke's famous 1901 study Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. The book is a compilation of accounts featuring persons both notable and unknown who underwent mystical experiences that uplifted their thought and character –  essentially what psychologist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences" and what Hindu tradition calls "kundalini experiences."

Some of these accounts are more interesting and persuasive than others. Many of the best are those provided at first hand by Bucke's contemporaries – otherwise ordinary people whose lives were changed by a transcendent sense of oneness with the cosmos lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. One of the most intriguing of these reports is related in Chapter 29 of Part V and involves a woman identified only as C.M.C.

What follows is an abridged version of her story.

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I was born in the year 1844. I have been told  that as a child I never seemed young – that is, that along with my youth there was an air of thoughtfulness that belongs to more advanced years. I cannot remember a time when I did not think and wonder about God. The beauty and sublimity of nature have always, from early childhood, impressed me deeply.…

The vastness and grandeur of the God which I felt in nature I could never reconcile with the God in the Bible, try as I would, and of course I felt myself a wicked skeptic in consequence. So it went on and though to all appearance I was happy and full of life like other girls, there was always that undercurrent – a vein of sadness deep down, out of sight.…

At twenty-two I was married. Ten years later a change of place broke up the old routine of my life, giving me new associates and new interests. I was thrown into relation with people of more liberal tendencies… From that time, without my going very deeply into the subject, a general idea of evolution was gained, and gradually the old conceptions gave place to more rational ones…. My attitude was that of an agnostic.

There I rested, not altogether content, it is true. Something in life had been missed which it seemed ought to be there; depths in my own nature which had never been sounded; heights I could see, which had not been reached.… An illness, combining extreme bodily prostration with the equally extreme mental and emotional disturbance, revealed to me the depths in my own nature. After some months my strength was restored and my mental condition to some extent improved, but the deep unrest remained. With the power to suffer came the power of sympathy with all suffering. What I had hitherto known or realized of life was as the prick of a pin to the thrust of a dagger. I had been living on the surface; now I was going down into the depths, and as I went deeper and deeper the barriers which had separated me from my fellow men were broken down, the sense of kinship with every living creature had deepened, so that I was oppressed with a double burden. Was I never to no rest or peace again?…

Passing over the interval between this time in September, 1893, as unimportant, except for the constant struggle within me, I proceed to describe, as well as may be, the supreme event of my life, which undoubtedly is related to all else, and is the outcome of those years of passionate search.

I had come to see that my need was greater even than I had thought. The pain and tension deep in the core and center of my being was so great that I felt as might some creature which had outgrown its shell, and yet could not escape. What it was I knew not, except that it was a great yearning – for freedom, for larger life, – for deeper love. There seemed to be no response in nature to that infinite need. The great tide swept on uncaring, pitiless, and strength gone, every resource exhausted, nothing remained but submission. So I said: There must be a reason for it, a purpose in it, even if I cannot grasp it. The Power in whose hands I am may do with me as it will!…

At last, subdued, with a curious, growing strength in my weakness, I let go of myself! In a short time, to my surprise, I began to feel a sense of physical comfort, of rest, as if some strain or tension was removed. Never before had I experienced such a feeling of perfect health. I wondered at it. And how bright and beautiful the day! I looked out at the sky, the hills and the river, amazed that I had never before realized how divinely beautiful the world was! The sense of lightness and expansion kept increasing, the wrinkles smoothed out of everything, there was nothing in all the world that seemed out of place….

The light and color glowed, the atmosphere seemed to quiver and vibrate around and within me. Perfect rest and peace and joy were everywhere, and, more strange than all, there came to me a sense of some serene, magnetic presence – grand and all pervading. The life and joy within me were becoming so intense that by evening I became restless and wandered about the rooms, scarcely knowing what to do with myself. Retiring early that I might be alone, soon all objective phenomena were shut out. I was seeing and comprehending the sublime meaning of things, the reasons for all that had before been hidden and dark. The great truth that life is a spiritual evolution, that this life is but a passing phase in the soul's progression, burst upon my astonished vision with overwhelming grandeur. Oh, I thought, if this is what it means, if this is the outcome, then pain is sublime! Welcome centuries, eons, of suffering if it brings us to this! And still the splendor increased….

