Notebook Export
The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science
Wilson, Robert Anton
CHAPTER SIX
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The fourth theory—“mind” and “matter” as metaphors—is, nobody will be surprised to learn, the one that seems most sensible to me. To paraphrase Hume, I never observe “my mind”—much less “the mind” or “mind” in general. All I ever observe or experience is mental state1, mental state2, mental state3 etc. And we never observe “matter” either, but only sense datum1, sense datum2 etc.
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(Historically, as noted earlier, measurement1, measurement2 etc. led to the concept of “that which is measured” which seems to be what “matter” means etymologically. The metaphoric nature of this is seen when we remember how Plato derived from chicken coop1, chicken coop2 etc. the Eternal Chicken Coop.)
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Psychosomatic metaphors seem more and more useful to physicians, psychiatrists and social scientists. Evidence accumulates that what people think and feel can make them ill, and that thinking/ feeling in different modalities can make them well again. This is “explained” by invoking a vague “psychosomatic unity” or, increasingly, by bluntly admitting that the old models of “mind” and “matter” cannot explain the data and calling for a new holistic model in which “mind” and “matter” will be integrated as neatly as Einstein integrated “space” and “time” into “space-time.”
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Behavioral scientists note also that there seems to be a great utility (pragmatic value) in models that regard “my” “mind” and “your” “mind” as aspects of a social field and not as isolated, block-like entities of the Aristotelian sort.
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Every version of the Copenhagen Interpretation either says explicitly or at least implies that “experimental reality” is a synergy including the experimenter and not the old philosophical “reality” “outside” and “apart from” us.
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One school of psychologists observes that, just as “mind” influences “body” in psychosomatic effects, so, too, “body” affects “mind” in many cases where, for instance, chronic tension of the muscles produces habitual negative “mental states” of worry or anger, etc. and relaxing the muscles eases the “mental” tension.
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Another school of psychologists observes that there is no “neurotic” or “psychotic” individual who does not appear to be part of a social field of habitual anxieties or evasions.
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Thus, “mind” merges into “matter” in some models, “matter” merges into “mind” in others, and “mind” becomes more and more a thing that cannot be adequately modelled at all without including the social field around it. And what sort of thing—“mental” or “material”—is a social field, by the way?
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Unless, in a “mind-matter” continuum, or a continuum in which “mind” and “matter” sometimes act separately and sometimes act synergetically—some things we tune in are more “mental” than “material,” and some more “material” than “mental”
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No: despite Charles Fort’s cynicism, I don’t care to attribute these appearances to a particularly tricky “God”—especially when an appearance has apparently killed 1500 people. But I do think, heretically and “dangerously,” of non-local effects, of the “maybe” in between “yes” and “no” in Quantum Logic, of “solid” “objects” that are superimpositions of waves, according to one quantum model, and of “minds” that are superimpositions of waves if the “minds” are transactions involving brains and the brains are made of cells which are made of atoms which are made of electrons which are superimpositions of waves.
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If “God” is not mad, as Fort claimed, then maybe “God” is, as Buckminster Fuller once wrote, not a noun but a verb. That is, “God” is what religious people do, as, in some models, an electron is an operation performed by people (physicists)—“God” as the act of praying, the energy raised
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We can all be glad that the word “coincidence” exists. Otherwise the Materialist Fundamentalists would find these stories just as puzzling and frightening as the Religious Fundamentalists will find them. Good old “coincidence”—once we think of it, we can banish the puzzlement and the fear at once, and forget these stories. Mention “coincidence” a few more times and you can forget most of the disturbing side of most of our stories. Just keep thinking “coincidence, coincidence, coincidence”; you’ll find it wonderfully soothing, as Nietzsche would say.
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September 1982 Science Digest p. 88—the smallest unit now scientifically recognized is 10-23 seconds. There’s that damned 23 again. And this time it sneaked its way into Science Digest, of all places. The context—for those of us deranged enough to continue at this point—is even more interesting. Science Digest, op. cit. still p. 88—“The Delta-1232, for example, created when a photon and a pi-meson collide, exists for only 0.66 x 10-23 seconds. Is it only a coincidence that the lifetimes of such particles are nearly always close multiples of the chronon?” (The chronon is the above-mentioned 10-23 seconds.)
