This is a world of changed plans, of sudden opportunities, of unexpected visions. For in this world, time flows not evenly but fitfully and as a consequence, people receive fitful glimpses of the future.

Einstein's Dreams, p. 86, Alan Lightman

It's a good and fun-filled meeting with many hundreds of people covering a broad spectrum from many serious researchers to a few obvious cranks and New Age flakes who always add entertaining color and comic relief to these events. I am in a coherent superposition of serious researcher and New Age flake! :-)

Many of the papers at this conference in neuro and cognitive science presented amazingly effective techniques for manipulating and controlling states of consciousness. The potentials for these techniques of mind-control to be used in the field on unsuspecting naive populations in "nonlethal warfare" are awesome to behold and contemplate. They can be and will be easily misused by authoritarian immoral power structures. These techniques not only involve manipulation by drugs and ordinary electromagnetic, sound and kinaesthetic signals as in subliminal television broadcasting and virtual reality transmission via the World Wide Web of the Internet, but also purport to involve quantum action at a distance in the reports on psychokinesis, telepathy and remote viewing. Murray Gell-Mann in his book, The Quark and The Jaguar vehemently denies the reality of the quantum voodoo that Einstein called "telepathic" and "spooky". He says remote viewing is "the story distorted", but he is lulling the public into a false sense of security. We will see below that E. J. Squires punches holes in Gell-Mann's argument. It is important to note in in this context that Cornell's D. J. Bem, initially a skeptic and a magician like James Randi, gave an orthodox "meta-analysis" showing that Ganzfeld telepathy is a real replicable effect!

Nonlethal psychic warfare using the distant manipulation of the consciousness of the "enemy" will be an important factor in the 21st century. It is preferable to the old means of war. At the risk of crying Cassandra, I must note that the cancerous growth of population and diminishing resources means that large decreases of population in the near future are impossible to avoid barring some breakthrough in space propulsion that would allow large numbers of us to migrate to virgin worlds. Michael Lockwood's close friend, Oxford physicist, David Deutsch has published a remarkable scenario on virgin worlds in Physical Review D based on one version the several many-worlds interpretations of orthodox quantum theory using closed timelike worldlines. Let's hope that UFOs are real and that they are time travelling ships from friendly ETs, or time travellers --- our descendents coming back from the future like in the film Twelve Monkeys, using the Alcubierre warp drive or traversable wormholes, because if they are not real, it looks pretty grim for your children and their children. The numbers are not good. A recent conference updating Schrodinger's classic book What is Life recently held at Trinity College, Dublin gives a detailed report on this.

When booking passage on The Titanic, you might as well go first class!

The world population is currently growing hyperbolically .... exponential growth .... involves successive doublings at equal intervals of time, with hyberbolic growth, these intervals become steadily shorter ... there will be 12 billion people in 2020 and in 2040 the growth curve will tend asymptotically to infinity! ... Near such a singularity, even the smallest fluctuation can be amplified and come to have an enormous effect. Catastrophes ... will limit the growth of world population...

Manfred Eigen, What is Life? The Next Fifty Years, p.6

(Murphy & O' Neill ed., Cambridge, 1995)

J A Hobson from the Harvard Medical School gave a good talk "The chemistry of conscious states: how the brain changes its mind" on the role of neurotransmitter ratios determining the "contents of consciousness".

In my theory, the brain changes its mind because of back-action which violates orthodox quantum mechanics. The mind can change its attached brain in orthodox quantum mechanics, but the brain cannot change its attached mind because there is zero back action in orthodox quantum mechanics. Stapp appears to disagree with me on this. Even though Stapp published a back-action theory in the July 1994 Physical Review A, he thinks back-action would only be important for anomalous paranormal phenomena not for ordinary qualia. I will keep hammering on this theme which is a Wagnerian leitmotif in this emerging pattern of my struggle to pull The Sword from The Stone.

Hobson presented an interesting 3D state space model providing a clear distinction between waking and dreaming states. This distinction is not so clear in my mind most of the time! :-)

They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain...

Einstein's Dreams p.25, Alan Lightman

Dennett is a large well-proportioned man with an impressive beard resembling Moses coming down off the mountain. Henry Stapp told me he thinks Dennett is contradicting himself. Dennett basically says classical physics is enough to solve the "hard problem" of consciousness which is the explanation of subjective experience.

David Chalmers and Michael Lockwood gave two good introductory talks on the hard problem. Chalmers told me he thinks my back-action theory is "interesting" because it is testable in principle, and if it passes the tests he says I would be considered a "genius". He insisted that he understood the point I am trying to make. Up until his seeing my back-action theory Chalmers favored a many-worlds view, now he may be less confident. I have asked Chalmers to clarify his position on this for this page.

