The magical tradition, of course, has a long history of paying attention to dreams.In the ancient world dreams were treated with respect. They were generally held as indicators of the future and regarded as channels through which the ‘gods’ communicated with man, though it was recognised that not all dreams were significant.
Because not a few of these dreams seemed to play a vital part in shaping affairs of the State and because there was a certain degree of interest in their interpretation they were one of the magician’s stocks-in-trade and many manuals were written to aid those who wanted to discover their import.
A quick look through history will reveal that the most influential of these manuals was Oneirocritica which was written by an itinerant ‘wise man’ from Asia Minor, called Artemidorous, in AD 140. The same manual was translated into Italian and appeared in Venice in the 16th century, and into English under the title The Judgement of Dreams which was reprinted in 1518. It sold so well that by 1772 it had gone through twenty editions!
Such is the popular fascination with dreams and their interpretations that not even the New World with its avowed faith in the practical could not long resist their allure. The first dream interpretation textbook published in America was called The New Book of Knowledge. Surprisingly perhaps, it came out in staid and boring Boston in 1767 and it proved immensely popular. Not long afterwards, back in Britain, in Glasgow, was started a tradition that saw the establishing of the popular almanac. A publication which, in a slightly modified form, has persisted to this day.
The popular rage for dream interpretation aside, however, magicians treated dreams with respect for entirely different reasons. The dream world was often called “The High Country of the Mind” and all too often a dream was likened to an unconscious vision.
Dreams, magicians reasoned, were representations of other worlds, very much like our own but also different. And for a lack of any other explanation, they thought these other worlds could be nothing but the abode of ‘spirits’ and ‘gods’. Worlds which man could tread in only with his mind.Such belief seems preposterous only in retrospect. Magicians in the past were the psychologists and psychiatrists of their day. Their knowledge of, and experimentation with, psychedelic drugs provided them with a body of experience concerning the workings of the brain and mind, which though couched in mystical and religious terms as it was, was nonetheless experimentally sound.
They were aware, for instance, of the fact that certain chemical substances contained in hemlock, foxglove, deadly nightshade and jimson weed (all ritually used in magical rituals, at one time or another, and all rich in an alkaloid based, brain protein called atropine that can induce hallucinations of flying) altered the way the senses perceived the ordinary world. They intuitively knew that the mind was far more than the sum of its parts and they could sense that the mechanism governing dreams was one that could act as a gateway to entirely different realities, though not all the time.
What magicians did not know, but suspected, was that the mind’s ability to shape reality, in order to work, required total suspension of disbelief. And to produce that they created the many physically exhausting, hypnotic almost, rituals that were designed to wear the analytical part of the brain out, and allow the power of implicit belief that is governed by the unconscious, to surface.
In the Trois Frères caves, in the south of France, is perhaps the most famous prehistoric recorded example of ancient man’s intuitive belief in the power of the mind. In the deepest part of the cave, above a high rock ledge approximately twelve feet up from the cave floor, is the picture of a man wearing an animal’s skin and tail. An owlish-looking mask and the antlers of a stag adorn his head.
This tradition of becoming a ‘part’ of nature by mimicking its attributes, in this case acquiring the strength of a stag and the wisdom of an owl, is so old that its beginnings can be traced as far back as the earliest recorded signs of the emergence of man. However crude, the technique represented by this ancient painting may be, it is nonetheless effective. Mimicry and ritual tend to hypnotise the mind and give rise to a non-judgemental sense of belief that is accompanied by chemical and physiological changes similar to those attained by trance-mediums, mystics and yogis. History abounds with references to ordinary men and women who have fought harder, ran faster and gone for days without food and water without suffering significantly ill effects simply because they believed that they could do it.
More recently, scientific experiments involving statistical analysis; random predictions and ESP indicate that there clearly exists a mechanism in the mind (and the placebo effect in medicine is the best documented case of its effectiveness) that has the power to transform or at least nudge ‘reality’ a little towards the desired path. And that mechanism may be the very same one involved in dreams.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
The Power of Dreams
We all dream when we are asleep and quite a few of us dream when awake. Despite what productivity experts may say, there’s nothing wrong with a little innocent daydreaming. It relaxes the mind, gives vent to whatever suppressed feelings or emotions we may have bottled up and even leaves us feeling a little refreshed at times. But in a universe where man is, in a manner of speaking, the centre of all things and where everything has been created, as we saw, for our benefit, there is no such thing as an innocent activity.
Cosmologists say we are supposed to be here, we may even have some sort of ultimate purpose which we have yet to discover. The entire fabric of creation, we are told, from the friendly star Sol to the tiniest glimmer in the coldest reaches of space, has been created so we can perceive it with our superior minds.
And when those minds are engaged in dreaming, either passively -late at night- or actively -during the day- the implications are bound to be far more than a little innocent escapism ‘dreamed up’ by the unconscious.
Now, everything I’m going to propose and all the theories which have been put forward from either magicians or physicists, depend upon a single, simple fact. Whatever the mind does, whatever activity it is engaged in, or undertakes, is part of the physical world. That is to say that no matter how complex and inexplicable any mental activity may seem to be, it is nonetheless governed by the same physical laws that dictate that an apple will fall if you release it from a height and that the toast will burn in the morning, if you leave it in the toaster too long.
Up to now I have used the term mind loosely, without bothering to define it as a distinct entity from the brain. Although this issue is not simple at all, it is outside the present scope of our discussion, so for simplicity’s sake I shall use an analogy that’s very much in vogue these days and say that for the time being we shall let the brain be a computer (i.e. the hardware or wetware as it is more commonly called) and treat the mind as the programming or software that is ran by the brain.
To get back to my argument though, by acknowledging that the mind operates within the framework of the physical world we immediately do away with the reek of the supernatural when it comes to considering any phenomena associated with it.
Anything supernatural, by definition, is an interventionary force from the outside (whatever that outside may be). It is not part of our universe and it is not subject to the same laws as we are and although in the past a supernatural agency has been invoked (primarily by magicians but also by some of the earlier scientists) in order to explain phenomena and events that lay outside their current breadth of knowledge, I firmly believe that any such entity, if it exists, can neither easily enter our universe nor comfortably function within it.
Every living thing is suited to its particular environment. People walk on land and use lungs to breathe in air, fish live in an aquatic environment and filter water through their gills. Water is part of our planet (7/10 of it at least) so, in a manner of speaking, it is also part of our environment. And yet we cannot very easily adapt to it without extensive use of our technology. If we were to enter a universe the natural laws of which are different from our own, to survive, we would need the technical ability to manipulate the laws of a nature totally alien to our own. As we cannot even begin to imagine what that nature may be like, to suggest that yes, we could possibly some day develop such capability, although probable is clearly not very realistic.
