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How to Feel Normal in an Anomalistic Universe
“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Another day, another anomaly.
When you are as deeply concerned with strange phenomena as I am, it’s hard to get up in the morning feeling normal.“She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Another day, another anomaly.
It helps if you drink.
The chasm between physical reality and our conscious perception thereof opens up with your morning coffee, and as you peruse the newspaper headlines and social media feeds, one has the same unsettling sense that no doubt prompted humorist Dorthy Parker to greet the doorbell each time it rang with the phrase, “What fresh hell can this be?”
Let’s face it, if you express anything more than a passing interest in UFO’s, Bigfoot, ghosts, monsters, or the various and sundry anomalies of the universe, you are generally regarded by your peers with trepidation, and a charitable concern for your mental health.
Now this may be “inside baseball”, but a curious development has emerged in the world of anomalistics, which we can understand to include those who experience and those who investigate, as well as those self-identified skeptics that nonetheless wade into the muddled marsh of Forteana.
Strange phenomena have been decentralized as an object of study, in favor of a psychologization of those who express an interest (either to believe, understand, or debunk).
Thus, we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the pathological delusions of true believers, the cognitive dissonance of skeptics, and the fear of commitment of those who straddle the line.
The focus has shifted from a simple ontological statement that while our valuation of science has an impressive track record of achievement, the universe nonetheless keeps serving up oddities that throw a wrench in our metaphysical project of comprehending the significance of human existence and grasping at the nature of reality.
Therefore, instead of debate, we more often see diagnosis.
This is as foolhardy as it is unproductive.
The unadulterated truth that is being largely sidelined is that the existence of an anomaly is prerequisite to scientific discovery, and the facts that don’t fit are what usher in the paradigmatic shifts that revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
Physicist, historian, and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, who coined the term “paradigm shift” in his seminal 1962 work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, offered the anomaly as that which impels our extension of knowledge, observing,
“Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.
New and unsuspected phenomena are, however, repeatedly uncovered by scientific research, and radical new theories have again and again been invented by scientists.
History even suggests that the scientific enterprise has developed a uniquely powerful technique for producing surprises of this sort.
If this characteristic of science is to be reconciled with what has already been said, then research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
This is what fundamental novelties of fact and theory do.
Produced inadvertently by a game played under one set of rules, their assimilation requires the elaboration of another set”.
When the debate is consistently framed in terms of delusion vs. fundamentalism, we have ceased to engage in intellectual inquiry, and turned towards a denigration of the mental faculties of our theoretical opponents (whose interest in our precious anomalistic phenomena truly makes them our colleagues, regardless of those ontological and epistemological presuppositions they bring to the table).New and unsuspected phenomena are, however, repeatedly uncovered by scientific research, and radical new theories have again and again been invented by scientists.
History even suggests that the scientific enterprise has developed a uniquely powerful technique for producing surprises of this sort.
If this characteristic of science is to be reconciled with what has already been said, then research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change.
This is what fundamental novelties of fact and theory do.
Produced inadvertently by a game played under one set of rules, their assimilation requires the elaboration of another set”.
This is far from crying, “Can’t we all just get along”?
Some people are just jerks.
It simply reiterates the importance of classical ontological debates of the realists (universals exist, as do particulars) and the nominalists (only particulars exist).
Universal truth has this pesky habit of shuffling out just past the boundary of our intellect, the minute we conclude we have understood something.
In the absence of incontestable and enduring physical proof, anomalistics has found its various objects of inquiry ghettoized in the world of “the pseudo-”, and understood to be an examination of cultural constructs, human misperceptions, and an expression of metaphysical yearning, turning the experience of the strange into a function of humans gone wild.
Us Homo sapiens do after all demonstrate an acute capacity to get wacky.
When it comes to Forteana (and those who argue that no such animal exists), a far more productive approach is to step back from the incessant demands for “proof”, the psychoanalysis of both believers and skeptics, and turn to the question of validation, which says we may never know the ultimate object itself, thus we most fruitfully approach knowledge by confronting interpretations and arbitrating between them as we look for points of agreement, even when agreement is an impossibility, or as Paul Ricoeur said, “The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism”.
Maybe the next time frogs inexplicably fall from the sky, the answer is not to call the Weekly World News, hand out the psychoactive medication, decry skeptics for their stalwart rejection of that which cannot happen, or talk about the delusional predispositions of those whose assert with supreme confidence that a “frog rain” was extant.
Validation is neither acceptance nor rejection, rather it is an open and honest arbitration of possible interpretations.
Such discourse is shockingly rare.
At least maybe we can validate their parking.
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Man composes music heard after being hit with lightening.
