The Serpent's Wisdom

Last week, the British Association for the Advancement of Science opened the floor to Rupert Sheldrake, a controversial researcher who two decades ago proposed the theory of morphic fields (essentially an entirely new scientific paradigm). Recently he's been investigating "the sense of being stared at" and other odd "coincidences."

In front of this prestigious gathering, Sheldrake presented evidence on the phenomenon of thinking about someone, and then getting a call from that person:

Over the past few years, with the help of my research associate, Pam Smart, I have investigated telephone telepathy experimentally in hundreds of controlled trials. Volunteers were asked to give us the names and telephone numbers of four people they knew well. During the test session, the subject was videotaped continuously sitting by a landline telephone. We selected one of the callers at random by the throw of a die. We then asked that person to call the subject. When the telephone rang, the participant guessed who was calling before lifting the receiver. The guess was either right or wrong.

By chance, participants would have been right about one time in four. In fact, 45 per cent of the guesses were correct. This research has been replicated at the University of Amsterdam, again with positive results.

from Gosh, I was just thinking about you

This is not the first time scientists have attempted to explore meaningful coincidence. Carl Jung worked with physicist Wolfgang Pauli to design ways to test Jung's notion of 'synchronicity,' an "acausal connective principle."

This is not, though, a topic which researchers will ever make much inroads into by way of the scientific method, because meaning is not inherently repeatable from one researcher to the next.

Meaning cannot be quantified, and, more than that, meaning cannot be commodified. We have a culture industry which produces entertainment product, and a religion industry which produces a mass-marketable form of religion. Like bread made from "enriched bleached flour," this is bland consumable stuff which is as devoid of meaning as it is possible -- because meaning is threatening to the status quo. The formulaic entertainment and doctrine favored by the seekers of profit is almost utterly devoid of nuance. In the commodified version of the world there are 'good guys' who wear white hats and 'bad guys' with facial scars who sneer, and at the end the good guy defeats the bad guy and the world is saved.

A world without "good guys vs. bad guys" is not too difficult to imagine, because all we have to do is think about the conflicts we see in our own lives. In some cases, you have people who are clearly wrong; but in most cases, each person involved with a conflict is right in some ways and wrong in others. And our habit of looking for a side to take means that someone's rightness gets trampled on in the process.

So long as this is the accepted way of handling disputes there can be no justice.

Science is a microcosm of the pattern in our society whereby the difficult voices are marginalized for the "better good." And in the shadow of science's great successes -- feats of engineering which have proven very profitable -- lie questions about meaning which have been cast aside.

Seekers of profit encourage a kind of myopia regarding the connections between things. They want us to focus on the details instead of looking at the big picture, at the ways in which all aspects of human society are interconnected. These are meaningful; they are not profitable. It is no mistake that scientific advance has led to the march of global warming and the nuclear arms race. Science has not been merely a hapless tool of dictators; it has been poisoned by profit, and is thereby a willing participant in the quest to drive meaning out of human discourse.

ETA: Lest this itself be an "us vs. them" i will add a reminder that as an employee in a capitalist society i am one of the "seekers of profit" and so any awareness i have of this "meaning myopia" occurs in spite of my life and my culture, and even my own tendencies to want to see things without nuance, to seek the easy solution to every dilemma. Evidence that i do not always succeed can be readily found in my journal.

For a while now i've been toying around from time to time with the idea that mind is a field. Under this view, mind is given the respect it is due as a phenomenon in its own right, but without a metaphysical dualism of the sort with which mind/body theories typically wrestle.

Some implications of this are interesting. Fields have properties like resonance, and theoretically extend over the whole universe. Noön particles would be quantum-interlinked just like other particles. So our individual minds, thoughts, feelings, are not as isolatedly individual as we seem to experience them. While noöns may be concentrated inside living brains, they wouldn't be found only there.

If noöns exist, why haven't we seen them? I think they possess a rather unique place in nature, in that they serve as an explication factor which draws spacetime reality into being from the melange of the holomovement. Trying to observe one directly would be difficult for the same reason it is hard to pinpoint the exact nature of first-person experience. Noöns are, in my hypothesis, what acts on quantum fields to produce what we perceive as the "quantum wave collapse." In other words, what defines "reality" as distinct from the fullness of existence is the influence of a noönic field. So to look at a noön would be analogous to looking at a mirror; you don't see an image, but only a reflection of what is around. Seeing anything at all *is* the process of seeing a noön.

