Messages From Water

"Water represents the interface between the 4th dimension in which we live and the 5th dimensional sphere of our soul." (Give me a moment to recover from finding that quote...)

I generally don't like the fact that water freezes and becomes ice. It has the nasty habit of doing so on roads that I have to drive on. I don't believe that ice would be any less dangerous to drive on if I had projected loving thoughts at the water while it was freezing. And that about sums up my interest to date in the water crystal formation studies of Dr. Masaru Emoto.

So I wasn't thinking too much about this recent replication of Emoto's work until I read this. And then I got to wondering about the exact nature of the differences in the water crystals after they had been treated... Where there physical differences in the structure of the crystals? Were those differences quantified/quantifiable? Do the treated water crystals exhibit a more highly-ordered state when compared to the untreated crystals?

To begin to get some answers, I had to go to this earlier replication of the same study. The results of the study deal primarily with subjective ratings of the aesthetic appeal of the crystals. "To assess the aesthetic appeal of these 40 crystals, a group of 100 volunteers were recruited over the Internet to blindly and independently rate each crystal, one at a time, on a scale from zero to six, where zero meant “not beautiful” and six meant “very beautiful.”... Beautiful crystals were defined as symmetric, aesthetically pleasing shapes." No objective measure of crystal structure was reported, however the presence of symmetry is a known contributor to judgments of beauty in other situations.

Now my question is... How does symmetry in the structure of a crystal relate to the energy needed to create the varying levels of crystal structure? (Is it easier or harder - in terms of energy - to create a symmetrical crystal? Is a more-symmetrical state more or less likely to occur naturally? Is there more or less information contained in a symmetrical crystal?) As I am still not a physicist, I resort to google searching for a quick and dirty explanation. "Factually, the correlation of entropy and symmetry in a qualitative manner was already hinted at by Schrödinger many years ago that negative entropy corresponds to asymmetry, broken symmetry, or less symmetry. However, it remains generally a tacit assumption that higher symmetry of a system implies less entropy." My source article goes on to explain "the symmetry increase leading to a macroscopically equilibrium state is obvious. [Obviously.] However, as will be pointed out, the corresponding effect of information loss (or entropy increase) is also obvious, such as the consequence in the formation of a perfect crystal. Here, information content and symmetry of different static structures are compared and their differences are considered." Sounds confusing but promising, yet a bit beyond the scope of this post...

The major questions that arise from the water crystal formation studies have to do with reconciling the differences in symmetry and entropy in the crystals with the processes were 'applied' to the crystals. I think we're all beyond the classic model of a physical force of some kind that is directed at the water, so I can safely ask this question... Are the observers who are directing intentions at the water and/or the observers of the crystals able to collectively select a more symmetrical state of the ice crystals? (While the 2006 replication briefly mentioned observer effects, it did so without mention of a mechanism for those effects.) I then also want to know if the more-symmetrical state has a higher or lower probability of occurring, relative to the 'not attractive' (and therefore, presumably, less symmetrical) crystal states? Can the relative probabilities be correlated somehow to the efforts of the relative observers?

An intentional selection of a specific state (whether it be ice crystals or any other system) is not possible without information about the system. I couldn't help but notice that information (photographs) about the target bottles of water was given to a much larger number of observers than the number who had information about the control bottles. I began to wonder about the total amount of information (and with it, the ability to influence the process of state selection) that existed with regards to those 'treated' bottles of water... While lost in earlier musings about the concept of relative entropy, I was quickly prompted to think about the related concepts of cumulative entropy (the sum of the information that exists about a system/state across multiple observers, moments in time, and degrees of knowledge) and distributed entropy (information about a system that is distributed among different observers). And I began to wonder... If the amount of information that is available about a system is related in some way to the amount of order in a system, then can varying the cumulative entropy of a system have an independent effect on the amount of observable order or disorder present? Can varying the nature of the information that is available about a system have an independent effect on the amount of observable order or disorder present?

