{"id":384,"date":"2007-03-24T14:06:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-24T14:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2007\/03\/24\/384\/"},"modified":"2007-03-24T14:06:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-24T14:06:00","slug":"384","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=384","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

I was swapping thoughts the other day with my correspondent from Illinois (Dr. Mary S.) regarding paranormal psychic powers<\/span> like clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition. (Let\u2019s not even get into spoon bending<\/span> 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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\u2019t meant to be.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019t take claims of paranormal abilities too seriously.<\/p>\n

However . . . . I\u2019m not 100% sure that there\u2019s 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<\/span> scenario (recall Edward Abbot\u2019s 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\u2019t have the means to document and understand what was happening; it couldn\u2019t be reliably reproduced or observed by them. Thus, the more scientific Flatlanders would conclude that these disappearing and reappearing things weren\u2019t real; they were just someone\u2019s hallucinations. <\/p>\n

So what if psychic phenomenon (or some of them, anyway) are actually like that \u2013 caused by some unreliable, rare, randomly occurring interaction between our known world, and some physical laws we haven\u2019t 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\u2018ve had 3 or 4 \u201cfunny feelings\u201d myself over the course of my life. I knew something was going to happen and it turned out to be right. These weren\u2019t very profound predictions on my part. Just simple stuff, like \u201cmy cousin and his parents are coming over to visit us right now\u201d. These mostly happened when I was younger. Can\u2019t say I\u2019ve had such a feeling in the last 5 or 6 years. <\/p>\n

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\u2019t remember having a \u201cfunny feeling in the mind\u201d and then being wrong about it. But I probably wouldn\u2019t remember it, unless it were vindicated. We tend to remember the successes, not the failures. <\/p>\n

Mary suggested that perhaps a new idea from physics about the universe being \u201cholographic\u201d in nature would support ESP, given that it more-or-less ties everything in the universe together. OK, here\u2019s what I\u2019ve heard about that, mostly from a Scientific American article<\/a>. Basically, the hologram idea \/ hypothesis arose from the study of black holes, including Stephen Hawking\u2019s 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 \u201cinformation\u201d. Information is the opposite of entropy \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cinteracting system\u201d, 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\u2019s \u201cextra dimension\u201d information is packed into its flat surface area. <\/p>\n

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 \u201corganization\u201d relates to all 3 dimensions of the black hole. Thus, 2 dimensions tell you about all 3 dimensions. I don\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s thus imaginable that information (as the basic stuff of reality) is painted on a 3-dimentional \u201csurface membrane\u201d (I use the word \u201cmembrane\u201d 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 \u201cmembrane\u201d; 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 . . . . <\/p>\n

To go out on a limb even further: a thinker named Ed Fredkin<\/a> 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 \u2013 for both computers, in an operational sense, and for our universe, in an ontological sense, if Fredkin is right.<\/p>\n

I could thus imagine (on a good day) a connection between a \u201cholographic reality\u201d and paranormal mind abilities \u2013 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 \u2013 the barriers of those dimensions could possibly be transcended if the
\nholograph 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 \u201chiccups\u201d 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\u2019s like an intermittent short-circuit in your car\u2019s dashboard. It only happens when you least expect it, never in the repair shop.<\/p>\n

This all sounds wonderful, but it would all go better with some psychedelic music<\/span> from the late 1960s. It\u2019s way out there, on an EXTREMELY thin reed of quasi-understanding. For now, I\u2019ll take my working reality to be the Fab Four \u2013 time, depth, length, and width. And as to my cousin and Mary \u2013 well, I can just e-mail them, don\u2019t need ESP or clairvoyance to keep in touch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}