Exploring Mysticism and Parapsychology. This blog is also an attempt to promote awareness of a Modern Universal Paradigm known as Multi-Dimensional Science. It offers a "Scientific" testable Hypothesis for a more "objective" understanding of claimed Psychic and Spiritual Phenomena. A link to this subject should be found on this page or alternatively it can be found easily via a word search.Please note that the Internet articles here may not always reflect the views of the Blogger.
One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out – or, to use the kind of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.
The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser, I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.” He grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. “He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up.”
The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out. There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?
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What jolted Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. “At the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping,” Hameroff said. “And everyone was like: ‘Oh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!’” Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. But Chalmers’s particular manner of reviving it “reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that we’re dealing with here?”
Two decades later, we know an astonishing amount about the brain: you can’t follow the news for a week without encountering at least one more tale about scientists discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or laziness, or love at first sight, or regret – and that’s only the research that makes the headlines. Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence – which focuses on recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to be one – has advanced stupendously. But like an obnoxious relative who invites himself to stay for a week and then won’t leave, the Hard Problem remains. When I stubbed my toe on the leg of the dining table this morning, as any student of the brain could tell you, nerve fibres called “C-fibres” shot a message to my spinal cord, sending neurotransmitters to the part of my brain called the thalamus, which activated (among other things) my limbic system. Fine. But how come all that was accompanied by an agonising flash of pain? And what is pain, anyway?
Questions like these, which straddle the border between science and philosophy, make some experts openly angry. They have caused others to argue that conscious sensations, such as pain, don’t really exist, no matter what I felt as I hopped in anguish around the kitchen; or, alternatively, that plants and trees must also be conscious. The Hard Problem has prompted arguments in serious journals about what is going on in the mind of a zombie, or – to quote the title of a famous 1974 paper by the philosopher Thomas Nagel – the question “What is it like to be a bat?” Some argue that the problem marks the boundary not just of what we currently know, but of what science could ever explain. On the other hand, in recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that it may finally be about to be solved – but only if we are willing to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might soon become conscious, too.
Next week, the conundrum will move further into public awareness with the opening of Tom Stoppard’s new play, The Hard Problem, at the National Theatre – the first play Stoppard has written for the National since 2006, and the last that the theatre’s head, Nicholas Hytner, will direct before leaving his post in March. The 77-year-old playwright has revealed little about the play’s contents, except that it concerns the question of “what consciousness is and why it exists”, considered from the perspective of a young researcher played by Olivia Vinall. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Stoppard also clarified a potential misinterpretation of the title. “It’s not about erectile dysfunction,” he said.
Stoppard’s work has long focused on grand, existential themes, so the subject is fitting: when conversation turns to the Hard Problem, even the most stubborn rationalists lapse quickly into musings on the meaning of life. Christof Koch, the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a key player in the Obama administration’s multibillion-dollar initiative to map the human brain, is about as credible as neuroscientists get. But, he told me in December: “I think the earliest desire that drove me to study consciousness was that I wanted, secretly, to show myself that it couldn’t be explained scientifically. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I wanted to find a place where I could say: OK, here, God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people.” Koch assured me that he had long ago abandoned such improbable notions. Then, not much later, and in all seriousness, he said that on the basis of his recent research he thought it wasn’t impossible that his iPhone might have feelings.
* * *
By the time Chalmers delivered his speech in Tucson, science had been vigorously attempting to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time. The source of the animosity dates back to the 1600s, when René Descartes identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. On the one hand, Descartes realised, nothing is more obvious and undeniable than the fact that you’re conscious. In theory, everything else you think you know about the world could be an elaborate illusion cooked up to deceive you – at this point, present-day writers invariably invoke The Matrix – but your consciousness itself can’t be illusory. On the other hand, this most certain and familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. It doesn’t seem to be physical. It can’t be observed, except from within, by the conscious person. It can’t even really be described. The mind, Descartes concluded, must be made of some special, immaterial stuff that didn’t abide by the laws of nature; it had been bequeathed to us by God.
