The A Priori Case for the Paranormal? [Resources]

My using "a priori" here means before even looking at any evidence [from parapsychology], one can make a case for the paranormal.

Off the top of my head a few things I think are worth covering:

- Irreducibility of Consciousness, which then includes the impossibility of "physical" matter to store memories.

- Ways in which Mind is different from Matter

- Ways in which studying Matter seems to run into potential cases of Mind (Fine Tuning, certain QM interpretations)

- The lack of any clear model for Causation.

- The varied -isms, including Theism, that can be argued for as live possibilities which would accommodate paranormal claims.

Will post some things for all of these, though admittedly it's not that likely to be new stuff. Just figured it might be useful to collect it all in one thread.

[Note that Sci prefers for any discussion of anything he posts in this thread, and for meta discussion about this thread itself, to occur in The A Priori Case for the Paranormal? [companion discussion thread]. Posts to this thread that better belong in that thread are subject to being moved there. Several such posts that preexisted this note have, according to Sci's wishes, been moved there. --This note added by Laird with Sci's endorsement on 2024-07-19]

First post regarding the immateriality of Consciousess

Probably the most famous entry would be the Hard Problem of Consciousness by David Chalmers. I linked the IEP entry as I think it provides a pretty good introduction to the problem.

However, I'd also note that the consideration of the divide between the physical and mental can go back, even to the Ancient Grecian atomist/materialist Democritus:

Intellect: “Color is by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void.”

Senses: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.”

As Democritus noted, the evidence for the supposed atoms must come by way of the senses that are part of the consciousness supposedly generated by the atoms.

The neuroscientist Smythies makes a similar observation when he asks, "How can the brain be in the head when the head is in the brain?"

Even atheist author of Why I am Not a Christian Bertrand Russell noted the divide when he said, "It is obvious that a man who can see, knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics."

There are varied other examples of this "Hard Problem" divide between Mind and Matter being known in some fashion long before Chalmer's birth but I think it's worth expanding on the "Hard" aspects of Mind.

At least based on his original conception Chalmers seems to think there are in fact Easy Problems, relating to information process. However it's worth noting EJ Lowe's There are No Easy Problems of Consciousness.

This paper challenges David Chalmers’ proposed division of the problems of consciousness into the ‘easy’ ones and the ‘hard’ one, the former allegedly being susceptible to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms and the latter supposedly turning on the fact that experiential ‘qualia’ resist any sort of functional definition. Such a division, it is argued, rests upon a misrepresention of the nature of human cognition and experience and their intimate interrelationship, thereby neglecting a vitally important insight of Kant. From a Kantian perspective, our capacity for conceptual thought is so inextricably bound up with our capacity for phenomenal consciousness that it is an illusion to imagine that there are any ‘easy’ problems of consciousness, resolvable within the computational or neural paradigms.

Also see Fodor's Trinity, which notes that there are at least three Hard Problems:

[S]ome of the most pervasive properties of minds seem so mysterious as to raise the Kantian-sounding question how a materialistic psychology is even possible. Lots of mental states are conscious, lots of mental states are intentional, and lots of mental processes are rational, and the question does rather suggest itself how anything that is material could be any of these.

Will get more into these divides in the next post...

Also see Fodor's Trinity, which notes that there are at least three Hard Problems:

[S]ome of the most pervasive properties of minds seem so mysterious as to raise the Kantian-sounding question how a materialistic psychology is even possible. Lots of mental states are conscious, lots of mental states are intentional, and lots of mental processes are rational, and the question does rather suggest itself how anything that is material could be any of these.

Will get more into these divides in the next post...

So I'd divide these into Subjective Awareness, Thoughts about Reality, and application [of Reason].

I think the previous post gave an intro to the Hard Problem of Subjectivity, but I would include the Empirical Case Against Materialism along with my prior links as something beyond an introduction but still IMO mostly graspable without too much diving into the weeds of technical philosophical terminology.

