APPLICATION OF MENTAL MONISM TO PARAPSYCHOLOGY Peter B.

Lloyd, 2005
This short essay is a follow-on to Mental Monism Considered as a Solution to the MindBody Problem, in Mind and its Place in the World: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness, edited by Alexander Batthyany and Avshalom Elitzur, published by Ontos Verlag, Frankfurt, December 2005. It was originally planned as a final section of that essay but, at forty-four pages the latter was already oversize, so the parapsychology section was dropped from that publication. The first essay, Mental Monism Considered as a Solution to the Mind-Body Problem, provides a detailed defence of the Berkeleian theory that the reality is ultimately wholly mental, and the natural phenomena are governed by some global consciousness, which I labelled metamind. (Berkeley names it as God, Shankara names it as Brahman.) This essay shows how mental monism would apply to parapsychology if it were true. 1.1 Does mental monism matter?

So what if the world is fundamentally mental? If everything works just as if you were a physical organism inside a three-dimensional physical world, then why would you care whether all this is ultimately grounded in consciousness? If the metamind did nothing but render a manifest world that is compliant with the laws of physics, like a colossal virtual-reality simulation, then mental monism even if correct would be intellectually sterile. But we know something else is going on. The mere fact that that we can report our conscious experiences demonstrates that the non-physical (and intrinsic) phenomenal character of conscious experiences can affect the physical machinery of our nervous system. The ramifications of this simple fact are staggering, but somehow seem to slip into a lacuna of the collective intellectual awareness of the industrialised West. 1.2 Characteristics of psi

In Lloyd (1999b), I proposed three categories of psi processes telepathy, telecognition, and telekinesis. Neither there nor elsewhere in the literature are these processes defined by their underlying nature or mechanism. They are defined by their observable empirical features. I will outline each of these processes below. Telepathy is sometimes described as the transmission of information or imagery from one conscious mind to another. If we were to regard this as a definition, it would be problematic in two regards. First, the term transmission conventionally denotes the passage of a message from a sender via a transmitting medium to a receiver. In experiments with telepathy, nobody has observed any transmitting medium, nor the
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transmitted material in any intermediate state between sender and receiver. Second, the term transmission also implies some well-defined concept of identity between what is sent and what is received. But there is no such concept in telepathy. In contrast, if I transmit a paper letter by the post to you, then the same physical object that was in my hand comes to be in your possession. This refers to a well-established spatiotemporal criterion of physical identity. If I transmit an email to you, then the same file of text is copied from my computer over the network to yours. This relies on a well established criterion for the spatiotemporal continuity of digital files over cables and radio waves. Now, when we consider telepathy, we have no pre-established criterion for whether the same information or image appears in the receiver as was in the sender. We must fall back to a criterion of mere similarity. If the sender identifies some mental content P that she intends to send, and the receiver identifies some mental content that seems to have been received, and if P and Q have, on average, a degree of close similarity that is statistically significant, then the process whereby this comes about is deemed telepathy. An implication of this definition is that it is almost never possible to speak confidently of individual instances of telepathy. For, there will be a risk of Qs resembling P by sheer chance. Telepathy will normally be discernible only as a statistical anomaly in a set of trials. Only if what is sent is extraordinarily unusual and complex would it be plausible to say with confidence that an individual act of telepathy had occurred. In such a case, though, any attempt to quantify the likelihood will be largely subjective and that unique occurrence would be of little use in the scientific investigation of telepathy. Telecognition is defined in a similar vein. Instead of a sender and receiver, there is an operator and receiver. If the operator designates some aspect of a physical target T, and if the receiver identifies some mental content Q that purports to contain information about, or imagery of, the chosen aspect of T, and if instances of Q exhibit a statistically significant degree of similarity to the actual facts of T or the images that an observer of T would have, and if physical channels of cognition have been eliminated, then the process whereby this comes about is deemed telecognition. Finally, telekinesis follows suit. This involves a single person, the agent. If the agent identifies a physical change that she intends to effect within a given time period, and if the target exhibits that change, and if physical channels of influence have been eliminated, then the process whereby this comes about is deemed telekinesis. (As a special case, if the target change is located in the past, and if the occurrence or nonoccurrence of the change is unobserved until after the telekinetic effort, then the process is deemed retrokinesis.) An important point, which enthusiasts for psi tend to forget, and Hyman (1996) emphasises, is that the criteria listed above are not simply tests for the occurrence of psi, they are all that we know of the nature of psi. In saying that telepathy has occurred in a given series of experiments, we are saying no more than that the above empirical criteria were met. We are saying nothing about how this came about. This is a weakness, but it is not a peculiar defect of parapsychology. We run up against just the same limitation when trying to establish causal relations in highly variable responses of any biological system. For instance, in clinical trials and epidemiology you may be able to do no more than determine statistically that a given pharmaceutical intervention or dietary change has
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a particular effect. Years, or even decades, may pass before there is an understanding of the biochemical processes that are involved. In other words, it is scientifically respectable for researchers to define a phenomenon by the empirical results it produces, and to study it on that basis, long before a good theoretic definition can be formulated. I shall use the term external psi where the target is outside ones own body, and internal psi where the target is inside the body. Let me clarify one thing about the empirical definition of psi. In the above rules for assessing whether or not external psi has occurred, I mentioned that a prerequisite is that known physical channels should be excluded. The term physical channels here pertains to channels between the receivers (or agents) body and the target. As I shall argue below. internal psi can be regarded as occurring in every act of perception or voluntary action, and therefore the term physical channel here must mean a channel between the surface of the receivers (or agents) body and the target. 1.3 Evidence for external psi