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Is it only a coincidence that they ask “is it only a coincidence?” when I am thinking “is it only a coincidence?” That’s the kind of question that got Carl Jung thinking about synchronicity (universal resonance) which is a little bit like Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field and also, coincidentally, a little bit like the non-local effect in quantum mechanics.
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I’ve been collecting mysterious 23s for a number of years—and not to annoy the Fundamentalists, but to annoy myself, which is how I provoke myself into thought, or at least into neurological reactions which sometimes are not totally mechanical and predictable.
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Arthur Koestler, Aleister Hardy and Robert Harvie, The Challenge of Chance—Hardy, a biologist, and Harvie, a psychologist, performed one of the most massive tests of so-called ESP ever accomplished. The subjects scored well above chance, which often happens and means that something is being measured, according to the testers, or else that the testers are incompetent or worse, according to the Fundamentalists. But this time, before the Fundamentalists could criticize the data, Harvie and Hardy shuffled the response cards at random, to see if results that far above chance could be obtained “by accident” (aleotorically). They found correlations so far above chance that they were stunned, as was Koestler, the philosopher, when they showed him the data.
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All three of them interpret this result as very damaging to previous “ESP” research—as I do also—but they further argue that it also casts doubt on our traditional ideas of causality. They suggest that some sort of “formative” or “organizing” principle is at work in such appearances of order out of chaos (randomness).
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In a letter from Robert Rickard, co-author of Phenomena and co-editor of Fortean Times—William Blake, the first great critic of Fundamentalist Materialism, lived at 23 Hercules Street, Lambert; the Turin shroud, which allegedly contains the image of Jesus, is kept at a constant 23 ° Centigrade.
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It is quite safe to expect, on the basis of past experience, that you will notice some peculiar 23s in the next few days. Such is the contagion of this phenomenon—or, as the Fundamentalist would say, such is the power of suggestion and the sinister ability of the forces of Unreason to seduce us.
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”Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence”
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it’s a lovely word. If you repeat it over and over, and over, and over, it will work exactly like a Hindu mantra: it will quiet anxieties and suppress doubts; it will relax and soothe you; and it will finally stop thought entirely.
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On a recent tour I was approached, after a lecture in St. Louis, by a fan who told me he had figured out how the “23 gimmick” works—why so many readers of my books encounter dramatic 23s while reading them. “It’s a neurological grid,” he said. “You set up the expectation, and then we notice the 23s more than ordinary numbers.” I congratulated him on his perceptivity. Indeed, that is one of my major messages, in everything I write—our emic realities are programmed by our expectations. You are the “Master who makes the grass green.”
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Then this chap invited me out to dinner with himself and his wife. I was in no mood for a real dinner; after a lecture, I want junk food and beer. We went to a fast-food Pizza joint, of the sort that gives you a ticket with a number to hold and then calls the number when your pizza is ready. Our number, of course, was 23. “How do you do it?” asked my friend, confused again. And—“My God,” asked Picasso, “is she really that small?”
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More recently I was giving a seminar in Amsterdam and took the opportunity to visit the Van Gogh museum. Walking past one astounding “psychedelic” canvas after another, I marveled again at the marvelous reality-labyrinth Van Gogh offers us—his multiple vision, his poetry, his creative acts of seeing. I realized again that, just as Van Gogh “is” great precisely because he did not copy Rembrandt’s reality-tunnels, and Picasso “is” great because he did not copy Van Gogh, and Mondrian “is” great because he did not copy Picasso, etc., all “greatness” in art is a new synergy, a new transaction between “observer” and “observed.”
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I suddenly remembered that Adolph Hitler once said that “anybody who paints the sky green should be sterilized at once.” I thought I understood the Right Man more deeply. The Right Man stays in one reality-tunnel because wandering into the reality-labyrinth of the creative mind terrifies him.
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Dr. Evan Harris Walker and Dr. Nick Herbert—in the anthology, Future Science, ed. by Dr. Stanley Krippner and John White, Doubleday, New York, 1976—propose a variation on Dr. David Bohm’s theory of the implicate order—the enfolded order which Bohm proposed might underlie the explicate, unfolded order of “space,” “time” and “matter.” Bohm sometimes calls the implicate order a “hidden variable” which programs the explicate order. Drs. Herbert and Walker propose a “hidden variable” theory of what parapsychologists have hitherto vaguely called “psychokinesis.”
