Scientists and Their Red Herring’s

From January 2008 item in the UK’s The Daily Mail:

In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected.

Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow.

She says: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established.

“The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments.”

Of course, this doesn’t wash with sceptical scientists.

Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing.

He says: “I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven, but begs the question: do we need higher standards of evidence when we study the paranormal? I think we do.

“If I said that there is a red car outside my house, you would probably believe me.

“But if I said that a UFO had just landed, you’d probably want a lot more evidence.

“Because remote viewing is such an outlandish claim that will revolutionise the world, we need overwhelming evidence before we draw any conclusions. Right now we don’t have that evidence.”

[Emphasis added]

What Professor Wiseman has just admitted in his own words is that, “by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven”. It literally passes the rigorous tests all other fields of science go through.

However, I have the suspicion that he doesn’t want to believe in it. So rather than accepting facts as facts, he’s arguing that we should move the goal-post; setting a standard that wouldn’t apply to any other scientific branch. Thereby creating a double-standard. If it sounds unjust, thats because it is.

He does this by throwing out a red-herring. By making a comparison to UFO’s, he can make remote viewing seem ridiculous to the public eye, all the while protecting his own paradigm.

Because we’d need a lot more evidence for a UFO than we would for a red car, right?

Wrong.

Indeed, if I was a skeptic, and someone told me there was a red car in my drive way, I might say: “I don’t know, is there a red car in my drive way? Why should I believe you? Lets go find out!” Then we would go and look and see if its there. That’s a skeptical attitude: not taking peoples word for granted and finding out yourself.

The same process for verifying the existence of a red car is the same you would use to verify the existence of a UFO. A UFO is by definition an ‘Unidentified Flying Object’. If you had analyzed it with the same standards you did a red car, you would have an Identified that flying object. Boom. Its no longer a mystery.

Remote Viewing is not a UFO. We’ve put remote viewing in the lab, and verified that its real with the same methods we verify other phenomena. This psychologist admits this, and by that merit, its a scientifically verifiable reality. No longer “paranormal”- but demonstrably normal and repeatable. Meaning you don’t have to take his or anyone’s word on it.

Sadly, this psychologist is not immune to confirmation bias, logical fallacies, or propaganda (ironic, I know). He has a narrow view of materialism that doesn’t account for Psi, and wants to keep it that way. But at this point, his attitude is no longer scientific, its dogmatic. If you wanted to jest, perhaps you could say he has fundamentalist attitudes about reality that science can’t change his mind about.

Stalin’s Secret Psychic Research Programs

Several Scientists in pre-revolutionary Russia studied parapsychology. In 1922, a commission composed of psychologists, medical hypnotists, physiologists, and physicists worked on parapsychology at the Institute of Brain research in Petrograd. Work flourished in the 1930’s with major publications in the year 1934, 1936, and 1937. After 1937, experiments in parapsychology were publicly forbidden during Stalin’s time, and their the rationale behind this was that studies in parapsychology were an attempt to undermine communist-materialism. Privately, though, Stalin continued the government research of parapsychology- and with much success.

In April of 1960, Dr. L.L. Vasilev spoke on the nature of these experiments while addressing a group of top Soviet scientists:

“We carried out extensive and until now completely unreported investigations under the Stalin regime… Soviet scientists conducted great many successful telepathy tests over a quarter of a century ago. It’s urgent that we throw of our prejudices. We must again plunge into the exploration of this vital field.”

In 1960, L.L. Vasilev, head of the Department of Physiology of Leningrad University and a corresponding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR, was given funds to establish well-equipped laboratories at the university for the study of telepathy. In 1963 the Kremlin gave top priority to the study of parapsychology, establishing as many as twenty or more centers for the study of this phenomena, with a budget ranging from 12 million rubles (13 million dollars), and as reportedly has as 21 million dollars.

Visiting Soviet psi labs in 1967, Doctor Ryzl says that he was told by a Soviet, “When Suitable means of propaganda are cleverly used, it is possible to mold any man’s conscience so that in the end he may misuse his abilities while remaining convinced that he is serving an honest purpose.” Ryzl continues, “The USSR has the means to keep the results of such research secret from the rest of the world and, as practical applications of these results become possible, there is no doubt that the Soviet Union will do so.” What will ESP be used for? “To make money, and as a weapon,” Ryzl states flatly.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

More details about Dr. Vasilev, and Russian research into ESP can be found in the unclassified document “Controlled Offensive Behavior” and “Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain“.

