I was swapping thoughts the other day with my correspondent from Illinois (Dr. Mary S.) regarding paranormal psychic powers like clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition. (Let’s not even get into spoon bending and out-of-body experiences right now, OK?). Do they really exist? Well, attempts to scientifically document such abilities have generally failed. Research psychologist Susan Blackmore, who spent a lot of time studying the paranormal, concludes that there probably are no paranormal phenomena.

As a guy with much regard for the scientific approach, I give a lot of credence to Dr. Blackmore. She allegedly started her career with a positive mindset towards ESP and its like, and hoped that she might actually settle the question in a positive fashion. But she eventually concluded that it just wasn’t meant to be.

I myself think that ESP and mindreading and clairvoyance are mostly a matter of people seeking attention or trying to hustle a few bucks. I remember Jeane Dixon, who was popular when I was still a kid; the local paper ran a weekly column with her cryptic predictions. She got lucky about JFK’s assassination, but after that she forecast that Jesus Christ was coming back in the 1980s, somewhere in India or the Middle East. Well, still no sign of that big reunion tour taking place. So, for the most part I don’t take claims of paranormal abilities too seriously.

However . . . . I’m not 100% sure that there’s absolutely nothing to it. As Mary and I concluded, it is possible that some as yet undocumented phenomenon of nature could occur very randomly and sporadically, and thus be impossible to capture by scientific method. We pondered the Flatland scenario (recall Edward Abbot’s classic book) of a 2-dimensional world with living beings having different geometric shapes (circles, squares, triangles, hexagons, etc.). Suppose their flat world occasionally encountered our 3-D world? Well, stuff would appear to them, then disappear, then magically reappear somewhere else. They wouldn’t have the means to document and understand what was happening; it couldn’t be reliably reproduced or observed by them. Thus, the more scientific Flatlanders would conclude that these disappearing and reappearing things weren’t real; they were just someone’s hallucinations.

So what if psychic phenomenon (or some of them, anyway) are actually like that – caused by some unreliable, rare, randomly occurring interaction between our known world, and some physical laws we haven’t yet come to grips with? This is a far-fetched thought. But actually, you can’t completely dismiss it. The reason that I give it any regard is that I‘ve had 3 or 4 “funny feelings” myself over the course of my life. I knew something was going to happen and it turned out to be right. These weren’t very profound predictions on my part. Just simple stuff, like “my cousin and his parents are coming over to visit us right now”. These mostly happened when I was younger. Can’t say I’ve had such a feeling in the last 5 or 6 years.

Well, skeptics would ask me, how often did you have such a feeling and it turned out to be wrong? Yea, good point. I honestly don’t remember having a “funny feeling in the mind” and then being wrong about it. But I probably wouldn’t remember it, unless it were vindicated. We tend to remember the successes, not the failures.

Mary suggested that perhaps a new idea from physics about the universe being “holographic” in nature would support ESP, given that it more-or-less ties everything in the universe together. OK, here’s what I’ve heard about that, mostly from a Scientific American article. Basically, the hologram idea / hypothesis arose from the study of black holes, including Stephen Hawking’s work. It turns out that the entropy (i.e., state of organization versus decay and randomness) of black holes depends more closely on the surface area of the black hole, versus its volume as originally expected. Entropy is tied at the hip to the more formal, scientific definitions of “information”. Information is the opposite of entropy – organization can carry information, while disorganization cannot. E.g., a metal key is organized in such a way that it can open a lock. A pile of rust cannot do that. The key carries information, the disorganized rust does not. When the key rusts, its entropy increases, and its information decreases. Eventually it can no longer open the lock, as its information is gone.

Where does the hologram analogy to a black hole come from? Well, a hologram is a special 2-dimensional surface that has certain added information, such that when light is reflected from it to an “interacting system”, say a human being with normal eyesight, the added information gives the impression that the image is actually of a 3D object, not of a flat plane. The hologram’s “extra dimension” information is packed into its flat surface area.

Well, for a black hole, the maximum amount of organization it can have (versus a state of random decay; like rust compared against a metal key), is tied to how much surface area it has. However, the information conveyed through this “organization” relates to all 3 dimensions of the black hole. Thus, 2 dimensions tell you about all 3 dimensions. I don’t totally understand it, but the ultimate idea is that information may be a fundamental characteristic of the universe, as much as space, matter, energy and time are.

It’s thus imaginable that information (as the basic stuff of reality) is painted on a 3-dimentional “surface membrane” (I use the word “membrane” to mean any boundary to a multi-dimensional reality; the membrane boundary of a 2D plane is a set of 1D lines; the boundary of a 3D object is a set of 2D planes; thus, a 4D reality has a 3D “membrane”; etc.). As such, 3 dimensions would then give us the experience of our familiar 4-dimensional spacetime. But, even more exciting: the “holograph equivalence” theorists note that the 4-dimensional reality we know of, plus “information”, may in fact be the stage for a 5 dimensional reality. In such a model, the lower-dimensional world has particles and forces and all kinds of perturbations, whereas the higher-dimensional side of reality is symmetric and undisturbed. Could ESP and such be, in certain instances, just another 4-D information disturbance that a 5-dimension “background reality” can cause or be caused by? Just remember, a lot can be done with an extra dimension . . . .

To go out on a limb even further: a thinker named Ed Fredkin has been saying something similar about the centrality of information, though not from the perspective of black holes. Fredkin says that the Universe, at bottom, is a computer; like a computer, the most important thing is information, i.e. the program that makes a computer run. At bottom, the deepest level of reality is information – for both computers, in an operational sense, and for our universe, in an ontological sense, if Fredkin is right.

I could thus imagine (on a good day) a connection between a “holographic reality” and paranormal mind abilities – since the ultimate question of psychic powers is information conveyance (the spoon benders notwithstanding). But this would be very, very speculative; way out there beyond accepted science. Nonetheless, perhaps there are information conveyance mechanisms other than length, depth, width and time – the barriers of those dimensions could possibly be transcended if the
holograph equivalence hypothesis were pushed to the limit. And from Fredkin’s view, perhaps the usual restriction that signals need to cross length, depth, width and time is not as impermeable as we now think, since these dimensions are arguably just illusions. They are illusions controlled by information; as such, the barrier is one that information could possibly overcome. Perhaps the “core reality of information” is written so as to flow according to what appears to be time / space restrictions, but occasionally “hiccups” and jumps over the normal barriers (maybe thru some random quantum fluctuation that occasionally gets magnified into the macroworld?). This arguably might allow a small part of the future to wind up in your mind at an odd time. But it’s like an intermittent short-circuit in your car’s dashboard. It only happens when you least expect it, never in the repair shop.

This all sounds wonderful, but it would all go better with some psychedelic music from the late 1960s. It’s way out there, on an EXTREMELY thin reed of quasi-understanding. For now, I’ll take my working reality to be the Fab Four – time, depth, length, and width. And as to my cousin and Mary – well, I can just e-mail them, don’t need ESP or clairvoyance to keep in touch.