He may have unraveled the secret of synchronicity. Will science prove him right?|306|

Sheldrake also mentioned there being two arrows of causation that meet in the present -> the usual forward causation and the backward causation from virtual futures.

Sadly this was a quick comment in an interview rather than an extended treatment, so not sure if he's elaborated on this.

edit: ah, here's something about it, but sadly also not in detail.

"Minds are extended beyond brains not only in space but also in time, and connect us to our own pasts through memory and to virtual futures, among which we choose."
The idea of two arrows of causation is becoming increasingly well established in QM circles, and it is the basis of my proposed mechanism. I should offer the disclaimer that I'm less committed to the particular mechanism I proposed (backward influence in neuronal microstructures via entanglement) than I am the basic idea that ESP phenomena can be explained as a kind of memory for our own future emotional upheavals.

I disagree with Sheldrake (and with Alex and probably many on this forum) that "minds beyond brains" is how we're going to solve the problem of psi. I think "brains through time" would be a better way of putting it. My mind doesn't connect to your brain and can't know your experience right now ... but my brain now can connect to my brain at a future time point when you have shared your experience with me. This produces the effects that would be studied under the rubric of transpersonal psychology, but the mechanism is far more PhilDickian. :-)
 
Eric's ideas fit with Sheldrake's MR, in my humble opinion. Maybe he will compare and contrast his stances with Sheldrake's writings.

Here is a quote from Sheldrake about Gibson. I suggest there is a theme in these three writers, which proposes the reality of future "information objects" interacting in a communicative manner with current observers. The connection being shared meaning that is independent of time-frame.
I contrast my ideas with Sheldrake's MR in that I don't want to explain psi using "fields" or "resonance." I'm not persuaded there is actual evidence for fields--morphic, Akashic, consciousness, etc.--and that this is really a metaphor that people are reifying right and left, because it is hard to think of a better way to explain various anomalous phenomena like psi. But I think if we allow ourselves to think in terms of precognition and retrocausality--a more PhilDickian universe, in other words--it explains psi phenomena (at least ESP) better, including explaining its characteristic limitations and quirks -- for example, its personal, memory-like, associative character, and the importance of real-world feedback and confirmation.
 
The eye is a receiver and it adds little or no mutual information to the patterned array of photons. The opening statement of your link (excellent article) says it all: "These signals are then sent through the optic nerve to higher centers in the brain for further processing necessary for perception"

Yet we have multiple lines of strong evidence that without the input from the retina the higher centres in the brain will not even develop in the same way. The higher centres completely depend on those receptors. In fact, recent research indicates that the plasticity of the visual cortex allows to it be "repurposed" for auditory and tactile processing in the congenitally blind. An adult wired in such a way would be unable to process the mad flow of information if subsequently healthy retinae were attached.
 
The idea of two arrows of causation is becoming increasingly well established in QM circles, and it is the basis of my proposed mechanism. I should offer the disclaimer that I'm less committed to the particular mechanism I proposed (backward influence in neuronal microstructures via entanglement) than I am the basic idea that ESP phenomena can be explained as a kind of memory for our own future emotional upheavals.

I disagree with Sheldrake (and with Alex and probably many on this forum) that "minds beyond brains" is how we're going to solve the problem of psi. I think "brains through time" would be a better way of putting it. My mind doesn't connect to your brain and can't know your experience right now ... but my brain now can connect to my brain at a future time point when you have shared your experience with me. This produces the effects that would be studied under the rubric of transpersonal psychology, but the mechanism is far more PhilDickian. :)

Hey Eric,

Have you looked into the role of the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) in the visual system?

Whereas it was previously considered a relay nucleus for taking information from the retina, sorting it, and sending it off towards the visual cortex, we now know that there are at least as many connections coming from the visual cortex back the LGN. Think about that! What might that mean in terms of the actual timing of perceptions, and possible implications for precognition?

(Incidentally, some of these feedback loops have been shown to be inhibitory in nature. If we imagine a brain state where these inhibitory loops are compromised, and experiences become unfiltered, might we describe hyperlucidity?)
 
I think "brains through time" would be a better way of putting it. My mind doesn't connect to your brain and can't know your experience right now ... but my brain now can connect to my brain at a future time point when you have shared your experience with me

Brains through time, (from their perspective of a spatial pattern) is correct as far as I'm concerned, but then you go off track and focus purely on brains in the future affecting brains in present, and ignore past brain states affecting future brain states. You also ignore relativity - that space and time are one thing, and ignore our common experience of a shared reality.

