Truth
Panpsychism or Sufi Science
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 05 October 2004
A Model of the Paranormal
Brian Josephson, a Nobel prizewinner (1973) and still a physicist at Cambridge, England, believes that psychics and telepaths genuinely exist. Having decided to pursue the pot of gold called paranormal phenomena, he is reduced to writing banalities. Josephson claims to present (arXiv:physics/0312012) “a model consistent with string theory for so-called paranormal phenomena such as extra-sensory perception (ESP)”. In this paper Josephson “explains” ESP as “thought bubbles”!
His “theory” is written in New Age style pseudoscience babble, and offers nothing that can be tested. It is therefore not actually scientific. He believes that psychics and telepaths may be able to direct random energy at sub-atomic levels for their own purposes. How does this differ in explanatory value from spirits, ectoplasm, vibrations or “pixie dust” (Patricia Churchland)? Not in any testable way. Psychics and telepaths might claim to make sunbeams from cucumbers, but we have to see it definitely done before we need to seek an explanation of it. The fact that Josephson is a Nobel laureate does not make his rambling speculations any more scientific that those of theologians or tabloid astrologers and health experts. Several Nobel prizewinners have gone on to dabble in fields outside their proven skill and have made fools of themselves. As Robin Mackie, science editor of The Observer newspaper, wrote about what prominent physicists thought of Josephson:
Although they believe Josephson richly deserved his 1973 Nobel prize, few believe he has done work of any merit since, while some argue that his flirtation with transcendental meditation and the paranormal has been intellectually disastrous.
David Deutsch, quantum physics expert at Oxford University, is blunt:
It is utter rubbish. The evidence for the existence of telepathy is appalling. If engineers or doctors accepted the level of proof that is accepted by paranormal supporters, bridges would be falling down round the country, and new medicines would be killing more than they cure.
In typical New Age fashion, Josephson and other speculators like him, use the remarkable discoveries of quantum physics to offer an explanation of paranormal phenomena that have not yet been demonstrated unequivocally. Josephson calls quantum mechanics “imaginative proposals”, and indeed they are, but, as he should know, they can be tested, have been repeatedly, and they work—they explain what we observe in the real world. The airy-fairy theories that he and other believers in supernatural phenomena are ready to accept are not even hot air. They are trivial and meaningless nonsense, as David Deutsch says, that cannot claim to be scientific on any accepted criteria of science.
A Real Panpsychism Guru?
The philosopher, David Chalmers, has persuaded some scientists that experience is a fundamental property of the universe, and as such must be taken account of. These “scientists” call themselves “panexperientists” or “panpsychists”, though they have no evidence their premise of universal experience is true. Peter Russell is a guru, a management guru, but wants to be a real one so has written a load of pseudo-religious guff with some scientific flavouring to try to make the grade (From Science to God). He is relevant here because he is a panexperientist, trained as a theoretical physicist and experimental psychologist at Cambridge University, where he says one of his teachers was Stephen Hawking.
Russell tells us he has had a fascination with consciousness, and is among the conglomerate of these panpsychic weirdos, who think everything is conscious, even if only a teeny-weeny bit:
I now believe that rather than trying to explain consciousness in terms of the material world, we should be developing a new worldview in which consciousness is a fundamental component of reality.
So, he seems to believe there is a reality, but that, despite the fundamental nature of consiousness, nothing in science predicts it. One wonders whether, from his scientific background, he thinks science should be able to predict everything. As he points out, science can explain the formation of elements, molecules, replicating molecules, and has a good idea how simple living cells evolved into more complicated ones and thence into advanced life forms, but every individual step on the way is not precisely understood, most notably how and when replicating molecules became life. Why, then, should science be able to explain consciousness, just like that. Let it be said that there are proper scientists working on it as well as cracked pots speculating themselves to orgasm. The “mystery” will be solved. What is stupid is that anyone claiming to be a scientist should imagine that science is revelation. It needs a lot of hard work, not a lot of idle speculators.
Popular Confusion
Though Josephson is a prizewinning scientist, he adds to the popular confusion that science is an arbitrary set of beliefs like religion and astrology. “You want a consciousness field in the universe, then you have one.” He even cites Bernard Carr, a mathematician at Queen Mary College, London, who writes worse tripe even than Josephson. Carr says that “our physical sensory systems reveal only a very limited aspect of reality”, a banal statement that cannot be gainsaid, but Carr wants to find a way round this truth and he hopes to find it in some physical speculations that reality might have more than the four dimensions we can normally sense.
