Do the Laws of Physics Rule Out the Paranormal?

Do the Laws of Physics Rule Out the Paranormal?



Allan Cybulskie

So, while reading the posts I looked at last week, I came across this post by Sean Carroll. Carroll is rather well-known in atheist circles for constantly arguing that based on what we know about the laws of physics certain phenomena can be ruled out a priori (which, I suppose, since he bases it on empirical and scientific examination, also makes it a posteriori. The perils of reading Kant [grin]). This is also what he attempts to do here: to show that by what we currently know about physics (in 2008) telekinesis and telepathy are ruled out.

So, even we were looking at the phenomena scientifically, why would we try to balance that? Why wouldn’t we just show that the phenomena that we’re considering were those sorts of cases? The only reason to invoke that they clash with the existing laws of physics is that we can’t or don’t want to take the time to actually show that they fall into the former category. And even if Carroll didn’t want to bother examining each individual case, surely it would make more sense to say that the ones that he and others have carefully examined and studied have always turned out to be in the former category, and so in order to bother investigating the new ones he’d need something special to make that worth his time. So not saying that he knows that it can’t be true, just that he needs something special — very reliable person, the phenomena is very repeatable, etc, etc — to make him think that this time will be different. So the only reason to bring in the “laws of physics” argument is to be able to dismiss the phenomena without having to actually demonstrate that the phenomena isn’t actually happening. Thus, it’s an argument that useless if they could demonstrate that it isn’t worth considering, just as we saw last week. Naturalists keep building theoretical commitments whose only use is for dismissing claims that they don’t have the evidence to actually show false, because if they had the evidence, they’d just use that instead of those commitments. Carroll’s use of the laws of physics here is no exception.

A good addendum to the above is Talbott's Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen? ->

The Impossibility of Mere Obedience to Law

The conviction that laws somehow give us a full accounting of events seems often to be based on the idea that they govern the world's substance or matter from outside, "making" things happen. If this is the case, however, then we must provide some way for matter to recognize and then obey these external laws. But, plainly, whatever supports this capacity for recognition and obedience cannot itself be the mere obedience. Anything capable of obeying wholly external laws is not only its obedience but also its capability, and this capability remains unexplained by the laws.

If, with so many scientists today, we construe laws as rules, we can put the matter this way: much more than rule-following is required of anything able to follow rules; conversely, no set of rules can by themselves explain the presence or functioning of that which is capable of following them.

It is, in other words, impossible to imagine matter that does not have some character of its own. To begin with, it must exist. But if it exists, it must do so in some particular manner, according to its own way of being. Even if we were to say, absurdly, that its only character is to obey external laws, this "law of obedience" itself could not be just another one of the external laws being obeyed. Something will be "going on" that could not be understood as obedience to law, and this something would be an essential expression of what matter was. To apprehend the world we would need to understand this expressive character in its own right, and we could never gain such an understanding solely through a consideration of external laws.

So we can hardly find coherence in the rather dualistic notion that physical laws reside, ghost-like, in some detached, abstract realm from which they impinge upon matter. But if, contrary to our initial assumption, we take laws to be in one way or another bound up with the world's substance — if we take them to be at least in part an expression of this substance — then the difficulty in the conventional view of law becomes even more intense. Surely it makes no sense to say that the world's material phenomena are the result — the wholly explained result — of matter obeying laws which it is itself busy expressing. In whatever manner we prefer to understand the material expression of the laws, this expression cannot be a matter of obedience to the laws being expressed! If whatever is there as the substance of the world at least in part determines the laws, then the laws cannot be said to determine what is there.

All this gives you some indication why so many scientists, when stepping back from the rather messy reality of their daily work and considering the character of their science, show such great reluctance to reckon with the substance of the observable world. They much prefer to conceive the explanatory value of science in terms of abstract laws — equations, rules, algorithms — which naturally remain gratifyingly lawful in an uncomplicated way. The world disappears into a vague notion of "whatever gives material reality to the laws".