So next up is Intentionality, aka The Aboutness of Thoughts. Starting with the IEP entry

If I think about a piano, something in my thought picks out a piano. If I talk about cigars, something in my speech refers to cigars. This feature of thoughts and words, whereby they pick out, refer to, or are about things, is intentionality. In a word, intentionality is aboutness.

The major role played by intentionality in affairs of the mind led Brentano (1884) to regard intentionality as “the mark of the mental”; a necessary and sufficient condition for mentality. But some non-mental phenomena seem to display intentionality too—pictures, signposts, and words, for example. Nevertheless, the intentionality of these phenomena seems to be derived from the intentionality of the mind that produces them. A sound is only a word if it has been conferred with meaning by the intentions of a speaker or perhaps a community of speakers; while a painting, however abstract, seems only to have a subject matter insofar as its painter intends it to. Whether or not all mental phenomena are intentional, then, it certainly seems to be the case that all intentional phenomena are mental in origin.

Some more introductory videos:






To show that it's not just proponents who see this issue Raymond Tallis, a (retired) neuroscientist atheist who rejects Materialism but doesn't accept Survival, actually centers Intentionality as a non-physical aspect of Mind in his essay What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us about Ourselves:

...Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible with, as in Dennett’s words, “the same physical principles, laws, and raw materials that suffice” to explain everything else in the material universe.

Unfortunately for neuroscientism, the inward causal path explains how the light gets into your brain but not how it results in a gaze that looks out. The inward causal path does not deliver your awareness of the glass as an item explicitly separate from you — as over there with respect to yourself, who is over here. This aspect of consciousness is known as intentionality (which is not to be confused with intentions). Intentionality designates the way that we are conscious of something, and that the contents of our consciousness are thus about something; and, in the case of human consciousness, that we are conscious of it as something other than ourselves. But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see. In other words, in intentionality we have something fundamental about consciousness that is left unexplained by the neurological account.

This claim refers to fully developed intentionality and not the kind of putative proto-intentionality that may be ascribed to non-human sentient creatures. Intentionality is utterly mysterious from a material standpoint...

Another argument that says Thoughts About Things isn't compatible with Materialism/Physicalism comes from the Physicalist Alex Rosenberg:

We see why the Paris neurons can’t be about Paris the way that red octagons are about stopping. It’s because that way lies a regress that will prevent us from ever understanding what we wanted to figure out in the first place: how one chunk of stuff—the Paris neurons—can be about another chunk of stuff—Paris. We started out trying to figure out how the Paris neurons could be about Paris, and our tentative answer is that they are about Paris because some other part of the brain—the neural interpreter—is both about the Paris neurons and about Paris. We set out to explain how one set of neurons is about something out there in the world. We find ourselves adopting the theory that it’s because another set of neurons is about the first bunch of neurons and about the thing in the world, too.

This won’t do. What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted—by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)—as being about that stuff outside the brain. What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff.

Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort. There are just fermions and bosons and combinations of them. None of that stuff is just, all by itself, about any other stuff. There is nothing in the whole universe—including, of course, all the neurons in your brain—that just by its nature or composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter. So, when consciousness assures us that we have thoughts about stuff, it has to be wrong. The brain nonconsciously stores information in thoughts. But the thoughts are not about stuff. Therefore, consciousness cannot retrieve thoughts about stuff. There are none to retrieve. So it can’t have thoughts about stuff either.

Rosenberg, Alex. The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (pp. 178-179). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Thus Rosenberg thinks we have to choose between accepting we have thoughts or Physicalism being true.

I agree, but rather than deny Cogito Ergo Sum I chose the IMO more rational conclusion that Physicalism is false.

So I'd divide these into Subjective Awareness, Thoughts about Reality, and application [of Reason].

So having covered Subjectivity and Intentionality (Aboutness of Thought), we're now at the examination of our Rationality (the application of Reason).

This last aspect of three highlighted by Fodor is intertwined with the other two. To apply reason we need thoughts about whatever we're reasoning about, and the rational course of action is a type of subjective quale...but one that ties into the Universals of Logic and Mathematics.

