Some Speculations About Psychophysics
Jim Fournier
November 11, 1996
Towards A New World View
PAR 649
Instructor: Richard Tarnas
PCC Faculty et al.
Time, Matter and Consciousness
The most fundamental question underlying any formulation of a new world
view would seem to me to be the relationship between matter and consciousness.
The deepest questions about this relationship also involve an element of
time, often expressed through synchronicity phenomena such as those alluded
to by Caroline Casey, both in the context of astrology and in other realms
of experience as well. Under the prevailing scientific model it has been
tacitly assumed that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of matter, and thus
that matter may inform consciousness, but consciousness may not directly
affect matter, except through the intervention of our bodies. The question
of how our 'own' consciousness may directly affect our 'own' bodies is rarely
addressed, but this interaction is assumed to be consistent with the accepted
model since both reside within the bounds of the same skin encapsulated
ego - discrete in space and time. In my analysis many (but not all) of
the reports of experiences and data which challenge the prevailing reductionist
paradigm have one common denominator. They suggest that the relationship
between consciousness and matter may be, at least to some degree, a two
way street. Just as in the hard sciences, where we speak about strong and
weak forces, the effect of 'individual' consciousness on matter may be much
more subtle and difficult to detect than the effect of matter on individual
consciousness. But just because a force is subtle does not mean that it
is weak. Gravity and electromagnetism appear to trade influences as one
changes scale, so too as we go from the effect of one individual unit, or
quanta, of consciousness on matter to the effect of collectively held belief
on matter, it may be that at the very large scale what we collectively
believe is, to a large degree, creating our reality. Implicit even in this
idea is the element of time. To say that we do something collectively in
consciousness at any scale implies non-locality in space. Yet the very
idea of non-locality in space is based, by definition, on an implicit assumption
of simultaneity in time. In quantum physics, two things that happen 'at
the same time' without any direct connection are said to be non-locally
'correlated'.
Medicine, Matter and Consciousness
The connection between matter and consciousness may be most apparent in
our own bodies and therefore in medicine. Speaking about her people's traditional
medicine and beliefs Pamela Colorado said repeatedly, "This is not
just what we believe, its real. People say, Oh it just works because its
what you believe, but its not that way at all, its what we believe because
its real." It seemed to me that she was taking the wrong side of the
right argument. The point is not that her people's beliefs are any less
real because they are what they believe, but rather that all reality, including
that of the modern developed world, is in some sense causally created by
our collective belief. This phenomenon seems to be particularly true in
medicine. The more I look at all of the disparate and apparently contradictory
systems of healing based on different systems of belief, the more it seems
likely that, at least in this realm, what is real is not absolute, but rather
a construct of collective belief. Such absolute relativism would seem to
be a maddening anathema to the hard sciences, and it does seem that such
conundrums are most acute in the realm of medicine where the mind and body
are most subtly and intimately intertwined. Even in 'conventional' Western
medicine it has long been accepted that what one individually believes is
so powerful that the placebo effect works about thirty three percent of
the time, so in an effort to isolate efficacious physical compounds researchers
must go to great lengths to screen this phenomenon out of their experiments.
But, if this effect is so powerful that it crops up when we are trying
to avoid it, what would happen if we instead consciously cultivated it?
This seems to be exactly the path that many indigenous and shamanic peoples
have pursued with great success.
Shamanic cultures seem to have also fully embraced a deeper dimension of
healing through consciousness which we have only recently began to re-explore
in the West; the power of prayer or invocation of the Divine in healing.
There has been some use of this in the past in various Christian traditions
but the radically different approach in shamanic cultures centers on the
use of entheogenic plants. Use of these plants brings the healer into a
state of consciousness which allows them access to deeper planes of knowing
where they report working with spirits, spirit guides or other discarnate
entities to heal people, gain knowledge, or even to find lost objects.
