04:19 Apr 03 2011
Times Read: 665
entrainment
Page 1
A new quantum theoretical framework for
parapsychology
Chris Clarke
School of Mathematics,
University of Southampton,
Southampton, United Kingdom,
SO17 1BJ
cclarke@scispirit.com
September 5, 2007
Abstract
An account is given of a recent proposal to complete modern quantum theory
by adding a characterisation of consciousness. The resulting theory is applied to
give mechanisms for typical parapsychological phenomena, and ways of testing it
are discussed.
1 Introduction
A succession of writers (see Radin, 2006, for a popular survey) have associated para-
psychological phenomena and quantum theory, their core motivation perhaps being the
strong but imprecise feeling that, in Radin’s words, “Experiments have demonstrated
that the worldview implied by classical physics is wrong ... in just the right way to
support the reality of psi.” Until recently it has been hard to turn this feeling into a
firm, testable link between physics and parapsychology. Now, however, this possibility
is offered by radically new approaches to quantum theory stemming from cosmology
(Hartle, 1991; Page, 2001) and the influence on consciousness studies of the work of
Chalmers (1995) and Hameroff and Penrose (1996).
Prior to these developments, most quantum theories of psi had been phrased in
terms of substance dualism, involving an interaction between mind and matter which
either causes and directs a collapse of the quantum state (e.g. Walker, 2000) or deter-
mines the nature of an (effective) “measurement” performed by the mind on the brain
(Stapp, 2005). The background and motivation for this paper, on the other hand, is
an approach inspired by a dual aspect philosophy, in which awareness/consciousness
is an aspect of particular quantum systems (Clarke, 2007a)—although from a formal
point of view the theory could equally well be formulated in terms of substance dual-
ism. On this view, consciousness does not perform a measurement, which is a purely
physical process, but it determines the nature of the universe that we are aware of. This
produces a testable theory, in which there are far fewer unknown quantities than in a
substance dualist theory where the nature of mind in itself remains a largely unknown
area.
1
Page 2
This paper also adopts a different approach to entanglement than that of Radin
(2006). He writes that “Quantum entanglement as presently understood in elementary
atomic systems is, by itself, insufficient to explain psi. But the ontological parallels
implied by entanglement are so compelling that I believe they’d be foolish to ignore.”
While agreeing with the first sentence, I would qualify the second. Entanglement usu-
ally takes place indiscriminately with the whole of the environment and thus obscures
quantum information rather than transmitting it. On the approach here, the explana-
tions of many forms of psi do not use entanglement directly. Instead, they draw on
Zeno-like effects (see section 2.4 below) paralleling those of (Stapp, 2005) but here
arising from very different philosophical and physical perspectives.
The interpretation of quantum theory used here (Hartle, 1991; Clarke, 2007a,b)
is based on the the use of “histories” (defined in section 2.3 below). The approach
developed makes no alteration to the dynamics of physical events (the Hamiltonian).
It adds to the quantum formalism only ingredients that are needed anyway in order
to make most current versions of this interpretation complete. The theory has no free
parameters still to be determined, though some structural aspects of its implementation
need to be refined by further physical and parapsychological investigation. It is a theory
which can stand in its own right as a likely implementation of requirements that have
already been accepted in mainstream physics (Page, 2001). I will demonstrate that a
theory of this form provides testable explanations for typical psi phenomena.
The account is in three parts. Section 2 describes in outline the historical back-
ground and quantum mechanical formalism to be used, section 3 presents mechanisms
for typical parapsychological phenomena in terms of this formalism, and section 4
outlines some salient aspects of possible future parapsychological experiments to test
these ideas.
2 Theoretical Context
2.1 Background to Quantum Theory
The theory involved here, which I will term “Algebra specification by consciousness”
or ASBC, in based on our current understanding of quantum theory. As the enormous
progress made in this area over the last 20 years is still little known outside specialist
journals, I will summarise this first.
Quantum theory in its early days was characterised by the notion of the “collapse
of the state” (or, in older writing, of the wave-function) which was supposed to be ini-
tiated by the process of observation. Precisely what characterised an “observation”,
and how it actually was responsible for the collapse, remained contentious, accounts
including the intervention of human consciousness (from Wigner onwards) or the ad-
dition an extra physical layer of hidden variables (Bub and others). Groundwork for a
different approach was laid by the first fully developed theory that dispensed with col-
lapse: the relative state formalism of Everett (1957). This was assumed in subsequent
work, but on its own it did not pinpoint which states could be regarded as classical and
which quantum. A decisive step was taken by Daneri et al. (1962) who argued that dis-
tinctively quantum effects relied on the relative phases of quantum states (in the sense
of the phase of a complex number), and showed that this phase information was lost in
the course of the macroscopic amplification of a state, resulting in an essentially clas-
sical situation but without the invoking of “collapse”. This loss of phase information
became known as “decoherence” and formed the basis of the modern full theory of the
2
Page 3
way in which classical behaviour emerges from a quantum world (Giulini et al., 1996)
without the need to invoke collapse.
In parallel with this, the growth of quantum cosmology raised more acutely the
need for a theory of the emergence of a classical world, for which a different approach
was chosen based on “histories” (Hartle, 1991), developed in section 2.3 below. The
two approaches of decoherence and histories are complementary, in that decoherence
theory characterises the physical mechanism through which a given subsystem can
behave classically, while the histories formalism describes how a sequence (or a space-
time network) of such subsystems can build a probabilistic structure, and shows how
decoherence enters into this to produce consistent probabilities. Both systems are in-
complete, however, in that they only demonstrate that quantum theory is consistent with
a classical structure without examining whether such a structure necessarily emerges,
or whether the structure is in any sense unique. A key negative result here was that of
Dowker and Kent (1996) showing that the requirement of classical logic did not single
out a unique framework.
A further strand in the argument was added by Penrose (2004). Working from a
picture that included the collapse of the state, he pointed out that general relativity
(which must be included in any subsequent general theory, although it is still far from
clear how this might be done) implied that not all quantum states could be superposed,
and hence gave a criterion for when the quantum state had to collapse as a result of
gravitational effects. This criterion can be translated into the language of the histories
interpretation (Clarke, 2007a), without the need for state collapse, where it does much
to reduce the arbitrariness of the choice of subsystems that is required in the histories
and decoherence approaches.
