Since the late 1980s there have been many attempts to explain consciousness in terms of quantum processes. One of the first was by Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose – author of The Emperor’s New Mind (1989) – who went on to collaborate with Stephen Hawking. Penrose said: ‘There is a certain sense in which I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance.’16
However, most attempts to link consciousness and quantum theory tend to be fuzzy and speculative, which is not totally surprising as they seek to explain one nebulous issue in terms of another. Basically, although there is a groundswell of feeling that consciousness will prove to be explicable in terms of quantum processes rather than as a chemical product of the brain or similar phenomenon in the ‘macro’ world, it is still very early days. But if the quantum route does turn out to be fruitful, the implications are enormous. It will mean human consciousness is intimately connected with the physical world at a very fundamental level, an astonishing – even apparently magical – scenario, with which the old Hermeticists would be totally at home. And this fits with accumulating evidence from the physical sciences that the very existence of consciousness can and does have a tangible, measurable effect on the world of matter.
One of the physicists drawn into the study of consciousness was Dick J. Bierman of the University of Amsterdam. From physics he moved into artificial intelligence, which naturally involved a study of cognition – how the mind picks up and processes information about the external world. This led him into the study of consciousness and its relationship with quantum physics. In fact, he got drawn even further into the physicists’ forbidden realm of parapsychology, the study of alleged weird abilities and events, known collectively as psi. He reasoned that psychic abilities could be a possible manifestation of the interface between consciousness and the quantum world.
But was Bierman brave or just foolhardy to enter the world of parapsychology? Even the word itself is a turn-off to self-confessed rationalists. Ever since attempts began to scientifically test claims of psychic abilities – telepathy, precognition and psychokinesis, or mind over matter – the scientific world has opposed not just the claims, but even the idea of testing them (unless the tests disprove the claims, of course). But why the prejudice?
The fundamental objection is that such phenomena just can’t exist since they violate the most basic, common sense principles that underpin our understanding of the material world. Telepathy upsets the rule that there must be a physical link between two objects for them to transmit information to each other. Precognition stands the concept of cause and effect on its head. Psychokinesis, or the alleged effect of mind over matter, is the ultimate horror, since it violates pretty much all the basic principles, including the laws of energy conservation. If real, psychokinesis would mean that it is possible to conjure energy out of nowhere. Unsurprisingly the scientific community at large has a problem with the paranormal. Such things can’t possibly be.
However, these rules only apply to the macro world of the atom and above. As understanding of the subatomic, quantum world has grown over the last century, it has become increasingly obvious that the common-sense principles with which we judge the world have no jurisdiction down there. There, effects sometimes precede causes (‘backward causation’). Particles can jump from one energy state to another without apparently getting the energy from anywhere. Experiments have shown that two particles created by the same event – a collision in a particle accelerator, for example – remain in some weird way connected, continuing to influence each other even when far apart and no longer linked in any way. And they can do so instantaneously, even seeming to breach the ultimate barrier of the speed of light.
Of all these violations of common sense, the most relevant to this discussion are the ones that relate to time. It may seem odd to most of us, but the fact that time usually flows in just one direction is a real puzzle to physicists, since there is no discernable reason for this according to the laws of physics. In theory many physical processes should be able to work in either direction. Whole conferences have been devoted to the problem of ‘time asymmetry’, such as one organized – somewhat unexpectedly – by NATO in 1991 in Magazan, Spain where celebrity scientists such as Stephen Hawking and John Archibald Wheeler delivered papers.17
In his 1988 paper, ‘A World with Retroactive Causation’, Bierman argues that even in the macro world, ‘there is empirical evidence that effects can precede causes’.18 He argues that no paradox is involved, and that his findings fit the discoveries of quantum physics. Describing its implications ‘far-reaching’ is something of an understatement.
Given that subatomic particles have been demonstrated to act fast and loose with supposedly inviolable physical principles, it seems almost unsophisticated to insist that they have to be obeyed everywhere else – with no exceptions. The ever-perceptive Paul Davies makes the point that whereas scientists are quite happy to explore ideas of backward causation and instantaneous communication between unconnected particles, ‘it is only when the end state involves life and mind that most scientists take fright and bale out’.19 In other words, it is fine for a subatomic particle to ‘see’ into the future, but not for a human being.
