The Cosmic Giggle

Terence McKenna used the term 'Cosmic giggle' to mean "a randomly roving zone of synchronicity and statistical anomaly. Should you be caught up in it, it will turn reality on its head. It is objective and subjective, simultaneously 'really there' and yet somehow is sustained by imagination and expectation....

Fritjof Capra - Bootstrap physics

by Fritjof Capra

In the last two chapters of my book The Tao of Physics, I discussed a theory known as “bootstrap theory,” which was very popular in the 1970s, and on which I worked myself during my ten years at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. This theory, proposed by Geoffrey Chew, is based on the idea that nature cannot be reduced to fundamental entities, like fundamental constituents of matter, but has to be understood entirely through self-consistency. All of physics has to follow uniquely from the requirement that its components be consistent with one another and with themselves.

This idea constitutes a radical departure from the traditional spirit of basic research in physics, which has always concentrated on finding the fundamental constituents of matter. At the same time, it can be seen as the culmination of the conception of particles as interconnections in an inseparable cosmic web, which arose in quantum theory and acquired an intrinsically dynamic nature in relativity theory.

The bootstrap philosophy abandons not only the idea of fundamental constituents of matter but accepts no fundamental entities whatsoever — no fundamental laws or equations, and not even a fundamental structure of space-time. The universe is seen as a dynamic web of interrelated events. None of the properties of any part of this web are fundamental; they all follow from the properties of the other parts, and the overall consistency of their mutual interrelations determines the structure of the entire web.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the bootstrap theory was eclipsed by the success of the standard model, which is very different, as it postulates the existence of fundamental fields and their corresponding particles. And today, bootstrap physics has virtually disappeared from the scene. However, if a theory of quantum gravity continues to remain elusive, and if the a priori assumption of the structure of space-time is broadly recognized as the essential flaw of string theory, the bootstrap idea may well will be revived someday, in some mathematical formulation or other.

Read the entire essay here:  http://www.fritjofcapra.net/the-unification-of-physics/

Wholeness: A Coherent Approach to Reality – David Bohm

“I think the difficulty is this fragmentation.. All thought is broken up into bits. Like this nation, this country, this industry, this profession and so on… And they can’t meet. That comes about because thought has developed traditionally in a way such that it claims not to be effecting anything but just telling you the way things are. Therefore, people cannot see that they are creating a problem and then apparently trying to solve it… Wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us.”

 “We are internally related to everything, not [just] externally related. Consciousness is an internal relationship to the whole, we take in the whole, and we act toward the whole. Whatever we have taken in determines basically what we are.

I think the difficulty is this fragmentation, first of all. Everybody, all thought is broken up into bits. Like this nation, this country, this industry, this profession and so on… And they can’t meet. It’s extremely hard to break into that.

But that comes about primarily because thought has developed traditionally in a way such that it claims not to be effecting anything but just telling you “the way things are.” Therefore, people cannot see that they are creating a problem and then apparently trying to solve it.

Let’s take a problem like pollution, or the ecology. See, the ecology in itself is not a problem. It works perfectly well by itself. Its due to us, right? It’s a problem because we are thinking in certain ways by breaking it up and each person is doing his own thing.

Therefore the ecological problem is due to thought, right? But thought thinks it’s a problem out there and I must solve it. That doesn’t make sense because simultaneously thought is doing all the things which make the problem and then tries to do another set of activities to try and overcome it. See, it doesn’t stop doing the things which are making the ecological problem, or the national problem, or whatever the problem is.

The earth is one household really, but we are not treating it that way, so that’s the first step in economics is to say the earth is one household and all that depends on, its all one you see…

Now, the implicate order would help us to see that, to see everything enfolds, everybody, not merely depends on everybody, but actually everybody is everybody in a deeper sense. See, we are the earth because all our substance comes from the earth and goes back. I mean, its wrong to say its an environment, just surrounding us. That would be like the brain regarding the stomache as part of its environment.

The word com-passion is to feel together, and if people have the same feeling together, they are responsible for each other, then you have compassion.

I don’t think that there is such a thing as original sin. I think it has developed more and more with the growth of our society. There is no evidence that people in a hunter/gatherer society were all that competitive. But the more you made society big and you had organization, and you had to get to the top, and people on the bottom would suffer. There was a drive to compete, naturally. It’s not a weakness, it’s a mistake.

So the first thing we have to do, in the long run, is to look at our way of thinking, which has developed over so many thousands of years. I don’t think it was the original way of thinking of the human race at all, but for many complex reasons it came about.

Now, that means that people have to participate, to make a cooperative effort, to have a dialogue, a real dialogue, in which we will not merely exchange opinions, but actually listen deeply to the views of other people, without resistance.

And we cannot do this if we hold to our own opinion and resist the other. It doesn’t mean we should accept the other, but we have to be able to look at all the opinions and suspend it, as it were, in front of us, without carrying them out, without supressing them.

Wholeness is an attitude or an approach, but can be given a scientific realization, because of relativity and quantum theory, we can if we wish look on the world as a whole.

Consciousness is really our most immediate experience of this implicate order. You may think of nets of consciousness that are finer and finer, or we may think of capturing finite aspects of the implicate order. I think there is an intelligence [in the Universe] that is implicit there, a kind of intelligence unfolds. The source of intelligence is not necessarily the brain, you see, but much more unfolding of the whole. Now, the question of whether or not you want to call it God, well, that depends on what you mean by the word. Taking it as a personal God might restrict it, in a way.

I think science has begun to replace religion as the major source of the world view, and therefore, if science takes a fragmentary world view it will have a profound effect on consciousness.

Science is whatever people make of it, science has changed over the ages and it is different now from a few hundred years ago, and it could be different again. There is no intrinsic reason why science must necessarily be about measurement. That is another historical development that has come about over the last few centuries. It is entirely contingent and not absolutely necessary.

Einstein eventually moved toward a view of field theory where everything was one field, all fields merging, so it was a step toward wholeness. It was a limited step, but still it was the beginning.

Wholeness is not a place you can get to, wholeness is a kind of attitude or approach to the whole of life. It’s a way. If we can have a coherent approach to reality then reality will respond coherently to us.

But Nature has been tremendously affected by our way of thinking on the earth. Nature is now being destroyed. There is very little left on the earth which wasn’t affected by how we were thinking.

[If we have coherence] we will produce the results we intend rather than the results we don’t intend. That’s the first big change. Then we will be more orderly, harmonious, we will be happier. I think we can put all that in there. But the major source of unhappiness [on our planet] is that we are incoherent and therefore are producing results that we don’t really want, and then trying to overcome them while we keep on producing them.”

Zuse's Thesis: The Universe is a Computer

Konrad Zuse (1910-1995; pronounce: “Conrud Tsoosay”) not only built the first programmable computers (1935-1941) and devised the first higher-level programming language (1945), but also was the first to suggest (in 1967) that the entire universe is being computed on a computer, possibly a cellular automaton (CA). He referred to this as “Rechnender Raum” or Computing Space or Computing Cosmos. Many years later similar ideas were also published / popularized / extended by Edward Fredkin (1980s), Jürgen Schmidhuber (1990s – see overview), and more recently Stephen Wolfram (2002). Zuse’s first paper on digital physics and CA-based universes was:

Konrad Zuse, Rechnender Raum, Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, vol. 8, pages 336-344, 1967. Download PDF scan.

Zuse is careful: on page 337 he writes that at the moment we do not have full digital models of physics, but that does not prevent him from asking right there: which would be the consequences of a total discretization of all natural laws? For lack of a complete automata-theoretic description of the universe he continues by studying several simplified models. He discusses neighbouring cells that update their values based on surrounding cells, implementing the spread and creation and annihilation of elementary particles. On page 341 he writes “In all these cases we are dealing with automata types known by the name “cellular automata” in the literature” and cites von Neumann’s 1966 book: Theory of self-reproducing automata. On page 342 he briefly discusses the compatibility of relativity theory and CAs.

Contrary to a widely spread misunderstanding, quantum physics, quantum computation, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bell’s inequality do not provide any physical evidence against Zuse’s thesis of a CA-computed universe! Gerard t’ Hooft (Physics Nobel 1999) in principle agrees with determinism a la Zuse: proof by authority :-)

Continue Reading:

There Is a Paranormal Activity Lab at the University of Virginia

from The Atlantic:


The market for stories of paranormal academe is a rich one. There’s Heidi Julavits’s widely acclaimed 2012 novel The Vanishers, which takes place at a New England college for aspiring Sylvia Brownes. And, of course, there’s Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters—Marvel’s take on Andover or Choate—where teachers read minds and students pass like ghosts through ivy-covered walls.

The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine is decidedly less fantastic than either Julavits’s or Marvel’s creations, but it's nevertheless a fascinating place. Founded in 1967 by Dr. Ian Stevenson—originally as the Division of Personality Studies—its mission is “the scientific empirical investigation of phenomena that suggest that currently accepted scientific assumptions and theories about the nature of mind or consciousness, and its relation to matter, may be incomplete.”