Experimental researchers have continued to carry out parapsychological work despite intense and pervasive hostility from the main stream of the scientific and technological community, in order to demonstrate the existence of the psi processes of telekinesis, telepathy, and telecognition. Radin (1997) provides a rigorous, detailed, and comprehensive survey of modern scientific work in this area. Nevertheless, the constant protest is heard that these processes do not exist, or that the jury is still out. In fact, it has been clear for some time that these processes are real, even though the processes have no more than an empirical definition. Hyman (1996, p 57) acknowledges this in conclusion no. 4 of his highly critical review of the remote viewing programme carried out by SRI and SAIC from 1973 to 1994: The statistical departures from chance appear to be too large and consistent to attribute to statistical flukes of any sort. Although I cannot dismiss the possibility that these rejections of the null hypothesis might reflect limitations in the statistical model as an approximation of the experimental situation, I tend to agree with Professor Utts that real effects are occurring in these experiments. Something other than chance departures from the null hypothesis has occurred in these experiments. Hymans reluctance to accept Utts conclusion that anomalous cognition is possible and has been demonstrated (Utts, 1996, p 23) essentially rests on the semantic objection that we cannot assert the existence of telecognition until we know what telecognition really is. Yet, our ignorance of the mechanism of the process does not prevent us from establishing the occurrence its empirical properties. In fact, as I mentioned above, throughout the history of science, new phenomena have been characterised empirically before a theoretical account of them had been formulated. That is precisely the situation that parapsychology finds itself in, and it does not debar parapsychology from acknowledging the brute existence of the phenomenon that it is investigating.

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Evidence for internal psi

It will, at first, seem surprising, but the normal function of the mind-body interface is, in effect, a psi process. When you have a conscious experience of the colour red because your eyes are receiving light from the red part of the spectrum, then you are in effect obtaining that visual information by telecognition of your brain. For, since the conscious mind is itself non-physical, it follows a fortiori that there is no physical channel between your conscious mind and the brain. And when you report this fact by saying I see the colour red, then you are telekinetically influencing the motor centres of your brain. The sceptical claim that psi processes do not exist is thus a non-starter. Clearly they do exist in the natural environment of the mind-brain interface and, as noted above, there is now adequate laboratory data that show that these processes can be invoked outside that locus. There seems to be an instinctive, rather than reflective, reluctance to recognise internal psi for what it is. Perhaps it is our sheer familiarity with bodily perception and voluntary action that blinds us to the fact that this is really an example of the mind interacting with a physical system other than through physical channels. 1.5 Reliability of psi

A sceptical claim that even the parapsychologists make is that psi can never be reliable. Success rates in telepathy, telekinesis, and telecognition, are always only marginally above what would be expected by chance. Although the magnitude of the difference is small, the use of very large samples has brought the limits of statistical significance into narrow enough bands that separate the effect from the null hypothesis of chance outcomes. So, there is a high confidence in the reality of the effects even though the effects themselves are small. Somehow the anti-psi camp look upon this is a glimmer of hope for their position as if to say that, even if psi exists, it will never be important. Disciplines such as engineering have never been daunted by the smallness of useful effects. For example, the photovoltaic effect is very small but systems can be engineered to harness it, and banks of photovoltaic cells can generate useful voltages. Even with small psi effects, we could engineer useful systems by multiplying the circuits. For the natural psi processes of the mind-brain interface we already have proof of principle of high levels of reliability: every time I hit a key in writing this essay, I demonstrate the capability of my mind to apply telekinetic influence to my brain in a highly reliable manner. Occasionally, I hit the wrong key. But my success rate in using my conscious mind in telekinetically triggering the nerve signals that moving my fingers has a success rate that is certainly in excess of 99%. If natural-grade telekinesis can do this, what could be achieved with industrial-strength psi?

