The Perfect Cosmic Balance Foreordained from the Very Beginning

The very readable cosmologist Ethan Siegel has a long-running "Ask Ethan" series of posts that are sometimes characterized by explanatory overconfidence, in which Ethan often acts as if he understands great mysteries that are actually far beyond the understanding of any human. An example is his latest post in the series in which he incorrectly states that "we know what makes up the Universe — i.e., what our ratios are of dark energy to dark matter to normal matter." No, we don't know any such things, and no one has ever even directly observed dark matter or dark energy, which don't even have any place in the standard model of physics.  We don't even know whether dark matter or dark energy exists.  I wish I had a nickel for every time a scientist said "we know" about some thing that is not actually known; I'd be rich. 

Siegel's latest post in this series is a post raising the question "Why Is the Universe Electrically Neutral?"  There is a kind of a half-answer to this question: the universe is electrically neutral because  from the very beginning there has been a law of nature (the law of  conservation of charge) that guarantees electrical neutrality in any universe beginning in an incredibly hot and dense state such as the Big Bang.  But this is only a half-answer, because there is no known intrinsic reason why such a law had to exist from the beginning.  Rather than explaining how this law foreordained an electrically neutral universe from the beginning,  Siegel refers us to speculative papers he has written that do not give us the main reason the universe is electrically neutral. 

When a person refers to the electrical neutrality of the universe, he means the apparent fact that the total amount of positive electric charge in the universe seems to be equal to the total amount of negative electric charge in the universe. At the lowest level, such electric charges are found in protons and electrons.  

Below are some of the fundamental constants of the universe, numbers that are believed to be the same everywhere in the universe:

Speed of light	299,792,458 meters per second
Planck's constant	6.62607004 × 10-34 m2 kg / s
Gravitational constant	6.67408 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2
Proton mass	1.6726231 × 10-27 kg
Electron mass	9.1093897 × 10-31 kg
Proton charge	1.60217733 × 10-19 coulomb
Electron charge	-1.60217733 × 10-19 coulomb

The table below shows a a great big coincidence scientists cannot explain. Even though each proton has a mass 1836 times greater than each electron, the charge of the proton is the exact opposite of the charge of the electron. An absolute magnitude is a number that you get when you discard the sign in front of the number. Experiments have actually indicated that the absolute magnitude of the proton charge and the absolute magnitude of the electron charge differ by less than 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000.

RATIO OF PROTON MASS TO ELECTRON MASS
1836.152672
RATIO OF PROTON CHARGE TO ELECTRON CHARGE
-1.000000000000000000

A physicist might try to offer an "explanation" for this coincidence by referring to the idea that protons are made of smaller particles called quarks. The theory is that each proton consists of three particles: two "up" quarks with a positive charge of 2/3 of the proton's charge, and one "down" quark with a negative charge of 1/3 of the proton's charge.  But this really only worsens the explanatory problem. Under such a scheme we have not just one very precise electric charge coincidence in the fundamental constants of nature, but two such coincidences:

(1) The coincidence that the absolute value of the proton charge has always been very precisely equal to the absolute value of the electron charge;

(2) the coincidence that the absolute value of the up quark has always been very precisely twice the absolute value of the down quark. 

Doubling the number of very precise coincidences isn't really anything in the way of explanation. In the informative and entertaining book We Have No Idea by physics professor Daniel Whiteson and Jorge Cham, on page 54 the authors state this:

"If the quarks had any more (or less charge), then the charge of protons wouldn't precisely balance the negative charge of the electron, and you couldn't form stable neutral atoms. Without these perfect -1/3 and + 2/3 charges, we wouldn't be here. There would be no chemistry, no biology and no life."

But is there any explanation for this? Apparently not, because the authors next state this:

"This is actually fascinating (or creepy, depending on your level of paranoia) because, according to our current theory, particles can have any charges whatsoever; the theory works just as well with any charge value, and the fact they balance perfectly is, as far as we know, a huge and lucky coincidence."

Life could have existed if protons and electrons both had some different charge, but only if the proton charge was the exact opposite of the electron charge. The situation is illustrated in the diagram below (when reading the diagram, imagine that the green line is less than a billionth of the width of the square):

As far as we know, our planet has an equal number of protons and electrons, and our planet is electrically neutral, having an equal amount of positive charge and negative charge. Given that electromagnetism is a force very roughly a hundred trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity (the force that holds our planet together), it seems that even the tiniest imbalance (such as 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000) between the proton charge and the electron charge would result in an electrical imbalance strong enough to prevent a planet such as ours from holding together.  

On page 64 of his book The Symbiotic Universe, astronomer George Greenstein (a professor emeritus at Amherst College) says this about the equality of the proton and electron charges: 

"Relatively small things like stones, people, and the like would fly apart if the two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Large structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." 

You can read the quote above in its original context using this link.

In fact, experiments do indicate that the absolute value of the charge of the proton and the electron match to fifteen decimal places, differing by less than one part in a million billion (1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000). 

Scientifically speaking, what kind of explanation can be given for this equality of positive charge and negative charge in the universe? The only thing that can be offered is a kind of half-explanation: a reference to a law of nature. The law is called the law of  conservation of charge. According to the law of conservation of charge, any event that causes an increase in electrical charge must also cause a corresponding decrease in electrical charge; and any event that causes a decrease in electrical charge must also cause a corresponding increase in electrical charge.

The best way to illustrate this law is to refer to the high-energy collisions that occur in particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider.  In that massive machine, particles are accelerated to almost the speed of light. When two very high-energy particles collide at such speeds, they create mainly out of energy new matter particles such as protons and electrons. Following Einstein's famous equaion of E=mc², energy can be converted to matter, and vice versa. But following the law of conservation of charge, nature always "balances the books" so that the number of protons created equals the number of electrons created.  For example, if a high-energy collision creates 1000 new protons mainly from energy, then also exactly 1000 new electrons are created. And if a more energetic high-energy collision creates 8338 protons from energy, then also exactly 8338 electrons are created. 

