Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  It isn’t that Zeilinger is a shrinking violet. He met publicly with the Dalai Lama, discussing the common ground shared by Buddhism and experimental physics. And he has given a few interviews in which he seems happy to acknowledge that quantum conundrums raise profound questions about the nature of reality. He is also not alone; other modern physicists are pointing toward the quantum as being far more integral to any true picture of the world than mainstream scientists and philosophers have cared to admit.

  In My Big TOE, or Theory of Everything, Tom Campbell, a nuclear physicist and consultant to NASA, argues that quantum mechanics forces us toward an entirely new understanding of physics, in which consciousness plays a central role. And physicists Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner make the case in Quantum Enigma for a physics that at least acknowledges and addresses the mysteries raised by quantum experiments. While openly deriding and mocking more outlandish theories like those in What the Bleep?, they bravely accuse their brethren of hiding the real mysteries raised by the quantum away—the skeleton in physics’s closet. Like them, Zeilinger generally stops short of giving statements so much as illuminating the relevant questions.

  I can’t say I blame him. There is a point, after all, at which we drift into mere speculation, in which we are simply giving voice to our own biases, conceits, and wishes—and at that point we are certainly revealing ourselves, while quite possibly saying absolutely nothing about the world. It is this inability some of us have to shut up and admit our lack of knowledge that dominates far too much of our conversation and creates such a massive verbal train wreck out of our discussions of the paranormal. Consider this: if we again take the word paranormal as referring to that which science hasn’t yet explained, then Anton Zeilinger’s experience would suggest the ultimate nature of reality qualifies as paranormal.

  There is nothing outrageous contained there—no reason for celebration or grief. The mystery of the world exists apart from our judgment of it. Reading the physics-specific journals and message boards, in fact, gives a clue to this. The questions they’re asking are fundamental: Does time as we know it really exist, or is our experience of it just a product of our perception? Are we living in one of many parallel worlds—or a multiverse? Do we live in a hologram? Is consciousness a fundamental property of the universe?

  These are questions that make a statement in their asking—a statement about our own status as a species just out of the trees, trapped on a dusty rock, floating through space … but to acknowledge what this means, that in essence we do live in mystery, we do live in a paranormal world—is verboten. The P word is the bearer, after all, of that unholy Taint.

  At this time, I should point out there is nothing here to offend materialist and atheist readers: Even if consciousness could have a quantum explanation, and even if this role might open the door to the validation of some paranormal claims, it certainly doesn’t mean there is a God. The two are not necessarily linked. And yes, even if we all already own the New Age holy grail of quantum consciousness, we could all still be no more significant or eternal than meat.

  All this uncertainty might be cold comfort, particularly to the materialist tribe that thinks of might and could and what’s possible as the sketchy province of believers. But cold comfort, it seems, is all we have—skeptics and believers alike. Up close, in fact, all Hameroff has is cold comfort for those who look to him for a scientifically plausible vision of an afterlife.

  IN THE YEARS SINCE Penrose and Hameroff first foisted their theory of consciousness on an unsuspecting world, Roger Penrose has in essence absented himself from the ongoing debate. Though Hameroff thought it unlikely, Penrose did respond to my emails and said the following: yes, he has moved on to other things, but he has kept an eye on his Orch-OR theory. And he thinks Hameroff has done an excellent job of defending it. Penrose himself is almost eighty, but he says that, in a couple of years, he plans on diving back into quantum consciousness head first.

  He also said he finds some of Hameroff’s paranormal musings a bit … unhelpful. This shouldn’t be surprising. Penrose is a committed humanist, though the British Humanist Association notes, with evident disappointment, that he “is more sympathetic to mystery and uncertainty than some atheists and humanists.” (Reading this, one wonders if the British Humanist Association understands that mystery does not require our sympathy, but it does accept acknowledgment.) What might be more surprising is that Hameroff isn’t a believer either. “I don’t follow any organized religion,” he says. “I find some of the Buddhist concepts appealing, but I’m not a Buddhist, either.”

  In What the Bleep?, Hameroff comes off as so happy and chatty, so willing to engage in the more out-there ideas associated with his theory, that I expected a weekend with him to include some incense-burning. But Hameroff is himself beset by people engaged in their own autodidactic vision quests. While I was with him, at the University of Arizona hospital, we went upstairs to check on his mail. There were a few envelopes stuffed with pages of hand-scrawled writings, equations, and predictions about the nature of the world. He even received a fax that looked like a page torn from a mad physicist’s graphic novel. The writer, or artist, broke the page up into panels like a comic book, with equations in some squares and crystalline drawings in others, including one of a solitary figure—looking out from its cube into what I guessed was a holographic universe.

  As a journalist, I’m trained to look for metaphors. So I took one look at that picture and thought of Hameroff’s own recurring childhood dream of standing at the universe’s edge. He looked at this image and saw only … garbage. He gets so much of this stuff, in fact, that he can’t do anything but throw it away. “I feel bad about it,” he says. “In a lot of cases, you can just tell, this is their life’s work and they’re looking for somebody to help them. But if I started looking, I’d never get back to my own stuff.”