The theories presented so far, while demonstrating the consistency of quantum the-
ory with a classical world, are incomplete in that they still do not explain the necessity
of a classical world. For this two further elements are needed: a physical characteri-
sation of what systems have consciousness, and a means of overcoming the problems
raised by Dowker and Kent (1996) without interfering with the basic (rigorously tested)
dynamics of quantum theory. The first of these, the criterion for consciousness, has
been highlighted but not solved by Page (2001), and it is recognised that the solution
must necessarily be to some extent speculative in the current nascent state of con-
sciousness research. A possible solution has been proposed by Donald (1990, 1995),
but it does not match well with the data from biology and consciousness studies. I
have explored a proposal of Ho (1998), based on observations of microorganisms, that
systems with consciousness are extensively coherent systems (see subsection 2.3, 3c,
below). Such a system is by definition one where any two of its parts are maximally
entangled, but it is effectively unentangled with systems outside itself. The virtue of
this definitions is that, being at a very basic level, it does not insert “by hand” fac-
tors such as memory, carbon-based life and so on which are likely to be explained by
evolutionary theory; that is, it does not presuppose the details of established biology.
The second of the elements that must be specified in order to make the classical
world a consequence of scientific theory, and to answer the challenge of Dowker and
Kent (1996) just described, concerns the structure of propositions. In order to under-
stand this, we need to note first that quantum theory tends to be expressed using two
alternative languages: based either on logical concepts, or on concepts from linear al-
gebra. In the language of logic, a proposition is a statement that can turn out to be
either true or false; and ascertaining this could be regarded either as a measurement or
as an act of consciousness. In linear algebra language, on the other hand, a proposi-
tion is represented by a projection of the space of quantum states into itself, and the
3
Page 4
proposition is true if this projection leaves the current state unchanged, and false if it
projects the current state to the zero vector in state space. In either case, a collection
of propositions together with the usual logical connectives OR, AND and NOT, is called
an Algebra, and a Boolean Algebra if these connectives satisfy the rules of classical
logic. The second element needed for completing quantum theory is then a process
that selects either a Boolean algebra of projections, or a subset of such an algebra, over
each extensively coherent (and so conscious) subsystem. Following the proposal of
Stapp (2005), we suppose that it is an act of consciousness that singles out a Boolean
algebra σ or a subset ς of one, as described in the next section. I will refer to the propo-
sitions in the selected (subset of a) Boolean algebra as being asserted by this dynamic
of consciousness.
2.2 Consciousness
My consciousness of the world is not a pure receptivity of raw data: in addition there
is an active side, in that data is inevitably construed (Kelley, 1955) into rocks, people,
stars etc.; and this not just by verbal association, but be a preverbal processing into
significant elements (Teasdale and Barnard, 1993). Though many details of this process
are still to be filled in, we can suppose that it takes place through a sequence of stages
of neural processing which in its initial stages is well approximated by a description
using classical mechanics. In the final stages that manifest to consciousness, however,
it is fruitful for both physics and psychology to conjecture that the process is quantum
mechanical in the sense that non-commuting propositions (see Note 2 at the end) play
an essential role.
As shown by Kelley (1955), the process of construal is fluid and constantly devel-
oping: with each moment of perception there is scope for a new construction, a new
“framework of meaning”, so to speak. This capacity constitutes the active aspect of
consciousness through which it can affect the behaviour of the organism. In terms of
the dual aspect approach to consciousness adopted here, the mental aspect of construal
has as its physical correlate the selection of a particular subset of a Boolean algebra of
propositions on the quantum of state of the final stage of processing.
In contrast to the dominant Copenhagen interpretation, which in some versions re-
gards consciousness as the essential part of the process of observation, in the histories
version of quantum theory the process of coming to consciousness, involving construal
as just described, is quite distinct from measurement. The latter is a conventional phys-
ical process in which a microscopic state (the system) is coupled to a macroscopic state
(the apparatus) so as to form a record. By contrast consciousness is a process indepen-
dent from the ordinary dynamics of physics, operating entirely within the conscious
system. The operation of consciousness is partly controlled by the effective state of the
system (see Note 2 at the end) which brings into play the effect of information process-
ing in the organism; but its details, which Penrose has argued are non-algorithmic, will
require extensive future research.
Because measurement and consciousness have quite different origins, their struc-
tures are different. In a measurement the macroscopic state has a very short decoher-
ence time as a result of interaction with the environment, which enables it to form a
record. It produces a mixed state on restriction back to the microscopic system, but
(since we are not assuming a mechanism for collapsing the state) it does not perform a
selection of one particular outcome. In particular, this means that when the quantity be-
ing measured is binary (a proposition having the values TRUE or FALSE) the operation
of negation operates in the usual way, so that finding not-A to be TRUE is equivalent to
4
Page 5
finding A to be FALSE.
Consciousness reflects a very different logic, which arises from the peculiarities of
our mental make-up. Though we identify the “I” with our inner verbal dialogue, it is
becoming increasingly clear from experiments in cognitive psychology (Teasdale and
Barnard, 1993; Barnard, 2004), now recently reinforced by neuropsychology (Dosen-
bach et al., 2007), that our mind is constituted by at least two distinct but closely inter-
acting systems. It is not necessarily the case that all of these systems are aware in the
sense used here; but it does seem from the data of meditative self-reflection (e.g. So-
gyal Rinpoche, 2002) that the core of consciousness lies in a non-verbal system which,
because of our self-identification with language, we (paradoxically) usually refer to
as “unconscious”. The non-standard logic of this area was first developed by Ignacio
Matte Blanco (Matte Blanco, 1998) and subsequently clarified by Bomford (2005). Its
significant points are that it does not possess the standard negation operation, and that
it has a structure analogous to, but distinct from, quantum logic (Clarke, 2006), which
makes it ideally suited to complementing quantum logic. Because of its non-standard
logic there is no requirement that when A is in the set ς of asserted propositions, not-A
need also be there. Thus ς need not be a full Boolean algebra. This will have cru-
cial implications for parapsychology later. Though the principles that have just been
specified above are rather general, they are already sufficiently precise as to give quite
a clear idea of the general form of the theory. In particular, it will turn out that the
general structure to be outlined will place strong constraints on what psi can or cannot
do, making it more testable than conventional dualistic approaches to quantum theory.