What sorts of “phenomena” qualify? Largely your typical catalog of Forteana: ESP, poltergeists, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, “claimed memories of past lives.” So yes: In 2014, there is a center for paranormal research at a totally legitimate (and respected) American institution of higher learning. But unlike the X-Mansion, or other fictional psy-schools, DOPS doesn’t employ any practicing psychics. The teachers can’t read minds, and the students don’t walk through walls. DOPS is home to a small group of hardworking, impressively credentialed scientists with minds for stats and figures.

Dr. Jim Tucker, a Bonner-Lowry Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, is one such scientist. With a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.D. from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Dr. Tucker arrived in Charlottesville to complete his postgraduate training at UVA’s Health Services Center in 1986. After a few years running a private psychiatric practice (still in Charlottesville), Dr. Tucker returned to UVA to work under Dr. Stevenson and carry out research on the possibility of life after death.

Tucker, who is a certified child psychiatrist, primarily works with children who’ve reported memories that are not their own—oftentimes linked to real-life individuals who lived decades in the past and thousands of miles away. To Tucker, these findings suggest the plausibility of “survival of personality after death”—something like a law of conservation of energy applied to human consciousness. Reincarnation, to the layperson.

“The main effort is to document as carefully as possible what the child says and determine how well that matches with a deceased person,” he told me. “And in the strongest cases, those similarities can be quite compelling.”

The cases Tucker refers to are indeed quite compelling. In an interview with NPR’s Rachel Martin earlier this month, he talked about James Leininger, a Louisiana boy who reported memories of flying a fighter jet in World War II. At around age 2, James experienced terrible nightmares, almost nightly, of violent plane crashes. During the day, he relayed extremely vivid memories of this supposed Air Force career. He recalled the name of a real aircraft carrier stationed in the Pacific during World War II (“Natoma”). He claimed to have a friend on the boat named Jack Larsen. He had memory of being shot down by the Japanese and dying near Iwo Jima.

The USS Natoma Bay lost only one pilot at Iwo Jima, a man named James Huston, and he died in a crash that matched Leininger’s description almost exactly: “Hit in the engine, exploding into fire, crashing into the water and quickly sinking,” Tucker said. “And when that happened, the pilot of the plane next to his was Jack Larsen.”

Spooky, right? Surely little James was merely parroting information he had absorbed elsewhere. “Children’s brains are like sponges,” the saying goes, but Tucker’s findings suggest something more profound at work. For one thing, James Huston is simply not a well known person. A cursory Google search of his name reveals only press related to Leininger’s claims. It’s hard to say how Leininger or his parents could have possibly known anything about Huston before the nightmares began.

Huston’s story is so obscure that it took Leininger’s father three to four years to track down his information. James Huston was killed more than fifty years before James Leininger’s birth, and came from Pennsylvania—more than a thousand miles from the Leininger family home in Louisiana. What’s more, James Leininger was only two years old when he first reported memories of Huston’s fiery death.

“It seems absolutely impossible that he could have somehow gained this information as a 2-year-old through some sort of normal means,” Tucker told NPR.

DOPS-affiliated doctors and scientists have reviewed and analyzed thousands of cases like Leininger’s. Before his retirement in 2002 and later death in 2007, Dr. Ian Stevenson logged more than 2,500 cases, publishing his analyses in a number of scholarly texts from 1969 onward. Today, DOPS inputs findings and patient profiles into an electronic database from which analysts can discern patterns that might explain why certain individuals are susceptible to believing they possess memories from past lives. Tucker and his colleagues believe such information could explain a number of psychiatric conditions as well; among them phobias, philias, or certain personality traits that cannot otherwise be attributed to environment or heredity.

There are, of course, those in the scientific community who are skeptical of the research carried out at DOPS and critical of the legacy of Dr. Stevenson. And there are those who are, perhaps rightly, suspicious of how DOPS has sustained itself financially through the years. Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, bequeathed a million dollars to DOPS upon his death in 1968, presumably at the request of his wife, known for her avid interest in the paranormal.

Stevenson and his contemporaries have their legitimate allies too. Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, saw merit in the possibility of a physical realm derived from the non-physical (“consciousness”). In his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, astrophysicist Carl Sagan, a known advocate of scientific skepticism, said that the phenomenon of children reporting “details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation” is an area of parapsychological research deserving of “serious study.”

Yet Stevenson is perhaps most respected not for his findings, but his methods. In a 1977 article published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, acclaimed American psychiatrist Harold Lief praised Stevenson’s overall approach to data collection.

“While I withhold final judgment on the content and conclusions of my friend’s study of telepathy, xenoglossy, and reincarnation, I am a ‘true believer’ in his methods of investigation. Stevenson’s writing and research reports are work of a man who is methodical and thorough in his data collection and clear and lucid in their analysis and presentation.”

“I’m happy to say [Stevenson’s work is] all complete and utter nonsense,” wrote Scientific American’s Jesse Bering, a research psychologist who pens the magazine’s behavioral science blog. “The trouble is, it’s not entirely apparent to me that it is. So why aren’t scientists taking Stevenson’s data more seriously?”

Bering claims current models for understanding brain function don’t allow for consideration of non-materialist data like those mined at DOPS. He asks: “But does our refusal to even look at his findings, let alone debate them, come down to our fear of being wrong?”

Stevenson’s most famous words have become somewhat of a rallying cry for paranormal enthusiasts the world over: “The wish not to believe can influence as strongly as the wish to believe.” But for Tucker, who is considered Stevenson’s protégé of sorts, delving into the paranormal has little to do with “believing” in anything at all.

“It’s certainly not to promote a belief or belief system,” he told me. “I didn’t come to [the field] with any sort of dogma.” He, like Harold Lief, was attracted to Stevenson’s methods.

“For me, I was interested in this effort for an analytic approach to studying survival of personality after death. The goal for me, personally, is to determine what evidence there is for the idea that some individuals can survive death.”

The information being collected at DOPS is certainly unusual. But overall, the organization functions no differently than your garden-variety scientific research outfit. If Dr. Jim Tucker is any indication, the groundwork of strict adherence to scientific method laid down by Dr. Stevenson is still firmly in place. And according to Tucker, the essential motivation of scientists at DOPS is the same as that at NASA, WHO, and other institutions devoted to scientific inquiry: “We’re just trying to find the truth.”

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle made simple

Holographic Principle Presentation: A thin sheet of reality

Two videos about the holographic universe; a short introductory one and a detailed panel discussion on the topic.

The art of Wu Wei

 By Gary McGee


“The Sage is occupied with the unspoken and acts without effort. Teaching without verbosity, producing without possessing, creating without regard to result, claiming nothing, the Sage has nothing to lose.” – Lao Tzu, Tao Tê Ching

How do we become a person, let alone a sage, who has nothing to lose? How do we achieve such a state of liberation that all things just seem to happen with effortless ease? The irony is that we are more likely to achieve something if we let go of our need to achieve it. But how do we make ourselves not want something that we actually want? How do we let go of wanting to win gold at the Olympics but still remain focused on winning gold at the Olympics? Quite the conundrum, indeed. But there may be an answer, albeit an elusive one, in the concept of Wu wei and the power of Spontaneity.

Wu wei is one of Taoism’s most important concepts. It is sometimes translated as “non-doing” or “non-action.” But a better way to think of it is the “Action of non-action.” Wu wei is a cultivated state of being effortlessly in alignment with the ebb and flow of the cosmos. It is a kind of “going with the flow” that is characterized by great ease and awareness, in which – without even trying – we’re able to adapt to any situation that might arise.

Infinity says we’re everything, finitude says we’re nothing. Between the two, we flow. It’s in this in-between where the power of spontaneity can be utilized, where we are both the seer and the seen, the Universe becoming aware of itself. The spontaneity of Wu wei is a different sort of energy than we may be accustomed to conceiving. It is not an energy that can be forced by the will. It is the noumenal experience of being in flow with the cosmos.

It is effortless and frictionless, despite needing a little effort and friction. And it is actually a letting go of our attachment to our goals so that we are in a better place to achieve our goals. It must be a free flowing process of intertwining synchronicities. But we must not be overly serious with our goals and aspirations, instead we must be sincere. We must trump our insecure seriousness with sincere humor. To be authentic we must be sincere, rather than overly serious or insecure about achieving a particular goal. One can be sincere without being serious. This is the wisdom of Wu wei.

 It’s analogous to growing a flower. All we can do, as good gardeners, is prepare the soil (the mind, the body, and/or the soul) and provide the proper conditions, and then let nature take its course. If you force a flower to open prematurely, you destroy it. Similarly, if you prevent it from opening, you destroy it. It must be allowed to grow with its own intelligence, in its own self-organized direction. This is the essence of Wu wei.

Our best effort is to become attentive gardeners, to become aware of a process that we may never understand, but to allow understanding to come as a natural progression of open-minded awareness and to give into the Flow state, as a creative microcosm gives in to a greater creative macrocosm. Like Shunryu Suzuki said, “We must have beginner’s mind, free from possessing anything, a mind that knows that everything is in flowing change.”