In a similar manner, anything which comes from outside our Universe would find it next to impossible to function (provided it could survive) in an environment so alien to its nature.
Having thus discounted the supernatural and along with it the miraculous, whatever remains, however improbable (to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes) must be of this world.What does all this have to do with dreams?
Quite a lot really, for according to one scientific theory dreams are real and according to another it is we who are the dream and yet a third suggests that we can dream our reality into being!
Cosmologists say we are supposed to be here, we may even have some sort of ultimate purpose which we have yet to discover. The entire fabric of creation, we are told, from the friendly star Sol to the tiniest glimmer in the coldest reaches of space, has been created so we can perceive it with our superior minds.
And when those minds are engaged in dreaming, either passively -late at night- or actively -during the day- the implications are bound to be far more than a little innocent escapism ‘dreamed up’ by the unconscious.
Now, everything I’m going to propose and all the theories which have been put forward from either magicians or physicists, depend upon a single, simple fact. Whatever the mind does, whatever activity it is engaged in, or undertakes, is part of the physical world. That is to say that no matter how complex and inexplicable any mental activity may seem to be, it is nonetheless governed by the same physical laws that dictate that an apple will fall if you release it from a height and that the toast will burn in the morning, if you leave it in the toaster too long.
Up to now I have used the term mind loosely, without bothering to define it as a distinct entity from the brain. Although this issue is not simple at all, it is outside the present scope of our discussion, so for simplicity’s sake I shall use an analogy that’s very much in vogue these days and say that for the time being we shall let the brain be a computer (i.e. the hardware or wetware as it is more commonly called) and treat the mind as the programming or software that is ran by the brain.
To get back to my argument though, by acknowledging that the mind operates within the framework of the physical world we immediately do away with the reek of the supernatural when it comes to considering any phenomena associated with it.
Anything supernatural, by definition, is an interventionary force from the outside (whatever that outside may be). It is not part of our universe and it is not subject to the same laws as we are and although in the past a supernatural agency has been invoked (primarily by magicians but also by some of the earlier scientists) in order to explain phenomena and events that lay outside their current breadth of knowledge, I firmly believe that any such entity, if it exists, can neither easily enter our universe nor comfortably function within it.
Every living thing is suited to its particular environment. People walk on land and use lungs to breathe in air, fish live in an aquatic environment and filter water through their gills. Water is part of our planet (7/10 of it at least) so, in a manner of speaking, it is also part of our environment. And yet we cannot very easily adapt to it without extensive use of our technology. If we were to enter a universe the natural laws of which are different from our own, to survive, we would need the technical ability to manipulate the laws of a nature totally alien to our own. As we cannot even begin to imagine what that nature may be like, to suggest that yes, we could possibly some day develop such capability, although probable is clearly not very realistic.
In a similar manner, anything which comes from outside our Universe would find it next to impossible to function (provided it could survive) in an environment so alien to its nature.
Having thus discounted the supernatural and along with it the miraculous, whatever remains, however improbable (to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes) must be of this world.What does all this have to do with dreams?
Quite a lot really, for according to one scientific theory dreams are real and according to another it is we who are the dream and yet a third suggests that we can dream our reality into being!
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
The anthropocentric universe Part IV (Man, The Universe and Everything)
Hawking holds Newton’s chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. It is in his capacity as the world’s leading cosmologist and theoretical physicist however that he holds in thrall the public imagination.
Now, unfortunately, for the last twenty years, Hawking has been confined to a wheel chair, the victim of a potentially fatal motor-neuron disease known as Lou Gehring’s disease. While his body is trapped, Hawking’s mind is free to roam, and its playground is the furthest reaches of the Galaxy.
There are certain clarifications that have to be made about looking back into the heart of the Galaxy. Because of the physical limitations imposed by the finite speed of light; looking back in space, is akin to looking back in time. The implication is that if we look back far enough we will, eventually, be able to determine the beginnings of the universe and theological considerations aside, examine the initial conditions that eventually begot us.
The problem is that the light we can detect with our best optical instruments and the radiation our satellite dishes can gather has been so weakened by the distance it has had to travel that the readings we get depend for final analysis upon man’s oldest instrument: the brain.
And this is where Hawking comes into his own. The shortcomings of his physical condition not withstanding, his brain, is one of the finest in the world, and when he talks, people listen, scientists amongst them.
Hawking is a proponent of modern science’s version of Bolus’ microcosmic man, known as the Anthropic Principle. In its simplest form the Anthropic Principle states that the universe is a statistical possibility of infinite potential. It also states that the potential of the universe is always achieved, so that the universe evolves along every possible path you can imagine.
The crunch, of course, comes when you consider life (mainly us), evolving in that universe. The Anthropic Principle states that the evolution of life can, statistically speaking, occur only in a certain, limited number of regions in an otherwise chaotic and infinite universe. What this means of course is that the universe and everything else we observe around us appear to have been tailor-made just for us.
If for instance the electric charge possessed by the electron that is found revolving around the nucleus of atoms had been slightly different, if the cores of the stars burnt just a little faster or a tiny bit slower or if the distribution of molecular carbon in the galaxy was not what it is now, you, I and the rest of the world would have never existed.
Were Hawking to be asked, at the intergalactic party at the edge of the Universe, “Why is the universe the way we see it?” he would glibly answer “If it had been different, we would not be here!”And that in a nutshell is what Bolus, in his own way, had said. It was all right for the gods to originate all these spheres of influence, but in order to have some sort of meaning, those spheres had to culminate in something, and that something was man.
Both Bolus and Hawking used the same instruments to guide them in their analysis: a strong sense of intuition and a fine intellect. The difference lies in 3,000 years of development in which our advanced technology has permitted us to cast our eye as far back in time as ten thousand million years ago.
We no longer believe that the gods ordered and originated perfectly circular spheres of influence, but as we shall see, just as cosmology has come to re-examine Bolus’ magical belief of man the microcosm, physics and mathematics have already laid the groundwork for the scientific explanation of sympathetic or corresponding magic. As a result, the advances made in statistical mathematics and clinical psychology have given us the means to explain just how potent is the power of dreams. More importantly, perhaps, they have succeeded in showing us what we must do in order to achieve their promise.