It should be born in mind throughout that in the dual aspect approach taken here
(which stems from the work of Spinoza — see Note 1 at the end of this paper), mental
aspects such as consciousness and physical aspects such as extensive coherence (item
3c, section 2.3 below) have evolved together and are complementary views into the
same reality. Extensive coherence does not “cause” consciousness, nor vice versa.
2.3 Quantum Histories
The notion of a history was first formulated by Griffiths (1984) and then transferred to
a global context by Hartle (1991). The evolution of the idea can be characterised as a
series of reformulations of quantum theory:
• from probabilities for outcomes of a single measurement (original quantum the-
ory); to
• correlations between outcomes of successive measurements; to
• probabilities for sequences of measurements (original history interpretation); to
• probabilities for an array of measurements in space-time (Hartle’s “generalised
quantum theory”); to
• probabilities for an array of moments of consciousness in space-time (ASBC).
I will first give (in outline) the definition of how a history represents “an array . . . in
spacetime”, closely following (Hartle, 1991), and then indicate briefly how probabili-
ties are linked into this. Fuller details are in (Clarke, 2007a).
1. Loci. The basic elements that form the basis for a history, termed loci, are spec-
ifications of a particular subsystem of the universe over a particular region of
5
Page 6
space and time-interval—i.e. over a particular space-time region U. An ex-
ample of a locus drawn from Hameroff and Penrose’s theory of consciousness
(Hameroff and Penrose, 1996) might be as follows. U would be the union of
regions U1,...,Un each corresponding to one of a collection of cells (not nec-
essarily connected) making up an organ or organs in the brain, all considered
over a (variable) interval of time, and the subsystem associated with conscious-
ness is described by a quantum space H of states of the conformational structure
of the microtubules in the cells of U, together with a complementary space H′
describing all the other degrees of physical freedom over U.
So formally,
(a) a locus consist of a triple (U, H′, H), where U is a space-time set and H
and H′ are Hilbert spaces associated with U. The total quantum Hilbert
space H0 over U can be represented as a subspace of H′ ⊗ H.
(b) It is also maximal in its extent in time while having the property that all
events in U are determined by data at a single moment of time (a property
known as global hyperbolicity).
Property 1b results in a time extent that in the centre of the region is of the order
of magnitude of the time taken for light to cross the region, reducing to zero at
the edges. This is the closest one can get in modern physics to an “instantaneous
moment”, since the latter cannot be defined in relativity theory.
2. The consciousness of a locus, which subjectively corresponds to the condition of
extensive coherence (see 3c below), results in there being specified (“asserted”)
at each locus a particular subset ς of a Boolean algebra σ of propositions (i.e.
projections) on H. As described above, ς will in general not be full algebra).
3. A history consists of a set (P1, £1), (P2, £2),... of pairs in which
(a) £1, £2,... are loci which are partially ordered with regard to their mutual
causal relations (given any two £1 and £2 either £1 is causally1 prior to
£2, or vice versa, or they are entirely space-like related to each other), and
(b) P1,P2,... are propositions from the sets ς associated with the respective
loci.
(c) Moreover it is required that each locus in a history is a region such that any
two spatially defined non-overlapping parts making up the whole are fully
entangled with one another. (See Clarke (2007a). This property is called
extensive coherence.) Each locus is also maximal—as large spatially as it
can be—while still exhibiting extensive coherence.
Property 3c implements the criterion for subsystems that are aware. The propo-
sitions P1,P2,... appearing in a history will be referred to as realised at their
associated loci. The combination of a realised proposition and its locus is inter-
preted as a moment of consciousness (Page, 2001).
Probabilities (or, more precisely, “weights” that can be interpreted as probabilities
when the logic of the propositions in the history is classical) are then attached to his-
tories by means of a function p((P1, £1),..., (Pn, £n); ρ) (see equation (2) in Note 2)
1Note that “causal” is used here in the sense of relativity theory, as asserting the existence of a time-like
or light-like connection between events, and not in the philosophical sense of causation considered later.
6
Page 7
which associates a real number between 0 and 1 with each history, and where ρ is the
initial state of the universe. In cases where the histories satisfy a classical logic (as can
be shown to be usually the case) the values of this function reproduce exactly the prob-
abilities for ordinary quantum theory. This function, discussed in more detail in Note
2, is a special case of the decoherence functional in conventional history theory (modi-
fied to this relativistic setting), which packages together the time evolution of quantum
theory, its probability interpretation, and the criteria for there being a classical logic.
2.4 Zeno effects
Henry Stapp (Stapp, 2005) introduced a concept similar to ASBC (in a dualistic con-
text) and emphasised the importance of the Zeno effect in understanding how con-
sciousness acted in the world, rather than being a mere epiphenomenon. The conven-
tional Zeno effect, which has now been well studied experimentally (Sudbery, 2002)
refers to the situation where an unstable state is prevented from decaying by being
observed continuously (an example of “a watched pot never boils”). It can easily be
shown that if τ is the normal half-life for the decay of a state, and the state is observed
at time intervals δt where thisis significantly less than τ then the half-life is extended
to a time of order τ2/δt. In Stapp’s dualistic setting, mind observes the brain in this
way and thereby maintains preferred brain states that would otherwise be transitory. A
similar process can occur in the ASBC approach, but by the inclusion of a succession
of projections in a history with the minimum spacing allowed by Penrose’s criterion;
i.e. δt is now the Penrose time for the physical structure described by H.
The question for parapsychology is, can the observed data from parapsychology ex-
periments be explained by some such mechanism as this, involving applying Zeno-like
observations or acts of consciousness to the entangled brain states of their subjects? If
the Zeno process takes place by observations (Stapp) or by repeated moments of con-
sciousness but using a full Boolean algebra of propositions, then it is hard to produce
a plausible explanation of psi. If the minds of two subjects are entangled in a way that
is implicitly (i.e. unconsciously) “known” to them, and they then observe/are aware of
their own states and announce the results, then, with or without resorting to Zeno tech-
niques, there will be an interesting correlation between what they say (see section 3.3.1
below). This is, however, not the protocol of a parapsychology experiment, in which
typically the content of the consciousness of one subject is controlled by an input from
an external random number generator—a completely different situation. The only way
round this might be to use a “moving Zeno process” in which the Boolean algebra
describing the observation is continuously rotated by the brain so that the projections
initially describing A and not-A can be interchanged, the process being steered so as to
produce the required final result. While this is theoretically possible, in the light of the
argument in section 2.2, it seems much more likely that the mind uses consciousness
with an incomplete set ς, and it is this option that I explore below.