But a willingness to consider this reality in its own terms immediately reveals the impossibility of the all-explaining laws with which science supposedly has to do. We come to realize that a physical phenomenon and its lawfulness must be considered as a unity — a syntactic-semantic unity of a sort that receives little recognition within science for the simple reason that physical phenomena (as opposed to their "governing" syntax) receive little recognition.

A common argument amongst parapsychologists is that paranormal phenomena can be explained without inventing new science. (I think this is an effort to be more acceptable to mainstream scientise (Normalists envy?).) But then an increasingly popular theory to help explain psychic phenomena is the Psi Field Hypothesis. In that, the influence of thought is described as "psi" and the medium of propagation for thought is described as the psi field. Psi is a nonphysical concept and some try to make it more agreeable to mainstream scientists by arguing that it is a natural product of brain.

So there are normalist parapsychologists arguing that psychic phenomena are delusion, fraud or normal mistaken as paranormal. Since that argument does not reasonably describe actual reported experience, a second group I will refer to as biological psi parapsychologists, has ventured further out on the frontier with the Psi Field Hypothesis. 

The jury is still out deciding if a biological psi explains apparent survived personality. If it does not, it becomes necessary to venture even further into the frontier with the Survival Hypothesis. These, I will refer to as dualists. The farther one ventures into the frontier, the fewer travelers one encounters, and therefore the less analytical support their theories enjoy.

The intellectual pressure is moving parapsychology further into the frontier. The political and economic pressure is drawing them toward the mainstream center.

As a practitioner--not a scientist--, the litmus test for me is how well a model describes reported experiences. Apparently, Sean Carroll's only test is if any proposed model requires as yet undefined principles of nature. Carroll's last statement is most revealing: 

"If parapsychologists followed the methodology of scientific inquiry, they would look what we know about the laws of physics, realize that their purported subject of study had already been ruled out, and within thirty seconds would declare themselves finished. Anything else is pseudoscience, just as surely as contemporary investigation into astrology, phrenology, or Ptolemaic cosmology."

"Pseudoscience" is the trump card skeptics play when they run out of logic. It is the ultimate insult and destroyer of emergent science. It is always based on the assumption that they are smart and the person interested in "pseudoscience" is stupid. This is not an intellectual argument and should be ignored as scientism.

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As an aside, I think the reason some parapsychologists are becoming more open to a dualist solution is that including a nonphysical aspect in the model enables relatively clean explanations. From my experience, I have decided that I am a reductionist because I assume the principles of nature are knowable and can be codified.

The trick is to recognize that there is a hierarchy of principles in which some preseed others in evolution. For instance, Psi space is conceptual (not new science) and physical space is objective (known science). If the influence of thought on physical space is modeled as a conceptual influence on objective space, the expected trans-etheric principle will be an influence on the concept defining the physical principle.

I am not sure how to model this idea. We see in EVP that a conceptually indeterminant signal is more easily influenced than a conceptually determinant signal. For instance, white noise is very random but it is also very conceptually determined. White noise is not so good for voice formation while a more chaotic noise like white noise frequently and randomly interrupted with noise spikes tends to be more useful for voice formation. Chaotic noise is much less determinant.

This can be studied as the physical process of stochastic amplification and the mental process of cognition. The only ingredient that has to be invented is psi as an influence and the psi field for propagation of that influence. The arrow of evolution in principle is that the conceptual influence of cognition precedes objective influence on the physical.

As a practitioner--not a scientist--, the litmus test for me is how well a model describes reported experiences. 

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From my experience, I have decided that I am a reductionist because I assume the principles of nature are knowable and can be codified.

These are assertions, with which I very strongly agree.  An Occam's razor cut in favor of Informational Realism may be justified by a simple model that presents and predicts occurrences of standard paranormal phenomena.  Synchronicity, two people thinking the same thing, dream messages, etc -- if predicted by the model -- move the ball forward and would lead to rational acceptance by the general public and experts alike.