Now, unfortunately, for the last twenty years, Hawking has been confined to a wheel chair, the victim of a potentially fatal motor-neuron disease known as Lou Gehring’s disease. While his body is trapped, Hawking’s mind is free to roam, and its playground is the furthest reaches of the Galaxy.
There are certain clarifications that have to be made about looking back into the heart of the Galaxy. Because of the physical limitations imposed by the finite speed of light; looking back in space, is akin to looking back in time. The implication is that if we look back far enough we will, eventually, be able to determine the beginnings of the universe and theological considerations aside, examine the initial conditions that eventually begot us.
The problem is that the light we can detect with our best optical instruments and the radiation our satellite dishes can gather has been so weakened by the distance it has had to travel that the readings we get depend for final analysis upon man’s oldest instrument: the brain.
And this is where Hawking comes into his own. The shortcomings of his physical condition not withstanding, his brain, is one of the finest in the world, and when he talks, people listen, scientists amongst them.
Hawking is a proponent of modern science’s version of Bolus’ microcosmic man, known as the Anthropic Principle. In its simplest form the Anthropic Principle states that the universe is a statistical possibility of infinite potential. It also states that the potential of the universe is always achieved, so that the universe evolves along every possible path you can imagine.
The crunch, of course, comes when you consider life (mainly us), evolving in that universe. The Anthropic Principle states that the evolution of life can, statistically speaking, occur only in a certain, limited number of regions in an otherwise chaotic and infinite universe. What this means of course is that the universe and everything else we observe around us appear to have been tailor-made just for us.
If for instance the electric charge possessed by the electron that is found revolving around the nucleus of atoms had been slightly different, if the cores of the stars burnt just a little faster or a tiny bit slower or if the distribution of molecular carbon in the galaxy was not what it is now, you, I and the rest of the world would have never existed.
Were Hawking to be asked, at the intergalactic party at the edge of the Universe, “Why is the universe the way we see it?” he would glibly answer “If it had been different, we would not be here!”And that in a nutshell is what Bolus, in his own way, had said. It was all right for the gods to originate all these spheres of influence, but in order to have some sort of meaning, those spheres had to culminate in something, and that something was man.
Both Bolus and Hawking used the same instruments to guide them in their analysis: a strong sense of intuition and a fine intellect. The difference lies in 3,000 years of development in which our advanced technology has permitted us to cast our eye as far back in time as ten thousand million years ago.
We no longer believe that the gods ordered and originated perfectly circular spheres of influence, but as we shall see, just as cosmology has come to re-examine Bolus’ magical belief of man the microcosm, physics and mathematics have already laid the groundwork for the scientific explanation of sympathetic or corresponding magic. As a result, the advances made in statistical mathematics and clinical psychology have given us the means to explain just how potent is the power of dreams. More importantly, perhaps, they have succeeded in showing us what we must do in order to achieve their promise.
Monday, April 16, 2007
The anthropocentric universe Part III (We Know What You Will Do Next)
Not everybody likes parties though and the possibility I entertained earlier, of a party at the edge of the universe ever coming off, was almost quashed between the 17th and late nineteenth century.
The culprits of course were scientists (rather than magicians, who are known to love a party anywhere) and the reason for their efforts in this direction lies, not in any killjoy trait in the scientific character (though this has been an oft aired accusation in the past) but in the fact that scientists, like the rest of humanity, like to face their universe with a certain degree of certainty.
And certainty is just what the Newtonian model of a mechanical, totally deterministic universe offered. Based on the original observations of the motion of a pendulum bob made in 1583 by the Italian astronomer, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, an English mathematician and natural philosopher was able to formulate the laws governing the fundamental behaviour of bodies in motion.
The principles of The Motion of Bodies was published in 1687 in Newton’s work Principia (Lat. Principles) and came to be known as Newtonian mechanics. When scientists saw that Newton’s laws of mechanics could be applied to just about any moving object in the universe and give a very good approximation of the result, they saw no reason why this could not be so in any direction in time and space.
Thus, after studying the behaviour of any physical object during an instant in time, scientists became confident that not only could they then ‘magically’ predict what was going to happen at any other given instant in the future by extrapolating its behaviour, but they could also tell exactly what had happened in the past. What’s more, unlike any other form of magic, they could do so with -what they then believed was- a terrific degree of precision.
The philosophical basis of this rigourously deterministic model of the universe had been laid more than forty years earlier by the fundamental division between ‘I’, the observer, and the observed world outside, introduced by the French philosopher and mathematician Réne Descartes in 1644.
Descartes believed in the existence of an independent, absolute world that had nothing to do with the senses. To hark back to my earlier example then, the description of a party, any party, given by a person became the definitive description of that party. The rationale was that since the party had an independent existence, totally removed from the observer; then the description the observer gave would be identical in every way to the description given by any other observer, including the host.
Now, those of us who have tried to gatecrash a party and have been found out, know this is not true. At the time however it did seem true to many and another French mathematician, Pierre Simon Laplace, gave what is perhaps the clearest expression of the world that was emerging.“An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature,” he said, “and the position of all things of which the world consists -supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis- would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.” Setting a trend that’s remained to this day then, scientists proceeded to take over the jobs of court astrologers and fortune tellers and relegated both the former and the latter into the dustbin of history.The universe, they argued, is totally deterministic.
Free will is illusory, God (if he exists) is reduced to turning the pages to a play that’s already been written and man, far from being the centre of things, is consigned to mouthing the empty lines of character actors.
The attraction of such a soulless universe, devoid of the life, vitality and dynamism of the magical model, was that within its framework predictions could be made that were accurate. If not quite as accurate as those envisaged by Laplace at least accurate to within a very tolerable standard.Not surprisingly magicians fell out of favour. Their definition of a vague, uncertain world which required their constant mediation to keep things in line, was suddenly out of fashion.
If the fact that man had very suddenly been marginalised and the validity of free will disputed, left a sour taste in the mouth, it was made a little more palatable by the promise that very soon every mystery of Nature that had remained hidden would now become known. The very concept of the existence of a soul was now at best trivialised and at worst doubted. After all the soul could neither be directly observed nor its actions exactly predicted and to many scientists, the claim that there did exist one, smacked of ignorance and superstition. It was seen as the direct result of man’s inability to explain the reasons behind his own actions. The soul was then discarded, but given enough hard data and information everything else would be made to fit into this grandiose clockwork of the universe; including, some scientists claimed, those quirky behavioural traits that were used as the basis for the existence of a soul.