Given such a law of nature, and a universe beginning in an extremely dense and hot state such as the Big Bang, electrical neutrality follows as a consequence. In the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the universe was so hot and dense that everything was like the high-energy collisions occurring in the Large Hadron Collider.  With a "balance the books" charge conservation law being followed everywhere, it was inevitable that the result would be an equal amount of positive charge and negative charge.  But this is merely a kind of half-explanation.  For we do not understand why such a law existed. 

Brittanica.com states the law of conservation of charge as the law that "at a subatomic level, charged particles can be created, but always in pairs with equal positive and negative charge so that the total amount of charge always remains constant." It describes this rather intricate "balance the books" system within nature:

"When a charged particle changes into a new particle, the new particle inherits the exact charge of the original. When a charged particle appears where there was none before, it is invariably accompanied by another particle of equal and opposite charge, so that no net change in charge occurs. The annihilation of a charged particle requires the joint annihilation of a particle of equal and opposite charge. "

Brittanica.com mentions mentions three other conservation laws, saying, "The laws of conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum are all derived from classical mechanics." But no such claim is made about the law of conservation of charge. There would seem be no contradiction if no such law existed, and we should not expect any such law of the conservation of charge to exist in a random universe.  

The term "law of the conservation of charge" is something of a misnomer, because charge itself is not conserved.  Over billions of years, stars convert matter into energy, resulting in a gradual decrease in the number of charges in the universe (as fewer protons and electrons exist). What is conserved is the ratio of positive charge to negative charge.  The law of the conservation of charge would be better named as the law of the preservation of the ratio of charges. But scientists would not like to use such a more accurate term, which would tend to make the universe sound like some purposeful, programmatic, mathematically-minded bookkeeper interested in the preservation of mathematical ratios. 

Imagine if there was a strange law in your household that you called the Law of Money Balance. The law might work like this: whenever you lost money, you would gain an equal amount of money. And whenever you gained money, you would lose an equal amount of money. So, for example, if there was a hole in your pocket and you lost $50 by dropping it on a crowded street, you might come home and find there was $50 that mysteriously appeared on your coffee table. And whenever you saw that there was some direct deposit of $4000 sent by your employer as a salary payment, you would find that there was at the same time some mysterious withdrawal of $4000 from your bank.  This would be great if you started out as a millionaire. No matter how much money you spent, you would always end up with the same amount of money, so you would always stay a millionaire.  

You might take such a law for granted, regarding it as some "natural law of how reality works." Or if you started out as a millionaire you might reasonably suspect that the strange law was some providential blessing.  Ditto for the law of conservation of charge, something we would not expect to exist in any random universe. 

In his recent post Ethan Siegel does a poor job of attempting an answer to the question: why is the universe electrically neutral? He fails to explain how the law of conservation of charge is the underlying physical law behind the universe's electrical neutrality (the perfect balance of positive electric charge and negative electric charge). Referring to failed wildly speculative "grand unification theories" never supported by evidence, Siegel  speculates wildly about how the universe could have begun with an imbalance of proton charge and electron charge, something that would have been in violation of one of our universe's main laws, the law of conservation of charge. He then refers us to some  imaginative paper he wrote that speculates about how such a universe with charge imbalances might have become more electrically neutral.  All of that makes up a very bad explanation as to why the universe is electrically neutral.  A much better and simpler explanation (although only a half-explanation) is to explain how our universe has always had a law (the law of conservation of charge) that guarantees that there would be a perfect balance of positive and electric charges.  But since we have no scientific explanation for why so convenient a law exists, one of many very convenient laws of nature necessary for our existence, this is merely a kind of half-explanation.

We take for granted a law such as the law of the law of conservation of charge, because it is has always existed. It seems that anyone always enjoying the blessings of a favorable law of nature will take that law for granted, no matter how improbable that law would be in a random universe.  For example, if we lived in a universe in which people always had nice gentle landings whenever they jumped off of high cliffs or high buildings, we might call such a law "the Law of Gentle Landings," and think that it was nothing special, not any providential blessing. And if we lived in some universe in which nice tasty well-cooked food would always conveniently drop from the sky at dinner time, gently landing in our back yards, we might call that regularity "the Law of Convenient Food Delivery," and think that it was nothing special, not any providential blessing, but just some law of nature to be taken for granted.  We would say "there's nothing special" about such a law, and claim that "it's merely the way nature works," language also strangely used about the law of  conservation of charge. 

From a Scientific Committee, a Puzzling Priority Judgment

Today's scientists can be pretty bad at judging how scientific money should be spent. If you want some simple proof for this claim, I suggest that you merely study the screen shot below from this recent web page.

Below the headline, we read this: "A new decadal survey outlines planetary defense and science goals through 2032. Top of the list: sending spacecraft to Uranus." What were these guys thinking?  Uranus is a lifeless ball of frozen ice and gas of no relevance to any of the most interesting or important scientific questions. 

We read this in the article (which conflicts with the headline): 

" 'This recommended portfolio of missions, high-priority research activities, and technology development will produce transformative advances in human knowledge and understanding about the origin and evolution of the solar system, and of life and the habitability of other bodies beyond Earth,' said Robin Canup, an assistant vice president of the Planetary Sciences Directorate at the Southwest Research Institute and a co-chair of the survey’s steering committee, in a National Academies release."

Studying Uranus will not produce any "transformative advances," and Uranus will not be of substantial value in "understanding about the origin and evolution of the solar system, and of life and the habitability of other bodies beyond Earth."  Uranus is a lifeless ball of ice and frozen gas, about the dullest planet imaginable. No one thinks there is any life on Uranus or any of its moons, because it's too cold where Uranus is. 

Here is a photo of the extremely boring, featureless planet that is Uranus. Can anyone imagine a less interesting-looking planet?

Dull as dishwater: Uranus as seen by Voyager 2 (Credit: NASA)

The story above has a link to a white paper by a Uranus enthusiast (Mark Hofstadter) who attempts to make "The Case for a Uranus Orbiter." The case is very weak.  There is no mention of life or biology. The biggest points the author makes seem to be these:

(1) Uranus "is the only giant planet whose gravity data cannot be fit by a simple 3-component model, with separate layers of rock, ice, and gas. Instead, it requires more realistic mixed-density regions (Podolak et al. 1995)." So the planet would be kind of interesting to planetary gravity modeling specialists. 