(It sounds like i am proposing a duality here between explicated and otherwise, but i do not imagine a universe where explicit matter is free from influence by that which remains enfolded. If you said this sounds like a hidden-variable-invoking Bohmian interpretation, you'd be right. Heck, noöns themselves are a hidden variable.)

There is a lot that might be explained by the supposition that each mind extends over all of spacetime. It might partly explain, for example, instant attraction or repulsion. Have you ever met someone and felt like you recognized them immediately? Perhaps there is a strong resonance between your noönic fields. If however you meet someone whose noönic field is dissonant with your own, you might be inclined to dislike them, and you'd likely be right: that person would think and act in ways very different from you.

Many different aspects of collective human behavior might be explained this way, from mob consciousness to the intuitive appeal of ideas like Jung's collective unconscious, or Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere as the endpoint of human evolution.

It also allows for the possibility of noönic solitons or persistences. I could write a whole entry on what that means, persistent noönic waves floating around free of brains to shape them, affecting thought, feeling, and perhaps even matter. Some memes might be noönic solitons -- as might memories or experiences some people attribute to "reincarnation." Perhaps instincts and patterns of human behavior i referred to recently as "human nature" are noönic solitons as well.

There are interesting implications regarding will and causation, too. Jeffrey Schwartz proposed a notion he called "mental force" to explain the observable change in brain structure which can result from focused meditation. That the brain is capable of self-reprogramming is fascinating and opens a wide range of potential for human improvement. But this result also gives us hard evidence that consciousness is something real. (Contrast the views of Daniel Dennett and other eliminative-materialists who claim that consciousness and self are pure memetic illusion, on the basis of the observation that there is no place within the brain where consciousness resides.)

I've come to think that being abusive, hateful, and intolerant is evidence of having a weak will in the face of external influence. A person who displays these traits is less of an individuated person; they are blown about and easily carried along by external currents. In my opinion, the work of individuation, of learning to focus one's will by way of discipline (meditation, contemplative prayer, martial arts, esoterica, and other kinds of discipline) is inseparable from the work of cultivating a better human society.

Bohm's theory about the nature of reality is difficult to properly summarize, because it requires a revolution in one's way of thinking about "things."

It is perhaps easiest to start with the analogy of two rotating glass cylinders, and viscous glycerin between them. This is taken from an introductory essay, David Bohm and the Implicate Order:

( the analogy of the cylinders and glycerin )

Bohm also compares the implicate state to the storage of information on a hologram. Taken from the same essay:

( the analogy of the hologram )

To get an idea of the way Bohm saw the relationship between the implicate or enfolded mode of existence, and the explicate or unfolded mode, he utilized again the analogy of the cylinders and glycerin:

( the analogy of the apparently-moving dye droplet )

As for the 'grey background' of "the vacuum of space," Bohm asserts that it is not a vacuum at all, but a vast, whole, enfolded, interconnected field of quantum potential -- akin to the plenum or pregnant potential-wholeness of ancient philosophy. (Compare to the pleroma of Gnostic cosmology.)

Just how pregnant is the plenum? Recall that a quantum particle can also be thought of as a wave-front which stretches out, however thinly, to the entire universe.

( the fullness of potential within the plenum )

To account for the paradox of non-connectedness first observed by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, Bohm suggests (following Bohr) that quantum particles are truly indivisible, and that what appears to our senses as "two separate particles" remains an interconnected whole within the implicate order. Bohm offers another analogy:

( the analogy of the cameras pointed at the fish tank )

See also:
http://www.qedcorp.com/pcr/pcr/bohm/bohm1.html
http://www.fdavidpeat.com/ideas/implicate.htm
http://www.justpacific.com/bits'n'pieces/bohm~implicateorder.html

Theological notes. I have commented in previous entries that the divine presence feels to me like potential. That seems to be compatible with the Implicate Order and Quantum Potential as described by Bohm.

I have also, following the example of Valentinus and Eckhart, described the divine as residing in a realm of perfect stillness, or comparable in essence to stillness. That does not seem to be incompatible with the Implicate Order, though demonstrating compatability would require some effort.

Some connection with the idea of the Tao seems to be implied as well.

F. David Peat noted that Rupert Sheldrake compared Bohm's conception of the Implicate Order to Platonism. Will have to follow that line of thought to see where it goes.