Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Bernardo Kastrup

Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. 
As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on 'Scientific American,' the 'Institute of Art and Ideas,' the 'Blog of the American Philosophical Association' and 'Big Think,' among others.

His blog   His book     Author    



 










https://www.nature.com/articles/nature05677?error=cookies_not_supported&code=53d72e55-1a55-4093-a691-ba9d490be413

https://sites.berry.edu/ttimberlake/wp-content/uploads/sites/37/2015/08/WIQuantum.pdf







Richard Conn Henry

https://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf

https://thepulse.one/2021/08/02/our-world-is-spiritual-mental-immaterial-says-renowned-physicist/

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kpDwWetu66fBRlPM7zjA5BpHzcu5wBY7AdB7gOz51OQ/edit?pli=1#!

Kabbalistic panpsychism: The enigma of consciousness in Jewish mystical ...

Friday, January 14, 2022

Donald Hoffman

Donald Hoffman, Ph.D.Cognitive Scientist and Author, Department of Cognitive Sciences, U.C. Irvine
Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist and author of more than 90 scientific papers and three books, including Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (W.W. Norton, 2000). He received his BA from UCLA in Quantitative Psychology and his Ph.D. from MIT in Computational Psychology. He joined the faculty of UC Irvine in 1983, where he is now a full professor in the departments of cognitive science, computer science and philosophy. He received a Distinguished Scientific Award of the American Psychological Association for early career research into visual perception, and the Troland Research Award of the US National Academy of Sciences for his research on the relationship of consciousness and the physical world.


This is from 2014 

Physicists have told us from Rutherford in 1916 or so that physical things are mostly empty space. What Hoffman is saying goes far beyond this. He says that this is a mistake - tyhe same mistake as the following, if you imagine little computer screen creatures saying, we know computer screen objects aren't real, becuase we can see the pixels and the space between the pixels, which are real. But the only computer screen reality is all the electronic workings of hte computer which they still can't see. Hoffman is pointing out that we are just doing the same as the computer screen people when we point to atoms and other particles as being a deeper reality. They aren't, they are still all part of our species-specific user interface. 

Camera theory of perception - not true. 
It feels like you're seeing what is already there, but in fact what you're doing is constructing a reality within about 100mS. 

We are constructing in response to other conscious agents. 

Vision is a process of construction. 
He criticises the standard view of evolution, whereby we evolve to see the truth. Our perceptions don't match reality. We evolve not to see the truth. 

Stephen Pinker "Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness.

examples - The Jewel beetle in Australia. 
Poor design of human eye compared to octopus. 

Evolutionary Game Theory - Implications from Evolution
Truth goes extinct. Just tuned to fitness. Truth seeing organisms don't even get a stage to come on stage before they go extinct. 
Fitness is distinct from truth

Hoffman argues that natural selection is necessarily directed toward fitness payoffs and that organisms develop internal models of reality that increase these fitness payoffs. This means that organisms develop a perception of the world that is directed towards fitness, and not of reality (or truth). This led him to argue that evolution has developed sensory systems in organisms that have high fitness but don't offer a correct perception of reality.


Compare computer desktop to our reality. Our spatial reality is to help us get things done - it's to hide the truth so things are simple enough for us to make decisions. Later he uses GTA as an analogy.

Each species has its own interface. ( this causes me a level of confusion. Why are we able to see other species adapting their icon as they appear to other species when it makes no difference to us? - because something is changing in the root reality that we can perceive. But why?). 

Neurons can not cause consciousness because they are a species specific symbol. There is no causation. Neural activity causes nothing. 


His 2015 TED Talk, "Do we see reality as it is?" explains how our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us.[3]

Hoffman notes that the commonly held view that brain activity causes conscious experience has, so far, proved to be intractable in terms of scientific explanation. Hoffman proposes a solution to the hard problem of consciousness by adopting the converse view that consciousness causes brain activity and, in fact, creates all objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, Hoffman has developed and combined two theories: the "multimodal user interface" (MUI) theory of perception and "conscious realism".