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I have discussed this model with Dr. Herbert—I haven’t met Dr. Walker yet—and I think I understand what this model implies. The best way to introduce the subject, however, seems to be through a digression about two other friends and a further digression about Dr. Carl Sagan and Fundamentalist Materialism.
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The two friends mentioned are Saul Paul Sirag, physicist, and Dr. Paul Segall, biologist. They have had a friendly argument going on for about twenty years about whether physics or biology is the more important science. Not unexpectedly, Sirag, the physicist, votes for physics, and Segall, the biologist, casts his ballot for biology. The essence of the argument is more or less this:
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The brain, according to Dr. Segall, produces all our ideas, including our best scientific models. When we understand the brain fully, we will understand how ideas, including scientific models, are produced, and even how to produce such models more efficiently and creatively. Biology is the science most likely to achieve this; ergo, biology is the most important science.
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Sirag argues that the brain, which does these wonderful things, is made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of the fascinating thingamajigs (” particles” and/ or “waves”) that are studied in quantum mechanics. Ergo, to understand the brain fully, we must first understand quantum physics fully, and therefore physics is the most important science, even for a biologist.
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Segall replies, Copenhagenishly, that the “waves” and “particles” etc. are still models generated by the brain, and so we must understand the brain as an entity before we can understand its models …
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And the argument, like Godel’s Proof, vanishes into an infinite regress.
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The Fundamentalist Materialist position has most recently been restated in elegant but popular form by Dr. Carl Sagan of CSICOP in his famous Dragons of Eden. The argument avoids the infinite regress by assuming that the brain can be understood entirely in terms of molecular chemistry. If this assumption is granted, then, obviously, “mind” is an epiphenomenon of “matter” (the molecules) and Fundamentalist Materialism is the sound philosophy for a scientist.
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Of course, the heresy—or one of the heresies—of the present book is that Fundamentalist Materialism “is” pre-Einsteinian as well as pre-Quantum, in the sense that the technicians at Houston “are” temporarily relapsing into pre-Copernicanism every time they talk about “up there.” The Houston chaps, however, only relapse temporarily and (despite Fuller’s warnings) remain post-Copernican most of the time (although I wonder about Challenger …). Fundamentalist Materialism, on the other hand, does appear, from our point of view, not a temporary lapse but a chronic neuro-semantic distemper. From a post-Einsteinian and post-Quantum perspective, “molecules” appear as—insofar as they “are” more useful scientific models than “ghosts” or psychokinetic forces” or great lines of poetry—models that are to be understood within the larger models of bio-physics, including quantum mechanics. That is, they should be considered as containing atoms, and electrons, and quarks, and the other entities of quantum mechanics.
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As such, “molecules” do not explain consciousness fully, since they themselves need to be explained by their sub-units on the atomic and sub-atomic levels.
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When we get down to sub-atomic or quantum level we encounter the “model agnosticism” I have been presenting. We have not one model but several;
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and we have also a widespread opinion that having more than one model may not be a fault or defect but a useful procedure in “freeing up creative energies.”
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We arrive—at least temporarily, and maybe permanently—at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.
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And if we consider the various quantum models, we find that the materialist proposition, “consciousness ‘reduces to’ molecules,” now appears not only Aristotelian and pre-Einsteinian but definitely incomplete. Consciousness now “reduces to” those thingamajigs (” waves” and/ or “particles”) which are either—models created by us for something so basic that we cannot speak meaningfully about it (Copenhagenism)
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and/ or—aspects of a “state vector” which mathematically produces every possible result, so that any manifestation as “matter” or “mind” here is balanced by the opposite manifestations in parallel universes (the EWG model)
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and/ or—locally tuned-in aspects of a non-locally connected Whole which does not fit into Aristotelian either/ or models and may need to be described in metaphors similar to those of Oriental Monism (various interpretations of Bell’s Theorem)
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and/ or—being created, along with their own “past” by our acts of measurement (Wheeler’s model)
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and/ or—the local explicate unfolding of a non-local implicate order (Bohm’s model)
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In any of these cases, “consciousness” seems to “reduce to” something not describable or containable in Fundamentalist Materialist models To quote Drs. Walker and Herbert: The hidden variable theory of consciousness asserts (1) there is a subquantal level beneath the observational/ theoretical structure of ordinary quantum mechanics; (2) events occurring on this subquantal level are the elements of sentient being.
