Jung, ESP & Physics

On Jungian Transpersonal Psychology, Psychokinesis, Precognition and Remote-Viewing in Post-Modern Physics.

Another "Sarfatti Commentary", in the Tradition of Rashi De Troyes (aka Solomon ha-Zarfati 1040-1105 AD) based upon recent communications from Victor Mansfield to me. This is an unfinished work-in-progress by Jack Sarfatti. Mansfield is not responsible for any errors.

Mansfield got his Ph.D. in physics under Phil Morrison at Cornell and he is a full tenured professor of physics at Colgate Univesity. These exchanges are emerging from our initial meeting at Tucson II and our email exchange. Text in quotes are either by Mansfield or by Jung, von Franz and others. The final drafts will clear this all up properly.

" These sporadic and unpredictable expressions of the Unus Mundus the unitary ground of psyche and matter, are always a visitation of the gods, an archetypal expression of numinous meaning."
Unus Mundus is the "Implicate Order" of Bohm and the "pre-geometry" of Wheeler and Penrose.

"If, therefore, we entertain the hypothesis that one and the same (transcendental) meaning might manifest itself simultaneously in the human psyche and in the arrangement of an external and independent event, we at once come into conflict with the conventional scientific and epistemological views."
I would replace "independent" by "nonlocally correlated".
"According to Jung[5] synchronicity is an acausal connection of meaning between inner psychological states such as dreams, fantasies, or feelings, and events in the outer or material world."
In my theory, inner psychological states or qualia are patterns in the mind pilot wave impressed on it by back-action from its attached matter system. However, this living mental quantum wave could, I suppose, be EPR correlated with a non-living event. Further this correlation may be established by an advanced or teleological retroactive effect rather than the usual retarded causal preparation.

"Jung uses the term causal in the conventional sense as denoting some force, energy, or information traveling from one well-defined object to another."
In Bohm's theory we associate "causal in the conventional sense" with the classical gauge forces in both the near and far-field. The acausal influence is in the non-classical nonlocal context-dependent quantum force -gradQ.

"the inner states and outer events are on the same ontic level"
This is generally true in Bohm's theory.

"According to the Jungian view, the collective unconscious is not at all an expression of personal wishes and goals, but is a neutral entity, psychic in nature, that exists in an absolutely transpersonal way."
This would be explained ultimately by higher-level entangled wave functions culminating in the wave function of the entire universe (i.e., the Mind of God).

"Usually we believe that if there is no causal connection between things then there really is no connection at all. Fortunately, quantum processes, as Jung learned from Pauli, are excellent examples of deeply interrelated but acausal processes in nature."
These "quantum processes" are precisely what I have been talking about above in Bohm's language.

"Jung understood them as purposive, having an intent, as striving toward some goal, some as yet unattained objective."
Sounds like retrocausation from the future.

"it is a lodestone from which consciousness gets direction, meaning, and purpose through the magic of unconscious compensation."
So is this "unconscious compensation" simply precognition?

"a momentary unification of two psychic states: the normal state of our consciousness, which moves in a flow of discursive thought and in a process of continuous perception that creates our idea of the world ...... As von Franz says, Synchronistic events constitute moments in which a 'cosmic' or 'greater' meaning becomes gradually conscious in an individual; generally it is a shaking experience"
This is the local decoding of messages from a higher-level entangled collective state by a lower-level part of itself.

"not limited by the usual categories of space-time"
This is simply the nonlocality of the quantum potential. The range of Hilbert space is outside of 4D spacetime.

"The most essential and certainly the most impressive thing about synchronicity occurrences . . . is the fact that in them the duality of soul and matter seems to be eliminated. They are therefore an empirical indicationof an ultimate unity of all existence, which Jung, using the terminology of medieval natural philosophy, called the Unus Mundus"
Well Bohm's theory is both dualistic and monistic in two different senses. There is a clear mathematical dualism between the "mental" pilot-wave and its attached material. But there is a unity in that they are attached to each other.

"synchronicity is an acausal connection of inner psychological states with outer events through meaning"
The connection between the inner (pilot-wave) and it outer attached material (i.e. particle sources plus classical gauge fields) is clear in Bohm's theory. It is -grad Q. My back-action adds to this connection forming the sentient "creative loop" or ebb and flow back and forth from mind to brain and brain to mind. The synchronicity is when separate material systems have entangled pilot waves. The entanglement produces faster-than-light actions at a distance between these spacelike separated systems. Backaction even permits causality-violating communication between the systems though there is no violation of the Lorentz transformations required here. A faster-than-light communication that is simultaneous in one inertial frame will not be simultaneous in a relatively moving inertial frame. The 4D spacelike separation between the sender and receiver events is frame-invariant in accord with the Lorentz transformations. Casuality-violation is logically independent of the Lorentz transformations.

"Because synchronicity must be understood within the process of individuation, it appeals to the notion of teleology or ultimate purpose without compromising its acausal nature. By appreciating its acausal connection of inner with outer, that the connecting meaning is not a product of the ego, nor willed by the ego, but the transcendent power of individuation, synchronicity encourages us to seek harmony between subjectivity and objectivity, psyche and matter, and acausality and teleology."
Again I understand "its acausal connection of inner with outer" as the nonlocality and context-dependence of the quantum force -gradQ on its attached matter. Similarly, for the reverse "back-action" of the same matter on its Q. The back-action is a friction term in the equation of motion of the density matrix that determines Q.

