Ex-Stargate Head Ed May Unyielding Re Materialism, Slams Dean Radin |341|

Interesting comments. Perhaps this may be of interest, a post I made some time ago about some relatively minor events which happened to me, but which had a huge effect on my point of view - though not necessarily any answers:
Time - some personal experiences

Thanks! I remember reading J B Dunne's 'An Experiment with Time' about 20 years ago, and I thought he made quite a good argument for the existence of precognitive dreams. I've had some similar dream experiences so I agree that something's going on. It seems clear to me that the dreaming mind sometimes has access to information it 'shouldn't' have.

This suggests to me that 'information flow from the future to the past' - or something stranger - is a very common occurrence, maybe happening constantly in our subconscious mind - and if humans do this, then maybe animals and even plants do it as well. Maybe even subatomic particles. Feynman and Wheeler played with the idea of constant retrocausation in their 'transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics', and more recently Carver Mead (the man who created VLSI computer chips and probably knows his electromagnetics) seems to have resurrected that in 'Collective Electrodynamics'. But where we go from there, I don't know.

I do know that I spent some years thinking deeply about how to portray time travel realistically in science fiction, and the Transactional Interpretation seemed like the best way (from a narrative viewpoint) of dealing with retrocausation. It solves a lot of plot problems of the 'how do you avoid characters killing their grandfathers?' type: as author you just wave your hands and say, well if they wanted to do that then the universe simply wouldn't allow them to activate the time machine because (handwave) the quantum wavefunction goes wibbly-wobbly and they can't. But if we believe Wheeler/Feynman/Cramer, then the whole universe IS a time machine; there are trillions of wibbly-wobbly wavefunctions from the future to the past going on *all the time*, and that still seems like begging the question: WHY does one particular interaction get 'allowed' by the universe and another one disallowed? Why does one particular past/future get 'chosen' if it's not the present state-vector of the universe which is the thing doing the choosing? Is it something beyond our universe making the choice? Do some instants in time 'count more', have greater reality, than others, and if so, why?

Some channelled documents, such as A Course In Miracles, suggest that yes, there's something going on much like this and that most of the 'choices' we make are illusions and don't actually affect the universe - but some choices DO influence both past and future. With that small set of 'real' choices being based on something spiritual... eg how aligned they are with God or love or the wider universe. And that idea (that our universe is a tiny bubble of virtual-reality or illusion inside a much larger, more 'real' one that actually sets the rules) seems to explain a lot for me intellectually, as well as being emotionally satisfying.

One thing I find interesting is that British science fiction, by and large - compared to American - tends to have a lot of stories majoring on a 'psi' or 'spiritual' (rather than a nuts-and-bolts General Relativity) interpretation of time. Think 1970s Doctor Who and Sapphire & Steel as the classic examples of the subgenre. I guess I would put this down to the influence of writers like Dunne - and the general high status of the Spiritualism movement and the Society for Psychical Research in British elite society, at least up until WW2.

But psychical ideas do cross over into American 'nuts and bolts' SF. Star Trek is a good case - the 1992 Next Generation episode 'Cause and Effect' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_and_Effect_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)) is basically a clear smuggling of both synchronicity and precognitive psi into a nuts-and-bolts materialist framework. A lot of SF seems to act in this way - almost a way for materialists to 'safely' (ie, with some ironic distance) think about ideas they find very exciting and want intuitively/emotionally want to be true, but which are otherwise banned by the science in which they believe. But since discussion of psi is so often downplayed, many STEM people don't realise that these 'science-fictional' ideas first came from the psi world. (Often making the jump during the 1930s, which was the heydey of pulp/noir/horror/SF, and which was also the highpoint of Theosophy/Spiritualism, and the two worlds overlapped very considerably.)

Regards, Nate
 
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Great post!

A paradox is an indication that another dimension needs to be considered. How can one sail west and end up in the East? It's a paradox on a 2D surface, but the answer is in adding a 3rd dimension to the shape.