Information theory and linguistics/semiotics are well developed science and could be bound together as substantial activity - which is intimately connected to - but discrete from physical activity.   If viewed as a separate generative level - each actual event could been seen as a joint evolution of physical objects and informational objects.  Science currently knows that multiple information objects exists before decoherence.  And the infosphere or other such concepts are already in widespread use.

 The computerised description and control of the physical environment, together with the digital construction of a synthetic world, are, finally, intertwined with a fourth area of application, represented by the transformation of the encyclopaedic macrocosm of data, information, ideas, knowledge, beliefs, codified experiences, memories, images, artistic interpretations and other mental creations into a global infosphere. The infosphere is the whole system of services and documents, encoded in any semiotic and physical media, whose contents include any sort of data, information and knowledge (for an analysis of the distinction between these three notions see Chapter 4), with no limitations either in size, typology or logical structure. Hence it ranges from alphanumeric texts (i.e. texts including letters, numbers and diacritic symbols) and multimedia products to statistical data, from films and hypertexts to whole text-banks and collections of pictures, from mathematical formulae to sounds and videoclips. As regards the infosphere, the symbolic-computational power of ICT tools is employed for ends that go beyond the solution of complex numerical problems, the control of a mechanical world or the creation of virtual models. - L. Floridi; page 8

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/dow...1&type=pdf

Looks like Annaka Harris - happens to be Sam Harris' wife - is also onboard the "Consciousness is a field" train ->

Think of consciousness like spacetime—a fundamental field that’s everywhere.

We have a deeply ingrained intuition that systems that act like us are conscious and those that don’t are not. We strongly believe, as a result, that consciousness arises out of complex processing in brains. But are these useful assumptions? When our intuitions don’t match the mounting evidence, the goal of science is to push past them—e.g., the earth is a sphere, disease is caused by germs, gravity warps spacetime. The idea that consciousness emerges out of non-conscious material, in fact, represents a kind of failure of the typical goal of scientific exploration: to arrive at as simple an explanation as possible. The celebrated biologist J.B.S. Haldane, for example, argued that the notion of the “strong emergence” of consciousness is “radically opposed to the spirit of science, which has always attempted to explain the complex in terms of the simple … If the scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them [signs of consciousness in inert matter], at least in rudimentary form, all through the universe.”

The combination problem may, in fact, be a reason to favor a version of panpsychism in which consciousness is fundamental in the form of a continuous, pervasive field, analogous to spacetime. Just as spacetime and gravity have an interactive relationship, consciousness can be thought of as a fundamental “field” that interacts with, and is integral to, matter. We typically don’t think of spacetime as bits and pieces that build on each other (it’s simply everywhere), and I don’t think we should be tempted to think of consciousness, if it is indeed a pervasive field, as divisible into building blocks either. Rather, it makes more sense to talk about a field that contains a range of content—the content depending on the other forces or fields it’s interacting with. In the same way that gravity is a two-way street—matter warps spacetime and the shape of spacetime determines how matter moves—a consciousness field would imbue matter with another property, giving rise to the range of content experienced. Under this view, content is divisible, but consciousness isn’t. Therefore, consciousness is also not interacting with itself, as it would be in the act of “combining.” Considering consciousness to be fundamental allows for matter to have a specific internal character everywhere, in all of its various forms.

If consciousness is fundamental, then the questions that prompt the combination problem are potentially the same as all the other questions we might ask about spacetime in which we don’t anticipate this problem. All matter would entail consciousness, and complex systems, such as human brains, would give rise to certain types of content in those locations in spacetime. Even if each individual atom has its own experience, consciousness itself is not necessarily isolated. The matter might be isolated, and therefore the content associated with the consciousness at that location is isolated. But consciousness itself would not be said to be isolated. Again, we can think of consciousness as analogous to spacetime: How it’s affected by matter depends on the matter in question (its mass, in the case of spacetime). Similarly, a consciousness field might be “shaped” by matter in terms of experiential quality or content. And this line of thinking yields interesting questions. How does the content that appears in an area of consciousness depend on the configuration of matter present in that location in spacetime? Are there experiences of overlapping or merging content?

