Category Archives: Science and Consciousness

Interconnectedness

May 31, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog

God bless Jerry Zaltman. In my May 17th blog post, I reported that Harvard’s pioneer neuroscientist who introduced the field of subconscious measurement by his creation of the patented ZMET system, is joining with me in a project to introduce methods in schools for thinking more constructively, objectively, clearly, and creatively. In laying the groundwork for this project, Jerry is finding that others are already moving in the same direction, which is inspiring.

Today I received notice from Jerry of a new paper in the Journal of Education for Business – Mental health among college students: Relationships with Actively Open-Minded Thinking, Spirituality, and Psychological Wellbeing – by educators at two US state universities, Arkansas and Idaho, which proves that:

“Mental health, like many other physical diseases, can contribute to a significant loss of output in our economy. Higher education institutes can play a significant role in enhancing the mental wellbeing of college students. In support of this endeavor, this research investigates how actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and spirituality (SP) relate to psychological wellbeing (PWB). Data revealed that both AOT and SP have a positive impact on most dimensions of PWB and in some instances, SP acts as a moderator. Our study highlights the importance of SP in the PWB of college students.”

One might wonder how spirituality being taught in public and state schools jibes with the separation of church and state. This paper however addresses spirituality at its core essence as a feeling and as a concept of interconnectedness. The spiritual feeling an individual has is that person’s sense of being connected with others, and possibly even with the universe itself. The Founders who insisted on freedom of religion would probably not deny the teaching of this concept and the feelings that surround it.

In the paper, the authors compare spirituality in this meaning to holistic thinking, starting from the big picture of how a specific subject is connected with other subjects, before drilling down to a micro level within that subject of interest. In this they consciously align with what they call the Eastern philosophical approach, contrasting it with the Western approach of starting from the micro level and studying a subject and possibly never getting to seeing the connections between that subject and all other subjects.

Back in the 70s, someone came up with the idea of adding one more level to Piaget’s model of the evolution of human cognitive processes, Systems Stage, which would appear above Formal Operational Stage in the model. This is where holistic thinking comes in, seeing everything as part of a single interconnected whole.

Prior to that the term “Systems Thinking” was coined by Professor Jay Forrester in 1956 when he founded the Systems Dynamic Group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

The idea that we are all interconnected was reintroduced in a new way in the modern era by one of Piaget’s influencers, Carl Gustav Jung, who published the idea of the Collective Unconscious in 1916.

Today in the Standard Interpretation of Quantum Physics it is recognized that particles become entangled by association with one another and after that they are able to share information instantaneously regardless of the distance they are apart.

This lays the groundwork for physics to one day include the entanglements of consciousness as part of its quantum entanglement theory. John Wheeler has already established a framework for including consciousness in the quantum physics model, called the Participatory Anthropic Principle (1983), which Stephen Hawking referenced and tacitly endorsed in his final book.

This Principle explains that consciousness, which observes, transforms non-determined probability waves into concrete realities by its act of observation. In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God”, I carry Einstein’s, Wheeler’s, and Hawkings’ ideas further by speculating that a single consciousness is all that exists, and that one of the ways it operates is to “look out from” a multitude of apparent selves (all of us including everything in the universe), and that Wheeler’s Quantum Foam is the substance of that Original Consciousness.

Science consists of theory and experimentation. Experimentation is the way that theories are proven, altered, or disproven. One wonders what sorts of experiments could be run in order to study the relationship of consciousness to quantum physics.

Another brilliant neuroscientist and perhaps the first of the neurophysicists, Dr. Richard Silberstein, is the first to carry out experimentation into the possible quantum entanglement of consciousness.

Science Explores Telepathy from a New Angle

Robert A. Heinlein wrote many great books, one of which is called Time for The Stars. The story is about achieving interstellar travel but needing a way to stay in touch with Earth, a method that is not limited to the speed of light, because when traveling light years away, messages would take years to go back and forth, which is not conducive to providing learning to the people at home.

In the story, the solution found is that some identical twins are able to telepathically communicate with each other, and that these messages happen instantaneously regardless of distance.

My great friend and highly respected neuroscientist, Dr. Richard Silberstein, never read that Heinlein novel. But he got the same idea. He read scientific papers which led him to have the idea. Having invented and patented an improved brain measurement system (steady state tomography, SST) he applied that method (commercially available through the company that Richard founded, Neuro-Insight) to conduct an experiment with monozygotic (MZ, coming from a single egg, “identical”) human twins.