Tony Cicoria is performing his "Lightning-Sonata" at Mozart House in Vienna
Tony Cicoria is performing his "Lightning-Sonata" at Mozart House in Vienna
[video=youtube;tDtYkxSCV18]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=tDtYkxSCV18[/video]
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The Eye Floater Phenomenon:
Between Science and Spirituality
Between Science and Spirituality
In the mid-1990s, I met a man named Nestor living in the solitude of the hilly Emmental region of Switzerland.
Nestor has a unique and provocative claim: that he has focused for years on a constellation of huge, shining spheres and strings which have formed in his field of vision.
He interprets this phenomenon as a subtle structure formed by his consciousness.
He believes consciousness creates our material world.
Nestor, who calls himself a seer, ascribes this subjective visual perception to his long lasting efforts to develop his consciousness.
In the history of religion and art, a multitude of cases are known in which spiritually committed individuals report abstract or figurative subjective visual phenomena they experienced—often while in ritually induced altered states of consciousness (Tausin, 2010b; Müller-Ebeling, 1993).
Nestor’s case, though, seems to be exceptional in two regards.
First, Nestor is aware of, and considers, the ophthalmological explanation of his visual experience, known as “eye floaters.”
And second, floaters are a common and wide spread phenomenon, experienced by a lot of people who do not claim to live a particularly religious or spiritual life.
In the course of my time with Nestor, I tried to understand the phenomenon from an ophthalmological point of view, as well as from my own observations.
My objective was to comprehend Nestor’s claims about the spiritual relevance of this phenomenon (Tausin, 2009a).
I considered the following questions:
1) What are floaters?
2) What makes Nestor think of floaters as a spiritual phenomenon?
3) Are there any equivalents in the history of science and religion to understanding floaters in terms of spiritually relevant visionary experiences?
4) Does Nestor’s claim require a new ophthalmological understanding of eye floaters, and how so?
5) Is it reasonable to think of floaters as a spiritual phenomenon, and to what extent?
Eye Floaters in Ophthalmology
“Eye floaters” (mouches volantes or muscae volitantes in French and German ophthalmology) is a collective term used in ophthalmology for all possible opacities in the vitreous.
Many of them can be traced to physiological disorders like retina detachment, diabetic vitreoretinophaty, as well as Marfan’s, Ehlers-Danlos, and Stickler’s syndromes.
Fig. 1: Idiopathic eye floaters in the visual field. (Floco Tausin)
The floaters at issue, though—which are also the most experienced floater type—are considered as “idiopathic,” i.e. without pathological cause.
They are seen as mobile and scattered semi-transparent dots and strands in the visual field, best perceived in bright light conditions (fig. 1).
These dots and strands float according to the eye movements, which makes them hard to focus on.
The explanations vary between remaining embryonic stem cells, cell debris between the retina and the vitreous, and hyaluronic vitreous fibrills clumped together due to vitreous liquefaction and posterior vitreous detachment (Trick, 2007; Sendrowski/Bronstein, 2010).
Nestor and the Inner Sense
Nestor’s statements about eye floaters differ significantly from the ophthalmologic explanation: for Nestor, we see these spheres and strings not with our eyes but with an “inner sense” or the “third eye.”
He characterizes this inner sense as an eye that gradually opens up through the withdrawal of the external senses as experienced in concentration exercises.
Therefore, he explains the initial symptoms of floaters as an indication of the third eye beginning to open.
The fact that many people see floaters in our contemporary Western societies means, according to Nestor, that many people already have a connection to their inner sense, even if they don’t work with it consciously.
Any activity that increases the attentiveness of a human being is understood by Nestor as “spiritual” in nature.
With such statements, Nestor ascribes an extraordinary meaning to the visual phenomena called “floaters”: they are a spiritual phenomenon, and thus a directly perceptible starting point for our own spiritual development, for the realization of our “true selves.”
But what made Nestor utter such claims?
According to him, these propositions are deduced from his own seeing.
It is important to understand that his description of the spheres and strings differs from the one of most others.
He doesn’t see scattered small dots and strings that drift away permanently, but large, bright spheres and tubes which he is able to hold in suspension and, therefore, to see clearly.
To be more precise, Nestor pleads to have observed the “lighting up” and “zooming in” of floaters; former transparent tiny dots and strands are now seen as large spheres and tubes full of light (fig. 2).
Fig. 2: Floaters, zoom effect. (Floco Tausin)
In the past 150 years, modern science has provided concepts to understand the physiological aspects of at least some of the extraordinary subjective visual phenomena.
For example, many of the abstract geometric figures in indigenous art or in shamans’ or yogis’ ritually induced visions can be understood as “entoptic phenomena” (Thurston, 1997).
Entoptic phenomena are colored or bright moving geometric shapes and patterns in the visual field, caused by certain conditions of the human visual nervous system.
An example is the archaeological controversy about a neuropsychological interpretation of the rock and cave art of the later Paleolithic era (about 40,000 to 10,000 B.C.).
