The Ragged-Trousered Philosopher
 

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History of Digital Telepathy

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Telepathy and Astrology

What follows started life as an email, which makes it more personal than most, but it does actually get pretty close to what I was trying to say. It represents my major foray into trying to answer the fourth question so I've left it virtually untouched...


My starting point was, as I explained years ago when we first raised the subject, the night I stopped wondering whether telepathy existed and asked, instead, the question, 'what would it mean if telepathy does exist?' What followed remains the most powerful 'road to damascus' experience of my life. A model sprang up before my eyes which showed just how telepathy provided the answer to so many questions and explained so many phenomena that it became blindingly clear that it was THE answer.

Let us begin with the propositions defining the telepathy we need to achieve the result. In a sense I know this is wasted on you. You take telepathy 'on faith' as it were. I don't. I suspect it exists and after our own recent experience, I am finding it more and more difficult to retain the option that it doesn't. But nevertheless, as an empiricist, I have to insist on certain standards of evidence which have yet to be met. In the meantime, I also feel compelled to offer a 'mechanism' by which it might be occurring. So please bear with me. My mechanism is explained thus: For a start, I postulate that it (telepathy) exists between all life forms which have anything which in any way functions as a nervous system. Essentially that means any life form which can react to stimuli. Which - obviously - entails ALL life. I hypothesise that the sharing of information is taking place at all levels. Including the transmission of (probably) weak electromagnetic radiation or 'something' arising from the electrical activity from the chemical and neurochemical reactions which are the mechanism for response to stimuli. For the time being, we'll assume that the 'medium' is electromagnetic radiation (emr) as we don't yet have another candidate.

Now, this radiation is 'received' by all other life forms in accordance with the normal rules for radiation - i.e. the inverse square law. (Einstein's biggest objection to telepathy was that it didn't seem to obey the inverse square law - we need an answer to that) So the nearer you are to the source the more emr or whatever you get. As the emr is 'modulated' by a) whatever caused it and b) the degree of stimulation which produces it, the emr can be seen to carry data (in other words, we can expect different stimuli to produce different telepathic retransmissions). And like any information processed by the senses, at the receiving end, the data is correlated to all the other simultaneous events.

Mundane example: When a door slams there are both visual and aural data. It is our experience that the noise always accompanies the vision which convinces us that the action of slamming the door makes a noise.

Similarly the telepathic data  are stored as 'memory'. As we are often not in the presence of the 'causes' of the telepathic transmission, our brains probably attempt to correlate the data to events happening in our vicinity, without much success. For which reason, in most cases, the data is 'filtered' out by the brain and not 'indexed' in the usual filing system. We are normally thus utterly unaware of having received any data and completely unable to retrieve it.

It is conceivable that now and again the intensity of the transmission is such that some of the symbolism breaks through the filtration process and you suddenly become aware of data you have no business perceiving. The 'jarring' effect of this is such that most individuals probably recoil in horror and refuse to acknowledge the experience.  The net result of all this is that very few individuals experience - or are prepared to admit they experience - a telepathic transmission. All of which is pure speculation but, if true, would explain the rarity of convincing accounts or lack of repeatability of the phenomenon.

But what is more important to my tentative hypothesis is that every sensory stimulation has two relevant effects. First it results in a local memory for the individual being stimulated - provided the individual is sufficiently advanced to store data as memory. And second - via the emr or whatever the actual mechanism is - the data is 'broadcast' and stored by the memories of all other life forms capable of storing data.

The first consequence of this is that we can explain the belief in life after death. Essentially if the primary recorder/signal generator/individual dies, well, ok, we've lost the hard disk. But we have millions of partial backups. Find a method of knitting them back together and the resulting data image would be a distorted but recognisable mirror image of the individual who had generated the original data. And there is no reason why you couldn't ask questions of this data collection and receive responses which will be a distorted but recognisable version of the answer you would have received from the original individual. You would be speaking to literally the mortal and mental remains of the individual. Note, however, that it would not BE the individual. It would be a collection of data only. The ego or whatever makes an individual 'animate' his own data set would be absent by virtue of having no single locus. This dataset could not 'think' as it resides in many entirely separate brains. It can only provide answers in much the same way as a database does. Nevertheless, its the nearest scenario we have to 'life after death' and I think its the first time anyone has offered a possible mechanism for the phenomenon which doesn't involve God or any religious imagery.