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Models of psi

There are three central conceptual problems in modelling psi. Parapsychologists generally focus on only the first one, and neglect the other two, which I would describe as informatic problems. (a) The transport problem. How is information (seemingly) transported from sender to receiver in telepathy, or between subject and target in telecognition and telekinesis? It is commonly presumed that a novel energetic mechanism carries the information. This can be dismissed because the efficacy of psi is unaffected by distance and physical barriers. An alternative notion is that a non-local quantum-mechanical interaction carries it. Given that the sender and receiver are separated by massive structures (such as room walls) at room temperature (hence well above absolute zero), this seems a wild speculation. We cannot rule it out while we know so little about quantum physics, but I do not know of any experiment in which even quantum entanglement has been established between environmentally non-isolated systems at room temperature. Moreover, even where remote entanglement occurs between environmentally isolated particles, the basic physics excludes the possible of signalling. (b) The navigation problem. How do the sender and receiver locate each other in telepathy, given that they may be at an arbitrary distance away in an arbitrary direction, unknown to either party? Likewise, how does the subject locate the target in telecognition and telekinesis? Given that there are more than six billion people on the planet, there is clearly a problem to explain how telepathic navigation works. If the telepathic link seeks out an individual with certain features (height, build, ethnic origin), then there are will be very many false positives who share the same features. The navigational ability of the psi process appears to involve at least some rudimentary intelligence, which is at odds with any dumb physical mechanism. The energetic and quantum-mechanical models seem to have nothing to offer on the navigation problem. (c) The coding problem. How is information represented when it is transferred between two minds, or between a mind and a target? This is especially puzzling in telekinesis. How, for example, does a random-number generator understand a mental command to generate certain digits? The telekinetic agent does not possess a detailed knowledge of the circuitry of the device. Therefore she cannot focus he telekinetic power on the internals of the device so as to produce the required result. It must be that the device itself somehow understands what is required of it, and performs whatever internal tasks are necessary to produce the required result. This is even more astonishing than the brute fact of telekinesis itself. This is not the place to investigate these problems in detail. I shall briefly summarise how mental monism offers a new approach to the navigation problem. In mental monism, personal minds are not separated by space, as space is merely notional. This is a strange move away from our normal habit of identifying minds with

spatially situated brains, so I shall suggest a partial metaphor to make it a little clearer. Imagine an old-fashioned bingo game, comprising a glass-sided box with ninety-nine coloured balls being blown around by a jet of compressed air. Suppose that there are four colours of balls. Each colour-set is conceptually a distinct entity, yet the members of the four colour-sets intermingle randomly. Normal bingo balls are dumb and do not exchange information. So, let us fit each ball with a microprocessor and a wireless network card. The red balls connect to a single local area network (LAN, in computer jargon), the blue balls to another, and so on. Now we have an interesting situation where the nodes of each network freely and randomly commingle, yet each network maintains its distinct identity. If one of the red balls wishes to communicate with a blue ball, then it can do so only if there is a gateway a ball that is a node in both the red and blue networks. This is a starting point for how I want to think of conscious minds. Each network of wirelessly communicating balls of one colour represents one mind. Obviously the contents of consciousness are not flying around, for they are not in space at all. The point of the analogy is that the contents of consciousness are not bodily and statically associated by virtue of being lumped together (as the different parts of your brain are). What makes them one mind is a closed informatic connection. What is this informatic connection from which the individuation of personal minds stems? It is, I would suggest, the relation of access under operations of mental association. Looking at any particular point in my visual field (say, the letter H on my keyboard), I can move the focus of my attention (while keeping my eyes still) to the adjacent letters. I can move my attention anywhere within this seemingly hemispheric field of view, but I cannot move it into the field of view of the person sitting opposite me. So, the contents of my conscious mind are closed under normal operations of access. If, however, there were a gateway between two minds an item that existed in both minds and thereby provided a bridge across which the operations of access could pass, then information and imagery could be shared between two minds. What could such a gateway be? Let us step back and re-view our earlier model of the mental world. We proposed a working hypothesis in which the metamind comprises functional modules corresponding to macroscopic objects (in Mental Monism Considered as a Solution to the Mind-Body Problem). Perception of an object involves an exchange of information between the observers mind and the objects module. This in turn relies on the entities being able to address each other. So, consider two persons, P1 and P2, each observing an object driven by a metamental module M. Because both P1 and P2 are each receiving imagery from M, we can infer that M knows how to address both P1 and P2, and vice versa. As a further hypothesis, assume that, after an act of observation, the observer and the observed module both retain the address of the other. Now, suppose P2 departs to some remote location. Then there is an addressability path from P1 via M to P2, and vice versa. That is to say, these entities possess the addressing information needed to carry out the telepathic communication. If internal processing exists inside P1, M, and P2 to utilise that information, then we have a possible model of psi.