I made a post earlier on the 5th dimension which was completely ignored (most of my posts on the 5th dimension get ignored... I think because it seems too speculative and it's difficult to visualize except by two layers of metaphor, and by then... what are we really talking about)

I think of the soul as a 5D shape with time being the 4th dimension and meaning being the 5th dimension. (Materialism ends up with a meaningless universe because it entirely ignores the dimension of meaning)

Hi Hurmanetar. I like this idea of the '5th dimension', and I guess the idea of conceptualising psi/spirit as a dimension began with William Hamilton's quaternions (1843) and Edwin Abbot's Flatland (1884) - but I think perhaps that '5th dimension' is a whole lot bigger than just one mathematical dimension. I think it's possibly an infinitely dimensioned space. Remember that Einstein with Kaluza and Klein played with a 5-dimensional physics theory in 1921 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaluza–Klein_theory) and it doesn't predict anything like psi. It has trouble even describing electromagnetism.

But yes, I believe there's much more 'inside' our mind/soul/spirit than 'outside' it, and that there's an actual reality there which can be described by *a* physics (just not necessarily the one that describes our physical world).

Regards, Nate
 
As Ed May said:
17:40 “the only way you can have”…

29:50 “you can’t do that; you just can’t”

Then Alex hit the nail on the head: “the ASSUMPTION that consciousness is a product of the brain. It is an assumption.”

I guess that short-circuited Ed May's brain?

Btw, how on earth can anyone maintain a reductionalist materialist position by explaining away remote viewing and NDEs as seeing something in the future/pre-cognition?
 
Great interview!

Haven't read this whole thread so if its been brought up sorry

Am I mistaken or did May say that the brain collapsing wave functions is subject to distance..... basically 'it' is so weak as to be a negligible/non existent thing?

Another thing I noted..... May saying being cremated being a for sure certainty that one is dead.
Apparently he doesn't like the idea that as long as there is still an intact person, there's still a chance for that person imagining an NDE.

So I thought, but dead is dead, yeah? Whether your dead for 5 minutes or totally decomposed, you're dead.
 
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Precognition/retrocausality is intriguing to me, and in NDEs, although I think it's wrong, it seems like a 'null hypothesis' that's worth exploring to find out what precognition (of our everyday, physical world) *can't* account for.

Precognition is indeed the most parsimonious, and therefore, starting hypothesis for ESP-like psychic manifestations. Yet there are, actually, experimental data which it cannot explain - precise and repeatable psychophysical corellations between spatially distant, mutually isolated subjects (such as in remote staring, remote emotion and remote intention experiments). Look at the "Physiological correlations at a distance" section of the Dean Radin's "Evidence for Psi" scientific paper list.

And there is also psychokinesis, especially of macro-variety... The macro-PK is, like Stephen Braude noted, probably the strongest evidence against materialism - current physical theory, no matter how actively and creatively reinterpreted, simply cannot account for poltergeist-like stuff (that's why even some parapsychologists seem to be afraid of it, I think...).
 
Precognition is indeed the most parsimonious, and therefore, starting hypothesis for ESP-like psychic manifestations.

Honestly curious about this -> How can a backward arrow of causality be parsimonious? How does it work without a closed time loop....something that involves an infinite regression?

Yet there are, actually, experimental data which it cannot explain - precise and repeatable psychophysical corellations between spatially distant, mutually isolated subjects (such as in remote staring, remote emotion and remote intention experiments). Look at the "Physiological correlations at a distance" section of the Dean Radin's "Evidence for Psi" scientific paper list.

Thanks for this....need to push back against the precognition hypothesis which only leads parapsychology into a dead end IMO....

And there is also psychokinesis, especially of macro-variety... The macro-PK is, like Stephen Braude noted, probably the strongest evidence against materialism - current physical theory, no matter how actively and creatively reinterpreted, simply cannot account for poltergeist-like stuff (that's why even some parapsychologists seem to be afraid of it, I think...)

I think you're right about this. There could be an explanation of macro-PK but it's doubtful, and Consciousness-First explanations are better.
 
Am I mistaken or did May say that the brain collapsing wave functions is subject to distance..... basically 'it' is so weak as to be a negligible/non existent thing?

No your right... May appears to think the wave function of QM is a physical wave from his explanation... and I think he said he had been trained in QM.
 
No your right... May appears to think the wave function of QM is a physical wave from his explanation... and I think he said he had been trained in QM.

Ah. :)

Now I'm thinking how would that work with regards to experiment and observation of a result? If the cat were both a live and dead so to speak, and the
experimenter is watching the box on video from a thousand miles away, then uses a remote control to open the box and observe the result, according
to May, he's too far away to affect an outcome. Is this a valid argument to May's assertion?