In James Ross's Immaterial Aspects of Thought he notes:

There is a larger and bolder project of epistemology naturalized, namely, to explain human thought in terms available to physical science, particularly the aspects of thought that carry truth values, and have formal features, like validity or mathematical form. That project seems to have hit a stone wall, a difficulty so grave that philosophers dismiss the underlying argument, or adopt a cavalier certainty that our judgments only simulate certain pure forms and never are real cases of, e.g., conjunction, modus ponens, adding, or genuine validity.

The difficulty is that, in principle, such truth-carrying thoughts cannot be wholly physical (though they might have a physical medium),3 because they have features that no physical thing or process can have at all.

The paper is excellent, and worth a read (along with a companion paper by Feser), but the summary provided by Rocket Philosophy is a good starting place to get the gist of what he's saying.                                      

When you add 2 and 2 to get 4, you really are adding and not performing some other exotic mathematical function. Or conversely, if you are performing some exotic function (such as the one the alien machine might be performing), then you really are performing that function and not addition. If we are not really performing the mathematical and logical functions we think we are, then everything we think we know goes out the window. Our reasoning abilities

In fact, this premise cannot be coherently denied, because if you are denying it then you are reasoning in the form of an argument, but whatever function you are reasoning with may not actually be the function you think it is.

This supports Ross's other premise: formal thought is determinate. Because if it isn't, then everything we think we know, science, math, everything, is gone.

Physical things, OTOH, are indeterminate. This isn't about indeterminacy like the kind we see in QM, but rather any physical thing can stand for anything else. You could hold a salt shaker and say, "imagine this is a pepper shaker", or take the written word cat and say for the purposes of a game it means "dog".

And for the case of applying a mathematical function or logical syllogism, your mental state is not about any other function or syllogism. Another good example of this (IIRC in the comments) in the world of application is a program that subtracts certain number combinations when you press the + button. Whether this is a bug or a deliberate prank is something you have to ask the programmer whose mind conceived of the program, the physical instantiation of a Turing Machine offers no answers.

A different way of looking at the issue is an argument often attributed to CS Lewis, but also made by Popper. The causal chain of the physical determines successive events. If the mind is reducible to matter, then all thought is determined by physical causal chains...but this would mean one's reasoning is not ultimately dependent on the semantic logical chains.

But then how could any reasoning really claim to be rational?

A longer summary of Popper's argument can be found on Feser's blog:

1. Materialism holds that thinking consists of nothing more than the transition from one material process in the brain to another in accordance with causal laws (whether these transitions are conceived of in terms of the processing of symbols according to the rules of an algorithm à la computationalism, or on some other model).

2. Material processes have their causal efficacy, including their ability to generate other material processes, only by virtue of their physical properties (i.e. those described by physical science), and not by virtue of any meaning or semantic content that might be associated with them.  (For example, punching the symbols “1,” “+,” “1,” and “=” into a calculator will generate the further symbol “2” whether or not we associate the standard arithmetical meanings with these symbols or instead assign to them some eccentric meanings, because the electronic properties of the calculator alone are what determine what symbols get displayed.  Similarly, neural processes that are in fact associated with the thought that all men are mortal and the thought that Socrates is a man would still generate the neural process that is in fact associated with the thought that Socrates is mortal even if these neural processes had all been associated with some other meanings instead, because the neurophysiological properties of the processes alone are what determine which further processes get generated.)

3. But one thought can serve as a rational justification of another thought only by virtue of the meaning or semantic content of the thoughts.  (For example, it is only because we associate the symbols “1,” “+,” “1,” “=,” and “2” with the standard meanings that “1 + 1 = 2” expresses an arithmetical truth.  Similarly, it is only because “All men are mortal,” “Socrates is a man,” and “Socrates is mortal” have the meanings they do that the first two sentences logically entail the third, and only when the neural processes in question are associated with the corresponding thoughts that the first two provide a rational justification for believing the third.)

4. So if materialism is true, then there is nothing about our thought processes that can make one thought a rational justification of another; for their physical and causal relations alone, and not their semantic and logical relations, determine which thought follows which.