Wu wei is spiritual blood. It spills from the heart like a razor just sliced open the wrist of the soul. Wu wei is the search for lost time, but it is also lost time. When we are in the flow state of Wu wei, we are caretaker & destroyer, teacher & student, hungry ghost & slithering wraith. Like Alan Watts said, “Change is not merely a force of destruction. Every form is really a pattern of movement, and every living thing is like the river, which, if it did not flow out, would never have been able to flow in. Life and death are not two opposed forces; they are simply two ways of looking at the same force, for the movement of change is as much the builder as the destroyer.”

But even words are merely trickster symbols that do no justice to the concept. Their only purpose is to trick us into higher imagination. The imagery is the thing, rising up from the words that just as surely kill it. Even this article kills it, and doesn’t quite grasp the elusive and poetic balance of the Wu wei experience. This article is admittedly a vain attempt, at best, to explain an elusive and sacred concept.

 Louis G Herman wrote about a similar concept in his book, Future Primal: “Thuru: the process by which things become “what they are not” and, in so doing, paradoxically, become more themselves… this is something similar to the dynamic interplay of yin and yang in Chinese philosophy or the unification of opposites in the flow of the Tao.

Western philosophy has a related concept in the dialectical exploration of the in-between – the flow of awareness from thesis to antithesis into the larger truth of synthesis, which in turn provokes a new antithesis. And so the beat of Thuru goes on, embodied in the shape-shifting trickster of mythology.” Wu wei comes from spontaneity. Spontaneity comes from Wu wei. It was not fire that Prometheus stole from the gods, it was Wu wei: the language of the gods. And the fire rages mightily on.

When we are caught in the ephemeral flow of Wu wei, we are caught in sheep-clothes with a wolf-heart, right-brain firing its tender nurturing toward imaginary ends while the left-brain stamps its iron bars of open-close linearity. Somehow a balance is maintained, despite the lock-down of rules, goals, and vicissitudes.

A frivolity of life subsumes the condition, and a new world rises up from the traditional; an army of imagery dances across our imagination, across the observer’s imagination, tying knots into each others thought-stream using love-strings and slipknots, loopholes and bon mots; until there is a web of life living, ever-so-shortly, in the span of a few seconds of give and take, inhale and exhale, sleep and awake, life and death. It’s the magic of the flow state. It’s the all-cylinders-firing of “being in the zone.” Like the great Jazz musician Charlie Parker advised to aspiring musicians, “Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.”

Simulations back up theory that the universe is a hologram

From Nature:

 A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

Maldacena's idea thrilled physicists because it offered a way to put the popular but still unproven theory of strings on solid footing — and because it solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity. It provided physicists with a mathematical Rosetta stone, a 'duality', that allowed them to translate back and forth between the two languages, and solve problems in one model that seemed intractable in the other and vice versa (see 'Collaborative physics: String theory finds a bench mate'). But although the validity of Maldacena's ideas has pretty much been taken for granted ever since, a rigorous proof has been elusive.

In two papers posted on the arXiv repository, Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his colleagues now provide, if not an actual proof, at least compelling evidence that Maldacena’s conjecture is true.

In one paper, Hyakutake computes the internal energy of a black hole, the position of its event horizon (the boundary between the black hole and the rest of the Universe), its entropy and other properties based on the predictions of string theory as well as the effects of so-called virtual particles that continuously pop into and out of existence (see 'Astrophysics: Fire in the Hole!'). In the other3, he and his collaborators calculate the internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity. The two computer calculations match.

“It seems to be a correct computation,” says Maldacena, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and who did not contribute to the team's work.
Regime change

The findings “are an interesting way to test many ideas in quantum gravity and string theory”, Maldacena adds. The two papers, he notes, are the culmination of a series of articles contributed by the Japanese team over the past few years. “The whole sequence of papers is very nice because it tests the dual [nature of the universes] in regimes where there are no analytic tests.”

“They have numerically confirmed, perhaps for the first time, something we were fairly sure had to be true, but was still a conjecture — namely that the thermodynamics of certain black holes can be reproduced from a lower-dimensional universe,” says Leonard Susskind, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University in California who was among the first theoreticians to explore the idea of holographic universes.

Neither of the model universes explored by the Japanese team resembles our own, Maldacena notes. The cosmos with a black hole has ten dimensions, with eight of them forming an eight-dimensional sphere. The lower-dimensional, gravity-free one has but a single dimension, and its menagerie of quantum particles resembles a group of idealized springs, or harmonic oscillators, attached to one another.

Nevertheless, says Maldacena, the numerical proof that these two seemingly disparate worlds are actually identical gives hope that the gravitational properties of our Universe can one day be explained by a simpler cosmos purely in terms of quantum theory.

 Leonard Susskind explains his ideas here:

RSA Animate on Outrospection

Alex Tsakiris Argues That Science Is Wrong About Almost Everything

From The Corbett Report

 Today James talks with Alex Tsakiris, host of Skeptiko and author of “Why Science is Wrong… About Almost Everything,” about the nature of consciousness and the failure of the “biological robot” paradigm. We discuss science as a methodology vs. science as a cultural, societal and political authority, and talk about the nature and likelihood of a true revolution in consciousness.

Listen to the interview here:

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?

One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out – or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.

The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser, I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.” He grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. “He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up.”

Read more The Guardian

Empathy and wholeheartedness explained by Brene Brown

Taken from from Brainpickings articles here and here.

 Happiness is something I’ve been intensely interested in, both from a research and from a cultural perspective. And one thing that consistently cooccurs with true happiness is the notion of authenticity — being, as the contrived but universally accurate saying goes, “true to ourselves,” something that inevitably necessitates a degree of vulnerability most of us are conditioned to be uncomfortable with. Brené Brown‘s fantastic talk from TEDxHouston deconstructs vulnerability to reveal what she calls “wholeheartedness”: The capacity to engage in our lives with authenticity, cultivate courage and compassion, and embrace — not in that self-help-book, motivational-seminar way, but really, deeply, profoundly embrace — the imperfections of who we really are.

Altered States and Paranormal Narratives with Jeffrey J. Kripal

from Disinformation

Like most readers, fellow Disinformation contributor Jeremy J. Johnson and I are both big fans of author Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal (Mutants & Mystics and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred).

We caught up with him recently to discuss Philip K. Dick’s precognition abilities, global shamanic culture, synchronicity, and a new documentary Supernature that he has in the works.

JJ/BR: Dr. Kripal, it is an honor to speak with you. Graham Hancock, Rak Razam, Jeremy D. Johnson and I have recently come up with the concept of entheodelic storytelling. It signifies the archaic revival narrative and gives definition to a new movement of art that is influenced by the usual subjects; altered states, the evolution of consciousness, entheogens, occultism, paranormal phenomena, shamanism, and metaphysics. This also seems to be entangled with what our friend Rak has called the “global shamanic resurgence.”
In recent mainstream media we have seen a more positive view of entheogens as psychedelic medicines slowly infiltrate the mainstream. In Aronofsky’s blockbuster Noah ayahuasca acts as a sacred tea that enables prophetic visions. In The Fountain, the main character Tom engages in meditation and tai-chi in addition to maintaining a healthy psilocybin regimen. In Hannibal, everyone’s favorite evil doctor of psychology administers psilocybin on national television in order to help a patient deal with blocked psychological trauma.

Psychedelic shamanism is obviously a prominent theme in Grant Morrison’s 90’s masterpiece The Invisibles, and next to Patrick Meaney’s equally excellent book Our Sentence is Up, your analysis in Mutants and Mystics is the best analysis I’ve seen on Morrison’s ouvre.

In addition to this, other authors such as the mythologist John David Ebert, have explored metaphysical and mythological analysis of comic books in Tiny Humans, Giant Worlds: Adventures in the Universe of Graphic Novels.

Why do you think there has been such a sudden influx in mystical themes dealing with consciousness altering substances in art? What are your thoughts on the rising popularity of global shamanic culture?

JK: Well, as a historian of various metaphysical currents in American history, and particularly in the counterculture, I can tell you that none of these enthusiasms are really new. They were all robustly present in the 1960s and 70s. What is new, perhaps, is a certain sophistication or “turning of the wheel,” to use a Buddhist phrase (no doubt inappropriately). I also think that we are seeing a renewed influx in such practices and interests because of the deadening effect of scientific materialism and secular culture. It is my own view that human beings are, by nature, spiritual beings. They are not just meat puppets. This spiritual aspect of human nature is not being addressed adequately in the culture, if at all. Indeed, it is being aggressively denied. So people give up on elite public culture and go to popular culture, to comics and graphic novels, to film and to the psychedelic sacraments. Where else are they supposed to go?

The idea of synchronicity is something that is explored in two of your own books Authors of the Impossible and Mutants and Mystics. Could you talk about how synchronicity relates to altered states?

Synchronicity was coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in deep conversation with Wolfgang Pauli, the great quantum theorist. A synchronicity signals a moment when an event in the physical environment corresponds eerily well to an event in the psyche, as if the two were connected or expressions of some deeper One World, which is what Jung and Pauli thought. They called this deeper substratum the unus mundus, literally the One World. Altered states of consciousness and energy, of course, are also often defined by a profound sense that everything is connected, that the mental and material worlds are the same world, that there is a deeper or occult reality behind, within or below this apparent one, that what you see is NOT what you get. In my own work, I describe synchronicities as “nondual signals,” that is, as expressions, often very playful, of a level of reality that is nondual, that is both mental and material at the same time. This level of reality cannot speak to us directly (since it is beyond language), but it can send up signals, as it were. And it does.