I mean it would make more sense that collapsing wave function are in the domain of non locality rather than some kind of electromagnetic field, yeah?

I heard Brian Cox, who's a materialist, say once in one of his tv lectures that altering some particle here, that the entire universe instantly responds to accommodate that change.
 
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Honestly curious about this -> How can a backward arrow of causality be parsimonious? How does it work without a closed time loop....something that involves an infinite regression?

I don't think of it like a closed infinite loop, but rather an "oxbow" in the timeline which results in coincidence or near coincidence/interference of two points at different locations on the timeline. The folding of the 4D shape occurs in the 5th dimension resulting in this coincidence. We can't get stuck in a truly closed time loop by natural selection... if we had, then we wouldn't be here! ...or we already are in a time loop of sufficient radius that - like the earth - it appears flat.
 
Ah. :)

Now I'm thinking how would that work with regards to experiment and observation of a result? If the cat were both a live and dead so to speak, and the
experimenter is watching the box on video from a thousand miles away, then uses a remote control to open the box and observe the result, according
to May, he's too far away to affect an outcome. Is this a valid argument to May's assertion?

I mean it would make more sense that collapsing wave function are in the domain of non locality rather than some kind of electromagnetic field, yeah?

I heard Brian Cox, who's a materialist, say once in one of his tv lectures that altering some particle here, that the entire universe instantly responds to accommodate that change.

I don't know what May was actually talking about... it was incomprehensible... but it appeared classical.
 
I don't think of it like a closed infinite loop, but rather an "oxbow" in the timeline which results in coincidence or near coincidence/interference of two points at different locations on the timeline. The folding of the 4D shape occurs in the 5th dimension resulting in this coincidence. We can't get stuck in a truly closed time loop by natural selection... if we had, then we wouldn't be here! ...or we already are in a time loop of sufficient radius that - like the earth - it appears flat.

I'm not convinced we can look time as a spatial dimension. So I would question thinking of reality as a 4D shape if you're taking time as the 4th axis?
 
I'm not convinced we can look time as a spatial dimension. So I would question thinking of reality as a 4D shape if you're taking time as the 4th axis?

Perhaps calling time a "spatial" dimension stretches the common meaning of spatial too far... so we could call it a fundamental dimension and visualize it as a spatial dimension in order to explore it since it is mathematically a dimension perpendicular to the other spatial dimensions. Our normal waking consciousness is looking along the t-axis at a present reality that is opaque. But movement at a right angle to this axis (E-motion) provides a line of sight around the opaque present.
 
Perhaps calling time a "spatial" dimension stretches the common meaning of spatial too far... so we could call it a fundamental dimension and visualize it as a spatial dimension in order to explore it since it is mathematically a dimension perpendicular to the other spatial dimensions. Our normal waking consciousness is looking along the t-axis at a present reality that is opaque. But movement at a right angle to this axis (E-motion) provides a line of sight around the opaque present.

But I think this is ultimately assuming time is a spatial in that you can look around it. And what does it mean for a fundamental dimension to be perpendicular to the other spatial dimensions?

We know that there are savants with different non-paranormal skills - factoring primes, finding the hidden image in magic eye pictures even when shown the two needed collections of dots at different times, etc.

Precognition could simply be a combination of Psi and calculation of the most probable future. Or there could be a block multiverse (As Arvan suggests with the P2P simulation hypothesis) and precognition resonates with the most probably incoming future...though that isn't very parsimonious since we now are saying the block universe AND MWI are true without actual evidence for either.
 
Perhaps calling time a "spatial" dimension stretches the common meaning of spatial too far... so we could call it a fundamental dimension and visualize it as a spatial dimension in order to explore it since it is mathematically a dimension perpendicular to the other spatial dimensions. Our normal waking consciousness is looking along the t-axis at a present reality that is opaque. But movement at a right angle to this axis (E-motion) provides a line of sight around the opaque present.
Hurm,
The new popular term is orthogonal. In Euclidean geometry it does mean perpendicular. However, Euclidean geometry does not apply to the way you are using it in the context of space/time in the sense of Einstein's relativity. Orthogonal means something related in programming and information programming. It has always confused me and I remain that way.