Ever since the discovery of the European Paleolithic caves, archaeologists have been wondering about the importance and meaning of such geometric representations, accompanying the vivid depictions of animals.
In 1988, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson brought forward the original thesis that Paleolithic art is inspired by entoptic phenomena (or, more specifically, “form constants”), seen and depicted by shamans or spiritual men and women during altered states of consciousness.
Towards a New Ophthalmological Interpretation of Eye Floaters
Thus, while scholars acknowledge that the visual experience of so-called entoptic phenomena can have a cultural or spiritual relevance to their observers under certain conditions, eye floaters are tacitly excluded from this line of thinking.
In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this.
First, eye floaters are an ordinary phenomenon, perceived by a lot of people in everyday consciousness.
And second, floaters are explained as idiopathic opacities in the vitreous, i.e. “entophthalmic” rather than “entoptic” phenomena—eye rubbish, so to speak.
Both reasons seem to mock the idea that they could have a positive, spiritual meaning.
However, I would like to reconsider these points drawing on Nestor’s and my own visual experience with floaters.
While eye floaters do show up in ordinary consciousness states, they also constantly look different—which is, in my opinion, pointing to the fact that there is no “ordinary,” but a constantly changing consciousness.
Anybody taking the time to carefully observe her or his floaters, recognizes that they constantly change size, brightness, and velocity.
A closer inspection reveals that this alteration depends on a number of factors, some of which are outer conditions like the brightness and color of the background against which floaters are viewed.
Others may be called “inner” or “psychic” conditions, like attention span, mood, degree of concentration, stress and the like.
It’s not by accident that vision improvement schools propose to influence floaters through relaxation practices—their goal, however, is to get rid of them (Tausin, 2009b).
As I have demonstrated above, Nestor is making the same claim, differing only in the degree of psychophysical abilities like concentration, calmness, “energy metabolism,” et cetera.
Thus, it is perfectly conceivable that a human’s perception of floaters could change to the extent explained above, revealing certain features that are experienced as “meaningful” or “spiritual.”
In my opinion, there is no reason to accept today’s ophthalmological explanation, since it fails to explain some of the more subtle floater characteristics that can be revealed through careful observation (Tausin, 2009d).
For example, the morphological regularity of eye floaters.
Floater spheres are perfectly circular and concentric and show a core and a surround.
Two contrasting types of spheres can be distinguished: one has a bright rim and dark core, and the other has a dark rim and bright core.
It is questionable if this morphological regularity really represents hyaluronic fibrills or cells clumped together.
They also seem to change size.
For simplicity, I distinguish between a “relaxed” (big) state and a “concentrated” (small) state.
Generally, it seems as if most eye floaters were, at first, bigger, nearer, and more transparent.
With increasing time of observation, however, they change into a concentrated state.
After abandoning concentration the spheres and strands change into the state of relaxation again; a quick glance to somewhere else may suffice.
Fig. 3: The two types of floaters spheres in a relaxed (left) and concentrated (right) state. (Floco Tausin)
Eye debris, in contrast, is not supposed to change size in that regular manner.
Nor is it supposed to light up.
Also, the sinking of the dots and strands is worth considering: Eye floaters react sensitive to eye movements.
It seems as if they would always move in the direction in which we look.
But as soon as we keep the eyes still and observe the floaters from the angle of vision, we recognize that they sink—sometimes faster, sometimes slower.
This sinking may be taken as evidence for the debris nature of floaters, debris floating in the vitreous and sinking due to the force of gravity.
However, this argument is disqualified if we recall that the image of the visual world on the retina is inverted—which means that any sinking down of floaters as seen by the observer would require the corresponding particles in the vitreous to ascend.
In this case, too, careful observation reveals that the sinking rather seems to be related to the consciousness state.
It tends to slow down in states in which floaters are seen big and shiny.
All of this suggests that the type of floaters at discussion should be reconsidered by ophthalmology or physiology.
With the concepts at hand, and based on my subjective experiences and experiments with floaters, I strongly suspect them to be an entoptic rather than entophthalmic phenomenon.
Yet, does this also indicate a “spiritual” nature of floaters?
As is the case with entoptics, it depends on the definition of “spirituality.”
The case of Nestor demonstrated that floaters, too, can have an extraordinary meaning for human beings.
The name Floco Tausin is a pseudonym. The author received a Ph.D. in the faculty of the humanities at the University of Bern, Switzerland. In theory and practice he is engaged in the research of subjective visual phenomena in connection with altered states of consciousness and the development of consciousness. In 2009, he published the mystical story “Mouches Volantes” about the spiritual dimension of eye floaters.