This religious and rather hand-wavy position, known as Cartesian dualism, remained the governing assumption into the 18th century and the early days of modern brain study. But it was always bound to grow unacceptable to an increasingly secular scientific establishment that took physicalism – the position that only physical things exist – as its most basic principle. And yet, even as neuroscience gathered pace in the 20th century, no convincing alternative explanation was forthcoming. So little by little, the topic became taboo. Few people doubted that the brain and mind were very closely linked: if you question this, try stabbing your brain repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and see what happens to your consciousness. But how they were linked – or if they were somehow exactly the same thing – seemed a mystery best left to philosophers in their armchairs. As late as 1989, writing in the International Dictionary of Psychology, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland could irascibly declare of consciousness that “it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”
It was only in 1990 that Francis Crick, the joint discoverer of the double helix, used his position of eminence to break ranks. Neuroscience was far enough along by now, he declared in a slightly tetchy paper co-written with Christof Koch, that consciousness could no longer be ignored. “It is remarkable,” they began, “that most of the work in both cognitive science and the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousness” – partly, they suspected, “because most workers in these areas cannot see any useful way of approaching the problem”. They presented their own “sketch of a theory”, arguing that certain neurons, firing at certain frequencies, might somehow be the cause of our inner awareness – though it was not clear how.
Illustration by Peter Gamelen“People thought I was crazy to be getting involved,” Koch recalled. “A senior colleague took me out to lunch and said, yes, he had the utmost respect for Francis, but Francis was a Nobel laureate and a half-god and he could do whatever he wanted, whereas I didn’t have tenure yet, so I should be incredibly careful. Stick to more mainstream science! These fringey things – why not leave them until retirement, when you’re coming close to death, and you can worry about the soul and stuff like that?”
It was around this time that David Chalmers started talking about zombies.
* * *
As a child, Chalmers was short-sighted in one eye, and he vividly recalls the day he was first fitted with glasses to rectify the problem. “Suddenly I had proper binocular vision,” he said. “And the world just popped out. It was three-dimensional to me in a way it hadn’t been.” He thought about that moment frequently as he grew older. Of course, you could tell a simple mechanical story about what was going on in the lens of his glasses, his eyeball, his retina, and his brain. “But how does that explain the way the world just pops out like that?” To a physicalist, the glasses-eyeball-retina story is the only story. But to a thinker of Chalmers’s persuasion, it was clear that it wasn’t enough: it told you what the machinery of the eye was doing, but it didn’t begin to explain that sudden, breathtaking experience of depth and clarity. Chalmers’s “zombie” thought experiment is his attempt to show why the mechanical account is not enough – why the mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.
“Look, I’m not a zombie, and I pray that you’re not a zombie,” Chalmers said, one Sunday before Christmas, “but the point is that evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!” We were drinking espressos in his faculty apartment at New York University, where he recently took up a full-time post at what is widely considered the leading philosophy department in the Anglophone world; boxes of his belongings, shipped over from Australia, lay unpacked around his living-room. Chalmers, now 48, recently cut his hair in a concession to academic respectability, and he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever. The zombie scenario goes as follows: imagine that you have a doppelgänger. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The sole difference is that the doppelgänger has no consciousness; this – as opposed to a groaning, blood-spattered walking corpse from a movie – is what philosophers mean by a “zombie”.
Such non-conscious humanoids don’t exist, of course. (Or perhaps it would be better to say that I know I’m not one, anyhow; I could never know for certain that you aren’t.) But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could. Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside. As Chalmers explained: “I’m talking to you now, and I can see how you’re behaving; I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly what’s going on in your brain – yet it seems it could be consistent with all that evidence that you have no consciousness at all.” If you were approached by me and my doppelgänger, not knowing which was which, not even the most powerful brain scanner in existence could tell us apart. And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra – an additional ingredient in nature.