Lets see where it takes us next. So we have the dataset of each individual being stored from the moment of birth in two places, their own brain being first and foremost. The rest of Life on the planet being the other repository. A full though occasionally distorted copy of the original.

However, if, for some reason or other, a new born baby happens to be imprinted with a large number of data from one such dataset, then we have an explanation for reincarnation. There would probably be various circumstances in which such imprinting takes place. I can imagine the simplest as being a birth taking place soon after a death. At the funeral and for a few days before and after, the most concentrated 'recorders' of the dear departed, i.e. his friends, will be gathered together and focussed on memories of the deceased. A new born infant - particularly in a close family - might well pick up and store significant quantities of the data that used to identify the dead person. Later in his or her life the child might well, as a result, find that s/he has memories which simply don't belong in his/her own life.

Another possible mechanism might apply when the individual is killed prematurely and the 'Group Mind' still has work for him or her to do. An unconscious consensus emerges which focusses the relevant data again onto an appropriate new born. And finally, in some cases, the will to live might be so strong in some individuals that as they are dying they grope for and find a new home to take root in.

The apparent phenomenon of 'past lives' as revealed by regression under hypnosis is also explained by similar mechanisms. Whether or not the individual being regressed has lived the specific lives which appear to emerge is a moot point. But it doesn't stretch credulity quite so much to imagine tuning into those 'past lives' which are permanently stored within the 'Group Mind'.

Moving on - to deja vu. This occurs in two forms - 1) the feeling that you have 'Done' something before and 2) the feeling that you have 'been' somewhere before. For the time being, we'll stick with the latter. The simplest expanation for this feeling is that you have. Been there before that is. But perhaps not you personally. But your experience of entering the room (or whatever) creates a response which is, like all other thoughts, broadcast to the world in general. The broadcast is picked up by an individual who has a particularly strong memory associated with that room. This might be similar to the phenonemon you may have experienced in crowded noisy places. Often despite the noise and despite the fact that you can not focus on or apparently hear in detail, any single conversation, if someone calls your name at about the same pitch as the background noise, you will instantly recognise it. There are, in other words certain 'patterns' which our brains are very good at picking out of the background noise. 

Similarly the individual telepath 'hears' the identifying pattern connected with the room being 'yelled' out (by you as you enter the room) and his mind is instantly triggered into replaying the relevant 'room' memories. And by a similar 'tuning' mechanism the data contained in those memories finds its way back to you and you experience the vague but fascinating sensation - which seems often to be borne out by what you find - that you know what is around the next corner or whatever.

This 'tuning' mechanism is a partial explanation at least for why the inverse square law does not seem to apply.

And the extreme version of deja vu is probably what explains 'ghosts'. Here the memories triggered by the location are so intense that we may even 'feel' or see and incarnation of the original 'recorder'.

And finally lets turn to clairvoyance. This is the hardest to explain. We are trying to establish no less than how it may be possible to predict the future.

Lets imagine there is a single human being and he is the only organic lifeform on the planet Zob. (dead or alive).  He is naked and has no supplies of any kind. His future is highly predictable. He will shortly die as a result of starvation. About a week or 10 days should do it. That was easy. Now lets see what we can predict if there are two humans. Well the end result is still inevitable - they both die but one might live longer if it eats the other.