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In other words, in this model, consciousness “is” a function of the subquantal implicate order of Bohm, functioning non-locally.
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Consciousness, in this model, is not “in” our heads. Our brains are merely local receivers; consciousness “is “an aspect of the non-local field. The “ego” then is the locally tuned-in aspect of this usually not-tuned-in non-local field.
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This sounds like Schrödinger’s notion that if you add up all the “minds” around the total you will arrive at is one. It also sounds like Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field, the “formative principle” of Harvie-Hardy-Koestler,
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and—perhaps?—the necessary result of taking some of our data seriously, or considering that, in addition to hoaxters and liars, the world contains some more-or-less accurate observers, or that even the worst of us can occasionally note what is happening around us and report it in ways that are not always as muddled as dreams or nightmares.
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If this model has any value—if it is sensible to talk of “consciousness” as non-local “software” rather than local “hardware”—then it is permissible to ask to what extent a local receiver, or “ego,” can tune in or influence the non-local field. Walker and Herbert do ask, and they deduce a set of predictions in answer.
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The predictions, they claim, are confirmed by the longest-running “paranormal” experiments on record, a series of experiments on “psychokinesis” conducted by Hakoon Forwald, a retired electrical engineer, between 1949 and 1970. Forwald’s subjects got results better than chance—the Fundamentalist “knows” they were cheating, of course, but those of us who do not “know” may still go on thinking at this point—and just as far above chance as they should have got, according to Walker and Herbert’s predictions, based on their model of how Bohm’s implicate order should function.
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In other, simpler words, the results are “as if” any local mind “is” an aspect of a non-local “mind” in something like the way a “personality” is an aspect of an environment in sociology.
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Herbert and Walker conclude: … we find that our consciousness controls physical events through the laws of quantum mechanics.
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For those who want to think in specific detail—i.e. to design, maybe, a large experiment—more technical details of this model, and Forwald’s experiments, will be found in Dr. Walker’s “The Compleat Quantum Anthropologist,” Proceedings of the American Anthropological Association, Mexico City, 1974.
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Fundamentalism stops thought and perception, whereas model-agnosticism encourages us to think further and look more deeply.
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It is traditional—I fear it is even predictable—to quote William Blake somewhere in every polemic against Fundamentalist Materialism. It is even traditional or predictable to quote, from Blake, the following lines: Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah’s night And twofold always. May God keep From single vision & Newton’s sleep!
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While I don’t claim to understand Blake’s visions any more than any other critic does, I think that, possibly, he is in at least partial agreement with the multi-model approach. He may even be saying, in our modern jargon, that he has four models usually, and a minimum of two models always, and that one model seems to him a type of trance or hypnosis.
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Of course, this is very hard for one-model people—modeltheists—to understand. It is especially perplexing to Aristotelians, for whom “a model is either true or false,” and once you find “the correct model,” all other models are by definition false.
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Perhaps we need to remember that that kind of modeltheism underlies the intolerance which perpetuates most of the violence and wars on this backward planet and creates the violent Right Man personality.
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An example, again from quantum mechanics, of the kind of minimum twofoldness that Blake, perhaps, was trying to convey: The famous or infamous two-hole experiments, also called the double-slit experiments.
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Here I mostly follow Gribbin, In Search … op.cit. p. 164-170.
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Take a screen with two holes in it, some distance apart, and place the screen at a good distance in front of a wall with another screen on it that will register patterns of light. Then, from in front of the first screen, flash a light toward the two holes.
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This has been done many times, starting in the 19th Century. The pattern on the second screen—the pattern made by the light after passing through the two holes—will be consistent with the wave model of light. That is, it will look like what you would expect if two waves came out of the two holes and made an interference pattern when they hit the second screen. They will also be consistent with the mathematical equations for such interference of waves.