The experiment was written up in the respected neuroscience journal Frontiers in Neuroscience paper published about a month ago. There is now strong statistical evidence that information was transmitted mind to mind in a significant number of cases within the design.

If and when science was to announce that telepathy is real, that too could have a potentially positive impact on the moods and emotions of the masses.

It would say —

We can be more than we think we can be.

Here’s a ten-minute video piece on Connectedness: Sanity Is an Acquired Taste: Connectedness

My best to all,

Live chat with my avatar now.

Science, Spirituality, and “Woo-Woo”

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Created April 5, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

“Woo-Woo” is defined as “unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.”

I’m grateful that there is not yet a derogatory term for “theories of universe grounded in science which are not in conflict with spirituality”.

As you may know, my books do not assert the existence of God, but point out that we could all be part of a single consciousness, a consciousness which could have the qualities we as a species have generally intuited for God – omnipresence, omnipotence, and benevolence.

My main emphasis in these books is that we should keep an open mind, and in our decisions and actions take into account the possibility that this is the truth—that we should be empirically scientific toward our own experiences, and objectively observe if the one-consciousness lens is useful in understanding what goes on in our lives.

Rather than filtering out our hunches and inspirations, our blatant experiences of telepathy and empathy (understanding, emotional telepathy), and our spiritual intuitions. EOP, Emergency Oversimplification Procedure, is the instantaneous dichotomistic bucketing of everything into good vs. bad based on accumulated imitative conditioning, without giving any fresh thought to any matter.

As a species we have been driven into the EOP condition by a combination of Acceleritis, accelerating information overload, plus the dominant unsupported assumption of Western science since circa 1800 that the material world is all that exists and that it came about by accident.

In that science thus constrained, the importance of consciousness has been generally belittled.

Stellar exceptions: William James, Jung, Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking — who in his last book held up Wheeler’s Participatory Anthropic Principle as part of Hawking’s own worldview. By the implications of their thinking, these renowned scientists all opened the door to the possibility of a universe which is a consciousness. None of them, however, took it that far.

Einstein, like Thales and Spinoza, had spiritual feelings aimed at the universe and at the intelligence which had created it. By bringing the observer into his thought experiments, Einstein snuck consciousness back into science’s picture of reality, thus discovering relativity.

These great thinkers were resuscitating animism, originally emerging as the first natural religion, essentially the feeling that the Creator is in everything. The native Americans shared these same spiritual feelings.

Animism never went on to become a formalized religion, that was pantheism, its next stage of evolution toward today’s dominant monism – which within Hinduism still contains a pantheistic pantheon as masks of the One, as established by the Upanishads.

Neither Spinoza nor Einstein saw any conflict between their animism and Judaism. This is key. What it says is that not only is it possible that we are part of a field of consciousness which invented matter-energy-spacetime, it also says that there is no distance between that and the beliefs and values of the world’s religions, that it is all internally consistent, integrity exists, science is its mental emanation, spirituality is its emotional emanation.

Will we then all become more positive about life and about each other? It would be natural, once we get out of the habit of implicitly putting down all spirituality because of some Woo-Woo extremists.

But Thales, Spinoza, Einstein, and many other people have experienced that moment, that rush, of spiritual realization, when one suddenly gets it— that there could be a scientific God.

We might not be limited to this world, this one lifetime.

One suddenly has a sense of cosmic resonance, of the importance of being.

We know that consciousness exists. We know that with much more certainty than we know that matter exists since we experience matter through our senses, which are part of our consciousness.

So it would be illogical to deny the possibility of a much larger consciousness.

Woo-Woo is another form of EOP. Oversimplification. It is not necessarily something that happens to people as a result of their own spiritual realizations, it might have been transmitted to them by friends and associates and/or by social media or books they’ve read.

Because Woo-Woo is essentially authoritarian and faith-based, it is a belief system and does not rely upon scientific support. It tends to be open-ended i.e. pretty much anything goes.

Back in the 70s when psychedelics first reached a mass audience, both spiritual realizations and Woo-Woo began to spread through the world culture. Two parallel and related processes.

Today there are about a thousand times more books published per year about Woo-Woo than in the 70s. They are almost all well-intended. A few are cryptopolitical propaganda. The field does much more good than harm, in my estimation.