Lewis-Williams, J. D. / Dowson, T. A. (1988): The Signs of All Times. In: Current Anthropology 29, no. 2: 201-245
Müller-Ebeling, Claudia (1993): Visionäre Kunst. In: Welten des Bewusstseins, ed. by Adolf Dittrich, Albert Hofmann u.a. (Vol. 1: Ein interdisziplinärer Dialog), Berlin
Plange, Hubertus (1990): Muscae volitantes — von frühen Beobachtungen zu Purkinjes Erklärung. In: Gesnerus 47: 31-44
Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. (1975). The Shaman and the Jaguar. A Study of Narcotic Drugs Among the Indians of Colombia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. (1978). Beyond the Milky Way. Hallucinatory Imagery of the Tukano Indians. Los Angeles: University of California
Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. (1987). Shamanism and art of the eastern Tukanoan Indians. In: Iconography of Religions IX, ed. by Th. P. van Baaren u.a. Leiden u.a.: Brill
Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo. (1997). Rainforest Shamans. Essays on the Tukano Indians of the Northwest Amazon. Themis Books
Sendrowski, David P.; Bronstein, Mark A. (2010). “Current treatment for vitreous floaters”. Optometry 81: 157-161
Tausin, Floco (2010a). Eye Floaters. Floating spheres and strings in a seer’s view. In: Holistic Vision 2. http://www.eye-floaters.info/news/news-june2010.htm (15.12.10)
Tausin, Floco (2010b). Lichter in der Anderswelt. Mouches volantes in der darstellenden Kunst moderner Schamanen. In: Ganzheitlich Sehen 2. http://www.mouches-volantes.com/news/newsjuni2010.htm (15.12.10)
Tausin, Floco (2010c). Entoptic phenomena as universal trance phenomena. In: Soulful Living. http://soulfulliving.com/entoptic-phenomena.htm (25.10.10)
Tausin, Floco (2009a): Mouches Volantes. Eye Floaters as Shining Structure of Consciousness, Leuchtstruktur Verlag: Bern
Tausin, Floco (2009b): Sanftes Fliegenmittel. Mouches volantes in der alternativen Augenheilkunde. In: VM — Virtuelles Magazin 2000 53. http://www.vm2000.net/53/FlocoTausin/FlocoTausin.html (18.11.09)
Tausin, Floco (2009c). Mouches volantes nicht im Glaskörper ? In: Ganzheitlich Sehen 4. http://www.mouches-volantes.com/news/newsdezember2009.htm#2 (14.6.10)
Tausin, Floco (2009d): Mouches volantes — Glaskörpertrübung oder Nervensystem? In: ExtremNews. http://www.extremnews.com/berichte/gesundheit/e01c12cc1d3c89f (22.12.09)
Thurston, Linda (1997): Entoptic Imagery in People and Their Art (M.A. thesis, 1991). http://home.comcast.net/~markk2000/thurston/thesis.html (15.12.10)
Trick, Gary L.; Kronenberg, Alaina. (2007). Entoptic Imagery and Afterimages. In: Duane’s Ophthalmology, ed. by William Tasman and Edward A. Jaeger. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
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Very curious!
Doubts are emerging about one of our leading models of consciousness.
It seems that brain signals thought to reflect consciousness are also generated during unconscious activity.
A decade of studies have lent credence to the global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness, which states that when something is perceived unconsciously, or subliminally, that information is processed locally in the brain.
In contrast, conscious perception occurs when the information is broadcast to a “global workspace”, or assemblies of neurons distributed across various brain regions, leading to activity over the entire network.
Proponents of this idea, Stanislas Dehaene at France’s national institute for health in Gif-sur-Yvette, and his colleagues, discovered that when volunteers view stimuli that either enter conscious awareness or don’t, their brains show identical EEG activity for the first 270 milliseconds.
Then, if perception of the stimuli is subliminal, the brain activity peters out.
However, when volunteers become conscious of the stimuli, there is a sudden burst of widespread brain activity 300 ms after the stimulus.
This activity is characterised by an EEG signal called P3b, and has been called a neural correlate of consciousness.
Brian Silverstein and Michael Snodgrass at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues wondered if P3b could be detected during unconscious processing of stimuli.
The study involved the oddball paradigm, in which one stimulus is presented frequently, interspersed with an oddball or rare stimulus.
In other research the oddball stimulus prompted a stronger brain response.
The twist in the new experiment was to ensure that all stimuli were entirely subliminal.
Subjects were frequently shown the word “LEFT” for 7 ms, immediately followed by a pattern that masked the word, preventing it from entering conscious awareness.
Just 7 ms was long enough for the brain to unconsciously register the word, but too brief for the volunteer to say whether they saw anything.
Occasionally, volunteers were shown the word “RIGHT”, followed by a mask.
The rare stimulus produced a strong P3b signal, widely spread across the brain.
“Even though they don’t know [what] the stimuli are, the brain is still able to recognise that there is something unexpected that occurs,” says Silverstein.