5. So if materialism is true, none of our thoughts ever is rationally justified.

6. But this includes the thoughts of materialists themselves.

7. So if materialism is true, then it cannot be rationally justified; the theory undermines itself.

The upshot of this argument is that instantiating causal relations, of whatever sort, does not by itself amount to instantiating logical relations; and this is precisely what Popper is getting at in the passage above when he says that “brain mechanisms” or “computer mechanisms” may “differ physically as little as you may specify, yet this difference may be so amplified that the one may operate according to the standards of logic, but not the other.” 

Next up is the Immateriality of Memory.

Next up is the Immateriality of Memory.

There's a dedicated thread related to this, so I'll share some relevant stuff by the atheist retired-neuroscientist Tallis (who rejects Survival), Braude (who last I checked grudgingly accepted Survival), and Sheldrake discussing memory with neuroscientist Alex Gómez-Marín.

First Tallis, from A Smile At Waterloo Station:

Let us return to that smile. It is supposed to be ‘stored’ in the changed state of excitability of a neural circuit resulting from my exposure to it. The state of the circuit is ‘a present propensity to react’, and when it does react, the memory is ‘activated’. That is to say, the memory is a present state of part of my nervous system: a physical state of a physical entity, namely my brain. This state has somehow to be about, or refer to, the smile. Yet it is difficult to understand how physical activity can be ‘about’ something other than itself. We encounter this difficulty in the case of the perception of something even actually present. The perceptual state is about the thing perceived. Outside of the brains of sentient beings, no other physical event has this ‘aboutness’. But understanding this aboutness presents an even greater challenge in the case of physical states that are supposed to correspond to memories: the states have to be about something that is no longer present – that no longer even exists. What’s more, memory in us humans is explicitly memory: it is not simply past experience acting upon us by reverberating in the present. That remembered smile is located by me in the past – indeed, in a past world, which, as John McCrone has put it, is, “a living network of understanding rather than a dormant warehouse of facts.”

Making present something that is past as something past, that is to say, absent, hardly looks like a job that a piece of matter could perform, even a complex electrochemical process in a piece of matter such as a brain. But we need to specify more clearly why not. Material objects are what they are, not what they have been, any more than they are what they will be. Thus a changed synaptic connexion is its present state; it is not also the causes of its present state. Nor is the connection ‘about’ that which caused its changed state or its increased propensity to fire in response to cues. Even less is it about those causes located at a temporal distance from its present state. A paper published in Science last year by Itzhak Fried claiming to solve the problem of memory actually underlines this point. The author found that the same neurons were active in the same way when an individual remembered a scene (actually from The Simpsons) as when they watched it.

So how did people ever imagine that a ‘cerebral deposit’ (to use Henri Bergson’s sardonic phrase) could be about that which caused its altered state? Isn’t it because they smuggled consciousness into their idea of the relationship between the altered synapse and that which caused the alteration, so that they could then imagine that the one could be ‘about’ the other? Once you allow that, then the present state of anything can be a sign of the past events that brought about its present state, and the past can be present. For example, a broken cup can signify to me (a conscious being when I last checked) the unfortunate event that resulted in its unhappy state.

Of course, smuggling in consciousness like this is inadmissible, because the synapses are supposed to supply the consciousness that reaches back in time to the causes of the synapses’ present states...

Then Braude, from Memory without a Trace :

So why is the concept of a memory trace fundamentally nonsensical? Let’s begin with an analogy drawn from John Heil’s outstanding critique of trace theory.4 Suppose I invite many guests to a party, and suppose I want to remember all the people who attended. Accordingly, I ask each guest to leave behind something (a trace) by which I can remember them. Let’s suppose each guest leaves behind a tennis ball. Clearly, I can’t use the balls to accomplish the task of remembering my party guests. For my strategy to work, the guests must deposit something reliably and specifically linked to them, and the balls obviously aren’t differentiated and unambiguous enough to establish a link only with the person who left it.
 