Critics and Cholera

The following is an excerpt from the book “The Biology of Belief,” by Bruce H. Lipton, PhD.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Buried in exceptional cases are the roots of a more powerful understanding of the nature of life – “more powerful” because the principles behind these exceptions trump established “truths.” The fact is that harnessing the power of your mind can be more effective than the drugs you have been programmed to believe you need. The research I discussed in the last chapter found that energy is a more efficient means of affecting matter than chemicals.

Unfortunately, scientists most often deny rather than embrace exceptions. My favorite of example of scientific denial of the reality of mind-body interactions relates to an article that appeared in Science about nineteenth-century German physician, Robert Koch, who along with Pasteur founded the Germ Theory. The Germ Theory holds that bacteria and viruses are the primary cause of disease. A modified version of that theory is widely accepted now, but in Koch’s day it was more controversial. One of Koch’s critics was so convinced that Germ theory was wrong that he brazenly wolfed down a glass of water laced with vibrio cholera, the bacterium Koch believed caused cholera. To everyone’s astonishment, the man was completely unaffected by the virulent pathogen. The Science article published in 2000 describing the incident stated: “For unexplained reasons he remained symptom free, but nevertheless incorrect.”

The man survived and Science, reflecting the unanimity of opinion of Germ Theory, had the audacity to say his criticism was incorrect? If it is claimed that this bacterium is the cause of cholera, and the man demonstrates that he is unaffected by germs… how can he be “incorrect”?  Instead of trying to figure out how the man avoided the dreaded disease, scientists blithely dismiss this and other embarrassing “messy” exceptions that spoil their theories. Remember the “dogma” that genes control biology? Here is another example in which scientists, bent on establishing the validity of their truth, ignore pesky exceptions. The problem is that there cannot be exceptions to a theory; exceptions simply mean that the theory is not fully correct.

David Bohm: The Holographic Universe

David Bohm was one of the most well respected scientists of the 20th century. He attended at the California institute of technology and UC Berkely. His Doctorate advisor was Robert Oppenheimer. Bohm was also a protege of Einstein’s, working as his assistant at Princeton University. He was one of the forerunners and pioneers of quantum theory in the mid-twentieth century.

In the early 1940’s, the US government was using much of UC Berkely’s physics research in the Manhattan Project- which would produce the worlds first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer had invited Bohm to a top secret lab called Los Amos, which helped designed the bomb, but Bohm was denied security clearance on the grounds that he had communist ties. Despite this, much of his own research was used in the development of the first atomic bomb during the Manhattan project. After the government had used Bohm’s research, they barred him from the products of his own work because of his lack of security clearance.

Helping develop the first atomic bomb was not the only major mark in his career. Bohm had made several contributions to the field of physics and the developments of new physical theories about the universe. One of those theories was that the universe itself was a hologram- which he called “the implicate and explicate order”. The implicate order was a deeper form of reality that was outside time and space, or ‘before’ it.

The implicate order to Bohm, in layman’s terms, is all the basic rules of reality that actually exist on a single plain. All events that we know of are tied to this plain of reality, but we cannot perceive how because it is hidden- or implicit. 

Bohm believed that the most basic elements of matter in the implicate order were mental, or at least mind-like. That matter was not inert and unconscious but carried with it meaning, or teleology.

“Every action starts from an intention in the implicate order. The imagination is already the creation of the form, it already has the intention and the germs of all the movements needed to carry it out. And it affects the body and so on, so that as creation takes place in a way from subtler levels of the implicate order, it goes through them until it manifests in the explicate.” – David Bohm

The explicate order was the every day world we experience in time and space. The every day objects we see and interact with, and the events that happened. All the things we know are coming ‘out of’ the implicate order as a projection or a hologram. A hologram is a flat surface with information contained in it, that can project itself as a larger image. Some people have theorized that Bohm’s theory of the Implicate order is related to Jung’s theory of synchronicity.

Bohm theorized that the implicate and explicate order interacted with each other as a greater whole- that things that appeared separate in real life were actually connected at a deeper part of reality- in the implicate order. Bohm believed that things could be manifest in reality through the mind, via the brain, which to him was a holographic machine.

This connection physicists were learning about through quantum physics.  Physicists have recently published papers that seem to confirm parts of Bohm’s theory that the universe is a hologram.

