via aeon
It’s tempting to think science gives a God’s-eye view of reality. But we forget the place of human experience at our peril
The problem of time is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics. The first bit of the conundrum is cosmological. To understand time, scientists talk about finding a ‘First Cause’ or ‘initial condition’ – a description of the Universe at the very beginning (or at ‘time equals zero’). But to determine a system’s initial condition, we need to know the total system. We need to make measurements of the positions and velocities of its constituent parts, such as particles, atoms, fields and so forth. This problem hits a hard wall when we deal with the origin of the Universe itself, because we have no view from the outside. We can’t step outside the box in order to look within, because the box is all there is. A First Cause is not only unknowable, but also scientifically unintelligible.
The second part of the challenge is philosophical. Scientists have taken physical time to be the only real time – whereas experiential time, the subjective sense of time’s passing, is considered a cognitive fabrication of secondary importance. The young Albert Einstein made this position clear in his debate with philosopher Henri Bergson in the 1920s, when he claimed that the physicist’s time is the only time. With age, Einstein became more circumspect. Up to the time of his death, he remained deeply troubled about how to find a place for the human experience of time in the scientific worldview.
These quandaries rest on the presumption that physical time, with an absolute starting point, is the only real kind of time. But what if the question of the beginning of time is ill-posed? Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature.
Such an approach not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world. That divide arises from what we call the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see. In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception.
Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.
This framework faces two intractable problems. The first concerns scientific objectivism. We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience.
This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.
The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.
This problem is known as Hempel’s dilemma, named after the illustrious philosopher of science Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-97). Faced with this quandary, some philosophers argue that we should define ‘physical’ such that it rules out radical emergentism (that life and the mind are emergent from but irreducible to physical reality) and panpsychism (that mind is fundamental and exists everywhere, including at the microphysical level). This move would give physicalism a definite content, but at the cost of trying to legislate in advance what ‘physical’ can mean, instead of leaving its meaning to be determined by physics.
We reject this move. Whatever ‘physical’ means should be determined by physics and not armchair reflection. After all, the meaning of the term ‘physical’ has changed dramatically since the 17th century. Matter was once thought to be inert, impenetrable, rigid, and subject only to deterministic and local interactions. Today, we know that this is wrong in virtually all respects: we accept that there are several fundamental forces, particles that have no mass, quantum indeterminacy, and nonlocal relations. We should expect further dramatic changes in our concept of physical reality in the future. For these reasons, we can’t simply legislate what the term ‘physical’ can mean as a way to get out of Hempel’s dilemma.
Objectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones – even if some scientists espouse them. They don’t logically follow from what science tells us about the physical world, or from the scientific method itself. By forgetting that these perspectives are a philosophical bias, not a mere data-point, scientific materialists ignore the ways that immediate experience and the world can never be separated.
We’re not alone in our opinions. Our account of the Blind Spot is based on the work of two major philosophers and mathematicians, Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead. Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.
Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic. That faith rests directly on our immediate experience. Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential.
Nowhere is the materialistic bias in science more apparent than quantum physics, the science of atoms and subatomic particles. Atoms, conceived as the building blocks of matter, have been with us since the Greeks. The discoveries of the past 100 years would seem to be a vindication for all those who have argued for an atomist, and reductionist, conception of nature. But what the Greeks, Isaac Newton and 19th-century scientists meant by the thing called an ‘atom’, and what we mean today, are very different. In fact, it’s the very notion of a ‘thing’ that quantum mechanics calls into question.
The classic model for bits of matter involves little billiard balls, clumping together and jostling around in various forms and states. In quantum mechanics, however, matter has the characteristics of both particles and waves. There are also limits to the precision with which measurements can be made, and measurements seem to disturb the reality that experimenters are trying to size up.
Today, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about what matter is, and what our role is with respect to it. These differences concern the so-called ‘measurement problem’: how the wave function of the electron reduces from a superposition of several states to a single state upon observation. For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it.
According to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, for example, the wave function has no reality outside of the interaction between the electron and the measurement device. Other approaches, such as the ‘many worlds’ and ‘hidden variables’ interpretations, seek to preserve an observer-independent status for the wave function. But this comes at the cost of adding features such as unobservable parallel universes. A relatively new interpretation known as Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism) – which combines quantum information theory and Bayesian probability theory – takes a different tack; it interprets the irreducible probabilities of a quantum state not as an element of reality, but as the degrees of belief an agent has about the outcome of a measurement. In other words, making a measurement is like making a bet on the world’s behaviour, and once the measurement is made, updating one’s knowledge. Advocates of this interpretation sometimes describe it as ‘participatory realism’, because human agency is woven into the process of doing physics as a means of gaining knowledge about the world. From this viewpoint, the equations of quantum physics don’t refer just to the observed atom but also to the observer and the atom taken as a whole in a kind of ‘observer-participancy’.
Participatory realism is controversial. But it’s precisely this plurality of interpretations, with a variety of philosophical implications, that undermines the sober certainty of the materialist and reductionist position on nature. In short, there’s still no simple way to remove our experience as scientists from the characterisation of the physical world.
This brings us back to the Blind Spot. When we look at the objects of scientific knowledge, we don’t tend to see the experiences that underpin them. We do not see how experience makes their presence to us possible. Because we lose sight of the necessity of experience, we erect a false idol of science as something that bestows absolute knowledge of reality, independent of how it shows up and how we interact with it.
The Blind Spot also reveals itself in the study of consciousness. Most scientific and philosophical discussions of consciousness focus on ‘qualia’ – the qualitative aspects of our experience, such as the perceived red glow of a sunset, or the sour taste of a lemon. Neuroscientists have established close correlations between such qualities and certain brain states, and they’ve been able to manipulate how we experience these qualities by acting directly on the brain. Nevertheless, there’s still no scientific explanation of qualia in terms of brain activity – or any other physical process for that matter. Nor is there any real understanding of what such an account would look like.
The mystery of consciousness includes more than just qualia. There’s also the question of subjectivity. Experiences have a subjective character; they occur in the first person. Why should a given sort of physical system have the feeling of being a subject? Science has no answer to this question.
At a deeper level, we might ask how experience comes to have a subject-object structure in the first place. Scientists and philosophers often work with the image of an ‘inside’ mind or subject grasping an outside world or object. But philosophers from different cultural traditions have challenged this image. For example, the philosopher William James (whose notion of ‘pure experience’ influenced Husserl and Whitehead) wrote in 1905 about the ‘active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us’. That active sense of living doesn’t have an inside-outside/subject-object structure; it’s subsequent reflection that imposes this structure on experience.
More than a millennium ago, Vasubandhu, an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the 4th to 5th century CE, criticised the reification of phenomena into independent subjects versus independent objects. For Vasubandhu, the subject-object structure is a deep-seated, cognitive distortion of a causal network of phenomenal moments that are empty of an inner subject grasping an outer object.
To bring the point home, consider that in certain intense states of absorption – during meditation, dance or highly skilled performances – the subject-object structure can drop away, and we are left with a sense of sheer felt presence. How is such phenomenal presence possible in a physical world? Science is silent on this question. And yet, without such phenomenal presence, science is impossible, for presence is a precondition for any observation or measurement to be possible.
Scientific materialists will argue that the scientific method enables us to get outside of experience and grasp the world as it is in itself. As will be clear by now, we disagree; indeed, we believe that this way of thinking misrepresents the very method and practice of science.
In general terms, here’s how the scientific method works. First, we set aside aspects of human experience on which we can’t always agree, such as how things look or taste or feel. Second, using mathematics and logic, we construct abstract, formal models that we treat as stable objects of public consensus. Third, we intervene in the course of events by isolating and controlling things that we can perceive and manipulate. Fourth, we use these abstract models and concrete interventions to calculate future events. Fifth, we check these predicted events against our perceptions. An essential ingredient of this whole process is technology: machines – our equipment – that standardise these procedures, amplify our powers of perception, and allow us to control phenomena to our own ends.
The Blind Spot arises when we start to believe that this method gives us access to unvarnished reality. But experience is present at every step. Scientific models must be pulled out from observations, often mediated by our complex scientific equipment. They are idealisations, not actual things in the world. Galileo’s model of a frictionless plane, for example; the Bohr model of the atom with a small, dense nucleus with electrons circling around it in quantised orbits like planets around a sun; evolutionary models of isolated populations – all of these exist in the scientist’s mind, not in nature. They are abstract mental representations, not mind-independent entities. Their power comes from the fact that they’re useful for helping to make testable predictions. But these, too, never take us outside experience, for they require specific kinds of perceptions performed by highly trained observers.
For these reasons, scientific ‘objectivity’ can’t stand outside experience; in this context, ‘objective’ simply means something that’s true to the observations agreed upon by a community of investigators using certain tools. Science is essentially a highly refined form of human experience, based on our capacities to observe, act and communicate.
So the belief that scientific models correspond to how things truly are doesn’t follow from the scientific method. Instead, it comes from an ancient impulse – one often found in monotheistic religions – to know the world as it is in itself, as God does. The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific.
Recent philosophers of science who target such ‘naive realism’ argue that science doesn’t culminate in a single picture of a theory-independent world. Rather, various aspects of the world – from chemical interactions to the growth and development of organisms, brain dynamics and social interactions – can be more or less successfully described by partial models. These models are always bound to our observations and actions, and circumscribed in their application.
The fields of complex systems theory and network science add mathematical precision to these claims by focusing on wholes rather than the reduction to parts. Complex systems theory is the study of systems, such as the brain, living organisms or the Earth’s global climate, whose behaviour is difficult to model: how the system responds depends on its state and context. Such systems exhibit self-organisation, spontaneous pattern-formation and sensitive dependence on initial conditions (very small changes to the initial conditions can lead to widely different outcomes).
Network science analyses complex systems by modelling their elements as nodes, and the connections between them as links. It explains behaviour in terms of network topologies – the arrangements of nodes and connections – and global dynamics, rather than in terms of local interactions at the micro level.
Inspired by these perspectives, we propose an alternative vision that seeks to move beyond the Blind Spot. Our experience and what we call ‘reality’ are inextricable. Scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. Science and its most challenging problems can be reframed once we appreciate this entanglement.
Let’s return to the problem we started with, the question of time and the existence of a First Cause. Many religions have addressed the notion of a First Cause in their mythic creation narratives. To explain where everything comes from and how it originates, they assume the existence of an absolute power or deity that transcends the confines of space and time. With few exceptions, God or gods create from without to give rise to what is within.