"very simple formalism" 

Turing - launched the theory of computation - a little machine with finite set of states, finite set of symbols, simple transition rules, and any computation can be done with a Turing machine. 

We need a consciousness equivalent of this. 

Conscious Agent

experience -> actions -> world -> experiences 

this can be translated into mathematics. 





The world consists of conscious agents. The real reality is just consciousness. Our reality is a desktop interface. 

Replacing the W with another conscious agent: 




you can have any number of CAs. 


Two conscious agents interacting satisfy the definition of one conscious agent. 

Given any pseudograph of conscious agents (CAs), any subset of CAs can be combined to form a new CA. 

Conscious Agent Networks (CANs) have the power of Universal Turing Machines. 

We have lots of models of unconscious processing - all of these can be re-expressed as networks of conscious processing. 

Consciousness itself can be modelled. 

Hoffman assumes consciousness is fundamental and assumes that all of physics can emerge from that - and it does. 

"The states of the (2) agents become entangled over the long term." 

its the same equation as the wave function of a free particle. 



He's written a paper on this

Chris Field - ? collaborator. 


all of space-time emerges from models of consciousness. Maybe even gravity waves - ? 

Multimodal user interface (MUI) theory[edit]

MUI theory[4] states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Hoffman argues that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes "fitness payoffs". Hoffman uses the metaphor of a computer desktop and icons - the icons of a computer desktop provide a functional interface so that the user does not have to deal with the underlying programming and electronics in order to use the computer efficiently. Similarly, objects that we perceive in time and space are metaphorical icons that act as our interface to the world and enable us to function as efficiently as possible without having to deal with the overwhelming amount of data underlying reality.[5] This theory implies Epiphysicalism, i.e., physical objects, such as quarks and brains and stars are constructed by conscious agents but such physical objects have no causal power.[4] While Panpsychism claims that Rocks, mountains, the moon, etc. are conscious, "Conscious Realism" in this theory (Multimodal user interface theory) does not. Instead, what it claims is all such objects are icons within the user interface of a conscious agent, but that does not entail the claim that the objects themselves are conscious.[4]

The interface theory of perception[edit]

The interface theory of perception is the idea that our perceptual experiences don't necessarily map onto what exists in the reality of itself. This is in contrast to the popular view of critical realism which argues that some of our perceptual experiences map onto the reality of the natural world. In the critical realist's view, primary qualities like height and weight represent actual qualities of reality, whereas secondary qualities don't. Within the interface theory of perception, neither primary nor secondary qualities necessarily map onto reality.[6]

Perception of the physical world is a byproduct of consciousness[edit]

Together, MUI theory and Conscious Realism form the foundation for an overall theory that the physical world is not objective but is an epiphenomenon (secondary phenomenon) caused by consciousness. Hoffman has said that some form of reality may exist, but maybe completely different from the reality our brains model and perceive.[8] Reality may not be made of space-time and physical objects.[3] Through supposing that consciousness is fundamental, Hoffman provides a possible solution to the hard problem of consciousness, which wrestles with the notion of why we seem to have conscious immediate experiences, and how sentient beings could arise from seemingly non-sentient matter. Hoffman argues that consciousness is more fundamental than the objects and patterns perceived by consciousness.[9][better source needed] We have conscious experiences because consciousness is posited as a fundamental aspect of reality. The problem of how sentient beings arise from seemingly non-sentient matter is also addressed because it alters the notion of non-sentient matter. Perceptions of non-sentient matter are mere byproducts of consciousness and don't necessarily reflect reality. This means the causal notion of non-sentient matter developing into sentient beings is up to question.