"we have what many (though not all) believe is strong experimental evidence for parapsychogical phenomena."
I agree. The on-line proceedings of Tucson II provide ample scientific evidence.

" Prior to the 1994 review article of the ganzfeld experiments by Bem and Honorton, no mainstream academic psychology journal had ever published a major article about parapsychology. This is an interesting phenomena itself, but I merely wish to draw attention to how unwelcome a guest parapsychology is and what a significant achievement it is that Bem and Honorton published their review article in the prestigious Psychological Bulletin. Ganzfeld, or total field, describes the conditions under which experiments test for the ability of subjects to receive images from a distant sender. ...... The experiments, such as those done at Cornell University, Bem's school, are done with great care. ..."
Bully for my Alma Mater! :-)

"The automated ganzfeld protocol has been examined by several dozen parapsychologists and behavioral researchers from other fields, including well-known critics of parapsychology. Many have participated as subjects or observers. All have expressed satisfaction with the handling of security issues and controls."
"Although much more could be said about these experiments, the key point is the careful data collection and the statistically significant evidence for anomalous perception."

"The Princeton experiments involve subjects willfully biasing the behavior of a variety of mechanical and electronic devices to conform to pre-stated intentions. ... The observed effects are small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand, but they are statistically repeatable and operator specific in their details. ... The results of given operators on widely different machines tend to be similar in character and scale. They can be demonstrated with the operators located thousands of miles from the laboratory, or exerting their efforts hours before or after the actual operation of the devices. These experiments and the handling of the data are subject to the same level of scrutiny by outside observers as the ganzfeld experiments. As in the ganzfeld experiments, sophisticated meta-analytic techniques accounting for methodological quality and overall effect size from a variety of studies at different labs show unequivocal non-chance effects. In short, under exacting laboratory conditions there is strong, repeatable evidence for psychokinesis."

"To conclude I briefly sketch the large body of research work on psychic functioning sponsored by the U. S. government during 1973-1989 at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and during 1992-1994 at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). I draw my summary from the review article by Professor Jessica Utts,[21] at University of California, Davis, one of two experts hired by the CIA to evaluate this research and the other expert, Professor Ray Hyman, University of Oregon, a well-known parapsychology critic. ....As in the ganzfeld and psychokinesis experiments, and especially in the latest studies, the experiments adhered to the highest standards of data collection and outside expert monitoring. As Utts says:

'Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that their results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.'
....this careful work has generated an anomaly (agreed upon by both scholars) strongly suggesting-although not rigorously proving-the existence of remote viewing."
Vic Mansfield's basic thesis here is that:

"Synchronicity is a creative and spontaneous act of the unitary ground underlying matter and psyche. Therefore, any parapsychological effect that depends upon volition, upon the subject's intent, is clearly different from synchronicity."
I cannot find any such distinction on the basis of my physical theory of the mind-matter interaction. To me, at this time, the two appear to be two sides of the same coin.

Mansfield adds:

"This does not deny that the parapsychological phenomena may be profoundly acausal. ... For example, in the Princeton psychokinesis studies, the choice about which way to bias the random number generator can be made thousands of miles away and hours before the actual random number generator produces its ones and zeroes, yet the effect still occurs. We can therefore be sure it is not due to a causal agency propagating from the subject to the generator. Despite its acausal nature, since it depends upon the subject's volition it cannot be an acausal connection through meaning transcendent to the ego. It is not synchronicity in the strict sense. ... I suggest we not accept paranormal phenomena as synchronistic merely because they illustrate acausal connections between a subjective psychological state and an objective event. I propose we reserve the word "synchronicity" only for those acausally connected events that express some specific, archetypal meaning, some particular display of unconscious compensation. ... I suggest that paranormal phenomena be considered an example of general acausal orderedness, but not of synchronicity, which I strictly define as an acausal exemplification of meaning in the inner and outer world. Paranormal phenomena are acausal in that no energy or information exchange can be responsible for the correlations measured, but they lack the meaning associated with synchronicity."
I made this distinction. i.e, "paranormal phenomena are acausal in that no energy or information exchange can be responsible for the correlations measured" 20 years ago where it was defended by Robert Anton Wilson in The Cosmic Trigger and debunked by Martin Gardner in "Magic and Paraphysics" in the book, Science,Good,Bad and Bogus. But now let me clarify this point. What Mansfield says in this phrase is consistent with orthodox quantum theory including Eberhard's theorem. The latter asserts that no faster-than-light communication can happen via quantum nonlocality by the shifting of local quantum probabilities at a distance. Precognitive remote viewing PRV clearly violates Eberhard's theorem. This means that if the PRV data is right, orthodox quantum physics has been violated. However, extending quantum physics to what I call "post-modern physics" with "back-action" permits PRV. PRV requires sentient quantum states protected against "interactive decoherence". Only such protected quantum states have sufficient back-action to transcend Eberhard's theorem. Stapp has published a back-action type theory in Physical Review A, July 1994, pp18-24.

As Mansfield correctly points out:

"Furthermore, paranormal phenomena, like similar quantum phenomena, are constant and reproducible,as the brief sketch of the experiments above shows. This reproducibility is in further contrast to the sporadic, unpredictable, and unique nature of the more narrowly defined synchronicity."

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