Unlike myth, however, science is constrained by its conceptual framework to function along a causal chain of events. The First Cause is a clear rupture of such causation – as Buddhist philosophers pointed out long ago in their arguments against the Hindu theistic position that there must be a first divine cause. How could there be a cause that was not itself an effect of some other cause? The idea of a First Cause, like the idea of a perfectly objective reality, is fundamentally theological.
These examples suggest that ‘time’ will always have a human dimension. The best we can aim for is to construct a scientific cosmological account that is consistent with what we can measure and know of the Universe from inside. The account can’t ever be a final or complete description of cosmic history. Rather, it must be an ongoing, self-correcting narrative. ‘Time’ is the backbone of this narrative; our lived experience of time is necessary to make the narrative meaningful. With this insight, it seems it’s the physicist’s time that is secondary; it’s merely a tool to describe the changes we’re able to observe and measure in the natural world. The time of the physicist, then, depends for its meaning on our lived experience of time.
We can now appreciate the deeper significance of our three scientific conundrums – the nature of matter, consciousness and time. They all point back to the Blind Spot and the need to reframe how we think about science. When we try to understand reality by focusing only on physical things outside of us, we lose sight of the experiences they point back to. The deepest puzzles can’t be solved in purely physical terms, because they all involve the unavoidable presence of experience in the equation. There’s no way to render ‘reality’ apart from experience, because the two are always intertwined.
To finally ‘see’ the Blind Spot is to wake up from a delusion of absolute knowledge. It’s also to embrace the hope that we can create a new scientific culture, in which we see ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding. We need nothing less than a science nourished by this sensibility for humanity to flourish in the new millennium.
---------------
Adam Frank is professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester in New York. He is the author of several books, the latest being Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (2018).
Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he is the Appleton professor of natural philosophy and professor of physics and astronomy, and the director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement (ICE). He is the author of The Island of Knowledge (2014).
Evan Thompson is professor of philosophy and a scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His latest book is Waking, Dreaming, Being (2015).
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Thursday, January 10, 2019
Tuesday, September 20, 2016
What is the scientific method, and why do so many people get it wrong?
via sciencealert:
Claims that the "the science isn’t settled" with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works.
So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong?
The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general.
Science and reasoning
Humans have two primary modes of reasoning: deduction and induction. When we reason deductively, we tease out the implications of information already available to us.
For example, if I tell you that Will is between the ages of Cate and Abby, and that Abby is older than Cate, you can deduce that Will must be older than Cate.
That answer was embedded in the problem, you just had to untangle it from what you already knew. This is how Sudoku puzzles work. Deduction is also the reasoning we use in mathematics.
Inductive reasoning goes beyond the information contained in what we already know and can extend our knowledge into new areas. We induce using generalisations and analogies.
Generalisations include observing regularities in nature and imagining they are everywhere uniform – this is, in part, how we create the so-called laws of nature.
Generalisations also create classes of things, such as 'mammals' or 'electrons'. We also generalise to define aspects of human behaviour, including psychological tendencies and economic trends.
Analogies make claims of similarities between two things, and extend this to make new knowledge.
For example, if I find a fossilised skull of an extinct animal that has sharp teeth, I might wonder what it ate. I look for animals alive today that have sharp teeth and notice they are carnivores.
Reasoning by analogy, I conclude that the animal was also a carnivore.
Using induction and inferring to the best possible explanation consistent with the evidence, science teaches us more about the world than we could simply deduce.
Science and uncertainty
Most of our theories or models are inductive analogies with the world, or parts of it.
If inputs to my particular theory produce outputs that match those of the real world, I consider it a good analogy, and therefore a good theory. If it doesn’t match, then I must reject it, or refine or redesign the theory to make it more analogous.
If I get many results of the same kind over time and space, I might generalise to a conclusion. But no amount of success can prove me right. Each confirming instance only increases my confidence in my idea. As Albert Einstein famously said:
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity (which are models and therefore analogies of how he thought the universe works) have been supported by experimental evidence many times under many conditions.
We have great confidence in the theories as good descriptions of reality. But they cannot be proved correct, because proof is a creature that belongs to deduction.
The hypothetico-deductive method
Science also works deductively through the hypothetico-deductive method.
It goes like this. I have a hypothesis or model that predicts that X will occur under certain experimental conditions.
Experimentally, X does not occur under those conditions. I can deduce, therefore, that the theory is flawed (assuming, of course, we trust the experimental conditions that produced not-X).
Under these conditions, I have proved that my hypothesis or model is incorrect (or at least incomplete). I reasoned deductively to do so.
But if X does occur, that does not mean I am correct, it just means that the experiment did not show my idea to be false. I now have increased confidence that I am correct, but I can’t be sure.
If one day experimental evidence that was beyond doubt was to go against Einstein’s predictions, we could deductively prove, through the hypothetico-deductive method, that his theories are incorrect or incomplete. But no number of confirming instances can prove he is right.
That an idea can be tested by experiment, that there can be experimental outcomes (in principle) that show the idea is incorrect, is what makes it a scientific one, at least according to the philosopher of science Karl Popper.
As an example of an untestable, and hence unscientific position, take that held by Australian climate denialist and One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts. Roberts maintains there is no empirical evidence of human-induced climate change.
When presented with authoritative evidence during an episode of the ABC’S Q&A television debating show recently, he claimed that the evidence was corrupted.
Yet his claim that human-induced climate change is not occurring cannot be put to the test as he would not accept any data showing him wrong. He is therefore not acting scientifically. He is indulging in pseudoscience.
Settled does not mean proved
One of the great errors in the public understanding of science is to equate settled with proved. While Einstein’s theories are 'settled',, they are not proved. But to plan for them not to work would be utter folly.
As the philosopher John Dewey pointed out in his book Logic: The Theory of Inquiry:
"In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is [of the science] being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry."
Claims that the "the science isn’t settled" with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works.
So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong?
The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general.
Science and reasoning
Humans have two primary modes of reasoning: deduction and induction. When we reason deductively, we tease out the implications of information already available to us.
For example, if I tell you that Will is between the ages of Cate and Abby, and that Abby is older than Cate, you can deduce that Will must be older than Cate.
That answer was embedded in the problem, you just had to untangle it from what you already knew. This is how Sudoku puzzles work. Deduction is also the reasoning we use in mathematics.
Inductive reasoning goes beyond the information contained in what we already know and can extend our knowledge into new areas. We induce using generalisations and analogies.
Generalisations include observing regularities in nature and imagining they are everywhere uniform – this is, in part, how we create the so-called laws of nature.
Generalisations also create classes of things, such as 'mammals' or 'electrons'. We also generalise to define aspects of human behaviour, including psychological tendencies and economic trends.
Analogies make claims of similarities between two things, and extend this to make new knowledge.
For example, if I find a fossilised skull of an extinct animal that has sharp teeth, I might wonder what it ate. I look for animals alive today that have sharp teeth and notice they are carnivores.
Reasoning by analogy, I conclude that the animal was also a carnivore.
Using induction and inferring to the best possible explanation consistent with the evidence, science teaches us more about the world than we could simply deduce.
Science and uncertainty
Most of our theories or models are inductive analogies with the world, or parts of it.
If inputs to my particular theory produce outputs that match those of the real world, I consider it a good analogy, and therefore a good theory. If it doesn’t match, then I must reject it, or refine or redesign the theory to make it more analogous.
If I get many results of the same kind over time and space, I might generalise to a conclusion. But no amount of success can prove me right. Each confirming instance only increases my confidence in my idea. As Albert Einstein famously said:
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity (which are models and therefore analogies of how he thought the universe works) have been supported by experimental evidence many times under many conditions.
We have great confidence in the theories as good descriptions of reality. But they cannot be proved correct, because proof is a creature that belongs to deduction.
The hypothetico-deductive method
Science also works deductively through the hypothetico-deductive method.
It goes like this. I have a hypothesis or model that predicts that X will occur under certain experimental conditions.
Experimentally, X does not occur under those conditions. I can deduce, therefore, that the theory is flawed (assuming, of course, we trust the experimental conditions that produced not-X).
Under these conditions, I have proved that my hypothesis or model is incorrect (or at least incomplete). I reasoned deductively to do so.
But if X does occur, that does not mean I am correct, it just means that the experiment did not show my idea to be false. I now have increased confidence that I am correct, but I can’t be sure.
If one day experimental evidence that was beyond doubt was to go against Einstein’s predictions, we could deductively prove, through the hypothetico-deductive method, that his theories are incorrect or incomplete. But no number of confirming instances can prove he is right.
That an idea can be tested by experiment, that there can be experimental outcomes (in principle) that show the idea is incorrect, is what makes it a scientific one, at least according to the philosopher of science Karl Popper.
As an example of an untestable, and hence unscientific position, take that held by Australian climate denialist and One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts. Roberts maintains there is no empirical evidence of human-induced climate change.
When presented with authoritative evidence during an episode of the ABC’S Q&A television debating show recently, he claimed that the evidence was corrupted.
Yet his claim that human-induced climate change is not occurring cannot be put to the test as he would not accept any data showing him wrong. He is therefore not acting scientifically. He is indulging in pseudoscience.
Settled does not mean proved
One of the great errors in the public understanding of science is to equate settled with proved. While Einstein’s theories are 'settled',, they are not proved. But to plan for them not to work would be utter folly.
As the philosopher John Dewey pointed out in his book Logic: The Theory of Inquiry:
"In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is [of the science] being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry."
Monday, December 21, 2015
10 things science (and Buddhism) says will make you happy
via WildMind
I’m a science geek as well as a Buddhist geek, and recently when I was leading a retreat on how to bring more joy into our lives I found myself making a lot of references to an article published in Yes magazine, which touched on ten things that have been shown by science to make us happier. It seemed natural to draw upon the article because so much of the research that was described resonated with Buddhist teachings.
So I thought it would be interesting to take the main points of the article and flesh them out with a little Buddhism.
1. Be generous
“Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it,” Yes magazine says. “Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.”
And in fact Buddhism has always emphasized the practice of dana, or giving. Giving hasn’t been seen purely as the exchange of material possessions, however; giving in Buddhist terms includes non-tangibles such as education, confidence, and wisdom.
“And which are the three factors of the donor? There is the case where the donor, before giving, is glad; while giving, his/her mind is bright & clear; and after giving is gratified.” (Anguttara Nikaya)
2. Savor everyday moments
“Study participants who took time to savor ordinary events that they normally hurried through, or to think back on pleasant moments from their day, showed significant increases in happiness and reductions in depression.”