If this is the case, it changes a lot for how we think of the world. Many people think of the world as composed of separate objects that have nothing to do with each other unless they collide with one another. Bohm’s theory of the universe posits that at some level, all things are interconnected and related to one another. Many people have posited that this theory of the universe has also serve as a framework for religion and spirituality.

Extra Reading

A Holographic View of Reality by David S. Walonick, Ph.D.

Interview with Bohm

The Holographic Universe by Technewsworld

Is the Universe a Hologram? by EurekAlert!

The Universe Might Be a Giant Hologram by Huffingtonpost

Dr. Michael Persinger on Psychic Phenomena

Michael Persinger is a researcher in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience with over 200 peer-reviewed publications in circulation. Much of his work has been subject to controversy and scrutiny, as well as praise.

Michael Persinger

During the span of his long career, Michael Persinger, an atheist, developed a controversial field of Neuroscience called ‘neuro-theology’. The main tool used behind this was an invention of his called the ‘God helmet’.Persinger believed that everything about human experience was source ultimately in the brain. That he could cause religious experiences in people using electromagnetic stimulation to the proper areas of the brain.

Needless to say, his work has been mixed with high praise and well as extreme criticism. Professor Richard Dawkins, who used the helmet, did not have any experience at all wearing ‘the God Helmet’. However, British research psychologist Susan Blackmore, said she had one of the most profound experiences in her life. One can find a critical dissection of Persingers “God Helmet” in the book “The Spiritual Brain” written by neuroscientist Mario Beauregaurd.

The greater theory behind his work is that the Earths magnetic fields play a role in peoples psychology and effect paranormal experiences- including everything from spiritual events to UFO sightings. He has claimed that there is some correlation between massive UFO sightings and mass hallucinations with the earth’s plate tectonics- which he called “Tectonic Strain Theory.” The idea behind it is that the earth’s crust near seismic faults creates creates massive electromagnetic fields that could interfere with peoples brainwaves create mass or individual hallucinations on the public at large.

Psychic Ingo Swann

More recently in the 2000’s Dr. Persinger (along with his colleagues) was involved in controlled remote viewing experiments with the famous psychic Ingo Swan -a man who was previously involved in psychic experiments with the US government. Persinger published several different papers claiming that he was able to connect Ingo Swan’s success rate to electro-magnetic activity in his brain, via an EEG.

Persinger developed a technology that he claimed was able to set the brain of even average people on the right frequency to get them to better communicate with others somewhere on earth. That they could see and feel what other individuals were experiencing. Persinger believes that the Earths Magnetic field is the medium that connects peoples minds together. He has studies that showed that success rates correlated tightly with whether or not there was any “noise interference” coming from the Earth’s magnetic field. In other words, test subjects had lower success rates when they during geo-magnetic storms, and test subjects had higher success rates when the earth’s magnetic field was quiet, or normal.

Persinger, who is himself a famous and world renowned skeptic, has suggested that science is due for a paradigm shift, and that until we change our fundamental ideas about what the universe is, there are going to be facts about existence that we are going to ignore because they don’t comply with our narrative. Much like the days of old, and our societies geocentric ideas about the world- we very well may be curtailing our findings to fit our worldview, and ignoring a lot of facts about reality.

“I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types.  They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.” – Persinger interviewed at Skeptico

Persinger believed that increased technological developments and discoveries regarding this phenomena has large implications for the entire world. “What would it mean for governments or administrations if they had no secrets?” He believes that taking a step in this direction of scientific knowledge would help create an Empathic World Civilization.

Quantum Physics in a Macro World

The following excerpts are from an article in the June 2011 Scientific American magazine, titled “Living In a Quantum World,” written by physicist and Oxford professor of physics, Vlatko Vedral. All emphasis is mine.

According to standard physics textbooks, Quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms, and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people, and planets. Somewhere between molecules and pears lies a boundary where the strangeness of quantum behavior ends and the familiarity of classical physics begins…

[T]his convenient partitioning of the world is a myth. Few modern physicists think that classical physics has equal status with quantum mechanics; it is but a useful approximation of a world that is quantum at all scales. Although quantum effects may be harder to see in the macroworld, the reason has nothing to do with size per se but with the way that quantum systems interact with one another. Until the past decade, experimentalists had not confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely do. These effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected. They may even operate in the cells of our body…

In the modern point of view, the world looks classical because the complex interactions that an object has with its surroundings conspire to conceal quantum effects from our view… Larger things tend to be more susceptible to decoherence than smaller ones, which justifies why physicists can usually get away with regarding quantum mechanics as a theory of the microworld…

[In the world of physics,] Entanglement binds together individual particles into an indivisible whole. A classical system is always divisible, at least in principle; whatever collective properties it has arises from components that themselves have certain properties. But entangled systems cannot be broken down this way. Entanglement has strange properties. Even when the entangled particles are far apart, they still behave as a single entity, leading to what Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.”