So perhaps it would help if each guest signed his or her own tennis ball or perhaps left a photo of himself or herself stuck to the ball. Unfortunately, this threatens an endless regress of strategies for remembering who attended my party. Nothing reliably (much less uniquely and unambiguously) links the signature or photo to the guest who attended. A guest could mischievously have signed someone else’s name or left behind a photo of another person. Or maybe the signature was illegible (most are), or perhaps the only photo available was of the person twenty-five years earlier (e.g., when he still had hair, or when he had a beard, wore eyeglasses, and was photographed outdoors, out of focus, and in a thick fog), or when he was dressed in a Hallo-ween costume or some other disguise.
 
But now it looks like I need to remember in order to remember. A tennis ball isn’t specific enough to establish the required link to the person who left it. What the situation requires is an unambiguous representational calling card, and the tennis ball clearly doesn’t do the job. So we supposed that something else might make the tennis ball a more specific link—a signature or a photo. That is, we tried to employ a secondary memory mechanism (trace) so that I could remember what the original trace (the tennis ball) was a trace of. But the signature and photo are equally inadequate. They, too, can’t be linked unambiguously to a specific individual. Of course, if I could simply remember who wrote the signature or left behind the photo, then it’s not clear why I even needed the original tennis balls. If no memory mechanism is needed to make the connection from photo to photo donor or from illegible signature to its author, then we’ve conceded that remembering can occur without corresponding traces, and then no trace was needed in the first place to explain how I remember who attended my party. So in order to avoid that fatal concession, it looks like yet another memory mechanism will be required for me to remember who left behind (say) the illegible or phony signature or the fuzzy photo. And off we go on a regress of memory processeses. It seems that no matter what my party guests leave behind, nothing can be linked only to the guest who left it. We’ll always need something else, some other mechanism, for making the connection between the thing left behind and the individual who left it.

And finally Sheldrake & Gómez-Marín :




Now that we've covered the immateriality of Subjectivity, Aboutness of Thoughts, Reason, and Memory we'll turn to looking at the supposed "physical".

Now that we've covered the immateriality of Subjectivity, Aboutness of Thoughts, Reason, and Memory we'll turn to looking at the supposed "physical".

Starting off with a quote by the physicist Lee Smolin in his book Time Reborn:

We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties.

Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe - through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence, it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations.

And another by Brian Whitworth, taken from Quantum Realism, Chapter 1: The physical world as a virtual reality :

The equations, tests and applications work but the theory makes no physical sense, e.g. in Feynman’s sum over histories an electron travels all possible paths between two points at once – but how can one electron do that? Theories usually increase understanding but in physics they seem to take it away. For example, wave-particle duality lets waves become particles, but this denies what waves and particles are. Given a choice between meaning and mathematics, physics long ago chose the latter. As a result, quantum theory still isn’t taught in high schools, because who can teach what makes no sense? Modern physics is a mathematical feast with no semantic substance, a hollow science built on impressive equations about quantum states that everyone agrees don’t exist!

Finishing off this introductory post is the article by Hedda Hassel Mørch,  Is Matter Conscious?: Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics:

...But perhaps consciousness is not uniquely troublesome. Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally hard, problem of matter. What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics? This problem, too, seems to lie beyond the traditional methods of science, because all we can observe is what matter does, not what it is in itself—the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.” On the surface, these problems seem entirely separate. But a closer look reveals that they might be deeply connected...

Next up I'll try and tie the question of matter into the supposed "laws" of nature.

Next up I'll try and tie the question of matter into the supposed "laws" of nature.

So the last post went into the mystery of the Physical, and a big part of that mystery is what the Laws of Nature that supposedly govern said physical are.

Examining these "Laws" is worthwhile because often enough you hear the argument that the Laws of Nature exclude Survival and Psi. But where are these Laws? How do they interact with the physical?

As Stephen Talbott notes in Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen:

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...