The team interprets the P3b signal as evidence for complex, sustained, unconscious brain activity, suggesting that P3b is not a neural correlate of consciousness, thus contradicting the global neuronal workspace theory.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in the UK is impressed by the rigorous methods used in the study, but cautions against interpreting the P3b signal as indicative of complex cognition. “The subject isn’t doing anything that need involve complex, sustained cognitive activity,” says Seth.
Still, he agrees that the study raises questions about neural correlates of consciousness.
“The neural signatures of conscious processing are likely to be more complex and interesting than just a P3b,” says Seth.
“[The study] is pushing us towards more refined explanations that actually connect neural dynamics to what it is like to be conscious, beyond relying on overly simple signatures like the P3b.”
Journal reference: Cortex, DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2015.09.004
Leading theory of consciousness rocked by oddball study
Doubts are emerging about one of our leading models of consciousness.
It seems that brain signals thought to reflect consciousness are also generated during unconscious activity.
A decade of studies have lent credence to the global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness, which states that when something is perceived unconsciously, or subliminally, that information is processed locally in the brain.
In contrast, conscious perception occurs when the information is broadcast to a “global workspace”, or assemblies of neurons distributed across various brain regions, leading to activity over the entire network.
Proponents of this idea, Stanislas Dehaene at France’s national institute for health in Gif-sur-Yvette, and his colleagues, discovered that when volunteers view stimuli that either enter conscious awareness or don’t, their brains show identical EEG activity for the first 270 milliseconds.
Then, if perception of the stimuli is subliminal, the brain activity peters out.
However, when volunteers become conscious of the stimuli, there is a sudden burst of widespread brain activity 300 ms after the stimulus.
This activity is characterised by an EEG signal called P3b, and has been called a neural correlate of consciousness.
Brian Silverstein and Michael Snodgrass at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues wondered if P3b could be detected during unconscious processing of stimuli.
The study involved the oddball paradigm, in which one stimulus is presented frequently, interspersed with an oddball or rare stimulus.
In other research the oddball stimulus prompted a stronger brain response.
The twist in the new experiment was to ensure that all stimuli were entirely subliminal.
Subjects were frequently shown the word “LEFT” for 7 ms, immediately followed by a pattern that masked the word, preventing it from entering conscious awareness.
Just 7 ms was long enough for the brain to unconsciously register the word, but too brief for the volunteer to say whether they saw anything.
Occasionally, volunteers were shown the word “RIGHT”, followed by a mask.
The rare stimulus produced a strong P3b signal, widely spread across the brain.
“Even though they don’t know [what] the stimuli are, the brain is still able to recognise that there is something unexpected that occurs,” says Silverstein.
The team interprets the P3b signal as evidence for complex, sustained, unconscious brain activity, suggesting that P3b is not a neural correlate of consciousness, thus contradicting the global neuronal workspace theory.
Neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in the UK is impressed by the rigorous methods used in the study, but cautions against interpreting the P3b signal as indicative of complex cognition. “The subject isn’t doing anything that need involve complex, sustained cognitive activity,” says Seth.
Still, he agrees that the study raises questions about neural correlates of consciousness.
“The neural signatures of conscious processing are likely to be more complex and interesting than just a P3b,” says Seth.
“[The study] is pushing us towards more refined explanations that actually connect neural dynamics to what it is like to be conscious, beyond relying on overly simple signatures like the P3b.”
Journal reference: Cortex, DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2015.09.004
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Wow! Excellent tenets to live by.
Skarekrow
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I think that they are very thoughtful.
It’s funny that following these instead of the 10 commandments would result in a much more equitable world IMO.
Hahaha
Skarekrow
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So I hope everyone will stop by an check out my Etsy shop I started to put together.
Trying to find as many interesting, magical, vintage, and unique items to sell there.
Let me know what you all think?
Trying to find as many interesting, magical, vintage, and unique items to sell there.
Let me know what you all think?
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Look at him in the beginning.... he feels weird explaining this inspiration came from the other side. We all do when it first comes to those of us who never in their wildest dreams would have believed there IS " the other side ". I feel for him.
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Which is why they tagged it to the bogey man Satan....
They didn't want anyone following this way of being.
sprinkles
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[video=youtube;Bl4dEAtxo0M]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl4dEAtxo0M[/video]
[video=youtube;vBecM3CQVD8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBecM3CQVD8[/video]
[video=youtube;aqO8LpE0GU4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqO8LpE0GU4[/video]
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The rolling stones for sure!!!
Here's one from my area. A Southern boy makes a deal with the Devil.
[video=youtube;FgvfRSzmMoU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgvfRSzmMoU[/video]
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Crossed paths with one of these guys last night in the pouring rain…I saw him somehow, through the pouring rain in the dark.
Picked him up for a moment and we looked at each other, then I put him in the grass where he sat for a moment before scurrying away.
Salamander has always been my first and foremost spirit animal.
I should expect change.
