Some Try to Super-Shrink the Self, But Others Try to Balloon It to Infinity

Explaining the human self is a problem for materialists. Under their assumptions, there is no particular need for you to be a you. From a Darwinian standpoint, things would work just as well if each of us were just a kind of Pavlovian stimulus-response system, with no sense of a personal self. So why do you have a self, particularly a self capable of introspection, philosophical curiosity, spirituality, and other higher human capabilities?

Faced with such a difficulty, many materialists have resorted to a strategy that we might call “shrink the self.” The idea is to describe the self as a kind of illusion. Such thinkers claim, very implausibly, that we are just a kind of stream of brain blips, and that our brains fool us into thinking this is a self. It's an idea which makes no sense, for how could a self be fooled about selfhood unless there was a self to begin with?

But a recent book by Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos takes an opposite approach, an approach that we may call “balloon the self to infinity.” Their book is entitled You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters. 

A profound insight or runaway ego-tripping?

The book often contains enigmatic prose that leaves you wondering whether the authors are speaking literally or metaphorically. There are many statements that seem to be written in a kind of Zen Buddhist style. For example, we are told on page 241, “To claim that there was nothing before the big bang is just as correct as saying that everything existed before the big bang.” On the next page we are told, “It is permissable to see the universe as perfectly designed, perfectly random, a mixture of the two, or, as some mystics would declare, mere dream stuff with no substantiality at all.” Then we have this cryptic passage on page 243:

Choosing to call the soft green moss on a rock a living thing while denying life to the rock is merely a mind-made distinction. In reality, everything in the universe follows the same path from its origin (dimensionless being) to a state that consciousness chooses to create out of itself. Since they follow the same path from the unmanifest to the manifest, a rock and the moss that clings to it share life on equal terms.

On page 95 the book tells us, “If we can look past the illusion created by clocks, the race against time comes to an end, and the fear of death is erased once and for all.” But on page 253 we are told the following:

Death is the termination of a particular qualia program (the life program of an individual). The qualia return to a state of potential forms within consciousness, where they reshuffle and recycle as new living entities. The consciousness field and its matrix of qualia are nonlocal and immortal.

At this point in the text the reader may be forgiven for saying, “Cold comfort!” Apparently the authors think that the self is not immortal, but that death brings some “return to a state of potential forms” and a reshuffling in which little parts of your self (qualia) are thrown into the vat, ending up perhaps as parts of some new person. That sounds for all practical purposes just like death not followed by any meaningful survival of the self. So if someone believed that his fate at death was such a fate, I don't see why it would be a situation that “the fear of death is erased once and for all.”

Qualia, incidentally, are transient “this moment” mental events experienced by a self, so it would seem to make no sense to speak of the qualia of one person being reshuffled and recycled into “new living entities.”

We may skeptically ask: if “you are the universe” as their book title asserts, why can't you at least have at death some fate better than just being reshuffled and recycled, like some tin can ending up at the recycling center? Like forty other statements at the end of the book, the statement quoted above is delivered in an oracular and dogmatic manner. The book discusses scientific findings, but the discussion is just window dressing for metaphysical conclusions that are derived through philosophy rather than scientific inference.

The authors make no mention of paranormal phenomena or psychic phenomena, which anyone should be studying before he pontificates on the fate of the soul. Such phenomena suggest a fate more hopeful than the “recycling center” fate the authors imagine.

The subtitle of the book is “Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters.” But the book fails to explain much in the way of any implications of their philosophy that matter. They describe some mysterious consciousness field giving rise to consciousness, but this conclusion doesn't seem to have any implications for mankind's future. They depict this consciousness field in such an impersonal way that it's hard to imagine such a thing taking much interest in the fate of man. The book's description of “qualia recycling” upon death doesn't seem to be any news flash that would cause anyone to think: now that really matters.