Right. Henry Corbin and his biographer, Tom Cheetham, have also explored the imaginal plane in some depth which is always worth re-reading from time to time. Have you heard of the Mandala Effect? What do you think the implications of overlapping multiple timelines are for artists who may become conscious of the multiverse?
No, but I am familiar with the idea from the writings of Philip K. Dick. If an artist or author has such an experience, as Dick had in abundance, the implications are massive for both the worldview and creativity of the artist or author in question. I mean, if creativity is about connecting familiar things in new ways, overlapping time-lines would be one extremely dramatic expression of this. I think precognition and memories of previous lives are somehow expressions of this as well. If my sources mean anything, time isn’t what it seems to be.

It seems that the overall thrust of storytelling influenced by metaphysics is that it is post-ironic, and that it is meta “meta-fiction”, meaning less self conscious and more informed first by altered states, rather than simply playing around with the tropes in the history of literature. I would also say that after a recent influx of post-apocalyptic narratives we are now moving more towards post-dystopia stories, or tales that tend to see the future as dominated and controlled by spirituality, and not the other way around. I think this trend is also a direct reaction to equally brilliant post-modern authors such as Thomas Pynchon and the late David Foster Wallace, at least they are some of the most well known proponents. What do you think?
I hope so. I am very tired of the dystopias and the relativizing irony and objective distance. I am reminded here of one of my intellectual heroes, Aldous Huxley. Every American high school kid reads his dystopian novel BRAVE NEW WORLD. But no one reads his utopian novel, ISLAND, which was his last novel, which was his final spiritual testament, and which he wrote to answer BRAVE NEW WORLD point by point. Why does no one read ISLAND but everyone reads BRAVE NEW WORLD? Why are we only attracted to the dark and destructive? I tease my colleagues in the academy with a “revelation” I received a few years ago. Do you know what that was? I figured out the ultimate criterion of truth in the academy. Do you want to hear it? Here it is: “The truth must be depressing.” If you say something depressing or deconstructive, you are an intellectual. If you say something positive and constructive, you are a dilettante and a dreamer. And God forbid you say anything hopeful or ecstatic. Why is this? Oh, please do what you are doing. Please move us on.

Agree on ISLAND, definitely one of our all time favorites. Rak has done a lot of recent work with the scientist Dr. Juan on using neuroscience to validate and map the experiential charts of inner planes. You also have an interest in this. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
I have a complex relationship to neuroscience and neuroscientists. Conventional neuroscience is ideologically committed to what we call “eliminative physicalism,” basically the philosophical position that there is only matter. That is, they think that we are only tiny dead things bouncing around and forming slightly bigger things, and bigger things, until you get to “us.” They think we are biological computers, basically zombies with computers perched on top. I think that this bizarre position is more a reflection of our present fascination with computer technology and spiritual vacuousness than it is an adequate model of the brain.

But there are other neuroscientists who are breaking with this physicalism and offering other models. I am thinking of the neuroanatomical reflections around the left and right brain hemispheres of writers like Jill Bolte Taylor and Ian McGilchrist. I find their work so helpful for thinking about so many things, including how our culture privileges only left-brain cognitive styles. Still, I have a great deal of faith in neuroscience as a science (as opposed to a materialist interpretation or ideology). I also know that philosophers of mind are moving away from physicalism into the exciting new (really very old) models of panpsychism (very shamanic) and consciousness as a fundamental feature of the cosmos (very mystical).

There is kind of a doom gloom face of the global ecological crisis, which indicates that modern fictional stories simply do not matter. On the other end of the spectrum, Lewis Mehl-Madrona has suggested that everything is a story, and of course Joseph Campbell often suggested that there is a potential to be the heroes of our own narrative.

Do you believe that utilizing sacred narrative in fiction can be used as a means of combating what you call what Graham Hancock calls frankenstein civilization and the endless consumerism of predatory capitalism therein? Do you think fiction still has the potential to be subversive in that sense of de-conditioning people from the prominent mainstream view of our materialistic account of history? Or is it all a bunch of illusion and hyped up nonsense?

Our environmental crisis is partly (not completely) a function of some pretty bad stories, like materialism again. I mean, if we are only matter, why does anything really matter? Why not use up the environment? We need a new worldview, which will never stick without a new story. We desperately need new positive stories of the human spirit that can embrace all we know about the cosmos through the sciences without adopting conventional science’s anti-spiritual interpretations. This is really what MUTANTS AND MYSTICS was all about—an emerging mythology, a meta-mythology, a Super Story.

Could you tell me about the forthcoming documentary Supernature coming out? When will it be released? How did that all get started?

My friend Scott Jones is directing the film. It is an adaptation and crystallization of my history of the human potential movement, ESALEN: AMERICA AND THE RELIGION OF NO RELIGION. It began with Scott’s enthusiasm for my work and the way it addressed his own existential dead-ends. “Supernature” is neither the traditional supernatural nor, certainly, the scientific nothing. Supernature is meant to signal a kind of evolutionary spirituality that sees the human as a cosmic expression of a living conscious universe, a human nature endowed with extraordinary capacities that have yet to find any adequate cultural expression. We intend this film to be one such cultural expression, as are your art and storytelling.

We are still working on the film as we try to find resources to get the technical work done.

Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.


Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel.


"Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can’t see your own back…


I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.


Everyone has a belief system, B.S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone's B.S. too seriously, especially your own.


I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)


Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.


Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.


If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

Philip K. Dick on living in a computer-programmed reality, 1977

From OpenCulture

In 1963, Philip K. Dick won the coveted Hugo Award for his novel The Man in the High Castle, beating out such sci-fi luminaries as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Arthur C. Clarke. Of the novel, The Guardian writes, “Nothing in the book is as it seems. Most characters are not what they say they are, most objects are fake.” The plot—an alternate history in which the Axis Powers have won World War II—turns on a popular but contraband novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Written by the titular character, the book describes the world of an Allied victory, and—in the vein of his worlds-within-worlds thematic—Dick’s novel suggests that this book-within-a-book may in fact describe the “real” world of the novel, or one glimpsed through the novel’s reality as at least highly possible.
The Man in the High Castle may be Dick’s most straightforwardly compelling illustration of the experience of alternate realties, but it is only one among very many. In an interview Dick gave while at the high profile Metz science fiction conference in France in 1977, he said that like David Hume’s description of the “intuitive type of person,” he lived “in terms of possibilities rather than in terms of actualities.” Dick also tells a parable of an ancient, complicated, and temperamental automated record player called the “Capard,” which reverted to varying states of destructive chaos. “This Capard,” Dick says, “epitomized an inscrutable ultra-sophisticated universe which was in the habit of doing unexpected things.”

In the interview, Dick roams over so many of his personal theories about what these “unexpected things” signify that it’s difficult to keep track. However, at that same conference, he delivered a talk titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (in edited form above), that settles on one particular theory—that the universe is a highly-advanced computer simulation. (The talk has circulated on the internet as “Did Philip K. Dick disclose the real Matrix in 1977?”).

The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently, and which may not exist all. I may be talking about something that does not exist. Therefore I’m free to say everything and nothing. I in my stories and novels sometimes write about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as deranged private worlds, inhabited often by just one person…. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo-worlds, but now I think I understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one—the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on.

Dick goes on to describe the visionary, mystical experiences he had in 1974 after dental surgery, which he chronicled in his extensive journal entries (published in abridged form as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick) and in works like VALIS and The Divine Invasion. As a result of his visions, Dick came to believe that “some of my fictional works were in a literal sense true,” citing in particular The Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, a 1974 novel about the U.S. as a police state—both novels written, he says, “based on fragmentary, residual memories of such a horrid slave state world.” He claims to remember not past lives but a “different, very different, present life.”
Finally, Dick makes his Matrix point, and makes it very clearly: “we are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in our reality occurs.” These alterations feel just like déjà vu, says Dick, a sensation that proves that “a variable has been changed” (by whom—note the passive voice—he does not say) and “an alternative world branched off.”

Dick, who had the capacity for a very oblique kind of humor, assures his audience several times that he is deadly serious. (The looks on many of their faces betray incredulity at the very least.) And yet, maybe Dick’s crazy hypothesis has been validated after all, and not simpy by the success of the PKD-esque The Matrix and ubiquity of Matrix analogies. For several years now, theoretical physicists and philosophers have entertained the theory that we do in fact live in a computer-generated simulation and, what’s more, that “we may even be able to detect it.”