This of course is an example of another fundamental Buddhist practice — mindfulness. When we’re mindful we stay in the present moment, and really pay attention to our experience. Walking meditation, and even eating, can be ways of savoring everyday moments. In being present, we dwell in the present without obsessing about the past or future, and this brings radiant happiness:
They sorrow not for what is past,
They have no longing for the future,
The present is sufficient for them:
Hence it is they appear so radiant.
(Samyutta Nikaya)
3. Avoid comparisons
“While keeping up with the Joneses is part of American culture, comparing ourselves with others can be damaging to happiness and self-esteem. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, focusing on our own personal achievement leads to greater satisfaction.”
Buddhists are advised to avoid “conceit.” Now in the west we think of conceit as a sense of superiority, but in Buddhism conceit includes thinking you’re inferior to others, AND it includes thinking that you’re equal to others! What’s left? Just not thinking in terms of self and other at all. The ideal in Buddhism is a kind of “flow” state in which we un-selfconsciously respond to others without any conceptualization of there being a self or an other.
“Though possessing many a virtue one should not compare oneself with others by deeming oneself better or equal or inferior.” (Sutta Nipata 918)
4. Put money low on the list
“The more we seek satisfactions in material goods, the less we find them there,” [researcher Richard] Ryan says. “The satisfaction has a short half-life—it’s very fleeting.” People who put money high on their priority list are more at risk for depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.
Despite western preconceptions to the contrary, the Buddha wasn’t against people making money. In fact he encouraged it! Money’s useful to the extent that it supports our physical needs, allows us to make others happy, and — most importantly — to the extent that we use it to support genuine spiritual practice. In Buddhist terms we validate our wealth creation by giving our money away to support what’s really important in life, which is the pursuit of wellbeing, truth, and goodness. The idea that materialism can bring us genuine happiness is what Buddhism calls a “false refuge.”
There is no satisfying sensual desires, even with the rain of gold coins. (Dhammapada 186)
Knowing the bliss of debtlessness,
& recollecting the bliss of having,
enjoying the bliss of wealth, the mortal
then sees clearly with discernment.
Seeing clearly — the wise one —
he knows both sides:
that these are not worth one sixteenth-sixteenth
of the bliss of blamelessness.
(Anguttara Nikaya)
5. Have meaningful goals
According to Harvard’s resident happiness professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, “Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning.”
The Buddha’s last words were “with mindfulness, strive.” The whole point of being a Buddhist is in order to attain spiritual awakening — which means to maximize our compassion and mindfulness. What could be more meaningful than that?
“He gains enthusiasm for the goal, gains enthusiasm for the Dhamma, gains gladness connected with the Dhamma.” (Majjhima Nikaya)
6. Take initiative at work
“How happy you are at work depends in part on how much initiative you take. Researcher Amy Wrzesniewski says that when we express creativity, help others, suggest improvements, or do additional tasks on the job, we make our work more rewarding and feel more in control.”
The Buddhist teaching on work is called the practice of Right Livelihood. And the Buddha saw work as being a way to show initiative and intelligence:
“By whatsoever activity a clansman make his living … he is deft and tireless; gifted with an inquiring turn of mind in to ways and means, he is able to arrange and carry out his job.” (Anguttara Nikaya)
Heedful at administering
or working at one’s occupation,
… [these are factors] leading to welfare & happiness.
(Anguttara Nikaya)
7. Make friends, treasure family
“We don’t just need relationships, we need close ones,” says Yes magazine.
To the Buddha, spiritual friendship was “the whole of the spiritual life.” And even though people tend to think about monks and nuns leaving home, for those who embraced the household life, close and loving relationships with others was highly recommended. “Generosity, kind words, beneficial help, and consistency in the face of events” are the things that hold a family together, according to the Buddha.
Let him associate with friends who are noble, energetic, and pure in life, let him be cordial and refined in conduct. Thus, full of joy, he will make an end of suffering. (Dhammapada 376)
Support for one’s parents,
assistance to one’s wife and children,
consistency in one’s work:
This is the highest protection [from suffering].
(Mangala Sutta)
8. Look on the bright side
“Happy people … see possibilities, opportunities, and success. When they think of the future, they are optimistic, and when they review the past, they tend to savor the high points,” say [researchers Ed] Diener and [Robert] Biswas-Diener.
Buddhism doesn’t encourage us to have a false sense of positivity, but neither are these researchers. They’re suggesting that we find the good in any situation we find ourselves in. Buddhism encourages positivity through practices such as affectionate and helpful speech, where we consciously look for the good in ourselves and others.
The strongest expression of this is where we’re told to maintain compassionate thoughts even toward those who are sadistically cruel toward us:
“Monks, even if bandits were to carve you up savagely, limb by limb, with a two-handled saw, he among you who let his heart get angered even at that would not be doing my bidding. Even then you should train yourselves: ‘Our minds will be unaffected and we will say no evil words. We will remain sympathetic, with a mind of good will, and with no inner hate. We will keep pervading these people with an awareness imbued with good will and, beginning with them, we will keep pervading the all-encompassing world with an awareness imbued with good will — abundant, expansive, immeasurable, free from hostility, free from ill will.’ That’s how you should train yourselves.” (Majjhima Nikaya)
9. Say thank you like you mean it
“People who keep gratitude journals on a weekly basis are healthier, more optimistic, and more likely to make progress toward achieving personal goals, according to author Robert Emmons.”
The Buddha said that gratitude, among other qualities, was the “highest protection,” meaning that it protects us against unhappiness. And:
“A person of integrity is grateful and thankful. This gratitude, this thankfulness, is advocated by civil people.”(Anguttara Nikaya)
To one ever eager to revere and serve the elders, these four blessing accrue: long life and beauty, happiness and power.(Dhammapada 109)
Gratitude in Buddhism helps us to align our being with the good (kusala) so that we’re more likely to live in a way that leads to happiness and wellbeing.
10. Get out and exercise
“A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense.”
And the Buddha said — well, I don’t think he said much about exercise! In a culture like the Buddha’s where most people worked manually, and where walking was the main form of transportation, there wasn’t much need to emphasize exercise as a thing in itself. It’s only in sedentary cultures like ours that people have to make a special trip to the gym to exercise — although they usually park as close to the entrance as possible to minimize the amount of exercise they have to do in order to get to the exercise machines! But walking meditation was, and is, a key practice in Buddhism, even though it’s sometimes done very slowly. However the Buddhist scriptures commonly mention that such-and-such a person was “walking and wandering up and down beside the river for exercise,” suggesting that monks, with their own form of semi-sedentary lifestyle, needed to set aside special time to get their bodies moving.
Monks, there are these five benefits of walking up & down. What five?
One is fit for long journeys; one is fit for striving; one has little disease; that which is eaten, drunk, chewed, tasted, goes through proper digestion; the composure attained by walking up & down is long-lasting.
These, monks, are the five benefits of walking up & down. (Anguttara Nikaya)
I’m a science geek as well as a Buddhist geek, and recently when I was leading a retreat on how to bring more joy into our lives I found myself making a lot of references to an article published in Yes magazine, which touched on ten things that have been shown by science to make us happier. It seemed natural to draw upon the article because so much of the research that was described resonated with Buddhist teachings.
So I thought it would be interesting to take the main points of the article and flesh them out with a little Buddhism.
1. Be generous
“Make altruism and giving part of your life, and be purposeful about it,” Yes magazine says. “Researcher Elizabeth Dunn found that those who spend money on others reported much greater happiness than those who spend it on themselves.”
And in fact Buddhism has always emphasized the practice of dana, or giving. Giving hasn’t been seen purely as the exchange of material possessions, however; giving in Buddhist terms includes non-tangibles such as education, confidence, and wisdom.
“And which are the three factors of the donor? There is the case where the donor, before giving, is glad; while giving, his/her mind is bright & clear; and after giving is gratified.” (Anguttara Nikaya)
2. Savor everyday moments
“Study participants who took time to savor ordinary events that they normally hurried through, or to think back on pleasant moments from their day, showed significant increases in happiness and reductions in depression.”
This of course is an example of another fundamental Buddhist practice — mindfulness. When we’re mindful we stay in the present moment, and really pay attention to our experience. Walking meditation, and even eating, can be ways of savoring everyday moments. In being present, we dwell in the present without obsessing about the past or future, and this brings radiant happiness:
They sorrow not for what is past,
They have no longing for the future,
The present is sufficient for them:
Hence it is they appear so radiant.
(Samyutta Nikaya)
3. Avoid comparisons
“While keeping up with the Joneses is part of American culture, comparing ourselves with others can be damaging to happiness and self-esteem. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, focusing on our own personal achievement leads to greater satisfaction.”
Buddhists are advised to avoid “conceit.” Now in the west we think of conceit as a sense of superiority, but in Buddhism conceit includes thinking you’re inferior to others, AND it includes thinking that you’re equal to others! What’s left? Just not thinking in terms of self and other at all. The ideal in Buddhism is a kind of “flow” state in which we un-selfconsciously respond to others without any conceptualization of there being a self or an other.
“Though possessing many a virtue one should not compare oneself with others by deeming oneself better or equal or inferior.” (Sutta Nipata 918)
4. Put money low on the list
“The more we seek satisfactions in material goods, the less we find them there,” [researcher Richard] Ryan says. “The satisfaction has a short half-life—it’s very fleeting.” People who put money high on their priority list are more at risk for depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.
Despite western preconceptions to the contrary, the Buddha wasn’t against people making money. In fact he encouraged it! Money’s useful to the extent that it supports our physical needs, allows us to make others happy, and — most importantly — to the extent that we use it to support genuine spiritual practice. In Buddhist terms we validate our wealth creation by giving our money away to support what’s really important in life, which is the pursuit of wellbeing, truth, and goodness. The idea that materialism can bring us genuine happiness is what Buddhism calls a “false refuge.”
There is no satisfying sensual desires, even with the rain of gold coins. (Dhammapada 186)
Knowing the bliss of debtlessness,
& recollecting the bliss of having,
enjoying the bliss of wealth, the mortal
then sees clearly with discernment.
Seeing clearly — the wise one —
he knows both sides:
that these are not worth one sixteenth-sixteenth
of the bliss of blamelessness.
(Anguttara Nikaya)
5. Have meaningful goals
According to Harvard’s resident happiness professor, Tal Ben-Shahar, “Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning.”
The Buddha’s last words were “with mindfulness, strive.” The whole point of being a Buddhist is in order to attain spiritual awakening — which means to maximize our compassion and mindfulness. What could be more meaningful than that?
“He gains enthusiasm for the goal, gains enthusiasm for the Dhamma, gains gladness connected with the Dhamma.” (Majjhima Nikaya)
6. Take initiative at work
“How happy you are at work depends in part on how much initiative you take. Researcher Amy Wrzesniewski says that when we express creativity, help others, suggest improvements, or do additional tasks on the job, we make our work more rewarding and feel more in control.”