  Hameroff is too busy doing his stuff to read theirs. He likes to spend time outside, hiking. He loves college basketball. He is, in fact, so far from New Agey that when I asked him if he meditates, he looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “Well, sometimes I get quiet and just kind of slow down and gather my thoughts,” he said.

  Up close, Hameroff is a worker. And his mentality might best be described as pugilistic. His performance at the Beyond Belief conference was typical Hameroff. When I asked him why he gave the speech he did, he said, “They pissed me off. They were basically saying, you know, philosophers and scientists should be the ones making all the decisions. Let’s replace organized religion with … us.’ And I just thought, ‘This is bullshit.’ And besides, everything I said, is possible. They just don’t want to hear it.”

  Perhaps the best place to find the real Stuart Hameroff, the worker and the fighter, is at his semi regular conference on consciousness at the University of Arizona. Whatever Hameroff’s critics think of him, they acknowledge the contribution he makes through these conferences, which were first put together by David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher most famous for setting forth the “hard problem” of consciousness at the first Tucson conference in 1994.

  In Chalmers’s estimation, which has swept the field, it is easy to put down seemingly automatic tasks, like driving a car, to computation no different than an insect darting this way and that. The hard problem is the one of conscious experience: Why is it I’m aware of myself and my own personal narrative and where this particular drive to the supermarket fits into all that? Why is it that I experience the color red on the stoplight as I do? “From an evolutionary perspective,” Chalmers told me, just recently, “it’s hard to understand why we would need consciousness.”

  Chalmers himself is an atheist and something of a materialist. He doesn’t buy his friend Hameroff’s idea of quantum consciousness operating inside the microtubules. But he does like the Penrose-Hameroff idea that consciousness is a fundamental property. Consciousness … just is. “It’s been close to twenty years since I first wrote about the hard problem,” he says, “
and we’re not any closer to an answer now than when I wrote it.”

  This may come as something of a surprise to the reader, particularly if you’re out there surfing the edge of the consumer science magazines, where every new neurological discovery wins headlines. Something that is rarely written about, in the midst of all the hyperbole, is that research at the level of the neuron isn’t getting us anywhere in terms of answering the larger philosophical question of consciousness. One physicist I corresponded with, in researching this book, even said he finds all the intense focus on the neuron a bit … suspicious. Marshall Stoneham, at the Centre for Materials Research in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College London, told me in an email, “I often get uptight after hearing scientists reading too much into matches of, say, thinking about X and the measurable brain signals that can be observable at the same time. It’s the Tolstoy problem: War and Peace, Epilogue 2. The Russian peasant, seeing a steam engine, will assume it is being pushed by the smoke, whereas the smoke and the motion have common origin and are not cause and effect. And I am cautious about making complex quantum explanations, even though we do believe quantum physics underlies the natural world and how things happen.”

  Stoneham’s take strikes me, and more importantly Chalmers, as being eminently reasonable. We’re still working on the issue, after all, and pretending we’ve got answers before we really do won’t serve anyone. The prospect of being the one to nail down the answer, however, is so appealing, that the Tucson conferences are legendary for offering combatants a chance to test their mettle. I spoke to one French neuroscientist, Arnaud Delorme, who said the conferences have become more combative now that Hameroff is in charge of organizing them.

  “When Chalmers was in charge, the conferences had a different feeling,” he says. “Chalmers is a philosopher, and philosophers admit they don’t know the answer. They are trying out different ideas. With Hameroff, he is a scientist and so he is used to debates where someone should win and someone should lose because they have the facts.”

  The field of consciousness studies, however, just doesn’t cross that threshold yet. And for a moment I think of Anton Zeilinger, a great scientist who realizes his own inability to reach some definitive scientific conclusion about the nature of reality. I admire Zeilinger because instead of making great assumptive leaps to arrive at some ultimate vision, he seems to have accepted the mystery and sought out the kind of professional who can understand his plight: a philosopher.

  In contrast, Hameroff probably does lack the philosopher’s light touch. In one of his more infamous exchanges, he battled one of the world’s most famous philosophers—Daniel Dennett. In his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained, Dennett argued that the problem of consciousness is in fact no problem at all. Our sense of self, the sensation of eating an apple, all these things we call consciousness, are just illusions triggered by the mechanistic computations of different collections of neurons. Dennett’s vision of human experience is, in fact, so reductionistic he seems to equate us with zombies—machines that, in essence, only think we’re thinking. At one conference Hameroff told Dennett, publicly, “You know, Dan, maybe the reason you like this idea is because you’re a zombie. And maybe the reason I see things differently is because, I’m not.”

  Hameroff told me he was half-joking. But Dennett took offense. “I wound up apologizing,” says Hameroff. “I guess he only likes the idea of being a zombie if we’re all zombies.”

  The scientists Nancy Woolf and Jack Tuszynski, who have each collaborated with Hameroff on papers furthering the investigation of quantum consciousness, both say Hameroff sometimes leaves a public talk he’s given and turns to them, a bit too late, for advice. “Hey,” he says, “did I go too far in there?”