Carr says the paranormal is an experience of consciousness because “this underlies all psychic experiences”, despite the fact that most mediums seem to give their seances in an unconscious state, and dreams are supposed to contain much ESP material, though the dreamer is presumably unconscious at the time. Such inconsistences do not deter Carr and his ilk, who tell us that consciousness is not what we think it is but is our gamboling in a new phenomenon called “communal space”, different but overlapping physical space, thus permitting telepathy. This space is in a higher dimension than normal space, becoming a “Universal Structure”, as he terms it, reconciling everyone’s different experiences of the world, and only accessible by the mind.
The question, “What else can exist in this space?” constitutes his justification. The only non-physical entities in the universe we can experience are mental ones, and they must exist, he tells us, in these extra Kaluza-Klein dimensions that constitute the Randall-Sundrum hypothesis of higher dimensionality. He insists his “theory” has “profound” consequences. Doubtless he thinks it has, but Carr offers no way of us finding out how, but nevertheless announces he is much more reasonable than the “reductionist materialists who reject psychic phenomena out of hand” to maintain their “naïve view of reality”. Judging by the account Carr gives online in a note called, Is there Space for Psi in Modern Physics, he cannot distinguish science from fiction.
Josephson is precisely the same, but prefers to talk of a “disconnected realm” explained by string theory, another higher dimensionality speculation. These supposed “theories” of the paranormal are actually crude analogies between what the speculator considers to be needed to explain the supposed phenomena, and various ideas in speculative physics. Thus speculations are piled on to speculations, but merely as analogies. This is typical of Sufism, New Age fancies and Ufology, none of which have ever explained anything in fact. Josephson falls back also on to Plato’s proposal of a world of ideas or forms. Presumably this too is provided for in the higher dimensions of these abstract speculations.
Josephson cleverly notices that so far “we have only replaced one mystery by another”—or no mystery at all by several! Still, it seems he intends to clarify all. To do it he introduces another mystery, that of the evolution of “informational systems” that can exist independently of the universe, and therefore independently of the physical component of experience that we normally sense around us. It is an “ever-present background” that everything interacts with—presumably the same background as Plato’s forms provided, and doubtless one that allows God to emerge from it, or be it! By interacting with it, drawing now on the analogy of Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, life can alter its environment in its own favour. Life forms can perturb the background to form a “thought bubble” in some further analogy of a phase transition. A “thought bubble” shared explained ESP, “if the scenario described is valid”! Now we get an analogy of the Mössbauer effect which is really no more enlightening than the others.
So there you have it. Justified by nothing more than a series of dubious analogies the modern Sufi discovers a new mystery, “thought bubbles” that we can share with others, and that is a theory!
A “Theory” Immune from Criticism!
Josephson realizes that the trouble with this as a general “explanation” is that most people do not experience “thought bubbles”, and more mundane explanations suffice for the occasions when people think alike. It is not an insuperable obstacle, Josephson opines, because the weather is also not easily predictable! Moreover, evolution will seive out that which is not advantageous to the organism. That is true, and being so, it seems that “thought bubbles”, that could lead to serious confusion in thinking and render predation impossible, must have been selected against in the early millennia of life in the universe. Rather, Josephson thinks, it is just developing in some individuals now that it can offer an advantage to them in evolutionary terms. For that to happen, of course, the “thought bubbles” must give these individuals an advantage in successfully reproducing. If thought-bubbly people can be identified, potentially here is something testable, although Josephson does not suggest it.
Josephson answers Steven Weinberg’s criticism of psychokinesis—moving objects by thought—by finding sunlight as another analogy. Weinberg thought it unlikely that some power that could move objects would not effect sensitive scientific instruments in the same vicinity. Josephson points to ordinary sunlight which does not normally ignite fires but does so when it is focussed. Analogy is the new science, according to Josephson, who must have spent his Nobel prise money on buying volumes of Bishop Butler, although he has to admit this is only “at best a sketch of a theory, since the arguments are of a very qualitative character”.
