Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Episode 95, Chapter 18

Photo by John Fowler on Unsplash

Chapter 18 is a chapter without any exercises. I like the bit about the "virtually superhuman music" of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. There's also some stuff about the brain being turned on by a "non-local information system."

Wilson's account of faster-than-light communication between particles seemed speculative to me, and for what it's worth, when Charles Faris interviewed Jack Sarfatti about this via email in 2016 (for the Cosmic Trigger 1 reading group), Sarfatti backed off from such claims. (Full interview here.)

CF: ERP “proves” that if Quantum Mechanics is “true” this requires instantaneous contact between some particles, even if at opposite ends of Universe.

JS: Not accurate. Back when it was written it was plausible, but no longer.

Quantum entanglement is very fragile, and for particles out in space, the initial entanglement will almost certainly be destroyed by collisions with other particles.

Even if it was not, it is of very little consequence since actual message using entanglement alone is not possible in quantum mechanics.

CF: BELL’s theorizes 3 possible interpretations of the ERP effect—QM fails, OBJECTIVITY fails, LOCALITY fails.

JS: Not accurate. Back when it was written it was plausible, but no longer.

We now know through the work of Yakir Aharonov, Huw Price, Ken Wharton, and Rod Sutherland, that the only way to correctly understand quantum theory is through OBJECTIVE LOCALLY REAL RETROCAUSALITY in which future "destiny" causes post-determine what happens in the present in addition to the common sense past "history" causes. OBJECTIVE LOCAL RETROCAUSALITY is the only way to understand quantum entanglement without violating Einstein's special and general theories of relativity.

FASTER-THAN-LIGHT NONLOCALITY never happens directly. It is a mirage, the effect of OBJECTIVE LOCAL RETROCAUSALITY as probably first explained in the 1950s by O. Costa de Beauregard as the "zig-zag" also used by John Cramer in his "transactional interpretation." Indeed, so long as the entanglement is not destroyed by environmental decoherence, the statistical correlations do not depend on the space-time separation between the localized strong measurements on each particle in the entangled network.

Quantum uncertainty (e.g. Heisenberg) in the present is only because we must integrate over all possible future destiny causes. Therefore, our quantum theory using only past causes is incomplete as Einstein correctly thought. When one includes future destiny causes "God does not play dice with the universe." However, because quantum theory does not allow stand-alone quantum entanglement messaging, the usual Heisenberg uncertainties apply as a pragmatically useful effective description for simple scattering experiments on dead matter. This situation changes for those degrees of freedom responsible for life and consciousness in open complex systems with long-range quantum coherence (as first discussed by Herbert Frohlich). The situation changes for living matter, which is a POST-QUANTUM THEORY effect.

More here. 

This is Tom again. My favorite "hippie physicist," Nick Herbert, still seems to hold out hope for faster than light communication, see for example this blog post from 2021. 

All this reminds me of the debate many years ago between Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke about whether faster-than-light travel might be possible with Asimov answering "no" and Clarke "yes." 

Cosmic Trigger online reading group, Week 23!

Charter members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, Fred Wolf

By Charles Faris, Cosmic Trigger reading group guest blogger

Welcome to lucky week 23 of the RAWIllumination Cosmic Trigger Reading Group. This week we take a look at ERP and Bell’s Theorem (193) and “see what modern physics has to offer.”

Esalen Institute co-founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price

Of course, what Bob called “modern physics” in the mid 1970’s is not what we would call modern physics today. And of course, like Bob, I am not a physicist. The Author’s primary sources for information on the relationship between physics and consciousness were members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, which included Jack Sarfatti, Nick Herbert, Fred Wolfe, Fritjof Capra, and Saul-Paul Sirag. Many of the members of this group also made up the Physics-Consciousness Research Group, which was founded by Sarfatti and Michael Murphy (of the Esalen Institute) and funded in part by Werner Erhard of EST fame.