If we allow ς to be less than a full algebra, generating the algebra σ, there are then
two variants on the Zeno effect, which I will call forcing and entrainment.
1. Forcing is achieved by consciousness asserting, at a sequence of loci with time-
spacing δt, a set ς which includes a projection P but not its negation not-P.
This can be done, even when the quantum state in H is initially not in P, but
merely has a non-zero component in P. With the conventional Zeno effect, as it
occurs in laboratory observations, the first application of P could either produce
the realisation of P or not-P, and subsequent applications would maintain it. In
7
Page 8
ASBC, if not-P is not in ς then not-P will not be realised, the corresponding
state will not be included in the history, and the moments of consciousness will
continue until eventually either P is realised or the probability of P is reduced
to nearly zero through interaction with external systems.
2. Entrainment is the result of including in a history a realised projection onto a
state that is entangled with a particular state in the environment.
Suppose that the apparent state α associated with a locus £ can be decomposed
as
α = ∑
i
aiφi ⊗ ǫi
(1)
with φi ∈ H1 and ǫi ∈ H2 ⊗EU where EU (the environment of U) consists of the
states outside U. The states φi are a basis for H0 lying in the atomic elements
of σ. A moment of consciousness realised at £ can produce an apparent state
(equation (3) of Note 2) of the form
αk = ∑
i∈sk
aiφi ⊗ ǫi
where all the φi for i ∈ sk are a basis for a single element Ak of ς (Clarke,
2007a).
This new apparent state will then be effective in determining the states at all
subsequent loci. In other words, the local moment of consciousness entrains all
aspects of the environment that are entangled with it into the subsequent manifest
universe, which emerges as a result of the joint interaction with the initial state
of the universe through of the whole network of living systems. Consciousness,
though it acts on the φi, necessarily restricts also the ǫi.
It will be clear that the conjunction of forcing and entrainment enables a living sys-
tem to exercise a determining influence on the whole of the subsequent manifestation
of the universe. Repeated inclusion in the history of a projection on a state in H that is
entangled with an environmental state will in principle eventually bring about the man-
ifestation of that environmental state unless this is countered by the competing effect of
other organisms. In the next section I will describe how this can appear as phenomena
such as psychokinesis and telepathy.
3 Prototypic examples from parapsychology
In this section I will briefly describe the application of ASBC to examples representa-
tive of some main experimental categories in parapsychology, after which I will discuss
how the theoretical insight afforded by the theory here can open up new lines of enquiry
for examining both quantum theory and its parapsychological effects.
3.1 Psycho-kinesis
As an example here I will use Peoc’h’s chick experiment (Peoc’h, 1988). Although it
has been criticised (Johnson, 1989) and the criticism has been countered by Peoc’h (and
the controversy has continued since), I will be using it here as an illustrative example of
the sort of effect that is to be expected under the present theory rather than as evidence
for the validity of PK.
8
Page 9
The report concerns a batch of chicks who were hatched in the presence of a
“robot”: a cylindrical device which moved in a straight line punctuated by random
changes in direction, under the control of a random number generator. The chicks
imprinted on the robot, so that when free they would follow it around. For the experi-
mental sessions they were confined in a cage which was placed on a randomly chosen
side of a compound in which the robot moved (see figure 1). The experimenter reported
that, on a statistically significant proportion of occasions, the robot’s movements were
mainly confined to a region close to the side of the compound where the chicks were
installed. Moreover (Fenwick, 1996) he further claimed that the same results were
obtained when the robot was controlled not by a direct connection with a random gen-
erator, but with a signal that had been pre-recorded on a floppy disc 6 months earlier!
[Insert figure 1 around here]
Figure 1. Schematic diagram of Peoc’h’s chick experiment. φi and ǫi, corresponding to
equation (1) above, indicate respectively the states of the conscious system of the chicks and of
the environment together with the other systems of the chicks.
A complicating factor in analysing this experiment is the multiplicity of organisms
involved: do we regard the chicks as independent organisms each engaging with the
robot, or could their brains, through a mutual entanglement of their states, become
jointly coherent, as a single organism? Is the experimenter Peoc’h watching the ex-
periment and also exercising his own influence (raising the intriguing possibility that
the chicks might in fact be irrelevant to the effect)? The ASBC formalism is explicitly
designed to accommodate such simultaneous loci of consciousness; but for simplicity
let us here think in terms of only a single organism, the joint-chicks.
We have here the conjunction of forcing and entrainment described in the previous
section. Taking the later variation described by Fenwick, let us suppose they are based
on a random number generator controlled by a quantum mechanical effect such as
nuclear decay. (Alternative mechanisms are discussed in section 4 below.) The output
of this generator is recorded as low intensity variations in the magnetisation of the
floppy disk, which has been safely locked up so that no living system has become aware
of these data prior to the experiment. The apparent state prior to the chicks experiment
will then include a superposition of states ∑i aiψi, each component of which describes
a position and velocity of the robot, together with a corresponding matching set of data
on the floppy disk.
The chicks visually observe the robot and thereby entangle their (joint) brain-state
with this external superposition (see equation (1) above and figure 1). As a result
9
Page 10
of their imprinting the chicks devote a major part of their conscious process to the
assertion of a projection of their joint state onto a state where they perceive the robot
to be nearer to them than some critical comfort distance.
Forcing and entrainment then restrict the subsequent apparent state to a superpo-
sition containing only positions less than this distance. The subsequent operations of
Peoc’h, acting at a causally succeeding locus, further reduce this superposition to a
particular sequence of positions and a particular (necessarily consistent) content of the
disk.
This example demonstrates that the ASBC framework give a very natural account
of the process. Without such a framework, it would seem that the chicks had somehow
exercised psychokinesis retroactively on the detailed mechanics of the random number
generator, defying both the laws of physics and the intellectual power of chicks. With
this framework, it is apparent that all they were doing was concentrating hard on their
“mother” and wanting it to be near. We can also note that most of the foregoing anal-
ysis can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to many other standard (and more replicable)
psychokinesis protocols, though for most of these the strength of the effect is much
lower than that reported by Peoc’h.