Given enough information, they argued, the behaviour and thoughts of every individual, from the buying of this book to attending a party in a distant part of the universe, could be accurately predicted. In a mechanistic universe it is possible to create the ultimate police state where the actions of every individual could be mapped out and analysed even before that individual undertook those actions. In other words not only would they (whoever ‘they’ would have turned out to be) know what you would do next, they would also know why. This is possible because in the eyes of the proponents of the mechanistic universe we are all reduced to the status of machines, albeit complicated ones, and our behaviour is equally determinable. In a short space of time, the proponents of hard science continued, not only would there be no place for anything in the least magical, in this universe, but the nature of science would also drastically change as everything that could possibly happen would be predicted and everything that could possibly exist would then be known. All man had to do was develop powerful enough and large enough, information processing capabilities. These capabilities, presumably, would copy the ideal model of the universe and take the form of more and more complex machines.
Thus, in the span of a relatively short time science managed to become not only the first profession to successfully do away with magic, but also the very first one to wish to try to do away with its own job!
Fortunately for all concerned things did not exactly work out that way. The universe may appear to run like a clockwork, but no amount of information collecting is capable of determining what will happen next. And as quantum mechanics came to show, in the early 1920s, the very act of collecting information changes the state of being of the object being observed thus adding to its indeterminacy.
Electrons for example, revolving around atomic nuclei are hazy clouds of probability and you can either know their velocity or know their momentum but never both accurately enough to allow you to predict a distinct instant in space and time when an electron will manifest out of the electronic cloud of its indeterminacy and appear as a distinct, concrete, entity.
Even the component parts of the atomic nucleus itself, the protons and the neutrons, are now perceived as constantly vibrating, empty space bounded by their form.
Science’s brief flirtation with a totally predictable universe, and its accompanying put-down, was not without benefits however. The best thing to come out of that era are a couple of very useful theories formulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his American counterpart John Bell, which tellingly show why the universe can never be truly deterministic even if at times it appears to behave that way, and which we will look at later.
It wasn’t long after the introduction of quantum mechanics which successfully explained the behaviour of the universe at a microscopic level, that the clockwork universe was perceived for what it was, a useful approximation, but no more.
Magic was suddenly back in vogue and those who cared to could, once more, entertain the notion of a party at the edge of the universe, without having to worry that their every decision and thought would be predicted in advance by an alien operating a super-powerful computer.
The culprits of course were scientists (rather than magicians, who are known to love a party anywhere) and the reason for their efforts in this direction lies, not in any killjoy trait in the scientific character (though this has been an oft aired accusation in the past) but in the fact that scientists, like the rest of humanity, like to face their universe with a certain degree of certainty.
And certainty is just what the Newtonian model of a mechanical, totally deterministic universe offered. Based on the original observations of the motion of a pendulum bob made in 1583 by the Italian astronomer, physicist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, an English mathematician and natural philosopher was able to formulate the laws governing the fundamental behaviour of bodies in motion.
The principles of The Motion of Bodies was published in 1687 in Newton’s work Principia (Lat. Principles) and came to be known as Newtonian mechanics. When scientists saw that Newton’s laws of mechanics could be applied to just about any moving object in the universe and give a very good approximation of the result, they saw no reason why this could not be so in any direction in time and space.
Thus, after studying the behaviour of any physical object during an instant in time, scientists became confident that not only could they then ‘magically’ predict what was going to happen at any other given instant in the future by extrapolating its behaviour, but they could also tell exactly what had happened in the past. What’s more, unlike any other form of magic, they could do so with -what they then believed was- a terrific degree of precision.
The philosophical basis of this rigourously deterministic model of the universe had been laid more than forty years earlier by the fundamental division between ‘I’, the observer, and the observed world outside, introduced by the French philosopher and mathematician Réne Descartes in 1644.
Descartes believed in the existence of an independent, absolute world that had nothing to do with the senses. To hark back to my earlier example then, the description of a party, any party, given by a person became the definitive description of that party. The rationale was that since the party had an independent existence, totally removed from the observer; then the description the observer gave would be identical in every way to the description given by any other observer, including the host.
Now, those of us who have tried to gatecrash a party and have been found out, know this is not true. At the time however it did seem true to many and another French mathematician, Pierre Simon Laplace, gave what is perhaps the clearest expression of the world that was emerging.“An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature,” he said, “and the position of all things of which the world consists -supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis- would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.” Setting a trend that’s remained to this day then, scientists proceeded to take over the jobs of court astrologers and fortune tellers and relegated both the former and the latter into the dustbin of history.The universe, they argued, is totally deterministic.
Free will is illusory, God (if he exists) is reduced to turning the pages to a play that’s already been written and man, far from being the centre of things, is consigned to mouthing the empty lines of character actors.
The attraction of such a soulless universe, devoid of the life, vitality and dynamism of the magical model, was that within its framework predictions could be made that were accurate. If not quite as accurate as those envisaged by Laplace at least accurate to within a very tolerable standard.Not surprisingly magicians fell out of favour. Their definition of a vague, uncertain world which required their constant mediation to keep things in line, was suddenly out of fashion.
If the fact that man had very suddenly been marginalised and the validity of free will disputed, left a sour taste in the mouth, it was made a little more palatable by the promise that very soon every mystery of Nature that had remained hidden would now become known. The very concept of the existence of a soul was now at best trivialised and at worst doubted. After all the soul could neither be directly observed nor its actions exactly predicted and to many scientists, the claim that there did exist one, smacked of ignorance and superstition. It was seen as the direct result of man’s inability to explain the reasons behind his own actions. The soul was then discarded, but given enough hard data and information everything else would be made to fit into this grandiose clockwork of the universe; including, some scientists claimed, those quirky behavioural traits that were used as the basis for the existence of a soul.
Given enough information, they argued, the behaviour and thoughts of every individual, from the buying of this book to attending a party in a distant part of the universe, could be accurately predicted. In a mechanistic universe it is possible to create the ultimate police state where the actions of every individual could be mapped out and analysed even before that individual undertook those actions. In other words not only would they (whoever ‘they’ would have turned out to be) know what you would do next, they would also know why. This is possible because in the eyes of the proponents of the mechanistic universe we are all reduced to the status of machines, albeit complicated ones, and our behaviour is equally determinable. In a short space of time, the proponents of hard science continued, not only would there be no place for anything in the least magical, in this universe, but the nature of science would also drastically change as everything that could possibly happen would be predicted and everything that could possibly exist would then be known. All man had to do was develop powerful enough and large enough, information processing capabilities. These capabilities, presumably, would copy the ideal model of the universe and take the form of more and more complex machines.