Deepak Chopra and Donald Hoffman: Reality is Eye Candy in 2018


conscious world behind the interface that we can't see - look into a mirror to see a demonstration of this. 
we have a dumbed down reality/ interface because we can't deal with the complexity. 
then we assume that the limits of our interface are really an insight into objective reality. 
Eg, we look at a rock and we assume there's nothing alive (or a an ant and assume there's no internal subjective experience in or of the ant). 
Hoffman says the rock (or ant) is a dumbed down consciousness. My interface has given up. 
He's not saying rocks are conscious - but an experience of a conscious agent that our model is too dumbed down to see as alive or conscious. 
Different species may well have very different conscious experiences. 
conscious experiences can leak from species to species - because our interfaces consist of symbols. So - leakage/ overlaps/ cross overs exist. 

Beyond Us: Competition with Donald Hoffman | Bernardo Kastrup & Fred Matser


Paul Levy, Sarah Jones, Anthony Peake


Join Anthony Peake and Sarah Janes in a fascinating discussion with American author  Paul Levy.

Levy is a recognised pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence. Among his books are The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality (SelectBooks, May 2018) and Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013). 

He is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over 35 years. He was the coordinator for the Portland Padmasambhava Buddhist Center for over twenty years. 

He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon.

Wetiko - disease of the mind, virus of the soul, a quantum phenomena, the medicine for Wetiko is encoded within it, has no objective existence, a native American word (?), inner disease of the psyche that can express itself out in the "real" world. 

When you see the dream like nature of our live then you begin to see into Wetiko. 

Fear, loneliness, etc. is the soil out of which Wetiko grows. 

Wetiko distracts us into thinking the solution is outside of ourselves. 

We're having a collective dream. Quantum physics - the greatest scientific discovery ever, there is no doubt about this, however, much disagreement about what it means. 

Egregorial reality - our act of observation is collapsing the wave function - co-creating the reality around us by collapsing the wave function. The work of Anton Zeilinger- large molecules, 40% the size of viruses, that are showing wave/particle duality - 60 separate atoms inside a Bucky ball - he's brought statistical wave function into point reality.
"if we collectively anticipate that something is going to happen it seems to manifest.." Feedback mechanism.  
Manichaeism, Gnosticism, the hymn of the pearl, mystery initiations, remembering your divine beginnings, the under-world was the realm of future secrets, ancient Egypt - you could travel through it in dreams and see the future, Shamanism, Shamanic trip, Shamans - wounded healer, initiation is going through the wound. We're all being called. 
There is no separation of things, nothing exists in and of itself. 

Matter is bottled light. 



Richard Martini

 Best selling author (kindle) “Flipside” “Its a Wonderful Afterlife” “Hacking the Afterlife” “Backstage Pass to the Flipside” writer/director of 8 feature films.

Richard Martini is a best selling author and an award winning writer/director. His 8 books about the afterlife have all been #1 in their genre on Kindle. (“Flipside” “It’s a Wonderful Afterlife” Part One and Two, “Hacking the Afterlife” “Architecture of the Afterlife” “Backstage Pass to the Flipside” 1, 2 and 3. He's written and/or directed eight theatrical features ("Limit Up," "Cannes Man" "You Can't Hurry Love")  curated historical content for “Salt” (Angelina Jolie) "Amelia" (Hilary Swank) was “Associate to Phillip Noyce” on “Salt.”  His documentaries include “Journey into Tibet with Robert Thurman”, “Talking to Bill Paxton” (Gaia) and “Flipside” Amazon Prime.  “Sister Cities – Chicago/Casablanca” was made for the U.S. State Dept. His latest book is TUNING INTO THE AFTERLIFE: his most recent documentary is HACKING THE AFTERLIFE 

His documentary about the afterlife under hypnosis ("Flipside") was also a best seller (#1 in its kindle genre); his 8 books on the topic have all hit #1 in their genres. He’s had 10 appearances on “Coast to Coast with George Noory” and seven on the “Beyond Belief with George Noory” on Gaia. This first appearance was the 2nd highest rated show on the network. His three books with medium Jennifer Shaffer (“Backstage Pass to the Flipside”) have all been to #1 in their genre after his Coast to Coast appearances.


http://richmartini.com/

Hacking the Afterlife Pocasts

On Coast to coast



Anthony Peake

 

Anthony Peake examines the theory that we all have not one but two separate consciousness’s – our every day mind and that of The Daemon, a separate ‘self’ if you will, or a higher consciousness that guides us, and occasionally breaks through into our day-to-day existence. An all-knowing passenger.