The Buddhist teaching on work is called the practice of Right Livelihood. And the Buddha saw work as being a way to show initiative and intelligence:
“By whatsoever activity a clansman make his living … he is deft and tireless; gifted with an inquiring turn of mind in to ways and means, he is able to arrange and carry out his job.” (Anguttara Nikaya)
Heedful at administering
or working at one’s occupation,
… [these are factors] leading to welfare & happiness.
(Anguttara Nikaya)
7. Make friends, treasure family
“We don’t just need relationships, we need close ones,” says Yes magazine.
To the Buddha, spiritual friendship was “the whole of the spiritual life.” And even though people tend to think about monks and nuns leaving home, for those who embraced the household life, close and loving relationships with others was highly recommended. “Generosity, kind words, beneficial help, and consistency in the face of events” are the things that hold a family together, according to the Buddha.
Let him associate with friends who are noble, energetic, and pure in life, let him be cordial and refined in conduct. Thus, full of joy, he will make an end of suffering. (Dhammapada 376)
Support for one’s parents,
assistance to one’s wife and children,
consistency in one’s work:
This is the highest protection [from suffering].
(Mangala Sutta)
8. Look on the bright side
“Happy people … see possibilities, opportunities, and success. When they think of the future, they are optimistic, and when they review the past, they tend to savor the high points,” say [researchers Ed] Diener and [Robert] Biswas-Diener.
Buddhism doesn’t encourage us to have a false sense of positivity, but neither are these researchers. They’re suggesting that we find the good in any situation we find ourselves in. Buddhism encourages positivity through practices such as affectionate and helpful speech, where we consciously look for the good in ourselves and others.
The strongest expression of this is where we’re told to maintain compassionate thoughts even toward those who are sadistically cruel toward us:
“Monks, even if bandits were to carve you up savagely, limb by limb, with a two-handled saw, he among you who let his heart get angered even at that would not be doing my bidding. Even then you should train yourselves: ‘Our minds will be unaffected and we will say no evil words. We will remain sympathetic, with a mind of good will, and with no inner hate. We will keep pervading these people with an awareness imbued with good will and, beginning with them, we will keep pervading the all-encompassing world with an awareness imbued with good will — abundant, expansive, immeasurable, free from hostility, free from ill will.’ That’s how you should train yourselves.” (Majjhima Nikaya)
9. Say thank you like you mean it
“People who keep gratitude journals on a weekly basis are healthier, more optimistic, and more likely to make progress toward achieving personal goals, according to author Robert Emmons.”
The Buddha said that gratitude, among other qualities, was the “highest protection,” meaning that it protects us against unhappiness. And:
“A person of integrity is grateful and thankful. This gratitude, this thankfulness, is advocated by civil people.”(Anguttara Nikaya)
To one ever eager to revere and serve the elders, these four blessing accrue: long life and beauty, happiness and power.(Dhammapada 109)
Gratitude in Buddhism helps us to align our being with the good (kusala) so that we’re more likely to live in a way that leads to happiness and wellbeing.
10. Get out and exercise
“A Duke University study shows that exercise may be just as effective as drugs in treating depression, without all the side effects and expense.”
And the Buddha said — well, I don’t think he said much about exercise! In a culture like the Buddha’s where most people worked manually, and where walking was the main form of transportation, there wasn’t much need to emphasize exercise as a thing in itself. It’s only in sedentary cultures like ours that people have to make a special trip to the gym to exercise — although they usually park as close to the entrance as possible to minimize the amount of exercise they have to do in order to get to the exercise machines! But walking meditation was, and is, a key practice in Buddhism, even though it’s sometimes done very slowly. However the Buddhist scriptures commonly mention that such-and-such a person was “walking and wandering up and down beside the river for exercise,” suggesting that monks, with their own form of semi-sedentary lifestyle, needed to set aside special time to get their bodies moving.
Monks, there are these five benefits of walking up & down. What five?
One is fit for long journeys; one is fit for striving; one has little disease; that which is eaten, drunk, chewed, tasted, goes through proper digestion; the composure attained by walking up & down is long-lasting.
These, monks, are the five benefits of walking up & down. (Anguttara Nikaya)
Sunday, August 16, 2015
The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here
via Rolling Stone
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."
Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."
Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."
Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still "unclear" whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.
And yet, these aren't even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth's biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.
Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life.
Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. "It's unbelievable," Thomas told a local paper. "Whales are all over
the place."
Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented "haul out" of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.
Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that's ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs.
No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he's been seeing this year is deeply troubling.
Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn't exist without salmon.
But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.
"You talk to fishermen, and they all say: 'We've never seen anything like this before,' " says Peterson. "So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, 'What the hell's going on?' "
Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year's, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven't yet figured out precisely what's behind them and why they happen when they do. It's not a permanent change — the ocean's temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.
"The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature," says Peterson, "but the main problem we've had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can't keep up with it, and neither can the animals." Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: "At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over."
Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean's food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a "quite traumatic" impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it's converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means "the whole food chain is going to be different."
The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we're heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she's trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren't. The ancient data she studies shows "really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We're talking less than a decade."
For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling "the blob" — a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that's thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.
Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what's happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.
A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that's persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" — weather patterns just aren't supposed to last this long.
What's increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world's oceans, it's not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world's reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.
Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it's also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it's been blamed on accelerated beach erosion "almost as significant as some hurricane events."
Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study's authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails' shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled "cauliflower" or "sandpaper." A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world's top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an "effectively irreversible" change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world's oceans.
"I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct," James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. "But this change we're seeing is happening so fast it's almost instantaneous."
Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next.
The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.
So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.
Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.
Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered "Great Dying" took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.
With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans' most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. "Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today," Moffitt said.
As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.
For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she's seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world's marine ecosystems.
The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: "A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn't mean it's not a good indicator of change."
Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: "This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?"
Alin's frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins "heightened the whole issue," she says. "I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed."
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she's already planning her exit strategy: "If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don't have an exit strategy. . . . So that's who I'm here trying to help."
James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That's because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that's also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.
One group Hansen is helping is Our Children's Trust, a legal advocacy organization that's filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.
A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn't just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it's also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.
Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that's enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph.
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state's Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public's attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren't cut, "We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization."
Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen's study, said their new research doesn't necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon "safe" level of climate change — "would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise."
Hansen's new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, "This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding."
Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still "unclear" whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.
And yet, these aren't even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth's biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.
Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life.
Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. "It's unbelievable," Thomas told a local paper. "Whales are all over
the place."
Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented "haul out" of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.
Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that's ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs.
No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he's been seeing this year is deeply troubling.
Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn't exist without salmon.
But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.
"You talk to fishermen, and they all say: 'We've never seen anything like this before,' " says Peterson. "So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, 'What the hell's going on?' "
Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year's, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven't yet figured out precisely what's behind them and why they happen when they do. It's not a permanent change — the ocean's temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.
"The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature," says Peterson, "but the main problem we've had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can't keep up with it, and neither can the animals." Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: "At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over."
Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean's food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a "quite traumatic" impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it's converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means "the whole food chain is going to be different."
The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we're heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she's trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren't. The ancient data she studies shows "really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We're talking less than a decade."
For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling "the blob" — a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that's thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.
Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what's happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.
A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that's persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" — weather patterns just aren't supposed to last this long.
What's increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world's oceans, it's not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world's reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.
Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it's also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it's been blamed on accelerated beach erosion "almost as significant as some hurricane events."
Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study's authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails' shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled "cauliflower" or "sandpaper." A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world's top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an "effectively irreversible" change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world's oceans.
"I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct," James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. "But this change we're seeing is happening so fast it's almost instantaneous."
Thanks to the pressure we're putting on the planet's ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here's what could happen next.
The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.
So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.
Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.
Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the "Great Dying," when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered "Great Dying" took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.
With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans' most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. "Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today," Moffitt said.
As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.
For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she's seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world's marine ecosystems.
The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: "A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn't mean it's not a good indicator of change."
Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: "This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?"
Alin's frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins "heightened the whole issue," she says. "I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed."
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she's already planning her exit strategy: "If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don't have an exit strategy. . . . So that's who I'm here trying to help."
James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That's because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that's also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.
One group Hansen is helping is Our Children's Trust, a legal advocacy organization that's filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.
A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn't just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it's also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.
Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that's enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph.
Monday, July 20, 2015
Science and Synchronicity
by Damon Orion
“Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist.”
-C.G. Jung, “Synchronicity”
Miller: A lot o’ people don't realize what's really goin’ on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents an’ things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: Suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say, like, “plate,” or “shrimp,” or “plate o' shrimp” out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
-Repo Man
The other night I was having a “Where are they now?” attack: an uncontrollable urge to find out what’s become of old friends, ex-girlfriends, etc. My orgy of nostalgia culminated in the early hours of morning, when I decided to do a Google search for a long-lost buddy of mine that everyone used to call Chet. (Our reasons for calling him Chet were complex—suffice to say that they involved a character from a Cheetos commercial by the name of Chester Cheetah, and that everyone but Chet thought the nickname was just super.) I found a band on MySpace called Gathering Moss whose singer had Chet’s name, and there was someone on Facebook who looked like he might be the guy, but I couldn’t be sure either of these people was the Chet I was looking for. I went to bed, figuring, “Maybe some other time.”
“Some other time” came sooner than I’d expected. When I woke up in the morning, I found two emails waiting for me: one from the band Gathering Moss, and another from the Chet whose Facebook profile I’d just found. My astonishment quickly gave way to anger—clearly, there was spyware attached to my computer, and I was being sent junk mail based on recent Internet activity. Wrong. Both of these emails were from the man himself, my long-lost buddy Chet. Incredible, but true: After going more than 15 years without communicating, we’d both picked the same night to look each other up online.
It gets weirder: Impressed by this freaky alignment of circumstances, I flashed on the last time I’d spoken with Chet, which I believe was in 1993: I’d just returned to Santa Cruz after living in L.A. for about a year and a half, and I’d dropped by The Poet and the Patriot on a hunch that I’d run into an old friend there—probably Chet. Nothing was happening, so I gulped down my last few drops of beer, turned to the friend I was with and said, “Screw it. Let’s go to Taco Bell.” (I’ve learned a thing or two about diet since then, by the way.) As I was getting up from my seat, Chet walked in the door and immediately spied me. Standing there with Taco Bell bag in hand, he gaped at me in obvious disbelief, blurting out, “Dude! I just had a dream about you last night!”