Josephson thinks we should not dismiss paranormal phenomena on merely plausible arguments, but his critics do not need to do the dismissing. No certain demonstration of the paranormal has yet been made, even though James Randi has a large prize available to anyone who can do it under scientific conditions of observation. Despite the insecure evidence offered for the paranormal, we find here a Nobel prizewinner offering theories that any Ufologist would be proud of. It is the supposed “explanations” of the supposed phenomena that depend on scientific plausibility, whence the plethora of scientific analogies. Analogies can provide insights, but they are not explanations, despite Bishop Butler, and they are not scientific hypotheses, although people ignorant about the nature of science might think they are.
What is Consciousness?
What is consciousness? For most of us, consciousness is being aware of what we know or are thinking. Humans think and are self-aware. Is that consciousness, or can it be something less? An awake person has consciousness, but does someone who is asleep? Human beings have consciousness, but do other life forms? Most of us will conclude that, at some stage in the chain of being, consciousness evolved, so that some animals cannot be conscious. This definition will not do for the panpsychics, though.
Evolution is not an evolution of consciousness but the evolution of the contents of consciousness.
For Russell, consciousness is not self-awareness. That is something that evolved—one of the contents of consciousness. The panpsychics redefine consciouness (or at least Russell does), more generally, as:
The capacity for inner experience.
To have the capacity for something does not mean it is there. A bowl has the capacity for porage but might not contain any. Plainly then, not to show any signs of consciousness does not mean the capacity for it is not there. By this means, the panpsychics can claim anything is conscious even when it has never shown any such property, because consciousness is just the capacity for consciousness.
Russell argues that other animals are obviously conscious, like a dog, because it seems to have its own mental picture of the world, full of sounds, colors, smells and sensations, to recognize people and places, to show fear or excitement, to dream, and feel pain. Other mammals must be the same, Russell thinks, and birds too, like parrots, intelligent as they are. If birds are conscious, then why not reptiles and amphibians, sharks and fish? He has no reason to doubt that insects have some kind of inner experience.
The fact is that Russell goes continuously down the chain of being declaring he has no reason to doubt all life forms are conscious, and concludes that even inert matter is conscious! Thus is panpsychism, or panexperientism, justified. The reader will notice that whatever Russell has no reason to doubt must be true. Like all gurus, he has already deified himself. Many scientists have a good deal of trouble trying to find criteria of consciousness in other species. It is difficult. If we inadvertantly touch something hot, like someone’s burning cigarette, we immediately pull away. It is an unconscious reaction, though, an observer might conclude it was done consciously.
For Russell and the panpsychics, consciousness is a fundamental quality of nature. It is always present, even if it provides only a “faint trace of awareness” (consciousness has become simply awareness, now). We are not to think, though, that rocks perceive the world around them, have thoughts and feelings, and enjoy an inner mental life like human beings. A rock would possess none of the qualities of human consciousness, Russell assures us, just the faintest glimmer of sentience. When then is something not conscious? It never arises. Everything is, even though its degree of consciousness might be minute. The original question does not go away. When is consciousness so minute that, to all intents and purposes, it does not exist? Even Russell seems to agree a rock qualitifes as not conscious—to all intents and purposes!
Studying Consciousness
Russell thinks there is a particular problem caused by the nature of consciousness not being physical, whereas science deals with the physical world. “How can an immaterial consciousness arise from unconscious matter?” he asks.
It is indeed problem to study what is not directly evident, but it is not difficult, in concept, that material things and material processes should work in hidden ways. As individuals we have a privileged view of this happening in our own case. Descartes could be convinced of nothing except that he was thinking. Whatever anyone told him could be false. He did not add, as a religious man, particularly what the religious priests and prophets told him, though it is true. Only his own consciousness was evident to him. Understanding that we all have only one view on to reality—that one mediated by our own senses and brain—explains the wise sayings and proverbs of the ancient religions that conclude the world is purely internal. However wise the sayings are, they are not wise enough, and no one sensible will actually take any notice of them in practice.
Consciousness might be a different type of phenomenon from a brain, but modern science and technology has devised physical processes that produce, in a non-obvious fashion, what is meaningful to us. A camera makes us a picture of a scene we look at that seems to us to be the same view as we have of it through our eyes. A computer game can create convincing worlds to allow us to experience situations that might be dangerous or undesirable for us to experience in reality! Even the workings of a motor car, a microwave oven, or a TV are mysteries to plenty of otherwise sophisticated people, and would certainly be to primitive people that had never seen them before. What guides and gurus, like Russell, refuse to accept is the astonishing progress of science in only 300 years since the yoke of received religion was thrown off. In particular, they will not recognize that there is nothing in principle different between a computer generated scene and a scene that we see in our heads. Though the process might be quite a different one, both give us a picture that we can recognize of the world we know—the real world.