(2) Composition-wise, the "ice giants" such as Uranus and Neptune are different kind of planets from the "gas giants" such as Jupiter and Saturn, so let's study them for kind of "variety" reasons (a weak point).  

(3) It's easier to get to Uranus than Neptune. 

Reading the paper confirms my suspicion that Uranus is of zero interest to anyone who is not a scientist specializing in the planets of our solar system. There are 1001 interesting topics for scientific study that are not being funded because of factors such as these:

(1) Big-ticket research projects gobble up such a large fraction of the money allocated for science research.

(2) Today's scientists only want to do research that produces results in their comfort zone, and they avoid doing research in hundreds of promising areas, because they don't want to get results that might challenge their cherished materialist dogmas about the way reality works.  So hundreds of experiments that would produce results of the greatest interest to the general public (or results of fundamental scientific importance) are not being funded, because our scientists are afraid of getting any result they might find to be too spooky or too upsetting to their belief system. 

There should be three main criteria for funding scientific research:

(1) Fund scientific research which is useful and helps people.

(2) Fund scientific research that produces results that are very interesting to the general public. 

(3) Fund scientific research that will have a reasonable chance of helping to produce fundamental breakthroughs or important corrections in human understanding about topics of life and mind. 

The proposed Uranus mission fails on all three counts. The Gizmodo.com headline shown above sounded so strange that at first I thought its author must have got things wrong. But upon further investigation, I found the story is correct. Here is the source press release, saying, "The Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) should be the highest priority large mission, the report says." A story here tells us the price tag for this boondoggle is more than 4 billion dollars.  That money could fully fund many thousands of experiments that would all be of more importance than studying the frozen boring desolation of Uranus. 

About a decade ago the same "decadal survey" recommendation group told us the most important space priority was to return rocks from Mars. The group also claimed back then that the second highest priority was to visit a moon of Jupiter called Europa (as you can see from page ES-4 of the file here).  Inexplicably the group now deems Uranus as the top priority. Well, I guess that's one way to increase news coverage. Not many sources would publish a story with a headline such as "Scientists STILL are nagging us to return rocks from Mars."

NASA is a privileged fiefdom where people have somehow got the idea that they are entitled to many billions of dollars per year in funding, even for projects of very little value (like some billionaire's teenage son who believes he is entitled to a $5000 weekly allowance). If billions have to be spent on space, rather than wasting billions on low-value boondoggle projects (such as a Uranus orbiter or NASA's poorly-designed recent Mars mission), it would be better to spend such funds on useful space projects such as some system for protecting our planet from the very real danger of asteroid collisions or comet collisions that might make our planet all but uninhabitable. Or money could be spent on something that might have a big economic impact, such as space-based solar energy satellites or asteroid mining. A Uranus orbiter would have virtually no economic benefit. A full-scale search for extraterrestrial civilizations using radio telescopes and optical telescopes (combined with a full investigation of earthly UFO reports) is another billion-dollar project not yet done by NASA, which would be of vastly greater scientific interest and public interest than a Uranus orbiter. 

Mrs. Croad and Five Similar Clairvoyants

Evidence for clairvoyance is extremely abundant, and much of it consists of very long and detailed written reports presented by credible witnesses, quite of a few of whom were scientists, professors or doctors.  Some extremely strong cases are discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.  Another very strong case I have not previously discussed is the report presented in an 1881 edition of The Journal of Psychological Medicine on page 37. The report (which you can read here) is entitled "Transference of Special Sense," and is authored by  J. G. Davey M.D. of Bristol, England.  Dr. Davey states right off the bat that the case is "one in which the phenomena of clairvoyance are plainly demonstrated." Although Dr. Davey describes himself as a materialist, he still reports observing paranomal phenomena. 

Dr. Davey describes Mrs. Croad's remarkable medical history as follows:

"Born in 1840, she is said to have passed through the greater part of childhood with fair health. On the occurrence of puberty she had attacks from time to time of syncope — very probably of the hysterical kind. At the early age of 19 she married. Five years afterwards she had a fall, when the spine was said to be injured. To this accident succeeded epilepsy, attacks of which occurred almost daily during four months. It was at this time, or near to it, that she lost a child — it was scalded to death. The shock then sustained by her appears to have been unusually severe and protracted. The lower extremities gave signs of great weakness, and became, at length, powerless or paralytic ; whilst, as a consequence or attendant on a chronic gastric affection, she is said to have lost 'all power to partake of or digest solid food.'  Her condition in 1866 is described as pitiable in the extreme. The frequent fits, the lost motive power, and the impairment of the general health led to her becoming  'bedridden.'  So she has remained to this time (1880), a period of fourteen years. In 1870, it is stated, ' she became totally blind ' ; in the following year deaf, and in 1874 speechless. The paralysis, which was limited to the lower extremities, involved, in 1879, the upper limbs ; but at this time the loss of sensation and motion is limited to the left arm, the fingers and thumb of the left hand being but partially affected. The right hand and arm have recovered their once-lost functions."

After noting that he spent months testing Mrs. Croad, Davey tells us that the blind Mrs. Croad was able to read by touching material with her fingers. This is the well-documented phenomenon of "transposition of the senses," which has been reported by very many witnesses in the West, in Russia and in China, over many years (as you can read about by reading my posts here, here, here, here, here and here).  Davey states this:

"The various tests referred to were witnessed by them in my presence, and with the effect of assuring us that she (Mrs. Croad) was and is enabled to perceive, through the aid only of touch, the various objects, both large and small, on any given card or photograph. After an experience extending over some nine or ten weeks, during which the ' tests ' were many times repeated, and, now and then, in the presence of several medical and non-medical (ladies and gentlemen) friends, there remained (I believe) not the least doubt of this ' transference of sense ' from the eyes of Mrs. Croad to her fingers and the palm of her right hand."