Occurrences like these are examples of what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung named “synchronicity”: “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events.” For some people, such happenings are treasured confirmations that life is more than a disjointed mural of birthdays, board meetings and bee stings that keep our senses occupied as we trudge toward the coffin. For others, they’re simply twin lemons on the cosmic slot machine—amusing anomalies that the random event generator spits out from time to time.
The rationalist will explain this kind of thing, quite reasonably, as follows: If 500 different people think of Mickey Mouse at 2:45 today, the law of averages says that with all the Disney propaganda floating around the globe, at least one of those people will see a picture or replica of Mickey Mouse and think it “eerie.” In other words, there’s an awful lot happening on this planet, so it’s inevitable that some events from Column A are going to match up with events from Column B in weird ways. You call that supernatural? Go hump a gnome, star child.
If you’ve ever experienced a truly uncanny synchronicity yourself, though—or several in rapid succession, as is sometimes the case—then perhaps you’ve found that the issue isn’t quite so simple. Once in a while something happens that’s so unlikely, so patently absurd, that it leaves you with the unshakeable feeling that you’ve just gotten a prank call from the Other Side. I’m not talking about minor synchronicities, where, say, you’re dressed as The Devil on Halloween, and you make a purchase that leaves you with $6.66 in change; I’m talking about when on top of that, the cashier is dressed as an angel, and at the same time that she hands you your $6.66, you hear a line about “giving The Devil his due” in the song playing over the PA.
Right now some of you are rolling your eyes and grumbling to yourselves about what a mush-brained, dandelion-smoking Mork from Ork I am for suggesting that an oogah-boogah notion like synchronicity could possibly have any validity. Well … good. Not so very long ago, people were being hunted down, tortured and murdered for promoting the heretical notion that the Earth revolved around the sun, and I salute skeptics like yourself for fighting the kinds of superstitious belief systems that gave rise to that sad situation. Now, however, we find ourselves at yet another turning point, and as certain sacred dogmas of science are replaced by demonstrably more accurate models of reality, those who cling to the old mechanistic worldview risk becoming the new fundamentalists.
Consider the fact that no less of a scientific genius than Albert Einstein once dismissed nonlocality, the strange phenomenon in which one object has a direct influence on another object without being anywhere near that object or even exerting any physical force (now a widely accepted, though mysterious, aspect of quantum physics), as “spooky action at a distance.” Like synchronicity, such activity doesn’t fit our present models of How It All Is … but there it is, right before the researchers’ eyes.
{mosimage}Permit yourself the heresy of supposing, for a moment, that not all claims of synchronistic events are products of selective perception, the law of averages and/or outright delusion, but that some are eyewitness accounts of a particularly vexing form of “spooky action at a distance” that may one day be re-shelved from “metaphysics” to “physics.”
Given the author’s playful style, it was difficult to discern whether he literally meant that thinking about these sorts of issues would cause synchronistic events to happen, or that it would simply lead us to notice coincidences. The key point of the book, after all, was “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves”—that is, we tend to find whatever it is we look for. If you have it in your head that you’re going to find quarters wherever you go, you’ll notice quarters on the ground all over the place. If you think the number 23 has special significance, you’ll notice the number 23 everywhere. Conversely, if you’re convinced that synchronicity is a family-sized bucket of bull, you’ll collect data to help convince yourself of this.
Either way, Wilson’s statement checked out: Mere hours after I’d read that passage, a friend of mine dropped by my house and casually asked if I’d be interested in going to a conference in Palo Alto where some of the world’s foremost psychedelic philosophers would be speaking … including that “Prometheus Rising” guy, Robert Anton Wilson. This in itself made me do a double-take, but the clincher came at the conference the following day (Hell yes, I accepted my friend’s offer), when, by chance—or something—I found myself walking side-by-side with Wilson in a hallway at Stanford University. (Mind you, there were thousands of people at this conference, and Wilson sightings at this event were few and far between, so at the very least, we can say this was a fluky thing to happen.) Seizing the opportunity, I quickly introduced myself to Wilson and got right down to business: “So, I’ve been reading ‘Prometheus Rising,’ and I have some questions for you.” Thus began a half-hour conversation that ended on a pair of couches in the building’s lobby, where I picked the brain of the author whose book had just told me to be on the lookout for amazing coincidences. (Later that night, I’d also have a memorable dialog with Timothy Leary, but that’s a whole other cube of sugar.)
Wilson has written exhaustively on the subject of synchronicity, but the idea of his that’s most relevant to our discussion is a point he made about quantum physics in the documentary film Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, released four years before his death in 2007. Here, he recounts an event that befell him and his wife in the early ’90s after they’d moved from Los Angeles to what they thought was Santa Cruz: “We had something stolen from our car, and we called the police, and it turned out we didn’t live in Santa Cruz—we lived in a town called Capitola. The post office thought we lived in Santa Cruz, but the police thought we lived in Capitola. I started investigating this, and a reporter at the local newspaper told me we didn’t live in either Santa Cruz or Capitola; we lived in a unincorporated area called Live Oak. Now, quantum mechanics is just like that, except that in the case of Santa Cruz, Capitola and Live Oak, we don’t get too confused, because we remember we invented the lines on the map. But quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people think we didn’t invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all.”
While it might sound like a bliss ninny’s wishful thinking to say there’s a scientific case for the idea that all things are connected, this is, in fact, exactly what Bell’s Theorem implies. Described by physicist Henry Stapp as “the most profound discovery of science” in 1975, Bell’s Theorem points to a conundrum known as entanglement, in which two physically related particles are linked in such a way that anything that happens to one of these particles is instantaneously communicated to the other, regardless of distance. According to quantum mechanics, any two things that have ever interacted are entangled in this way forevermore.
Bruce Rosenblum, professor of physics at UCSC and coauthor of the book “Quantum Enigma,” notes that although the present record distance for this kind of communication between particles is 144 km. (89 miles), “physicists don’t really doubt that it would also work from Moscow to Manhattan. According to quantum theory, this should happen across the universe.”
Rosenblum, who claims to have met Einstein in the 1950s and John Bell in the late ’80s, adds, “What quantum mechanics is saying is that there’s an interconnectedness to the universe. For big things, it’s not demonstrable: It’s too complicated, too messy. But in principle, it’s there.”
Yes, even big things like human beings. According to Rosenblum, if two people meet and shake hands, they are forever entangled, but this entanglement is so complicated that it can’t be observed. After all, those two people have also interacted with the floor, with the air, etc., etc., etc.
{mosimage}When you consider the fact that human beings are composed of subatomic particles that are constantly sending and receiving information, it seems worth asking whether the kind of complex entanglement Rosenblum describes might be what’s going on backstage during certain types of synchronistic events. If so, we probably needn’t bother trying to figure out what that event “means” or “why” it happened—we’re dealing with a system of connections so vast and elaborate that trying to understand this individual occurrence would be like trying to follow the path of a single thread in a ball of string the size of Jupiter.
A 1978 experiment led by Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (later replicated by neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of London) provided what may have been a demonstration of quantum entanglement on the macroscopic level: Two test subjects were put in individual electromagnetically isolated rooms, and each subject’s brain was hooked up to an electroencephalograph. One test subject was then shown a series of strobe light flashes, which produced a unique brainwave pattern on the EEG. Strangely, the same pattern appeared on the other test subject’s EEG, although he was not shown the flashes. When the first test subject was given no stimulus, this correlation of brainwave patterns did not occur, nor did increases in distance affect the reproducibility of the experiment. In reference to this experiment, theoretical nuclear physicist Amit Goswami, PhD has written, “I am convinced that the transferred potential can be interpreted as the effect of quantum nonlocal interaction effect between correlated brains.”
As noted in books by the likes of Brian Clegg, Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav (as well as in the regrettably New Age-y film What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?), the findings of quantum mechanics more and more frequently confirm notions previously associated exclusively with mysticism. One of the latest enthusiasts of such discoveries to come into public consciousness is French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, who was announced as the winner of the $1.4 million 2009 Templeton Prize, the world’s largest annual award to an individual, on March 16. According to the award’s organizers, d’Espagnat’s work in quantum mechanics affirms a spiritual dimension of existence: Mysteries such as entanglement have led the scientist to perceive an interconnectedness and wholeness to the universe and a “veiled reality” underlying space, energy and matter.
Rosenblum, too, has had his paradigm remodeled by the “quantum enigma.” “To me there’s no question: It changes your worldview,” he states. “Even if you don’t know it, the worldview that everybody, including physicists, lives with is Newtonian: It’s the real world; everything has a cause. Oh, yes, there’s some randomness, of course, but basically, things separate, and one thing doesn’t influence the other. Hey, we know the Newtonian worldview works, but ultimately, we know it’s flawed. Does that affect you spiritually? Some people say yes.”
Perhaps enigmas like entanglement and synchronicity will eventually be demystified in this way, and we’ll find that they only seem weird to us because of our somewhat primitive perspectives (“primitive,” of course, being relative to what lies ahead). For now, when we encounter such mysteries, it might be useful to think of ourselves as third-century folks confounded by the riddle of the tuning forks. These tuning forks don’t have some mutual destiny or some message for each other, and there’s no specific “meaning” to the fact that one causes the other to vibrate; rather, we’re face-to-face with some kind of connection we don’t yet understand.
As I hammer these last words into my laptop at a coffee shop, the sight of a man walking through the front doorway is jolting the three women at the table behind me from their discussion of the archetypes that Wagner’s music evokes. “What an amazing coincidence!” one of them shouts to the man, who, it turns out, has some kind of profound connection to Wagner. “Were your ears burning?”
I could speculate here about people’s brainwaves entraining at a distance, about these people resonating in sympathy with each other by way of a “shared overtone” (the thought of Wagner) or some such “spooky” thing, or I could simply categorize this as yet another coincidence (one of many that have intersected with my awareness since I began writing this piece). Instead, I think I’ll follow my own advice and leave such questions to be answered in the future, when scientists and mystics alike are ready to abandon certain dearly cherished beliefs, and humanity is ready to see beyond boundaries that, as Wilson pointed out, exist solely in our minds.
Jung Einstein
Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity has been entangled with quantum physics from day one. As revealed in Jung’s “Letters, Vol. 2,” it was a series of dinner conversations with Albert Einstein in Zurich between 1909 and 1913 that first got the psychiatrist “thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later, this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.”