Another issue, raised by the physicist Bernard Haisch, in Is The Universe A Vast, Consciousness-Created Virtual Reality Simulation?, is that by current evidence the "Laws" have probabilistic aspects:

Now point the laser at a spot on the surface of a pane of glass and let a detector count the photons that are reflected off the front surface. In any sequence of 100 photons there will be four reflected photons counted on average

We can think of no way to hardwire the behavior of photons in the glass reflection or the two-slit experiments into a physical law, or explain things in terms of particles coming in touch with each other. In the case of the two-slit experiment, we need to assume, following Feynman, that a photon instantaneously traverses every possible path through the entire universe in order to "explain" the behavior of one little laboratory photon. What kind of bizarre information is being shared between particles in the glass reflection experiment and how would that conceivably be possible?

One can even argue, as Nancy Cartwright does, that the very notion of Laws would require God and thus a Mind:

... I do not mean to argue that the enterprise of modern science cannot be made sense of without God. Rather, if you want to make sense of it you had better not think of science as discovering laws of Nature, for there cannot be any of these without God. That depends of course on what we mean by ‘laws of Nature’. Whatever else we mean, I take it that this much is essential:

Laws of Nature are prescriptive, not merely descriptive, and – even stronger – they are supposed to be responsible
for what occurs in Nature. 

Since at least the Scientific Revolution they are also supposed to be visible in the Book of Nature, not writ only on stone tablets nor in the thought of God. My claim here is that neither of these features can be made sense of without God; this despite the fact that they are generally thought to provide some autonomy of the world order from God.

Next post will look at the nature of Time & Space.

Next post will look at the nature of Time & Space.

Tallis on how physics fails to capture significant aspects of time.

He also has some writings on this subject:

Time, Tense & Physics

Tallis

Readers of this column may recall an earlier piece, ‘A Smile at Waterloo Station: The True Mystery of Memory’ in Issue 78, in which I challenged the claim that there is, or ever could be, a purely neurological, that is to say a materialist, explanation of human memory. I focused on those memories in which we explicitly locate things in the past, in particular our own past. Such memories are tensed: indeed, they are crucial to our sense of tensed time. Now, according to Einstein and many other physicists, tensed time is unreal, and tenses are illusions, although rather ‘stubborn’ ones, as Einstein admitted. Since matter does not entertain illusions, there cannot be a materialist account of memory.

You may be relieved that I am not planning to take yet another pop at physicalist accounts of consciousness. My target this time is somewhat bigger: it is physics itself. Or to be more precise – since I am not so ungrateful as to criticise a science responsible for most of the technology that has made my life longer, healthier, more comfortable and more fun than that of pre-scientific man – I want to take issue with those who believe physics has the last word on the nature of time, or indeed ourselves. I think physics captures very little of what matters to us about time. Consequently, its much vaunted aspiration to develop a ‘Theory of Everything’ – which ‘everything’ presumably includes time-torn beings like you and me – is absurd...

Regarding Space:

Firstly I think we should consider the Materialist belief that consciousness is conjured by your brain. This means there is a world out there, the physical world, but your brain is creating a whole reality with qualia for you to interact with said world.

This is illustrated by Lehar:



As Sheldrake and Kastrup noted, this means the entire experienced reality - including the stars in the distant night sky - are inside your skull.

Yet, as Donald Hoffman notes, that skull and the brain inside it are also in your conscious experience:

If it’s true that your brain creates all your conscious  experiences, then it must be your relational brain, not your phenomenal brain, which is the creator.

But what is your relational brain? Does it resemble your phenomenal brain? There’s no reason to suppose it does. In fact, as we saw with the volleyball, there’s no reason to suppose that the nature of the phenomenal brain in any way constrains the nature of the relational brain. Your phenomenal brain is simply a graphical interface that allows you to interact with your relational brain, whatever that relational brain might be. And all that’s required of a graphical interface is that it be systematically related to what it represents. The relation can be as arbitrary as you wish, as long as it’s systematic.

The neuroscientist Smythies also notes this issue when he asks How Can the Brain be in the Head when the Head is in the Brain?