Admittedly, the computer is not conscious, because the whole point of consciousness is that it builds up by experience. The computer has its “experience” pre-programmed by human beings, it has not learnt it, but—neural networks, purposely so called—might offer the chance of even mechanical computers getting to be conscious. We shall have to wait and see.
World or Dream World?
Russell gets more and more ridiculous, having apparently accepted reality, and indeed argued that consciousness is part of it, he now says:
All that I perceive—all that I see, hear, taste, touch and smell—has been reconstructed from sensory data. I think I am perceiving the world around me, but all that I am directly aware of are the colors, shapes, sounds and smells that appear in the mind. Our perception of the world has the very convincing appearance of being “out there” around us, but it is no more “out there” than are our nightly dreams.
This is typical baloney. This man is telling us that the world of our senses is no different from a dream. So, if I am confronted by a rabid dog, I can forget all about it. It is no danger, being no more than a dream. The whole point of our experience, and the reason why we have been selected to have consciousness is that it helps us to survive. The world we live in is real, since otherwise there could be no selective pressure at all. Russell, with his high brow education at Cambridge University, is too stupid to notice that the real world is utterly different from our dreams!
The very point of the scientific method is that it is tested against the real world in just the way that evolution tests life forms in the real world. If the test fails then the life form fails and it has no offspring with the same fault. Another life form passes the test and successfully reproduces similar life forms with the same ability to pass the tests of life. Scientific hypotheses do the same. They pass the tests of “corresponding” adequately with reality, or they fail it. The ones that pass become bricks in the scientific edifice. They are true.
Russell goes on to say:
Our image of the world is based on sensory information drawn from our physical surroundings. This gives our waking experience a consistency and sense of reality not found in dreams. But the truth is, it is as much a creation of our minds as are our dreams.
He cannot seem to get that this is a different statement from his previous one. No one denies that the images we have are images. What he cannot understand is that our images of real things are different images from our images in our dreams. Crossing a road, it matter that I have an image of a bus heading towards me. For Russell it is just a construction in my consciousness, but so far as I am concenred, it is a bus that could kill me if it hit me, so I shall take notice of this mere image and step back to avoid it. It is plain that Russell does the same or he would never have lived as long as he has. The point is correspondence. The bus image in my head corresponds with a real bus heading towards me. To dream of a bus is quite different. The bus does not correspond with anything real. The dream bus is a memory of an actual bus, and it is memories like this that remind us of what has happened to us to provide our experience. Experience is not an abstract force field in the ether, it is a complex of memories stored in our brain.
These would-be intellectuals talk about us “confusing” our perceptions with reality. They are the ones who are confused, or dishonest. If our perceptions are not reality itself, they provide a very good proxy for it, much too good a one for these phonies to ignore as mere illusions in practice. Better to think we are actually experiencing reality in our perception of it than to doubt it and walk in front of a bus. They will not test their “theories” in this way.
Matter
Though Russell accepts he cannot walk through walls and that his own experience of such things ties in with other people’s, he maintains the reality of the world is an assumption! An assumption is a minor premise supposed to be true without any foundation, but there are so may reasons for supposing the world to be real, that an encyclopedia would be needed to list them. That we cannot walk through walls, however, seems good enough. It is plain from this one example that the wall is solid, and we ourselves are sufficiently solid that we cannot pass the one through the other without causing a damaging impact. Yet Russell goes back to the schoolboy idea that matter is not solid at all! It is our illusion that it is, and the scientists have proven otherwise. He cites Sir Arthur Eddington:
Matter is mostly ghostly empty space.
Eddington died at the age of 62 in 1944, and apparently Russell’s education must, in fact, have stopped when he was still at school and reading Eddington’s books in the school library. Electrons are not little ball bearings much tinier than some other ball bearings called atomic nuclei, with the rest of the space between empty. That is the schoolboy picture based on an early but simplistic picture of the atom as ball bearings. The electron is smeared out in space and, so far from space being empty, it contains the electron, and more importantly it contains the electron’s charge. The mass of the electron is much tinier than the mass of the nucleus of an atom, but its charge occupies all the space surrounding it. Electrons are negatively charged as even schoolboys know and like charges repel each other with some force. This repulsion, between the multitude of electrons of the atoms that constitute us and the atoms of the wall, cause the damage when we attempt to walk through it.