I can guess what skeptics of the paranormal are now thinking. They are thinking "they didn't make the blindfolds tight enough," or "the blindfolds were not thick enough" or "she looked through the bottom crack of a blindfold."  The statement below by Dr. Davey rules out such objections (which are pretty silly given the blindness of Mrs. Croad):

"It need not to be supposed that I and others were content to believe in Mrs. Croad's blindness and to take no specific precautions against any possible trick or deception — far from this. On solicitation, she very kindly assented to be blindfolded, after a very decided fashion ; and so blindfolded that neither deception on her part nor prejudice nor false judgment on ours were — either the one or the other — possible. The blindfolding was accomplished thus: a pad of cotton wool being placed on each orbit ; the face was then covered by a large and thickly-folded neckerchief; this was tied securely at the back part of the head, and — even more than this — more cotton wool was pushed up towards the eyes, on either side of the nose. Not content, however, the aid of two fingers of a bystander were called into requisition, and with these a continued pressure was kept up, during the 'testing' outside and over the neckerchief and wool and above the closed eyes. At this stage of the proceedings the room was, on two different occasions, very thoroughly darkened. Under such circumstances it was the testing commenced, and continued to the end ; the result being, as theretofore, in the highest degree, conclusive and satisfactory."

Dr. Davey then mentions an ability of Mrs. Croad to see inside letters:

"Further, Mrs. Croad is said to have the additional power to detect as it were by sympathy, or by a community of ideas and feeling, any letter written by a friend of hers and put into her hands by a third party. This I know, on receiving a letter some weeks since from Dr. Maclean, of Swindon, I took it forthwith to her. On receiving it from me she exclaimed, ' Oh, from my dear Doctor Maclean.' "

A paranormal ability to detect the contents of sealed envelopes or  enclosed boxes has been reported very many times by observers of clairvoyants.  Clairvoyants such as Alexis Didier demonstrated such an ability before a host of witnesses in public exhibitions.  There are many reports of such an ability occurring in China.  I asked only one person from China (not a student of the paranormal) whether she had ever heard of such an ability, and she promptly replied that a relative of hers had such an ability when young.

Dr. Davey then mentions a claim about Mrs. Croad that he had difficulty believing (although, as I will note later, it matches an ability well-demonstrated in another very similar clairvoyant). Davey states this:

"It is said also by those near and dear to her that such is Mrs. Croad's prevision that she has been known to have foretold my own visits to her ; what I mean is, that on my approach to the house she occupies and when at a distance from it, and unseen by anyone about her — in fact, not within sight— she has said, ' Dr. Davey is coming ; he will be here directly.' I confess to a difficulty in either believing or  comprehending this. If such prevision or prescience is really within the capacity of the human organism, we, of all others, have much to learn in respect to the nervous system in man and animals. However, I learn by letter from my friend Dr. Maclean, that in the early part of his medical career he had a patient of the hysterical type who displayed a like lucidity."

Mrs. Croad's daughter was often around during some of these tests, but Dr. Davey states that Mrs. Croad performed just as well when her daughter was absent. We read this statement by Dr. Davey:

"It has been suggested that Miss Croad did, in some strange way, convey to her mother during the testing a knowledge of the cards &c., the objects represented on them, their colours, &c. Well, the suggestion was acted on : the same testing, on being again and again repeated, and in the absence of Miss Croad from the room occupied by her mother, proved altogether and conclusively in favour of Mrs. Croad. The same evidence of the same ' transference of special sense ' from the eyes to the digits [fingers] was always forthcoming. We are bound, then, to conclude that the 'transference'  was, or is, altogether independent of any kind of influence imparted by Miss Croad to her mother, and that the existence of the same in Mrs. Croad is due to what is called ' clairvoyance.' "

Dr. Davey then describes an apparent case of mind reading performed by Mrs. Croad:

"As a further illustration of Mrs. Croad's peculiar and clairvoyant gifts, it should be stated that at my second interview with Mrs. Croad, and in the presence of Dr. Andrews and others, certain of my own personal and private convictions on a particular subject became, as it would seem, in a strange and exceptional manner, known to Mrs. Croad. She asked me if I would allow her to tell me a secret in my own life history, and would I be offended if she wrote it on her slate. I replied ' No.' That written on the slate was and is a fact, than which nothing could or can be more truthful and to the point. Dr. Andrews is prepared to verify this ; the others present on this occasion were but little known to me." 

The case of Mrs. Croad bears a strong resemblance to the even more astonishing case of Mollie Fancher, who lived in Brooklyn, New York about the same time as Mrs. Croad.  Like Mrs. Croad, Mollie Fancher had a very bad vision problem. Fancher was described at various times as either blind or very nearly blind.  Mollie had suffered terrible injuries even worse than Mrs. Croad's, including a fall from a streetcar. Both Mrs. Croad and Mollie Fancher were bedridden, and Mollie stayed bedridden for decades. Witnesses very often reported that Mollie Fancher would announce who had arrived at her door, before she could even see who had entered (something also reported of Mrs. Croad).  Both Mollie Fancher and Mrs. Croad passed with flying colors the most stringent tests of clairvoyance while securely blindfolded. Both Mollie Fancher and Mrs. Croad went in and out of trances.  Both Mollie Fancher and Mrs. Croad had long periods of time in which they seemed to neither eat nor drink, with such an abstinence occurring for much longer periods with Mollie Fancher.   

A newspaper called the Brooklyn Eagle published an account of Mollie Fancher which stated this: 

"When in the quiet condition of rigidity, the patient is in a trance. Her eyes closed, the ears are dead to sound, the muscles cease to act, respiration is hardly perceptible, and once or twice a state of ecsstacy indicative of mental unsteadiness has resulted. These seasons last for four days, or two hours each. When in this condition, she is powerfully clairvoyant in her faculties. She can tell the time by several watches variously set to deceive her, read unopened letters, decipher the contents of a slate, and repeat what 'Mrs. Grundy says,' by serving up the gossip of the neighborhood. She appears to possess the faculty of second sight to a remarkable degree."

The Mollie Fancher case is described in my post here, and in the long book here. 