I think “you are the universe” is a poor way of expressing whatever truth the authors were trying to express by making such a claim. How could each one of us be the universe when there is such a difference between individual minds? Whether it is mainly material or mainly mental, the universe is something vastly more than any one of us.

Four Places to Look for a Calling Card of the Transcendent

The cosmology PhD Zeeya Merali authored a recent book entitled A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes. When I look up this book on www.amazon.com, I see the following claim in the text promoting the book: “As startling as it sounds, modern physics suggests that within the next two decades, scientists may be able to perform this seemingly divine feat – to concoct an entirely new baby universe, complete with its own physical laws, star systems, galaxies, and even intelligent life.” The claim is complete nonsense, and there is nothing at all in the book that justifies such a laughable claim. What the book actually discusses rather briefly are a few cases where a theorist has speculated that if his theory is true, then you might be able to create some fleeting microscopic irregularity; and the theorist calls such irregularities “universes.” The theories in question are just speculative schemes which are completely unproven.

Merali's book is fairly interesting and has some interviews with prominent cosmologists. Having lots of material for a good book, we can only wonder why she chose a book title hyping this “manufacturing of baby universes” nonsense. Maybe, it was kind of a “that will attract attention” type of thing. As the Big Bang involves an entire universe, the very phrase “a Big Bang in a little room” makes no more sense than a “big galaxy in a little soda bottle.”

One of the interviews in the book is with a cosmologist named Anthony Zee who suggested an interesting idea: that a Creator of the universe might cause a message to exist in the cosmic background radiation. The cosmic background radiation pervades all of space, and is believed to be the afterglow of the Big Bang in which the universe began. In a scientific paper entitled “Message in the Sky,” Zee and co-author S. Hsu speculate that if a Creator of the universe wanted to provide a message, the cosmic background radiation would provide a “stupendous opportunity,” since the same message could be observed all over the visible universe. It is believed that the cosmic background radiation looks the same to observers all over the universe. 

 

Zee and Hsu do not provide any evidence that the cosmic background radiation actually has such a message. They merely speculate about low-level details of how such a message could be implanted in the cosmic background radiation, suggesting that such a message could be found “hidden in very small temperature fluctuations in the CMB (of order 10⁻⁵) ,presumably resulting from primordial density perturbations.”

Another interesting idea is that a Creator of the universe might put a message or signal in pi, the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle. Some scientists wrote a scientific paper entitled “Pi in the Sky” which addressed this possibility. The paper begins by suggesting that there is statistical nonrandomness in both pi and the cosmic background radiation. We hear a discussion of various such abnormalities, and it sounds fascinating.

But then the paper tells us that if we convert the digits of pi into letters, we get a message. There's a visual suggesting that when the first digits of pi are converted into letters, we read the full name of Stephen Hawking: Stephen William Hawking. At this point the paper gives away that it's a fake. The paper has a date of April 1, 2016. I think poorly of people who put up fake material on the Internet, and I do not excuse them for using April Fool's Day as an excuse.

The idea that a divine creator might use pi as a kind of divine calling card was once suggested by an unlikely source: the late astronomer Carl Sagan. In his nonfiction writings Sagan had always sounded completely irreligious. So it must have come as a surprise to readers of Sagan's novel Contact when they read the book's end. In the novel's end, scientists discovered that there was a gigantic circle pattern embedded in the digits of pi, something that the novel said was proof that the universe had been designed. This highly original ending was removed from the movie version of Contact starring Jodie Foster, which left in an unoriginal “meet an extraterrestrial looking just like a human” element that reminded people of previous scenes in The Twilight Zone and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Sagan's idea of a message embedded in the digits of pi raises the interesting philosophy of mathematics question as to whether such a thing could conceivably be done by an omnipotent agent. Are the digits of pi some transcendental thing that must be the same in every possible universe? Or could an omnipotent agent create a universe that had pi digits with some desired sequence?