Parapsychology

Essay from: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~n51ls801/PHI340mirror/parapsych.html

Parapsychology is a relatively young branch of inquiry. It dates from the late nineteenth century with the founding of the British Society for Psychical Research, among whose members were some famous philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, including the American William James, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

The first problem we meet is a rather basic one: What is parapsychology? The term itself means only "outside of, but related to, psychology"; that can't be a good definition here, since biology would then be counted as parapsychology. To say it is the study of paranormal phenomena doesn't help much either, unless we're told what "paranormal" means. If paranormal phenomena are defined as those that do not have any discoverable natural causes or scientific explanation, then that immediately disqualifies parapsychology as nonscientific and makes further scientific investigation pointless. It'd be cheating to try to settle the debate by such stipulative definition. Often there is an anti-materialistic bias and a strong sympathy for a dualistic view of mental phenomena among parapsychologists, but this is a just a matter of personal bias and has no business being assumed as definitive of parapsychological investigation. There are other ways that one might characterize the boundaries of the concepts "parapsychology" and "paranormal," but they have their problems, too. Perhaps we need look no further. The trouble in defining parapsychology suggests an easy way to dismiss it as pseudoscience, since, as we've seen, precision in definition is a virtue:

Parapsychology is a pseudoscience because it and its fundamental concept, paranormal phenomenon, lack any clear definition; sciences always have clearly defined fundamental concepts.

Like most easy ways of dealing with something, this one is wrong. In many well-developed branches of science there is profound controversy and unclarity about fundamental concepts. I have already alluded to the dispute in biology over the concept of "living thing." The problem is not just how to classify viruses. The successes of molecular biology are remarkable, but do they support a chemical definition of life, or an information-theoretic definition that allows for artificial life? Also within biology, there is a very active debate, with a direct influence on the choice of experiments and the distribution of grant money, concerning the proper definition of the notion of species, so important to evolutionary biology. In medicine, there is no more important distinction that between being alive and being dead; the last thing you want your doctor to be fuzzy about is that distinction. But it is bedeviled by hard cases, and despite the moral urgency attached to drawing the line, no hard and fast distinction seems on the horizon. The situation is so bad that some state legislatures have stipulated a legal definition of death (typically some sort of 'brain death' criterion), but, of course, one doesn't solve such conceptual problems by legislative stipulation. In developing sciences, the fundamental concepts may be ill-defined or even unknown. It often takes a while, say, 100 years, for it to become apparent how best to organize a new field of inquiry. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when modern physics was getting its start, there was just such debate concerning force and momentum. While precision in definition is certainly highly desirable, it is often the end result of a great deal of experimental and theoretical investigation. One of the most difficult tasks in science is figuring out which concepts are needed to explain the phenomena we discover. Nevertheless, we don't allow complete chaos to reign when we grant that there is a field of inquiry developing. But parapsychology is not completely chaotic either. There are certain classes of phenomena which it seeks to study (either by proving that there are such phenomena or by proving that there are none): ESP of various sorts (clairvoyance, precognition), telekinesis, reincarnation, communication with the dead, dowsing, psychometry, and so on. Although it may be more chaotic than most familiar examples of science, it can't on that ground alone be dismissed. We must, after all, be careful not to cut off new inquiry too quickly.

In 1987, a psychologist named David Marks published a helpful review of parapsychology in one of the world's leading science journals, Nature. He makes an astonishing and potentially disturbing observation about parapsychology: that there are no theories to account for paranormal phenomena. But as we've already seen in the case of astrology, the absence of a known underlying physical mechanism is no reason to dismiss something as pseudoscience. There is, however, another criticism lurking in the neighborhood, and it may seem more promising:

Parapsychology is a pseudoscience because paranormal phenomena are known to be physically impossible.

To take a simpler case, suppose that Senator Porkbarrel proposed funding an Institute for the Advanced Study of Round Squares. He wouldn't get very far because round squares are impossible, and we can prove that. One problem with this criticism is that it isn't so clear that paranormal phenomena are physically impossible. (Remember that the belief of some parapsychologists in purely spiritual, nonphysical media is just that: their belief, not a fundamental principle of parapsychology.) There might, for example, be some hitherto unsuspected, purely physical mechanism permitting the transmission of information from one mind to another without going through the usual channels. What's often at issue in such a debate is just what is and is not physically possible, possible, that is, according to science. Suppose, however, that parapsychology established in some way, experimental, theoretical, or both, that paranormal phenomena were physically impossible. That in itself would be a scientific achievement. Impossibility arguments and proofs are quite common and valuable in all branches of science since they help to define the extant theories and to constrain the range of possibilities to investigate. Although parapsychology would thereby put itself out of business, that's nothing against it; we all hope that someday medicine will put itself out of business, too.

Perhaps there's no point in looking for such underlying mechanisms if there's no reason to believe that such extrasensory perception of one mind by another ever actually occurs. (Remember that what we're looking for here is a criterion that will allow us to send the unqualified packing, not a principle that will tell us in advance who'll win the race for truth.) If the objection is to be relevant in this case, it must be because it's based on a suspicion that the methods of parapsychology are not of the right kind to yield the relevant information about the actuality of ESP. And there is, after all, much talk among scientists and others of the scientific method. Perhaps then

Parapsychology is a pseudoscience because it does not employ The Scientific Method.

This criterion is pretty empty unless we've got some independent understanding of what the scientific method is. I'm skeptical that there is such a thing. Try this 'experiment': find basic college-level texts in each major branch of science and look through them. Do you get an impression of one method, common to all branches? On the contrary, the overwhelming impression is of enormous diversity - of methods, among other things. And this impression would only be reinforced by a wider survey of more advanced materials. There are many, many methods in science. Nevertheless, some sorts of reasoning do seem especially important throughout science. The kind of reasoning taught in statistics and lab courses about designing of experiments, estimating precision, and estimating probability and degrees of confidence are part and parcel of scientific method, as are the principles of deductive logic taught in symbolic logic courses. If parapsychology systematically ignores all of that, then it might justly be sent home before the race. And if it systematically tries to excuse every apparent failure of every relevant statistical tests, that would tend to show that it had no real interest in sticking to the standards set by statistical reasoning.

However, if anything is clear about parapsychology, it is that it strives to employ the statistical techniques common to the conduct of the rest of experimental science. Some, even many, of its practitioners make mistakes in the application of statistical techniques, but parapsychology is hardly unique in that respect: much of modern statistical theory was developed to serve as sound techniques for assessment of agricultural experiments which hadn't been so well-managed before. The author of one standard introductory text on probability theory gives examples drawn from respectable scientific journals of misapplied statistical technique. In fact, plenty of published parapsychological research exemplifies very high standards of statistical reasoning; and in those many cases where the highest standards were not observed the investigator may nevertheless have been trying hard to do well. The most famous modern parapsychologist, J. B. Rhine, who worked at Duke University for many years, often stressed the importance of proper statistical design and analysis of experiments.

To recall a previously discussed and unsuccessful criterion, parapsychology has a social role very much like that of older, more established sciences: its investigators have attained well-paid university posts, there are research institutes devoted to it, and parapsychologists publish technical articles in their own journals and in some of the best psychology journals. Even their orders for equipment are much the same as those of other lab scientists: computers, various measuring devices, special shielded chambers, and so on.

So despite its relative conceptual disarray, the doubts of some about the possibility of paranormal phenomena, and the statistical mistakes of some of its investigators, parapsychology seems especially difficult to rule out, on principled grounds, as pseudoscience.

As before, none of our discussion tends in the least to show that the provocative claims made by parapsychologists are true.A careful look at the data shows that despite many years of trying, not a single properly performed experiment has shown the existence of any paranormal phenomena.

[But see:

http://moebius.psy.ed.ac.uk/js_index.html
http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp
http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/psy1.html ]

Why, then, is belief in such phenomena so widespread, given that it is scientifically unsupported? This isn't exactly on topic, but it's such an interesting question about human irrationality that I want to say just a bit about it.

How many of you have had this experience: you pick up the phone to call your best friend (spouse, mother, etc.), and there, at the other end of the line, is your friend waiting to talk with you - the phone's not even had a chance to ring! What an amazing coincidence! Why, the only possible explanation is extrasensory contact, mind to mind, without benefit of telephone wires!

Phooey. Given how often people talk to one another on the phone and the tendency of human schedules to synchronize, this experience is not that unlikely. Amazing-seeming coincidences are often cited as evidence for various paranormal phenomena. But amazing-seeming coincidences are far more common than most of us think - that, of course, is why they seem amazing when they occur, and this fact is exploited by pretenders to psychic power. There is an interesting body of psychological research on how bad most people are at estimating probabilities, even after having received extensive training and done well on standard tests. Some researchers have even been driven to hypothesize that being bad at statistics might have evolutionary survival value. I'm not sure we need to go quite that far, but there's no denying that most of us do a poor job in this arena. To give two other simple examples: The likelihood of getting five heads for five fair coins flipped at once is about three percent; but the likelihood of the same outcome in a run of 100 flips is about ninety-six percent, far higher than most would estimate. Then there is the surprising Common Birthday phenomenon, which can be used by pretenders to psychic powers. In a randomly selected group of just 200 the likelihood that two or more people will have the same birthday is very high, about 1 - (1/10^55), which is awfully close to dead certain. Not only do our inadequacies in estimating likelihoods make us more credulous than we ought to be, they also interfere with rational assessment of risk and so make public policy-setting to deal with risks far more difficult.