Fritjof Capra

Werner Erhard

At the time that Bob was writing Cosmic Trigger the PCRG approach was white hot, and best-sellers such as Space-Time and Beyond (1975—Fred Wolfe), The Tao of Physics (1975—Capra), and The Dancing Wu-Li Masters (Gary Zukav—1979) were high in the public consciousness. The Zukav book in particular, partially ghost written by Sarfatti, Bob’s primary source for New Physics in CT, was a big hit and set the tone for the popularization of anything that mixes Quantum Mechanics and Eastern Mysticism into a frothy stew. Today we have Deepak Chopra, Amit Goswami, and Michio Kaku, all of whom are prone to much more Pronouncement and much less Model Agnosticism than Bob, which could explain a bit about his life-long financial struggles (but I digress).

Gary Zukav

Deepak Chopra

Amit Goswami

Michio Kaku

Of course there was also a lot of push-back from The Skeptics, led by The Amazing Randi and his famous million dollar prize, which has yet to be collected, although this is hardly surprising given that PSI, ESP, and Telepathy etc. seem to operate more in a Quantum Chaos throw the dice manner, whereas Randi wants proof that looks more Newtonian Classical, like “put that damned particle through the left slot EVERY TIME, dammit.” Again, not much Model Agnosticism going on.

The Amazing Randi

Since The Author wrote Cosmic Trigger a lot has changed as far as interpretations of Quantum Mechanics go, and there are now at least 13 competing (and perhaps commingling) interpretations currently.

Since he was apparently Bob’s primary source in the writing of Cosmic Trigger, I contacted Jack Sarfatti and asked him to bring us up to date on the information presented in this chapter. Bearing in mind that the following is Jack’s particular reality tunnel, it may perhaps be best to utilize this chapter as a historical view—if anyone has a well-written contemporary piece of similar intent and agnostic attitude, please let us know!

Herewith is my email interview of Sarfatti regarding the info in ERP and Bell’s Theorem:

CF: ERP “proves” that if Quantum Mechanics is “true” this requires instantaneous contact between some particles, even if at opposite ends of Universe.

JS: Not accurate. Back when it was written it was plausible, but no longer.
Quantum entanglement is very fragile, and for particles out in space, the initial entanglement will almost certainly be destroyed by collisions with other particles.
Even if it was not, it is of very little consequence since actual message using entanglement alone is not possible in quantum mechanics.

CF: BELL’s theorizes 3 possible interpretations of the ERP effect—QM fails, OBJECTIVITY fails, LOCALITY fails.

JS: Not accurate. Back when it was written it was plausible, but no longer.

We now know through the work of Yakir Aharonov, Huw Price, Ken Wharton, and Rod Sutherland, that the only way to correctly understand quantum theory is through OBJECTIVE LOCALLY REAL RETROCAUSALITY in which future "destiny" causes post-determine what happens in the present in addition to the common sense past "history" causes. OBJECTIVE LOCAL RETROCAUSALITY is the only way to understand quantum entanglement without violating Einstein's special and general theories of relativity.
FASTER-THAN-LIGHT NONLOCALITY never happens directly. It is a mirage, the effect of OBJECTIVE LOCAL RETROCAUSALITY as probably first explained in the 1950s by O. Costa de Beauregard as the "zig-zag" also used by John Cramer in his "transactional interpretation." Indeed, so long as the entanglement is not destroyed by environmental decoherence, the statistical correlations do not depend on the space-time separation between the localized strong measurements on each particle in the entangled network.

Quantum uncertainty (e.g. Heisenberg) in the present is only because we must integrate over all possible future destiny causes. Therefore, our quantum theory using only past causes is incomplete as Einstein correctly thought. When one includes future destiny causes "God does not play dice with the universe." However, because quantum theory does not allow stand-alone quantum entanglement messaging, the usual Heisenberg uncertainties apply as a pragmatically useful effective description for simple scattering experiments on dead matter. This situation changes for those degrees of freedom responsible for life and consciousness in open complex systems with long-range quantum coherence (as first discussed by Herbert Frohlich). The situation changes for living matter, which is a POST-QUANTUM THEORY effect.

CF: If QM fails, then we have a Whole New Ball Game—I assume we are not at this juncture.

