The Merger of Mind and Machine

telepathically — no brain implants, please!

[This article is not about Neuralink, or anything like it. Neuralink requires wiring to the brain, and then learning to use nerves to send electrical signals to the implanted wires. This article is about what we might do via telekinesis, the power of pure thought without wires.]

Start with what we know, or should know, or would know if the science establishment had not suppressed 30 years of data from the basement of the Princeton Engineering Department, corroborated by several other labs around the world, to wit:

Human intention, without any intermediary that we would recognize as “physical”, is
able to influence probabilities that standard quantum theory regards as purely random.

{rant} This is obviously a Nobel-worthy result, but Robert Jahn instead found that he was ostracized, and all of the work of his principal laboratory (rocket propulsion) became suspect as well because, so his colleagues said, Jahn should not be doing these experiments or asking this questions. {/rant}

As documented by Jahn and collaborator Brenda Dunne at the PEAR lab, this effect is small, amounting to flipping a few bits in 10,000. But once the possibility of this effect is established, it is fair to look for circumstances in which the same effect might be larger.

My hypothesis is the reason the effect is small is that undergraduates who wander into the basement lab and stare at a screen for a few minutes have little stake in the result. I would like to see an experimental protocol in which the consequences are life-changing — would the results then be obvious and dramatic?

For example, the ideal lab experiment would be taken from Frank Stockton's short story. Our experiment takes place in an open-air colosseum. Subjects are presented with two doors. A quantum random event generator (REG) determines which door leads to a beautiful young maiden, whom the subject will marry, and which one leads to a hungry tiger. I have proposed this excellent experimental protocol on numerous occasions, but thus far I have been unable to get approval from a captious ethics review board.

So here’s the next best thing: Put a plant next to a REG that controls its grow-light. If the plant can hack into the REG, then it gets enough light to thrive; if not, it will wither in the dark.

Brenda Dunne is no longer with us, but several years ago, I had the opportunity to ask her about the feasibility of the experiment with REGs and plants. She told me that she had done this experiment decades ago at the PEAR lab, and that it had been successful, but that with a small staff and so many experiments, this one had never been written up for publication.

Could this be how life “works”?

From here, it is a teeny-weeny leap of the imagination to speculate that this story is the seed of a solution to the venerable mind-body problem. How does a soul take up residence in a body? Imagine all the synapses of the brain poised on a quantum knife-edge. (There is some evidence that this is really the case.) In a newborn person or animal, conscious-awareness learns through biofeedback trial-and-error to manipulate the nerve signals, and thus to control eyes and ears, motor neurons and then thoughts and attention.

The process may be easiest to imagine in a brain, but it is not limited to nerves, or even to animals. Attention supplied by embodied Awareness is what keeps the metabolism ticking and the digestive juices flowing. As long as that attention is watching and taking charge of biasing the quantum probabilities appropriately, an organism can live; when the Spirit stops paying attention to the body, the system stops working and the organism dies. I imagine this may be true of plants as well as animals, and even to microbes.

Could we make a machine to respond similarly to the way our bodies respond?

If plants can learn to operate a quantum on-off switch with their plant-minds, perhaps humans can learn to operate a far more intricate control system for an airship or a programmable lathe or a 3D printer.

Presumably, the control system of the machine would have to depend in some complex way on random numbers from a quantum system. Cheap, available REGs use noise levels in Zener diode.

But how would they be organized? Designing a machine, we might be tempted to put each REG in charge of one function; but looking at living systems, we suspect that there is an advantage to a multiplexed system, where each REG plays a role in controlling many functions, and each function is controlled by many REGs. This is a principle which helps biological systems to be far more robust than mechanical systems — in other words, when any one component fails, the system goes on as before, never missing a beat.

In one of the creative experiments by Jahn and Dunne, cute robots were programmed to perform random walks on a platform, with the random turns determined by REGs. Children were invited to call the robots over to their side of the platform. The children loved it, and statistically, the robots spent more time on that side of the platform when there were children calling them.

A system as complicated as a jetliner or a nuclear power plant can be flown by a pilot using multiple computer interfaces. Why would we want to go back to the drawing board and design a completely different system, based on direct interaction with consciousness?