From above, " ...consciousness can be thought of as a fundamental “field” that interacts with, and is integral to, matter."

The field concept turns out to be very useful for modeling functional metaphysics.* Rupert Sheldrake uses it in his Morphic Resonance model and many parapsychologists refer to "psi" as the influence of thought and the "Psi Field" as the medium of propagation for psi. In the Implicit Cosmology I work with I model reality as a nested hierarchy of life field with the "Source" life field acting as the reality field. As I think I have said in the past, in this model, reality consists of life fields and the expression of life fields. It is best thought of as fractals with a top fractal and each sub fractal as an aspect of the top more or less expressing the same functional characteristics. In the sense of a field, the attractor is the core concept.

Current thinking is that an important characteristic of the psi field is nonlocality. I concur with this from our study of transcommunication. The effect is that everywhere is here. There is no apparent distance in the psi field so that propagation of the influence of thought (psi) is not a physical corollary. Propagation of psi should be thought of as a change in attention.

If that model holds up, then it is a violation of known physical principles to think of it as interacting with the physical. That is why I try to model it as interacting with the concept of the physical. In effect, consciousness is not an emergent property of the physical. Rather, the physical is an emergent property of consciousness. Remember that we are like fish trying to model the stars.

*(I am saying "functional" to designate a metaphysical view that is not limited to physical. In other contexts, I would use "survival metaphysics," also to reference a greater reality. This, just to avoid limiting the view to known physics.)

From above, " ...consciousness can be thought of as a fundamental “field” that interacts with, and is integral to, matter."

The field concept turns out to be very useful for modeling functional metaphysics.* Rupert Sheldrake uses it in his Morphic Resonance model and many parapsychologists refer to "psi" as the influence of thought and the "Psi Field" as the medium of propagation for psi. In the Implicit Cosmology I work with I model reality as a nested hierarchy of life field with the "Source" life field acting as the reality field. As I think I have said in the past, in this model, reality consists of life fields and the expression of life fields. It is best thought of as fractals with a top fractal and each sub fractal as an aspect of the top more or less expressing the same functional characteristics. In the sense of a field, the attractor is the core concept.

Current thinking is that an important characteristic of the psi field is nonlocality. I concur with this from our study of transcommunication. The effect is that everywhere is here. There is no apparent distance in the psi field so that propagation of the influence of thought (psi) is not a physical corollary. Propagation of psi should be thought of as a change in attention.

If that model holds up, then it is a violation of known physical principles to think of it as interacting with the physical. That is why I try to model it as interacting with the concept of the physical. In effect, consciousness is not an emergent property of the physical. Rather, the physical is an emergent property of consciousness. Remember that we are like fish trying to model the stars.

*(I am saying "functional" to designate a metaphysical view that is not limited to physical. In other contexts, I would use "survival metaphysics," also to reference a greater reality. This, just to avoid limiting the view to known physics.)

There are a few points here that merit further comment:
"The effect is that everywhere is here." - this is an established 'metaphysical' idea that seems to be validated in quantum physics.
" In effect, consciousness is not an emergent property of the physical. Rather, the physical is an emergent property of consciousness." - ditto well-established.

Psi violates the "laws" of physics in the same way Quantum violates Newtonian - the Newtonian still functions perfectly well. Its just not a sufficient explanation.

If 'everywhere is here" and here is everywhere, what stops it all being just one undifferentiated whole? Functional sub-sets that appear to be differentiated - only not in an absolute sense - an emergent attribute.

It all depends on what laws are being obeyed - because most laws do no more than describe necessary limitations, or the attributes of a sub-set - and never ' absolute reality' per se. So there is always the prospect of conduct beyond whatever we think is law.

This POV will not yet sit within an empirical scientific framework. It's a philosophical POV constructed from knowledge sources beyond standard scientific method. This matters. There is no contest between the 2. They co-exist in natural harmony.