We have examined three allegedly clear examples of pseudoscience. They form a sort of progression. Astrology had an effect on the development of a true science - astronomy - but its connection was not one of content: no specifically astrological principles remain part of astronomy. Phrenology had not only an important effect on the development of modern neuropsychology, but it actually contributed some content: (an early version of) a central hypothesis of modern brain science, the hypothesis of localization of brain function. Nevertheless, phrenology was very badly flawed in its methods. Parapsychology may not have an important contribution to make to the way science views the mind, but its methods are often those of true science. We may not care deeply about how any of these three are classified, as nonscience or bad science; either way, they don't win the race - although the prevalence of belief in ESP suggests that many of you do care about the fate of parapsychology. We turn next to an example that has been the focus of an intense and emotionally charged controversy, one that has already has had an effect on how children are educated, and on the larger issue of the proper role of education in our society. I refer, of course, to Scientific Creationism. Many of its opponents, some of whom have testified to their views in court, claim that it is pseudoscience - a cover for a religious and political agenda that has no place in the public schools. (Some of its opponents even contend that it doesn't belong in private schools or churches - they want it to go away altogether.) We'll next take a look at whether their charge of pseudoscience stands up under scrutiny. And we'll take a close look at how Scientific Creationism itself fares when judged by the scientific standards its proponents claim as their own.

Will the real Ubik please stand up?

This article is titled Will the real Ubik please stand up? Precognition of scientific information in the fiction of Philip K Dick.

It was written by William Sarill, a biochemist with a background in theoretical physics, for EdgeScience magazine.

Also by the same Author: Philip K Dick was a friend of mine.

“God Helmet” Inventor, Dr. Michael Persinger interviewed about telepathy experiments

from skeptiko.com

Neuroscience Researcher and Laurentian University professor, Dr. Michael Persinger, demonstrates telepathy under laboratory conditions.

Claims of telepathy, ESP and other psi phenomena are a mainstay of popular culture but taboo in neuroscience research circles.  Fortunately, Dr. Michael Persinger of Canada’s Laurentian University has never been afraid to venture where other researchers fear to go. In the 1980’s Persinger made headlines with his “God Helmet”, a device that stimulates temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field in order to produce religious states.

Now, Persinger has discovered the same type of brain stimulation can create metal states conducive to human telepathy.  “What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.”

While Persinger’s experiments could prove groundbreaking, he remains doubtful about his controversial findings reaching his colleagues, “I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types.  They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.”

Read the interview with Alex Tsakiris:

Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and before we get started with today’s interview, and a very fascinating interview it is with Dr. Michael Persinger, I’m going to take a minute and invite you to connect – connect with this show, Skeptiko, and with me personally.

In the last few months as I had a chance to talk to more and more researchers and dig into all the science surrounding human consciousness and spirituality and where science is leading us, I felt a stronger and stronger need to connect with you and to create a community, if you will, of like-minded people. So in the last week or so I’ve tried to take some steps in that direction.

I’ve finally gotten on Facebook and Twitter and I’m going to try and post there more regularly. But I’m going to invite you to join me. To follow me and to allow me to follow you and see if we can create a community, if you will, of like-minded people who are interested in following the data wherever it leads, as I say. So you’ll find all the links on the Skeptiko Web site for following me and please connect up and I’ll do the same.

But for right now, let’s move into this interview that I have with Dr. Michael Persinger.  And quite a fascinating interview it is. I really, really admire the courage that the maverick scientist has, and that’s where Dr. Michael Persinger is. You know, he gets it from both sides. He really is a materialist and very much a mind equals brain guy.

That’s not where I see the data leading but it’s certainly where he sees the data leading, and he really approaches it from a “let’s get down and prove it, here’s the research.” He doesn’t shy away from that. He doesn’t throw extraordinary claims, extraordinary proof kind of bullcrap. He just says, “Hey, here’s what I’m finding, here’s what I think, here’s the way I think things are showing themselves.” I find that very refreshing.

But he also gets it on the other side because while he is very much of a materialist and a neuroscience guy, he also has some surprising data when it comes to telepathy, that you’ll hear about, where he says he’s basically proven it in his lab and can replicate this quantum entanglement communication thing that you’ve heard about maybe on this show and certainly a lot of other places. So very, very interesting. In my mind it’s what makes Skeptiko so exciting for me and makes it hopefully interesting for you to be able to hear from these researchers who we really, really don’t hear enough from. So stay with me for Michael Persinger.

I’m joined today by Dr. Michael Persinger, an internationally renowned cognizant neuroscience researcher and professor at Laurentian University in Canada. He’s probably most famous, and many of you I’m sure have seen him on TV or especially in a YouTube video with his God Helmet, a device that he has used experimentally to demonstrate that electromagnetic disturbances in the brain maybe the source of mystical and spiritual experiences. So, Dr. Persinger, thank you very much for joining me today on Skeptkio.

Dr. Michael Persinger: You’re quite welcome.

Alex Tsakiris: And let me start by as I kind of stuttered through that introduction, is there anything that I may be didn’t quite get right there in describing, I guess, the research that most people associate with you, and that is with the God Helmet and the electromagnetic stimulation of the brain to create mystical experiences.

Dr. Michael Persinger: No, that was very succinctly stated. I mean, effectively what we’ve been doing all these years is to try to understand the brain basis to all experiences. The basic assumption is that all experiences are generated by brain activity, determined in large part by the structure of the brain.

Alex Tsakiris: That point that you just made, is you started with the idea, the materialistic notion that all conscious experience originates with the brain. I think what’s fascinating, if we’re going to dive right into this and make the most effective use of your time, is what do you think about some of the research that seems to be pointing in a different direction?

We could look at the research of folks who have just concentrated on the spiritual experience like a colleague of yours in Canada, Dr. Mario Beauregard or we could look at Dr. Andrew Newberg, or Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, who have all looked at various kinds of spiritual experience and maybe seem to be leaning towards another direction. And that’s that perhaps the neurocorrelates that we see firing one that they may not just be in the right temporal lobes but also that they may point to a kind of different nature of consciousness. I know that’s a lot to kind of bite off, but I’m sure this is stuff that you think about, talk about, and write about all the time. So just jump right in.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Our research starts on the basic premise that all experience is generated by brain activity. Now, the critical thing is that all experience means your experience of love, or memories, or having a mystical experience, must be associated with specific patterns of brain activity. That brain activity in large part is determined by the brain structure. Many of these things, because structure dictates function, may be relatively unique to the human being itself.

Now, although that’s our assumption, the most powerful tool of science is the experiment. So if we want to understand these experiences and how they are generated by brain activity, we have to reproduce them in the laboratory. So the basic approach then was, okay, if people have mystical experiences and they’re associated with brain activity then if we imitate them in the laboratory and we understand the physical conditions that produce them, we should be able to 1) understand the areas of the brain and the patterns of activity responsible for these experiences, and 2) we should be able to control them.

And if they’re a natural phenomena, and we think that mystical experiences, including the God experience, the God belief, are natural phenomena, we should be able to reproduce them easily if we have the correct parameters in the laboratory, control them and understand how they may be manipulated by others with less honorable goals.

Alex Tsakiris: Here’s what intrigues me. You’ve really pioneered this work and I think you have some very interesting comments that I’ve seen in previous interviews about what it’s been like to be a pioneer, the old adage of  you know, the pioneer cause he has arrows not just in the front but in the back as well. And I think you’ve experienced a little bit of that just in terms of delving into an area that touches on so many hot buttons on both sides, either believers or non-believers.

Maybe you’d like to comment about that. But in particular, comment about that within the framework of where some of the research into what’s being called “neurotheology” is going. I threw out the spiritual brain, Mario Beauregard, Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania, Davidson at Wisconsin, you know, folks who are also looking at the spiritual experience and maybe coming to a slightly different conclusion than you are about the relationship between the brain and the neurocorrelates and that spiritual experience.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, in terms of trying to understand the neural basis to these powerful experiences that determine the history of human behavior, I mean, don’t forget more people have been killed in wars under the auspices of who’s god is correct, either directly or indirectly than most plagues. So this is a powerful phenomena that may be intrinsic to the nature of the human brain. It may have had a adaptive function over the years. For example, we know that people who believe in God and have God experiences have reduced death anxiety, which may allow them to be more productive.

The whole concept of the immortality is implicitly tied to this experience and the belief in immortality actually reduces anxiety about death and sometimes can make individuals more adaptive to their environment. But ultimately, all of this has to be related to the brain function and there may be different approaches. For example, some of my colleagues have said that there is a non-physical component that’s very difficult to understand because in the history of science those phenomena which were considered to be non-physical ultimately we did find a physical basis. And that when we found the physical basis then we understood it.

If you talk about a phenomena as being sort of ephemeral and non-testable and something beyond measurement, then effectively it’s an empty hypothesis and you never will be able to test it.

To answer your question about people’s approaches, I think it’s really important to have a versatile approach and have people have different ideas, have open ideas, but ultimately the end point must be measurement and reproduction in the laboratory. For example, some of the stuff by Beauregard with the MRI studies, what he really did was look at memories. He asked the people to remember their experiences and found patterns of activity that were basically typical of a memory.