Similar to the cases above is the case of Eliza Hamilton. A book gives these details:

"She had been in hospital for four months, on her return home frequently passed into the trance state, and on awakening described various people and places she had visited, and objects seen. These descriptions have been invariably verified subsequently....She often describes events which are about to happen, and these are always fulfilled exactly as she predicts. 'Her father' says Mr. Hudson Tuttle, 'read in her presence a letter he had received from a friend in Leeds, speaking of the loss of his daughter, about whose fate he was very unhappy, as she had disappeared nearly a month before, and left no trace. Eliza went into the trance state, and cried out, 'Rejoice! I have found the lost girl ! She is happy in the angel world.'  She said the girl had fallen into the dark water where dyers washed their cloths; that her friends could not have found her had they sought her there, but now the body had floated a few miles, and would be found in the River Aire. The body was found as described. Now, knowing that her eyes were closed, that she could not hear, that her bodily senses were in profound lethargy, how are we to account for the intensity and keenness of sight? Her mental powers were exceedingly exalted, and scarcely a question could be asked her but she correctly answered. ' "

In 1876 the president of a Psychological Society reported on a case in his own family reminding us of the claim above that Mrs. Croad could tell when Dr. Davey was about to arrive while he was still out of her sight.  He stated this: 

"Matilda C , aged fifteen, had fits of a cataleptic character, which attacked her at irregular intervals, and seized her at unexpected times. At such times she became insensible, and had to be carried to a couch : at first she was rigid, but the flexure of the limbs was afterwards partially restored ; her power of speech was lost, and she could express her feelings only by actions. While in this state she had a supersensuous power of perception. She was conscious of her father's approach before any of her senses had been affected in the ordinary way ; she could feel his influence when he was at least a quarter of a mile from the house. The insensible form upon the sofa gave notice of his approach with unfailing certainty a quarter of an hour or more before he arrived. If he (Mr. Cox) opened a book containing pictures, she could see those pictures, although she was in another part of the room, and would throw herself into the attitudes of the persons represented in any engraving at which he might be looking at the time. Even had her eyes been open she could not have seen those pictures in the ordinary way. This state lasted for more than a year, and experiments were tried many times during that period, so that the facts were proved conclusively, beyond all manner of doubt. It had been objected, that she perhaps knew the book and guessed at the pictures ; consequently he tried her with books and pictures borrowed from strangers ; moreover, in a volume containing thirty pictures, she never once made a mistake as to the particular picture at which he was looking. He found by experiment that she saw his mental impressions, and not the pictures themselves, for she could only see as much of any engraving as he saw himself. Sometimes she wished for something not in the room, and if her attendant, who went to fetch it, touched the wrong thing, she showed signs of displeasure and annoyance. This experiment was repeatedly tried. She did not see the object itself, but the impression on the mind of the attendant, for when the latter was blindfolded there was no perception on the part of the patient. While in this abnormal state the patient was graceful in all her actions, and more than commonly intelligent ; she could play games of cards with skill with her eyes closed, whilst in her normal state she could not play a game at cards at all." 

A similar account of a female being able to tell when an unseen visitor was about to arrive is told by Mary Dana Shindler in an 1889 book:

"An aunt of ours was very ill with fever, and her only brother, commanding a packet ship between Havana and Charleston, was daily expected; but we feared he would arrive too late to see his sister in earth-life. One morning while we were watching at her bedside, she suddenly sat up, clapped her hands, and exclaimed joyfully, ' Brother William has come!' We all thought her mind wandering; but in about ten minutes he arrived at her house, and from that moment she began to recover. She could not tell us how she discovered that he had arrived, but only said, 'I knew it; I heard, and felt him.' "

It is remarkable how similar are accounts like this, which show up in the accounts of quite a few different writers from different countries. Here is another example of an apparently clairvoyant detection of the arrival of an unseen visitor, one occurring in nineteenth century Brussels, Belgium, involving a hypnotized person named Marie:

"She very quickly fell into a somnambulistic state, and while in that condition suddenly exclaimed: 'Hallo, that’s funny, here are my two cousins coming to visit me; they are just now coming up to the front- door'. And indeed, Marie had hardly finished speaking when Lafontaine heard the front-door bell ringing. This fact of spontaneous clairvoyance (lucidité à distance is the term used by Lafontaine) had greatly perplexed him and in fact he was completely dumbfounded. After a while Marie requested him to awaken her. When she awoke from her somnambulistic condition she was greatly astonished to find her two cousins, who had come all the way from Nivelles (a little Belgian town 18 miles from Brussels) on a surprise visit."

On page 317 of the 1898 book Glimpses of the Unseen by B. J. Austin, we read a similar account involving another clairvoyant, a female in a land (Scotland) famous for sometimes yielding those with the second sight:

"On  another  occasion  she  informed  the  members  of  the  family  at breakfast that  I  was  on  my  way  from  Edinburgh  to  the  works  adjacent  to  her  home,  and that  I  had  on  a  gray  check  tweed  suit.  I  had  not  had  time  to  inform  her  father of  my  intended  visit  to  the  works,  but,  sure  enough,  within  three  hours  or  so  I arrived  in  a  dog-cart  at  the  works,  dressed  as  she  had  described."

On the same page we have a description that reminds me of the famous account of Swedenborg in the eighteenth century describing in accurate detail a fire that was happening three hundred miles away (Immanuel Kant's original account of this is contained here). We read this:

"Then  she  commenced  the  relation  of  a  fire  which  was  taking  place. It  was  in  Newcastle.  'Oh  !  there  are  two  men  killed ! '  she  cried.  Again,  she proceeded  to  recite  to  Mr.  S.  the  contents  of  some  letters  she  extracted  from his  pocket,  though  he  did  not  remove  the  envelopes....Now,  one  of  the  foregoing  is  the  fact  that  the  newspapers  of  the  following Monday  contains  an  account  of  a  fire  that  took  place  at  Newcastle  on  Saturday night,  and  detailed  the  fact  that  ' two  men  were  killed'  at  it. Again,  there  was  actually  no  apparent  connecting  link  between  the  personalities of  anyone  present  and  the  town  of  Newcastle."