Once you invoke a temporal effect, you're inevitably invoking a spatial effect due to our understanding of space-time, so it makes no sense to say 'my mind doesn't connect to your brain'... (I mean, what do you think you're doing when your having sex? How do you want to explain epigenetic inheritance via IVF?) ...and the clues provided by anomalous past experiences (time-like), present experiences (space-like) and future experiences (time-like) are exactly what people experience.

Hanging everything on the future doesn't make any sense, it simply doesn't fit with the phenomena, or the evidence.
 
Brains through time, (from their perspective of a spatial pattern) is correct as far as I'm concerned, but then you go off track and focus purely on brains in the future affecting brains in present, and ignore past brain states affecting future brain states. You also ignore relativity - that space and time are one thing, and ignore our common experience of a shared reality.

Once you invoke a temporal effect, you're inevitably invoking a spatial effect due to our understanding of space-time, so it makes no sense to say 'my mind doesn't connect to your brain'... (I mean, what do you think you're doing when your having sex? How do you want to explain epigenetic inheritance via IVF?) ...and the clues provided by anomalous past experiences (time-like), present experiences (space-like) and future experiences (time-like) are exactly what people experience.

Hanging everything on the future doesn't make any sense, it simply doesn't fit with the phenomena, or the evidence.

Common experience of a shared reality doesn't necessarily mean the reality really is shared. Sex, as Slavoj Zizek cynically insists, is masturbation with a partner, etc., and one of the masterful illusions of the brain is to coordinate social experiences with others; the temporal shenanigans pointed to by Libet's work (and that my proposed precognitive circuits would help explain) account for the illusion of simultaneity of social (and sexual) experience.

You'll have to elaborate what you mean by epigenetic inheritance via IVF and how that relates to this discussion. I'm simply trying to explain veridical ESP experiences and the fact that they are so memory-like in their character (highly personal, associative, emotional, loosely but not totally matching "ground truth", connected to reward/enjoyment, etc.). My touchstone is JW Dunne's writing -- his veridical dreams on the surface suggested a range of anomalous cognition (phantasms of the living, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.), but when examined forensically, they consistently turned out to be dreams of imminent experiences of learning emotionally salient news in the paper or from friends. I'm just suggesting re-looking at a lot of the data across ESP research (and psychical research more generally) and seeing if they do not also provide evidence of this kind of relationship to ourselves and our own learning/reward across time, but disguised as something else.
 
Common experience of a shared reality doesn't necessarily mean the reality really is shared. Sex, as Slavoj Zizek cynically insists, is masturbation with a partner, etc., and one of the masterful illusions of the brain is to coordinate social experiences with others; the temporal shenanigans pointed to by Libet's work (and that my proposed precognitive circuits would help explain) account for the illusion of simultaneity of social (and sexual) experience.

You'll have to elaborate what you mean by epigenetic inheritance via IVF and how that relates to this discussion. I'm simply trying to explain veridical ESP experiences and the fact that they are so memory-like in their character (highly personal, associative, emotional, loosely but not totally matching "ground truth", connected to reward/enjoyment, etc.). My touchstone is JW Dunne's writing -- his veridical dreams on the surface suggested a range of anomalous cognition (phantasms of the living, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.), but when examined forensically, they consistently turned out to be dreams of imminent experiences of learning emotionally salient news in the paper or from friends. I'm just suggesting re-looking at a lot of the data across ESP research (and psychical research more generally) and seeing if they do not also provide evidence of this kind of relationship to ourselves and our own learning/reward across time, but disguised as something else.

I have no problem with anomalous affects from the future being a perspective of these phenomena. I just have a problem with you hanging everything on the future. You're chucking the baby out with the bathwater.

IVF Epigenetic inheritance studies show very specific past sensory/fear associations made by the male donor are passed on to offspring in a weakened way which is difficult to explain. The offspring have never been exposed to the sensory stimuli, yet it appears they experience fear when they are exposed, controls do not. That's the specific experience of an organism in the past, affecting an organism in the future.

How are you gonna explain apparitional experiences like the Roman ghosts seen by Harry Martindale in York, or Time Slip phenomena. They all show past experience can affect a future experience... and a specific persons mind/experience can be connected to your brain in some way.