Most demonstrations of entanglement involve at most a handful of particles. Larger batches are harder to isolate from their surroundings. The particles in them are likelier to become entangled with stray particles, obscuring their original interconnections. In accordance with the language of decoherence, too much information leaks out into the environment, causing the system to behave classically….

   A neat experiment in 2003 proved that larger systems, too, can remain entangled when the leakage is reduced or somehow counteracted. Gabriel Aeppli of University College London and his colleagues took a piece of lithium fluoride salt and put it in an external magnetic field. You can think of the atoms in the salt as little spinning magnets that try to align themselves with the external field, a response known as magnetic susceptibility. Forces that the atoms exert on one another act as a kind of peer pressure to bring them into line more quickly . As the researchers varied the strength of the magnetic field, they measured how quickly the atoms became aligned. They found that they atoms responded much faster than the strength of their mutual interactions would suggest. Evidently some additional effect was helping the atoms to act in unison, and the researchers argued that entanglement was the culprit. If so, the 10²⁰ atoms of the salt form a hugely entangled state.

To avoid confounding the effects of the random motions associated with heat energy, Aeppli’s team did its experiments at extremely low temperatures- a few millikelvins. Since then, however, Alexandre Martins de Souza of the Brazilian Center for Physics research in Rio de Janeiro and his colleagues have discovered macroscopic entanglement in materials such as copper carboxylate at room temperature and higher. In these systems, the interaction among particles spins is strong enough to resist thermal chaos… Physicists have seen entanglement in systems of increasing size and temperature, from ions trapped by electromagnetic fields to ultra-cold atoms in lattices to superconducting quantum bits…

Other experiments scale up this basic idea, so that huge numbers of atoms become entangled and enter states that classical physics would deem impossible. And if solids can be entangled when they are large and warm, it takes only a small leap of imagination to ask whether the same might be true of a very special kind of large, warm system: life…

People have long wondered whether birds and other animals might have some built-in compass. In the 1970’s the husband wife team of Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko of the University of Frankfurt in Germany caught robins that had been migrating to Africa and put them in artificial magnetic fields. Oddly, the robins, they found, were oblivious to the reversal of the magnetic field direction, indicating that they could not tell north from south. The birds did, however, respond to the inclination of the earth’s magnetic field- that is, the angle that the field lines make with the surface. That is all they need to navigate. Interestingly, blindfolded robins did not respond to a magnetic field at all, indicating that they somehow sense the field with their eyes.

In 2000 Thorsten Ritz, a physicist then at the University of Southern Florida who has a passion for migratory birds, and his colleagues proposed that entanglement is the key. In their Scenario, which builds on the previous work of Klaus Schulten of the University of Illinois, a bird’s eye has a type of molecule in which two electrons form an entangled pair with zero total spin. Such a situation simply cannot be mimicked with classical physics. When this molecule absorbs visible light, the electrons get enough energy to separate and become susceptible to external influences, including the earths magnetic field. If the magnetic field is inclined, it affects the two electrons differently, creating an imbalance that changes the chemical reaction that the molecule undergoes. Chemical pathways in the eye translate this difference into neurological impulses, ultimately creating an image of the magnetic field in the bird’s brain…

Another biological process where entanglement may operate is photosynthesis, the process whereby plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. Incident light ejects electrons inside plant cells, and these electrons all need to find their way to the same place: the chemical reaction center where they can deposit their energy and set off the reactions that fuel plant cells. Classical physics fails to explain the near-perfect efficiency with which they do so…

The division between the quantum and classical worlds appears not to be fundamental. It is just a question of experimental ingenuity, and few physicists now think that classical physics will ever really make a comeback at any scale. If anything, the general belief is that if a deeper theory ever supersedes quantum physics, it will show the world to be even more counterintuitive that anything we have so far…

The Oracle at Delphi

The Oracle of Delphi was the most important shrine in all of Greece. The oracle, also known as the pythia, can be traced back all the way to 1400 bc. The temple the Oracle performed in was built around a sacred spring. The city of Delphi was considered by the Greeks to be the omphalos – the center (literally ‘the navel’) of the world.