An important point concerning hypnosis is that for about eighty years stubborn mainstream scientists told us incorrectly that there was nothing to it (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary). Between about 1780 and 1860 a host of mainstream scientists told us that hypnotism (previously called Mesmerism, artificial somnambulism or animal magnetism) was nothing but fraud and error. Then at some point in the nineteenth century (roughly about 1860) mainstream professors began to admit the reality and medical importance of hypnotism under a new name of "hypnotism." When pondering the evidence for clairvoyance, we should remember how an extremely important anomalous human reality (hypnotism) was denied for about eighty long years (roughly 1780 to 1860) by mainstream scientists despite abundant evidence for the reality of that phenomenon, and also suspect that something similar is happening impeding the mainstream's acceptance of the overwhelming evidence for clairvoyance.   

My recent science fiction story Planet of the Blind (which you can read here) imagines a planet (perhaps a future Earth) on which almost everyone is blind, except for a very small group of scorned misfits that can still see. On such a planet, those who claim to have vision are treated as people reporting the paranormal, and the schools deny that anyone can see, claiming that all reports of a vision ability are delusions.  The blind narrator of the story gets completely convincing evidence that vision is a real ability, but he refuses to accept it.  Maybe those who deny clairvoyance are like such a narrator. And maybe clairvoyance at its greatest can allow perception as superior to vision as vision is superior to hearing. 

Planet of the Blind: A Science Fiction Story

All information comes to people through their senses. There are exactly four senses that people have:

1. The sense of hearing, the most useful of all senses;

2. the sense of touch;

3. the sense of smell;

4. the sense of taste.

That there are only four senses is a scientific fact taught by a great consensus of our school teachers. But for a long time there has been a strange tiny group of eccentrics who claim that there is something they call a “fifth sense.” They use the strange term “vision” to refer to this alleged ability. They even claim that they have the ability to use this so-called “fifth sense,” by doing some weird paranormal activity that they call “seeing.” These weirdos call regular men like me "blind men." 

I was hired by a committee at a major school to scientifically investigate this strange claim. Feeling the bumps on many a road sign, and asking directions from people on the way, I finally made my way to a small community of people who called themselves “seers.” I asked whether any of them had this strange power they called “vision.” They said they all had the power. I asked whether they would be willing to engage in a scientific test of this ability. I was rather surprised when they agreed without hesitation to the test I proposed.

The scientific test I proposed was a simple one. At one end of a large room, I would sit next to one person. A second person would sit about twenty paces away. I would instruct the first person to raise a random number of fingers in the air at an interval of thirty seconds. I would be able to tell how many fingers had been raised by feeling the person's fingers with my fingers. At each interval, someone named Adra sitting twenty paces away would have to call out how many fingers had been raised. This is a test that no person twenty paces away should be able to pass, because there is no way to tell how many fingers a distant person has raised through the known senses of hearing, smell, taste or touch (unless the person raising his fingers told how many fingers he raised, which was prohibited).

The test was tried 10 times, and in each case the person seated twenty paces away called out the correct number of fingers that had been raised. I knew that there must have been some kind of cheating. I accused the two persons of previously conspiring to memorize a sequence of numbers that would be remembered by both the person raising the fingers and the person seated twenty paces away.

“There is an easy way to prove that we really do have vision,” said  the person raising the fingers. “You can be the one who raises his fingers. And you can make sure to pick a random number of fingers each time you raise them.”

So I replaced this person in the test who raised the fingers. Twenty times I raised a random number of my fingers, changing how many fingers were raised each time. I was surprised that each and every time, Adra seated twenty paces away called out the correct number of fingers that I had raised.

“Those must have been only lucky guesses,” I said.

“Surely you can do better than that as an explanation,” said Adra.

“It makes no sense that so few people would have this rare skill you call 'vision,' and that almost everyone in the world would not have such a skill,” I said.

“There is a simple explanation for that,” said Adra. “Would you like to hear it?”

“Sure,” I said. “I like a good children's story as much as anyone else.”

“I will tell you the truth, not a children's story,” said Adra. “Once long ago every person in the world could see with the wonderful fifth sense we call vision. The eyes of every person allowed them to discover the nature of distant objects as soon as they pointed their eyes in the right direction. But then one year something very strange happened to the sun. For reasons we don't understand, the sun suddenly got much brighter. It was what we called the Great Brightening.”

“What do you mean by this odd word brighter?” I asked.

"It's hard to explain the word to a blind person like you who has never seen anything,” said Adra. “It's kind of like when a fire suddenly gets much hotter. It means a sudden increase in energy. When the sun suddenly got much brighter, some delicate part in the eye called the retina got damaged, and everyone in the world that looked at the sun lost their ability to use their eyes. They could no longer see. They became what we call blind, meaning without any ability to use their fifth sense.”

"So, tell me,” I said skeptically, “how did you and your friends ever acquire this magical paranormal ability you call vision?”

“We were born with the ability, just like everyone in the whole world is born with such an ability,” said Adra. “The only difference is that we were extremely careful never to lose our ability to see. Whenever we went outdoors, we would always wear thick very dark sunglasses that would protect our eyes from being damaged by the very brightened sun. If you had taken the same precaution all your life, you would also be able to see. You also would have vision, a fifth sense.”

“That is a very interesting story,” I said. “How did you ever learn such a story? Was it passed down from generation to generation? Such tales passed through oral tradition are not very reliable.”

“We discovered it in a book,” Adra said. “I will show you the book.”

Adra brought a book and I asked to feel it. I opened up the pages, and turned them. I could feel nothing. The pages were all smooth.

“The pages are all smooth,” I said. “Clearly the book has no information in it.”

“You're wrong,” said Adra. “The book has very much information. Nowadays almost everyone gets information from books by using their fingers to feel the tiny bumps on the pages. But before what we call the Great Brightening, people would produce books with smooth pages. They put information on the book by using a machine rarely used today, a tool called a printer. A book created in such a way could be read by anyone with the fifth sense, what we call vision. By getting the information from this book, we were able to find out how the Great Brightening caused most people to become blind, to lose their vision, when the sun flared up like a fire that burns much more brightly.”

“How many of these old books with smooth pages do you have?” I asked.

“Thousands of them,” Adra said.