Provided that there is some past pattern which has a reasonably close match to a present pattern available to both parties, and that there has been a lack of coherent interference related to those patterns during the intervening period of time, then somebody in the present can experience something from the past which is quite individual in nature. Normally coherent interference just results in us experiencing the sum (the blurred average) of these experiences.

In my woman in a box thought experiment, Freda dies because of something she does in the past, and she doesn't know about her death and can't do anything about it. Relevant systems appear to combine in this reality, even if they are hidden and secret - the external world is shared. Freda is no longer alive because of what she stored in the system. She never gets to experience the future.
 
Common experience of a shared reality doesn't necessarily mean the reality really is shared. Sex, as Slavoj Zizek cynically insists, is masturbation with a partner, etc., and one of the masterful illusions of the brain is to coordinate social experiences with others; the temporal shenanigans pointed to by Libet's work (and that my proposed precognitive circuits would help explain) account for the illusion of simultaneity of social (and sexual) experience.

You'll have to elaborate what you mean by epigenetic inheritance via IVF and how that relates to this discussion. I'm simply trying to explain veridical ESP experiences and the fact that they are so memory-like in their character (highly personal, associative, emotional, loosely but not totally matching "ground truth", connected to reward/enjoyment, etc.). My touchstone is JW Dunne's writing -- his veridical dreams on the surface suggested a range of anomalous cognition (phantasms of the living, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc.), but when examined forensically, they consistently turned out to be dreams of imminent experiences of learning emotionally salient news in the paper or from friends. I'm just suggesting re-looking at a lot of the data across ESP research (and psychical research more generally) and seeing if they do not also provide evidence of this kind of relationship to ourselves and our own learning/reward across time, but disguised as something else.

Here some other food for thought for you, Eric (and further stuff which appear to be at odds with your theory): bio-PK, that is, precisely simultaneous and strictly harmonised (or "sychronised", to apply this much-used here term again), distant ("non-local"?)and psysiological (or, probably, physiologically manifested) interaction between two living beings. The range of such phenomena are quite wide, from remote staring (also remote emotion, remote intention etc.) to healing and cursing. For a quick example, look at this famous video by Michael Persinger:


And, for more information, read studies under heading "Physiological correlations at a distance" on Dean Radin's Psi Evidence page.

Looking at this materials, it is very hard to believe that psi is exclusively "intrapersonal" phenomenon: these highly precise and visible corellations seem to imply that there is an "interpersonal" type of psi as well. That is, Radin's proverbial "entangled minds" (whether the entanglement is "quantum" or not)...
 
I have no problem with anomalous affects from the future being a perspective of these phenomena. I just have a problem with you hanging everything on the future. You're chucking the baby out with the bathwater.

IVF Epigenetic inheritance studies show very specific past sensory/fear associations made by the male donor are passed on to offspring in a weakened way which is difficult to explain. The offspring have never been exposed to the sensory stimuli, yet it appears they experience fear when they are exposed, controls do not. That's the specific experience of an organism in the past, affecting an organism in the future.

How are you gonna explain apparitional experiences like the Roman ghosts seen by Harry Martindale in York, or Time Slip phenomena. They all show past experience can affect a future experience... and a specific persons mind/experience can be connected to your brain in some way.

Provided that there is some past pattern which has a reasonably close match to a present pattern available to both parties, and that there has been a lack of coherent interference related to those patterns during the intervening period of time, then somebody in the present can experience something from the past which is quite individual in nature. Normally coherent interference just results in us experiencing the sum (the blurred average) of these experiences.

In my woman in a box thought experiment, Freda dies because of something she does in the past, and she doesn't know about her death and can't do anything about it. Relevant systems appear to combine in this reality, even if they are hidden and secret - the external world is shared. Freda is no longer alive because of what she stored in the system. She never gets to experience the future.

I don't know enough details about the Martindale case, but some time-slip cases can be explained as precognition of learning about a historical episode, experienced as a hallucination. I'm not saying this is the only or necessarily the best explanation, but I'm asking people to consider it, to see how far the explanation leads us. There's no way to know Martindale was seeing real Roman soldiers that actually existed. From the snippets I have read, the "veridicality" of the case seems to rest on details of the shields and sandals he claims to have seen, which were only verified later (but still, it seems, within his lifetime); how do we know he didn't read an archaeological report or see a TV documentary about Romans later in his life, and that this didn't resonate backward in his associative precognitive memory to appear as a vision/hallucination when working in that cellar? (Remember, he fell from a ladder--how do we know he didn't hit his head, which might have triggered a precognitive experience?)