I'm not suggesting that more information about the system means that more energy is locally available to physically affect the crystal formation. Rather, I suggest examining the process of state selection as a function of the amount and nature of the information that exists about the system.

City at the End of Time

"They are fate-shifters, born with the ability to skip like stones across the surface of the fifth dimension, inhabiting alternate versions of themselves."

"Some call it luck, others fortune. We know it here as Chancing, which is great Will, consistently applied to random circumstance to guide favor..."

From City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear (2008).

And here I was thinking that I had a solid lock on my first science fiction novel. ;)

Now if we could just get a forward-thinking institute to host a conference on the fifth dimension... (cough) ... perhaps we could explore turning science fiction into science fact.

I have a sneaking suspicion that writing quality science fiction is actually a harder skill to master than doing quality science. Science fiction is notoriously forward-looking, while being grounded in concepts to which we can all relate. It reaches people who enjoy playing with ideas and thinking about things in different ways. You never know what a particular flight of imagination will touch off. (It was science fiction that put us onto state exclusion.) Someday I'd like to seriously try writing science fiction, just for the freedom of expression.

For the moment though, as I can now create a list of 'fiction with a 5th dimension', I shall do just that, keeping this post open for updates and/or reviews as I have time to add them. Your additions to the list are warmly solicited.

Fiction with a Fifth Dimension

Here, There, & Everywhere, by Chris Roberson (2005)
City at the End of Time, by Greg Bear (2008)

Do You See What I See?

"The realization of this experiment opens interesting perspectives for controlling quantum systems. Instead of freezing their evolution, repeated measurements could provide information used to channel them towards tailored quantum states by active feed-back operations." - Bernu et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 101: 180402 (2008). (here)

Don't look now, but something got me thinking...

When last we discussed how I was going to take a wild stab at modeling physics to include 5 dimensions of experience, I was fixated on the quantum zeno effect, which is perhaps the most direct example of a physical system being impacted by measurement. (I am still absorbing information on QZE and the particular observations and problems that gave rise to the idea of quantum decoherence. This will take awhile.)

While reading this blogpost, my thoughts went to another article - one on non-local observation. In this experiment "[t]he experimenter asked each participant either to imagine that he or she could intuitively sense the presence of the photons in a specific area of the interferometer... or to withdraw that intuitive perception and allow the photons to pass through the same area unimpeded." (My emphasis.) In this experiment, the participants were not directly observing the laser/Michelson interferometer system. The hypothesis was that if "such [non-local] observation were possible, it would theoretically perturb the photon's quantum wave functions and change the pattern of light produced by the interferometer." A significant decrease in overall level of illumination was present in the non-local observation condition, as predicted by the behavior of the same system when the interference pattern has collapsed due to attempts to gain information about the path of the photon.

Is quantum decoherence compatible with non-local observation? Or would it make more sense to map observation effects (like QZE) onto certain cognitive parameters associated with observation? It's interesting to me that in Radin's study the "result was primarily due to nine sessions involving experienced meditators". This suggests that cognitive attributes of a particular observer are associated with the degree and nature of 'observation' that they can bring to bear on a system. This in turn reminded me of Schmidt's article, discussed lo these many months ago, which also suggests a continuum of observation based on factors such as the 'alertness' of the observer.

And I began to wonder... Where are the studies that map cognitive attributes such as absorption, and neurological properties such as visual cortex activation, onto effects of observation such as the QZE?

What If It's ALL Pattern?

"Congratulations. You have swamped the probabilities of chance with your mind." - Ghost, by Alan Lightman (2008). (Yes, that Alan Lightman. A most enjoyable read!)

This is going to have to be quick, as yours truly is currently swamped with more mundane things to do.

There seems to be something in the air that makes people want to discuss patterns. I concede that our ultimate understanding of the universe may always include an element that is not understood. Call it 'noise', 'randomness', or whatever else you like.