Imediately we have a mass of variables. Will they simply wait till one dies and then the other eat him/her? Or do they agree that its such a horrendous prospect thats its not worth staying alive for? Or does one have a stronger desire to live and thus takes the earliest opportunity to slay the other and thus ensure that s/he's the one to have the extra week of life. How can we know who will do what? Answer: we can't - unless we can read their thoughts. And if we can, then, the future, once again becomes highly predictable. We know exactly who is motivated by what and we know exactly what each player is planning to do and how the other will react.

Given that we also know how long these things take, then we can expand that awareness into a detailed forecast of the immediate future. In this case, with just two individuals in the equation, the forecast could be relatively accurate for a couple of weeks ahead. Introduce a third individual and immediately all the variables are cubed in volume and the respective period of accuracy is drastically reduced to say the next day or so. Add a billion or two more human beings and the period of accuracy is down to milliseconds. EXCEPT where we are focussing on key events.

For instance, a road traffic accident. The cause is an old lady stepping prematurely out onto a crossing as a speeding car rounds the corner too fast to avoid hitting her. If we know the mind of the driver and the mind of the old lady, clearly we can see that the two will 'come together' at least several seconds ahead of the incident. But this much insight you might also get just by watching it all from a few hundred feet up in a helicopter. You can see the old lady approaching the crossing and you can see the speeding car, indicating right, approaching the turning. You can't however, from that vantage, predict that the driver won't slow down through the corner - you have to be in his head to know that. And you can't predict that the old lady will not check for oncoming traffic before she starts to cross. Only if you are in her mind will you perceive that she is absent mindedly planning a tea party for her grand daughter and is simply not paying attention to what is going on around her. But if you are in both their minds, then, yes, now you are in a position to predict disaster.

Multiply that effect by a few million - bearing in mind that even when the entire life system is the data source the accuracy of forecasting drops off alarmingly with distance. It still leaves it as entirely credible that if you could interrogate this 'database' it would be a fairly effective predictor of the future. Certainly capable, for instance, of predicting the Oklahoma bomb some months ahead of its occurrence. And ultimately, of course, of tracking down the source of these thoughts. Timothy McVeigh, like it or not, is also part of the 'Group Mind'.

This might be how clairvoyance works. It is an ability to tune in to the Group Mind's awareness of what is going on and thus be presciently aware of what is about to happen.

A similar mechanism may explain the other half of the deja vu experiences - the 'have done this before' type. Essentially what you may be picking up is an echo of the plan or consensus that is already formulated in the Group Mind, often largely as a result of the information you yourself have fed it. This is replayed to you in the form of the disorienting realisation that you already 'remember' what you're about to do.

And now consider what the Group Mind would be capable of when it acts as a single entity - all responses geared to the same stimuli and all collectively calculating the result. Such occasions will be rare indeed and would require something cataclysmic - like the threat of an asteroid hitting the earth - to produce that moment of unity - to get us all thinking the same thoughts. But once we get it, we may not only have the capability to predict disaster arising from the data collectively but even, in limited circumstances, to avert the disaster.

The asteroid one would be a bit of a bitch though, I have to concede. In order to avert it we would have to apply our tiny pressure some months or even years ahead of the actual event - because the influence we can exert is so limited that it must be applied at the source of the disturbance - where it still has a chance of influencing events (like identifying and killing the butterfly that would otherwise start the hurricane) But humans for example generate about 10 watts of electricity in their brains. If it is somehow possible to mentally focus that stored energy on a 'consensus' target, then we have the potential to exert a reasonable force albeit for a short time. Possibly even enough to divert the asteroid provided it was exerted about 500 million miles out and not when its about to hit us!

Hmm... pulling it all together, what have we got? We have a database that contains all our memories. This constitutes the data image of the entire life system of the planet. It provides an explanation for life after death, reincarnation, past lives, deja vu, ghosts and clairvoyance. We have the ability to foresee the future and to shape the present, albeit weakly. What we have here is no less than God in diapers!

