From Abracadabra to Zombies

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reader comments: psychic

7 Dec 2000 
Hello, I have recently learned that my 50 year old sister has been taken in by Sylvia Browne, hook line and sinker. Isn't there some way that, under current consumer protection laws, that Sylvia can be charged with false advertising? There must be a way that we can stop her kind from taking advantage of people's gullibility. If there isn't, there should be. Just because her victims don't complain, doesn't make it any less a travesty. What can I do to help expose the people for what they are?

Bill

reply: According to an online article,  17 states have laws against fortune telling. Maybe yours is one of them. Another article reveals that psychics are sometimes charged with crimes. But, most psychics seem to be able to get away with their capers unless their clients complain to the police. Many who have been ripped off by a psychic, feel too stupid to file a formal complaint. But there are so many satisfied customers, one is likely to find the citizen brigade storming the skeptic's camp rather than rallying around the fighter of fraud.

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03 Dec 1999
In studying the strange behaviour of subatomic particles like photons in quantum experiments Einstein coined "spooky action at a distance" to describe the apparent ability of photons, etc. to know what's going on elsewhere and behave accordingly. The Copenhagen interpretation of these bizarre results posits that photons, electrons and even entire atoms in their 2 slits experiments have no concrete existence but exist as probability waves until an observation of the experimental result collapses the probability function and causes a determinate result. Nobody has ever said how this mental causation is transmitted or how it works, but the Copenhagen interpretation is taught in all the physics departments.

In his book, Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality, John Gribben presents John Cramer's alternate explanation for the 2 slits experiments, the "transactional interpretation". Cramer thinks that energetic entities (electrons, photons) constantly emit "information waves" , and that before the entity can actually DO anything there has to be an "offer wave", a "confirmation wave", and an information "handshake" with whatever the entity will interact with. The information waves and transactions occur in an "atemporal" space (and Einstein, again, showed that the subjective perception--the frame of reference--of something approaching the speed of light is that time slows, and time stops at light speed, so if the information travels at lightspeed it would happen in 'no time' as Cramer requires). This is how the entities in 2 slits experiments seems to know beforehand how they should behave in the experiments.

Cramer apparently claims there are mechanisms in place that prevent "leakage" of the atemporal information into our temporal space, but his interpretation requires that the information waves travel backwards and forward in time without taking any time to do so. A logical consequence of this is that, ultimately, all of the "information" about everything that has ever happened or ever will happen coexists simultaneously in this atemporal space. Gribben doesn't say what kind of waves the information travels on, but all waves are vibrations at whatever frequency, so if people somehow become attuned to a frequency on which some of Cramer's advanced waves (traveling backwards in time, if viewed, from our frame of spacetime reference; as contrasted with "retarded waves" traveling forward to our 'now' from our past) exist then they'll be receiving information about some future event (precognition), and if somebody happens to latch onto the frequency of some dead or distant person's experiences (assuming that consciousness is electromagnetic and thus works like other e/m entities like photons and electrons so that the overall e/m structure of an experience behaves like an e/m unit--sending and receiving information waves) they will experience "past lives" or "distant viewing".

reply: I knew there was a point to this somewhere.

The anecdotal evidence that people actually experience such things is quite compelling, and Cramer's lucid interpretation of quantum strangenesses [?] offers the means of explaining these "paranormal" phenomena quantum mechanically. Considering that practically the entire subject matter of science is "phenomenal"--our awareness of reality begins with visual and other sensory experiences of "phenomena"--I don't think paranormal phenomena reported by people should be off-handedly skeptically dismissed merely because science does not yet possess the intellectual tools to explain them. With William James I say experience should be held as prior to conceptual systems in our ranking the credibility of "realities", so if even a very good conceptual system like modern science cannot explain widely experienced phenomena then that shows a shortcoming in the conception, NOT in the perception (I'm familiar with Willard Quine's "core/periphery" view of our neural net, so I'm not simplistically assuming that conception does not affect perception and vice versa). But I think Cramer has given science the tools to begin understanding temporal oddities like precognition, etc., so that this area, at least, of "paranormal" perceptions can be 'normalized'.

Quantum physics has shown us that the reality underlying our everyday perceptions of a clockwork Newtonian universe is far stranger than appearances would lead us to believe, though philosophy and intellectual culture in general have failed to embrace this decades old development and are still stuck in the 19th century scientific paradigm where everything is ultimately predictable--in principle if 'not yet' in practice. The probability equations of modern physics do not preclude the possibility that the improbable might occur, and I think the improbable in fact does occur with surprising frequency. No "laws" are broken when the improbable occurs because the laws of classical physics are merely laws of 'averages', and the very term "average" presumes a whole range of actual cases occurring away from the center. So to presume that human experiences that fall outside the range of "normal human experience" are suspect simply because of their relative rarity constitutes a material fallacy: the "conceptualist fallacy" of an entrenched Newtonian.
Derryl Hermanutz

reply: Obviously, we disagree. I think explanations for psychic phenomena are to be found in the brain (by neuroscientists), in misinterpretation of perception, and in fraud rather than in some bizarre application of quantum physics. I recommend Victor Stenger's Physics and Psychics: the Search for a World Beyond the Senses (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990).

psychic