Can mainstream science learn anything from parapsychology?


Since the birth of quantum mechanics, there has been a huge debate among physicists as to how it should be interpreted, whether it is complete and whether the spooky quantum effects observed can be explained within the framework of existing knowledge. Some of the interpretations are really exotic, bordering science fiction.

(From Wikipedia article Interpretations of quantum mechanics)

 

 

Also, there is an ongoing effort to create a unifying theory, encompassing quantum mechanics, relativity, and gravity, the best attempt being M-theory, the theory unifying all existing string theories. However, M-theory is not widely accepted yet, because it is insufficiently developed and incomplete, as quantum mechanics (which is supposedly part of it) is.

Parapsychology has managed to prove convincingly the existence of phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, but it has failed to convince the public and the mainstream scientific community. This so to such extent, that they qualify it as a pseudoscience.

What is very disappointing is that parapsychology has hardly attempted to provide any link between its findings and modern physics. That might at least in part explain the lack of popularity of its findings.

However, parapsychologists undoubtedly can teach physicists a few very important lessons. If physicists were to listen to them, much of the ongoing debate could undoubtedly shift to other more fruitful activities. Some of the lessons can be derived from the solid experimental evidence for:

  1. Carrierless information transfer through space-time, including back in time (clairvoyance, precognition, and retrocognition experiments).
  2. The human brain is capable of extracting information about anything from any space-time point (at least here on Earth). (clairvoyance / remote viewing research).
  3. Human consciousness is capable of separating from the brain (meditation, out-of-body, and lucid dreaming).

It appears that the dogmatic insistence that nothing can travel faster than light, not even information (so-called no-communication theorem) urges revision. If the entire universe’s information is present in any point of time-space, there is no need to overcome the light barrier to access it.

On the other hand, the materialistic view that human consciousness is bound to the human brain and only exists in it, urges revision too.

 

 

Some recent mainstream science developments aligned with the above points

  • Physicists now know that time is flexible. According to relativity, it depends on the relative speed of reference frames and gravity. Geographic positioning systems such as GPS could not operate without relativistic corrections for time. Time is also known to be reversible, although generally growing entropy (second law of thermodynamics) causes the impression of directionality (time arrow). Time reversal is systematically employed as a tool in theoretical physics. It has been shown theoretically that the states of quantum computers could be time-reversed.
  • Physicists now know that quantum entanglement is possible both through space and time.
  • There appears to be a necessity to consider the observer as part of any quantum system to achieve a correct description of the measuring process. In quantum measurements, it has been shown that the observer can retroactively affect the states of quantum particles.
  • The holographic principle developed as part of the still-controversial M-theory assumes that all the information of the 4D universe might be encoded onto a 2D surface such as the cosmological horizon. Also, the information of a black hole is hypothesized to reside entirely on its 2D surface, (the event horizon) but it is not clear where all that information ends once the black hole evaporates through thermal radiation (information paradox).
  • A few years ago, scientists proposed that the universe is a giant quantum computer. More recently it was shown that the mathematical description of the dynamics of a neural network can be used to create a theory of everything in which quantum mechanics, gravity, relativity, and holography all fit nicely. The brain itself has been treated as a holographic device and a quantum computer.

It seems that at least on the quantum scale there is a growing acceptance of phenomena that appear to be “spooky actions at a distance” (using Einstein’s words) despite general reluctance. However, the parapsychological observations cited are macroscopic. That seems to be an obstacle even for parapsychologists, impeding them from hypothesizing any link to quantum mechanical phenomena.

Nevertheless, it has to be noticed that the definition of the term “quantum scale” is continuously modified in accordance with the characteristics of the systems, in which quantum properties, such as entanglement are demonstrated. Thus, there is a clear trend of creating experimental setups, which progressively push the imaginary boundary between quantum and non-quantum behavior toward larger and warmer systems.

It appears that not only isolated particles can be entangled but large-scale objects too. One of the biggest promoters of this theory is the Hungarian philosopher Ervin Laszlo, who is also the main popularizer of the Sanskrit word “Akasha” to denote the Universal Consciousness (see e.g. his book Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything). He defended that virtually any process in the universe occurring on any scale is governed by a shared information field that he calls the Akashik field and many phenomena such as life, the stability of our universe, and precognition cannot be attributed to mere chance. However, it is not clear yet, whether correlations on the quantum scale translate into large-scale correlations like these or if there is some different type of large-scale correlation.

In summary, the latest developments in physics and parapsychology appear to be going towards a common convergence point called a theory of everything that should be capable of explaining apparently spooky phenomena belonging to both fields of research.

 

Published: 2020-11-20

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