People came from all over Greece and even from beyond to ask the oracle questions and receive answers from the Pythia, who was also known as the priestess of Apollo. Her answers could determine everything from when farmers should plant their crops, to when an empire should declare war.

The following is an excerpt about the Oracle of Delphi from Dean Radin’s book “Entangled Minds.”

“In 650 BC, on of the longest-lived business in history began. The Delphic oracle at the Temple of Apollo in Greece lasted for seven hundred years. The god Apollo was said to foretell the future through his priestess, the Pythia. She inhaled vapors rising up through the cracks of the Temple’s floor to induce an altered state of consciousness, and then responded to the questions of visitors while in a trance. An official interpreter inscribed her resulting moans and mumblings. It’s difficult to know how effective the Delphic oracles were in forecasting the future, as few written records remain.

Fortunately, Herodotus did carefully document one test case. He wrote that King Croesus of Lydia wished to consult an oracle, and he knew that most of the oracles of the day were fakes. So the king devised a test to find one with genuine skill. The Pythia of the Temple of Apollo was the only oracle who responded to his experiment with the correct answer. She said through her interpreters, in traditional hexameter verse:

I can count the sands, and I can measure the ocean;
I have ears for the silent, and know what the dumb man meaneth;
Lo! On my sense there striketh the smell of a shell-covered tortoise;
boiling now on a fire, with the flesh of a lamb, in a cauldron-
Brass is the vessel, and brass the cover above it

In fact, King Croesus had taken a tortoise and a lamb, cut them into pieces, and boiled them together in a brazen cauldron covered with a lid, also made of brass. On the basis of the Delphic oracle’s accuracy, Croesus consulted her about what would happen if his army invaded persia. She replied that if he did this, that is would “destroy a great empire.” Croesus assumed this meant his invasion would crush Persia. but unfortunately he didn’t verify that flattering interpretation.  As history shows, he did indeed destroy a great empire- except it was his own. When dealing with oracles, it’s a good idea to check your assumptions.”

 

Synchronicity and The Golden Scarab

Carl Jung was a famous Swiss Psychiatrist who worked in both psychotherapy and analytical psychology. He was a student of Freud’s who played a huge influence in a number of fields, including psychology, literature, archaeology and religious studies.

Probably most famous for his theory of the “Collective Unconscious.” Jung believed that all religions  were linked together, and that all spiritual experiences people had came from the same source, and that this could be traced across all cultures of people through their common religious beliefs and myths about the world- many of which who had no connection to eachother.

Another theory of Jung’s was the theory of Synchronicity. Jung worked on this theory with the famous theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli- who was a pioneer in the field of quantum physics, and was nominated for the Nobel prize by Albert Einstein.

The theory of Synchronicity has to do with events that appear to be of coincidence, but are tied together by meaning. Two or more events may happen and may have no causal connection with one another, but are none the less related.

Jung posited that Synchronicity was acausal by nature, or came before causality. He believed that forces in a persons unconscious (in the form of archetypes) could bring forth events enfolding in the real world; these events happened in a meaningful manner which defied causal explanation, but often gave way to extreme, life changing epiphanies in peoples lives.

 The following story is an excerpt out of C.G. Jung’s “Synchronicity: An Acausal connecting principle.”

“My example concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite of her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab-a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabeid beetle common of rose-chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now begin with satisfactory results.

This story is meant only as a paradigm of the innumerable cases of meaningful coincidence that have been observed  not only by me but by many others, and recorded in large collections. they include everything that goes by the name of clairvoyance, telepathy, etc., from Swedenborg’s well-attested vision of the great fire in Stockholm to the recent report by Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard about the dream of an unknown officer, which predicted the subsequent accident to Goddard’s plane.

All phenomena I have mentioned can be grouped under three categories

1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content (e.g., the scarab), where there is no evidence of causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.
2. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observer’s field of perception, i.e., at a distance, and only verifiable afterward (e.g., the Stockholm fire).
3. The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward.

According to Jung’s theory, there may be no coincidences, or at least many of the coincidences people experience are not coincidences at all. What many might see as a coincidence is actually a manifestation of a deeper psychic or spiritual level of reality that people are connected to. A reality that is a result of some type of karmic progress that shows in peoples lives.