It might seem a distant dream to learn to control a complex machine as intuitively and naturally as a gymnast or a pianist or a basketball player controls her body. People with such highly-developed skills can take control at a high level such as “Bach Partita #6” or “back handspring”, and the unconscious takes over to execute the details.

We have hints from stories of recovered UFOs that they have no control panels. Some researchers have concluded that they are operated telepathically. [The Day After Roswell, Jake Barber interview]

Jason Jorjani is the only author I know who is writing about humanity’s current nexus with full awareness of the many facets of our polycrisis (which many have explored separately)

• the Deep State behind international politics and staged events like 9/11 and COVID

• the hidden technologies, some perhaps of extraterrestrial origin

• the reality of paranormal powers of the mind, in anecdotes and in lab research

• the mythical history of our species, and the real history to which it might correspond

Trained as a philosopher, Jorjani draws fluently on traditions of Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In Closer Encounters, Jorjani foresees a convergence of parapsychology with computer technology to give reliability and predictability to the powers of the mind that we experience only rarely and episodically.

Bingo! This is the technology of the future — half spirit, half machine. Men shall be gods.

Bulk quantum states

When we think of a quantum state, what come to mind are tiny things — the orbital of an electron or a click of a Geiger counter or a photon that makes a flash on an LED screen. But this is only because single particles are the only domain in which quantum equations can be solved. The reality of quantum theory is that it applies naturally to large systems of many interacting particles, in particular to macroscopic objects. Harking back to what I wrote above, it is perfectly reasonable that a cat might observe (continuously), “I am alive”.

This raises the possibility that the mind-guided spacecraft may not be controlled by a network of REG devices as described above. It could be very different, in ways that I invite you to imagine (because they are beyond my own imagination at present). The only requirement is that the apparatus cannot be mechanistically determined, as are all human-designed machines to date. All machines ever invented are designed to operate reliably, which means they are “safe” from being influenced by any abstract wish or human intention.

I have read enough accounts from people who have experienced spoons bending in their own hands that I take seriously the possibility that people can sometimes do this, that groups might be more effective than individuals, and that Uri Geller might be able to bend spoons at a distance, reliably and on demand. The electrons that hold together a piece of metal are in a single quantum state, and might be considered one observable. Softening the metal by thinking about it is as simple as changing this one quantum state. Easy-peasy.

I have no personal experience with this, have never done it myself, and have never seen someone else bending a spoon in person. But

Megalithic structures of antiquity — Pyramids, Baalbek, Machu Picchu, and others — are a deep mystery. We could not build the Giza pyramids with today’s technology, at any cost. (We could certainly build something that looks like them, made out of poured concrete, for example.) The largest stone at Baalbek is 10 times heavier than the capacity of today’s largest crane. How was it quarried and transported? Brien Foerster makes a case that the Baalbek stone was put in place before the end of the last ice age, 12,700 years ago.

Certainly there was a technological civilization at that time. Almost certainly, their technology was very different from ours. There are no microplastics from 12,700 years ago, no nuclear waste, no sign that the world’s store of fossil fuels were tapped before the 19th century AD. So what did they use for energy? The possibility that their technology was some harnessing of the physical to the mental is intriguing.

We have some indication that human intention has disproportionately more power when many humans are intending the same thing [ref, ref]. We have all seen (ridiculous) drawings of teams of Egyptian slaves pulling stone blocks over log rollers.

It would be satisfying to know that the teams of people were harnessing their minds rather than their muscles.

Trans-transhumanism

The Transhumanist agenda is also about melding biology and machine, but there is no parapsychological component. Transhumanists think that the brain is a computer that can do some things well and other things inefficiently; so why not hook the meat computer, with its special skills, to a silicon computer with different skills?

There are no paranormal abilities in this model, and no quantum mechanics (beyond what is needed to design a silicon chip).

Beyond transhumanism is this vision of humans empowered to create realities with their thoughts. With practice and, perhaps, meditation, we develop the power of concentrated attention and we build whole civilizations from pure thought.

Will we create Atlantis? Or will we create a Forbidden Planet?