Orthogonality is an important concept, addressing how a relatively small number of components can be combined in a relatively small number of ways to get the desired results. It is associated with simplicity; the more orthogonal the design, the fewer exceptions. This makes it easier to learn, read and write programs in a programming language.[1] The meaning of an orthogonal feature is independent of context; the key parameters are symmetry and consistency (for example, a pointer is an orthogonal concept). - Wiki

Maybe you guys can help me out. Reading modern science papers this term appears often.
 
But I think this is ultimately assuming time is a spatial in that you can look around it. And what does it mean for a fundamental dimension to be perpendicular to the other spatial dimensions?

Hurm,
The new popular term is orthogonal. In Euclidean geometry it does mean perpendicular. However, Euclidean geometry does not apply to the way you are using it in the context of space/time in the sense of Einstein's relativity. Orthogonal means something related in programming and information programming. It has always confused me and I remain that way.

Thanks for that. Yes Orthogonality is what I meant. Maybe one way to put it would be that an orthogonal dimension is the simplest way to express a similar difference. Where two lines intersect is the similarity or point of coincidence. Being orthogonal means that the variable in one dimension can be held constant while independently varying the other variable.

We know that there are savants with different non-paranormal skills - factoring primes, finding the hidden image in magic eye pictures even when shown the two needed collections of dots at different times, etc.

How do we know this is "non-paranormal"? It could be a type of Psi. For the savant that factors primes, the primes carry a special meaning and significance which elevates their 5th dimensional topography allowing a line of sight for them to be seen - like mountain peaks rising above the forest. Or if you like - like a folding of the landscape so that points of significance become coincident. You and I might not find that primes are anything to elicit an emotional response, but savants do love their numbers and it seems plausible that primes could elicit a special kind of emotional response to them.

Anything that carries some type of meaning or emotional significance is connected to all experiences of that meaning or emotional response. Remote viewers can view targets that are written in a sealed envelope... same mechanism could be at work in seeing the hidden image in magic eye pictures... no actual brain calculation is going on, but rather the dots - even incomplete and indecipherable - are a symbol inextricable associated with the meaning of the combined resultant picture and that meaning is a real shape or a real feature that can be observed.

Precognition could simply be a combination of Psi and calculation of the most probable future.

I don't think that kind of computational ability exists. This is especially true of the studies where presentiment responses occur before the computer's RNG chooses the stimulus.

Or there could be a block multiverse (As Arvan suggests with the P2P simulation hypothesis) and precognition resonates with the most probably incoming future...though that isn't very parsimonious since we now are saying the block universe AND MWI are true without actual evidence for either.

I don't have time at the moment to read that, but sounds interesting.
 
Thanks for that. Yes Orthogonality is what I meant. Maybe one way to put it would be that an orthogonal dimension is the simplest way to express a similar difference. Where two lines intersect is the similarity or point of coincidence. Being orthogonal means that the variable in one dimension can be held constant while independently varying the other variable.

Claim: Anything that carries some type of meaning or emotional significance is connected to all experiences of that meaning or emotional response.

I don't think that kind of computational ability exists. This is especially true of the studies where presentiment responses occur before the computer's RNG chooses the stimulus.
Thanks!!! That was very helpful.

I strongly agree with your claim. The best tools, in my humble opinion, for addressing measurements of emotional significance and for environmental meaning is from Bayesian Inference.
 
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T
How do we know this is "non-paranormal"? It could be a type of Psi. For the savant that factors primes, the primes carry a special meaning and significance which elevates their 5th dimensional topography allowing a line of sight for them to be seen - like mountain peaks rising above the forest. Or if you like - like a folding of the landscape so that points of significance become coincident. You and I might not find that primes are anything to elicit an emotional response, but savants do love their numbers and it seems plausible that primes could elicit a special kind of emotional response to them.

Fair enough though not sure why prime numbers would any dimensional topography?

Similarly with time, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to give it a spacial representation? Even to consider it orthogonal - why would you think you could hold the spatial dimensions constant while moving along a time "line"? It implies the future exists in a way that I'm not sure there's reason to believe - perhaps there is a "Res Potentia"* where the possible exists in a way different from the Actual Present...


*Coined by Kauffman - A Hypothesis: Res Potentia and Res Extensa Linked By Measurement, see also:

 
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