The Greatest Scientific Challenge

What would you say is the greatest challenge facing science today?

Many physicists would say of course that it is to reconcile the two great and deep theories that are utterly incompatible. Einstein’s General Relativity is a theory of gravity that applies to large-scale phenomena, black holes, pulsars, and also the universe as a whole. Quantum mechanics is an approach to computing properties of small things, on the scale of molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles. Einstein’s geometric approach to gravity resists quantization, but scientists expect that the world obeys one set of self-consistent laws, and there must be a framework for understanding both GR and QM as limiting cases of a more general theory. The trouble is that since one applies to the realm of the very large and the other to the very small, there are no experimental probes that might be used to find clues toward the general theory, or even to test a candidate Theory of Everything.

Astronomers, philosophers, and Big Picture thinkers might say that the greatest problem is the large-scale structure of the Universe, its history and projected future. In 1965, the Big Bang became a framework for interpreting all astronomical observations. The 1965 breakthrough was a promise of explaining the fact that everywhere we look, stars and gas clouds are made of about ¾ hydrogen and ¼ helium. But that promise fell apart with better measurements, and over the last 30 years, BB cosmology has had to be patched beyond recognition as one anomaly after another has appeared. Honest astrophysicists now agree that we need a new cosmological paradigm.

Neuropsychologists or even computer scientists might answer: Chalmers’s “hard problem” — how does the brain generate first person experience? But increasingly, philosophers and even scientists are taking a radical position: The “hard problem” is mis-stated. The brain does not generate consciousness at all. Consciousness is an element of physical reality, perhaps the most primitive element. The brain is a transceiver, mediating between consciousness and a physical body.

One reason for this perspective is a compilation of evidence for conscious activity that cannot be linked to neural activity in the brain.

• The most abundant evidence is for various forms of telepathy, for which no mediating neural activity is known.

• Remote viewing, clairvoyance and blindsight are real phenomena, observed and reported, but mostly ignored by the scientific community because they are impossible within the commonly-accepted framework of neuroscience.

• There is abundant anecdotal evidence and several experimental protocols indicating that we sometimes have premonitions of future events that we would have no way of anticipating based on what we know from our senses.

• In near-death experiences, people have vivid experiences when their brains are flatlined, without neural activity.

• In seances, mediums are reported to communicate with the dead.

• Psychokinesis is the power of the mind to affect physical reality “from a distance”.

My answer to the question at the top of this page comes from these phenomena, viewed as anomalies in the context of a detailed science of physics that works well most of the time. Conventional science has had conspicuous, even world-shaping success with a paradigm in which the universe is made of particles that obey fixed laws.

How can we reconcile the successes of physics with the anomalies that blatantly violate our most basic paradigms?

Telepathy is not about transmission of some kind of EM wave, or even a wave that physics has yet to detect. It is dependent on emotional closeness and history of being together. It is independent of distance. We all receive telepathic messages sometimes, but they are so well mixed with other thoughts that for the most part we don’t recognize it. Some people are more sensitive to telepathy than others, and some people read minds consistently, accurately, without confusion. I met someone this Spring who could do that. Plants are also able to sense the environment without sense organs or even nerve cells.

Premonitions of the future are described and documented in works by Daryl Bem and Julia Mossbridge. Of course, they are the subject of anecdotes and myths since ancient times.

There are people who have uncanny clairvoyant ability, rebranded as “remote viewing” by the US intelligence services during experiments at Stanford Research Institute. People reportedly can read with their fingers and some people are able to see details of what is around them without eyes.

I know of no one who predicts the future with the same reliability as some people read minds. This is a hint that the future remains open and that we have free will. Premonitions are about a “probable future”, however difficult that is to define. We can imagine that we were evolved to sense what is coming and step aside to avoid disaster. Parapsychology experiments in which the future is predicted and the prediction is used to avoid the predicted outcome are called “bilking”. It’s been practiced since the time of King Laius.

Micro-psychokinesis is the ability to apply our intention from a distance to bias quantum probabilities. This was meticulously documented by Jahn and Dunne in the 1980s and 90s. This is the only part of the paranormal for which I think I have a model. Maybe what quantum mechanics calls “random” is exactly the realm of the mind. It appears random when there are many minds watching and no mind focusing on a particular outcome, but it can be strongly biased if a large number of conscious beings pay attention to a particular outcome or if there is one person whose attention is tightly focused. I have speculated that the way the soul occupies the body is by learning to manipulate neurotransmitters via a process of biofeedback.

But macro-psychokinesis also exists, though it seems to be quite rare. Ted Owens claimed to be able to make things happen — or maybe he was just precognitive. Thousands of people witnessed St Joseph of Cupertino floating high above the ground on multiple occasions. Spoon bending seems to be real. In the 1990s, the Scole Experiment found things moving and appearing, reportedly by people who were not even alive at the time.

Of course, the most difficult thing is to describe a single, consistent paradigm in which physics works reliably with high precision most of the time, but then there are gross violations. We would like to know when we can count on predictions of the equations and when to expect exceptions. One clue is that all the violations involve life in one way or another. A starting point may be a philosophy of Idealism, in which reality is fundamentally mental, and the physical world exists within a global, shared consciousness. But this is only a starting point. What we would like to have is a predictive framework for what we call anomalies.