JS: Yes, we are. QM fails for living matter. We now have a Bohmian Pilot-Wave/Beable Post-Quantum-Theory PQM that explains living matter. It solves the "hard problem" of David Chalmers i.e. how our conscious "qualia" fit in with laws of physics and it opens up the door for new kinds of super-technology.

CF: If Objectivity fails we might have an Observer-Created World, which would allow for Psychokinesis, and/or Many World’s Model, which allows for Time Travel without paradox.

JS: No, the "observer-created world" is largely a fantasy. It's the same as believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. One does not need to sacrifice objectivity to allow for psychokinesis, and time travel to the past without paradox. That is a wrong idea that was plausible in the 1970s when Bob wrote Cosmic Trigger, but no longer.

CF: If Locality fails we have Superluminal Information Transfer, which allows for ESP and Extra-Terrestrial Communication, and/or Synchronistic Acausal Connections, which is like a Jungian World.

JS: No, again this is muddled. There is never Superluminal Information Transfer SIT - that is Fool's Gold that we all bought for a long time. What we have is PQM OBJECTIVELY LOCALLY REAL RETROCAUSAL ENTANGLEMENT MESSAGING THAT ZIG-ZAGS IN SPACETIME AND WHICH IS MISTAKEN FOR SIT. It's AS IF there is SIT, but in fact it is BACK FROM THE FUTURE PQM messaging.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.00039.pdf

above is picture of the objective locally real but back-from-the-future retrocausal zig-zag that explains the MIRAGE the Fool's Gold of FTL spooky action

it's really BACK FROM THE FUTURE SPOOKY ACTION - that does not violate Einstein's relativity.

Bottom line—everything R A Wilson wrote over 40 years ago was how we thought back then, but no longer.
We have advanced significantly since then.

Other useful links are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0AipdgHRtI

https://vimeo.com/171013596

https://vimeo.com/171178181

If you would like to see how Jack writes when he is not trying to be simple, this is worth a look: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/progress-post-quantum-theory-consciousness-augut-27-2016-sarfatti?articleId=7008179474198465064

If this subject is of particular interest to you I recommend How the Hippies Saved Physics, which is mentioned quite a few times right in this blog. Nick Herbert’s Quantum Tantra blog is also a good place to explore if you are interested in a contemporary gloss on this sort of thing, and his book Quantum Reality is still a good look at Quantum Mechanics from the more psychedelic POV, even if it is 30 years old. Jack Sarfatti is active on Facebook and has an active blog as well. [You can also follow @JackSarfatti on Twitter — The Management.]

Okay — that’s about it as far as the physics goes. If anyone has any interesting insights into this intellectually challenging area please share them with the group. Next week we change tack and look at the Leary 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness with Tunnel-Realities and Imprints (201).

Cosmic Trigger online reading group, Week 18!

George Gurdjieff

By Charles Faris, Cosmic Trigger online reading group guest blogger 

Welcome to week 18 of the RAWIllumination Cosmic Trigger Reading Group. This week we cover 3 chapters ostensibly about signals from Sirius, beginning with Other starry signals (141 Hilaritas) and finishing with Dope and divinity. I say ostensibly because Wilson is always building maps, connecting people, places, and ideas, and at the same time…well, we’ll get to Mr. Wilson’s Doggie Funeral business…eventually…eventually.

Other Starry signals begins as a straight exposition of a variety of “reputable” scientists who have received “signals” from interstellar space (or expended considerable energy trying). Jorge Hals, Norwegian radio engineer. L. George Lawrence, American radio engineer. Carl Sagan, American face of science.

Jack Sarfatti 

Wilson then brings in Dr. Jack Sarfatti’s notion of “electromagnetic chauvinism” as an argument against the radio signal efforts of Sagan and crew. When I asked Dr. Sarfatti about this phrase, he said “That’s what post quantum retro-causal signaling is all about” — I’ll let you investigate that nugget on your own.