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The Phil Dick Circuit and the Future of Precognitive Technology
Much of the skepticism surrounding quantum neuroscience is that its aim is generally to explain consciousness–a tall, confused, and some would say impossibly misguided order.
Quantum explanations for consciousness invariably require large-scale coherence–that is, entanglement–across the whole brain or at least between large populations of neurons.
Quantum wet blankets point out that this can only be hand-waving and magic.
And anti-materialists would say that no scientific account, no matter how quantum-y, is going to explain the subjective experience of being alive and aware.
Psi is exciting because it means precognition, time-traveling information.
That should make people poop their pants with wonder and forget about boring old consciousness.
Precognition is mind-bending, and it is not some vague airy effect of “nonlocality.”
If I’m right, it is specifically sensitivity to our own responses to future stimuli, which means it is extremely local, in the sense of personal, like memory, and thus certainly involves brain processes.
We now know that information can be sent back in time, and Seth Lloyd has shown how to do it (theoretically anyway).
It involves entanglement, but not the long-distance entanglement between neurons that most offends quantum critics.
If it can happen, nature will find a way, and those microtubules inside neurons that fascinate Penrose et al appear to be the best place in nature for it to occur.*
But as I’ve already argued, even if we know they are chasing a red herring, we should actively encourage Roger Penrose and others who are hunting for elusive consciousness in the quantum behavior of neurons and neural circuits.
This is because a beneficial side-effect of that effort is that it is going to bring an explanation of the more philosophically humble but also more exciting phenomenon, psi.
I’d bet money that select, as-yet undiscovered neurons deep within specific circuits of the brain are going to turn out to be finely tuned time machines that fire before they are stimulated.
Serial entanglement of particles within or between the neuron’s microtubules over a short span of time would be involved.
Particles traveling up and down a neuron’s axon through those tubes “just” need to break their prior entanglements and be re-entangled (sending information back in time), and this “just” needs to perturb the neuron’s behavior by even a tiny amount.
I trust there are people working on the nitty gritty of this problem.
When you string multiple time-displaced neurons together, you can multiply the time-displacement effect.
For instance, even if the net result of the various quantum shenanigans in a given neuron’s microstructures is that it fires off neurotransmitters to the next neuron just a hundredth of a second before it receives an input via its dendrites–a modest request–a string of twenty such neurons would produce an “output” (e.g., a motor or autonomic response) a fifth of a second before the stimulus.
That’s enough to account for the delay Benjamin Libet famously noted between the neural readiness potential and the feeling of conscious will, which some wet blanket types like to wave before our eyes as proof that consciousness in an illusion.
Fifty such neurons would give you a whole half-second “pre-sponse”–enough to account for the subjective timing discrepancy between seeing your foot hit the ground and feeling it hit the ground, noticed by Libet back in the late 1970s.
A hundred such neurons in a circuit would give you a full second advance warning of events, useful on the highway, the battlefield, or the racquetball court.
Three hundred would be sufficient for effects seen in many presentiment experiments conducted by Dean Radin and Daryl Bem.
There are a hundred billion neurons in the brain, and thus there could be any number of precognitive circuits or clusters of neurons in there, “tuned” to specific temporal distances that are sweet spots for certain adaptive responses or functions like subjective timing, conscious will, and James Carpenter’s “first sight,” not to mention premonitions of more remote events.
I hope they name a particularly long one the Phil Dick Circuit, because such a neural mechanism would go a long way to explain the world he described in his writings.
The Skynet Is (Not) the Limit
So here’s a business model for a forward-thinking biotech company: Isolate the most precognitive neuron you can find in the animal kingdom, perhaps from an elephant or whale–something involved in synchronizing a large animal’s sense of self–and find a way to sustain a group of such neurons in culture.
You could create a nice little precognitive alarm by chaining such neurons together.
A chain of 1000 neurons, each of which fire, say, 20 milliseconds before they are stimulated, would produce a device that triggers about 20 seconds before a designated input. (This may be an easier and faster route than trying to build a mechanical quantum computer from scratch, given the extreme refrigeration requirements, etc.)
Or you could just buy shares in a quantum computing company like D-Wave, because they are surely going to do something like this once it occurs to them … or it probably already has occurred to them.
Such a scheme could, for all I know, be a big secret dream in the emerging quantum tech biz.
Then, assemble several of these devices in a petri dish, and set the first neuron in each chain to respond to a downward change in the value of one of your stocks, triggering a “sell” as the output of the chain.
I don’t have much of a head for such things, but you get the picture.
Do it quietly, though, and amass your fortune quickly, because sooner or later a branch of the SEC will be established to prevent precognitive trading. (No doubt there will be telltale signs of such stunts, such as a tendency of company or an individual mad-scientist investor to drop shares in a stock just seconds before a downturn in value.)
I’m not completely kidding.