I just think that it's possible to understand a whole lot more of that 'noise' in terms of a pattern or set of underlying causes. I don't hold this opinion because I can't stand the idea that some things are simply unexplainable; in fact, I tolerate that idea quite well. But, having seen the potential to crack one previously untouchable 'code' (that of the origins of dreams), I can't help but think that it might be possible to crack more of the 'code' of consciousness.

Cracking the code of conscious experience will involve a grand synthesis of many lines of research, including those on rarer types of conscious experience. I also see the multiple-observer question as a necessary line of inquiry for understanding the interplay of consciousness with the observable world. The code of a self-contained consciousness that is isolated from outside influences is (hypothetically) much easier to crack. But the code of a consciousness that is dependent in some way on other observers will likely be much more complicated.

This challenge merits only the following response - Bring it on! ;)

Journal Club #5

"It is like hearing an echo from a long way off." - said of telepathy.

Venkatasubramanian, et al, Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy, International Journal of Yoga, 2008 (here)

I'm all for studies which aim to link hard neurological data to psi activity. To date, there appear to be three other such studies which involve functional brain mapping techniques. Two of the three previous studies examined subjects with telepathic ability, whereas the third dealt with "distant intentionality." Only the study on distant intentionality (healing at a distance) used fMRI.

I'm commenting on this study because it indicates that the telepathic subject/receiver, who performed the telepathy task while being scanned, displayed activation in the parahippocampal gyrus when asked to engage in the task of 'receiving' the telepathically-transmitted image. The parahippocampal gyrus is typically associated with memory encoding and retrieval, which begs the question - why would an area of the brain whose primary function seems to be memory encoding and retrieval be implicated in telepathy?

Granted, the parahippocampal gyrus has been implicated in many things - from panic attacks to the perception of sarcasm. It's not an entirely implausible stretch to relate the need for perceiving social context when identifying sarcasm with the ability to 'detect' what another person is thinking. It can all be related to Theory of Mind. Telepathy just seems to bypass a few of the more conventional information-gathering steps.

So I'm uber-curious to know why the authors of this study think that the parahippocampal gyrus might have a legitimate connection to telepathy. The previous studies using SPECT, EEG, and MRI seem to claim only that a larger activation was seen in the right cerebral hemisphere. The telepathic subject's fMRI data was analyzed by comparing periods of 'activation' with periods of 'rest'. Periods of 'activation' represented active attempts to 'send' an image on the part of the sender/investigator and active attempts to 'receive' on the part of the subject. The images being 'sent' were abstract geometric figures of low complexity, hand-drawn by the investigator.

The control subject also displayed a differential activation in another area of the brain that is associated with Theory of Mind - the left inferior frontal gyrus. So what's going on here? The key to successful telepathy is in the degree of correspondence between the 'received' data and the original target. Emotional content (which implicates the hippocampus more directly) is non-existent in this particular task and in specific target material chosen for the task. (Right about now you should open the article and look and the two sets of 'received' images, if you haven't already done so. I confess that I am hard-pressed to call one drawing the result of telepathy when compared to the other.)

The discussion section of this article talks quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus in processing emotion, though it's hard to tell how this line of thinking corresponds to this particular study. The authors also digress to mentioning sensitivity to magnetic field energies though, again, the reasons for doing so in the context of this study are unclear. (But we're noting the relevant references for later.) The paragraph that links the parahippocampal gyrus with magnetic fields via their common association with schizophrenia and psychosis makes me cringe. The implication is that magnetic fields are the mechanism of telepathy and the parahippocampal gyrus is a 'hot' center for processing those signals, but the leaps in thinking to link these two ideas are extreme.

So what, if any, other plausible explanations exist for the why the parahippocampal gyrus might be implicated in this act of telepathy? (It really is a stretch to think that it has to be implicated in every act of telepathy.) Without a successful replication of this task using similar stimuli, it's impossible to conclude that this parahippocampal activation was not simply an anomaly that has no relevance to the task. All that being said, I mention this study because it brought to mind a theory about telepathy that I think has received far too little attention. Now that I think about, there are actually two theories that can come into play here...