Jung met Pauli shortly after the idea of synchronicity began to take solid form in Jung’s mind. Pauli, who, at age 21, wrote a book-length critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity that Einstein praised as accurate, insightful and thorough, was instrumental in establishing the foundations of quantum mechanics. One of his major contributions to science is the exclusion principle, which physicist F. David Peat describes in his book “Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind” as the “discovery of an abstract pattern that lies hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter and determines its behavior in a non-causal way.” The influence of such concepts on Jung’s theory of synchronicity is unmistakable.
In 1934, after having Jung analyze several of his dreams, Pauli had a dream in which a man who looked like Einstein told him that quantum physics was only a one-dimensional part of a deeper reality. The following year, Einstein and physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen presented a paper that inadvertently illustrated a mysterious, acausal connectedness between particles. This EPR (Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen) paper lodged three complaints against quantum mechanics, one of them being the implausibility of nonlocality: the direct influence of one object on another object from far away. (Einstein famously scorned such activity as “spooky action at a distance.”)
{mosimage}In the mid-’60s, physicist John Bell responded to the EPR paper by proving a theorem that provided a way of testing the validity of these “spooky actions.” The experiments that followed produced empirical evidence of nonlocality. Thus, Einstein inadvertently opened the gates to the study of two different kinds of “spooky action at a distance”—synchronicity and quantum entanglement (the latter of whose implications he ironically found disconcerting)—and Pauli deliberately helped bring these ideas into focus.
In Synch
All over the globe, we see a tendency of organisms and even inanimate objects to synchronize with each other. One of the most intriguing examples of this principle is entrainment, which is believed to be nature’s way of conserving energy. Entrainment was discovered in 1665 by Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, who found that if you put several grandfather clocks whose pendulums are swinging out of synch with one another in the same room, their pendulums will be moving in time with each other within a day or two.
Entrainment exists within the animal world as well: Through the phenomenon of collective motion, groups of organisms such as flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarms of insects and colonies of bacteria move as a single body. In a more romantic vein, there are multiple instances of synchronized courtships, such as when groups of male fireflies in Southeastern Asia flash their lights on and off in perfect synchronization to attract females, or when frogs or crickets “serenade” potential mates in unison. Recent research at Cornell University has also revealed that while mating, mosquitoes synchronize the frequencies of the beats of their wings (400 Hz for the female and 600 Hz for the male) into a “male/female” harmonic of 1200 Hz.
In human biology, we see the principle of synchrony at work in both the locking menstrual cycles of women who live together and in the activity of pacemaker cells (the cells that control a person’s heart rate): When two pacemaker cells are in close proximity to each other, they quickly fall into rhythm with one another, building and releasing charges in unison.
{mosimage}By analyzing a film of children on a playground at lunchtime, a graduate student working under the supervision of anthropologist Edward T. Hall found another example of synchrony in the human realm: Kids all over the playground were unknowingly moving in rhythm with each other, as if dancing to the beat of a song. Similarly, by analyzing films of people in conversation, Boston University School of Medicine psychologist William S. Condon noticed that the listeners’ bodily gestures were in perfect synchrony with the speakers’ voices. Stranger still, when he hooked up pairs of people in conversation to separate electroencephalographs, he found that the brainwaves of people engaged in “good” conversation oscillated “in harmony” with each other. Similar experiments have revealed that the brainwaves of attendees of church sermons and students listening to lectures generally oscillated in synch with those of the speaker, and that only when this kind of brainwave entrainment occurred was the class or church service perceived as “good.” Such data convinced Condon that human beings are not “isolated entities sending discrete messages to one another,” but rather are participants within “shared organizational forms."
“Synchronicity is the love underlying the happenings of the time. Love brings everything together. Now, there is a resonating field. There is a field that tries for everything to come together, because we live in this unified field, and love is always trying to pull us into being unified. As we become more and more conscious, we enter that unified field of love, and then we have synchronistic experiences. Love is not a feeling—it’s pure reason. As we interact with each other, as we become more and more aware, as we have our desires placed out there, everything on the planet tries to bring it forth.”
“I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand these events, and although I believe their true origin is beyond human comprehension, it has much to do with the spiritual concept that time is an illusion, and events can be orchestrated by entities in spirit form (including our higher selves) which are designed to keep us on our true path.”
“Synchronicity, along with déjà vu, is a phenomenon that people too easily take for granted. People regularly toss off this everyday minor miracle with a ‘Wow! What a weird coincidence,’ not really thinking about it again. We should pay closer attention in these moments, ‘smell the rose of synchronicity,’ if you will, as there is probably something important happening if we look a little closer. I think of synchronicity as experiential proof of the interconnectedness of all things and the existence of a higher power. I think that if one could somehow empirically measure the countless individual synchronistic events across the globe at any given moment and simultaneously show all of them to the people of the world, it would go a long way to bind us together … or maybe that would just make us like The Borg … Either way, resistance is futile.”
“Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist.”
-C.G. Jung, “Synchronicity”
Miller: A lot o’ people don't realize what's really goin’ on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents an’ things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: Suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say, like, “plate,” or “shrimp,” or “plate o' shrimp” out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.
Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days?
-Repo Man
The other night I was having a “Where are they now?” attack: an uncontrollable urge to find out what’s become of old friends, ex-girlfriends, etc. My orgy of nostalgia culminated in the early hours of morning, when I decided to do a Google search for a long-lost buddy of mine that everyone used to call Chet. (Our reasons for calling him Chet were complex—suffice to say that they involved a character from a Cheetos commercial by the name of Chester Cheetah, and that everyone but Chet thought the nickname was just super.) I found a band on MySpace called Gathering Moss whose singer had Chet’s name, and there was someone on Facebook who looked like he might be the guy, but I couldn’t be sure either of these people was the Chet I was looking for. I went to bed, figuring, “Maybe some other time.”
“Some other time” came sooner than I’d expected. When I woke up in the morning, I found two emails waiting for me: one from the band Gathering Moss, and another from the Chet whose Facebook profile I’d just found. My astonishment quickly gave way to anger—clearly, there was spyware attached to my computer, and I was being sent junk mail based on recent Internet activity. Wrong. Both of these emails were from the man himself, my long-lost buddy Chet. Incredible, but true: After going more than 15 years without communicating, we’d both picked the same night to look each other up online.
It gets weirder: Impressed by this freaky alignment of circumstances, I flashed on the last time I’d spoken with Chet, which I believe was in 1993: I’d just returned to Santa Cruz after living in L.A. for about a year and a half, and I’d dropped by The Poet and the Patriot on a hunch that I’d run into an old friend there—probably Chet. Nothing was happening, so I gulped down my last few drops of beer, turned to the friend I was with and said, “Screw it. Let’s go to Taco Bell.” (I’ve learned a thing or two about diet since then, by the way.) As I was getting up from my seat, Chet walked in the door and immediately spied me. Standing there with Taco Bell bag in hand, he gaped at me in obvious disbelief, blurting out, “Dude! I just had a dream about you last night!”
Occurrences like these are examples of what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung named “synchronicity”: “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events.” For some people, such happenings are treasured confirmations that life is more than a disjointed mural of birthdays, board meetings and bee stings that keep our senses occupied as we trudge toward the coffin. For others, they’re simply twin lemons on the cosmic slot machine—amusing anomalies that the random event generator spits out from time to time.
The rationalist will explain this kind of thing, quite reasonably, as follows: If 500 different people think of Mickey Mouse at 2:45 today, the law of averages says that with all the Disney propaganda floating around the globe, at least one of those people will see a picture or replica of Mickey Mouse and think it “eerie.” In other words, there’s an awful lot happening on this planet, so it’s inevitable that some events from Column A are going to match up with events from Column B in weird ways. You call that supernatural? Go hump a gnome, star child.
If you’ve ever experienced a truly uncanny synchronicity yourself, though—or several in rapid succession, as is sometimes the case—then perhaps you’ve found that the issue isn’t quite so simple. Once in a while something happens that’s so unlikely, so patently absurd, that it leaves you with the unshakeable feeling that you’ve just gotten a prank call from the Other Side. I’m not talking about minor synchronicities, where, say, you’re dressed as The Devil on Halloween, and you make a purchase that leaves you with $6.66 in change; I’m talking about when on top of that, the cashier is dressed as an angel, and at the same time that she hands you your $6.66, you hear a line about “giving The Devil his due” in the song playing over the PA.
Right now some of you are rolling your eyes and grumbling to yourselves about what a mush-brained, dandelion-smoking Mork from Ork I am for suggesting that an oogah-boogah notion like synchronicity could possibly have any validity. Well … good. Not so very long ago, people were being hunted down, tortured and murdered for promoting the heretical notion that the Earth revolved around the sun, and I salute skeptics like yourself for fighting the kinds of superstitious belief systems that gave rise to that sad situation. Now, however, we find ourselves at yet another turning point, and as certain sacred dogmas of science are replaced by demonstrably more accurate models of reality, those who cling to the old mechanistic worldview risk becoming the new fundamentalists.
Consider the fact that no less of a scientific genius than Albert Einstein once dismissed nonlocality, the strange phenomenon in which one object has a direct influence on another object without being anywhere near that object or even exerting any physical force (now a widely accepted, though mysterious, aspect of quantum physics), as “spooky action at a distance.” Like synchronicity, such activity doesn’t fit our present models of How It All Is … but there it is, right before the researchers’ eyes.
{mosimage}Permit yourself the heresy of supposing, for a moment, that not all claims of synchronistic events are products of selective perception, the law of averages and/or outright delusion, but that some are eyewitness accounts of a particularly vexing form of “spooky action at a distance” that may one day be re-shelved from “metaphysics” to “physics.”
That Synching Feeling
At age 19 (back in the early ’90s, when Chet and I were the best of friends), I was introduced to the ideas of philosopher Robert Anton Wilson by way of his book “Prometheus Rising.” One passage from the book struck me as especially intriguing: At the end of a chapter about archetypes, Wilson wrote, “Contemplating these issues usually triggers Jungian synchronicities. See how long after reading this chapter you encounter an amazing coincidence.”Given the author’s playful style, it was difficult to discern whether he literally meant that thinking about these sorts of issues would cause synchronistic events to happen, or that it would simply lead us to notice coincidences. The key point of the book, after all, was “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves”—that is, we tend to find whatever it is we look for. If you have it in your head that you’re going to find quarters wherever you go, you’ll notice quarters on the ground all over the place. If you think the number 23 has special significance, you’ll notice the number 23 everywhere. Conversely, if you’re convinced that synchronicity is a family-sized bucket of bull, you’ll collect data to help convince yourself of this.