3.2 Target guessing
[Insert figure 2 around here]
Figure 2. Schematic depiction of a typical target-guessing experiment. P1,P2 etc. indicate
propositions asserted by the receiver or the experimenter at successive moments of
consciousness (loci).
Figure 2 depicts in broad outline a protocol for a variety of parapsychological ex-
periments. Many variation can be made: the random number generator controlling the
process could act on many principles, feedback could be immediate after each “guess”,
or be given after the whole session, or be omitted, the “transmitter” person could be
omitted for pure clairvoyance, and so on. I shall assume that there is at least one
instance of feedback in each session. In broadest terms, however, the basic structure
10
Page 11
remains similar to Peoc’h’s experiment in involving a random number generator whose
influence is subsequently entangled with consciousness; but we now have an explicit
succession of moments of consciousness linked to the outcome, making it appropriate
to describe the process in terms of a history. The process could thus be described as
involving a sequence {Pi | i = 1, 2,...,n} (with at least one member) of propositions
at moments of consciousness (loci) by the “receiver”, and at least one proposition PE
at a moment of consciousness by the experimenter. For example, the proposition PE
in the set ςE being asserted by the experimenter might be the occurrence of a statistical
significance of better than 1%. The probability of some or all of these propositions
being satisfied is then given by a function of the form of equation (2) in Note 2 which
links all the propositions. Because of the entanglement of the effective state at the locus
of Pi with the receiver’s memory state, the entanglement of the effective state at PE
with the final record of the whole series, and the causal connections between the these
and the individual random number generator states, there will be a positive correlation
between the probabilities of each of the Pi and PE.
Two effects arise from this positive correlation. (a) The individual probabilities of
the Pi are enhanced by the effectiveness of the assertion of the set containing PE by
the experimenter, producing an “experimenter effect”. (b) The probabilities of each
of the Pi (success in individual sessions) will be enhanced by the feedback. Both
of these effects might be regarded as a form of retroactive causation, in the sense of
causation that operated in a direction opposite to the usual arrow of time (Reichenbach,
2003). This would, however, be a misleading way to think about it. The arrow of
time enters into the histories interpretation through the time-displacement maps Λ in
equation (2). These represent normal dynamical causation with is made unidirectional
by thermodynamic effects that are ultimately traceable to the expansion of the universe.
The correlation between the different Ps is of a logical nature: as described in Note
2 it is identical to the correlation existing between logically connected propositions
asserted a single moment of time but is in itself independent of time. This non-causal
correlation is analogous to Jung’s concept of synchronicity. On this viewpoint there
is, because of the time-independence of this structure, no essential difference between
precognition and telepathy.
3.3 Spontaneous psi
I will examine here two general types of spontaneous occurrence, the first suggesting
a different sort of mechanism from the forgoing cases and the second suggesting an
instance of the previous mechanisms.
3.3.1 Empathic telepathy
By this title I mean the spontaneous occurrence of apparently paranormal communica-
tion between two connected individuals. This is a large category, and I will examine
only the phenomena exemplified by the “but I was just about to phone you!” syndrome,
when a particular idea or image occurs to two individuals, well known to each other, at
the same time. This case differs from target-guessing in that the random number gener-
ator is replaced by a second organism, so that both organisms select the apparent state
as part of the history before there is any comparison between them. An explanation
through forcing, applied to a state which is not yet selected, is therefore ruled out.
This sort of occurrence seems to be most frequently reported among pairs of or-
ganisms, hereafter referred to as Alice and Bill, who have close and sympathetic rela-
11
Page 12
tionships. In that case we could postulate what might be called a common or shared
(component of) mind. By this I mean that there exists a locus £AB = (U, H′, H) in
which U consists of two disconnected parts UA and UB, one in the brain of Alice and
one in the brain of Bill.2. By definition of extensive coherence (item 3c, subsection
2.3), the states over these two components will be highly entangled. In particular, if we
denote states that correspond to particular ideas over UA by α1
A,α2
A,... and similarly
for B, where the superscripts label the same idea for A and B, then we can expect the
occurrence of states of the form ∑i aiαi
A ⊗ αi
B, If in addition we suppose that the
occurrence of a situation where communication is appropriate results in the repeated
assertion within £AB of a projection on states of this form, then forcing will take place
as in the previous example, and the result will be a raised probability of Alice and Bill
entertaining the same ideas at a given time.
This example is of particular theoretical interest, because, unlike the mechanisms
just described for parapsychology experiments, it involves the entanglement of minds
discussed by Radin (2006) (section 1) – or more precisely, the entanglement of two
parts of a system that is being maintained in a state of extensive coherence as a result
of being a mind. This maintenance has to be achieved by the repeated assertion of
propositions that project onto particular entangled states of the two parts, which is part
of the conatus (Note 1) that characterises minds. Since entanglement is by definition
between states that are not time-related, it brings in a condition of simultaneity, which
again distinguishes it from the previously discussed effects.
A further distinction from the previous cases is that the underlying mechanism here
could give rise to a distance effect. This is because of condition 1b in section 2.3, which
implies that the temporal extent of a locus is (approximately) the light-crossing time
od its spatial extent. Each component of the joint mind would thus have to maintain
its quantum phase, through internal shielding against decoherence, for up to 40msec in
the case of long-distance telepathy on earth – a very severe constraint. The mechanism
just described is also the most likely candidate for the possible correlation (Grinberg-
Zylberbaum et al., 1994; Sabell et al., 2001) of EEG records between distant subjects,
where time-synchronisation is a vital aspect.
3.3.2 Spontaneous precognition
This case is of interest because it appears to combine the time independence of subsec-
tion 3.2 with the spontaneous empathic connection of 3.3.1 above. It seems to be of
widespread occurrence, and happens to be a phenomenon that I have found striking in
my personal experience in the form of precognitive dreams that I have either reported
to others or recorded in my journal at the time of their occurrence. I will therefore
take precognitive dreams as a particular example of spontaneous precognition in what
follows.