I felt myself going, losing myself. Then I was terrified, but with a sweet terror. I was losing my consciousness, my identity, but was powerless to hold myself. Now came a period of rapture, so intense that the universe stood still, as if amazed at the unalterable majesty of the spectacle! Only one in all the infinite universe! The All-loving, the Perfect One! The Perfect Wisdom, truth, love and purity! And with the rapture came the insight. In that same wonderful moment of what might be called supernal bliss, came illumination. I saw with intense inward vision the atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composed – I know not whether material or spiritual – rearranging themselves, as the cosmos (in its continuous, everlasting life) passes from order to order. What joy when I saw there was no break in the chain – not a link left out – everything in its place and time. Worlds, systems, all blended in one harmonious whole. Universal life, synonymous with universal love!… How long the vision lasted I cannot tell. In the morning I awoke with a slight headache, but with the spiritual sense so strong that what we call the actual, material things surrounding me seemed shadowy or a shadowy and unreal. My point of view was entirely changed. Old things had passed away and all had become new. The ideal had become real, the old real had lost its former reality and had become shadowy. This shadowy unreality of external things did not last many days. Every longing of the heart was satisfied, every question answered, the "pent-up, aching rivers" had reached the ocean – I loved infinitely and was infinitely loved!…

How foolish, how childish, now seemed petulance of discontent in presence of that serene majesty! I had learned the grand lesson, that suffering is the price which must be paid for all that is worth having; that in some mysterious way we are refined and sensitized, doubtless largely by it, so that we are made susceptible to nature's higher and finer influences – this, if true of one, is true of all. And feeling and knowing this, I do not now rave as once I did, but am "silent" "as I sit and look out upon all the sorrow of the world" – "upon all the meanness and agony without end." That sweet eternal smile on nature's face! There is nothing in the universe to compare with it – such joyous repose and sweet unconcern – saying to us, with tenderest love: All is well, always has been and always will be.…

The consciousness of completeness and permanence in myself is one with that of the completeness and permanence of nature. This feeling is quite distinct from any that I had before illumination and has sprung from that. I often ponder on it and wonder what has happened – what change can have taken place in me to so poise and individualize me. My feeling is as if I were as distinct and separate from all other beings and things as is the moon in space and at the same time indissolubly one with all nature.

Out of this experience was born an unfaltering trust. Deep in the soul, below pain, below all the distraction of life, is a silence vast and grand – an infinite ocean of calm, which nothing can disturb; Nature's own exceeding peace, which "passes understanding."

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The piece probably doesn't require much comment, but I will note that a major part of C.M.C.'s "illumination" consisted of seeing the order of things:

I saw with intense inward vision the atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composed – I know not whether material or spiritual – rearranging themselves, as the cosmos (in its continuous, everlasting life) passes from order to order. What joy when I saw there was no break in the chain – not a link left out – everything in its place and time. Worlds, systems, all blended in one harmonious whole.

Though I don't mean to reduce C.M.C.'s highly emotional and life-changing experience to cold, impersonal, quasi-scientfic terms, I can't help noting that this passage possibly relates to an idea we have often considered on this blog – namely, that the universe ultimately consists of information and information processing, and that this informational content is constantly changing as part of a vast, interconnected system. Passing "from order to order" is actually a very precise and concise way of describing the visible changes in such a system – for instance, the constant change from one ordered pattern to another in the animated graphics on a computer screen that occurs every time the screen refreshes.  

I would add that the "atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composed ... whether material or spiritual" could be interpreted as bits of data in this information processing system, which would be neither material nor spiritual, but would occupy some other ontological status as pure information; or, to make a related argument, they could be interpreted as Leibniz's monads (see Matt Rouge's guest post on that subject).

Of course, C.M.C. immediately links the above revelation to the following:

Universal life, synonymous with universal love!

The universal love is, perhaps, the attention bestowed by consciousness on the system, which brings it to life – breathing fire into the equations, to borrow the words of Stephen Hawking's famous question. Consciousness, in this view, observes and interacts with this system, perhaps by choosing a given pathway to actualize out of many possible alternatives. This is not to say that consciousness cannot love the objects of its attention; indeed, bringing a world to life out of cold, abstract algorithms could be seen as not only the ultimate act of creation but also the ultimate act of love. It is just possible that some intimation of this reality-actualizing power of consciousness underlies the consistent view of God across cultures as the creator of life and order, the generative principle that makes all things possible, and without which nothing could exist.  