But if we do take Space as something that has to exist, we can ask the question, "Are there more dimensions to space than just the three I experience?"

This then offers the possibility of added spatial dimensions, which then offers another avenue for the paranormal:

'If the very dimensionality of space is open to question, then what beliefs remain sacred?

What else should we question?

For example: Is there really a sharp division between animate and inanimate matter?'
– Alan Lightman, Intro to Flatland
 
There's also a larger discussion that looks at Psi data and Hyperspace in this thread, but that's not really "a priori" so I'll leave off here by just nothing that Space has enough mysteries about it that the Physicalist notion of "Space-Time" does not rule out the paranormal.

Especially when we consider the Simulation Hypothesis that has gained popularity, as we'll do in the next post.

Especially when we consider the Simulation Hypothesis that has gained popularity, as we'll do in the next post.

First off worth mentioning Simulation Hypothesis is a subset of arguments for Design. Overall, AFAIK, design arguments focus on two things - the Cosmic Fine Tuning of the Universe and the Intelligent Design interventions in the evolutionary process. These are huge topics that we've discussed & debated over the years, and if you accept either there's a strong suggestion that at least one Mind is over and above all that is physical. This in turn would support the existence of Survival and Psi in an "a priori" way.

I wanted to focus on the Simulation Hypothesis because it has gained greater academic tolerance - IMO due to materialist bias - than the idea of an immaterial Mind (God) having any influence on reality.

However I think there are (at least) three considerations here - that our brains create a simulation over the actual reality, that we are programs running in some kind of computer, and that we exist in a higher frame of reality "stuck" in a lower frame for our lifetimes.

The first we covered a bit in the last post, that the spatial environment we perceive is created by our brains. I had quoted Donald Hoffman, and his essay Peaking Behind the Icons. Hoffman actually has a theory, the Interface Theory of Perception, that suggests we've evolved for fitness over truth:




Beyond that clip there's the actual introductory paper.

A very similar way of arguing that evolution enforces a partial view of reality is that of the Umwelt:

In the early twentieth-century, biologist J. von Uexkull introduced the notion of the Umwelt (literally, “around-world”) into sensory biology, which is typically, though maybe infelicitously, translated as “environment.” Cognitive scientist Andy Clark unpacks what Uexkull has in mind by Umwelt as “the set of environmental features to which a given type of animal is sensitized.”[72] As mentioned earlier, this notion has been well-tested across a variety of disciplines, e.g., sensory biology, cognitive science, and phenomenological philosophy.

Uexkull’s famous example is a kind of tick whose sensory system is solely attuned to butyric acid (emitted by the skin of mammals), surface pressure (good for detecting when one has landed), and heat (good for detecting when one is close to a blood source). These three sensory factors allow the tick to time its jump onto an approaching mammal, find a good place to bite, and get the blood it needs to survive. The important point is that the full richness of the sensory factors available in the physical world is narrowed to three affordances that matter to the tick. The tick’s perceptual capacities are not ordered to “getting” the whole world, but only the world in the aspects that make a difference for it, and that means the tick’s perceptions leave behind more than they take in.

Madden, James. Unidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the World (p. 79). Ontocalypse Press. Kindle Edition.

So if our perception of reality is limited by the simulation presented to us by our brains, that leaves a lot of room for Survival and Psi. [As the book Unidentified Flying Hyperobject notes, paranormal experiences would be instances when the greater reality crosses into our Umwelt. Eventually I'll make a thread for the book but here I am just noting how this is another "a priori" way for Survival and Psi to be true.]

This is compounded if this reality is a digital simulation, since the restriction of supposed laws - along with life and death - are arbitrary parameters in the simulation.

Admittedly I think the idea that consciousness can be a computer program is a deeply flawed idea, due to arguments raised by Searle in Is the Brain a Digital Computer? and Lanier's You Can't Argue with a Zombie.

This leaves the last of the above three considerations, that our consciousness exists in a higher frame but is (temporarily?) stuck in a lower frame. Will get into this in the next post.