This leads to a quick view of the life-work of Jack Parsons, rocket engineer, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, thelemite, receiver of messages from Higher Intelligence, buddy of L. Ron Hubbard, prophet of libertarianism, sex-magick, and rockets into space, etc. Wilson notes that “For his countless contributions to aerospace science, Parsons is honored by having a crater on the moon named after him.” He is also honored by being virtually expunged from NASA history.
Wilson relates Parsons to Sirius, as well as the push to “get off this planet.”

Jack Parsons

Quick cut to The footsteps of the Illuminati, which finds out intrepid Author browsing in a bookstore! (See! He’s just like us!) Via some writings of J. G. Bennett our Hero comes across the Gurdjieffian directive to “bury the dog deeper,” i.e. hide important esoteric information from easy discovery by superficial minds.

Of course, on this level “the dog is Sirius, the dog star,” which is what drew Bob’s attention to the passage in the first place, and as the years went by I would argue that the Sirius connection paled in comparison to the notion of hiding various harder to digest notions “in plain sight.” I would argue that great treasures can potentially be discovered whenever we come across any of the many “mysteries of Bob”—the areas where he seemingly just ‘got it wrong’ if we just dig a bit into that doggie graveyard. In my experience the times that Bob seems most “off” usually involve a certain level of naivety, and while Bob plays the naive waif quite a bit in Cosmic Trigger (and various other writings), in “real life” I’m not so sure. In my case certainly Bob did not suffer fools gladly!

This chapter is also notable for bringing up Bob’s notion of “the indispensable Big 3 of 20th century occultism.” That would be Blavatsky, Crowley, and Gurdjieff, all of whom Bob can tie to Sirius of course, of course.

We also get a bit of a clue regarding Bob’s reading of Joyce’s Ulysses, as Bob claims that in 1973 he did not yet know why Joyce had set the novel in the spring of 1904.

Bob also brings back the “angelic language” argument, which strikes me as one of the weakest that the Author uses, and it would bother me not one iota if both of those were struck from the book—and yet i wonder, what might be buried underneath them? For which reason I reveal my first law for reading RAW: whenever you come upon something that seems just plain wrong, bordering on crankiness, or …, ask yourself why lies beneath it? What dog is buried there?

Dope and divinity bring us back to Gurdjieff, and the question of whether the interstellar Higher Intelligences of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson are allegory or a case of hiding the “real secret out in front where nobody would think to look for it.” I was intrigued by the section on angels and archangels, which some in Mr. Gurdjieff’s St. Petersburg group equated with planets and suns, and which Bob suggests perhaps equating with “intelligent, more evolved entities in other solar systems” in order to bring Gurdjieff in line with Leary.

All of this brings to mind an earlier chapter, Sirius Rising, where, on page 85 (Hilaritas), the Investigator thinks that whatever he had tuned into during his June 6th trip was “a kind of planetary consciousness.” An angel perhaps? And then following a drug-free sex-magick trip on July 22, the Shaman scribbles in his magical diary “Sirius is very important.” Archangels anyone?

At a certain point, of course, it is hard to tell what is being concealed and what is being revealed, and this seems as good a time as any to remember that the map is not the territory!

Diving a bit further into the worldview of Mr. G, we are presented with a vision of an unconscious mankind — “asleep, hypnotized, sleepwalking” — and the occasional interstellar intervention to accelerate our evolution.

At this point the Author takes another rough cut to make a case for the development of language, civilization, and religion (i.e. communication with Higher Intelligences) via the shamanic use of metaprogramming substances (peyote/amanita mascara). Bob ties these intelligences directly to other planets through the use of a Don Juan/Carlos Castaneda quote, and then finishes with a question from Captain James T. Kirk — “Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?”

On the one hand, it is easy enough at this point to frame this as the Author posing a rhetorical question, as he seems quite clearly to favor the alien intelligence theory, and to locate the aliens in question somewhere in the vicinity of Sirius. And on the other hand, perhaps all this Sirius business is just another deeply buried shaggy dog story.

What do you think? So much here to chew on, dig into, serve up in a nice fresh comment. So take it away—until next week when Adam Golightly, Discordian expert and author of Historia Discordia offers us his own unique slant on The horrors begin (150) and Ishtar’s Walk: a guided tour of Hell (154).