That’s quite different than direct stimulation of the brain and producing the experience, so although we can have different approaches, and I think that’s really important for science to be open-minded and to basically exclude no one. The ultimate measure is going to be 1) can you reproduce it in the laboratory and 2) can you actually product the same phenomena by experimental techniques? And that’s the powerful tool to demonstrate you have a causal connection.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, and we can jump into that causal connection because there’s a couple of points. Let me back up. I’m not as totally familiar with Beauregard’s work although I did remember that he did FMRIs while these nuns were in this peak spiritual state, so I think he did have that…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Actually they were remembering the peak spiritual stage.

Alex Tsakiris: Okay, well Newberg certainly did at the University of Pennsylvania…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Newberg did. And Newberg found completely different patterns which were really similar to what we find when we measure the electroencephalographic activity of individuals having mystical experiences and basically is the same area that we focus upon when we stimulate it with the weak electromagnetic fields generated by the God Helmet. So again, the critical thing is the instructions you give to your subjects in large part will influence different patterns of the brain and that’s why that precision is so important in understanding the neural basis to the God experience.

Alex Tsakiris: You know, let’s move into I think probably the most challenging research given what you’ve just said, and that’s the research that’s been done in near-death experience. We can point to just a whole bunch of people, but Peter Fenwick is someone who’s been on the show and Raymond Moody, of course, has been on the show, although I don’t think he’s as active in the field.

What do you make of the rather substantial amount of evidence that has come back that suggests that in some way that we don’t totally understand, there is this continuation of consciousness after a period when there is no EEG and no EKG for a number of patients that have been verified clinically  in a hospital setting by the people we normally trust to kind of gather that kind of information.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, first of all, the electroencephalogram or brain waves simply measures a very, very small component. It’s in the microvolt range. It’s about a thousandth times smaller than the actual steady state potential of the brain itself which can last for several minutes to half an hour under sort of deprived conditions. The EEG also reflects only the cortex. It doesn’t tell you very much at all what’s going on deep within the cortex. So when you have these near-death experiences and flat EEGs, that just tells you what the cortex is doing. It doesn’t tell you necessarily the integrity or the activity taking place deep within the brain.

Alex Tsakiris: Right, but…

Dr. Michael Persinger: The second feature…

Alex Tsakiris: Go ahead. I was just going to say, I was just going to interject here. But I’ve heard that argument before from materialists and I just – I don’t get it. I mean, at this point we have tens and tens of thousands of EEGs and we know how your EEG is supposed to look when you’ve having the kind of experience that these people describe. And it certainly never looks flat. I mean, we don’t have any record of that in any that I’m aware of, where anyone has done an EEG of a live person and say, oh, it’s flat and then they say yeah, but I had this incredible experience. How do you kind of connect those two?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well I certainly can. And I think the reason is we’re looking at the fact that out of body experiences, which is what you’re talking about in near-death experiences in large part, the idea that you’re detached from your body and you’re somewhere else. It is not due to a homogeneous source. For example,  a near-death experience after a flat EEG is quite different, for example, when someone is wide awake or in an altered state and experiencing an out of body experience. In that case, the activity is very, very clear and very, very systematic. You usually get certain kinds of alphoid activity which is in the order of a low frequency over the right parietal region.

Mind you, the same thing can be done by stimulating, as reported in Nature a few years ago. The right parietal region, you can actually get a feeling of being detached or being somewhere else. The so-called mental bipolaria of being two places at once. So when people are awake and the experience takes place that’s quite different than when people have been in a medical situation where they’re considered to be dead and then the EEG returns to normal and they report what they think they’ve experienced.

Alex Tsakiris: I’m still not getting that. I mean, my understanding is that all our understanding of this tool we have, called an EEG, suggests that this other kind of very ephemeral thing that we’re trying to get our arms around called consciousness, that there’s some correlation between the way we measure the two. And I just can’t accept the idea unless maybe you can point me to the research where I can find that. Where people are saying, “yes, you can have this complex conscious experience and we would not be able to measure it with an EEG.” I just don’t see where anyone has demonstrated…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, I agree with you, I agree with you. Yeah, I agree with you totally. If there’s an experience there’s going to be brain activity. And if you can articulate the experience, that is, at the time the person’s having the experience, measure the EEG, particularly quantitative EEG, there are very specific patterns over very specific regions of the brain that relate to that kind of experience. That’s well known in the quantity EEG literature. So when someone says, “I have an experience, ” be it mystical or whatever, you can actually measure the brain, which we’ve done on many occasions and see very specific signatures taking place.

Even with those that are so-called psychic experiences we tested Shawn Haribands, who is a very reliable individual for sort of guessing and feeling people’s memories. When he’s doing that, there’s very specific patterns that take place over his right parietal temporal lobe. The number of those that take place is directly related to how accurate he is in how many of these statements he makes. So you can relate quantitative EEG or brain activity to very specific experiences.

Alex Tsakiris: I mean, I think that’s a whole fascinating area and I’d love to kind of jump in there, but I don’t want to quite yet leave this near-death experience because I want to understand fully what you’re saying. So my understanding in reading the near-death experience research is we have some pretty – a handful, dozens, on the order of dozens or maybe a hundred, of very well documented cases where we do have EEG and EKG records of folks who have had cardiac arrests and during that whole process, then we’re also able to verify that they had some kind of experience when they were resuscitated and they have some kind of conscious experience that seems to correlate time wise to the time when we had no EEG from them, so I’m just wondering what you make of that.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, like I’ve said, if you’re talking about having out of body experiences in a waking person, there are very specific patterns over the right parietal temporal lobe that are measured reliably. This has been known for at least 30 or 40 years. Now, the near-death experiences which are also out of body experiences but usually occur in specific settings, for example, like in a hospital or fatigue or following a crisis or a trauma, yes EEG can change remarkably and sometimes be flat-lined for a protracted period. When the person wakes up and the EEG becomes normal, they report these interesting experiences.

Those experiences in large part reflect the areas of the brain that were activated during that time and many of the patterns of near-death experiences are very specific, very reliable. That’s why they show up across all humans in all cultures, of changes within the vasculature, that is the blood vessel activity or blood flow, in the areas that are most vulnerable. That’s why first you get the tunnel effect and the moving through the tunnel and then of course the out of body detachment. Then you may get memories and you may have the invariably the sense of presence of a deceased entity or a cultural icon, for example, it could be a religious icon. These are very predictable patterns if you know the part of the brain that is slowly becoming over-active because it’s in a failure state.

Alex Tsakiris: But wait a minute. I’m still not making the connection. No EEG, conscious experience. How can that be?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, first of all, during the flat EEG, okay the person’s not saying anything. They’re in a state that’s not – they’re making not any state. When they come out of the flat EEG and they begin to talk, they talk about experiences. Now it’s important to realize that the EEG is measuring only the cortex, which is the outer 2-3, 3-5 millimeters of the brain. It’s a tool that’s only measuring 1,000 potentials, all those fluctuations, but when you flat-line, there’s still tremendous potential. The DC potentials are there. It’s like a pool. If you have a pool that’s 100 meters deep and only the top one meter is fluctuating, if you flatten out the fluctuating and make it nice and flat, that doesn’t mean that the 100 meters has gone away. It’s just not moving anymore.

And so the measurement will look like it’s flat, but there’s still potential difference. That’s a very important technical aspect of EEG work that most people don’t realize.

The second feature is that the electrical ability or electrical storage of memory is about 30 minutes. So every – right now as you and I are chatting, our brains are going to store this information in electrical form for about 30 minutes before it’s ultimately transformed into the small microstructures, the synapses that allow us long-term memory.

Now that information is being stored deep within the brain. It’s not in the cortex at all and you can’t even see it from an EEG. For example, the areas of the brain we call the hippocampus that store memory, you can’t even see the activity from a EEG. You have to actually put electrodes deep into the brain in order to see that activity. So there’s a common misconception that a flat EEG means no brain activity. In actual fact, it simply tells you a kind of activity is no longer common.

Alex Tsakiris: So that’s interesting. So you would speculate that that’s what’s happening in these near-death experiences, at least the ones that we can verify where there is no EEG measurable. You suspect that there is the same kind of conscious experience that they report going on but it’s at some level deep inside the brain that we just can’t measure. Is that correct?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, that would be very close. In fact, when the person wakes up after 20 or 30 minutes or at some particular protracted time, what they’re doing is telling you what they experienced. So they’re not necessarily conscious at the time. They’re reporting experiences that they’ve had. And I think that’s a very important distinction that deep within the brain that information is being consolidated and so if you suddenly become active again, then you can have access to the information. Very much like during a good portion of the night you’re not dreaming.

There’s all kinds of activity going on within your brain. All kinds of metabolic activity and information being represented. During the dreaming state you suddenly have access to it and if you wake up you can actually remember it, even though it may have been going on for several minutes to tens of minutes. You now are aware of it and you can now report it. So it’s like suddenly becoming on-line, so to speak, in terms of a computer. The information’s been there for quite a while. Now you can talk about it and remember what happened.