Sometimes the person being healed may take the medicine as well, but often
they don't and it is just the shamans who change their own state of consciousness
in order to heal the patient. This turns modern Western concepts of medicine,
matter and consciousness on their head. Dr. Larry Dossey has documented
what may be a parallel phenomenon examining a large number of Western double
blind experiments involving patients being prayed for by others. These
experiments, which often involved people who the patients did not know,
praying for them from remote places, have demonstrated the highly statistically
significant efficacy of such approaches. These findings raise serious challenges
to prevailing 'scientific' assumptions about the relationship between matter
and consciousness.
These phenomena also lead to serious questions about the nature of the
quantization of consciousness. If one person can influence another's body
without any physical contact, or even overt communication. Where does one
person's consciousness end and the next begin? Where exactly is the boundary?
If we are all in some sense tuning in to mind, are we tuning into each
others minds, or into one larger Mind of which we are all merely part?
If there is one Mind, does it exist prior to us and separate from us, or
is it possible that we are collectively creating it? Or are we 'IT' co-creating
itself? I still have no definitive answers to these questions, but more
and more they seem to me false distinctions, artifacts of the impoverishment
of our perspective. Until recently it has been assumed in the West, somewhat
smugly, that the answers to these questions were obvious and that we, unlike
other superstitious people, knew the truth about such questions. But what
does the most exalted of the Western hard sciences, quantum physics, actually
have to say about such questions?
Quantum Physics and Consciousness
There are only a handful of interpretations of quantum mechanics which
attempt to integrate consciousness. Perhaps the most obvious is an idealist
interpretation such as Amit Groswami's. The idealist simply makes consciousness
prior to matter i.e. consciousness creates matter, not vice versa. This
approach is appealing in its simplicity, and is extremely ancient. When
one goes deeply into experiences in non-ordinary states, such an insight
seems to scream for supremacy. However, the problem becomes not one of
understanding how consciousness could create reality, but rather, if consciousness
is creating reality, how does it constrain itself, how does it construct
the rules of matter within itself? One could simply postulate mathematics
as an idea in the mind of God, but this may not be the most convincing explanation
of the specific details of the complex mathematical formalism we find in
quantum theory.
Another physicist and philosopher who attempted to integrate consciousness
and physics was Arthur Young, inventor of the helicopter. Arthur Young
principally focused on process in time, and on light. He associated light
with consciousness and pointed out that from light's perspective there is
no time and no distance, because at the speed of light time stops, and it
thus takes no time for light to go anywhere. Arthur also noticed that
one may trade dimensionality for degrees of freedom. This is to say that
an object existing in a three dimensional space has one more degree of freedom
than an object existing in a four dimensional space, and so on. A 'degree
of freedom' is a mathematically specific term which defines the number of
ways an object may be rotated, reflected or transposed. It is related to
an object's number of axes of symmetry. Topologists studying the question
have apparently come to the conclusion that the maximum balance between
symmetry and freedom may be expected in a range between three and four dimensions.
This may have interesting implications for New Age channels who insist
that we are evolving into higher dimensional beings. We might be, but we
would quite literally have less freedom there. The reason for the frequently
channeled claim that higher dimensions would be desirable may be the accurate
insight that what seems totally disconnected at one level of dimensional
understanding may be recognized as part of a coherent structure at the next.
The classic example of this is the Flat Land thought experiment wherein
we postulate a being living in two dimensional space, and then examine their
understanding, or rather lack of understanding, of three dimensional structures
they might encounter. It is tempting to extrapolate that if we were in
fact living in a three dimensional section through a four (or higher) dimensional
manifold, much of what seemed miraculous to us, like synchronicity experiences
for instance, might be easily explained in terms of the deeper geometric
structure of reality. There may already be geometric evidence suggesting
the existence of a phenomenon like this in nature. Biologists have found
Penrose tiling patterns expressed in organisms. The occurrence of these
mathematically complex tiling patterns (tortoise shell patterns) were thought
to be impossible to explain in natural systems, but they may be easily explained
if one assumes that they are the physical residue in matter of a pattern
in a higher dimension which is expressed through the growth of biological
organisms.