I'm not trying to be stubborn here, but I don't see how we can assume that time slips are genuinely intersections or resonances across history. Establishing veridicality is a problem with those cases -- we don't know that a Roman legion like the one Martindale described passed along that road in exactly that way, but we do know the human imagination is quite remarkable for creating realistic scenes of things that never really happened. Dreams, for instance, can be intricately (and even realistically) detailed.

While something like morphic resonance or Bohmian resonance (which I take you to be advocating?) is a seductive model, somehow it lacks traction for me -- seems "hand wavy," if you know what I mean. Not that mine doesn't also have its hand-wavy elements, so maybe it boils down to a matter of taste. But I'm just not convinced that patterns distant in spacetime resonate or interact just because they are similar -- who or what defines "similarity" of a form or a pattern? Why isn't my daily commute to work the most paranormally eventful part of the day, full of time-slips; it ought to be, because literally every configuration and pattern repeats.

As far as the epigenetic inheritance of experiences, this is a literature (bio-PK as a subset of PK more generally) that I'm not as versed in, and I don't claim that my model explains it. My only caution would be that there, as in ESP research, we should be watchful of potential illusions in the data caused by failure to incorporate our own future actions as well as our own influence on ourselves in the past. If I seem to be overemphasizing the temporal dimension, it is because I think it is so easily overlooked.
 
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I think we probably have to accept the current fragility of any model trying to explain any Psi effect.

I mean even the idea the QM is involved with consciousness remains controversial, though perhaps less so now. Even quantum biology itself is a new, and thus fragile, discipline.
 
I don't know enough details about the Martindale case, but some time-slip cases can be explained as precognition of learning about a historical episode, experienced as a hallucination. I'm not saying this is the only or necessarily the best explanation, but I'm asking people to consider it, to see how far the explanation leads us. There's no way to know Martindale was seeing real Roman soldiers that actually existed. From the snippets I have read, the "veridicality" of the case seems to rest on details of the shields and sandals he claims to have seen, which were only verified later (but still, it seems, within his lifetime); how do we know he didn't read an archaeological report or see a TV documentary about Romans later in his life, and that this didn't resonate backward in his associative precognitive memory to appear as a vision/hallucination when working in that cellar? (Remember, he fell from a ladder--how do we know he didn't hit his head, which might have triggered a precognitive experience?)

I'm not trying to be stubborn here, but I don't see how we can assume that time slips are genuinely intersections or resonances across history. Establishing veridicality is a problem with those cases -- we don't know that a Roman legion like the one Martindale described passed along that road in exactly that way, but we do know the human imagination is quite remarkable for creating realistic scenes of things that never really happened. Dreams, for instance, can be intricately (and even realistically) detailed.

While something like morphic resonance or Bohmian resonance (which I take you to be advocating?) is a seductive model, somehow it lacks traction for me -- seems "hand wavy," if you know what I mean. Not that mine doesn't also have its hand-wavy elements, so maybe it boils down to a matter of taste. But I'm just not convinced that patterns distant in spacetime resonate or interact just because they are similar -- who or what defines "similarity" of a form or a pattern? Why isn't my daily commute to work the most paranormally eventful part of the day, full of time-slips; it ought to be, because literally every configuration and pattern repeats.

As far as the epigenetic inheritance of experiences, this is a literature (bio-PK as a subset of PK more generally) that I'm not as versed in, and I don't claim that my model explains it. My only caution would be that there, as in ESP research, we should be watchful of potential illusions in the data caused by failure to incorporate our own future actions as well as our own influence on ourselves in the past. If I seem to be overemphasizing the temporal dimension, it is because I think it is so easily overlooked.

I'm only advocating my own idea's that fit with the evidence, I'm not advocating anybody else's ideas.

I don't think just relying on the future to explain 'everything', fits what we know about the world, or is in the least bit tenable on it's own to explain the wide range of interesting phenomena. Indeed your insistence that it is sufficient, is beginning to sound not just stubborn, but a bit silly to me.

I was going to respond to your comments about Harry Martindale etc... but there's no point. People can easily judge for themselves.
 
On Jeroen's point...

Most people thing that models and theories (by default) exclude the possibility or truthiness of other models.

