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Interesting article, though. Reminds me of Ray Brassier (author of "Nihil Unbound") who argues that entropy is the ultimate fate of everything, and that time as we know it doesn't "really" exist at a quantum level, so in reality everything is dead already.
This is an elegant and powerful idea. It suggests that time is an emergent phenomenon that comes about because of the nature of entanglement. And it exists only for observers inside the universe. Any god-like observer outside sees a static, unchanging universe, just as the Wheeler-DeWitt equations predict.
Of course, without experimental verification, Page and Wootter’s ideas are little more than a philosophical curiosity. And since it is never possible to have an observer outside the universe, there seemed little chance of ever testing the idea.
Until now.
Our clinical research with the naturally-occurring human psychedelic, DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) sought to understand the relationship between the psychopharmacology of DMT and spiritual experience. Eastern religious systems, particularly Buddhist, provided the spiritual model which I, and previous investigators, believed would be most relevant to our research. However, unitive experiences of ego dissolution typical of enlightenment experiences were quite rare. Rather, volunteers actively related to what appeared to be autonomous, external alternative realties, while firmly maintaining a sense of personal identity. Old Testament descriptions of prophetic experience are replete with psychedelic content, and comport more closely with the DMT volunteers’ reports than a Buddhist model of enlightenment. This finding provides support for utilizing Old Testament prophetic literature as an alternative, Western model by which to understand and integrate contemporary psychedelic experience. It also suggests a means by which students of the Old Testament may access the state of consciousness out of which emerged prophetic Old Testament text.
My own reservations come from a sense of limited scope. I occupy such an insignificant slice of history (though I concede that I could be doing a lot more with yon slice). Maybe I would feel more fulfilled if I were to have access to more of existence, or maybe I should stop watching time-travel films.
An interesting article, all in all. Reminds me a lot of the "total uncertainty" of Celia Green, in many ways.
Because there is no "I" in any real sense. Once those comforting illusions are broken, I can't go back and live a lie.
Maybe I'm clinically insane. I don't know.
I suppose that's one way of dealing with existential doubts, lol.
Panpsychism makes no sense to me. If "everything is conscious", what even counts as a "thing"? If my shoe is conscious, is any part of it separately conscious too? Is the (arbitrary but valid) object consisting of my foot inside the shoe a conscious mind?
The knock on parapsychology studies has long been that any so-called evidence of ESP is usually limited to negligible effects only detectable after scouring massive bodies of data. "Those to whom this criticism has any appeal should be aware that the Maimonides experiments are clearly exempt from it," wrote Irvin Child, Yale's former psychology department chair, in American Psychologist, the APA's flagship journal. "I believe many psychologists would, like myself, consider the ESP hypothesis to merit serious consideration and continued research if they read the Maimonides reports for themselves."
First of all, our original dream telepathy results were repeated several times in our own laboratory. We published both the successful replications and the unsuccessful replications. All of these articles are referenced at the end of our book DREAM TELEPATHY (by Ullman, Krippner, and Vaughan). A meta-analysis of all the studies produced high significant results and was published in a 1985 article by Irvin Child in The American Psychologist, flagship journal of the American Psychological Association..
Several other researchers attempted to replicate our work. Both the successful replications and the unsuccessful replications have been published in the chapter by Roe and Sherwood in ADVANCES IN PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH, VOLUME 9 (edited by Krippner and Friedman). A meta-analysis of all these studies produced highly significant results. They were not as strong as the Maimonides data, probably because they used "home dreams" instead of "laboratory dreams," the latter involving psychophysiological recordings. In the lab, participants can be awakened once they have been in REM sleep for a while. For home dreams, participants are usually awakened randomly by telephone, hence many dreams are lost.
But everytime I say to me:"What can he tell me, that I don't know myself?" and I don't go.
Although the interface theory is compatible with idealism, it is not idealism, because it proposes no speci fic model of objective reality, but leaves the nature of objective reality as an open scientifi c problem.
Never heard of those Krippner telepathy experiments, either. Since this is the first time I ever hear about them, they can't have been especially convincing, so excuse me if I'm still seriously doubting that telepathy exists.