Getting people to be less negative is a good thing. It would be better to do that with less exaggeration and fewer black-and-white generalizations. But game theory proves that optimism is more utilitarian than pessimism. Yes, Woo-Woo goes too far, but I wouldn’t waste time putting people down. Better to help Woo-Woo folks metacognize, recognize, and master their own egos, reopen their minds to all possibilities, and move up into the Observer and Flow states, and out of Woo-Woo followership.

Mixing Woo-Woo with politics is a sure sign that it is the most naïve, imitative form of Woo-Woo. Spirituality is above politics. If we are all one thing, factions are a mental illness.

Takeaway:

Don’t believe anything except your own experience, be observant and keep an open mind, test and learn, see if this one-consciousness lens is useful to you, realize Oneness as an ever-constant possibility.

My Best to all,

Quote images from Quotefancy.com

The Future Psychology

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Created September 30, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Why think about the future of psychology, aren’t the rush of current discoveries enough? We are close to proving ESP. What else do you want?

A common phrase in marketing nowadays is “early wins”. It means when you have a Big Idea, it’s good to have some immediate tangible benefits.

Physics has had a never-ending run of early wins going back as far as you can go. Rubbing two sticks together was an early win of physics, the discovery of how to cause fire. The unbroken string continues through television and atom bombs, space travel, the Internet, virtual reality, cyborgism and perhaps cyborgasm.

What has psychology done for us lately? People continue to benefit from psychotherapies of all kinds. Research continues on all fronts. Nothing quite so spectacular as physics in the pragmatic big picture.

Could there be?

Why should we postulate a possible breakthrough by which psychology can become as relevant to the average person as physics?

Because what could be more important to us than us, ourselves? Any tangible improvement in our abilities to function effectively has more value than our pastimes. (Like love and war, television and VR.)

What if that shift de-necessitated war – naturally, coming from insides of us, out. No longer needing that psychotic entertainment form.

It has to emerge naturally or it is just another feeble hope that everyone will play nice forever, despite having been killer apes since before the beginning. We have to de-evolve away from the bloodlust by natural causes, stuff like psychotherapy and yogic meditation is where the new wave will come from in psychology.

The new wave will center on the notion of helping the human race improve cognitive and all other functional capabilities of consciousness. Therefore its metrics will be guided by experimental performance trials and verified increases in individual effectiveness. Analytics will be set up to deconstruct effectiveness into separate components including such types of effectiveness as creativity, imagination, hunches, system1, system2, etc.

Should new wave psychologists focus more on the structure of the mind, or on its functions? In consciousness, structure is function. However, connecting the physical neurological manifestations which happen concurrently with experiential qualia, is one horizon at which to aim. Many are working in this field which has been ably led by Dr. Richard Davidson since he and Daniel Goleman and their famous friends including Ram Dass started the trail. Richy has identified the brain signatures of meditative states and made the connection to beneficial health effects.

“Interventions” is a term used to signify third party actions with a goal in mind. The new wave psychologists will ultimately wind up testing all sorts of interventions to determine the Efficacy Lift Score (ELS) for each one. The epigrams in my book Mind Magic will be in that long conveyor belt of interventions worth testing.

Although the general drift will be to assuage but not be dominated by one’s own ego, the ego always has a way of sneaking back in. In this case the ego will cause there to be hierarchical thinking related to levels of consciousness, where people will strive to give the appearance of having a higher level of consciousness than the others. That will be unfortunate but it will be managed with appropriate forethought.

The idea that some of us are in a more effective state of consciousness, and the experience that we ourselves have, of going up and down in level of effectiveness, leads to the notion that there are organically-defined states or levels of consciousness in a ladder, and that this will turn out to be a scientific fact.

In an earlier post, I theorized what this ladder might look like, based on the work of Abraham Maslow and of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, and my own experiences, shown here and more detail in that post:

Given the human tendency to oversimplify, objective research into levels of consciousness may be tarred as elitist. That too can be clarified. It’s desirable not only for the one person but for all of us, for the one person to be effective. Wanting to make everyone more effective is not an elitist thought.

You have the opportunity to get ahead of the crowd. Test alternative interventions to see if they increase your effectiveness by watching these short videos, here or here.

In next week’s edition: A Brief History of Levels of Consciousness Research.

