"There is a sharp disagreement among competent men as to what can be proved and what cannot be proved, as well as an irreconcilable divergence of opinion as to what is sense and what is nonsense." Eric Temple Bell
Let us, as the Chinese say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and see what we are talking about.
The story so far: the parapsychologists have accumulated a great deal of strange data about wild, bizarre behaviors of human consciousness. Although they have labeled these strange experiences with many names, the data all seem to reduce to the phenomenon of consciousness acting as if it were not imprisoned in the brain, as if it could migrate elsewhere occasionally ("out-of-body experience"), or as if there were nonsensory openings through which information from elsewhere can leak in. The quantum physicists, meanwhile, have found a subatomic jumpiness or randomness that cannot be reconciled with common-sense ideas of cause and effect. Aside from saying the whole problem is in our heads (the Copenhagen interpretation) or that everything that can happen does happen (the multiple-universe model), the most plausible theory that has been devised is the hidden-variable theory which, together with Bell's Theorem of cosmic glue, suggests that consciousness is nonlocal in space and time (not locked into the brain).
The hidden-variable theory is gaining ground because its central assumption of nonlocality (Bell's Theorem) has been experimentally confirmed five times since 1974. These experiments showed that two photons (light particles), once in contact, will continue to react as if still in contact, no matter how far apart they are in space, exactly as predicted by Bell's math—and just as would be true if Walker and Herbert are right in claiming that quantum events are controlled by a consciousness which transcends space and time.
In San Francisco, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, President of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group, has gone a step beyond Walker and Herbert. "Below the spacetime level of the universe we perceive," Sarfatti says, "is the subquantal world of minimum intelligences. Imagine them as micro micro-microcomputers. They make up the hardware of the universe and are localized in space and time." (Each is here or there, not both.) "But," Sarfatti goes on, "the software or programming is nonlocal in Bell's sense." (The cosmic blueprint is here, there, and everywhere; now, then, and everywhen.) "The hidden variable," Sarfatti concludes, grinning benignly over his Mephistophelean black beard, "is not precisely consciousness, as Herbert and Walker think, but information."
Information in modern science has a very special mathematical meaning, more specific than in ordinary speech. Without going into the math of it, information is coherent order, as distinguished from noise, which is incoherent chaos.
Biological evolution is the gradual emergence of information out of chaos. To the biologist, it is information in the genetic code of the cherrystone that tells it to grow into a cherry tree and not a teakettle. To the modern sociologist, information is the roads, customs, and traditions that mold random individuals into a society. If Sarfatti is right, information is also coded into the quantum foam, telling it to grow into the universe of space and time we know.
Imagine that your brain is a biological computer, as most neurologists now think. Imagine further that all subquantal events are also computers (micro-micro-microcomputers, as Sarfatti says.) Imagine finally that the universe is also a computer—a mega-mega-mcgacomputer. What Bell's Theorem means, according to Sarfatti, is that the hardware of this interlocking system of intelligent Chinese boxes—or computers within computers within computers— is localized in space and time; but the programming—the subquantal hidden variable—is everywhere and everywhen.
This sounds suspiciously like a definition of God, because God is, according to all theologians, just such a nonlocal programmer—omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. But if this information system is a kind of God, or a scientific analog of God, it is also you and me... and the lamppost. The information, remember, is nonlocal in space and time; so the whole universe and every particle in it partakes of the information, and is thus a cocreator of the whole, but on different scales. Is this not what the pantheists have been claiming for millenniums?
Currently, Sarfatti is attempting to demonstrate this interpretation of Bell's Theorem practically by designing a faster-than-light communication system (US patent disclosure #071165, May 12, 1978). Although Dr. Carl Sagan has pontificated that this whole project seems to him "at most a playful notion," there is already a patent search afoot because of rumors that one or more other inventors are trying to patent the same device. Sarfatti also claims an unnamed intelligence agency is very interested in this, and a nuclear engineer, who has not given me permission to use his name, claims that the Russians already have such a device. (Faster-than-light communication does not contradict Einstein, incidentally. The Theory of Relativity says only that energy cannot travel faster than light. Bell's non-local information system, as developed by Sarfatti, does not transfer energy but only information [order].
What is interesting to the layman about all this is that such a device, if built, would function precisely as the brain does in those altered states of consciousness studied by parapsychology. It would be a model of the extrasensory circuits of the brain, just as an ordinary computer is a model of the brain's logical circuits. And Sarfatti strongly suspects that, whether the Russians have this or not, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations certainly do. When Sagan says that Sarfatti's hope of contacting extraterrestrials this way is "playful," Sarfatti replies that Sagan's attempts to contact them by radio represents "electromagnetic chauvinism." So there.)
http://www.metaphysicspirit.com/books/The%20Illuminati%20Papers.pdfCollection of essays, interviews, etc. Many of the subjects addressed in this brief read would further the discussion on several current RI threads. In that sense, it could have been written just yesterday.
That isn't a good thing, in my opinion. Although it isn't really a bad thing, either. I
guess (sigh). I like the style of presentation: many of the pieces are credited to "fictional" characters. As a result, "Bob" appears to be as real as any other.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.