So, matter is not empty space, it is full of electronic charge. This is not matter as we know it persists this dolt, but it is indeed matter, and science explains why we experience the wall as solid. Russell persists, like a bar room philosopher after a long day:
Whatever matter is, it has little, if any, substance.
Since substance is a synonym for matter, this statement is idiotic. Substance is matter is reality is solidness (in a narrower sense), and all of it is explained by science. Matter is recorded scientifically as mass, and in a particular gravitational field, it manifests as weight. Its solidity or firmness is a function of the electron field that surrounds the atomic nuclei that constitute the molecular structure of the matter. What has no substance at all is the drivellings of people like Russell, the Sufi-scientists trying to find new gaps for God.
Sight and Sound
We get more drivel. He avers that green is merely a quality in the mind, not anything real. But only light of certain frequencies or wavelengths register in the mind as green, unless the observer has the defect of vision called colour blindness. We have evolved an excellent proxy for determining the frequency of the light we see. It is colour. Colour is a measure of the frequency of daylight. Who cares that the light itself is not green because green is only a sensation in our brains? When we open our jar of paté and find it is green, we know it is putrid, and that saves us from possibly being poisoned. If we had evolved with a meter in our heads recording the actual frequewncy of the light, would we have been better off?
To deny the meaning of our senses is puerile. We often use proxies for something that is otherwise hard to measure. The expansion of mercury or alcohol in a thermometer gives a proxy for the temperature. The level of the mercury is not the temperature, Russell would argue, merely a construct, but would the phony philosophers prefer to use a thermometer to test their baby’s bathwater or test its temperature by throwing the baby into it?
He comes out with the same about sound. Sound, like colour, is merely a sensation in the human brain. That is true enough, but sound is a proxy for pressure waves in the air. Sound is how the pressure waves manifest themselves through our ears in our brains. It is pedantically correct to say that a tree falling in the forest with no human observer makes no sound, because sound is the sensation the observer experiences, but the fall certainly makes the vibrations in the air that cannot fail to manifest as sound to any observer were one there.
To be able to sense the pressure waves is what is important. The sensation of sound is the way the ability to do it has evolved in mammalian life, and many other types too. Would it be valid to say there was no sound in the forest when the tree fell if the observer was a grasshopper? The grasshopper registers the sound through its skin. Is that then sound, or must we invent a new word for it? It is registering the same “sound waves” as the human ear and brain. Russell accepts it is indeed sound, but the sensation of sound in an insect must be quite different from that we experience. A philosopher can imagine a notional observer and will then declare that the tree falling certainly makes a sound because it has made the atmospheric vibrations necessary for sound to be heard.
Pedantry can be useful, but this use of it is merely misleading. The sound of the bus approaching me in reality warns me not to step on the road. It does not matter to me that what I experience is a sensation and not a more direct appreciation of molecules vibrating in the air. It “corresponds” with reality and that is suffient for my survival, and science has been able to locate the origin of the sensation of sound, in the vibration of air.
Our senses are limited, and so do not give us a total picture of reality. We cannot see infra red light, but infra red is heat and we can feel that instead. We cannot see ultra violet, but our skin can detect it and develop a pigment that stops it from harming us as much as it might. We cannot see other radiation that is dangerous to us like X-rays and gamma-rays, but they are rarely met in Nature, and would not offer us any advantage in sensing them. Such phenomena as the magnetism of the earth has given a particular sense to birds, and, in a rudimentary form, even to some mammals, ourselves among them. It gives them an awareness of direction. The point is that we have evolved to sense what is dangerous or beneficial to us, thus helping us survive.
Sensing the dangerous rays, that only cause us any trouble when a nearby nova erupts, offers us no selective advantage, and so has not evolved. Even if we knew about the danger, it is unlikely that we could have escaped it until we reached the technological level, and even then most people would not. Consciousness has evolved to be useful. We know that other animals have senses we do not have, because we do not need them to help us survive with the lifestyle we have. The fact that we are unconscious to X-rays and gamma-rays, but animals have senses we do not have, shows that some vague general consciouness simply does not exist. Consciousness evolves. It is the fantasy of these Sufi-scientists who seem to have no idea of empiricism despite the benefits of it they daily enjoy.