Another idea along these lines is the possibility that some transcendent force might leave a calling card in the genetic code, the system of symbolic representations used by all earthly life. Something along these lines has been suggested in the scientific paper “The 'Wow! Signal' of the Terrestrial Genetic Code” by two scientists. The scientists claim to have found “readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality” in the genetic code, and claim that this may indicate that earthly life was brought here by extraterrestrials.

I can think of one other possibility along these lines, a scenario that we might call “a calling card left in the subatomic particles.” Imagine you are creating a universe. You could create the universe so that all matter was built from two or three stable subatomic particles, including a positively charged particle and a negatively charged particle. Each of the positively charged particles might be hundreds or thousands of times more massive than each of the negatively charged particles. But when you set up this universe you could make it so that the charge of each of the negatively charged particles was the exact opposite of the charge on each of the positively charged particles. Across the universe you had created, scientists would be able to discover this coincidence. After the scientists across your universe had measured that the charge on the negatively charged particle was the exact opposite of the charge on the positively charged particle, with the match extending to twenty decimal places, would they then not conclude that this was some “signal in the particles” that indicated you had set things up very precisely?

No, they would do no such thing; the scientists would simply ignore the exact match. We know this from the example of our universe. For there exists exactly such a match in our universe, in which each proton has a mass 1836 times greater than each electron, but in which the charge of the electron is the exact opposite of the charge of the proton, with the match being to twenty decimal places. Our sharp-eyed scientists have paid no attention to this exact match.

New Book Documents the Government's Paranormal Entanglements

Journalist Annie Jacobsen has written an excellent new 500-page book entitled Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. The book is a very fascinating look into decades of governmental involvement in paranormal phenomena.

During the Cold War, the US government's involvement in areas such as remote viewing was spurred by reports that the Soviet Union was making progress in investigating psychic phenomena. We are told on page 72 that in 1960 a Soviet scientist said this:

Today the American Navy is investigating telepathy on their atomic submarines. Soviet scientists conducted a great many successful telepathy tests over a quarter of a century ago.

On page 78 the book tells us that the Russian woman known as Nina Kulagina (born as Ninel Kulagina) was filmed apparently stopping the heart of a frog through psychokinesis. We are told, “The film caused uproar within the American defense community.” Page 79 tells us that in one test Kulagina attempted to increase the heart rate of a skeptical physician. An analyst wrote, “Abrupt changes were noted in both people [Kulagina and the skeptical physician] within one minute after the experiment began.”

Page 95 tells us that psychic Uri Geller said that the president of Egypt (Gamal Abdel Nasser) “had just died or is about to die,” at a time shortly before Nasser unexpectedly died of a heart attack. In a declassified documents obtained as part of a 2015 Freedom of Information Act, a researcher named Puharich claimed that he and another person had seen Geller “breaking a gold ring held in another person's clenched fist; concentrating on a pair of bimetal-type thermometers, and selectively making the temperature rise 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit on one or the other instrument; starting broken clocks and watches solely by concentration; moving the hands of a watch forward or backward without any physical contact with the watch,” and also “telepathy...with 90% accuracy in telepathy tests, where Dr. Puharich would think of a 3-digit number” (page 98).

The government funded lab tests of Geller, who did well in the clairvoyance tests reported here. Another psychic investigated by scientists using government funds was Ingo Swann. In one test with Swann, he was asked to describe a “superconducting-shielded magnetometer” he had never seen. At this time witnesses observed a strange disturbance in the output of the device, something they couldn't explain (page 134). In one impromptu test, a scientist found a small moth and placed it in a sealed box. Asked to describe what was in the box, Swann said it was something like a leaf, “except that it seems very much alive, like it's even moving” (page 136).

Under controlled laboratory conditions, Geller was able to guess the faces of unseen dice with an accuracy that had a chance probability of 1 in a million, while in another clairvoyance test he produced results with a chance probability of 1 in a trillion (page 143-144). A psychokinesis test involving Geller and some fancy scientific apparatus “indicated an apparent ability of Geller to affect the apparatus by an as yet unidentified means,” a scientist reported (page 144).