It would be understating things a bit to say that this argument wasn’t universally well-received when Chalmers began to advance it, most prominently in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. The withering tone of the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci sums up the thousands of words that have been written attacking the zombie notion: “Let’s relegate zombies to B-movies and try to be a little more serious about our philosophy, shall we?” Yes, it may be true that most of us, in our daily lives, think of consciousness as something over and above our physical being – as if your mind were “a chauffeur inside your own body”, to quote the spiritual author Alan Watts. But to accept this as a scientific principle would mean rewriting the laws of physics. Everything we know about the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things: atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining. Above all, critics point out, if this non-physical mental stuff did exist, how could it cause physical things to happen – as when the feeling of pain causes me to jerk my fingers away from the saucepan’s edge?
Nonetheless, just occasionally, science has dropped tantalising hints that this spooky extra ingredient might be real. In the 1970s, at what was then the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, the neurologist Lawrence Weiskrantz encountered a patient, known as “DB”, with a blind spot in his left visual field, caused by brain damage. Weiskrantz showed him patterns of striped lines, positioned so that they fell on his area of blindness, then asked him to say whether the stripes were vertical or horizontal. Naturally, DB protested that he could see no stripes at all. But Weiskrantz insisted that he guess the answers anyway – and DB got them right almost 90% of the time. Apparently, his brain was perceiving the stripes without his mind being conscious of them. One interpretation is that DB was a semi-zombie, with a brain like any other brain, but partially lacking the magical add-on of consciousness.
Chalmers knows how wildly improbable his ideas can seem, and takes this in his stride: at philosophy conferences, he is fond of clambering on stage to sing The Zombie Blues, a lament about the miseries of having no consciousness. (“I act like you act / I do what you do / But I don’t know / What it’s like to be you.”) “The conceit is: wouldn’t it be a drag to be a zombie? Consciousness is what makes life worth living, and I don’t even have that: I’ve got the zombie blues.” The song has improved since its debut more than a decade ago, when he used to try to hold a tune. “Now I’ve realised it sounds better if you just shout,” he said.
* * *
Illustration by Peter GamelenThe consciousness debates have provoked more mudslinging and fury than most in modern philosophy, perhaps because of how baffling the problem is: opposing combatants tend not merely to disagree, but to find each other’s positions manifestly preposterous. An admittedly extreme example concerns the Canadian-born philosopher Ted Honderich, whose book On Consciousness was described, in an article by his fellow philosopher Colin McGinn in 2007, as “banal and pointless”, “excruciating”, “absurd”, running “the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad”. McGinn added, in a footnote: “The review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it. The editors asked me to ‘soften the tone’ of the original [and] I have done so.” (The attack may have been partly motivated by a passage in Honderich’s autobiography, in which he mentions “my small colleague Colin McGinn”; at the time, Honderich told this newspaper he’d enraged McGinn by referring to a girlfriend of his as “not as plain as the old one”.)
McGinn, to be fair, has made a career from such hatchet jobs. But strong feelings only slightly more politely expressed are commonplace. Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with – making the whole debate kickstarted by Chalmers an exercise in pointlessness. Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesn’t actually give rise to something called consciousness. Common sense may tell us there’s a subjective world of inner experience – but then common sense told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat. Consciousness, according to Dennett’s theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named “fictoplasm”; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying. To Dennett’s opponents, he is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain: their inner experience of sights, smells, emotions and the rest. (Chalmers has speculated, largely in jest, that Dennett himself might be a zombie.) It’s like asserting that cancer doesn’t exist, then claiming you’ve cured cancer; more than one critic of Dennett’s most famous book, Consciousness Explained, has joked that its title ought to be Consciousness Explained Away. Dennett’s reply is characteristically breezy: explaining things away, he insists, is exactly what scientists do. When physicists first concluded that the only difference between gold and silver was the number of subatomic particles in their atoms, he writes, people could have felt cheated, complaining that their special “goldness” and “silveriness” had been explained away. But everybody now accepts that goldness and silveriness are really just differences in atoms. However hard it feels to accept, we should concede that consciousness is just the physical brain, doing what brains do.