Russell goes on about the different images of reality that bees, snakes, dolphins and bats have compared with us:
There are as many different ways of perceiving the world as there are species of life in the universe. What we take to be reality is just the particular way the human mind sees and interprets the physical world.P Russell
Perhaps so, but there is a reality in the physical world to sense. It is idle to argue that reality is different from what we sense it to be. Since reality has an objective existence outside us, it must be sensed, and whatever senses we have to do it are not transporting reality physically into our heads. So, we can agree that the image of reality we have is a construction, but the scientific method is to test the constructions we share to determine how they “correspond” with reality. Thus we approximate successively to it.
The Internal World
The East appeared to have a lot to say about consciousness, and so did many mystics.
Russell, like all his New Agey type, now turns to “spiritual adepts” who claim to have a better way of knowing the world than science, by perceiving the world by their “deep personal investigations into the nature of consciousness”. Why, then do we have to use the poor method of science to discover about the world when there is the better method of these adepts available? Why are the corporate bosses not hiring these adepts to discover oil? Why are the countries they come from abysmally poor with such expertise available to them? Why, at least, are these “spirituals adepts” not revealing all to their admirers, the consciousness gurus, wallowing in the speculative ordure they write? The reason is evident from the examples Russell gives. They offer pure tripe suitable for gullible asses:
You are the entire universe. You are in all, and all is in you.
So, it turns out that the world is entirely your own, and that is sufficient to discount everything that we communally experience and have tested among ourselves. As already noted, at a trivial level, it is obvious that the universe is our own. We observe it and when we die, our personal experience of the universe dies with us. What is wrong is the conclusion that lifetimes of meditation have revealed that our personal universe is the only universe. The universe is real. Even if our perception of it is peculiar to us, everyone else in the world has their own image of it besides us.
I return to tests like those suggested earlier. Let gurus like Russell, convinced that there is no reality, jump off a high cliff to see whether their hypothesis is true or not. Since their personal universe rejects the reality of the external world, rejects “the delusion that we are directly perceiving the physical world”, but believes “everything we know, including space, time and matter, manifests from consciousness”, such an act must be purely imaginary.
Russell seems astonished that ancient religions and theologians had a lot to say about light and that metaphors about light abounded.
The tenth-century Christian mystic S Symeon saw: “a light infinite and incomprehensible… one single light… simple, non-composite, timeless, eternal… the source of life”.
S John referred to “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”.
He thinks these ancient people had some insight into relativity or quantum mechanics or even their fantasy that the fundamental nature of the universe is consiousness. The much easier explanation is that ancient people worshipped the sun, the physical source of life and light, and so saw light as equivalent in some sense to life. The opposite was true, of course, of darkness. Light is metaphorically good and darkness metaphorically evil. Only complete idiots could overlook this elementary fact, unless they did it purposely because they are less than honest.
No one sensible can expect to find scientific answers in the books of ancient religions, or the writings of supposed mystics whether ancient or modern. But Russell, the theoretical physicist and experimental psychologist, preferred reading the works of ancient eastern religions and such fakes and dreamers as Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung, and Christopher Isherwood. He also took to reading various Buddhist “teachers”. A Buddhist teacher teaches Buddhism, not natural science. Though Buddhism is the most rational of ancient religions, it has been used like them all for terrible wickedness, something Russell cannot see. He seems to admire the Tibetan Lamas who had escaped from the communists, but these people had run Tibet as a cruel feudal state, isolated in immense suffering for centuries. He also took to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with continuing enthusiasm, though even the Beatles were forced to admit he was a fraud.
We were spending most of the day in meditation—and much of the night as well.
Not much time was left, then, for discovering anything useful! The aim, apparently, was to transcend thinking. His work testifies that he succeeded. This transcendental state is the faculty of consciousness without any content. How, then, can anyone be aware they are conscious without having a thought—without thinking, “Am I conscious?”?
Content or Capacity
This guru glibly separates consciousness from the content of consciousness. If the psychologist separated behaviour from the body, the body would be dead. Life manifests itself as behaviour. How can the content of consciousness be separated from consciousness? He uses the false analogy of a film projector with no film in it. The blank illuminated screen is consciousness, and the film is the content of consciousness, but what Russell fails to recognize is his consciously noting this from outside. If the analogy were correct, his consciousness would be the consciousness of the blank screen, aware of nothing at all, and so it could not be aware that it had no content—that no film is running.