The first theory (and you'll pardon me if I can't properly attribute it to a source) is that telepathy works by activating existing memory traces. That is, I perceived your message to me in terms of ideas, images, events, and emotions that I've already experienced. My challenge is then to correctly 'connect the dots' and decode the messages by correctly interpreting the relative strength of the memory activations. To be completely honest, I like this theory because it jibes with my own experiences and the anecdotal evidence I've collected from others. Remote viewers also discuss the difficultly they encounter in correctly interpreting their perceptions.

The second theory (again, I beg pardon for lack of attribution) is that instances of ESP such as are purported to have occurred in this task may actually be the result of the mind/brain accessing its own future observations. In other words, the telepathy was not mind-to-mind contact (in this case), but the brain accessing what it will see during the feedback stage of the experiment. The brain accessing future memory traces, if you will.

By implicating memory traces in the 'telepathic' act, via either of the two theories I just described, you have a much more plausible reason to suspect that the parahippocampal gyrus activation is a significant find.

Though I remain, as ever, an appropriately skeptical scientist who awaits the validation of replication with eager anticipation.

What Remains To Be Discovered

"They both had serious reservations about the direction quantum physics was taking, but stepped out of the fray into another place altogether - the fifth dimension." - The Quantum Ten, by Sheilla Jones (2008). ;)

Per the nuggets of good advice that popped up today in the blogosphere, I create/blog about my current muddled state of thought.

"Consider how the problem will be solved..." Recapping: The big problem I have is this - What laws govern a system that produces all aspects of classical physics experience and the consistently observed exceptions to those laws? (Auxiliary problems abound.)

Unfortunately, all indicators right now are pointing to the need to study consciousness and the mechanisms that give rise to the various aspects of conscious experience. (I say 'unfortunately' because mentioning 'consciousness' is often enough to cut your audience by at least half.) But this is also a problematic perspective because, in order to produce something scientifically useful, you end up attempting to map elements of subjective mental experience onto external knowledge structures. 'Why is that problematic?', you ask.

Consider: If I want to say that the mechanisms involved in object classification might give rise to our experience of gravity, then with what structures do I identify those mechanisms? If gravity isn't an absolute external force, then how can I justify introducing neurons or neurochemistry into the model? When does external knowledge reflect something that is absolute? (Rabbit hole!)

What remains to be discovered is whether or not I can extricate myself from this predicament and preserve something that has validity beyond a subjective perspective...

A Wizard Should

"Above all else, a Wizard knows himself - what drives him, and his weaknesses, for without this knowledge, he is not a Wizard at all."

You didn't really think that I just read books on physics, did you? ;)

Contributed by Katlyn Breene to Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard (2004)...

A Wizard Should...

• Be a constant student of life.
• See the Divine in Nature and Nature in the Divine.
• Not say a word and be clearly heard.
• Lead without force and teach without pride.
• Take the most mundane things and surrounding, sense their inner magick, and be able to open that window for others.
• Stare into the dark infinity of the night sky and feel it as an awesome source.
• Love the beauty of paradox and always be able to see the cosmic humor in the darkest times.
• Be a shapeshifter to blend in or be invisible if needed... and make those around feel safe, and heard.
• Maintain his calm center and clear mind when all around him is chaos.
• Open his inner eyes and really see.
• Say 'I don't know...' and realize that is great wisdom, that is okay.
• Have compassion for all beings, and know when to be a healer and when to be a witness.
• Know that the secrets of magick are bestowed upon the open-hearted.
• Speak to the Gods and know he is heard.
• Cast a sphere of protection and light.
• Make up his own mind, walk his own path, and never follow another blindly.
• Know the courage and power of nonviolence and the swift strength of a keen mind.
• Conjure a tale or myth that the moment requires to be understood. ;)
• Know the plants and creatures of the wild enough call them friends and allies.
• See the God and Goddess within all and everyone.
• Have a spirit that glows in the dark.

That's good advice regardless of how you feel about magick.