Naturally, I don't suggest that this interpretation is the only possible one, or necessarily the correct one. An experience as profound as C.M.C.'s can be viewed from a variety of perspectives. 

The Internet vs. the Zeitgeist

Many years ago I read an odd little book called The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. It’s one of those desperately magisterial tomes like Julian Jaynes’ Origin of Consciousness — an overview by a nonspecialist attempting to assimilate a raft of information from disparate disciplines into a new overarching theory — and like Jaynes’ book, it’s worth reading even if most of its conclusions are probably wrong.

Shlain’s theory is that the advent of widespread literacy, especially in alphabetic languages, brings about changes in brain function, shifting the dominant hemisphere from right to left. He believed that the right hemisphere is associated with “female”traits while the left is associated with “male” traits; thus, the switch from one hemisphere to the other precipitated societal changes that worked to the disadvantage of women. In the original period of alphabetic literacy, the old goddess religion, matriarchal and pacific, was suppressed and replaced by new god-centered, patriarchal, militaristic faiths. In the much later period after the invention of the printing press, when literacy was rapidly extended to much of the population instead of being limited to an elite, there were further reactions against women, including the witch-burning manias that flared up unpredictably around Europe. Finally, Slain speculates that the rise of movies, television, and the Internet — all of which place more of an emphasis on visual information — will cause a shift back toward equality of the sexes and a more peaceful world.

I am skeptical of the gender assignments given to the two sides of the brain, and even more skeptical when Shlain extends his thesis to the cells of the eye, distinguishing between “male” cones and “female” rods. I am also skeptical that the goddess religion, as he describes it, even existed; while fertility statuettes with exaggerated female features turn up in many prehistoric sites, it’s a bit of a stretch to infer a matriarchal society, much less a time of Edenic peace. We don’t even know if these female figures were goddesses or simply charms, perhaps used to ensure a favorable pregnancy.

Though Shlain’s thesis is far from proven, one aspect of it has stuck with me – the idea that changes in communication technology can rewire the brain, with destabilizing societal effects.

Which brings us to what’s going on today.

Throughout much of the developed world, and certainly in the United States, we see intensifying polarization between increasingly extremist and uncompromising ends of the political spectrum. On a daily basis we’re treated to public displays of hysteria – wild outrage expressed by both left and right, though for different reasons. No area of life is off-limits. Escapist movies about comic-book superheroes give rise to charges of racism and sexism. Twitter and Facebook have become ideological battlegrounds. Restaurants offering ethnic foods are flashpoints for controversies about “cultural appropriation” (as if all culture is not appropriated from somewhere). Sports shows and teams are boycotted for political reasons. Everything is a hot button issue.

Many explanations for this new intensity in our political life have been advanced. It is said that the middle class is being “squeezed”; yet statistics indicate that while both middle-class and lower-income shares of the population have shrunk over the past 35 years, the percentages of Americans defined as upper-middle class and rich have grown – suggesting the middle class is contracting mainly because some of its members are migrating to a higher tax bracket.



Source: Urban Institute study

Or it’s said that middle-class affluence simply has less to offer us than it once did. But this seems to be a case of looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. Recently, in doing research for a time travel novella that takes place in 1972, I was intrigued to discover how much lower the standard of living was for middle-class people in that era. Houses, for example, were significantly smaller and had fewer amenities, while many ubiquitous modern-day items would have been considered science-fiction. A computer you carry in your pocket, which connects you to databases throughout the world and incidentally serves as a videophone? Household robots that vacuum or mop your floor? Wall-size flatscreen TVs with hundreds of channels, many commercial free and uncensored, in high definition? Self-driving cars, prosthetic limbs almost indistinguishable from the real things, medical treatments using genetic engineering to target specific cells, an orbiting telescope that sees to the ends of the universe …?