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According to the experiment in this form, both vision and mathematical analysis indicate that light “really is” waves and that each hole had its own separate waves coming through it. It is very much of a muchness with what is observed near a beach when water waves pass through a fence with two holes in it.
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On the other hand, if you open only one hole, and keep the other closed—this experiment has also been performed many times—the results are consistent with the particle model. The pattern on the second screen is now mathematically what it should be if light was not waves but particles—little tiny “bullets,” so to speak.
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If you open one hole and then the other, the total result is still consistent with the particle model. That is, adding up the number of assumed particles that should have passed each hole to create the observed pattern gives the result it should give if the particles “really are” particles and behave like separate bullets would behave. There is no interference pattern, such as we found in the two-hole experiment. However, if we open both holes again—the two-hole experiment repeated—the wave pattern again appears, with its associated interference; an interference consistent with the wave model but mathematically inconsistent with the particle model.
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It is “as if” light traveled in waves when it “knew” we were going to open both holes, but then decided to travel in particles when it “knew” we were going to open one hole or the other, or both successively, but not both simultaneously.
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It has been tried experimentally to find out what the damned light would do if we tried to “trick” it by starting with two holes open and then quickly closing one of them when the light is in motion but has not yet reached the screen. It behaves in accord with the proper model consistent with the conditions at the instant when it arrives at the screen. That is, if one thinks of it “really” starting out as waves, to be consistent with the wave model, it “discovers” en route that we are “cheating” by changing from two holes to one, and it immediately changes itself to fit the particle model. But that is absurd (I hope).
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In Bucky Fuller’s metaphor, one experimental set-up tunes in the wave aspect and the other tunes in the particle aspect; but the not-tuned-in is not non-existent—it is merely not-tuned-in.
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These experiments have been duplicated continually, first because physicists themselves could hardly believe the results, and latterly to demonstrate to physics students that quantum mechanics does indeed violate traditional Aristotelian either/ or logic or traditional notions of “reality.”
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This is why physicists, following Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity, no longer believe in either the wave model or the particle model but say both models are equally useful. (Which is more useful at a time depends on the context.)
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The same experiments have been performed with so-called electrons, which are the thingamajigs of which “matter” is composed, as photons are the thingamajigs of which “light” is composed. The same complementarity appears. Electrons “are” both waves and particles, or—and by now you can see that this is not pedantry—can be described by both wave models and particle models.
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Thus, the minimum twofoldness: when physics gets to basics, we need, as Blake may have foreseen, two models at least. One will not serve. As for the fourfoldness—I’m only guessing, but—1. We can say “it is waves.” 2. We can say “it is particles.” 3. We can say “it is both waves and particles,” i.e. either of the first two will serve, at different times. 4. We can say “It is neither waves nor particles,” i.e. the models are our metaphors; the Etic non-verbal event remains—unspeakable.
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This, of course, is the traditional Buddhist logic—It is X, it is not-X, it is both X and not-X, it is neither X nor not-X—which Capra (Tao of Physics), and others here and there, have argued is more consistent with quantum mechanics than is the traditional Aristotelian logic of It is either X or not-X.
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If it’s too much of a mind-boggler, the reader can retreat to the Quantum Logic of von Neumman which has only three choices—“Yes, no and maybe.” That may seem now, however it seemed at first, comparatively conservative.
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The Mysterious Case of Garry Owen and the Three Quarks: Garry Owen “was” a “real dog.” That is, if we assume we possess accurate records—if we do not worry about the carping of possible Revisionist Historians—Garry Owen was born in 1888. He was a pedigreed Irish Setter. He was owned by a Mr. J.J. Giltrap, a breeder of pedigreed dogs. Garry Owen appears twice in James Joyce’s Ulysses. The first time, Garry is seen-or-hallucinated by the anonymous and drunken narrator of the “Cyclops” chapter and appears as an ugly, mangy, evil-tempered and dangerous hound. The second time, Garry is seen-or-hallucinated by the adolescent, sentimental Gerty McDowell and appears as a dear, sweet dog “so human he almost talked.” Which is the real Garry Owen?