The concept of The Daemon goes back to the ancient Greeks, and Philip Pullman put another slant on it in His Dark Materials, but the idea of the silent partner guiding us has surfaced in accounts of odd experiences by many people across the centuries. Peake quotes Byron, Cocteau, Goethe and particularly Philip K Dick among several others as he presents his case.

Joan of Arc – a case study.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Geschwind & https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/stephen_waxman/

temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE)


https://www.anthonypeake.com/4499-2/

https://www.anthonypeake.com/

DuckDuckGo video search 

Haisch, Bernard

 https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bernard_Haisch

Wikipedia says: Even though Haisch is a scientist and has used evidence from quantum mechanics, Big Bang, Newton's laws, inflation theory, superstrings and many other scientific paradigms in an attempt to help explain his God theory he has also used some dubious and pseudoscientific material in his books such as advocating reincarnation and aliens.

Christians and other religious reviewers have criticised the book as they claim Haisch's theory is incompatible with monotheistic religion. Others have described his "God theory" as a book for the average person dissatisfied with organized religion but also wanting something more beyond science.[8] His book has become popular amongst New agers and spiritual philosophers.[9][10] His book The Purpose-Guided Universe has also received some mixed to negative reviews by scientists as Haisch proposed that quantum theory, general relativity and natural selection were all created by the mind of God yet most scientists disagree with this view.

A list of Eminent People Interested in Psi

 https://galileocommission.org/a-list-of-eminent-people-interested-in-psi/

Henri Bergson (1859-1941), philosopher, 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, president of the Society for Psychical Research and theoretician of psi.

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910), 1903 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote an article about a person said to be psychic.

Pearl S Buck (1892-1973), 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature, visited JB Rhine’s parapsychology meetings.

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947), 1931 Nobel Prize in Peace, President of Columbia University, philosopher and diplomat, wrote about psi32 and helped organize the American Society for Psychical Research.

Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, discussed anomalous healing in a book.

Arthur Holly Compton (1892-1962), 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics, was supportive of psi in his correspondence with JB Rhine.

Marie Curie (1867-1934), 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, participated in séances with Eusapia Palladino and wrote of the importance of research in parapsychology.

Pierre Curie (1859-1906), 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, participated in séances with Eusapia Palladino and wrote of the importance of research in parapsychology.

John Eccles (1903-1997), 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, edited a book discussing psi and participated in related conferences.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, wrote the preface to a telepathy book38 and commented, ‘We have no right to rule out a priori the possibility of telepathy. For that the foundations of our science are too uncertain and incomplete.’

Brian Josephson (1940-), 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, has written about psi and been a staunch advocate of psi research for decades.

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), 1911 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote on ostensible psi phenomena.

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature, attended and reported on séances.

Kary Banks Mullis (1944-), 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has participated in psi research and spoken in support of it.

Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics, discussed with Carl Jung the notion of synchronicity and was believed, by himself and by colleagues, to have an interfering psychokinetic effect on machines.

Jean Perrin (1870-1942), 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics, was a member of the Institut Général Psychologique’s (IGP) Group of Study of Psychic Phenomena.

Max Planck (1858-1947), 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics and author of quantum theory, expressed his interest in psychical research in his correspondence.

Sully Prudhomme (1839- 1907), 1901 Nobel Prize in Literature, participated in the Société de Psychologie Physiologique’s committee for the study of telepathy.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, researched hypnosis and psi phenomena and wrote a book about them (destroyed during the Spanish Civil War).

Charles Richet (1850-1935), 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, founded the Annales des Sciences Psychiques, president of the Society for Psychical Research (1905), and of the Institut Métapsychique International (1923).

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), 1925 Nobel Prize in Peace, reported the paranormal phenomena he observed in Africa and remarked that he would like to carry out psi research.