Alex Tsakiris: Interesting. What do you make of the reports of people retrieving information that they wouldn’t normally know? Being able to say, “Yes, I recall that you were the one who resuscitated me.” Dr. Penny Satori has actually done some research of the ability of people who’ve recovered from cardiac arrest, those who have experienced a near-death experience are better able to recollect, if you will, I don’t know if that would be the correct term – the actual procedures that happened during the resuscitation.

Then a control group who were resuscitated but didn’t have a near-death experience. What do you make of the fact that people routinely in these near-death experience accounts say, “I was able to travel. I was able to see inside the room. I was able to travel home and see what Mom was cooking for dinner. Or see what was going on in these other places.” What do you make of that?

Dr. Michael Persinger: I think those are very interesting experiences and I think the critical thing is the information may be very accurate but the explanation and the perception the person has may not. For example, most of us would agree that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. If you’re in Ptolemies’ day, the perception would be it’s because the sun is moving around us. That’s the perception. Now, of course, we realize that’s not the case. It’s because the Earth rotates. The sun is not going around us. But the perception is similar, so the interpretation will change.

And the same thing happens with these near-death experiences in the sense that yes, information may be obtained but that of course is then filtered through how the brain interprets information. For example, right now if you’re looking at someone nearby, you see an integrated image. But in actual fact, from the time that the retina picked up that image, all the parts of that image were broken apart into more than 3, 4, a dozen different kinds of components. What the color was, how the person was moving, their facial characteristics, goes to different parts of the brain and then is re-integrated according to how the brain is organized and your expectations.

So in large part, memory is a reconstruction of the experiences. So the same thing happens here. The information may be there but how you interpret it and report it is going to be a function of how your brain is organized, your belief system, and how you accommodate language and information.

Alex Tsakiris: I’m not sure I totally got that. So how would someone know something that was happening at a distance? Happening far away, three floors above them in the hospital where they saw something?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Oh, okay, now in terms of looking at something that’s a distance away, again, information is around us all the time and we’re typically not aware of it. Let’s first of all address that first comment about how can people be aware of things when they’re under anesthesia? Well, first of all, for over 30 years we’ve known that if you’re sleeping and deep sleep, and we whisper your name in your ear, your EEG will show a response or evoke potential, will show response even though you’re never aware of it. So the brain never really goes away, even though it may be in a state of anesthesia.

The second feature: if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a near-death experience and is exotic, it wouldn’t be as impressive because if you look at the functional MRI of a brain of a person reading and you suddenly change the text, very subtly, there are areas of the brain that are activated even though the person is not aware of what’s going on. In other words, the brain responds even though there’s no awareness associated with it.

And in another example, so-called psychic blindness, these are individuals who are blind but yet as they are walking about they can move around objects and if you look at their brains you find that a small amount of their occipital cortex is activated enough for the unconscious reflex systems to respond and move around the objects, but not enough critical mass for them to say, “I’m aware of what I see.” So the critical thing is you can have a lot of changes and detect a lot of changes in your environment without necessarily awareness.

Now to address the issue of things at a distance, that of course, is totally acceptable and expected. Right now you and I are being inundated by cosmic rays, by signals from cell phones, from just literally billions of events but we’re only aware of a couple of them or a few of them per unit time that we call stimuli. So what would happen if you changed the organization of the brain and you became aware of events that were taking place at a distance? It could be anything from, for example, picking up radio signals or something equivalent. If you change the structure of the brain, and that’s what happens in altered states, then of course, you can pick up information at a distance.

The classic example would be when you’re dreaming. All right, the environment, stimuli that you’re not even aware of at quite a distance, for example, a sound from a bell or the temperature of the room can be incorporated into your dream content. So what makes the near-death experience so exciting is that – and indeed, altered states in general – is it opens up a more objective way of trying to understand what has been rejected, sadly, so many years, called parapsychological phenomena, which is simply information obtained from a distance or time through mechanisms not known to date. And if you keep the definition that way it becomes much less mystical.

Alex Tsakiris: Wow. You just gave a definition there that I guess you could take in a number of different directions. Now you took it in a kind of very – ordinary is probably the best word – ordinary direction in terms of, hey, maybe you can tune into radio waves or other signals at a distance. But you also seem to leave open the possibility that you could tune into other communication along the lines of the experiment you said you did with the psychic who seems to be able to tune into certain kinds of information at a distance. Any thoughts on that? And I guess that would also tie into…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think the critical thing about science – and again, this is how I started at the top of our interview – is it’s really important to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. And sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not individuals who are mystic believers. It’s scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like. In science we have arbitrarily divided nature into increments we call scientific disciplines into physics and chemistry and psychology and so forth. But in actual fact, this division is quite artificial.

And natural phenomenon – and there’s lots of natural phenomenon to study – really are the subject matter of science and pursuit of the unknown is the subject matter. So that means we have to remain open-minded. The only difference between a scientist and a religious believer or a mystical believer is the fact that we measure. And once we measure it we can reproduce it experimentally. If you can experimentally reproduce it, you can control it. And then you understand how it works. That’s the only difference to science is open-minded. Anything is possible.

Alex Tsakiris: What an interesting way to maybe start to wrap things up. Can you maybe in the last few minutes that we have, tell us some of the most interesting things that are going on in your lab today, and some of your most current discoveries?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well, what’s going on in the laboratory – and I have some fantastic graduate students and we work together as a team – and what we have found for example, is that if you place two different  brains, two different people at a distance, you put a circular magnetic field around both. There’s a magnetic field going around like a coil, around both brains even at a distance. You make sure both coils are connected to the same computer which means they’re generating the same configuration of two different spaces.

If you flash a light in one person’s eye, even though they’re in a chamber that’s closed up, the person in the other room that’s receiving just the magnetic field now, they’re not aware of the light flashing or not, they will show similar changes in frequency in the room. And we think that’s tremendous because that maybe the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection or so-called quantum entanglement. And if that’s true then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical application and application, for example, in space travel because there’s no time involved with it. That’s one thing we’re looking at. That’s one of our more exotic hypotheses.

Other ones we’re looking at, for example, how various kinds of patterns of electromagnetic fields generated from the brain may influence cell cultures in terms of influencing their outcome in terms of their molecular chemistry, which may someday add to the understanding of how somebody being nearby can influence the physiology and health of a person. We know about individuals with green thumbs. We know that certain physicians are better than others just by touching the patient. And it’s more than just a placebo effect. What’s the mechanism? We’re trying to understand that.

And the third thing I think is really important is we’re trying to understand the nature of consciousness itself. And of course, consciousness is probably more like an over-inclusive term. It’s probably not consciousness but a variety of complicated processes and we just slam this word on it that are involved with individuals have these unique skills, like the Shawn Haribands and the Ingo Swanns who seem to have access to information that others do not have. So we’re trying to understand the neurophysical basis to it and to try to integrate it in terms of the known energies around us so that someday we can also replicate it. That really is the real test of a hypothesis or an idea. Can you replicate it with an experiment?

Alex Tsakiris: Wow, very fascinating stuff. It does lead me – I can’t resist asking this one more question. If you do seem to be kind of leaning in the direction of saying that there might be other ways that consciousness interacts with other consciousness, you know, the telepathy thing with the light flashing, then are you open to the possibility that maybe the physical structure of our brain is more of a transceiver than the agent that creates consciousness, as some people have suggested. Is that on the table for you, or…

Dr. Michael Persinger: Absolutely. The idea that the brain, of course,  is a source of all experiences because the brain, obviously if you terminate it you don’t have experiences, but the counter hypothesis – actually it’s not even counter, it’s a parallel hypothesis – that the brain is microstructured. This infinitesimal, complex pattern, is microstructured so that it can serve as a substrate for electromagnetic patterns.

And those electromagnetic patterns are the behaviors and the experiences, which means technically they could exist somewhere else. That means that if indeed there is an electromagnetic pattern, a complex one though it may be, associated with consciousness, if you recreated a substructure in another kind of setting, for example, a computer or in rocks or in trees, could you have some simulation of that? That, of course, is a hypothesis that definitely deserves testing.

Alex Tsakiris: What a wild ride you have there in your lab, huh? You must wake up – also in your interview I read how your work ethic is quite impressive. Do you still work until the wee hours of the morning every day?

Dr. Michael Persinger: Yes, we do. We work until about four in the morning.

Alex Tsakiris: Wow. That’s great. Well, we’ll all stay tuned to the exciting and interesting things that are sure to come out of all your work. Thank you, thank you so much for joining us today on Skeptiko, Dr. Persinger.

Dr. Michael Persinger: Well thank you for asking me.

Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Dr. Michael Persinger for joining me today on Skeptiko. If you’d like more information about this show, including all those links that I spoke about in terms of connecting up with me and connecting up with this show, please visit our Web site. It’s at skeptiko.com. You’ll find links to all our previous shows. You can also post your comments right there, or you can go to the Skeptiko forum and post your comments there, as well.

That’s going to do it for today. I have some very interesting interviews along this line coming up, so stay with me for that. And until next time, bye for now.