So we (intuitive default) to exclusive OR aka XOR in logic.

However, unless the underlying theory specificly dictates and excludes (and proves so!) the existence of other models, the OR should be by default inclusive , OR in logic.

So possibilities with an example:

"Model 1 is CORRECT" OR "Model 2 is correct" (this could continue.... with other models) could mean various options:
Model 1 is correct AND Model 2 is correct [both at the same time, to the concept space that models apply to]
Model 1 is correct AND model 2 is incorrect
Model 1 is incorrect and Model 2 is correct

Logically the only proposition (in two-value Boolean logic) that would differ in terms of truth value is: "model 1 is incorrect" AND "model 2 is incorrect".

Yes, how did Fitzgerald put it in his own words:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vedic philosophy is often based on multi-valued logic, and as such has much more expressive power than the so often (in West) used Boolean logic, and by default the very human implicit assumption of exclusivity in OR sentences (XOR).

Or as Thomas Nagel puts it in "The View from Nowhere":

What is the super-set of all truths? Does it not contain all truths, even the ones that are mutually in contradiction and exclusive?

That is the order of highest truth, imho.
 
On Jeroen's point...

Most people thing that models and theories (by default) exclude the possibility or truthiness of other models.

So we (intuitive default) to exclusive OR aka XOR in logic.

However, unless the underlying theory specificly dictates and excludes (and proves so!) the existence of other models, the OR should be by default inclusive , OR in logic.

So possibilities with an example:

"Model 1 is CORRECT" OR "Model 2 is correct" (this could continue.... with other models) could mean various options:
Model 1 is correct AND Model 2 is correct [both at the same time, to the concept space that models apply to]
Model 1 is correct AND model 2 is incorrect
Model 1 is incorrect and Model 2 is correct

Logically the only proposition (in two-value Boolean logic) that would differ in terms of truth value is: "model 1 is incorrect" AND "model 2 is incorrect".

Yes, how did Fitzgerald put it in his own words:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vedic philosophy is often based on multi-valued logic, and as such has much more expressive power than the so often (in West) used Boolean logic, and by default the very human implicit assumption of exclusivity in OR sentences (XOR).

Or as Thomas Nagel puts it in "The View from Nowhere":

What is the super-set of all truths? Does it not contain all truths, even the ones that are mutually in contradiction and exclusive?

That is the order of highest truth, imho.
Or. On the mountaintop--no truth, no meaning. No nothing. ;)
 
Regarding this quote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

For a long time I struggled with this. I could only manage to grasp one point of view, which seemed to make all others if not incorrect, at the very least unimportant. But at some stage, not through any great study or contemplation, just through living in this world, it became clear to me that mutually incompatible ideas could be simultaneously valid and correct. That's not a first rate intelligence. That's just life.
 
Regarding this quote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

For a long time I struggled with this. I could only manage to grasp one point of view, which seemed to make all others if not incorrect, at the very least unimportant. But at some stage, not through any great study or contemplation, just through living in this world, it became clear to me that mutually incompatible ideas could be simultaneously valid and correct. That's not a first rate intelligence. That's just life.
But how do we determine what is right and what is wrong? There is a danger, I think, that people allow that sentiment to slide into a kind of moral relativism.
 
Regarding this quote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

For a long time I struggled with this. I could only manage to grasp one point of view, which seemed to make all others if not incorrect, at the very least unimportant. But at some stage, not through any great study or contemplation, just through living in this world, it became clear to me that mutually incompatible ideas could be simultaneously valid and correct. That's not a first rate intelligence. That's just life.
How would ideas like, the Tao, neutral monism, wave/particle, matter/energy - not all be examples of a complementary (dipole) PoV? I tend to see a world that is "fuzzy" in nature. Processes are mostly stochastic in outcomes, and in these resulting outcomes one should expect a range of results and an eventual equilibrium of opposing results.
 
But there's another -- to my mind more parsimonious -- way of looking at it: The one-stop-shop for both the data (what's at the site) and the metadata (the identity of the site) is his own future, when he learns what his task was and whether he got it right.
Hi Eric... I don't see how this solves the problem. for example, Super psi has been floated around as an explanation for mediumship... i.e. the medium isn't really connecting with a deceased loved one, just connecting with the field of consciousness (as if there is some distinction, but that's a digression). applying precognition to this one is a mess as it involves all sorts of unexplained hypothesized timelines.
 
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