The government began to fund a program to test the feasibility of remote viewing, a process in which a person attempts by clairvoyance to obtain a physical description of a remote location. The program ended up being funded by the government for many years, because it continued to achieve impressive results. On page 161 a report is quoted on Pat Price's remote viewing of a secret location: “The names on the folders were correct...The location of the doors and the elevator, the number of floors, where the cabinets were located. The color of the cabinet was correct...It was all correct.”

Skeptics are fond of mentioning that Geller was unable to bend a spoon on the Johnny Carson show, but they neglect to discuss a later radio appearance on November 23, 1973 in which Geller asked for audience participation. Not only was Geller able to bend a spoon to the host's satisfaction, but phone calls started flooding in from the audience reporting things such as bent spoons in their houses or the hands of broken watches starting. Shortly thereafter a newspaper reported these results: “Clocks and watches restarted: a total of 1,031; forks and spoons bent or broken, a total of 293; other objects bent or broken: a total of fifty one.” (See page 174-176 of Jacobsen's book for details.)

The book includes some details of successes in remote viewing. On page 213 to 216 we are told about a remote viewer named Graff was apparently able to use a psychic “map dowsing” technique to specify the coordinates where a downed plane had crashed. Former president Jimmy Carter described the incident by saying:

[She] gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite camera on that point and the plane was there.

On page 218 to 219 we have a story of how a psychic infuriated an army general. The government had hatched a plan to hide atomic missiles in a “shell game” setup in which the missiles would move around on rail tracks between different locations, making it hard for the Russians to guess where the missile was. But in a guessing simulation in which the chance of success was 10 percent per guess, a psychic was able to guess the correct location of the simulated moving missile 80% of the time. An infuriated general ordered a halt in ESP tests.

On page 235 to 236 we are told how Joe McMoneagle used remote viewing to psychically provide details of a new type of Soviet submarine, before anyone else in the US knew about them. The book says:

Joe McMoneagle had provided seminal information on the Typhoon submarine before any other intelligence asset in the United States. Fort Meades's Detachment G now had what is known in military and intelligence circles as an “intelligence first.”

On page 245 through 246 the book tells us about psychokenesis experiments in China:

A young girl could move an object across a desk using only her mind. Another could cause a flower bud inside a sealed jar to blossom in a matter of seconds. A boy could snap tree branches from a distance of several feet. Children with EHBF were tested in psychokinesis experiments. They could “turn the hands of watches, bend metal, break matches, and cause spontaneous combustion of flammable materials at the wave of a hand,” wrote an analyst with DIA.

On page 257 to 259 we are told that during the 1980's an American aerospace engineer named Jack Houck began hosting “spoon bending parties” in which people tried to bend spends by thought alone. Supposedly more than 1000 people were able to successfully bend spoons at such parties. This document in a recently declassified CIA repository describes these parties. The document says that when there was one helper between 20 people, the success rate would be between 80% and 100%. 

Referring to PK (mind-over-matter psychokinesis) and “warm forming,” meaning a person experiencing heat in a spoon he is trying to bend through mind-over-matter, the document states this:

In the spring of 1983, Cynthia Siegel, a graduate student at the John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California did a survey of the first 800 people to attend Houck's PK Parties. Of the 311 people who returned her questionnaire, 72% believed that they experienced warm forming...A very high percentage of the people attending PK Parties now believed that PK really works.

Such an account should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the table-tipping phenomenon that was very popular for quite a few years during the nineteenth century. People used to gather together and put their hands on a table, urging the table to rise. Very often heavy tables would rise in a way no one could explain. You can see amazing demonstrations of such a thing by going to youtube.com and searching for “table tipping.”