This leaves the last of the above three considerations, that our consciousness exists in a higher frame but is (temporarily?) stuck in a lower frame. Will get into this in the next post.

In entertainment this idea of a higher/lower frame is best exemplified by the Matrix, though the Matrix in turn was partially inspired by Plato's Cave where a false reality of shadows is escaped from. But the basic Dualism of a Spirit World apart from this Physical World is a staple of religions across history & geography.

In more modern philosophy, I'd say the Peer to Peer Simulation Hypothesis is best exemplar of this idea that the transcendent reality is the origin of our psyches but for whatever reason we're stuck in the lower frame of the physical. There's a whole thread about the P2P Hypothesis, and it's even been mentioned in the companion discussion thread for this topic, so I'll just hit the main points relevant to the "A Priori" case:

...Halo Scientists and Philosophers would have the sneaking suspicion – just as we do – that their “minds could not be physical.” Why? Because, in a P2P, just about all of the simulation is “physical.” When Halo Scientists and Philosophers examine physical objects within their simulated reality, they would be able to develop an empirical theory of “Halo physics” just as we develop empirical theories of our world’s physics on the basis of our measurements of it. And yet there are simple and obvious reasons why observers in a P2P simulation would feel that their minds could not possibly be physical. The reasons? Their minds are non-physical in a relevant sense: their minds make up the measurement apparatus that exists in a higher reference-frame (the reference frame of the simulation network coding) and which cannot be reduced to any physical property or measurement taken within the simulation. But this is precisely what we appear to face. We can measure “red wavelengths” of light; we just can’t explain in physical terms – in terms of measurements within our world – why red looks like this.

...Halo Scientists and Philosophers would have the sneaking suspicion – just as we do – that their persistence over time (as the same conscious persons) must be something more than merely continuity of their physical bodies or psychology. And again they would be right. The fundamental nature of personal identity is inaccessible to observers in a P2P simulation: it is comprised by the “game consoles” in the higher frame-of-reference that comprises the functional architecture of the simulation

I do believe, however, that we can know the answer to one important question: which is that, if we are in a P2P simulation, there is one fundamental sense in which it differs from the kinds of simulations (P2P or otherwise) that we have constructed in our world: simulations such as Halo, Call of Duty, The Sims, and so on. Notice that all of these simulations are mere structure. That is, they are generated by quantitative data. The data and network coding that
comprise, say, the online world of Halo are just that: programs.

Human consciousness, on the other hand, is – if philosophers who defend mind-body dualism are correct (and I think they are) – fundamentally qualitative in nature. It cannot be reduced to mere structure.

- Arvan, How the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Hypothesis Explains Just About Everything, Including the Very Existence of Quantum Mechanics

So if something like the P2P Simulation Hypothesis were true, it would easily align with Survival as the key aspect of the theory is that the Mind is ultimately existing in a "higher frame" of reality.

However I'd contend that with a bit of variation from what Arvan proposes the P2P Simulation Hypothesis can also help explain at least some Psi abilities. This is because of how P2P games, as noted by Arvan in a different essay, resolve the shared world:

Notice what a P2P simulation is. A P2P simulation just is:

• An array of two-dimensional information (e.g., each computer’s game program or DVD)
  
• Comprising a vast array of “possible pasts, presents, and futures” for the simulation
  
• Being read in real time
  
• By a multitude of external measuring devices (i.e., each computer on the network)
  
• All interacting in parallel, such that
  
• The joint measurements of all the computers on the network result in the appearance of single observed, intersubjective reality
  

So Psi, it would seem to me, would be when a particular "player" participating in the lower frame has some ability to skew this resolution of joint measurements toward an intended outcome.

There are some additional points of evidence Arvan presents that are worth a read, the main ones being how to explain QM level oddities. Personally I think some of them are possible, but it's hard to reconcile the idea that QM level oddities which seem to be a natural state of reality being explained by the rarer glitches in Peer to Peer simulations.

But as I'll get into in my next post there are a variety of ways of looking at QM that are friendly to the possibility of Survival and/or Psi.