“The history of science is full of cases where people thought a phenomenon was utterly unique, that there couldn’t be any possible mechanism for it, that we might never solve it, that there was nothing in the universe like it,” said Patricia Churchland of the University of California, a self-described “neurophilosopher” and one of Chalmers’s most forthright critics. Churchland’s opinion of the Hard Problem, which she expresses in caustic vocal italics, is that it is nonsense, kept alive by philosophers who fear that science might be about to eliminate one of the puzzles that has kept them gainfully employed for years. Look at the precedents: in the 17th century, scholars were convinced that light couldn’t possibly be physical – that it had to be something occult, beyond the usual laws of nature. Or take life itself: early scientists were convinced that there had to be some magical spirit – the élan vital – that distinguished living beings from mere machines. But there wasn’t, of course. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label we give to certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually, neuroscience will show that consciousness is just brain states. Churchland said: “The history of science really gives you perspective on how easy it is to talk ourselves into this sort of thinking – that if my big, wonderful brain can’t envisage the solution, then it must be a really, really hard problem!”
Solutions have regularly been floated: the literature is awash in references to “global workspace theory”, “ego tunnels”, “microtubules”, and speculation that quantum theory may provide a way forward. But the intractability of the arguments has caused some thinkers, such as Colin McGinn, to raise an intriguing if ultimately defeatist possibility: what if we’re just constitutionally incapable of ever solving the Hard Problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become known as “mysterianism” – after the 1960s Michigan rock’n’roll band ? and the Mysterians, who themselves borrowed the name from a work of Japanese sci-fi – but the essence of it is that there’s actually no mystery to why consciousness hasn’t been explained: it’s that humans aren’t up to the job. If we struggle to understand what it could possibly mean for the mind to be physical, maybe that’s because we are, to quote the American philosopher Josh Weisberg, in the position of “squirrels trying to understand quantum mechanics”. In other words: “It’s just not going to happen.”
* * *
Or maybe it is: in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, Chalmers and Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age. This is “panpsychism”, the dizzying notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds ridiculous: when he mentions panpsychism, he has written, “I often encounter blank stares of incomprehension.” But when it comes to grappling with the Hard Problem, crazy-sounding theories are an occupational hazard. Besides, panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too – well, where does it stop?
Illustration by Peter GamelenGrowing up as the child of German-born Catholics, Koch had a dachshund named Purzel. According to the church, because he was a dog, that meant he didn’t have a soul. But he whined when anxious and yelped when injured – “he certainly gave every appearance of having a rich inner life”. These days we don’t much speak of souls, but it is widely assumed that many non-human brains are conscious – that a dog really does feel pain when he is hurt. The problem is that there seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or sparrows or mice or insects, or, for that matter, trees or rocks. Since we don’t know how the brains of mammals create consciousness, we have no grounds for assuming it’s only the brains of mammals that do so – or even that consciousness requires a brain at all. Which is how Koch and Chalmers have both found themselves arguing, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, that an ordinary household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind you might find in your smoke detector, might in principle be conscious.
The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.
Koch’s specific twist on this idea, developed with the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, is narrower and more precise than traditional panpsychism. It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organised. The human brain certainly fits the bill; so do the brains of cats and dogs, though their consciousness probably doesn’t resemble ours. But in principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. (The ethical implications are unsettling: might we owe the same care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals? Koch, for his part, tries to avoid stepping on insects as he walks.)
Unlike the vast majority of musings on the Hard Problem, moreover, Tononi and Koch’s “integrated information theory” has actually been tested. A team of researchers led by Tononi has designed a device that stimulates the brain with electrical voltage, to measure how interconnected and organised – how “integrated” – its neural circuits are. Sure enough, when people fall into a deep sleep, or receive an injection of anaesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness, the device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Among patients suffering “locked-in syndrome” – who are as conscious as the rest of us – levels of brain integration remain high; among patients in coma – who aren’t – it doesn’t. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, Koch argues and in theory you could take any device, measure the complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious.