On page 263 of Jacobsen's book we are told this astonishing account:

Out of Langford's mouth came a prophecy. “A United States Pentagon official would be kidnapped by terrorists on the evening of 17 December 1981.”....Langford said he saw the terrorists breaking into the Pentagon official's apartment, binding and gagging the man, and then kidnapping him. Even more specifically, Langford saw this high-ranking official being shoved inside a trunk and secreted in the back of a van.

Sure enough, on December 17, 1981 exactly such a thing happened to Brigadier General James L. Dozier, who was kidnapped by a terrorist group called the Red Brigades. The van even had the same color mentioned by Langford.

On page 321 we are told of a remote viewing session in which Angela Dellafiora described with remarkable accuracy a randomly chosen target. On page 333 to 334 we are told how the US government apparently used Uri Geller to try to psychically influence a Soviet official so that he would support an arms control treaty, one the Soviets did agree to support. We are told on page 10 of this document (from a CIA repository) that “Dellafiora eschewed remote-viewing and instead 'channeled' her psychic data through a group of entities named 'Maurice' and 'George.'”

On page 343-345 of the book we are told of a case of a remote viewer named Paul Smith employed by the government to obtain information through clairvoyance. On May 15, 2017 he described an incident similar to what happened to the USS Stark two days later.

On page 358-360 we are told how Dellafiora said that a fugitive (believed to be out of the country) was in "Lowell, Wyoming." When informed that there was no such town, but only a Lovell, Wyoming, Dellafiora said, "That's probably it." After the fugitive was found, it was determined that he had actually been in Lovell, Wyoming. 

Government-sponsored remote viewing investigations such as the StarGate project were supposedly closed down in the 1990's, although we have no idea whether such research is continuing in secret. On page 380 of Jacobsen's book we are told the government embarked in 2014 on a multi-million dollar program to explore premonition and intuition, so that sailors and Marines can make better use of it.  

As Jacobsen's mesmerizing book documents, evidence for paranormal phenomena is very strong. Skeptics use two techniques to try to sweep such evidence under the rug. The first technique is simply the technique of "total denial," in which they dishonestly state that there is "no evidence whatsoever" for such phenomena. Another technique is for skeptics to invent imaginative explanations trying to account for the facts. As Jacobsen notes on page 173, an article in New Scientist tried to account for ESP in people like Geller by suggesting that Geller was using a radio receiver implanted in his tooth. Will our skeptics next be telling us that secretly implanted bionic fingers are behind all the cases of spoon bending?

Postscript: Under the assumption that our minds are just neural activity, phenomena such as discussed here may seem like unthinkable impossibilities. But as soon as you drop that unproven assumption, such phenomena seem not so surprising. If we have souls or spirits, then all kinds of strange things may be possible. We cannot at all predict what type of powers a soul or spirit would have. 

Revolt of the Half-People: A Science Fiction Story

In the year 2040 Monty Meekson had a hard job working as the right-hand man of a billionaire. His boss James Crassus would bark out an order, and expect Meekson to do the job, moving heaven and earth if necessary. If the job wasn't done just right, Crassus would dish out a tongue-lashing that Meekson would always endure stoically, without talking back. Despite his important role, Meekson was paid little. Crassus never paid his employees generously.

One day Crassus assigned Meekson the job of coming up with radical new ideas to help Crassus earn his second billion dollars. Meekson met with Crassus, and presented his list of ideas.

“Your ideas are worthless rubbish!” yelled Crassus.

“Yes sir, Mister Crassus,” said Meekson.

“I shouldn't have expected an idiot like you to come up with a good idea,” said Crassus. “But I've come up with a great idea myself. It's a whole new way to staff a military armaments factory, one that will be much more profitable.”

Crassus explained his wild idea. His company would get involved in genetic engineering humans. A hundred genetically engineered babies would be produced. But the babies would not be genetically engineered to be more intelligent than normal humans. The babies would be genetically engineered to grow up to be obedient, unquestioning workers who would not mind working in the factory for 80 hours a week, beginning at the age of 12. The whole project would be kept secret, unknown outside of the company owned by Crassus.