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Joyce’s text sayeth not—which may be one reason Ulysses increasingly appears as the archetypal 20th Century novel. We can believe the drunk, or we can believe the sentimentalist, or we can believe a little of both, or we can believe neither.
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Garry Owen is X and not-X and both X and not-X and neither X nor not-X.
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Now the Objectivists hate me as much as the Fundamentalist Materialists do.
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The three quarks in Finnegans Wake, which have gotten into quantum mechanics via Dr. Murray Gell-Mann:
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Joyce symbolizes them, in his notebooks, as ,  and , which is obviously a synthesis of  and . Sometimes  and  are Abel and Cain and then  is “cainapple” which combines both and includes the Forbidden Fruit.
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Sometimes  and  are Brown and Nolan, a bookstore in Dublin in Joyce’s youth, and then  is Bruno of Nola, who was both “brown” and “nolan”—and who, incidentally, said all things are a coincidence of opposites.
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Sometimes  and  are Shaun and Shem, two deaf-mute twins in Dublin in Joyce’s youth, and  is “Shimar Shin,” a sinister Hindu.
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Sometimes  and  are “offender” and “defender” and  is a composite “fender” who is guilty and innocent at the same time.
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Sometimes  is Mick (the archangel Michael) and  is Nick (the devil) and  is Micholas de Cuzack”—who combines Nicholas of Cusa, medieval mystic, and Michael Cuzack, founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association, or Mick-and-Nick combined.
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Many of the word-coinages in Finnegans Wake are  s. For instance “chaosmos” is a  combining cosmos () and chaos ().
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I think the idea behind Joyce’s literary experiments was that we are all too quick in pronouncing things “real” or “unreal” ( or ) or “right” or “wrong” ( or ) and that much of experience should be considered in the  mode.
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Quantum Logic (von Neumann) easily converts into this symbolism. Schrödinger’s cat is alive () and dead () and in-between ().
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Transactional Psychology, similarly, says we cannot understand observer () alone or observed () alone but can only understand the synergetic transaction ().
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Somebody does something that seems offensive to me. The Right Man approach—the model-theist approach—is to decide “He is offensive,” and to counterattack accordingly (or to slink away and day-dream of revenge, as Nietzsche would add).
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The Principle of Complementarity (Bohr) applied to this situation would be “He is offensive and he is not offensive.” That is, he is offensive, in one way of looking at it, but he is not offensive in a relativist model which suggests that maybe he doesn’t know the local “rules” of courtesy. If he is a visitor from elsewhere, this is worth thinking about.
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In Buddhist Logic one would think, “He is offensive and he is not offensive and he is both offensive and not-offensive and he is neither offensive nor not-offensive,” which reminds us of the Four-Fold Vision, including the model in which all our evaluations are not the non-verbal event “out there” being evaluated.
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”Social fields” are “real” enough that, as psychologists have demonstrated, people react visibly when you come within their “personal” space: they become defensive or nervous. “Social fields” are not “real” enough to remain constant, as physical fields do, or usually do. They vary from culture to culture. An American reacts nervously when you get within one foot of him, but a Mexican wants you that close and becomes nervous if you stay further away. In Buddhist Logic, then: Social fields are real. Social fields are not real. Social fields are both real and not-real. Social fields are neither real nor not-real. This may have important implications for many necessary models in social studies, including the alleged “unconscious” and the “collective unconscious.” A field that depends on what people believe is “unthinkable” to a Fundamentalist Materialist, but social studies seems to “need” such fields.
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Think of the cock-eyed room designed by Dr. Ames where men “become” giants and midgets, because we cannot reprogram our brains fast enough to change perception accurately when confronted with dissonance, so we choose “the lesser of two evils,” and accept congenial hallucination, rather than—Chaos and the Abyss. Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.
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We know that Copernicus has a better model than Ptolemy but we still speak of “sunset” and even “see” the sun “going down” at twilight, accepting the hallucination cheerfully because were accustomed to it.
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Buckminster Fuller often urged his audiences to try this simple experiment: stand, at “sunset,” facing the sun for several minutes. As you watch the spectacular technicolor effects, keep reminding yourself, “The sun is not ‘going down.’ The earth is rotating on its axis.” If you are statistically normal, you will feel, after a few minutes, that, even though you understand the Copernican model intellectually, part of you—a large part—never felt it before. Part of you, hypnotized by metaphor, has always felt the pre-Copernican model of a stationary Earth.