But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that? Koch shrugged.
“It’s like black holes,” he said. “I’ve never been in a black hole. Personally, I have no experience of black holes. But the theory [that predicts black holes] seems always to be true, so I tend to accept it."
It would be satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually to vanquish the Hard Problem. On the one hand, it wouldn’t require a belief in spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics would escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldn’t need to accept the strange and soulless claim that consciousness doesn’t exist, when it’s so obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, it’s everywhere. The universe is throbbing with it.
Last June, several of the most prominent combatants in the consciousness debates – including Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett – boarded a tall-masted yacht for a trip among the ice floes of Greenland. This conference-at-sea was funded by a Russian internet entrepreneur, Dmitry Volkov, the founder of the Moscow Centre for Consciousness Studies. About 30 academics and graduate students, plus crew, spent a week gliding through dark waters, past looming snow-topped mountains and glaciers, in a bracing chill conducive to focused thought, giving the problem of consciousness another shot. In the mornings, they visited islands to go hiking, or examine the ruins of ancient stone huts; in the afternoons, they held conference sessions on the boat. For Chalmers, the setting only sharpened the urgency of the mystery: how could you feel the Arctic wind on your face, take in the visual sweep of vivid greys and whites and greens, and still claim conscious experience was unreal, or that it was simply the result of ordinary physical stuff, behaving ordinarily?
The question was rhetorical. Dennett and Churchland were not converted; indeed, Chalmers has no particular confidence that a consensus will emerge in the next century. “Maybe there’ll be some amazing new development that leaves us all, now, looking like pre-Darwinians arguing about biology,” he said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if in 100 years, neuroscience is incredibly sophisticated, if we have a complete map of the brain – and yet some people are still saying, ‘Yes, but how does any of that give you consciousness?’ while others are saying ‘No, no, no – that just is the consciousness!’” The Greenland cruise concluded in collegial spirits, and mutual incomprehension.
It would be poetic – albeit deeply frustrating – were it ultimately to prove that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one could argue that nothing else could ever matter more – since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Yet there’s no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer. Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we would even recognise that we’d found it. Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread
This article was amended on 21 January 2015. The conference-at-sea was funded by the Russian internet entrepreneur Dmitry Volkov, not Dmitry Itskov as was originally stated. This has been corrected.
Some people claim that they have experienced out-of-body experiences—aka "astral trips"—floating outside of their bodies and watching themselves from the outside.A team of scientists found someone who says she can do this at will and put her into a brain scanner. What they discovered was surprisingly strange.
She was able to see herself rotating in the air above her body, lying flat, and rolling along with the horizontal plane. She reported sometimes watching herself move from above but remained aware of her unmoving "real" body. The participant reported no particular emotions linked to the experience.
How the hell is this possible? Can it be real? The researchers found that something dramatic, and consistent with her account, was happening in her brain: The fMRI showed a "strong deactivation of the visual cortex" while "activating the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery," which includes mental imagery of bodily movement. This is the part of the brain that makes it possible for us to interact with the world. It's what makes you feel where your body is in relation to the world.
This is the very first time that this type of experience has been analyzed and documented scientifically. Researchers know that out-of-body experiences can be induced "by brain traumas, sensory deprivation, near-death experiences, dissociative and psychedelic drugs, dehydration, sleep, and electrical stimulation of the brain, among others. It can also be deliberately induced by some." But this may be the first documented case of someone who can get into this state at will.
So is it real or not?
It is real in the sense that she's actually experiencing it. The brain scans show that she's going through what she's claiming. But that doesn't mean that her "soul" is getting out of her body. This is not an astral trip, like those described by mystics. There's no paranormal activity of any kind.
