Psychology Today recently published an article called “Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!” an unfortunately minor exegesis regarding the large amount of “psychic” data that has appeared recently in peer-reviewed publications.
The article highlights Dr. Daryl Bem's research into “seeing into the future” and “retrograde priming study” which appropriately echoes Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s work for the last few decades (morphogenetic field theory). Regarding telepathy, Sheldrake has said, “I think all social animals have such fields…I think it’s a normal means of communication…I don’t think it’s paranormal, I think it’s normal. I don’t think it’s supernatural, I think it’s natural. I think it’s essentially a form of animal communication within groups.”
We all know the feeling of falling in love with an individual or being close with a friend or family member or group; and when separated from each other we find each other thinking or feeling the exact same thing. How many times have you answered the phone and exclaimed, “I was just thinking of you–hard!” This “entangled minds” phenomena is the basis of one of Dr. Dean Radin’s book of the same title.
Rumors of psychic abilities have steadily been bleeding in from the fringes and into the mainstream culture for the past century. From Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research laboratories, to government funded remote viewing projects at Stamford Research Institute, to the models of Campbell, Sheldrake, Wolf, and Radin to name a few, science (“the religion of the west”) is under pressure, now more than ever, to address the problem of consciousness–the measurer of all measurements.
Though it may be in the word “psychic” that loses the oldest or most bigoted of the intelligencia. One can almost sense the swelling venom among some at the very utterance of the word when used in a legitimate context. Military docs reveal that the term “unconventional human intelligence support” rings better for our boys in fatigues. “Psychic” could also be just as easily and accurately be referred to as “nonlocal data interaction” or NDI. Likewise, “extra-sensory perception” seems misleading in that it’s suggestion is that it is “outside,” “enhanced,” or “non-usual” and the like, yet it very well could be that all of our sensory inputs actually feed into an awareness that is essentially nonlocal and nonphysical; ergo the system of consciousness is fundamentally NDI at it’s core.
Nonlocality, probability distributions, and nonphysical qualities have all been observed, documented, and part of mainstream science of many decades (entanglement, superposition, and more recently teleportation in China). If the mind exhibits features that are also nonlocal, probable, self-organizing, and nonphysical it would be congruent with not only findings in quantum physics but also open us up to the “psychic” evidence as well. Though we do see that damaging the brain results in cognitive, perceptual, behavioral, memory, thought problems and biological death; there is still little that can explain how individuals can recognize nonlocal information to a degree far beyond chance, repeatedly.
In mainstream culture and science it is an unknown as to whether or not the brain is in communion with a nonphysical, computational, self-organizing system (ergo physical reality is a byproduct) but very little else could argue the NDI evidence. Though argument is strong from such power players in the emerging field of digital physics, computational math, and information theory. These groups often end up solving the problems string thing has not been handling well at all (eg. self-organization, the cosmological constant, the big bang, nearly all of the problems created in the last century) and rarely do they include a conscience, through account of consciousness. See Whitworth, Fredkin, Bostrom, and Campbell for more examples.
As the now fringe scientists can no doubt attest, out-of-date models that dismiss consciousness entirely will only perish with their there propagators, regardless of any new repeatable discovery or phenomenological evidence offers.
Despite being behind "fringe" science, credit must be given to Psychology Today for catching up with the data. An extra gas can added to the nonphysical inferno is roundly welcomed by truth seekers world wide.
Image by A Journey Round My Skull on Flickr Courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.