'Hippie physicists' at it again

Nick Herbert and Jack Sarfatti, two of the hippie physicists described in David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics and Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger 1,  still believe that sending signals faster than light may be possible. (Kaiser's book describes how they pursued it and laid the groundwork for quantum cryptography instead.)

The latest proposal for FTL signaling comes from Demetrios Kalamidas, described by Herbert as a physicist who "who has a degree from CCNY and is currently working at New York nanotech company Raith USA."

Herbert explains the proposal here. Sarfatti discusses it here and here.

Sarfatti writes, "This may be a historic event of the first magnitude if the Fat Lady really sings this time and shatters the crystal goblet. On the Dark Side this may open Pandora's Box into a P.K. Dick Robert Anton Wilson reality with controllable delayed choice precognition technology. ;-)"

And he writes, "This technology, if it were to work is as momentous as the discovery of fire, the wheel, movable type, calculus, the steam engine, electricity, relativity, nuclear fission & fusion, Turing machine & Von Neumann's programmable computer concept, DNA, transistor, internet ..."

A big if, but it's interesting that they are excited. I don't pretend to understand the physics.

Assorted Links

Bobby Campbell is maintaining a page where he posts links to all of the episodes of Agnosis posted so far. (Also posted, for your convenience, under "Resources."

A book on Ezra Pound's economics theories. (Hat tip, John Merritt.)

Timothy Leary's prison correspondence with Carl Sagan. 

Video of Leary interviewed at Folsom Prison.  (Thanks again to Mr. Merritt.)

Jack Sarfatti's VALIS experience. (He's mentioned in Cosmic Trigger I, and probably also other RAW books.) Via Ted Hand, on Twitter,

Robert Anton Wilson article from Oui magazine

How the Hippies Changed Physics by David Kaiser is a new book about the oddball physicists that Robert Anton Wilson discusses in Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati — people such as Jack Sarfatti, Nick Herbert, and so on.

In the notes, Kaiser references an article by Robert Anton Wilson from Oui magazine, published in 1979, which discusses quantum mechanics and many of the topics which the "hippie physicists" obsessed over. In fact, if you read Wilson's article first, you can read the Kaiser book as a "sequel" to many of the topics Wilson raises. (For example, Sarfatti and then Herbert both used Bell's theorem to try to invent a way to achieve faster than light communication. Both ideas were not viable, but according to Kaiser, Herbert's idea was so clever, it helped give birth to quantum cryptography.)

Anyway, I have now obtained a PDF of that Wilson article, which is a valuable explanation of certain concepts of quantum mechanics and has much other useful material. (It's surprising that it's never been reprinted, to my knowledge.) You can read it here (right click to download, then read it in any PDF viewer. Google "PDF viewer" in the unlikely event your computer doesn't already have one.) I also have posted it under "Feature Articles and Interviews." I gratefully acknowledge the help of Michael Johnson, who supplied the article from his copious RAW files.

'Was missing pilot snatched by aliens?'

If you don't have enough conspiracy theories involving terrestrial players to worry about, you can always wonder what the off-planet "folks" are up do. "Was missing pilot snatched by aliens?" is the headline for an article at stardrive.org, Jack Sarfatti's Web site.

"RUMOURS a RAF Binbrook pilot was abducted by aliens have been published in newly-released Government files on UFOs.

"Reports describe how Capt William Schaffner was never seen again after his Lightning plane merged with a UFO over the North Sea on September 8, 1970. A second later the UFO is said to have sped off travelling at more than 20,000mph."

Lots of other unusual stuff at stardrive.org, too.

Excerpt from 'How the Hippies Saved Physics'

The Institute of Noetic Sciences has published an excerpt from How the Hippies Saved Physics by David Kaiser. That's the book I've blogged about here, which is all about the offbeat physicists, such as Nick Herbert and Jack Sarfatti, who Robert Anton Wilson wrote about it Cosmic Trigger 1: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. The excerpt should give you a pretty idea of what the book is like. (Via Jack Sarfatti on Twitter.)