The fact is that, even while there aren't a lot of solid experiments on this subject except this research paper and a few others, scientists believe that these out-of-body experiences are a type of hallucination triggered by some neurological mechanism. The researchers of this paper speculate that this neurological mechanism may be present in other people too and that some people—like this woman—may train themselves to activate it. She told them that she first noticed this happening when she was a little kid, while taking naps.
Perhaps out-of-body experiences may end up being like synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that was largely ignored during the mid-20th century. Synesthesia—which makes some people to automatically see colors in their brain when they read or hear letters, numbers and words—is now accepted, studied and understood.
Top image: Significantly activated regions of the brain while the participant was having extra-corporeal experiences. Most significantly activated regions are lateralized to the left side and include the supplementary motor area (F), the cerebellum (B,D,E), the supramarginal gyrus (D,F), the inferior temporal gyrus (B,D,F), the middle and superior orbitofrontal gyri (A,C,D,E).
The technocracy movement is a social movement which arose in the early 20th century. Technocracy was highly popular in the USA for a brief period in the early 1930s, when it overshadowed many other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression.[1][2] The technocrats proposed replacing politicians and businesspeople with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy.[1]
Technocracy advocates contend that price system-based forms of government and economy are structurally incapable of effective action, and promoted a more rational and productive type of society headed by technical experts.[3]
The coming of the Great Depression ushered in radically different ideas of social engineering,[4] culminating in reforms introduced by the New Deal[3][4] By late 1932, various groups across the United States were calling themselves "technocrats" and proposing reforms.[5]
By the mid-1930s, interest in the technocracy movement was declining. Some historians have attributed the decline of the technocracy movement to the rise of Roosevelt's New Deal.[6][7]
Many books have discussed the rise and decline of the technocracy movement.[8] One of these is Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941 by William E. Akin.[9]
The technocratic movement has its origins with the progressive engineers of the early twentieth century and the writings of Edward Bellamy,[10] along with some of the later works of Thorstein Veblen such as Engineers And The Price System written in 1921.[11][12][13] William H. Smyth, a Californian engineer, invented the word "technocracy" in 1919 to describe "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their servants, the scientists and engineers",[14][15] and in the 1920s it was used to describe the works of Thorsten Veblen.[16]
Early technocratic organisations formed after the First World War in both Europe and the United States. In the U.S., these included Henry Gantt’s "The New Machine" and Veblen’s "Soviet of Technicians". These organisations folded after a short time, but not before Howard Scott attended a series of "Soviet of Technicians" lectures.[16]
A sign on the outskirts of a Depression-era town about meetings of the local technocracy branch.
Map of the North American Technate.
Howard Scott has been called the "founder of the technocracy movement"[1] and he started the Technical Alliance in New York near the end of 1919. Members of the Alliance were mostly scientists and engineers. The Technical Alliance started an Energy Survey of North America, which aimed to provide a scientific background from which ideas about a new social structure could be developed.[17] However the group broke up in 1921[18] and the survey was not completed.[19]
In 1932, Scott and others interested in the problems of technological growth and economic change began meeting in New York City. Their ideas gained national attention and the "Committee on Technocracy" was formed at Columbia University, by Howard Scott and Walter Rautenstrauch.[20] However, the group was short-lived and in January 1933[21] splintered into two other groups, the "Continental Committee on Technocracy" (led by Harold Loeb) and "Technocracy Incorporated" (led by Scott).[22][23]
At the core of Scott's vision was "an energy theory of value". Since the basic measure common to the production of all goods and services was energy, he reasoned "that the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy", and that by using an energy metric instead of a monetary metric (energy certificates or 'energy accounting') a more efficient design of society could be made.[24] Technocracy Inc. officials wore a uniform, consisting of a "well-tailored double-breasted suit, gray shirt, and blue necktie, with a monad insignia on the lapel", and its members saluted Scott in public.[3][25]