Disgusted by these lies about a claimed paranormal ability, I left the community. Using my bump puncher to make bumps in paper, I must now write my report to the committee of the great school that hired me. I will report that the claims of a mysterious fifth sense called “vision” are delusions without foundation. I will report that those who claim to be able to “see” with their eyes are probably mentally disturbed people, of interest only to doctors who treat the mentally ill. I am sure that my report will help advance the noble cause of true science. I look forward to the day when great scholars will read my report by using their finger tips. 

Why Imagining "Cognition All the Way Down" Does Nothing to Explain Morphogenesis

About two years ago biologist Michael Levin authored (with philosopher Daniel C. Dennett) an essay with the title "Cognition All the Way Down." In the essay Levin and Dennett start out by following some of the worst speech customs of materialist biologists.  But then the two start pushing something sounding different from the usual materialist claptrap: a novel-sounding idea of "cognition all the way down."  Suddenly, out of the blue, we read the following: "Thinking of parts of organisms as agents, detecting opportunities and trying to accomplish missions is risky, but the payoff in insight can be large."

Were Levin and Dennett actually trying to suggest that cells are agents? It's hard to tell, because we then read them write as if what they're talking about are agents that aren't really agents. It's just the kind of language misuse we would expect from the kind of guys who frequently talk about the "selection that isn't really selection": so-called natural selection, which isn't really selection at all. Selection means an act of choice by a conscious agent, but proponents of so-called natural selection are not talking about any such thing when they refer to "natural selection." 

The paragraph below makes rather clear that what Levin and Dennett are talking about are "agents that aren't really agents," and "selves that aren't really selves," namely unconscious things that will be misleadingly referred to as agents or selves:

"Notice how ‘you’ can be a single cell or a multicellular organism – or an organ or tissue in a multicellular organism – and still be gifted with informational competences composed out of the basic ‘nuts and bolts’ of information-processing structures. Agents, in this carefully limited perspective, need not be conscious, need not understand, need not have minds, but they do need to be structured to exploit physical regularities that enable them to use information (following the laws of computation) to perform tasks, beginning with the fundamental task of self-preservation, which involves not just providing themselves with the energy needed to wield their tools, but the ability to adjust to their local environments in ways that advance their prospects."

The title "Cognition All the Way Down" refers to cognition, but what Levin and Dennett refer to in the article is not really cognition at all. When I do a Google search for "cognition" the first result I get is "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses." Levin and Dennett are not referring to any such thing in this article. When they refer to cognition, they seem to refer to some "cognition that isn't really cognition," and when they use the word "know" they seem to refer to some "knowing that isn't really knowing."  And when the two refer to cells as "cognitive systems," they seem to mean "cognitive systems that are not really cognitive systems." 

In a later essay by Michael Levin co-authored with Rafael Yuste entitled "Modular Cognition," there is the obtuse claim that evolution hacked its way to intelligence. Because hacking is an activity carried out by intelligent agents, you cannot explain the origin of intelligence by claiming that before it existed there was hacking.  In the essay Michael Levin continues to use weird language in which words such as "agent" and "cognition" and "know" are abused and distorted.  We have a very strange diagram entitled "Tiers of Biological Cognition," in which cells and protein networks are included.  "Cognition" is a useful word in the English language, and it is an abuse of language to start using it to refer to microscopic low-level things that the vast majority of scientists believe to be no more cognitive than a stone. It is also an abuse of language when the authors state that "networks of cells began to work as a society" during the morphogenesis leading from a single cell to a full-grown baby.  A society is a group of conscious, understanding minds, which cells are not. 

In the last paragraph of the essay, Levin and Yuste make what seems to be a claim that they're not just being metaphorical. They state, "With that in mind, we call on biologists to embrace the intentional stance: treating circuits, cells and cellular processes as competent problem-solving agents with agendas, and the capacity to detect and store information – no longer a metaphor, but a serious hypothesis made plausible by the emergence of intelligent behaviour in phylogenetic history."  But this seems like a quarterback's pump-fake, because they seem very much to be using terms such as "problem-solving agents" and "agendas" in a purely metaphorical sense.  They seem to be referring to agents that aren't really agents, agendas that aren't really agendas, and intentions that aren't really intentions. 

But it certainly could be possible for some thinker to propose some theory similar to "cognition all the way down" without using metaphorical or tricky language that fools us and confuses us by talking about agents that aren't really agents and intentions that aren't really intentions and cognition that isn't really cognition.  Sticking his neck out and proposing an idea that would seem very heretical to the average biologist, a thinker could maintain that protein molecules are literally conscious agents with real lives and minds of their own, and that cells are literally conscious agents with real lives and minds of their own. Would such a radical proposal help explain the great mystery of morphogenesis, the mystery of how a newly fertilized speck-sized ovum is able to progress to become a full-sized human body (something a billion times more organized than that ovum)?  No, it would not. 

Let us first consider how great is the mystery of morphogenesis. To explain the magnitude of the mystery,  I must first explain why a common conception of the origin of a full human body is very much mythical.  That mythical conception (deplorably promoted by many biologists for ideological reasons) is the idea that a human body arises because a body blueprint is read from DNA. DNA contains no such blueprint for building human bodies, nor does it contain any recipe or program for building any of the organs or cells of a human body.  The only information in DNA is very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids belong in particular protein molecules. DNA does not specify how to make a human body, and does not even specify how to make any organ or any cell of a human body.  Humans have about 200 types of cells, and DNA does not specify how to make any one of these cells. DNA does not even specify how to make one of the organelles that are the building blocks of cells. 

So the idea that a human body arises from a blueprint for such a body found in DNA is purely mythical.  At the end of the post here, you can read quotes by more than 20 distinguished science authorities (mostly biologists) stating that DNA is neither a blueprint nor a recipe nor a program for building a human.  If such quotes do not convince you, you need merely consider the elementary fact that blueprints don't build things. Complex things get built with the help of blueprints only because there are conscious blueprint readers that read blueprints and get ideas about how to act to construct things.  Within the womb of a human being, there is nothing like any conscious agent capable of reading and acting on incredibly complex instructions for building a human body if they existed.  So even if there was a blueprint for making a human in DNA, that would not explain the origin of a full human body; for there would be nothing below the neck capable of reading and understanding such instructions for the incredibly complex job of building the hierarchically organized and immensely dynamic reality of a human body.  Blueprints don't build things. 