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This experiment also might help some persons understand such terms as “existential reality,” “emic reality,” “reality-tunnel,” etc. You might get a real insight into how “real” bizarre reality-tunnels are to those who “live” inside them.
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This effect can be multiplied by trying to feel/ perceive a larger hunk of the Copernican model: on evenings when the Earth’s moon and Venus are both visible at “sunset” find them and tell yourself, “That great big moon is actually only about 1/ 6 the size of that little pin-prick I call Venus. The moon looks relatively bigger, and Venus looks relatively smaller, because Venus is about 120 times further away than the moon.”
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If you can feel you are seeing all this from a rotating ball, you might understand why you are not seeing it accurately, and why it is not extravagant to say Universe is like a cock-eyed room, and why Picasso wondered how big the woman “really” was.
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Another interesting experience happens if you remind yourself of the laws of optics, and then go for a walk, trying to remember that everything you see is inside your head. If you are as dumb as me, you will relapse 100 times in a 10-minute stroll into “seeing” them outside you. Such is the power of perspective and metaphor.
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It is even more amusing to remember that an orange “is” “really” sort of blue in the model accepted in optical physics. That is, the fruit has absorbed blue—blue is conducted through its skin. We see “orange” precisely because there is no orange in the fruit—because orange is being reflected off the skin, to our eyes. The “substance” or “isness” of the fruit contains the blue we do not see; our brains contain the orange we do see. Who is the Master who makes an orange, orange?
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But, of course, Berkeley is on a well-known earthquake fault, which passes near San Pablo. Persinger and Lafreniere claim a statistical clustering of energy fluctuations on earthquake faults. A liberal materialist might be willing to think about that.
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Those who have had similar forbidden perceptions will have a certain sympathy for Mr. Devereux. I continue to maintain that Fundamentalist Materialism, like other Fundamentalisms, is, or appears within psychological models to be, a defense mechanism, and within neurological models, an editing-out device, to stave off the shock and sense of “conceptual rape” that causes the unsophisticated to panic when confronted with “wonder about the nature of Reality.”
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In the two-hole experiment, the second screen “sees” light as waves in one design (both holes open) but “sees” light as particles in other designs (one or the other hole open). In the phenomenological models of sociology, “consciousness” is not merely a product of a brain but a synergy of the brain and the surrounding social field. In the Walker-Herbert quantum model, “consciousness” includes also the non-local connection described by Bell’s Theorem in which “space” and “time” are either unreal or at least irrelevant.
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And: According to the super-determinist model, mentioned but not endorsed by Dr. Clauser of UC-Berkeley, I cannot think a thought without effecting the whole universe, including its past—just as in the Wheeler model, our current experiments are affecting the whole universe including its past—because the thought either “is,” or “is connected with” an energy-event in my brain, and that energy-event is non-locally connected to everything, everywhere, everywhen.
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But, of course, to say it that way is misleading, because it stresses one half of the non-local connection. To see non-locality correctly we have to add: I cannot think a thought unless the whole universe (past, present and future) collaborates in producing such an energy-event in my brain.
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Dr. Capra in his Tao of Physics seems to me to be saying, or implying, that only if you see both of these sides of the non-local connection can you comprehend the real meaning of quantum mechanics.
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But, of course, this is only two-fold vision. If we are to try, experimentally, to share in the Blakean or Buddhist fourfold vision, we would have to say: I am creating the universe. The universe is creating me. I am creating the universe and the universe is also creating me. I am neither creating the universe nor is the universe creating me.
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The only way, thinkable by me, that this remotely makes any more sense than random gibberish, or at least as much sense as Alice in Wonderland, is if old Schrödinger was right all along. The appearance of separation between “minds” is, like the appearance of separation “in space” or separation “in time”—only an appearance. The sum total of all minds is one.
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In other words, the You who is making the grass green is non-local. The local You is, like the greenness of the grass, or the flatness of Earth, a social Game Rule or hallucination. Did you get it that time?