It is hard to see how anything in such a state of blank consciousness could return to conscious thought, that is to say to begin to run the film again. Once in the blank state it is impossible to begin to think again, because breaking the blankness requires the thought of doing it, and all thoughts have been expunged. Now here is more contradiction:
- When the mind is devoid of all content, you not only find absolute serenity and peace, you also discover the true nature of the self.
- When the mind is silent, when all the thoughts, feelings, perceptions and memories with which we habitually identify have fallen away, then what remains is the essence of self, the pure subject without an object. What we then find is not a sense of “I am this” or “I am that”, but just “I am”. In this state, you know the essence of self, and you know that essence to be pure consciousness. You know this to be your true identity. You are not a being who is conscious. You are consciousness. Period.
If the mind is devoid of all content, it is impossible to be aware of serenity, peace, self or even the essence of self, because all of this is content. To know anything is content, so to know that you are conscious is content. Moreover, the whole argument specifically ignores experience, yet these people are called, among other things, panexperientists. It is the content of consciousness, in Russell’s terminology, that is experience, and therefore is true consciousness. Our consciousness has developed in the way it has through evolution in which certain behaviours are selected for as favourable. The very notion of self is one such behaviour that has been selected. It enables sentient life to distinguish itself from the outside world so that it can use strategies favourable to its own survival.
Depriving yourself voluntarily of sensual input to the brain might be akin to sleep, though sleep is more natural, and therefore might be refreshing, but when it is not voluntary, it is a form of torture, much used in the last half century. It is certainly not natural, and plainly when forced on anyone, is dangerous and even literally maddening. Anyone’s experiences in life are the very things that make you yourself, from your genetic make up to the nurture given you by your guardians, and the life you then led. To be rid of all this is to undermine your sanity, not to find an identity with the cosmos, though perhaps it might seem it to a madman. Sadly, these Sufi-scientists are producing manure for dung beetles. They should be locked up for fraud.
Sufi-Science
Sufi-scientists think some “irreducible protoconscious precursor” of consciousness must come from the Planck scale of the universe (space, 10-33m, time, 10-43s). Philosophers call the raw elements of conscious experience “qualia”, which they are pleased to identify with patterns or properties hypothesised at the Planck scale. Penrose’s quantum spin networks are one approach to describing reality at the Planck level where Sufi-scientists think experience resides. Stuart Hameroff, a medical doctor specialising in anaesthesia, asks, “Why not? They have to exist in some form”, the same sort of bad argument used by Carr, and, in the same flow of “logic”, if qualia exist at the Planck scale, then, “Why not Platonic values like truth and beauty, good and evil”.
If truth and beauty are indeed fundamental, perhaps the Platonic world is ingrained at the most basic level of reality?S Hameroff
These men claim to be scientists, so, perhaps self-delusion and dishonesty are basic qualia at the Planck level too! They often argue like the scholastics, citing authorities (oft cited are Spinoza, Leibniz, Whitehead, Wheeler and Chalmers), as if the untested opinion of an authority had some particular significance independent of reality. Besides Plato because of his unperceived ideal world, they love Leibniz for whom correspondence with reality was a distraction from internal logic, but who thought there was an infinite number of basic units he called monads. Any vaguely suitable modern discovery is likened to some or another old philosophical invention, like the monad, as if old philosophers had some direct line to God by which they positively knew what they could not possibly have known.
- Funda-mental spacetime volumes and configurations may qualify as philosophical (quantum) monads.
- Perhaps Planck-scale spin networks encode proto-conscious experience and Platonic values?
- The non-computable influence in OR (Objective Reduction) may be a Platonic grain in Planck-scale geometry.
S Hameroff
And perhaps they do not, and maybe they do not. It is infantile! Woulds, coulds, mays and perhapses do not constitute an argument. They might be dimly visible illustrations, or weak analogies, but they are not scientific hypotheses whatever the New Age and Christian admirers of these latter-day spiritualists might hope for. The proper scientist wants to know why the mays, and so on have not been tested to eliminate them one way or the other. It would spoil the pseudo-scientific games these Sufi-scientists like to play. It seems:
A N Whitehead’s discrete occasions of experience are comparable to quantum state reductions.