This hand-waving argument illustrates that, under simple assumptions of economy, mental monism implies a chain of addressability that is informatically required for any model of psi. Vague though this model is, it is nonetheless focused enough to yield testable predictions for experiments in remote viewing, as described by Lloyd (1999b, section 4.3.1). 1.7 Locus of telekinesis

We discussed earlier the physical correlates of the personal conscious mind and concluded that the mind must act on non-deterministic processes in the brain. Similar considerations apply to telekinesis. If telekinesis is to avoid doing violence to the laws of physics, then it must act at some site of non-determinism. Telekinesis has confidently been established in very small processes, such as dice and electronic random-number generators (see e.g. Radin, 1997). This has led several authors to speculate that telekinesis acts upon quantum mechanical measurements, which are then amplified in chaotic systems to yield macroscopic effects (e.g. Jahn and Dunne, 1985). But experiments with mechanical systems at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (e.g. Dunne, Nelson, and Jahn, 1988) indicate telekinetic effects comparable to those with electronic random-number generators. Therefore, even if quantum mechanics were involved in some forms of telekinesis, it certainly cannot be a general explanation. What this suggests, therefore, is that the locus of telekinesis is the first of the two possibilities that we have discussed (in Mental Monism Considered as a Solution to the MindBody Problem), that is, unobserved initial conditions. On this view, there is no reason to expect the mass of the telekinetic target to affect the success rate of telekinetic experiments. The only criterion for susceptibility to telekinesis is that some hitherto unobserved physical condition can affect the outcome of individual trials. In an experiment such as the random mechanical cascade (Dunne, Nelson, and Jahn, 1988), this hypothesis would predict that the success rate will be independent of the mass of the balls. Likewise for more conventional forms of randomisation, such as dice, the susceptibility to telekinesis should be independent of how big the dice are. The use of highly massive telekinetic targets is a good test for informatic versus energetic theories of telekinesis. In experiments conducted by Schmidt (1976, 1978) telekinetic agents apparently affected previously unobserved events in the physical past. Stapp (1994) has suggested a quantum-mechanical account of retrokinesis, but Schmidt (1978) reported the same magnitude of retrokinetic effect for mechanical and electronic targets, and in his remarkable equivalence hypothesis he proposes that for any non-deterministic system the telekinetic effect will be independent of the physical mechanism and physical time of occurrence. The mental monist theory outlined here seems to be the only candidate for accounting for this behaviour. Schmidts work needs to be duplicated, but so far it is the most exciting potential confirmation of the mental monist model.

REFERENCES Dunne, B.J., Nelson, R.D., and Jahn, R.G. (1988), Operator-related Anomalies in a Random Mechanical Cascade. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2:155-179. Hyman, R. (1996), Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena. Journal of Scientific Exploration 10:31-58. Jahn, R.G., Dunne, B.J. (1986), On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, with Application to Anomalous Phenomena. Foundations of Physics 16:721-772. Lloyd, P.B. (1999a), Consciousness and Berkeleys Metaphysics. Software. London: Ursa

Lloyd, P.B. (1999b), Paranormal Phenomena and Berkeleys Metaphysics. London: Ursa Software. Lloyd, P.B. (2003), Glitches in the Matrix and How to Fix Them. In Yeffeth, G. (2003), Taking the Red Pill: Science, Religion, and Philosophy in the Matrix. Dallas: BenBella Books. Radin, D.I. (1997), The Conscious Universe. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Schmidt, H. (1976), PK Effect on Pre-Recorded Targets. The Journal for the American Society for Psychical Research 70: 267-291. Schmidt, H. (1987), The Strange Properties of Psychokinesis. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1:103-118. Stapp, H.P. (1994), Theoretical models of a purported empirical violation of the predictions of quantum theory. Physical Review A 50:18-22. Utts, J. (1996), An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning. Journal of Scientific Exploration 10:3-30.