Take this image forward a few hundred billion years and imagine that Life throughout the Universe is more or less united. The resulting God will have the power, if it so chooses, at the end of the Universe, to command 'Let there be light' and start the whole thing over again. Perhaps it already has. And our dim memories of that event are what feeds the equally dim and irrational belief in the supernatural Gods of religion and superstition. We are merely remembering what we once were and what we will once again become.

Note, Michelle, how analogous this all is to your 'snapshot of the cosmic stream' image. What you say about that  (which I agree with) is that knowing the starting conditions doesn't help you make meaningful predictions about final outcome. Thats what makes weather forecasting so difficult and sometimes unreliable.

Despite the fact that you know where and when you drop your twigs into the stream they can not only end up miles apart within the stream/river/ocean but they can at any point be caught in a backwater, be swept up onto the banks or shore, etc etc. So about the only thing you can say with confidence about the course to be taken by the twigs, is that they will not travel 'upstream' - which I'm increasingly convinced, means merely that they/we cannot go back in time. The 'direction' of the 'cosmic stream' is mainly the direction of the entropic arrow of time. BUT...

In the same way we might be able to avert an asteroid collision just by giving it a hefty thump with a baseball bat when its 500 million miles away, we almost certainly influence individual futures in major ways with very minor actions or environmental factors at very early stages in their development. I am talking here about events as trivial as, for example, the food a woman eats the day before she conceives. This will affect, by altering the alkilinity of the womb, the selection of sperm that actually makes it to the egg. That alone has immediately effected half the individual's genetic makeup. Sex, hair colour, potential intelligence, body type and predisposition (or not) to various genetic disorders are all decided by the initial fusing of sperm and ovum. So that Chilli you ate the day before has essentially determined some of the most important features of your new baby's life!

Note, however, that such micromanipulations are NOT random, nor are their effects entirely unpredictable. The problem for anyone wanting to make serious predictions, however, is that in each day of our lives, we perform probably hundreds of such actions which, years down the line, could be seen - with the benefit of perfect hindsight - to have major 'final outcomes'. Did smacking the child produce the mass murderer, for instance?

And we can not conceive of a method of tracking all these micromanipulations or, having tracked them, of calculating their longer term effects - taking into account all the other micromanipulations they are 'competing' with. Or, rather, up to now, we could not conceive of such a method. Telepathy provides both the source of the data (ALL actions, great and small, are recorded) and the method of analysing it. Because the 'Group Mind' can simultaneously witness all the micromanipulations AND has the data it needs to know what effects they will have on the various individuals, it, and it alone, is in a position to calculate the global consequences of all this interaction, and thence to focus on the effects that it will all have on a given individual or group.

Now if something like astrology has any validity it may be due to both the micromanipulative effects of the planetary positions being observed - which will be even lower level than the effects of our own actions (but which could in a similar 'distant enhancement' fashion, affect key micromanipulative actions themselves) AND the even lower level micromanipulations of which the planetary orbits and positions are themselves the 'final outcome'. As we are mere specks of organic pollutant on these planets, then clearly anything which has already affected bodies as large and massive as them must be affecting us, even if the effect is so miniscule as to be unmeasurable by currently available means. It is the latter effect which, as I understand it, you and Elwell both believe to be the 'mechanism' behind astrology. And clearly if you are right, then it is crystal clear that detailed predictions of something as insignificant as the lives of an individual are always going to be well outside the 'resolution' of that method of gazing into the future.

The astrological 'database' amounts to an attempt to correlate clearly defined events here at ground level with planetary alignments either leading up to or coinciding with those events. In that sense it is pure empirical observation. The hope is that, like any other empirical data, we can eventually gather sufficient reliable data to be able to say that, for example, since on 873 of the last 1000 occasions that planets X and Y were in this particular configuration, Z happened, then the next time that configuration is due, there is an 87.3% probability that Z will happen again.

This, in my view, is where Elwell took his most unjustified risk. Yes, the Titanic did sink, and yes the Herald of Free Enterprise went down. There may be a dozen other useful examples, but no empiricist worth his salt would have dared make such a detailed prediction of the outcome of a further similar event on the basis of such statistically insignificant data.