Well a sweet desired by a child like a Smartie is comparable with an ecstasy tablet. A cluster bomb might seem like a plastic toy. A parson might compare with a crook. What conclusion is to be drawn from such comparisons? A comparison alone means nothing, and is no argument, but Sufi-scientists think they are!
Their argument continues as—even when the brain is not working, quantum information remains coherent for a while because of quantum entanglement. So, to these people, the soul emerges as a coherent pattern in space-time geometry at the Planck scale, and God appears as the highest monad. Hamerof admits:
I’d like to think that, anyway. It’s sort of reassuring. I like the idea that spirituality and God and consciousness could be part of the universe in a scientific way.
It might be reassuring for Hameroff, but, to anyone interested in science, hearing his deeply held fears about his immortal soul emerging in the guise of science, is not at all reassuring for science! A sure sign of New Age barminess is the tendency to split words in “meaningful” ways by spurious hyphens. Hameroff does this to the word “fundamental”. He could just drop the “funda” part to get a suitable self description, or drop the “al” part, to get a better one.
If physicists want to understand consciousness, they should first learn a few essential neurological facts, according to Alwyn Scott in a polite debate with Hameroff on the latter’s website. Brains are macro-scale organs which are nevertheless incredibly intricate and for both these reasons are not readily explained by quantum mechanics, which explains how particles below atomic size interact, but can say little novel about macro-molecules like proteins, and nothing about the electrophysiology of the brain.
Science or Sufi-Science
Of course, those—whether physicists, philosophers or theologians—who turn to quantum theory for explanations of consciousness are not really interested in the brain. Before they even consider any facts, they want to establish some quasi-scientific basis for the separation of mind and matter—they set out to establish a scientific basis for dualism, for Platonism, for spiritualism. Their ideas, though, are not science until they have been tested and shown to be so. Even Russell is obliged to remind us, in arguing the opposite:
We live in an era dominated by science and reason. For new ideas to be accepted, they need to satisfy our rational mind and be testable. It is not enough that they should resonate with our intuition; they must also make sense within the contemporary worldview.P Russell
Astronomers have looked out into deep space, to the edges of the universe. Cosmologists have looked back in deep time to the beginning of creation. And physicists have looked down into the deep structure of matter, to the fundamental constituents of the cosmos. In each case they have found no evidence of a God, nor any need for God. The Universe seems to work perfectly well without divine assistance.P Russell
No experimental evidence yet supports a quantum theory of neural behavior. At least Hameroff, the crypto-spiritualist pretending to be a scientist, has suggested experimental tests of his and Roger Penrose’s hypothesis, they call “Orch OR” (or is it “Punc RAP”?). Will anyone try to do them? So far no one has because the experiments are too difficult. Nor is there any hard evidence for quantum coherence and OR in microtubules. Orch OR is an abstract model. That is what Sufi-science is all about. Tests would spoil it, and then the Sufi-scientists would no longer be “reassured”.
A hypothesis must be testable in practice to be a scientific hypothesis. Parallels and plausibility are not enough. Piling conjecture on analogy and analogy on conjecture is not enough, and violates Occam’s razor or the principle of parsimony, which insists that entities must not be multiplied as Carr and Josephson do after the fashion of Sufis and medieval Scholastics—before Occam pointed out their error. Analogy and mere conjecture is not science. Science must work in reality either in experiment or in observation of the world, and must also be internally consistent. No random assemblage of analogies and speculations are likely to fulfil such criteria. Isaac Newton, no less, tells us Josephson is no longer a scientist:
It is not the business of experimental philosophy to teach the causes of things any further than they can be proved by experiments. We are not to fill this philosophy with opinions which cannot be proved by phenomena.Sir Isaac Newton (1715)
Showing the correct scientific practice, Newton declared:
I make no idle hypotheses,
which the scientist ought to read in the imperative. Assuming the existence of some new basic force, if that is what the new conjecture of “universal experience” is, without experimental confirmation of it, is not valid science. It is Sufi-science. These Sufi-scientists ought to return to empiricism and abandon their pure scholasticism to become scientific. Meanwhile, physics journal editors should reject the Sufi-scientists until they begin to experiment again. They can publish their fantasies as fairy tales until they prove them by experimentation. Correspondence not spiritualism is still the only sound basis for science.