Glenn Seaborg (1912-1999), 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the investigation of traunsuranium elements, co-wrote with Margaret Mead a praising statement about a book on parapsychology.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1908-2008), 1970 Nobel prizewinner in literature, mentions precognition as a fact in his work.

Otto Stern (1888-1969), 1943 Nobel Prize in Physics, is said to have banned Pauli from his lab, for fear that Pauli’s involuntary PK effect would interfere with the machinery there.

Eugene Wigner (1902-1995), 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics, encouraged research on physics and psi.

John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919), 1904 Nobel Prize in Physics, president of the Society for Psychical Research.

JJ Thompson (1856-1940), 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics, member of the governing council of the Society for Psychical Research for 34 years.

Source: Cardeña, E. (2015). ‘Eminent People Interested in Psi’. Psi Encyclopedia. London: The Society for Psychical Research. <https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/eminent-people-interested-psi>. Retrieved 13 April 2020.

Anton Zeilinger

 Anton Zeilinger (German: [ˈtsaɪlɪŋɐ]; born 20 May 1945) is an Austrian quantum physicist who in 2008 received the Inaugural Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics (UK) for "his pioneering conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information". Zeilinger is professor of physics at the University of Vienna and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information IQOQI at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Most of his research concerns the fundamental aspects and applications of quantum entanglement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Zeilinger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcPUfcn94ms&t=1498s

referenced at 35 minutes in the above video. 


Science - Bell's inequalities

Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox (EPR paradox) is a thought experiment proposed by physicists Albert EinsteinBoris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (EPR), with which they argued that the description of physical reality provided by quantum mechanics was incomplete.

In a 1935 paper titled "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?", they argued for the existence of "elements of reality" that were not part of quantum theory, and speculated that it should be possible to construct a theory containing them. Resolutions of the paradox have important implications for the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

As Bell wrote later, "If [a hidden-variable theory] is local it will not agree with quantum mechanics, and if it agrees with quantum mechanics it will not be local."[5]

To date, Bell tests have found that the hypothesis of local hidden variables is inconsistent with the way that physical systems do, in fact, behave.[6][7]

While the significance of Bell's theorem is not in doubt, its full implications for the interpretation of quantum mechanics remain unresolved.

In QM, predictions are formulated in terms of probabilities — for example, the probability that an electron will be detected in a particular place, or the probability that its spin is up or down. The idea persisted, however, that the electron in fact has a definite position and spin, and that QM's weakness is its inability to predict those values precisely. The possibility existed that some unknown theory, such as a hidden variables theory, might be able to predict those quantities exactly, while at the same time also being in complete agreement with the probabilities predicted by QM. If such a hidden variables theory exists, then because the hidden variables are not described by QM the latter would be an incomplete theory.

near death experiences

 international association for near death studies



Can the Physicists' Description of Reality be Considered Complete?



Monday, January 10, 2022

Brian Josephson



Science - failings

 Science thinks it knows what things are - but this is arrogance. 

Upon his return from Brazil, Arthur Stanley Eddington dove into the work of the mathematician Bertrand Russell. One of Russell’s observations, first developed in the 1920s and furthered in the 1950s, was this: “All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to — as to this, physics is silent.” In other words, while physical science might appear to give us a nearly complete account of the nature of matter — what everything is made of — it really only provides a description of mathematical structures: the “causal skeleton” of reality. These descriptions are incredibly valuable and have led to many of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements, because they can be used to predict how matter will behave. But as Goff said to me: “Physical science only tells us what stuff does, not what stuff is. It’s not telling us the underlying nature of the stuff that is behaving in this way.”

Consider this crude breakdown of water. What is water? Water is a colorless, transparent, odorless chemical substance that fills our oceans, lakes, rivers and bodies. But what is it composed of? It is composed of sextillions and sextillions of tiny water molecules. What are they composed of? Well, each molecule contains three atoms: two hydrogen and one oxygen. And what are hydrogen and oxygen made of? Subatomic particles like neutrons and electrons. What is an electron made of? An electron has mass and charge. And what are mass and charge? They are properties of the electron. But what is the electron? 