No matter how you look at it, our opportunities for leisure, recreation, and discovery are greater than ever. And the average middle-class American today lives like a sci-fi character in a '70s TV show  

It is also claimed that people are frustrated by unchanging social problems such as race and gender discrimination; but again, this claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There is far less discrimination in the developed world today than in any previous generation. As an example, a newspaper article I came across from 1972 reported casually that the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks had just voted to reaffirm their policy of not admitting blacks as members, a policy that was only rescinded in 1976 under intense legal pressure. The same newspaper regularly published the names of divorced couples in what I took to be a sign of the social stigma attached to divorce. (Mary Tyler Moore's groundbreaking sitcom of that era was originally intended to depict her as a divorcée,  but the network balked at anything so controversial.) Interracial relationships were illegal in many states and virtually unheard of anywhere. Gays had to remain closeted or face ostracism and abuse, including physical attacks. And on and on. No matter how you look at it, society has grown much more open and tolerant. A black president, a serious female presidential candidate, gay marriage – all would have been completely unrealistic 40 years ago.

Crime is down, too. Way down. Parts of New York City that were virtual no-go zones four decades ago are thriving now. Remember the scene in 1973's Live and Let Die when James Bond nearly gets killed in Harlem? That's right - in 1973, Harlem was too dangerous for James Bond. 

And let’s not forget that in 1972 draftees were being sent to fight and die in Vietnam. The casualties that the US accepted in that unpopular war were far higher than US losses in any recent conflict (58,209 American deaths in Vietnam vs. 4,497 in Iraq and 2,356 in Afghanistan), yet the war dragged on for years, and those who opposed it were labeled traitors.

America of forty years ago often seemed to be spiraling into chaos, with assassinations, urban riots, war, Watergate, the energy crisis, sky-high homicide rates, skyjackings, rampant prejudice and closed-mindedness, cult movements, apocalyptic predictions of the End Times, and TV fodder consisting almost exclusively of mind-numbing pap ("the glass teat," Harlan Ellison called it) ... and if we think our present conditions are worse, we are only fooling ourselves. 

But if the external circumstances – the economic, social, political, and cultural climate – have not worsened, and have in fact improved by any objective standard, then why are people becoming so upset about everything, to the point where it can reasonably be argued that we’re experiencing a “cold Civil War”?

People often point to cable TV and the Internet, both of which feed news consumers a steady diet of inflammatory stories while encouraging people to confine themselves to channels or websites that reflect their own biases; as a result, people become trapped in an echo chamber or bubble that reinforces and amplifies their opinions. This is clearly true. But I’m not sure it’s the whole truth, and this leads us back to Leonard Shlain and The Alphabet Versus the Goddess.

It’s at least arguable that the advent of the Internet poses as big a social and psychological challenge as the advent of literacy did for previous societies. I’m not sure anyone yet understands how the brain is affected and changed by the constant processing of online information – not only when one is sitting at a computer, but when one is using a smartphone or any web-connected device. It may not be too far-fetched to think that literacy altered brain function by making the left brain more dominant. Is it possible that the Internet is altering brain function in some new way?

What if the intuitive process of clicking on links and following one link to the next while chasing down snippets of information tends to activate the intuitive faculties of the brain, popularly supposed to reside in the right hemisphere? Perhaps this very process, endlessly and obsessively repeated, has the effect of deemphasizing or inhibiting those qualities associated with the left hemisphere — notably logical reasoning, goal-setting, and objectivity. There is a widely publicized claim that Internet usage correlates with a decline in attention span; though this study may be junk science, it’s hard to deny that the rapidity and convenience of the Internet can make it intolerably frustrating to plow through the pages of a book in search of information. There may be other, more subtle changes in neurological/psychological functioning that are not yet understood or even recognized. Could the surge in diagnoses of attention deficit disorder, autism, and Asperger’s syndrome be related to widespread neurological reprogramming?

Let’s suppose so. Even if most of us aren’t affected that profoundly, we may still feel as if things are somehow getting out of control. The changes in our mental processing may bring on the same kind of anxiety, confusion, mania, and hysteria (think of the witch burnings) that Shlain sees as the historical result of rapid advances in literacy.

In other words, it’s just possible that we are undergoing a massive transition from one mode of consciousness (developed as a result of general alphabetic literacy) to a new mode of consciousness (currently developing in response to the new technology of the Internet). And because we experience this change as something alien, we look for a cause outside ourselves, even though actually it is the inner workings of our mental mechanism that are directly responsible. Feeling confused and lost, we latch on to any convenient bogeyman to explain our chronic insecurity. We don’t hunt witches, but we do harass anyone who thinks differently than we do. Alt-right types mock and insult their critics and spread vicious memes. “Social justice warriors” define anyone who disagrees with them as racist, misogynistic, fascist, etc. The problem is always Someone Else.