Public interest in technocracy peaked in the early 1930s:
Technocracy's heyday lasted only from June 16, 1932, when the New York Times became the first influential press organ to report its activities, until January 13, 1933, when Scott, attempting to silence his critics, delivered what some critics called a confusing, and uninspiring address on a well-publicized nationwide radio hookup.[23]
Following Scott's radio address (Hotel Pierre Address)[26], the condemnation of both him and technocracy in general reached a peak. The press and businessmen reacted with ridicule and almost unanimous hostility. The American Engineering Council charged the technocrats with "unprofessional activity, questionable data, and drawing unwarranted conclusions".[27]
The technocrats made a believable case for a kind of technological utopia, but their asking price was too high. The idea of political democracy still represented a stronger ideal than technological elitism. In the end, critics believed that the socially desirable goals that technology made possible could be achieved without the sacrifice of existing institutions and values and without incurring the apocalypse that technocracy predicted.[28]
The faction-ridden Continental Committee on Technocracy collapsed in October 1936.[29][30] However, Technocracy Incorporated continued, adopting distinctive red and grey uniforms for its staff and a fleet of cars in these colors.[31][32] These features brought the organization under suspicion during World War II. The organization was banned in Canada for several years, but the ban was lifted in 1943.[31]
There were some speaking tours of the USA and Canada in 1946 and 1947, and a motorcade from Los Angeles to Vancouver:[33]
Hundreds of cars, trucks, and trailers, all regulation grey, from all over the Pacific Northwest, participated. An old school bus, repainted and retrofitted with sleeping and office facilities, a two-way radio, and a public address system, impressed observers. A huge war surplus searchlight mounted on a truck bed was included, and grey-painted motorcycles acted as parade marshalls. A small grey aircraft, with a Monad symbol on its wings, flew overhead. All this was recorded by the Technocrats on 16-mm 900-foot colour film.[34]
1948 saw a decline in activity and considerable internal dissent. One central factor contributing to this dissent was that "the Price System had not collapsed, and predictions about the expected demise were becoming more and more vague".[35] Some quite specific predictions about the Price System collapse were made during the Depression, the first giving 1937 as the date, and the second forecasting the collapse as occurring "prior to 1940".[35]
Membership and activity declined steadily in the years after 1948, but some activity persisted, mostly around Vancouver in Canada and on the West Coast of the United States. Technocracy Incorporated currently maintains a website and distributes a monthly newsletter.[36]
In Great Britain, Political and Economic Planning, a think-tank founded in 1931, also advocated similar economic intervention. In Germany prior to the second world war a technocratic movement based on the American model introduced by Technocracy Incorporated existed which ran afoul with the political system there.[37]
A Russian movement existed based on similar beginnings from the North American movement also.[38]Alexander Bogdanov's concept of Tectology bears some semblance to technocratic ideas. Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings as presented by Zenovia Sochor,[39] imply that he expected a coming revolution against capitalism to lead to a technocratic society. The most important of the non-Leninist Bolsheviks may have been Alexander Bogdanov.[40]
^ abcBeverly H. Burris (1993). Technocracy at work State University of New York Press, p. 28.
^ abWilliam E. Aikin (1977). Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocracy Movement 1900-1941, University of California Press, pp. ix-xiii and p. 110.
^Beverly H. Burris (1993). Technocracy at work State University of New York Press, p. 30.
^Beverly H. Burris (1993). Technocracy at work State University of New York Press, p. 32.
^Frank Fischer (1990). Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise, Sage Publications, p. 86.
^Daniel Nelson. Technocratic abundanceReviews in American History, Vol. 6, No. 1, March 1978, p. 104.
^Elsner, Jr., Henry (1967). The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation. Syracuse University.
^Donald R. Stabile, Veblen and the Political Economy of the Engineer: the radical thinker and engineering leaders came to technocratic ideas at the same time, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol, 45, No. 1, 1986, pp. 43-44.
^ abAkin, William E. (1977). Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement, 1900-1941. University of California Press. ISBN0-520-03110-5.