Eddington agreed with Russell: “The physicist cannot get behind structure,” he wrote in a glowing review of Russell’s 1927 book “The Analysis of Matter.” 

https://www.noemamag.com/the-conscious-universe/

The taboo in scientific circles:

The invite-disinvite sequence. See https://noetic.org/blog/the-psi-taboo-in-action/ by Dean Radin

But what happens when both academic affiliation and status are extremely high? Does the snub still happen? It sure does. I give you Brian Josephson. Josephson is a full professor at Cambridge University, and he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1973 “for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects.” Full professor at a major university with a Nobel Prize is the pinnacle of status within the rarefied world of high-powered academia.

Last week, any veneer of serenity was shattered. Conference organiser Antony Valentini, research associate in the Theoretical Physics Group at Imperial College London, wrote to three participants to say their invitations had been withdrawn.

The physicist and science writer David Peat, biographer of David Bohm (co-founder of de Broglie-Bohm theory), was considered tainted because of his books on “Jungian synchronicity” and “connections between Native American thought and modern physics.”

Brian Josephson, head of the Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge, was rejected on the grounds that “one of his principal research interests is the paranormal.”

Professor Josephson, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on superconductivity, has long been one of the discipline’s more colourful figures.

In 2001, he attracted derision from some of his peers when he discussed telepathy in his contribution to a booklet issued to celebrate the centenary of the Nobel prizes.

 How to Run a Conference: closed-minded practices revealed by Brian Josephson http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/articles/uninvite.html

 

Pathological Disbelief

https://galileocommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Josephson-2004-Pathological-Disbelief.pdf - Brian Josephson

 

With parapsychology a dominant factor is editor power, (the ability to control journal content), combined with the ease of making denunciations if the situation is such that, as is typically the case, assertions that are made do not have to be properly substantiated.

https://galileocommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Josephson-2004-Pathological-Disbelief.pdf




 

Remote Viewing

 remote viewing’ is the name given to a human capacity believed to exist involving the ability to ‘see’ what is happening at a distance

the CIA’s ‘remote viewing’ group when asked if they might be able to help locate some missing H-bombs, in a plane that had crashed somewhere in Africa, and which people seemed keen to locate, fulfilled their brief in less than a day’s focussed attention (see Joe McMoneagle’s account in his book The Stargate Chronicles).

https://galileocommission.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Josephson-2004-Pathological-Disbelief.pdf

panpsychism

https://www.noemamag.com/the-conscious-universe/ 

Derived from the Greek words pan (“all”) and psyche (“soul” or “mind”), panpsychism is the idea that consciousness — perhaps the most mysterious phenomenon we have yet come across — is not unique to the most complex organisms; it pervades the entire universe and is a fundamental feature of reality. “At a very basic level,” wrote the Canadian philosopher William Seager, “the world is awake.”

Plato and Aristotle had panpsychist beliefs, as did the Stoics. At the turn of the 12th century, the Christian mystic Saint Francis of Assisi was so convinced that everything was conscious that he tried speaking to flowers and preaching to birds. In fact, the history of thought is dotted with very clever people coming to this seemingly irrational conclusion. William James, the father of American psychology, was a panpsychist, as was the celebrated British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead; the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck once remarked in an interview, “I regard consciousness as fundamental.” Even the great inventor Thomas Edison had some panpsychist views, telling the poet George Parsons Lathrop: “It seems that every atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence.”

Philip Goff is one of a rising tide of thinkers around the world who have found themselves drawn back to this ancient theory. Spurred on by scientific breakthroughs, a lost argument from the 1920s and the encouraging way panpsychism is able to bypass the “hard problem” of consciousness, they are beginning to rebuild and remodel its intellectual foundations, transforming it into a strong candidate for the ultimate theory of reality.

