Mind over matter? 


I'm not generally given to speculation about psychic powers and parapsychology, but the following two articles really caught my imagination. Both involve electronic devices that can allegedly ‘sense’ things to which they have no apparent connection. The first involves a device that is apparently influenced by the thoughts of a human subject who is asked to concentrate on influencing the outcome of an event that is determined purely by chance. The second concerns a mysterious ‘black box’ that supposedly reacts to major world events, such as the recent Asian tsunami, or the attacks on the World Trade Centre, even before they happen. Although both of these are most likely hoaxes, or perhaps some kind of neo-urban myth, if there is even the slightest bit of truth in either, then scientists have a hell of a lot of explaining to do… 

The idea that an electronic device could be influenced by global media events, such as the funeral of Princess Diana or the aftermath of September 11th, is perhaps not so far-fetched given that modern communications technology generates large quantities of electromagnetic fields that could conceivably influence electronic equipment such as the black box random number generator described in the Edinburgh experiment. However, the fact that this device supposedly reacts to these events before they occur is completely inexplicable within a conventional scientific framework, except perhaps in some weird quantum sense in which possible past and future universes somehow interfere with or affect one another, but this probably belongs more to the realm of science-fiction than rational scientific debate.

On the other hand, perhaps we should positively expect things like this to occur in a universe where everything is connected and signals can travel faster than the speed of light in apparent defiance of the conventional laws of physics, such as Einstein's theory of relativity. At least, that's what the quantum scientists would have us believe.

Whatever the truth of the matter—and, being a philosopher, I could probably talk about the meaning of that phrase means for several hundred pages—it it often hard to separate reality from fiction, especially when one has a strong desire to want to believe in these kind of mysterious phenomena. The fact that scientists have tried so hard to quantify and explain every aspect of our world sometimes drives one to look for the bizarre and inexplicable, partly out of a general sense of awe and wonderment about the sheer impossibility of it all, and partly from a perverse desire to find at least one thing that you can point to and say “See! You can't explain that!”.

Personally, I think the desire to account for and control every aspect of our universe has to be balanced with a healthy respect for the limits and inadequacy of human knowledge, and indeed any kind of knowledge, which by definition must always be incomplete (I believe that a chap called Gödel had some important things to say about that). Sometimes science and logic only get you so far, and we forget that there are senses and faculties other than intelligence with which we can investigate the world that are equally, and occasionally more reliable, if not so easy to share with one's fellow man (or woman). In order to counter this intellectual bias, I'd recommend anyone who has more than a passing interest in the strangeness of the world to pick up a book on basic quantum mechanics (John Gribbin's Schrödinger's Cat is a particularly good one), which will confirm that the universe is indeed a far stranger place than one might (and possibly than one can) imagine. Perhaps in the final analysis, in the words of respected zoologist, Richard Dawkins, the universe really is just “too queer” for us to understand. 

Posted on Tuesday - July 19, 2005 at 02:02 PM            

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