The New Inquisition Chapter 6 Mind Matter and Monism

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The New Inquisition Chapter 6. “Mind”, “Matter”, and Monism

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1986 Review Date: 2023-4-28 Status:⌛️

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I know the Berkeley-San Pablo area; I lived there for eight years. It is full of witches, or would-be witches, or loonies who think they are witches. They are constantly trying “psychic” experiments, such as thought-transference, or moving objects by the power of the mind. There are also parapsychology laboratories in Berkeley and nearby Palo Alto. Maybe somebody was concentrating—wishing—hoping—

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I will only note in passing that the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn has its headquarters in Berkeley.

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They trace their lineage back to the London Golden Dawn of Arthur Machen and William Butler Yeats and others interested in non-dualistic “mental” research, or research on “mind-like” behavior of the synergetic whole system.

Highlight(pink) - Page 181 · Location 3746 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 182 · Location 3761 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.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 182 · Location 3770 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 182 · Location 3766 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 182 · Location 3772 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 182 · Location 3774 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?
Highlight(pink) - Page 185 · Location 3828 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”

Highlight(pink) - Page 187 · Location 3889 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 190 · Location 3946 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 190 · Location 3955 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.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 189 · Location 3940 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.

Highlight(pink) - Page 195 · Location 4077 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!
Highlight(pink) - Page 196 · Location 4082 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.

Highlight(pink) - Page 196 · Location 4090 ❗️ 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 196 · Location 4092 Here I mostly follow Gribbin, In Search … op.cit. p. 164-170.
Highlight(pink) - Page 196 · Location 4094 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 196 · Location 4096 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 196 · Location 4100 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 197 · Location 4103 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 197 · Location 4105 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 197 · Location 4111 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 197 · Location 4113 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).
Highlight(pink) - Page 197 · Location 4119 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 197 · Location 4121 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.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 198 · Location 4124 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.)

Highlight(pink) - Page 198 · Location 4129 ❗️ 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 198 · Location 4137 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 198 · Location 4146 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?
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4154 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4158 Garry Owen is X and not-X and both X and not-X and neither X nor not-X.

Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4160❗️ The three quarks in Finnegans Wake, which have gotten into quantum mechanics via Dr. Murray Gell-Mann:
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4161 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4166 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4169 Sometimes and are Shaun and Shem, two deaf-mute twins in Dublin in Joyce’s youth, and is “Shimar Shin,” a sinister Hindu.
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4171 Sometimes and are “offender” and “defender” and is a composite “fender” who is guilty and innocent at the same time.
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4174 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4177 Many of the word-coinages in Finnegans Wake are s. For instance “chaosmos” is a combining cosmos () and chaos ().
Highlight(pink) - Page 199 · Location 4181 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 200 · Location 4185 Quantum Logic (von Neumann) easily converts into this symbolism. Schrödinger’s cat is alive () and dead () and in-between ().
Highlight(pink) - Page 200 · Location 4188 Transactional Psychology, similarly, says we cannot understand observer () alone or observed () alone but can only understand the synergetic transaction ().

Highlight(pink) - Page 188 · Location 3916❗️ 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 189 · Location 3923 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).

Highlight(pink) - Page 191 · Location 3987❗️ 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:
Highlight(pink) - Page 191 · Location 3990 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 192 · Location 3994 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 192 · Location 3998 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 …
Highlight(pink) - Page 192 · Location 4000 And the argument, like Godel’s Proof, vanishes into an infinite regress.
Highlight(pink) - Page 192 · Location 4001 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 192 · Location 4007 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4016 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4018 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;
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4019 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.”
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4020 We arrive—at least temporarily, and maybe permanently—at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4022 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)
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4026 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)
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4029 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)
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4032 and/ or—being created, along with their own “past” by our acts of measurement (Wheeler’s model)
Highlight(pink) - Page 193 · Location 4034 and/ or—the local explicate unfolding of a non-local implicate order (Bohm’s model)
Highlight(pink) - Page 194 · Location 4036 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 194 · Location 4041 In other words, in this model, consciousness “is” a function of the subquantal implicate order of Bohm, functioning non-locally.
Highlight(pink) - Page 194 · Location 4043 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 194 · Location 4046 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,

Highlight(pink) - Page 194 · Location 4050❗️ 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 194 · Location 4055 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 195 · Location 4060 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.
Highlight(pink) - Page 195 · Location 4062 Herbert and Walker conclude: … we find that our consciousness controls physical events through the laws of quantum mechanics.
Highlight(pink) - Page 195 · Location 4067 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.

Notes

Amount: 1

The Law of 23s

🔮 The Cosmos