When a later experiences matches salient points of an earlier dream, this is felt to
be remarkable because the subject thinks that such a match would be “extremely im-
probable by chance”. If one were to try to make quantitative this subjective impression
(and the area is notoriously difficult to analyse statistically), one might suppose that
both our dreams and our experiences of events combine a number of elements whose
possible range, though large, is finite, so that one could, at least very roughly, assign
2Hitherto I have allowed a tacit assumption that within a human being there exists a unique physical
system that carries a coherent state, and that this constitutes “the” consciousness of the person. There is,
however, significant evidence that this is not so (Teasdale and Barnard, 1993; Douglas-Klotz, 2001; Lock-
wood, 1989)
12
Page 13
probabilities to particular combinations. For instance, one dream of mine contained the
following elements: a book bound in a distinctive yellow ochre colour without other
ornament, a Catholic mass and myself weeping, together with other elements strongly
correlated with the Catholic mass element. These elements were all fairly rare in my
experience, and there seemed only weak correlations between them, so that the dream
itself appeared curious enough to be noted. When, a couple of weeks later, an event oc-
curred that combined all these elements at the same moment of time, then if the dream
and the event were uncorrelated the occurrence of both would seem very unlikely in-
deed, and this in turn might suggest that was in fact some causal mechanism operating
which did correlate the dream and the subsequent event.
Setting aside the question of whether the statistical guesses just made are in fact
reliable (something that in this particular case could indeed by seriously challenged) we
can examine the light shed on this by the present theory. First, entanglement between
the consciousness of the dream and the consciousness of the later event are ruled out:
events that are related by separation in time are not in quantum theory regarded as
constituting a single compound event, so that entanglement is only definable between
events that not separated in time. Second, the theory as at present articulated deals
only with moments of consciousness and not with the concept of an enduring self or
soul; so that from the point of view of the mental aspect of the world no significance
attaches to two experiences belonging to the same person. (The theory thus differs
significantly from the ideas of, for example, Sheldrake (1988).) There is thus no basis
for the physical connection between the two loci that characterised the previous case
of sub-subsection 3.3.1.
On the other hand, part of the mechanism of the target guessing protocol in sub-
section 3.2 matches well with what is happening with the dream. The delight and
fascination that I feel when a dream is verified is similar to that which I experience
when a scientific prediction is verified, and in both the case of the experimenter in a
target-guessing experiment and the case of my experience of significant events in daily
life it could be said that a pre-conscious or unconscious assertion of a desire for a mean-
ingful outcome (i.e. a “proposition”) was satisfied. In both cases the two moments of
consciousness are in fact correlated by virtue of their entanglement with contemporary
records and memory traces. History theory does give a mechanism that connects them,
although it is not strictly speaking a causal mechanism.
4 Experimentally testing algebra selection
Untestable theories are not worth the name, and one impetus behind the present work is
to open up a theoretical area that will enable one to formulate possible areas for testing
more precisely. Caution is, however, called for in this particular domain, because of the
way in which the effects operate at the human level, all participants necessarily being
involved, including the experimenter, in a strongly interlinked way. The distinctive
features of this theory (presented here as a summary of what has gone before), which
make it particulary open to refutation are as follows.
1. No physical forces other than those of conventional physics are being introduced.
2. Reality is jointly determined by all conscious organisms, within the constraints
imposed by the probabilities of conventional quantum mechanics, by their as-
serting sets of propositions dependent on their effective quantum state, with a
frequency of assertion limited by the Penrose time τP .
13
Page 14
3. Conscious organisms are identifiable as all systems that are extensively coherent
(any two parts are entangled and the system is spatially maximal with respect to
this property).
Aspects of this, particularly regarding point 3 and the Penrose time, are testable
by physical or neurophysiological means, but I shall focus here on parapsychological
tests. I have already described (section 3.3.1 above) an area where there might be an
observable distance effect, though that was not in a very reproducible area of parapsy-
chology. Here I explore another line of inquiry suggested by the dominant role of the
experimenter effect in these experiments, which stands in contrast to their usual analy-
sis in terms of the transmission of information from one place/person to another. It is
a prediction of this theory that an experimenter who is strongly motivated to obtain a
particular result will consistently achieve that result more readily than an experimenter
motivated to obtain the reverse result, even when their protocols are exactly identical.
This possibility, which has often been reported in parapsychology and cited as evidence
against all parapsychological effects, deserves careful investigation as means for dis-
tinguishing the mechanism presented here from information-passing mechanisms for
parapsychology.
The mechanism involved in psi effects is, as we have seen, different in the ran-
domised trials required for experimentation and spontaneous phenomena. Thus the
nature of randomisation is a key factor in this approach. The previous examples have
been phrased in terms of randomisation using a “quantum event” such as radioactive
decay. This is sometimes contrasted with a “classical event” such as the generation
of a large integer by an iterative process seeded by the clock time. This assumed dis-
tinction between quantum and classical randomness was taken for granted until the
development of decoherence theory in the late 1970s. Before then, it was supposed
that quantum mechanics took place only among microscopic objects (or arrays of such
objects between which an unusual coherence had been established) and that there was
an unambiguous distinction between the quantum world and the classical world, with
the collapse of the quantum state mediating between the two. Quantum randomness
was an inherent aspect of collapse, whereas classical randomness was a result of our
ignorance of the exact initial state of the process giving rise to it. As described in
subsection 2.1, this position was replaced by the current picture of decoherence and
histories.
Within this new picture, a “classical” uncertainty is one deriving from a process,
such as tossing a coin, whose physics can be accurately described without reference
to quantum mechanics. The initial conditions of any such process, however, stem
from unmeasurably tiny fluctuations in the conditions of the whole environment within
which the process takes place, fluctuations that are part of a causal chain that stretches
back to the earliest phases of the universe when it was a homogeneous quantum en-
tity. In this sense, all uncertainty is of quantum origin, and in the ASBC approach it is
explicitly represented as such. The important distinction in that theory is not between
classical and quantum uncertainty, but between situations that are still malleable and
open to influence through consciousness, and those that have entered consciousness
and become public. Here “public” means that the consequences of the situation have
significantly impinged on the consciousness of a wide range of disinterested organ-
isms, or have made multiple stored impressions on a single organism. For example,
in the Peoc’h experiment involving pre-recording data that controlled the robot, the
data was still malleable and subject to influence by the chicks or the experimenter be-
cause it had been “locked up” in low-energy imprints on a magnetic disc. Even if it
14
Page 15
had been printed, as a long list of binary digits, say, and disseminated in a scientific
journal it might still have been malleable, because the information that could have been
extracted from it into the consciousness of any reader would still have left more than
enough freedom for there to have been a wide range of quantum states available for a
behaviour of the robot that would yield a positive result.