In 1929, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget found that children between two and four years old are inclined to attribute consciousness to everything around them. A child can happily talk to a grasshopper and blame the pavement if they trip up, and it isn’t such an alien thought, at that age, to think a flower might feel the sunlight and perhaps even enjoy it. Fairy tales and children’s media are infused with animate worlds in which trees, animals and objects come to the aid or annoyance of a protagonist.

Eddington’s view, matter is the mystery; consciousness is the thing we understand better than anything else. The only matter we experience directly is the matter in our living brains, and we know that to be conscious. Therefore, we have good reason to believe that all matter is conscious. And while critics of panpsychism are quick to challenge its proponents to prove that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter, the panpsychists are equally poised to respond: prove that it isn’t.

As Eddington wrote in the conclusion to his book: “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” Consciousness didn’t emerge or flicker into existence; it has always been there — the intrinsic nature of us and everything around us. This is what breathes fire into the equations.

“For a panpsychist,” Goff said, “the story of physics is the story of consciousness. All there is is forms of consciousness, and physics tracks what they do.”

entities - what are they?

I found this Blog... deadbutdreaming - which is where a lot of the links and quotes in this post come from. Please check it out. There is nothing original in my post, its just a way of signposting others' work for future research. 

This is a blog site about the otherworldly creatures most often known as faeries. They have taken many forms over the centuries, and interact with humanity in a myriad of ways. Are they nothing but the nebulous hallucinations of gullible people, turned into folktales by imaginative storytellers, or are they messengers of deeper meaning accessed by both mystics and the unwary in altered states of consciousness? Maybe both, and much more. They’ll be investigated here from many perspectives, and perhaps some of their secrets will be divested. Content will appear regularly… See also this Facebook site.

 “If we are prepared to set aside the automatic scepticism and reductionism of our age, and if we spell out the problem in plain language, then we find that we are contemplating the existence of highly intelligent discarnate entities belonging to an order of creation fundamentally different than our own… it really is almost as though the beings we are dealing with have been changing and developing alongside us for thousands of years, and that they therefore cannot simply be mass delusions, but must have a definite, independent reality outside the human brain.” Graham Hancock, Supernatural (2005).

Endless eye witness accounts of faeries, goblins, elves, etc. 

Use of DMTs

But is it real? Building on a study carried out by Peter Meyer in 1994, Luke gets to the crux of the issue of psychedelically-induced faeries (and by extension all faerie encounters) and suggests there are three interpretations for what is happening:

They are hallucinations. The entities are subjective hallucinations. Such a position is favoured by those taking a purely (materialist reductionist) neuropsychological approach to the phenomena.

They are psychological/ transpersonal manifestations. The communicating entities appear alien but are actually unfamiliar aspects of ourselves, be they our reptilian brain or our cells, molecules or sub-atomic particles.

The entities exist in otherworlds. DMT provides access to a true alternate dimension inhabited by independently existing intelligent entities in a stand-alone reality, which exists co-laterally with ours. The identity of the entities remains speculative.

Of course, all three interpretations may be true at different times, but whatever conclusions are drawn, there does appear to be a pantheon of faerie-types accessible to people who retune their consciousness with psychedelic compounds.

Are aliens faeries? Are Faeries aliens?

in his 1969 book Passport to Magonia, the astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallée – whilst holding back on any definitive conclusions about the objective/subjective nature of alien abductions – put forward the theory that the alien beings who had been purportedly abducting people around the world for a couple of decades by that date were one and the same as the faeries of European folklore. Vallée uses a range of evidence to tie-up faerie abductions from folklore and alien abductions from modern reports, and goes as far to state

… the modern, global belief in flying saucers and their occupants is identical to an earlier belief in the fairy-faith. The entities described as the pilots of the craft are indistinguishable from the elves, sylphs and lutins of the Middle Ages. Through the observations of unidentified flying objects, we are concerned with an agency our ancestors knew well and regarded with terror: we are prying into the affairs of the Secret Commonwealth.”