(For the benefit of new readers - in 1995, in an attempt to score a major publicity success for astrology, renowned British astrologer Dennis Elwell publicly predicted  a shipping disaster for mid April in 1996. Instead we had the Tokyo subway nerve gas attacks and the Oklahoma bombings - which fit the astrological patterns just as neatly but he hadn't predicted. In corresponding about the case with me, Michelle pointed out that such things as explosions were just as valid an astrological outcome and thus she 'accidentally' predicted the bombing about 3 days ahead of detonation. )

Take our playing card experiment. I guessed one card correctly in the week out of 4 attempts. I had a 2% chance on each occasion. Given 4 guesses there was roughly an 8% chance that by the end of the week I would get one exactly right. There was an 8.5% chance for each guess that I would get the value of the card right. There is a 25% chance that on any given day I would get the suit right and a 50% chance every day that I will get the colour right. Now things only start looking significant if I can perform ahead of probability. By the end of the week, for example, I should have got the colour right twice (achieved 3), the suit right at least once (also 3) and I should only get a value right about once in 12 days. Getting the precise card should only happen once in 52 guesses. So, no doubt about it, our results were significant, but could you possibly step from there to predicting that I would guess another one right in the following week? Of course not. And only if I had that level of success for at least a few months could you begin to justify such predictions.

In a nutshell, there haven't been enough 'Titanics' in all of human history to justify a prediction like Elwells. But I would not be at all surprised to learn that there have been enough other disasters under those planetary configurations to justify the more general warning.

Elwell - and perhaps astrologers in general - doesn't appear to have taken those statistical requirements sufficiently seriously. Your approach, on the other hand is intuitively much more 'scientific'. You accept the lack of sufficient data and the implication thereof - that given we don't know enough about all the things this has caused in the past we can't possibly predict in detail what it may cause in the future. What I am suggesting is that telepathy may be the key to real precision.

If my model is anything like the truth, the telepathic data is infinitely more complete than the collected works of human astrologers. The Group Mind knows exactly what events (great and small), tendencies, revolutions, inventions, disasters, triumphs, etc etc have correlated to which planetary (or general cosmic) configurations. It has the statistical data required to make meaningful assessments of probability. In addition to which, as outlined above, it also has the intimate knowledge of the actions, reactions and motivations of all living things which can be influenced by the forthcoming configuration. So, again, it is in the prime position to make fairly detailed forecasts even, in some cases, quite long range. (Years, even centuries, rather than mere days) Now if an individual could tune in to the Group Mind, knew how to interpret what s/he saw there and knew how to put questions to it, then that individual would be capable of predicting significant events in the future and advising the rest of us how to either avoid the worst consequences of such events or maximising them to their advantage. In less 'advanced' cultures than our own, individuals demonstrating abilities like these have been called 'prophets'. With lesser abilities or merely skilful acting abilities, they have become priests.

I can even see how the Group Mind, being aware of the effects of cosmic influence might well have provoked the discovery of the outer planets. Elwell points out that key events in the nature of those planets were historically occurring at the time these planets were discovered. I can see it working the other way around. That the Group Mind could perceive an overall 'attractor' with nothing to link to, so it figured out that there must be a further planet and its rough location and then 'delegated' the task to an individual - who finds himself 'inspired' to look in a particular place at a particular time, and there, sure enough, is the planet we need to explain these new phenomena.

And you can see why awareness of such a 'pool of wisdom' could, again, encourage the dim perception of an intelligence so much greater than ours that it must be that of a superbeing - a God. In fact, however, for this model to work, it does not require great intelligence on behalf of the Group Mind at all - its efficiency arises purely from its access to all relevant data. In this respect it need be no more 'intelligent' than a computer. The intelligence arises from our ability to understand and manipulate the data which it presents to us. Which makes us the God - not it! 

 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed by Harry Stottle (1996-2005) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

 
 
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