Thus, in the span of a relatively short time science managed to become not only the first profession to successfully do away with magic, but also the very first one to wish to try to do away with its own job!
Fortunately for all concerned things did not exactly work out that way. The universe may appear to run like a clockwork, but no amount of information collecting is capable of determining what will happen next. And as quantum mechanics came to show, in the early 1920s, the very act of collecting information changes the state of being of the object being observed thus adding to its indeterminacy.
Electrons for example, revolving around atomic nuclei are hazy clouds of probability and you can either know their velocity or know their momentum but never both accurately enough to allow you to predict a distinct instant in space and time when an electron will manifest out of the electronic cloud of its indeterminacy and appear as a distinct, concrete, entity.
Even the component parts of the atomic nucleus itself, the protons and the neutrons, are now perceived as constantly vibrating, empty space bounded by their form.
Science’s brief flirtation with a totally predictable universe, and its accompanying put-down, was not without benefits however. The best thing to come out of that era are a couple of very useful theories formulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his American counterpart John Bell, which tellingly show why the universe can never be truly deterministic even if at times it appears to behave that way, and which we will look at later.
It wasn’t long after the introduction of quantum mechanics which successfully explained the behaviour of the universe at a microscopic level, that the clockwork universe was perceived for what it was, a useful approximation, but no more.
Magic was suddenly back in vogue and those who cared to could, once more, entertain the notion of a party at the edge of the universe, without having to worry that their every decision and thought would be predicted in advance by an alien operating a super-powerful computer.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
The anthropocentric universe Part II (The Center of Attention)
Now, I like parties as much as the next man. And I enjoy them even more when they are being held in my honour and people pay attention to me not because of anything I’ve said or done, but simply because I’m there.
If a grand, humdinger of a party were to be held in an otherwise quite corner of the Universe and all life forms were to be invited, including man, then I can tell you now that all eyes (and other alien sensory organs) would be upon us, for we would be the centre of attention at that party, simply for being there.
Before you get me wrong, I must hasten to add that looks will have nothing to do with all the interest we will generate. The reason we will be honoured and paid lavish attention to, is none other than the fact that if not for us, the Universe, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.
You may find this piece of information a little strange and rather hard to come to grips with, but it is in fact a contention countenanced by a great many cosmologists and physicists including Britain’s own Stephen Hawking.
All this has come about from science’s attempts to answer the question “Why are we here?”. Now, there’s nothing very new about this question. It has been asked before and a rather mediocre philosopher and wizard named Bolus of Mendes, an Egyptian who lived in Hellenistic Greece in 200 BC, wrote a book trying to answer just that.Bolus’ book became a best-seller, sparking off a minor revolution in the magical circles of its time. Its message was so intuitive and so simple that it probably predated its formal statement by several hundred thousand years.
What Bolus wrote was that man was a microcosm or ‘little world’ and that within him he contained, on a somewhat smaller scale, all the levels of being in the Universe. Wizards in Bolus’ time visualised the Universe as being spherical, comprised of an almost endless array of ever narrowing concentric spheres that began with the gods and narrowed down to planet Earth. Now Bolus placed man squarely in the centre of that fixture, able to influence anything he chose to direct his attention to.
That was about 3,000 years ago and it became the basis for the tradition of sympathetic or corresponding magic; according to which great effects can be set in motion simply by activating their corresponding element on Earth, which in turn will activate its corresponding element in the next sphere and so on. Before you laugh, remember that every time you touch wood to ward off bad luck, while surrounded by the high-tech fruits of 20th century technology, you too become part of that tradition. Wood was sacred in the ancient world for its ability to float on water and burn in fires. It was vital for building shelters against the elements, keeping oneself warm, and as a raw material for tools, implements and amulets! To the minds of the people it was both alive and dead, it could grow out of the ground and attain great size but its death did not diminish it. By touching wood then, they evoked the life-force of the spirit that lived in it.
I’m not suggesting that we all start wearing amulets and worship trees, but there are, often little understood urges in us, which account for the grip of superstition on our minds. By the same token, magic, and science today, enjoy a similarly strong grip.Modern science can, of course, now produce theories which are a little more refined than your average magical one. To thank for this we have the unstinting efforts of Francis Bacon, an English mathematician and one time Lord Chancellor to James I, who in the early 17th century with the intention of becoming a “second Aristotle” argued for the establishment of the experimental method which has become the basis of the scientific approach. Beneath all the dressing, however, the messages science has to give us today are restatements of theories wizards and magicians have championed since the dawn of history and they hark back upon a past where, as we shall see, intuition was the sole guiding principle.
If a grand, humdinger of a party were to be held in an otherwise quite corner of the Universe and all life forms were to be invited, including man, then I can tell you now that all eyes (and other alien sensory organs) would be upon us, for we would be the centre of attention at that party, simply for being there.
Before you get me wrong, I must hasten to add that looks will have nothing to do with all the interest we will generate. The reason we will be honoured and paid lavish attention to, is none other than the fact that if not for us, the Universe, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.
You may find this piece of information a little strange and rather hard to come to grips with, but it is in fact a contention countenanced by a great many cosmologists and physicists including Britain’s own Stephen Hawking.
All this has come about from science’s attempts to answer the question “Why are we here?”. Now, there’s nothing very new about this question. It has been asked before and a rather mediocre philosopher and wizard named Bolus of Mendes, an Egyptian who lived in Hellenistic Greece in 200 BC, wrote a book trying to answer just that.Bolus’ book became a best-seller, sparking off a minor revolution in the magical circles of its time. Its message was so intuitive and so simple that it probably predated its formal statement by several hundred thousand years.
What Bolus wrote was that man was a microcosm or ‘little world’ and that within him he contained, on a somewhat smaller scale, all the levels of being in the Universe. Wizards in Bolus’ time visualised the Universe as being spherical, comprised of an almost endless array of ever narrowing concentric spheres that began with the gods and narrowed down to planet Earth. Now Bolus placed man squarely in the centre of that fixture, able to influence anything he chose to direct his attention to.
That was about 3,000 years ago and it became the basis for the tradition of sympathetic or corresponding magic; according to which great effects can be set in motion simply by activating their corresponding element on Earth, which in turn will activate its corresponding element in the next sphere and so on. Before you laugh, remember that every time you touch wood to ward off bad luck, while surrounded by the high-tech fruits of 20th century technology, you too become part of that tradition. Wood was sacred in the ancient world for its ability to float on water and burn in fires. It was vital for building shelters against the elements, keeping oneself warm, and as a raw material for tools, implements and amulets! To the minds of the people it was both alive and dead, it could grow out of the ground and attain great size but its death did not diminish it. By touching wood then, they evoked the life-force of the spirit that lived in it.