Either way, Wilson’s statement checked out: Mere hours after I’d read that passage, a friend of mine dropped by my house and casually asked if I’d be interested in going to a conference in Palo Alto where some of the world’s foremost psychedelic philosophers would be speaking … including that “Prometheus Rising” guy, Robert Anton Wilson. This in itself made me do a double-take, but the clincher came at the conference the following day (Hell yes, I accepted my friend’s offer), when, by chance—or something—I found myself walking side-by-side with Wilson in a hallway at Stanford University. (Mind you, there were thousands of people at this conference, and Wilson sightings at this event were few and far between, so at the very least, we can say this was a fluky thing to happen.) Seizing the opportunity, I quickly introduced myself to Wilson and got right down to business: “So, I’ve been reading ‘Prometheus Rising,’ and I have some questions for you.” Thus began a half-hour conversation that ended on a pair of couches in the building’s lobby, where I picked the brain of the author whose book had just told me to be on the lookout for amazing coincidences. (Later that night, I’d also have a memorable dialog with Timothy Leary, but that’s a whole other cube of sugar.)
Wilson has written exhaustively on the subject of synchronicity, but the idea of his that’s most relevant to our discussion is a point he made about quantum physics in the documentary film Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, released four years before his death in 2007. Here, he recounts an event that befell him and his wife in the early ’90s after they’d moved from Los Angeles to what they thought was Santa Cruz: “We had something stolen from our car, and we called the police, and it turned out we didn’t live in Santa Cruz—we lived in a town called Capitola. The post office thought we lived in Santa Cruz, but the police thought we lived in Capitola. I started investigating this, and a reporter at the local newspaper told me we didn’t live in either Santa Cruz or Capitola; we lived in a unincorporated area called Live Oak. Now, quantum mechanics is just like that, except that in the case of Santa Cruz, Capitola and Live Oak, we don’t get too confused, because we remember we invented the lines on the map. But quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people think we didn’t invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all.”
Quantum Metaphysics?
As Wilson stated, the fabric of the universe doesn’t play by human rules—even scientific ones. To understand just how strange things can get in the quantum realm, we need to take a look at Bell’s Theorem, often referred to as the Pandora’s box of modern physics. As long as Wilson has gotten us into this mess, let’s let him do the explaining (again from “Prometheus Rising”): “Bell’s Theorem is highly technical, but in ordinary language it amounts to something like this: There are no isolated systems; every particle in the universe is in ‘instantaneous’ (faster-than-light) communication with every other particle. The Whole System, even the parts that are separated by cosmic distances, functions as a Whole System.”While it might sound like a bliss ninny’s wishful thinking to say there’s a scientific case for the idea that all things are connected, this is, in fact, exactly what Bell’s Theorem implies. Described by physicist Henry Stapp as “the most profound discovery of science” in 1975, Bell’s Theorem points to a conundrum known as entanglement, in which two physically related particles are linked in such a way that anything that happens to one of these particles is instantaneously communicated to the other, regardless of distance. According to quantum mechanics, any two things that have ever interacted are entangled in this way forevermore.
Bruce Rosenblum, professor of physics at UCSC and coauthor of the book “Quantum Enigma,” notes that although the present record distance for this kind of communication between particles is 144 km. (89 miles), “physicists don’t really doubt that it would also work from Moscow to Manhattan. According to quantum theory, this should happen across the universe.”
Rosenblum, who claims to have met Einstein in the 1950s and John Bell in the late ’80s, adds, “What quantum mechanics is saying is that there’s an interconnectedness to the universe. For big things, it’s not demonstrable: It’s too complicated, too messy. But in principle, it’s there.”
Yes, even big things like human beings. According to Rosenblum, if two people meet and shake hands, they are forever entangled, but this entanglement is so complicated that it can’t be observed. After all, those two people have also interacted with the floor, with the air, etc., etc., etc.
{mosimage}When you consider the fact that human beings are composed of subatomic particles that are constantly sending and receiving information, it seems worth asking whether the kind of complex entanglement Rosenblum describes might be what’s going on backstage during certain types of synchronistic events. If so, we probably needn’t bother trying to figure out what that event “means” or “why” it happened—we’re dealing with a system of connections so vast and elaborate that trying to understand this individual occurrence would be like trying to follow the path of a single thread in a ball of string the size of Jupiter.
A 1978 experiment led by Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (later replicated by neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of London) provided what may have been a demonstration of quantum entanglement on the macroscopic level: Two test subjects were put in individual electromagnetically isolated rooms, and each subject’s brain was hooked up to an electroencephalograph. One test subject was then shown a series of strobe light flashes, which produced a unique brainwave pattern on the EEG. Strangely, the same pattern appeared on the other test subject’s EEG, although he was not shown the flashes. When the first test subject was given no stimulus, this correlation of brainwave patterns did not occur, nor did increases in distance affect the reproducibility of the experiment. In reference to this experiment, theoretical nuclear physicist Amit Goswami, PhD has written, “I am convinced that the transferred potential can be interpreted as the effect of quantum nonlocal interaction effect between correlated brains.”
As noted in books by the likes of Brian Clegg, Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav (as well as in the regrettably New Age-y film What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?), the findings of quantum mechanics more and more frequently confirm notions previously associated exclusively with mysticism. One of the latest enthusiasts of such discoveries to come into public consciousness is French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, who was announced as the winner of the $1.4 million 2009 Templeton Prize, the world’s largest annual award to an individual, on March 16. According to the award’s organizers, d’Espagnat’s work in quantum mechanics affirms a spiritual dimension of existence: Mysteries such as entanglement have led the scientist to perceive an interconnectedness and wholeness to the universe and a “veiled reality” underlying space, energy and matter.
Rosenblum, too, has had his paradigm remodeled by the “quantum enigma.” “To me there’s no question: It changes your worldview,” he states. “Even if you don’t know it, the worldview that everybody, including physicists, lives with is Newtonian: It’s the real world; everything has a cause. Oh, yes, there’s some randomness, of course, but basically, things separate, and one thing doesn’t influence the other. Hey, we know the Newtonian worldview works, but ultimately, we know it’s flawed. Does that affect you spiritually? Some people say yes.”
Meta-Metaphysics
Strike a mounted tuning fork that produces the pitch of A, and its oscillations will cause another mounted A tuning fork in the same room to vibrate “in sympathy.” Though this probably would have seemed magical to pre-scientific societies, physics tells us that these forks are connected by the air particles that surround them, and that one responds to the other because of a shared overtone. That doesn’t mean that such activity isn’t amazing—it simply means that there’s an explanation for it. Similarly, if someone who had never been exposed to television saw the same program coming through two different TV sets, he or she might be baffled as to how information could “travel” so quickly from one television to the next, never suspecting much there was a bigger picture.Perhaps enigmas like entanglement and synchronicity will eventually be demystified in this way, and we’ll find that they only seem weird to us because of our somewhat primitive perspectives (“primitive,” of course, being relative to what lies ahead). For now, when we encounter such mysteries, it might be useful to think of ourselves as third-century folks confounded by the riddle of the tuning forks. These tuning forks don’t have some mutual destiny or some message for each other, and there’s no specific “meaning” to the fact that one causes the other to vibrate; rather, we’re face-to-face with some kind of connection we don’t yet understand.
As I hammer these last words into my laptop at a coffee shop, the sight of a man walking through the front doorway is jolting the three women at the table behind me from their discussion of the archetypes that Wagner’s music evokes. “What an amazing coincidence!” one of them shouts to the man, who, it turns out, has some kind of profound connection to Wagner. “Were your ears burning?”
I could speculate here about people’s brainwaves entraining at a distance, about these people resonating in sympathy with each other by way of a “shared overtone” (the thought of Wagner) or some such “spooky” thing, or I could simply categorize this as yet another coincidence (one of many that have intersected with my awareness since I began writing this piece). Instead, I think I’ll follow my own advice and leave such questions to be answered in the future, when scientists and mystics alike are ready to abandon certain dearly cherished beliefs, and humanity is ready to see beyond boundaries that, as Wilson pointed out, exist solely in our minds.
Jung Einstein
Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity has been entangled with quantum physics from day one. As revealed in Jung’s “Letters, Vol. 2,” it was a series of dinner conversations with Albert Einstein in Zurich between 1909 and 1913 that first got the psychiatrist “thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later, this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.”
Jung met Pauli shortly after the idea of synchronicity began to take solid form in Jung’s mind. Pauli, who, at age 21, wrote a book-length critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity that Einstein praised as accurate, insightful and thorough, was instrumental in establishing the foundations of quantum mechanics. One of his major contributions to science is the exclusion principle, which physicist F. David Peat describes in his book “Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind” as the “discovery of an abstract pattern that lies hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter and determines its behavior in a non-causal way.” The influence of such concepts on Jung’s theory of synchronicity is unmistakable.
In 1934, after having Jung analyze several of his dreams, Pauli had a dream in which a man who looked like Einstein told him that quantum physics was only a one-dimensional part of a deeper reality. The following year, Einstein and physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen presented a paper that inadvertently illustrated a mysterious, acausal connectedness between particles. This EPR (Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen) paper lodged three complaints against quantum mechanics, one of them being the implausibility of nonlocality: the direct influence of one object on another object from far away. (Einstein famously scorned such activity as “spooky action at a distance.”)
{mosimage}In the mid-’60s, physicist John Bell responded to the EPR paper by proving a theorem that provided a way of testing the validity of these “spooky actions.” The experiments that followed produced empirical evidence of nonlocality. Thus, Einstein inadvertently opened the gates to the study of two different kinds of “spooky action at a distance”—synchronicity and quantum entanglement (the latter of whose implications he ironically found disconcerting)—and Pauli deliberately helped bring these ideas into focus.
In Synch
All over the globe, we see a tendency of organisms and even inanimate objects to synchronize with each other. One of the most intriguing examples of this principle is entrainment, which is believed to be nature’s way of conserving energy. Entrainment was discovered in 1665 by Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, who found that if you put several grandfather clocks whose pendulums are swinging out of synch with one another in the same room, their pendulums will be moving in time with each other within a day or two.
Entrainment exists within the animal world as well: Through the phenomenon of collective motion, groups of organisms such as flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarms of insects and colonies of bacteria move as a single body. In a more romantic vein, there are multiple instances of synchronized courtships, such as when groups of male fireflies in Southeastern Asia flash their lights on and off in perfect synchronization to attract females, or when frogs or crickets “serenade” potential mates in unison. Recent research at Cornell University has also revealed that while mating, mosquitoes synchronize the frequencies of the beats of their wings (400 Hz for the female and 600 Hz for the male) into a “male/female” harmonic of 1200 Hz.
In human biology, we see the principle of synchrony at work in both the locking menstrual cycles of women who live together and in the activity of pacemaker cells (the cells that control a person’s heart rate): When two pacemaker cells are in close proximity to each other, they quickly fall into rhythm with one another, building and releasing charges in unison.