The application of scientific rigour to measure Psi is not the same thing as trying to 'prove' Psi. Psi, as phenomenon, is not objective, but an attribute of human awareness. For the most part it is unconscious and unschooled. It is wild and shy. Radin has established its presence is a weak form. At the very least anecdotal evidence indicates erratic spiking. People with a stable capacity to demonstrate Psi skills are tested with good results - but only under conducive conditions -and hence always the risk of fraud.

I'd encourage an exploration of this history of fraudulent conduct in Psi - and then compare that with other instances of fraudulent conduct. Of course there's fraud - its human conduct.

The idea of forcing proof against a mindset of denial of validity stems from an assumption that Psi is a violation of an understanding of reality in which it should not happen. It is an extraordinary claim - to violate a model of reality in which Psi is impossible. But that model resides entirely within the minds of a certain class of persons - like devotees of Newtonian physics who rejected all that came after. Other ways of knowing accommodate Psi. These ways of knowing constitute the majority of human experience.
  
Sheldrake demonstrates that we can engage in disciplined observation to discern that Psi is real. We can get caught up in pointless debates between the boosters and deniers in any field. Dancing is not fun is you don't/can't/won't let yourself go. You can explore dance as a disengaged 'skeptic' or as a dancer - and you will have two very different narratives.

If you look at the history of the acceptance of quantum science you will see a similar instance of 2 very different narratives.

The denial of Psi is the result of the merging of 2 influences since The Enlightenment - the emergence of materialism, and the intent of Christianity to invalidate any kind of 'magic' that could not be strictly attributed to Jesus - and hence exceptionally rare. Interest in Psi was pushed into a non-conforming class shunned by faith and science. And yet it persists beneath the taboo.

Psi does not violate laws. It violates rules. Materialism is a valid POV as the foundation to inquiry. It is, in essence, a 'metaphysical guess' - like the alternative. However human consciousness, unmolested by dogmas, naturally moves toward Psi as real and natural. Humans are inherently animistic (I wrote a bad Masters thesis on this theme). 

If we study Psi as if it a natural attribute of human consciousness we will have a better chance of getting to know it. Look at it this way, if you want to study a wild critter the last thing you do is create conditions that are not conducive to it appearing. You don't try to lure a fox into a pub's beer garden on a Saturday afternoon, and you don't go into the countryside with 50 drunken mates with boomboxes. 

I have had Psi experiences my whole life. I have never, and would never, participate in an experiment because I know that it's not something I can turn on on demand. I am not a 'psychic' in the sense that I have control over what happens. In any case I have no motive at all to 'prove' to anybody that Psi is real. Its a backdrop to my life these days, and if I want to ramp it up, I have to reach out to it, not call it to me.

I am fascinated by the strength in interest in Psi in academia. It marks a turning point in our culture. I grew up on a diet of post WW2 heroics and rationality. Now folk can grow up with Star Wars, Harry Potter and Marvel super heroes as mainstream cultural influences. That's such a different set of influences. Of course there's a demand to study Psi now - to render legitimate the ideas and ideals of childhood influence.

Can we fuse ethnography with mainstream scientific method - and apply an approach more predicated on biology rather than physics - and better - psychology rather than biology. Keep the rigour of the method but shift the foundation upon which a hypothesis is established?

A Response to “Quantum Misuse in Psychic Literature

Bernardo Kastrup, PhD

ABSTRACT: This invited article is a response to the paper “Quantum Misuse in Psychic Literature,” by Jack A. Mroczkowski and Alexis P. Malozemoff, published in this issue of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Whereas I sympathize with Mroczkowski’s and Malozemoff’s cause and goals, and I recognize the problem they attempted to tackle, I argue that their criticisms often overshot the mark and end up adding to the confusion. I address nine specific technical points that Mroczkowski and Malozemoff accused popular writers in the fields of health care and parapsychology of misunderstanding and misrepresenting. I argue that, by and large—and contrary to Mroczkowski’s and Malozemoff’s claims—the state-ments made by these writers are often reasonable and generally consistent with the current state of play in foundations of quantum mechanics.