I’m not suggesting that we all start wearing amulets and worship trees, but there are, often little understood urges in us, which account for the grip of superstition on our minds. By the same token, magic, and science today, enjoy a similarly strong grip.Modern science can, of course, now produce theories which are a little more refined than your average magical one. To thank for this we have the unstinting efforts of Francis Bacon, an English mathematician and one time Lord Chancellor to James I, who in the early 17th century with the intention of becoming a “second Aristotle” argued for the establishment of the experimental method which has become the basis of the scientific approach. Beneath all the dressing, however, the messages science has to give us today are restatements of theories wizards and magicians have championed since the dawn of history and they hark back upon a past where, as we shall see, intuition was the sole guiding principle.
Friday, April 13, 2007
The anthropocentric universe Part I
Today, when scientists talk people listen. For many people science has taken on the mantle formerly worn by religion. It promises salvation from a great many of life’s problems and claims to offer the only possible way to save the planet from its inevitable, looming fate, which has been brought on by the bad management of our natural resources, overcrowding and the excesses of...yes, science.
It would not be wrong to assume, when listening to scientists, that the future is going to present few problems science will not effectively be able to deal with, and as long as we keep supplying scientists with tax-dollars, we have little to worry about. Yet, we have been down that road before. There was a time when tithes supported the researches of alchemists, necromancers, astrologers and wizards, and it was they who stood beside Kings and Heads of State, rather than the Science Advisers we see today.
The picture of the poor alchemist or lone magician bent over his work, supported by his meagre earnings as he quests for Truth and Knowledge, has as much countenance as that of the lone scientist setting up a laboratory in his basement or town-house garage.
To be honest there were some astrologers, alchemists and wizards who toiled on alone, as there are today certain scientists who choose to go down that route, James Lovelock (of the Gaia theory fame) being a prime example, but the reason for their position tends to be more the nature of the individual pursuit of their studies than the effect of their calling.Magicians who dabbled with the conjuration of devils in the past, were naturally not in as great a demand as those who specialised in casting horoscopes and divining where wells lay. Scientists who choose to champion an unpopular area of research today are cut off from the fold and have, therefore, to strike out on their own.
But no one, given half a chance, will not choose to be part of the mainstream, and the mainstream like a self-regulatory free market mechanism, dictates (for ill or good) what the general thrust of the discipline will be.
Cynical as this may sound to those who think that science (like magic, once) is ruled by high ideals and a thirst for knowledge, it is nonetheless true and it works in a more or less desirable direction, as it tends to guide magicians and scientists alike towards an area of study useful to those who employ them. After all, he who pays the piper, invariably, calls the tune.#
So, scientists today hold the awe of the masses, not least because they tread in areas of thought that fascinate everybody but which few people are properly equipped to explore themselves. Not surprisingly, when scientists talk, they also couch their language behind a thicket of jargon reminiscent of secret initiation rites and use symbols which to the untrained eye may as well be runes. Does all this sound familiar?
Scientists don’t yet say abracadabra, but I have heard them speak of “the transmutation potential of morphogenic field phenomena on the inverse wave interface.” The reason I’m not impressed by such things anymore is because I have heard the explanations and they are far from impressive (like the one above referring to a change in the weather!).Science (which originally, in true market-forces style, sprang from a branch of magic) has today cornered the ‘Explanations about the Universe’ market and is seeking to monopolise our trust. In the face of the decline of the power of religion, the erosion of social institutions, the uncertainty of new values and mores and the constant thirst for answers that is the hallmark of man, science has certainly caught our attention.
Books on popular science (not unlike what I am writing here one) now vie in sales with fiction best-sellers. The promises of scientists about the security of the future sound like the hawking of elixirs promising to cure all ills and the vying for attention, prestige, and research money bring to mind the Hapsburg court in Austria and its armies of astrologers, or the Senate of Rome and its attendant priests who were at hand to read the entrails of sacrificed animals.
Now, it may sound like I object to all this. Far from it. I admire what science has achieved to date and applaud the brave, new concepts put forward for the future. But at the same time we should keep things in a certain perspective. None of this is really ‘new.’ Nor has science just ‘discovered’ terrific new insights that will permanently change the nature of man’s interaction with the Cosmos.
Like I said earlier, we have been down that road before. And one only needs to listen carefully to realise that science today is in the business of rediscovering rather than discovering, very much like the time of the Renaissance that was sparked off in Italy and which rediscovered the wisdom and knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome, restated it, and then claimed it for its own.
To be sure, science is an exciting field to be working in today. The bespectacled, white lab-coated, boring stereotype of the scientist, if it was ever true, has gone the way of the dodo. Scientists today have to be as good at presenting their theories as they are at formulating them; this means that they must have a little of the showman in them; and this, unfortunately, attracts not a few charlatans to the profession.
Over the last few years, as the money has become scarcer, either because there are that many more scientists chasing after it, or else because there are other demands, just as legitimate and often far more pressing being made upon it, the clamour and the claims have got louder.
It is necessary then, to sort the facts from the hype and listen carefully to what these ‘new’ scientists are saying about their achievements to date, their theories, and the world we will all soon be inhabiting.
It would not be wrong to assume, when listening to scientists, that the future is going to present few problems science will not effectively be able to deal with, and as long as we keep supplying scientists with tax-dollars, we have little to worry about. Yet, we have been down that road before. There was a time when tithes supported the researches of alchemists, necromancers, astrologers and wizards, and it was they who stood beside Kings and Heads of State, rather than the Science Advisers we see today.
The picture of the poor alchemist or lone magician bent over his work, supported by his meagre earnings as he quests for Truth and Knowledge, has as much countenance as that of the lone scientist setting up a laboratory in his basement or town-house garage.
To be honest there were some astrologers, alchemists and wizards who toiled on alone, as there are today certain scientists who choose to go down that route, James Lovelock (of the Gaia theory fame) being a prime example, but the reason for their position tends to be more the nature of the individual pursuit of their studies than the effect of their calling.Magicians who dabbled with the conjuration of devils in the past, were naturally not in as great a demand as those who specialised in casting horoscopes and divining where wells lay. Scientists who choose to champion an unpopular area of research today are cut off from the fold and have, therefore, to strike out on their own.
But no one, given half a chance, will not choose to be part of the mainstream, and the mainstream like a self-regulatory free market mechanism, dictates (for ill or good) what the general thrust of the discipline will be.