Love to all,

Bill

Reopening Your Mind to All Possibilities

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Created October 22, 2021

We all have heroes and heroines. That’s a very good thing. But life is complicated, there can be harmful things that come out of good things, and vice versa. The harmful aspect I’m thinking about right at the moment is that we can become violently protective of every single thing our idol ever said.

The idolized person if they were still around would probably wish this inflexibility were not the case, especially if that unbudgeable position were being invoked in his or her name.

We must allow for the possibility that we can see further than the role model could see, because we sit upon their shoulders.

Imagine your role model might be proud of you for thinking for yourself, even it led to a degree of difference from something that person once said.

Each of us is always growing up, and things we said a long time ago might not be something we would bother to defend today.

Science is not a person, and individual scientists may have varying degrees of personal evolution, hence can have biases, but science as a whole has never claimed to have completed its quest and found the explanation for everything, including our existence in the first place. That basic existential question nowadays is labelled “The Hard Question” in physics. It includes the question of why there are laws of nature, because laws imply a lawmaker, order implies a mind of far greater powers than our own, the beautifully-ordered complexity of the universe having come about accidentally, having struck Einstein and many other scientists as hard to believe.

Yet to the average person there is the assumption that science has closed the books on that question, that any sort of great mind or spirit behind and responsible for nature cannot possibly be true.

Science has never declared that. It would be hard to call it science if it were to do that. Science is about objectively searching for truth by means of intuitive hypotheses based on observation and inductive logic, then conducting experiments to isolate variables one at a time so as to verify or eliminate hypotheses based on deductive logic. Without that process, a scientist taking a strong position on a subject is just another biased person stating his or her beliefs. The fact that in one sphere of life s/he is a scientist doesn’t make them an expert on every subject under the sun. The psychological halo effect, however, gives more weight to the words of a person to the degree that they have stood out in any way within their society. Nowadays that even includes the hate heroes polluting the media. Whether famous as a gang leader or a scientist, their words have much more impact than those of the average person.

The Hard Question to physicists is actually a fighting matter for most human beings. Many wars have been fought over such matters. Today some of the energy in the schism derives from people who are ardently loyal to one church, one way of answering The Hard Question. In the U.S. there is an overlap between people who are fighting mad, fiercely patriotic, and devoted to explicit orthodoxy within a specific religion. Even beginning to come close to what intends to be an open-minded consideration of The Hard Question may be offensive to some readers, so I hasten to say that I have no strong revisionist position about any religion, and that my personal hypothesis actually can coexist 100% with every major religion on Earth. (Readers who do not see how that could be possible are invited to get a free sample of my novel The First Son.)

The top physicists – Einstein and Wheeler for example – both allowed for the possibility of a lawmaker behind nature’s laws. Neither of them unfortunately studied consciousness as deeply as they studied physics and mathematics (and as deeply as Einstein studied philosophy). They both realized and used the power of intuition, and if they had been disposed to study psychology as deeply, they could have come to the same hypothesis as mine, that all that exists is a single consciousness, a single lawmaker, and each of us is that entity temporarily self-assigned to one role in the total performance. This view would have satisfied Einstein’s inability to accept and explain the existence of free will, and his rejection of the possibility of a God who could care about individual humans.

You may get a good feeling out of viewing this 2-minute video of a father and daughter having a conversation about the existential question:

Let the real magic of life back into your life. Without adopting any worldview, allow yourself to enjoy the lack of closure on the largest question, and to be awed by the significance of the question: our lives are a mystery. We are in the most important movie that could possibly ever exist. Get used to keeping your mind open until you see what would be considered legal evidence or scientific evidence – which will be rarely. Learn to enjoy (it is admittedly an acquired taste) not feeling 100% certain about anything, so long as you’re able to make decisions effectively, harking to your preferred hypotheses.

If you’d like a ten-minute video explanation of my hypothesis, it’s here.

For a set of wonderful Einstein quotes curated by one of my heroines Yana Lambert please click here.

We don’t need to get negative about any subject so long as we are internally flexible to consider lots of different points of view, while always choosing to do things the way we like, and allowing for the possibility that we are not as separate from each other as we presently look.

You want to be able to land on your feet if it turns out to be that we are all one thing together. It’s scientifically possible. Decisions made with that possibility in mind will work out better for you and everyone, and that is a pre-scientific pragmatic validation of sorts.