Is it possible to arrange randomisation in terms of data this is public in all its details,
particularly in view of the potentiality of the experimenter to capitalise effortlessly on
any lacunae in the prior determination of the data, while still carrying out a well con-
trolled experiment? It could be that the answer is no, on two very general grounds.
First, the establishment of a correlation between events at different times independently
of causation has many similarities with the so-called “time machine effects” that can
arise in some cosmological models. Such models can regularly produce events which,
when judged by the standards of ordinary cosmology, are wildly improbable (Clarke,
1977). Secondly, any protocol for an experiment must be based in some way on a sug-
gestion or decision by some human being (such as myself in writing this article). That
person may well have some particular interest, positively or negatively, in parapsychol-
ogy, so that they will be likely to assert the corresponding proposition when they come
to view the results of the experiment and will thereby, by interacting with the quantum
factors that swayed their original decision on a particular protocol, influence the out-
come of the experiment in line with their own preference. The methodology thus has
to be indirect: different forms of quasi-randomisations could be used, together with
different inclinations of experimenters, to determine whether the results are consistent
or inconsistent with the predictions of this theory. As an example of a public quasi-
randomisation, one could generate a sequence of digits by applying an algorithm to
the text of a specified book (the algorithm designed to remove as far as possible the
strong non-randomness of letters in a book) starting at the first occurrence of the eigh-
teenth noun in the leader of a specified newspaper on a specified date. If this procedure
consistently nullified the results of experiments with the general structure of those in
subsections 3.1 and 3.2, irrespective of the views of the experimenter, then this could
be construed as evidence against point 2 above, which is an essential part of the whole
theory.
Notes
1. The influence of Spinoza. A further strand of thinking in determining the na-
ture and role of consciousness stems from the philosophy of Spinoza. On the
one hand he has been the central source for dual aspect ideas, rather than dual-
ism, which have entered neuropsychology and consciousness studies through the
influence of Spinoza on Antonio Damasio (2003); on the other hand Spinoza de-
fined the modern concept of conatus (de Spinoza, 1925, Ethices p.102) through
which an organism expresses its definitive goal of the maintenance of its own es-
sential being, and which was developed in the pan-psychist picture of Mathews
(2003). In this sense the inner activity of consciousness, represented through ς, is
not just a disinterested observation of whether A or not-A is the case (so that both
of these must be included in a Boolean algebra), but is rather an inner urge that
some particular As might be the case. The linking of this theory with panpsy-
chism is further supported by a second influence on it: the work of (Ho, 1998)
who argues with considerable evidence that living systems are characterised by
internal coherence, expressed in the definition of extensive coherence used here.
15
Page 16
Spinoza’s approach also puts in a different the light the association of a physical
characteristic, extensive coherence, with a the mental characteristic of conscious-
ness, which might otherwise seem odd. It is not that extensive coherence causes
consciousness. Rather, the basic entity is the organism which develops, in inter-
action with other organisms, both the internal aspect of consciousness and the
external aspect of coherence which implements it.
2. Consciousness and the quantum state. This Note contains more technical ma-
terial of interest to those wanting to relate this approach to traditional quantum
theory. The latter describes phenomena as arising from the conjunction of an
observation and and the (quantum) state of the observed system. There is a ten-
dency to regard observations and states as a ‘real’ physical entities; but at the
same time it is recognised that they can also be regarded as merely mathematical
constructs for analysing the results of laboratory physics. At this mathemati-
cal level several different equivalent representations of observations and states
are possible. In particular, the Shrödinger representation uses a fixed (time-
independent) mathematical operator to represent each given measurement (such
as position, momentum and so on) with time-varying elements of an abstract
space to represent states; whereas at the other extreme in the Heisenberg repre-
sentation the state is time-independent and each measurement is represented by
a time-varying operator.
Using these two representations gives an easy way to understand the first stages
in the evolution of the histories interpretation from traditional quantum theory to
histories described at the start of 2. In conventional quantum theory there is a
function – call it ̟ – that gives the probability ̟(A; ρ) of finding the proposition
A true in the (mixed) state ρ (explicitly ̟(A, ρ) := TrAρA†). If two proposition
P and Q belong to a Boolean algebra , then P AND Q is the same as Q AND P;
as projection operators PQ = QP, and the probability of both being true in
the state ρ is ̟(PQ; ρ). Such propositions are said to commute. If we now
extend this to a sequence P1,P2,...,Pn of projection operators performed at
different increasing times, then in the Heisenberg representation the formula for
the probability of their all being true simply generalises to ̟(PnPn−1 ...P1; ρ).
This would clearly seem to be also the most natural form for the corresponding
quantity (denoted by p above) in the case of moments of consciousness. When
rewritten in terms of the more usual Schrödinger representation, and making
allowance for the finite time taken by each moment of consciousness, it becomes
p(P1,P2,...,Pn; ρ) = ̟(Λn(Pn)Λn−1(Pn−1) ... Λ1(P1); ρ)
(2)
where the function Λ describes a time evolution from one moment of conscious-
ness to the next, followed by an averaging over the duration of the succeeding
proposition. If we want to retrieve from this the older picture of the “collapse of
the state” then we can regard the successive states
ρk := Λk(Pk) ...Λ1(P1)ρΛ1(P1)† ... Λk(Pk)†)
(3)
as k increases from 1 to n as successive “collapses” of an initial state as a result
of a succession of moments of consciousness, but this is not necessarily helpful.
Formally, however is is sometimes useful to refer to the state ρk as the apparent
state of the universe at Uk. The organism is aware of the restriction of this state
to its locus, which I refer to a the effective state.
16
Page 17
We see from this that the quantum state is given a much reduced role in history
theory. The decoherence functional (closely analogous to p above) involves the
initial state of the universe, but this is regarded as essentially fixed by some such
criterion as the Hartle-Hawking “no boundary condition” (Hartle and Hawking,
1983).
References
Philip J. Barnard. Bridging between basic theory and clinical practice. Behaviour
Research and Therapy, 42:977–1000, 2004.
Rodney Bomford. Ignacio Matte Blanco and the logic of God. In Chris J. S. Clarke,
editor, Ways of knowing: Science and mysticism today, pages 129–142. Imprint Aca-
demic, 2005.