Cynical as this may sound to those who think that science (like magic, once) is ruled by high ideals and a thirst for knowledge, it is nonetheless true and it works in a more or less desirable direction, as it tends to guide magicians and scientists alike towards an area of study useful to those who employ them. After all, he who pays the piper, invariably, calls the tune.#
So, scientists today hold the awe of the masses, not least because they tread in areas of thought that fascinate everybody but which few people are properly equipped to explore themselves. Not surprisingly, when scientists talk, they also couch their language behind a thicket of jargon reminiscent of secret initiation rites and use symbols which to the untrained eye may as well be runes. Does all this sound familiar?
Scientists don’t yet say abracadabra, but I have heard them speak of “the transmutation potential of morphogenic field phenomena on the inverse wave interface.” The reason I’m not impressed by such things anymore is because I have heard the explanations and they are far from impressive (like the one above referring to a change in the weather!).Science (which originally, in true market-forces style, sprang from a branch of magic) has today cornered the ‘Explanations about the Universe’ market and is seeking to monopolise our trust. In the face of the decline of the power of religion, the erosion of social institutions, the uncertainty of new values and mores and the constant thirst for answers that is the hallmark of man, science has certainly caught our attention.
Books on popular science (not unlike what I am writing here one) now vie in sales with fiction best-sellers. The promises of scientists about the security of the future sound like the hawking of elixirs promising to cure all ills and the vying for attention, prestige, and research money bring to mind the Hapsburg court in Austria and its armies of astrologers, or the Senate of Rome and its attendant priests who were at hand to read the entrails of sacrificed animals.
Now, it may sound like I object to all this. Far from it. I admire what science has achieved to date and applaud the brave, new concepts put forward for the future. But at the same time we should keep things in a certain perspective. None of this is really ‘new.’ Nor has science just ‘discovered’ terrific new insights that will permanently change the nature of man’s interaction with the Cosmos.
Like I said earlier, we have been down that road before. And one only needs to listen carefully to realise that science today is in the business of rediscovering rather than discovering, very much like the time of the Renaissance that was sparked off in Italy and which rediscovered the wisdom and knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome, restated it, and then claimed it for its own.
To be sure, science is an exciting field to be working in today. The bespectacled, white lab-coated, boring stereotype of the scientist, if it was ever true, has gone the way of the dodo. Scientists today have to be as good at presenting their theories as they are at formulating them; this means that they must have a little of the showman in them; and this, unfortunately, attracts not a few charlatans to the profession.
Over the last few years, as the money has become scarcer, either because there are that many more scientists chasing after it, or else because there are other demands, just as legitimate and often far more pressing being made upon it, the clamour and the claims have got louder.
It is necessary then, to sort the facts from the hype and listen carefully to what these ‘new’ scientists are saying about their achievements to date, their theories, and the world we will all soon be inhabiting.
Introduction to both science and magic
When I was training as a chemical engineer, science offered very few opportunities for heresy. Science was, even then, an exciting field in which one could hope to practise a profession, but it was also a serious business.
I suppose it was a little like High Magic. Laymen weren’t expected to understand it; all that mattered were the results not the process and everyone held scientists in a kind of quite awe.
The latter was mostly because no one was quite sure what scientists did. There was the suspicion (advanced at cocktail parties after the punch had finished) that scientists made bombs.
Some would even go so far as to intimate that scientists were not the most sane of people one could know. Which was laughable given the fact that, at the time, it taxed the imagination to think of anyone less sane and strait-laced than a scientist.
The profession simply did not encourage colourful personalities, and anything that could not be rigourously proven was never even thought about, let alone mentioned in public.
Pretty sombre staff all round, but the popular image of scientists in white lab coats, sporting hairdos that befitted music composers and orchestra conductors, persisted.
Inevitably, as the evening wore on and the punch sunk lower out would come the party-joke imitation of the archetypal genius (who always happened to be portrayed as a scientist). And in direct contrast, the more serious and quiet science looked, the more the jokes persisted.
Today the awe, if anything, has intensified. These days however practically everyone knows what it is that scientists do and, more to the point, everyone is aware of the fact that modern society has taken the form it has because of the advances (and underlying principles) of science.
The odd thing about all this is that modern science is only about 500 years old. Far too young to hold this kind of influence, you may say. I wouldn’t disagree. We’ve been on this planet long enough not to be swayed by so young a discipline. The bedrock this discipline stands on, however, has been with us since the very emergence of our species and although it has not been called so, it is in fact, mankind’s oldest form of science.
Long before we had our chemists and our physicists, we’d had our shamans; our witches, wizards and alchemists. Their methods may have been a little unorthodox but their ultimate aim was the same: to find a way to give man control over Nature.
Science today has done that and more. Where wizards once entertained visions of flying, Concorde jets scythe through the air at speeds twice that of sound. The dream of universal telepathy has fallen to the miracle of the telephone which, in turn, has given way to the fax machine and the PC network. Anyone of us can, through the use of technology today, achieve almost anything magicians of the past ever hoped to be able to do.
Today’s scientists dream of reactivating dead cells, engineering human genes, travelling in time using biogravitational wormholes, constructing singularities in space and gaining absolute control over matter. Funnily enough the archetypal jokes have dried up. Given its claims you may say that in its progress science has drawn inspiration from its own unique set of dreamers: the science-fiction writers.
Progress however is a strange thing. The more it advances and the more things it has to cope with, the more general the assumptions of the science that drives it must be and the more that science must expand and grow.
It is a vicious circle of sorts, with no end in sight. Trying to cope with the constant demands our lifestyle makes upon the science that put this lifestyle on its present path, science has had to reach not only the heights of science-fiction but also the depths of magic.
Facing questions about Man, Time and the Universe, today’s scientists are looking far back in time, to the beliefs of their magical counterparts and, behind the hype, they are finding wisdom!There are distinct parallels to be drawn between the philosophical teachings of Magic and the theoretical sorties of modern science, sometimes so much so that in a slightly unnerving way today’s consummate magicians are scientists. Where once wizards talked of creating ethereal slave-spirits called familiars, to guide and advise them, today we stand on the threshold of the bodiless, omniscient, entity: The Artificial Intelligence.
Where once magicians faced persecution for trying to create their own version of life today there is talk of genetic engineering and artificially designed life forms. These are overt similarities and crude by necessity. At a different level every human discipline has required a set of fundamental principles that form its guiding paradigms. And it is here, at this level, that the true similarities are to be found.