A handful of physicists – most prominently British professor Brian Josephson, joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 for his work on superconductivity – has openly accepted the reality of psi and is actively seeking a quantum explanation. As a result he is now head of the Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. Josephson is fond of using the Royal Society’s motto, nullius in verba – our favourite translation being ‘take nobody’s word for it’ – against scientists who dismiss parapsychology without deigning to look at the evidence. In an interview for New Scientist in 2006 on this very topic he railed:
I call it ‘pathological disbelief’. The statement ‘even if it were true I wouldn’t believe it’ seems to sum up this attitude. People have this idea that when something can’t be reproduced every time, it isn’t a real phenomenon. It is like a religious creed where you have to conform to the ‘correct’ position.20
He added: ‘These things are not hard to prove, they’re just hard to get accepted.’21
The general trend towards linking consciousness and quantum physics promises parapsychologists real hope. If mind and matter prove to be connected at that deep level it could offer an explanation for psi that keeps it within physical laws. This is the line taken, for example, by leading American parapsychologist Dean Radin in Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experience in a Quantum Reality (2006).
The most exciting discoveries to emerge from parapsychology in recent years do appear to confirm a link between consciousness and the material world at the quantum level. This began serendipitously during research by Bierman.
In the mid-1970s Bierman pioneered the use of Random Event Generators (REGs, also called Random Number Generators) in psi experiments. The advantage of REGs is that they circumvent one of the main problems in evaluating psi experiments. To substantiate claims of extraordinary abilities, the outcome of an experiment has to be compared to chance, which is why all too often parapsychology disappears into a fog of tedious calculations and statistics that become hard to interpret – or have several possible interpretations. Bierman first used a REG in experiments where volunteers tried to mentally influence the output. It was therefore easy to see whether the output had deviated statistically from chance – as indeed it had, unequivocally.22
In 1995 Bierman was using an REG in a house in Amsterdam where poltergeist activity was allegedly taking place, testing whether the REG behaved differently when the invisible hooligan was at work. When the results were analysed for one particular day they did indeed show a ninety-minute period of non-random output – but puzzlingly this related to no spooky goings on in the house. Bierman and his team realized it coincided with something rather more mundane: the 1995 UEFA Champions League final, in which Ajax – t
he famous Amsterdam football team – was playing AC Milan. Even more tantalizing, the moment of greatest non-randomness coincided with Ajax scoring the only goal of the game.23
The REG output was obviously affected by some aspect of the game, the most obvious candidate being the country’s intense focus and collective excitement. The same effect has been found since, for example in a 2004 study by German researchers at the Institut für Psycho-Physik in Cologne, during an important football match in the city.24 This suggested a completely new avenue for research, not involving the special mental states associated with psi but the collective workings of ordinary people’s consciousness in everyday situations.
Bierman’s accidental discovery particularly excited a group of American parapsychologists, including Dean Radin. Seeking the same effect in 1996, he and his colleagues began the REG monitoring of mass events such as the Oscars, the Super bowl and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Atlanta Olympics – anything with television audiences of many millions. Although the results were variable, they seemed to confirm Bierman’s discovery. This encouraged them to follow a new line. Rather than picking selected events in advance, they decided to set up a system to permanently monitor fluctuations in global randomness. This way they could find out if a similar effect coincided with unplanned news events – major disasters or the death of an international celebrity, for example.
The idea was given a dry run with the television coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral in August 1997, which obviously had the advantage of being both global and live. Using twelve REGs, they found deviations of 100 to 1 against chance in their output. Cannily, they used Mother Teresa’s funeral a few days later as control. This was also broadcast live, but the peaceful death of an old lady, however much respected, carried little of the raw emotion associated with the demise of a glamorous young princess and mother in horrifying circumstances. This time they found no effect.
Encouraged by these preliminary results, the Global Consciousness Project was created in 1998, funded by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where Radin is a senior researcher, and headed by Roger Nelson of Princeton University. The Institute of Noetic Sciences is the California-based research institute founded in the 1970s by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. (‘Noetics’ comes from the Greek nous, the faculty of ‘inner knowing’, which has no exact equivalent in English. The word is liberally sprinkled throughout the Hermetic texts.)
There is now a network of some 65 REGs – nicknamed ‘eggs’– located all over the world, from large American cities to remote Pacific islands, connected by the Internet. All the REGs do is continually churn out their counts, one per second, day in, day out. The data from each egg is downloaded every five minutes to a server in Princeton, which is accessible to any interested party. The results are then analysed for periods of non-randomness, either from individual or all eggs, which are then compared to world events. Conversely, when major news events occur, the REG data is examined for signs of non-randomness.
One of the most elegant aspects of this set-up is that because the data from all the eggs has to be grouped together, put through a series of statistical analyses and then plotted on graphs before any anomalies can be noticed, it isn’t readily apparent just from the streams of numbers that anything interesting has happened. The analysts can’t bias the results even by subconscious selection of the data. Dates and times of all the major global events – both pre-planned such as sporting fixtures and awards ceremonies or random occurrences like major disasters – which happen within a particular period can be listed from an independent source such as the annual review of a news service. The data from the eggs during that period can be analysed independently, and then the two compared for correlations. And the calculations can be checked on request.