I’m not an engineer, so I admittedly don’t have a sense of the technical hurdles, but as far as I can tell it “just” needs to be scaled up from what has already been accomplished at very micro scales in laboratories … or, again, from what select undiscovered neurons are doing right now in your own head.
I imagine precognitive tech could be huge in the mid-21st century; the possibilities would be mind-blowing, not to mention highly destabilizing.
The very first obvious application would be in financial trading, but a natural next step would be pairing artificial precognition with AI, which could be beyond scary. (FYI, just last month, D-Wave announced a multi-year contract with Lockheed-Martin. Skynet, anyone?)
But precognitive chips could also have wide beneficial applications and revolutionize safety features in vehicles and security systems, not to mention healthcare.
They might also provide the needed failsafes against those scary precognitive AIs.
Although it may seem like it, the sky is not the limit with precognition, synthetic or natural.
The challenge of precognitive technology is working within the narrow margin where information tends not to be self-cancelling–this is the parameter of “post-selection” that is required by a Seth-Lloyd-style quantum time machine: You can’t build a system whose (prior) output leads to a chain of events that prevents its (subsequent) input.
Fiction about time travel has failed to incorporate this crucial parameter, and as a result has given rise to all the comedy of grandfather paradoxes, etc.
In reality, there wouldn’t be such problems because of the constraints within which information sent back in time can actually be readable and not noise.
Quantum computers are actually analog computers, not digital; reality is analog too.
Quantum computers and quantum time travel operate, if I understand correctly, on a signal-to-noise ratio–just as I have argued human precognition operates.
The vagaries of the analog universe are what forever prevent us from using the existence of precognition to answer questions about free will versus determinism.
There is always wiggle room and uncertainty.
These vagaries also set interesting constraints on the precognitive chips that might one day be at the heart of our devices and computers.
They can only give us advance warning of certainties we can do nothing to prevent.
Precognitive Chips
As a thought experiment, imagine a precognitive computer chip inside your security system, tripped when unauthorized entry is detected. How much pre-warning could it give of a home intrusion?
For any given application of precognitive tech, there would probably be a sweet spot–an optimal temporal distance between output and input within which the system tends to work reliably without noise exceeding signal.
So for instance, an alarm system set to notify the police station 15 minutes before a break-in would not be viable and would literally not provide useful information; the reason is that 15 minutes is too much time, and would theoretically allow the police to be on the scene in advance and scare off anyone with malicious intent; in reality, the alarm would never go off except in cases when there was a break-in and the police were for some reason unable or unwilling to respond in time to prevent it.
False alarms would tend to increase the more the alarms were ignored–too much noise to signal, resulting in a feedback loop, because they would be taken less and less seriously…
It would be a highly dysfunctional chip, in other words.
But the alarm manufacturer would never make such an alarm in the first place. (Makes you wonder if car alarms use such chips, since it seems the more we ignore them, the more they are tripped.)
For a home security system, I can imagine that a three-minute pre-lay might be more in the right ballpark.
This might be enough time for the police to be en route to the scene and nab the burglar but not enough time for them to prevent the break-in that trips the alarm.
In that case, the alarm would work more reliably; just after the burglar got in and tripped the alarm, he’d hear sirens approaching.
The same principle could be applied to vehicle safety devices: You could not have a precognitive system in a car that reliably warned you five seconds before a collision, because you or the car’s computer driver could avoid the collision with that kind of warning, nullifying the chip’s effectiveness.
You could however have a precognitive system that responded to a non-avoidable collision half a second into the future.
This could be useful, for instance, in pre-triggering airbags and other safety features to protect the vehicle’s occupants.
Or, in a jet fighter–if there are still human pilots in jet fighters when this becomes possible–you could have an ejector seat triggered by a precognitive sensor half a second before a missile strike (but, again, not one that gave the pilot sufficient time to evade or destroy the threat with a countermeasure).
And there’s medical devices: For instance, medical sensors to detect an imminent heart attack.
Again, a bio-chip could not alert you to an adverse event that was preventable through your actions (like popping an aspirin), but it could trigger an emergency response and perhaps pre-initiate measures to mitigate the harm or tissue damage and prevent death.
Those are just a few ideas that come to mind.
The applications in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, of course, are intimidating (and bewildering) to think about.
But again, they wouldn’t enable anyone (or even any AI) to fully manipulate reality, just game it or leverage it in interesting ways.
The Safety Zone
To me, this narrow band within which precognition’s effects are actionable and useful is the really interesting thing about it.
Most precognitive effects, especially when they enter consciousness at all, such as in dreams, are only visible after the fact.
It needs to be that way, because enhanced consciousness of future events would result in us taking “evasive action,” even inadvertently, so the farther out in the future a precognitively portended event, the more we will tend to encounter the information obliquely, associatively, “synchronistically,” or otherwise in a way that facilitates our misinterpreting or ignoring it until too late.