V Norris (vjn@leicester.ac.uk) gave a good talk on "Are bacteria conscious?". Single-celled organisms, like Escherichia coli, are quite complicated from the microtubule point of view.

Well back to the meeting, Penrose is talking soon. More anon.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first... A young woman sits near a fountain ... Suddenly her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic?

Einstein's Dreams, p40, Alan Lightman

I am sitting next to Brian Josephson at a bank of computers. Brian is defending the reality of parapsychology experiments in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. We had breakfast with Ed May (and Spottiswoode) who took over the CIA and DIA-supported remote-viewing project at SAI from Hal Puthoff who is now working on zero-point exotic propulsion possibilities for star ship drives. I was contacted by NASA Houston to join a workshop on this along with Robert Forward, Greg Benford and other visionaries. Ed May has a macho "no nonsense" almost redneck disdain for basic theories that purport to explain the anomalous information transfers he is investigating. This may be a defense mechanism of over-compensation since most establishment scientists, like Murray Gell-Mann, founder of the Santa Fe Institute who controls the Mac Arthur Foundation grants, would, incorrectly I think, claim that he is doing pseudo-science. Spottiswoode is definitely the theorist of the two while May prefers to play Faraday.

I missed Penrose because WIN95 on my laptop started acting irrationally in trying to make a connection to WELL. But apparently Roger did not say anything new that is not in his previously published work. The interesting encounters will be Nanopoulos confronting Penrose and Stapp confronting Dennett.

3. April 11, 1996 9:30 am. I had drinks and dinner with Dimitri Nanopoulos and Vitiello last night. Like most Greek and Italian physicists that I have met (I am a bit of both.) , Dimitri is totally charming, energetic, enthusiastic with enormous charisma. He is in his prime. He is going to give a talk in about an hour in which he will compare Dan Dennett (the quintessential New England Yankee WASP who also has enormous charisma and theatrical presence in this dramatic Clash of the Titans) to Ernst Mach. You will recall that Mach did not believe in the existence of atoms. He may have even been the cause for Boltzmann's suicide. Even though Einstein had high respect for Mach, Einstein's Brownian motion paper proved Mach wrong. Similarly, Dennett says that the hard problem of consciousness is a kind of linguistic confusion stemming from the Cartesian homunculus and that quantum mechanics plays no interesting role in the creating the subjective qualia of immediate consciousness that I know I feel.

4. April 12, 1996, 9am

In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible .... The chemist thinks all these thoughts as he steps along the path ...He breathes the moist air and feels oddly free to do as he pleases, free in a world without freedom.

Einstein's Dreams, p. 162, Alan Lightman

I note that the two-state extended quantum theory of Aharonov shows how both future post-selected ensembles and past pre-selected ensembles influence what happens now in-between. The explicit future-to-past quantum influences would not show up in the traditional Born probability measurements of orthodox quantum theory. But these precognitive remote viewing phenomena would show up in what Aharonov calls the qualitatively new "weak" measurement from the interference between past and future. It has been shown that the Born probability interpretation, in the Bohm pilot wave theory, is due to the thermal equilibrium of nonlocal hidden variables. Non-equilibrium distributions, which may be an intrinsic property of life, would permit superluminal and precognitive message decoding using nonlocal correlations as the communication channel. This, of course, violates the statistical predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics and is a new post-modern physics for the 21st century.

Churchland did not go into the moral implications as I have done. She is correct, but what she did not acknowledge, perhaps because she has not yet realized it, was that the new models of Josephson, Penrose, Stapp, Nanopoulos and myself extend quantum mechanics and permit morally responsible free will in accord with "folk psychology" (e.g. David Hodgson's The Mind Matters). I include Stapp in the above list because of his July 1994 Physical Review A paper (p.18) in which he is ready to violate the Born rule to explain anomalous paranormal phenomena. However, Stapp does think that ordinary qualia do not require a violation of orthodox quantum theory. I, and apparently Josephson and Squires, think that even ordinary consciousness requires a new kind of intentional controllable non-randomness violating the complete indeterminism of orthodox quantum theory. This can come about because of back-action in the pilot wave theory, or because of a non-thermal distribution of the nonlocal hidden variables at the sub-quantal string-foam level of Nanopoulos, or, perhaps because of Aharonov "weak measurement"effects. Perhaps all of these approaches are facets of the same mechanism.

Herbert Frohlich's widow, the still-very beautiful Fanchon is attending the conference. She studied with Rudolph Carnap, and is a painter dividing her time between Paris and Liverpool. I plan to post her work on the WEB soon. I first met Frohlich in the halls of UCSD when he was visiting Bernd Matthias. Frohlich discovered the isotope effect in superconductors which was an important clue to Bardeen, Cooper and Schreifer in their discovery that quantized crystal lattice oscillations called "phonons" provided an effective attractive force to bind electron pairs into a superfluid boson condensate in the second order phase transition from a normal electrical conductor to a superconductor at low temperatures. Frohlich became close to my thesis advisor Fred Cummings and I published some papers in Frohlich's journal Collective Phenomena. One of those papers on strong gravity in hadronic physics attracted the interest of Abdus Salam who consequently invited me to his Institute in Trieste. Frohlich invited me to Liverpool when I was an Honorary Research Fellow with David Bohm at Birkbeck College in 1971.