Having turned its gaze upon subjects that also once interested magic, modern science has found that the beliefs of yesteryear are only narrowly removed from the facts uncovered by experimental evidence in the here and now.
It’s needless to say that no one talks of mad scientists anymore at the parties I go to. Cutting-edge science today, has caught the public imagination like never before and scientists these days are celebrities in their own right.
Their individual fields of study and the advances they have made are so many that even their fellow scientists find it difficult to keep up preferring instead to concentrate only on those aspects of science of immediate interest to them. Likewise, following a hallowed tradition, the topics I have chosen to present you in the next few pages follow neither rhyme nor reason apart from the fact that they lie close to my heart. Collectively they deal with the fundamental aspects of intelligence, consciousness, life, the nature of reality and the very fabric of the universe.
But in a world where science has began to replace almost every aspect of magic, the same themes could (appropriately enough) be broached no matter which topic I had chosen to examine. By choosing the ones I did I’m hoping to give you an idea of the on-going process of investigation of the unknown in all its forms that was the basis of magic and has now become the cornerstone of science.
To achieve clarification I have purposely left all scientific jargon (and equations) out of the book, but a comprehensive, further reading list at the end will point you in the right direction if you wish to further investigate any of the claims outlined here.
I hope you have as much fun reading this book as I had writing it. And if we should ever meet at a party by a half-empty bowl of punch well, you can then let me know.
In the posts to come I will cover it all. ESP, metaphysics, Out-of-body experiencs, Kirlian photography and the proverbial partidge on the pear tree :).
Stay tuned for my daily posts.
I suppose it was a little like High Magic. Laymen weren’t expected to understand it; all that mattered were the results not the process and everyone held scientists in a kind of quite awe.
The latter was mostly because no one was quite sure what scientists did. There was the suspicion (advanced at cocktail parties after the punch had finished) that scientists made bombs.
Some would even go so far as to intimate that scientists were not the most sane of people one could know. Which was laughable given the fact that, at the time, it taxed the imagination to think of anyone less sane and strait-laced than a scientist.
The profession simply did not encourage colourful personalities, and anything that could not be rigourously proven was never even thought about, let alone mentioned in public.
Pretty sombre staff all round, but the popular image of scientists in white lab coats, sporting hairdos that befitted music composers and orchestra conductors, persisted.
Inevitably, as the evening wore on and the punch sunk lower out would come the party-joke imitation of the archetypal genius (who always happened to be portrayed as a scientist). And in direct contrast, the more serious and quiet science looked, the more the jokes persisted.
Today the awe, if anything, has intensified. These days however practically everyone knows what it is that scientists do and, more to the point, everyone is aware of the fact that modern society has taken the form it has because of the advances (and underlying principles) of science.
The odd thing about all this is that modern science is only about 500 years old. Far too young to hold this kind of influence, you may say. I wouldn’t disagree. We’ve been on this planet long enough not to be swayed by so young a discipline. The bedrock this discipline stands on, however, has been with us since the very emergence of our species and although it has not been called so, it is in fact, mankind’s oldest form of science.
Long before we had our chemists and our physicists, we’d had our shamans; our witches, wizards and alchemists. Their methods may have been a little unorthodox but their ultimate aim was the same: to find a way to give man control over Nature.
Science today has done that and more. Where wizards once entertained visions of flying, Concorde jets scythe through the air at speeds twice that of sound. The dream of universal telepathy has fallen to the miracle of the telephone which, in turn, has given way to the fax machine and the PC network. Anyone of us can, through the use of technology today, achieve almost anything magicians of the past ever hoped to be able to do.
Today’s scientists dream of reactivating dead cells, engineering human genes, travelling in time using biogravitational wormholes, constructing singularities in space and gaining absolute control over matter. Funnily enough the archetypal jokes have dried up. Given its claims you may say that in its progress science has drawn inspiration from its own unique set of dreamers: the science-fiction writers.
Progress however is a strange thing. The more it advances and the more things it has to cope with, the more general the assumptions of the science that drives it must be and the more that science must expand and grow.
It is a vicious circle of sorts, with no end in sight. Trying to cope with the constant demands our lifestyle makes upon the science that put this lifestyle on its present path, science has had to reach not only the heights of science-fiction but also the depths of magic.
Facing questions about Man, Time and the Universe, today’s scientists are looking far back in time, to the beliefs of their magical counterparts and, behind the hype, they are finding wisdom!There are distinct parallels to be drawn between the philosophical teachings of Magic and the theoretical sorties of modern science, sometimes so much so that in a slightly unnerving way today’s consummate magicians are scientists. Where once wizards talked of creating ethereal slave-spirits called familiars, to guide and advise them, today we stand on the threshold of the bodiless, omniscient, entity: The Artificial Intelligence.
Where once magicians faced persecution for trying to create their own version of life today there is talk of genetic engineering and artificially designed life forms. These are overt similarities and crude by necessity. At a different level every human discipline has required a set of fundamental principles that form its guiding paradigms. And it is here, at this level, that the true similarities are to be found.
Having turned its gaze upon subjects that also once interested magic, modern science has found that the beliefs of yesteryear are only narrowly removed from the facts uncovered by experimental evidence in the here and now.
It’s needless to say that no one talks of mad scientists anymore at the parties I go to. Cutting-edge science today, has caught the public imagination like never before and scientists these days are celebrities in their own right.
Their individual fields of study and the advances they have made are so many that even their fellow scientists find it difficult to keep up preferring instead to concentrate only on those aspects of science of immediate interest to them. Likewise, following a hallowed tradition, the topics I have chosen to present you in the next few pages follow neither rhyme nor reason apart from the fact that they lie close to my heart. Collectively they deal with the fundamental aspects of intelligence, consciousness, life, the nature of reality and the very fabric of the universe.
But in a world where science has began to replace almost every aspect of magic, the same themes could (appropriately enough) be broached no matter which topic I had chosen to examine. By choosing the ones I did I’m hoping to give you an idea of the on-going process of investigation of the unknown in all its forms that was the basis of magic and has now become the cornerstone of science.
To achieve clarification I have purposely left all scientific jargon (and equations) out of the book, but a comprehensive, further reading list at the end will point you in the right direction if you wish to further investigate any of the claims outlined here.
I hope you have as much fun reading this book as I had writing it. And if we should ever meet at a party by a half-empty bowl of punch well, you can then let me know.
In the posts to come I will cover it all. ESP, metaphysics, Out-of-body experiencs, Kirlian photography and the proverbial partidge on the pear tree :).
Stay tuned for my daily posts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