{mosimage}By analyzing a film of children on a playground at lunchtime, a graduate student working under the supervision of anthropologist Edward T. Hall found another example of synchrony in the human realm: Kids all over the playground were unknowingly moving in rhythm with each other, as if dancing to the beat of a song. Similarly, by analyzing films of people in conversation, Boston University School of Medicine psychologist William S. Condon noticed that the listeners’ bodily gestures were in perfect synchrony with the speakers’ voices. Stranger still, when he hooked up pairs of people in conversation to separate electroencephalographs, he found that the brainwaves of people engaged in “good” conversation oscillated “in harmony” with each other. Similar experiments have revealed that the brainwaves of attendees of church sermons and students listening to lectures generally oscillated in synch with those of the speaker, and that only when this kind of brainwave entrainment occurred was the class or church service perceived as “good.” Such data convinced Condon that human beings are not “isolated entities sending discrete messages to one another,” but rather are participants within “shared organizational forms."
The Mystical Perspective
“Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irreprehensible, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them.”
- Carl Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche”
“Synchronicity is the love underlying the happenings of the time. Love brings everything together. Now, there is a resonating field. There is a field that tries for everything to come together, because we live in this unified field, and love is always trying to pull us into being unified. As we become more and more conscious, we enter that unified field of love, and then we have synchronistic experiences. Love is not a feeling—it’s pure reason. As we interact with each other, as we become more and more aware, as we have our desires placed out there, everything on the planet tries to bring it forth.”
- Risa D’Angeles, founder and director of the Esoteric & Astrological Studies & Research Institute
“I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand these events, and although I believe their true origin is beyond human comprehension, it has much to do with the spiritual concept that time is an illusion, and events can be orchestrated by entities in spirit form (including our higher selves) which are designed to keep us on our true path.”
-Mystic Life, editor of SynchronicityTimes.com
“Synchronicity, along with déjà vu, is a phenomenon that people too easily take for granted. People regularly toss off this everyday minor miracle with a ‘Wow! What a weird coincidence,’ not really thinking about it again. We should pay closer attention in these moments, ‘smell the rose of synchronicity,’ if you will, as there is probably something important happening if we look a little closer. I think of synchronicity as experiential proof of the interconnectedness of all things and the existence of a higher power. I think that if one could somehow empirically measure the countless individual synchronistic events across the globe at any given moment and simultaneously show all of them to the people of the world, it would go a long way to bind us together … or maybe that would just make us like The Borg … Either way, resistance is futile.”
-Chet (now married, a father of three, and working as a retail manager in Chicago)
Saturday, March 7, 2015
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:
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:
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Why is Consciousness so Mysterious? - David Chalmers
David John Chalmers (/ˈtʃælmərz/; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the area of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He is also Professor of Philosophy at New York University. In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Lucid dreamers help scientists locate the seat of meta-consciousness in the brain
From ScienceDaily:
Studies of lucid dreamers show which centers of the brain become active when we become aware of ourselves in dreams.
Which areas of the brain help us to perceive our world in a self-reflective manner is difficult to measure. During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness.
The human capacity of self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development are among the unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Despite modern imaging techniques, it is still impossible to fully visualize what goes on in the brain when people move to consciousness from an unconscious state. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to watch our brain during this transitional change. Although this process is the same, every time a person awakens from sleep, the basic activity of our brain is usually greatly reduced during deep sleep. This makes it impossible to clearly delineate the specific brain activity underlying the regained self-perception and consciousness during the transition to wakefulness from the global changes in brain activity that takes place at the same time.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institutes of Psychiatry in Munich and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and from Charité in Berlin have now studied people who are aware that they are dreaming while being in a dream state, and are also able to deliberately control their dreams. Those so-called lucid dreamers have access to their memories during lucid dreaming, can perform actions and are aware of themselves – although remaining unmistakably in a dream state and not waking up. As author Martin Dresler explains, “In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming. It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state.”
By comparing the activity of the brain during one of these lucid periods with the activity measured immediately before in a normal dream, the scientists were able to identify the characteristic brain activities of lucid awareness.
“The general basic activity of the brain is similar in a normal dream and in a lucid dream,” says Michael Czisch, head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. “In a lucid state, however, the activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex increases markedly within seconds. The involved areas of the cerebral cortex are the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, to which commonly the function of self-assessment is attributed, and the frontopolar regions, which are responsible for evaluating our own thoughts and feelings. The precuneus is also especially active, a part of the brain that has long been linked with self-perception.” The findings confirm earlier studies and have made the neural networks of a conscious mental state visible for the first time.
Studies of lucid dreamers show which centers of the brain become active when we become aware of ourselves in dreams.
Which areas of the brain help us to perceive our world in a self-reflective manner is difficult to measure. During wakefulness, we are always conscious of ourselves. In sleep, however, we are not. But there are people, known as lucid dreamers, who can become aware of dreaming during sleep. Studies employing magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) have now been able to demonstrate that a specific cortical network consisting of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the frontopolar regions and the precuneus is activated when this lucid consciousness is attained. All of these regions are associated with self-reflective functions. This research into lucid dreaming gives the authors of the latest study insight into the neural basis of human consciousness.
The human capacity of self-perception, self-reflection and consciousness development are among the unsolved mysteries of neuroscience. Despite modern imaging techniques, it is still impossible to fully visualize what goes on in the brain when people move to consciousness from an unconscious state. The problem lies in the fact that it is difficult to watch our brain during this transitional change. Although this process is the same, every time a person awakens from sleep, the basic activity of our brain is usually greatly reduced during deep sleep. This makes it impossible to clearly delineate the specific brain activity underlying the regained self-perception and consciousness during the transition to wakefulness from the global changes in brain activity that takes place at the same time.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institutes of Psychiatry in Munich and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and from Charité in Berlin have now studied people who are aware that they are dreaming while being in a dream state, and are also able to deliberately control their dreams. Those so-called lucid dreamers have access to their memories during lucid dreaming, can perform actions and are aware of themselves – although remaining unmistakably in a dream state and not waking up. As author Martin Dresler explains, “In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming. It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state.”
By comparing the activity of the brain during one of these lucid periods with the activity measured immediately before in a normal dream, the scientists were able to identify the characteristic brain activities of lucid awareness.
“The general basic activity of the brain is similar in a normal dream and in a lucid dream,” says Michael Czisch, head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. “In a lucid state, however, the activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex increases markedly within seconds. The involved areas of the cerebral cortex are the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, to which commonly the function of self-assessment is attributed, and the frontopolar regions, which are responsible for evaluating our own thoughts and feelings. The precuneus is also especially active, a part of the brain that has long been linked with self-perception.” The findings confirm earlier studies and have made the neural networks of a conscious mental state visible for the first time.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Cymatics: When Science And Music Dance
From IFLScience :
When you weave science and music together, what happens?
Only some of the most mind blowing, jaw dropping visuals you’ll ever see.
Derived from the Greek word “wave”, Cymatics is defined by cymatic.org as revealing “a strange and beautiful symmetry at work in nature.” Commonly described as” visible sound”, it is a branch of modal phenomena originally created by Swiss doctor Hans Jenny.
Cymatics is achieved by vibrating a plate that is covered in a thin film of a medium, for example sand, water or iron fillings, by placing a frequency though it, commonly using tones or music. We can then observe the different frequencies displacing the medium, creating intricately stunning patterns or shapes.
Check out this unbelievable video by Nigel Stanford and his crew, demonstrating the incredible applications of Cymatics.
When you weave science and music together, what happens?
Only some of the most mind blowing, jaw dropping visuals you’ll ever see.
Derived from the Greek word “wave”, Cymatics is defined by cymatic.org as revealing “a strange and beautiful symmetry at work in nature.” Commonly described as” visible sound”, it is a branch of modal phenomena originally created by Swiss doctor Hans Jenny.
Cymatics is achieved by vibrating a plate that is covered in a thin film of a medium, for example sand, water or iron fillings, by placing a frequency though it, commonly using tones or music. We can then observe the different frequencies displacing the medium, creating intricately stunning patterns or shapes.
Check out this unbelievable video by Nigel Stanford and his crew, demonstrating the incredible applications of Cymatics.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Scientists Have Discovered a Way For You to Take Total Control of Your Dreams
The news: In the 2010 film Inception, it's bad news to realize you're dreaming.
When Leonardo DiCaprio's character reveals to Ellen Page that their outdoor café chat isn't really happening, for instance, the world unravels: Page panics, her coffee starts vibrating and everything around them explodes.
But in real life, "lucid dreaming" — or realizing you're in a dream while it's happening — is a valuable and coveted state. And in a revolutionary new study, scientists may have discovered exactly how to make it happen.
Really. The results were published in Nature Neuroscience this weekend, and they're pretty fascinating. Twenty-seven healthy adult volunteers spent multiple nights sleeping in a lab in Germany, where they eventually entered the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep. About two minutes in, the researchers applied a weak 30-second electrical current directly to the frontal lobes of some of the patients. The others received a "sham current with no electricity."
The outcome was telling: For the subjects who received electricity, particularly at an output of 40 Hertz, lucid dreaming was reported 77% of the time. Another 58% reported lucidity when exposed to 25 Hertz, while lucid dreaming was never reported by any of the subjects who received zero electricity.
As none of the volunteers had a history of such dreams, the results, though self-reported, seem reliable. In addition, none were aware what type of stimulation they'd be receiving, nor was the electrical current strong enough to wake them on its own.
According to a 2009 study, the 30-40 Hertz range is a sweet spot for lucidity. This rate matches the brain waves typically measured during unprompted lucid dreams, which represent much higher brain function than a normal REM cycle.
Why this is important: Vox reports that these findings constitute a "major contribution to consciousness research." Not only are they conceptually intriguing, they may represent possible ways to treat mental health problems, like the "recurring nightmares" that accompany post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Gutenberg University philosopher Thomas Metzinger also points out that the transition from non-lucid to lucid dreaming is similar to "snapping back to attention after daydreaming," so the study could provide insight into waking life as well. Additionally, electricity has become increasingly common in brain treatments in general: The FDA recently approved "an electrical brain implant that treats tremors associated with Parkinson's disease."
Of course, this method is still in its early stages. Needless to say, don't try this at home. But all told, the possibilities are certainly exciting and may constitute an entirely new way of studying the brain and the physiological impact of dreams.
Christopher Nolan would be proud.
http://mic.com/articles/89269/scientists-have-discovered-a-way-for-you-to-take-total-control-of-your-dreams
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)