By getting wired up to an endless supply of digital information, we may be rewiring our own brains – and experiencing all the unintended side effects that go along with a neurological remodeling job. The trickle of information from books and magazines that we perused in our spare time has become a spurting garden hose of facts, opinions, memes, urban legends, “fake news,” lies, distortions, slanders, and insults, illustrated with vivid images and sounds, 24 hours a day. And our beleaguered brains are melting under the strain.

Again, this is only a speculative hypothesis. It may be all wrong. It’s almost certainly at least partly wrong. But it just might be partly right. It could help to make sense of the rapid and baffling descent into hyper-partisanship, political polarization, and escalating demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings (on the left) and border walls and authoritarian crackdowns (on the right). In an era of relative peace and prosperity, when the West faces no true existential threat remotely comparable to the Axis powers of World War II or the USSR of the Cold War, it is truly strange that we find ourselves coming apart at the seams. We live in what should be seen as a Golden Age, yet we’re obsessed with apocalyptic visions and paranoid fantasies.

Instead of scanning the cultural and political trends of the modern world to understand our anxieties, perhaps we need only direct our attention to the softly glowing screen in front of our face.

Arrival

Since I never go to movie theaters anymore, I didn't watch the highly acclaimed science-fiction drama Arrival until last night, after I rented it from one of those supermarket vending machines.

It's a good movie, with strong performances and a compelling storyline – though I thought the method selected for establishing communication with the aliens was a bit disappointing, given the enormous technology that presumably would be marshaled for the task. Some of the story elements work better than others, and there are probably plot holes if you think about it really hard, but that's true of most movies.

I mention Arrival here because it provides an interesting angle on the whole Flatland idea that we sometimes explore on this blog – the idea that our current perception of reality is dimensionally limited, and that, from a higher-dimensional perspective, our experience would be radically different. Not that the movie ever mentions Flatland or extra-dimensionality as such, but you can read those ideas into it.

The appearance of this film, along with Interstellar, virtual reality technology, and the popularizing of the holographic universe notion, may suggest that a new paradigm is slowly forming in the public mind.

Or maybe not. Anyway, I liked the movie enough to sit through it twice last night. It made me curious to see the director's earlier effort, Sicario.

Two halves, but still whole

NDE researcher Titus Rivas posted a link 0n Facebook to an interesting article called "Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness."

One of the most popular arguments against the so-called transmission theory (the idea that the brain serves as a receiver, rather than an originator, of consciousness) involves studies of patients who've undergone a callosotomy — the severing of the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fiber joining the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This increasingly rare operation is used as a last resort in cases of severe epilepsy. It has the effect of almost entirely isolating the two halves of the brain, which remain joined only by a few thin threads of nerve tissue (primarily the fornix and the anterior and posterior commissures) which transmit very limited electrical signals.

Previously, scientists who studied the post-op patients concluded that these people now had two distinct centers of consciousness. In effect, where there had been one mind, there were now two. This was taken by many champions of materialism as strong evidence that the mind is generated by the brain, and that mind-body (or soul-body) dualism is untenable.

The new study, however, reaches a different conclusion. Here's a summary provided by the linked article:

A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain. Their results are published in the latest edition of the journal Brain.

Pinto, lead researcher on the University of Amsterdam team, writes, "The established view of split-brain patients implies that physical connections transmitting massive amounts of information are indispensable for unified consciousness, i.e. one conscious agent in one brain. Our findings, however, reveal that although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent. This directly contradicts current orthodoxy and highlights the complexity of unified consciousness."

Though the article says nothing about the philosophical implications of the study, it appears to me that one of the most commonly employed arguments against the brain as a mediator, not producer, of consciousness may now be obsolete. In fact, we can go further and say that the new study's findings are more consistent with transmission than with production. If the mind remains unified even when the brain has been divided, it would suggest that the mind is primary, the brain secondary — that consciousness originates outside the brain and is merely processed by it or funneled through it.

At the very least, the new findings greatly complicate the case for materialism.