When we talk about dimensionality, we are in the habit of talking about
three dimensions, or three space dimensions plus time, or when we remember
Einstein, a four dimensional space-time continuum. However, another little
known physicist and friend of Arthur Young's named Stan Tenen has pointed
out that we really mean three and a half dimensions, as we assume that time
is uni-directional and therefore really only half a dimension. For time
to represent a full dimension it should have both a positive and negative
sign, or direction, possible along its length. He further points out what
you might say to someone in Flat Land to cause them to have a 'spiritual'
revelation. "Hey look up, there's more out here." But what would
'up' mean? To someone in Flat Land it would mean attempting to peer into
a hyperdimensional shift. And the voice calling them to do so would seem
miraculous, outside of "reality" as they experienced it. So,
where would 'up' be for us? Again it would be in the 'direction' of the
hyperdimensional shift beyond the dimensionality we normally experience.
But, if we really only live in three and a half dimensions we don't even
have to stretch a whole spatial dimension higher, just half a dimension
- in time. All we would have to do would be to meet time coming backwards
toward us. And if we did, if we looked forward in time it would seem miraculous,
outside of our reality, like the intervention of God. Most miracles and
synchronicity experiences might be seen as expressions of some strange cross
connectedness in time, some behavior of events or experiences in time which
do not conform to our expectations of reality.
This brings us to another relevant interpretation of quantum mechanics,
most recently put forward by John Cramer, which is essentially a mathematically
elegant exposition of the Feynman diagrams. Richard Feynman was perhaps
the world's greatest physicist living in the late 20th Century. Not only
was he a great theorist, but he had a brilliant knack for understanding
and explaining complex phenomena in simple terms. He was the guy who tossed
the space shuttle
O-rings in ice water while everybody else was arguing at the blackboard
after the Challenger crash. Feynman was largely responsible for the theory
of quantum electrodynamics, and he invented simple little diagrams which
reduced his entire theory of light and matter to simple pictures which concisely
depict the interactions of subatomic particles arising, interacting and
annihilating each other. These diagrams are intuitively extremely satisfying,
except for one problem, they require some of the lines to represent particles
moving backward in time. What Cramer did was to re-examine the Schrodinger
equation, the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics, in a new way.
The way Schrodinger equation is normally interpreted, half of it, which
is mathematically well behaved, is treated as physically meaningful, while
the other half is simply discarded as non-sense. What Cramer found is that
if the term which is usually discarded is instead interpreted as describing
a virtual particle moving backward in time, then the whole system may be
understood coherently. But what do we make of a particle, even a virtual
one, moving backward in time?
Synchronicity as Hyperdimensional Inverse Time
According to my interpretation of the model of dimensionality advocated
by Arthur Young and elaborated by Stan Tenen, the place where we would expect
to find ingression of what seemed miraculous or divine manifestations would
be at the junction with the next dimension, at a hyperdimensional interface.
This would seem to describe many people's experience under the influence
of entheogenic plant substances, but it might also describe synchronicity
experiences and 'miracles' once these events were understood as collisions
between our reality moving forward in time, and a one half dimension higher
aspect of reality moving backward in time. As consciousness began to shift
into awareness of this slightly higher dimensional reality the nature of
time itself would shift subtly, and the cross connected relationship between
what had previously been regarded as disparate events would begin to be
taken for granted. Synchronicity would become a commonplace and universally
accepted attribute of a more coherently connected reality.
I don't know if this is exactly synonymous with David Bohm's theory of
implicate order, but if not, it must be a closely parallel idea. In Bohm's
theory of implicate order another plane of connectedness is postulated to
account for the meaningful connections we experience. Bohm's theory is
actually one of several attempts to interpret quantum mechanics in a manner
which addresses consciousness and the evidence of our own experience. Will
Keepin referred to Bohm's theory of implicate order in the context of astrology
as a way of illustrating the underlying the connections between meaning
and matter implicit in astrology. The question of time itself also brings
us back to astrology. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the prevailing
world view is astrology. Because astrology not only raises questions of
consciousness and matter which we have been exploring, but also the even
deeper question of the relationship between consciousness, meaning, matter
and time. One of the great problems of astrology is its apparent determinism
in time. How can it be that one can look forward in time? One can't predict
the future. It hasn't happened yet. And yet, astrology suggests that some
deep meta-pattern exists prior to or beyond time, or manife