“Let's genetically engineer these kids to be strong and energetic,” said Crassus. “But let's take out lots of the genes related to intelligence, independence and the human spirit. So these kids won't grow up to be real full-fledged people. They'll kind of be like what we may call half people. They'll be kind of like half-zombie drones, and won't mind working their asses off all their lives, getting only room and board for pay.”

“Yes sir, Mister Crassus,” said Meekson.

Hiring scientists who would work in secret, Meekson arranged for the genetic engineering to be done. A hundred female eggs were combined with male sperm, and the fertilized eggs were then raised in 100 special glass incubators. Eight months later, the hundred babies were born. They were raised together in the same special child-raising facility, which was manned by ten employees each charged with taking care of ten children. Crassus refused to pay for any more nannies, demanding that the children be raised as inexpensively as possible.

When the children approached four years of age, Meekson asked his billionaire boss how the children should be schooled.

“I want them to learn almost nothing about the outside world,” said Crassus. “I don't want them to get jealous about other people who don't have to work in a factory 80 hours a week. Teach them only what they need to do their jobs in the factory that will make killer robots.”

“Yes sir, Mister Crassus,” said Meekson.

When the 100 children reached the age of twelve, Crassus ordered that they should begin their jobs at the secret armaments factory. The children did not object to the 80 hours of work each week, for they had been told for seven years that this is how they would have to work when they reached the age of 12. The children knew of no reality beyond their company's facilities and factory.

For two years, the productivity of the children was very high. They toiled at their hard jobs with few complaints. They lived in barracks like soldiers. Whenever one of the children complained, he could usually be pacified by giving him some candy, something the children had been denied in their childhood.

But eventually somehow one of the 100 children learned that 80-hour work weeks were not normal for fourteen-year-old children. The information quickly spread. The children began to talk among themselves. One day they refused to work, demanding better conditions and shorter working hours.

“You idiot, the scientists you hired probably bungled the genetic engineering,” said Crassus to Meekson. “The 100 half-people weren't supposed to be capable of such independence.” It never occurred to Crassus that maybe the human spirit was something that went beyond a person's genes.

“We'll have to get tough,” said Crassus. “Get a gun, go into the factory, and shoot one of those little rebels. Tell them they will all be killed unless they get back to work. It may seem rough, but I've got to get my next billion dollars some way, haven't I?”

“Yes sir, Mister Crassus,” said Meekson.

Meekson got the gun, but he couldn't bring himself to pull the trigger. He told Crassus what had happened.

“Oh, so you got a little problem – well, I'll fix that,” said Crassus.

Crassus went with Meekson into the factory, and asked for the gun. Crassus then shot one of the young workers, killing him.

“This is how you'll all die if you don't get back to work!” shouted Crassus.

“That should scare these damn rebels into submission,” said Crassus. “I'm going to France, and when I come back, I'll expect to see the workers working 80 hours a week like before.”

When Crassus returned from his business trip to France, he went into the factory to inspect it. There were no workers there. Enraged, he summoned Meekson.

“Why is the factory empty?” asked Crassus. “Why isn't this factory churning out killer robots? I told you there were to be no days off.”

“The workers are out enjoying your money,” said Meekson. “While you were in France, I pulled some computer shenanigans and financial funny business that amount to a billion dollar embezzlement. I've arranged for your billion dollars to be divided up among those children that you've mistreated for so long, and I'm keeping a few million myself.”

“You scum, I will destroy you!” raged Crassus.

Crassus looked around and saw a killer robot at the end of one of the factory's assembly lines. He switched on a switch on the robot's side. The robot stood up.

“Robot, do as I command,” said Crassus. “Kill human!” Crassus pointed to Meekson.

“I OBEY,” said the robot. “KILL HUMAN.”

The robot reached out its metal arms, and strangled Crassus to death.

“That's a good robot,” said Meekson with a chuckle, turning the robot off. He thought to himself: I'm lucky these silly things are so stupid.