So the mystery of morphogenesis is one that is currently a thousand miles over the heads of today's biologists.  When a biologist mutters something about DNA to try to make it sound like he understands the progression from a speck-sized ovum to the vast organization of a full-grown human body,  he is like some elementary school student trying to persuade you that he understands the Second World War because he has memorized the year it started and the year it ended. 

The organization of a human body is profoundly hierarchical. Subatomic particles are organized into atoms, which are organized into molecules such as amino acids, which are organized into peptides and polypeptide chains, which are organized into protein molecules with elaborate three-dimensional structures, which are organized into organelles, which are organized into cells, which are organized into tissues, which are organized into organs, which are organized into organ systems, with organ systems and a skeletal system being organized into a full human body.  We certainly cannot explain such a marvel of hierarchical organization by referring to DNA (or its component genes), one reason being that DNA does not contain any information structured in a very hierarchical way. 

Would it lessen this great mystery if we imagined conscious protein molecules and conscious cells? No, it would not.  The first reason it would not is that we would not explain the origin of cells by imagining "cognition all the way down." A cell cannot be imagined as merely some random merging of protein molecules that clung to each other. A cell is a fantastically complex orderly arrangement of protein molecules, one that is specialized for some particular task in the body, and one that is often somehow capable of the wondrous feat of self-replication.  Cells are so complex that they have been compared to factories. Each cell type requires a specific and extremely complex organization of millions of protein molecules, in order for the cell to do its job in the human body, and in order for the cell to be able to reproduce. 

Let us imagine conscious protein molecules. Could such molecules somehow know or figure out how to make a cell? No, this would be like thinking that building materials in a Home Depot (such as bricks and pipes and wood planks) could somehow figure out how to make a ten-story building suitable for housing humans.  If you were a protein molecule floating about in a body,  you would know nothing about the incredibly complex task of building a functional cell, one capable of self-reproduction.  Living your "protein molecule life" you would also know nothing about any such complex topics as cells or the human body or the type of cells that humans need to function on planet Earth.  If you and some other protein molecules were to join together for companionship or mutual self-preservation, the resulting agglomeration would never be a functional human cell.  The chance of such random combination of protein molecules leading to a functional or self-reproducing human cell (of a type that would be useful in a human body)  would be like the chance of a million random keystrokes producing a brilliant book that would make the best-seller lists. 

So we cannot explain how human beings get about 200 types of functional cells by imagining conscious protein molecules inside the body.  "Cognition all the way down" does not explain the origin of cells. But what about the origin of organs and organ systems in a human body? Would we help to explain such things by imagining that cells in the body are conscious?

The answer is no. To help explain why,  let me raise a question: which is it that appears within a human womb during pregnancy:

(1) A child's body that is optimized for survival inside the womb?

(2) Or, a child's body that is optimized for survival outside of the womb, in an environment radically different from the environment of the womb, a body having a whole set of features and appendages that are useless inside the womb, but useful outside of the womb?

The correct answer to this question, of course, is (2).  Consider a male newborn baby. He has the following features:

(1) arms that are very useful outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(2) legs that are useful for walking around outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(3) eyes that are useful for seeing things outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (where everything is so dark that nothing can be seen even if you have eyes);

(4) ears that are useful for seeing things outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(5) a penis and testicles that will one day be useful for reproducing outside of a womb, but are useless inside a womb;

(6) a mouth that is useful for eating and speaking outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (where a developing baby gets all nutrients through an umbilical cord); 

(7) a nose and lungs that are useful for smelling and breathing outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (babies take their first breath after being born).

If we imagine conscious cells inside the womb, we have no explanation as to why such conscious agents would ever band together to make a human body that is optimized for living not within a womb but in the utterly different environment outside of the womb. Such cells would know nothing about existence outside of the womb and would know nothing about the requirements of organisms outside of the womb.  We cannot imagine any leap of creativity or imagination in such cells that would cause such cells to assemble into a human body optimized not for living inside the womb, but for a totally different environment outside of the womb. Similarly, if there were people living on some extraterrestrial planet perpetually covered in very thick clouds, and such people had no knowledge of outer space or any bodies outside of their world, such beings would never build some kind of rocket like the Apollo 11 system, one capable of reaching outer space, traveling through outer space, and also capable of landing a spacecraft on the surface of a body very much smaller than their own planetary body.  

If cells in the human body were conscious, this would not at all explain how cells end up in the right place for there to arise a gigantically organized human body.  Such a cell would also lack any idea of what was the right place for it to go to, for the cell would not understand such grand ideas as human anatomy, and also would not understand what proper role it should play in such a grand scheme.  A conscious cell would also lack any senses, meaning it could never use visual information to navigate to the right place.  The cell would be like a blind, dumb and speechless man stumbling around in New York City, one that didn't know where its house or apartment building was. 

So the fanciful notion of "cognition all the way down" is worthless in explaining morphogenesis. Such an idea is of no value in explaining how inside a mother's womb there occurs the origin of any of the 200 types of cells in the human body, nor is such an idea of any value in explaining how the large-scale organization of a human body happens inside the womb. 

The fact that a biologist (Levin) has proposed an idea to explain morphogenesis that has no value in explaining it reminds us that our biologists are very much lost in the woods trying to explain morphogenesis.  The progression from the tiny speck of a newly fertilized ovum to the vast functional complexity and hierarchical  organization of a human body is a miracle of progression a thousand miles over the heads of our biologists.  Their failure to understand morphogenesis makes a mockery of all claims by biologists that they understand the origin of the human race. He who does not understand morphogenesis cannot credibly claim to understand the origin of the human species.  It makes no sense whatsoever to claim that you understand the origin of a whole species when you cannot even explain the physical origin of a single full-grown organism in that species.  Biologists understand neither the physical origin of any adult body nor the origin of any adult mind.  For reasons discussed at great length in the many posts here, the "it's all just your brain" claim biologists offer to try to explain the mind is as much of an "ivory tower old wives' tale" as the "DNA did it" myth they sometimes advance to explain the origin of a human body. 

The ball is getting bigger every decade