The results have been unequivocal. The periods of anomalous non-random output coincide with times of major global events. Dean Radin demonstrated this most vividly in 2001, when the REGs’ output deviated from pure chance many times, but one day above all stood out for the sheer size of the deviation … 11 September, when the eyes of a horror-struck world were riveted on television footage of the terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers and its sickening traumatic aftermath. Likening the sharp peaks and troughs on the graph to the ringing of a bell, Radin wrote that, ‘in metaphorical terms, our bell rang more loudly on this day than any other day in 2001’.25
Even more compelling evidence that the REGs were measuring something real came from a more detailed analysis showing that it wasn’t just the amalgamated data from all the eggs that ‘rang the bells’; all the individual eggs around the world rang that day. As Radin declared: ‘Something, perhaps changes in mass attention, caused the random data to behave in a dramatically non-random way on 9/11, whereas it behaved normally on other days’.26
Inevitably, critics claim that the apparently striking results of the Global Consciousness Project are due to methodological flaws in analyzing the data. But given the sheer amount of accumulated information from the last decade, it is hard to see the results as demonstrating anything other than a real effect. Human consciousness really does seem to have a tangible effect on the material world.
So given the enormous implications, why isn’t this ‘global coherence effect’ much more widely known? Probably because to non-scientists its significance might be hard to grasp and even seem rather dull. After all, this is not exactly moving mountains by the power of mind alone. The experiments show that the focused attention of millions of people is needed to cause just tiny fluctuations in a few REGs – which is not even in the same league as one dramatic spoon-bending.
What exactly do these results tell us? The Global Consciousness Project team use them to support the idea of the evolution of a planetary consciousness – the noosphere, a term borrowed from Teilhard de Chardin. However, that may be extrapolating way too much from the current data. It is true that such an effect is exactly what Teilhard and others would have predicted, and it may indeed turn out to be a sign of the emergence of a global consciousness. But right now the evidence simply doesn’t stretch that far.
What can be said at the moment is that the network of REGs is not being deliberately influenced by the massed minds of the people on the planet, only a relative handful of whom even know it exists. The REGs can only be registering a side-effect of something else, something that people are unaware of doing. And the effect can’t be confined to the REGs; if their output is less random, the effect can only be because all and any random processes are being smoothed out in some way. When a large number of people pay attention to the same thing, for some as yet unknown reason the world becomes more ordered, particularly at the quantum level where randomness and unpredictability rule. It is not even deliberate; it just seems to be the effect that consciousness creates, simply by existing.
Perhaps what is even weirder is that this is also the thinking of certain top physicists, who propose that consciousness – human or otherwise – is literally what keeps the universe in place. And even that consciousness created the universe in the first place.
‘THE MYSTERY WHICH CANNOT GO AWAY’
We all know the world of quantum mechanics is head-spinningly weird, but it does have a clear relevance to our understanding of life, the universe, everything – and humanity’s role in all of it. And despite the implications of quantum theory being so left-field that even Einstein had problems with it, it does provide some potential clues in our search for the mind of God – or, indeed, our Great Universal Designer, GUD.
Einstein clashed, albeit in a friendly fashion, with Neils Bohr, the great champion of quantum theory, in a debate that went on for nearly thirty years. John Archibald Wheeler, who studied under both luminaries, wrote in his autobiography:
These two giants, full of admiration for each other, never came to agreement. Einstein refused to believe that quantum mechanics provides an acceptable view of reality, yet he could never find an inconsistency in the t
heory. Bohr defended the theory, yet he could never escape being troubled by its strangeness. Reportedly, once when Einstein remarked, as he liked to do, that he could not believe that God played dice, Bohr said, ‘Einstein, stop telling God what to do’.27
One of the most bizarre aspects of quantum mechanics is that it recognizes an intimate relationship between the mind of an observer and what happens at the quantum level. It is really just a question of how deep the relationship goes.
The classic example comes from the famous ‘wave-particle duality’ conundrum, the recognition that subatomic particles (in most experiments photons, the particles of light, but it applies to all of them) sometimes behave like particles and sometimes like waves. Richard Feynman called the enigma ‘the mystery which cannot go away’.28
The classic demonstration of wave-particle duality is the renowned ‘double slit’ experiment, the earliest version being carried out as long ago as 1803, by the woefully little-known English polymath Thomas Young (1773–1829). The scientist, physician, philologist and Egyptologist disproved the prevailing view, established by Newton, that light was made up of particles, by demonstrating it was really a wave. By shining a single beam of light through two narrow slits onto a screen, Young showed that bands of light and dark appeared. Such interference patterns are only explicable if light moves in waves: the light passes through both slits and, just like water in similar circumstances, the two waves emerging from each slit either cancel each other out or reinforce each other to produce the interference pattern.
The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God Page 30