David J. Chalmers. Facing up to the problem of consciousness. J. Cons. Studies, 2:
200–19, 1995.
Chris J. S. Clarke. On the nature of bilogic: the work of Ignacio Matte Blanco. Website
page, 2006.
Chris J. S. Clarke. The role of quantum physics in the theory of subjective conscious-
ness. Mind and Body, 5:45–81, 2007a.
Chris J. S. Clarke. Generalised histories and decoherence: an outline for a large-scale
quantum theory. Submitted, 2007b. See http://www.scispirit.com/physics5.pdf.
Chris J. S. Clarke. Time in general relativity. In J S Earman, C N Glymour, and
Stachel J J, editors, Foundations of Space-time theories, pages 94–108. University
of Minnesota Press, 1977.
Antonio Damasio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Harcourt,
2003.
A. Daneri, A. Loinger, and G.M. Prosperi. Quantum theory of measurement and er-
godicity requirements. Nuclear Physics, 33:297–319, 1962.
Benedict de Spinoza. Spinoza opera; im Auftrag der Heidelberger Akademie der Wis-
senschaften. Carl Winters, Heidelberg, 1925. Edited by Carl Gebhardt.
Matthew J. Donald. Quantum theory and the brain. Proceedings of the Royal Society
(London) Series A, 427:43–93, 1990.
Matthew J. Donald. A mathematical characterization of the physical structure of ob-
servers. Foundations of Physics, 25:529–571, 1995.
Nico U. F. Dosenbach, Damien A. Fair, Francis M. Miezin, Alexander L. Cohen,
Kristin K. Wenger, Ronny A. T. Dosenbach, Michael D. Fox, Abraham Z. Snyder,
Justin L. Vincent, Marcus E. Raichle, Bradley L. Schlaggar, and Steven E. Petersen.
Distinct brain networks for adaptive and stable task control in humans. Proc. Nat.
Acad. Sci. USA, 104:11073–11078, 2007.
Neil Douglas-Klotz. The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Message of the Aramaic Jesus.
Quest Books, 2001.
17
Page 18
Fay Dowker and Andrew Kent. On the consistent histories approach to quantum me-
chanics. J. Stat. Phys., 82:1575, 1996.
H. Everett. ’Relative State’ formulation of quantum mechanics. Rev. Mod. Phys., 29:
454, 1957.
P. Fenwick. Chickens dont lie. Network: the Scientific and Medical Network Revue,
(62):12–13, 1996.
D. Giulini, E. Joos, C. Kiefer, J. Kupsch, I.-O. Stamatescu, and H. D. Zeh. Decoherence
and the appearance of a classical world. Springer-Verlag, Berlin and Heidelberg,
1996.
R. Griffiths. Consistent histories and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. J. Stat.
Phys., 36:219–272, 1984.
J. Grinberg-Zylberbaum, M. Delaflor, L. Attie, and A. Goswami. The Einstein-
Podolsky-Rosen paradox in the brain: the transferred potential. Physics Essays,
7:422–427, 1994.
Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Orchestrated reduction of quantum coherence in
brain microtubules: A model for consciousness? In S.R. Hameroff, A.W. Kasz-
niak, and A.C. Scott, editors, Toward a Science of Consciousness – The First Tucson
Discussions and Debates, pages 507–540. MIT Press, 1996.
James Hartle. The quantum mechanics of cosmology. In S. Coleman, P. Hartle, T. Pi-
ran, and S. Weinberg, editors, Quantum cosmology and baby universes. World Sci-
entific, 1991.
James Hartle and Stephen Hawking. Wave function of the universe. Physical Review
D, 28:2960–2975, 1983.
Mae-Wan Ho. The Rainbow and the Worm. World Scientific, Singapore, 1998.
M. H. Johnson. Imprinting and anpsi: An attempt to replicate Peoc’h. Journal of the
Society for Psychical Research, 55:417–419, 1989.
George Kelley. The psychology of personal constructs. Vol. I, II. Norton, New York,
1955. 2nd printing: 1991, Routledge, London, New York.
Michael Lockwood. Mind, Brain and the Quantum. Blackwell, 1989.
Freya Mathews. For Love of Matter: a contemporary panpsychism. State University
of New York Press, 2003.
Ignacio Matte Blanco. The Unconscious as infinite sets: an essay in bi-logic. H.
Karnac, 1998.
D.N. Page. Mindless sensationalism: A quantum framework for consciousness. In
Q Smith and A. Jokic, editors, Consciousness: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2001.
Roger Penrose. The Road to Reality: a Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.
Jonathan Cape, 2004.
18
Page 19
R. Peoc’h. Chicken imprinting and the tychoscope: An anpsi experiment. Journal of
the Society for Psychical Research, 55:1–9, 1988.
Dean Radin. Entangled Minds. Pocket Books, 2006.
Hans Reichenbach. The Direction of Time. Dover, 2003.
A. Sabell, C. Clarke, and P. Fenwick. Inter-subject EEG correlations at a distance -
the transferred potential. In C.S. Alvardo, editor, Proceedings of the 44th Annual
Convention of the Parapsychological Association, page 419. 2001.
Rupert Sheldrake. The presence of the past. Collins, 1988.
Sogyal Rinpoche. The Tibetan book of living and dying. Random House, second
edition, 2002.
Henry O. Stapp. Quantum interactive dualism: An alternative to materialism. J. Consc.
Studies, 12:43–58, 2005.
Tony Sudbery. Diese verdammte Quantenspringerei. Stud. Hist. Phil. Mod. Phys., 33:
387–411, 2002.
John D. Teasdale and Philip J. Barnard. Affect, Cognition, and Change: Re-Modelling
Depressive Thought. Erlbaum, Hove, UK, 1993.
Evan Harris Walker. The physics of consciousness. Perseus Books, Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts, 2000.
19
COMMENTS
-
captainglobehead
20:10 Apr 05 2011
I REALLY wanted to say, "You had me at Hello."
The fact is, you completely lost me at "Dean Radin."
Oceanne
22:54 Apr 05 2011
LOL..I doubt that..you're a pretty smart cookie.:D
captainglobehead
22:36 Apr 08 2011
No, really! The man combines physics, metaphysics, psi AND quantum physics? And throwing in the observer effect, so even being psychically aware of an event changes it?
I've just gotten to accept things in the mundane world that I can't understand.