UCB philosophy professor, the charming John Searle, gave a humorous informative sensible talk in which, among other things, he pointed out that the objective-subjective distinction is a different basis of representation than is the epistemic-ontological distinction. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to talk of a subjective ontological structure such as consciousness. Thus, for example, applying Searle's remark to my theory, the Bohm pilot wave of the quantum Eccles Gates connecting mind to brain, is an ontological subjective structure of qualia.

In Bohr's paradigm:

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which is an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous...

Einstein's Dreams, p. 41, Alan Lightman

Many neuroscience-types have asked me to come up with a "consciousness meter" to measure the mind-field directly the way we would an electric field. If, the mind field is a macroscopic quantum state of some pumped collective matter modes in the brain, and if conscious events correspond to Aharonov's "weak measurements" that violate the Born probability rule, then it may be possible to, one day make such a consciousness meter because Aharonov has indicated how even the wave function of a single particle can be directly measured. Until this breakthrough, it was thought that only the modulus of the complex-valued wave function could be measured. It should be easier to measure the mental wave function of the brain since it is more like a superfluid order parameter which is measured by the Josephson effect. Indeed, use of SQUIDs on the brain may be measuring this order parameter. The 40 Hz global brain oscillation measured by Francis Crick may be some kind of superfluid AC Josephson effect oscillation. Recall that superfluid helium II has a gravitational Josephson effect analogous to the original electrical effect in superconductors. The brain may show some hybrid combination of the two. This is all very tentative and "wild" speculation at this moment that spontaneously erupted out of my sub-conscious information processing much like "automatic writing" or "New Age channeling". So this particular substring of text is like a virtual particle which may not be up on this web page for too long since it violates conservation of sanity! :-)

6. Monday April 16, 1996. 3pm

I am in San Diego trying to make sense of the week before. There was too much stuff and not enough time. Smaller workshops are now needed so that the key ideas can be explored in depth. I did get a chance to talk to Henry Stapp extensively on Saturday night and to clarify our differences as well as similarities in our respective models of the quantum brain.

I also met Aharonov's student Tollaksen that same evening. He confirmed that the Aharonov two state theory really means that the clash of future and past influences creates what happens in the now. He did say that they have not come up with a scheme to send messages back in time this way. But this is not clear. Aharonov does talk of a quantum time machine. I can see that "strong" measurements that obey the Born rule will not give anything anomalous like precognitive remote viewing, but what about the "weak" measurements which evade the Born rule. This may correspond with back-action. I would tend to say that all mental experience requires "weak" measurements. Stapp would tend to say that only anomalous mental informational transfers do. None of this is clear yet but we are definitely evolving new approaches and ways of thinking about the mind-matter problem that are testable.

Like my ancestor, Doctor Frankenstein, I envision using nanotechnology to make artificial microtubules etc and to see if we can make artificial conscious life. :-)

7 Wednesday, April 17, 1996

Thanks to Rhett Savage, who was at the conference, for giving me a copy of Sciama's student, Antony Valentini's paper, cited by Josephson, "Signal-locality, uncertainty, and the subquantum H-theorem. II" from Physics Letters A 158 (1991) pp 1-8. This is important background for anyone interested in a quantum physics of mental states both ordinary and extra-ordinary as in claims of remote-viewing. There was lots of background talk at the conference about someone named Nicolas Humphrey who apparently is attacking the claims of many of the presenters at this conference who are reporting paranormal experiments. I have not yet had the opportunity to examine Humphrey's ideas.

First recall that the GRW and Nanopoulos theories are all examples of "objective reduction" in which a new physical principle is added to orthodox quantum theory. The extra term in the density matrix equation of time-evolution is that the decoherence time scales as 1/N where N is the number of interacting particles in the complex system. Bohm and Hiley showed that back-action of the N particles on their attached quantum pilot wave gives a GRW theory. Therefore, objective reduction extensions of orthodox quantum mechanics can be pictured as a new kind of feedback-control loop between particles and their attached pilot wave which is able to violate the Born probability rule opening Pandora's Box to the use of nonlocal quantum correlations as a new kind of practical communication channel in which both superluminal and retroactive signals can be locally decoded in strong violation of the traditional idea that causes are always in the timelike past of their effects. Now Penrose and Hameroff do not go as far as I have just done, but what I say here is an inevitable consequence of the path they have taken.

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