There is a consistency to these experiences (there are thousands of them) that provides a dataset of testimony that Mack and Jacobs insist must be taken seriously as a phenomenon. For the abductees, the experience is often highly traumatic (Mack states that the best psychiatric diagnosis for many abductees is post-traumatic stress disorder), and no wonder, when they are confronted with alien hybrids often described as more like foetuses than babies. One abductee described to Mack their appearance, which is fairly typical: “Their bodies were short for their heads. Their heads seemed oversized. They had very blue eyes. They had very thin, wispy hair… I would say they were probably three and a half feet tall, but they all looked the same age. ‘You’re our mother and we need you,’ they said.”

The evidence presented by Vallée and Hancock makes a convincing argument for the tight relation between faerie abductions in folklore and alien abductions in the 20th and 21st centuries. Once again, the encounters are culturally coded to time and place, but the correlations and similarities are intriguing, and suggest the possibility of a common source for the phenomena, however the participants arrive at their experience.

My own favoured hyptheses (Jenna speaking) is that Faeires are manifestations of plant consciousnesses - or Nature Spirits. Read this and scroll down. 

You give DMT to ten people. They’ve never had DMT before, and you tell them only that they might see something. If nine out of ten of them come back with descriptions of elves, and four of them use the word elves unprompted, we think you should investigate the phenomenon of elves seen on DMT.”

Zarkov “Coming Out of Left Field with Gracie and Zarkov”, High Frontiers 3 (1987)

And another Blog to dive into Erowid - Documenting the complex relationship between humans and psychoactives. 

Altered States of Consciousness and the Faeries. 

“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness that are entirely different.” WILLIAM JAMES

Terence Mckenna discovers DMT and the world of elves and fairies

a research study conducted between 1990 and 1995 in the General Clinical Research Center of the University of New Mexico Hospital, by Dr Rick Strassman found that volunteers on the study injected with varying amounts of DMT underwent profound alterations of consciousness. This involved immediate cessation of normal consciousness and transportation to a different realm of reality with divergent physical properties, and inhabited by a range of creatures described as elves, faeries, lizards, reptiles, insects, aliens, clowns (yes, clowns) and various therianthropic entities. One woman even describes a pulsating entity that she described as ‘Tinkerbell-like’. The experiences, especially at higher doses, represented to the participants a parallel reality that was ‘super real’, not an hallucination, not a dream, but a substantial built reality with full sensory interaction + telepathy. Strassman published the results as DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and there is a lucid documentary summarising the study.

Aldous Huxley’s description of a universal consciousness being ‘Mind at Large’ and that the brain is a ‘reducing valve transceiver‘, that can be retuned by a variety of methods. Huxley did this with Mescaline and LSD.



Friday, January 7, 2022

Bernardo Kastrup


Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, is a computer scientist, who has also completed a second doctoral degree in philosophy. He is author of Rationalist Spirituality, Why Materialism is Baloney, Dreamed Up Reality, Meaning in Absurdity, Brief Peeks Beyond, More Than Allegory, The Idea of the World, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics, and Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe, and most recently Science Ideated: The Fall of Matter and the Countours of the Next Mainstream Scientific Worldview. He has published several papers on Scientific American's website arguing for metaphysical idealism. His website is https://www.bernardokastrup.com/

Bernardo has launched a new organization, #EssentiaFoundation, and has produced some wonderful short  videos that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/Nls4o_mR-sY and https://youtu.be/wJG6yL4ncK8.

Here he points out the many irrational conundrum pits into which defenders of scientific materialism dig themselves. He points out that mainstream theoretical physics has almost completely eliminated the notion of matter – preferring other abstractions such as information or mathematics that are divorced from actual experience. He argues that our conventional notion time is an illusion. Therefore, causality itself is also an illusion. He suggests that the universe operates on a structured web of interrelated meanings and that Jungian synchronicity could replace our notion of causality. 

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is the Grand Prize winner of the Bigelow Institute essay competition on the postmortem survival of human consciousness.

(Recorded on December 20, 2021)

Angels and Guides