In the comments to my last post, a reader asked an excellent question, which goes to the heart of this problem: What if you have a dream that you’re going to die in a car accident so you take a bus instead, and nothing happens?
From what future could the idea “you’re going to die in a car accident” have been sent?
The answer is going to seem evasive: How do you know it was ever a premonition?
How do you knowthat information was sent from the future?
You have no way of reliably saying so until it “comes true.”
So it’s wrong to say it was a premonition; it may have felt premonitory, but we have hunches all the time that prove wrong.
Our metacognition–knowledge of where a piece of information comes from–is often distorted or imperfect.
This is as true of precognition as it is of memory (and they will both probably turn out to be the same thing).
Causality in an analog universe never contradicts the possible, but information is buried deeply in noise; we can never know for certain what information actually comes from the future, or even its “accuracy” (i.e., correspondence to future events) beforehand.
The confirmation scene, when some prior hunch matches a real event, is a crucial part of the process, and this must happen in the ordinary workaday flow of linear time.
Hacking the system is possible, but within narrow parameters.
An elaborate associative remote viewing setup, for example, can be used to play the stock market, as Russell Targ proved in 1982 with his successful adventure in silver futures trading.
But you can’t just, by yourself, rub your temples and see straight-on what’s going to happen in the future; it just doesn’t work that way, because it can’t.
There are good reasons evolution hasn’t made us all massively precognitive supermen and -women; even apart from the peculiarities of post-selection, there would be adaptive reasons for a biological system to keep precognition within strict limits and mostly unconscious.
Fire, Walk With Me
Precognition is built around reward and enjoyment, not trauma and pain.
Post-selection explains why positive signals of reward are preferentially “pre-ceived”: Reward circuits would be precognitive, because we will orient toward future pleasures, and thus tend to produce the action that results in the pleasure that sends a signal back in time.
This is the primary reason why I think dopamine and the brain’s reward circuitry will turn out to have an important connection to those precognitive neuronal ensembles.
This is the system that keeps us focused on “the next thing,” drawing our interest to pleasure as well as survival-relevant information.
Why then is the precognitive signal so strong around other people’s pain and suffering–the observation that led Fredric Myers to believe that trauma “powered” psychic phenomena?
The answer is jouissance, the binding of pleasure to pain, including the intense sublime awe at surviving disasters that befall other people. Precognition may in fact be the very reason for jouissance, the very reason we get excited about destruction, fire, and death, especially when these things happen to others.
Jouissance was Jacques Lacan’s answer to Freud’s concept of the “death drive,” which seemed paradoxical because Freud couldn’t see how it would be adaptive to be drawn to death.
We’re not really drawn to death, but we are necessarily fascinated by death and pain as long as we can extract some personal reward from it.Pain traveling into the past, on the other hand, would lead the organism to take a course of action that leads to the avoidance of the stimulus that caused it, thus such a circuit would not be reliable, would violate the rules of post-selection, and would be selected against.
Even as a survival tool, precognition will be oriented toward relief from threat or punishment, not the threat or punishment itself.
I have noticed in my own case, for example, that precognitive dreams occur most around changes in emotion, from frustration to gratification.
When I think of jouissance in the context of psi, I think of “Bob” and his demon-spirit friends in Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge, who seem to personify our necessary and terrifying dark side, the hunger for others’ pain and suffering, or “Garmonbozia.”
David Lynch is deeply keyed into this nexus of psi and occult forces, which probably has its roots in our most basic and ancient survival needs.
So psi (as precognition) is a system that orients us to threats by making threat-vigillance and the threat response rewarding.
Here’s where I disagree slightly with Myers, or Jeffrey Kripal: There is nothing particularly “moral” about psi, at least not directly.
Instead of binding us to other people across space, psi binds us to ourselves across time, specifically to our own relief or pleasure within the larger context of life’s perils and pains.
Yet I think a major positive byproduct of psi is that it orients us, unconsciously, to rewarding (or relieving) future scenes of connection to other people IRL, in real life.
Unconsciously, it pulls us toward eros and the good.
This is because it is with and among others that our more mundane, linear-in-time, classical brains take conventional pleasure and respite from those perils and pains.
NOTE
* Here’s a fun microtubule fact: The ancestors of the microtubules in your cells were spirochetesback in the primordial soup days of the early Earth. They were eventually engulfed as endosymbiotes within other bacteria, to make the more complex cells that build the macro-sized beings of our world. So in other words, the billions of mini time machines in your brain right now share a common ancestor with syphilis.** You’re welcome.
FRACTAL NOTE WITHIN A NOTE (added 12/5/15)
** A reader has helpfully alerted me that, despite decades of searching, Lynn Margulis has been unable to support her hypothesis that microtubules descended from engulfed spirochetes.
So that idea, however cool, is probably not true.
We can’t have everything.