  But in person, one on one with some time to reflect, he is far less likely to offend—or step into the ether of his ideas. In fact, when I ask him about the window quantum consciousness opens upon a potential life after death, he closes it. Maybe halfway. “Well, I’ve certainly never said it’s a definite,” he says. “But it is possible. These near-death experiences could be the beginnings of that experience, some kind of dreamlike experience of pure consciousness, which is temporary.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “I’ve never heard you say that before.”

  We were sitting, at the time, in Hameroff’s kitchen. Over his shoulder I could see fat cactuses and an endless sky. “You’ve never heard me say what before?”

  “That life after death could itself be temporary,” I said.

  My head was spinning a bit with the irony of it—death might yet await us, after life after death. “Oh yeah,” said Hameroff. “It could be.”

  He went into a brief explanation. A coherent sense of self in the afterlife might be dependent upon quantum entanglement, but entangled particles can in fact be separated. (There is a potential out here, for believers. Time behaves so differently at the smallest levels of the quantum scale. Maybe once we’re all a part of the great cosmic hoo ha, we never experience our own disentanglement—even if it happens.) I let this cold comfort wash over me. In myriad books and articles, mystics prattle on about the quantum afterlife, as if its eternal nature is a certainty. And Hameroff has been quoted on the subject numerous times. But until I asked him, I never knew he saw life after death as a potentially terminal condition.

  What so impressed me about this moment, however, was Hameroff’s ease, his utter lack of concern. Paranormal belief is so often put down to a simple fear of death. But Hameroff had mentioned this possible, final death with a stunning casualness. I saw and sensed no more emotion in him than I did the previous night, at dinner, when he pronounced his broiled fish mediocre. I laughed, there in his kitchen, about how wrongheaded so much of our thinking is about the paranormal: if he had proposed his ideas because he was a pie-eyed believer, he would hold some kind of spiritual belief. If he had opened a window to the mystical because he was scared, he wouldn’t close it so casually.

  In the end, I think, he proposes his ideas for one reason only: he found himself, finally, out at the edge of the universe—the man taking over for the boy in his childhood dream. And once he got a chance to take in the view, all he saw there is what’s possible: a picture in which the ultimate reality of every line and shape is uncertain; a picture in which our own minds are perhaps more fundamental than even our bodies; in which mind was there at the beginning, like time and space, waiting for us, and abiding after we’re gone.

  Chapter 4

  Blazing Saddles

  UFOs and the Strange Lights Over a Texas Town

  I’m trying to listen to the leaves speak, trying to steal secrets from fishes in the creek.

  —Jewel, “Stephenville, TX”

  Lee Roy Gaitan didn’t know quite what to make of this. Ricky Sorrells was a big, quiet man, and central Texas cool—meaning he kept to himself, he took care of his family, and he never caused trouble. But on this day he came to Gaitan’s front door, eyes wet with the threat of tears, telling Gaitan that he didn’t know what to do anymore. “I think I saw something,” Sorrells told him, “that I shouldn’t have seen.”

  Gaitan could only nod. Because whatever it was that Sorrells saw, Gaitan figured he saw it, too. Weeks later and from a greater distance, but probably the same thing. Lots of people in the trio of little farming communities, Selden, Dublin, and Stephenville, had seen it. But Ricky’s encounter was the longest and the closest, and after he was discovered by the media, the most controversial.

  “I didn’t know what to tell him,” says Gaitan.

  Well, who would?

  The military won’t leave me alone, Ricky told him. They keep flying over my house. Gaitan was an officer of the law, a police constable. And he stood there and heard Ricky out. Sorrells fought the tears back. He held it together. He thanked Gaitan. Then he packed his big body inside his truck, and he left.

  A tiny, dairy farming community of roughly 17,000 people, Stephenville is one of the many small towns in
Texas where everyone knows each other and life is largely about routine: breeding cattle, birthing new calves, maintaining water misters to keep the animals cool in summer. Football season is king. The Yellow Jackets, the local high school team, draw 7,000 fans with homemade noisemakers into the stadium to watch them play. But in January 2008, all of that seemed threatened. Literally overnight, the town had a choice—to remain a proud cow town, or to embrace perhaps the most notable mass-UFO sighting in American history.

  The attention Stephenville received in the wake of that sighting knocked residents just about flat. An international volunteer group that investigates sightings, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), arrived within days to interview witnesses. The streets were filled with television trucks, including a CNN crew, and reporters flew in from as far away as Japan. Angelia Joiner, the only full-time reporter on the staff of the local newspaper, the tiny EmpireTribune, started doing radio interviews and even CNN’s Larry King Live. Not everyone liked this new status. In fact, when the news first broke, and the EmpireTribune ran a headline about the UFO on page 1, the paper’s managing editor cried. She figured the people of her town would become nationally known as fools. And who could blame her?

  This country has a UFO problem, after all. You might not have been aware we have one, or thought about it in these terms, but we do have a UFO problem: namely, we don’t seem to understand what UFO really means. So here it is: a UFO is an unidentified flying object. So any time we see some object flying in the sky that we can’t positively identify, we’ve seen a UFO. But in the same way the words paranormal and supernatural have been conflated, we now equate UFO with alien spacecraft.