Postulate of economy: the metamind computes no more than is necessary for creating the mental experiences of the finite minds.Question: Does the metamind model every elementary particle of the physical world?
A particular instance of this principle is well known in quantum physics: the trajectory of an unobserved particle (such as a photon passing through two slits) is indeterminate: there is no fact of the matter.
The objects that you engage with in the manifest world are modelled by 'modules' in the metamind. The desk, the chair, the poster, whatever. Each module is a like a rudimentary mind: a slice of the metamind's consciousness, encapsulated by informatic rules.
A module has some 'memory' of its past. And it has 'methods'. When it receives a message of a certain kind, it responds by executing the appropriate method.
The metamind is like an army of mental automata. In some forms of Judaeo-Christian mysticism, the metamind was apprehended as 'God', and the modules as 'angels' - terms that are now laden with many extraneous connotations.
Standard physical model: Light is reflected off its surface and sent in all directions. When you point your eyes in this direction, some of the light enters your eyes. That triggers off neural activity in the visual cortex of your brain, which somehow induces conscious visual experiences. The flow of causation, and hence of information, is in one direction only. The poster is unaffected by your looking at it.
Berkeleian model: There is no poster. Instead there is a module in the metamind that models a notional poster. By the postulate of economy, it does nothing unless somebody is perceiving the poster. When you look at the poster, your mind gives a message to the poster module: "What do you look like?" The poster module replies by rendering a visual image of the poster in your conscious mind.
Question: How does the visual image get back to your mind? Answer: Your initial message must contain a return link, or mental vector. Corollary: Whenever you perceive something 'externally', that thing knows you are perceiving it, and it has a vector back to your mind.
Analogy: It is like e-mail. If you send an e-mail to someone, your message contains a 'reply-to' address. Without a reply-to address, you couldn't get a reply. Likewise, when you perceive something in the Berkeleian world, there is a return vector. Without the return vector, how could the relevant module of the metamind send you any imagery?
Anecdotal evidence has accumulated for centuries. Scientific evidence has been gathered throughout the past hundred years. For quarter of a century, the US Government funded a secret research project to establish the existence of telecognition and harness it for intelligence purposes.
Professor Jessica Utts was commissioned to review the project:
Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.The task now is to establish theoretical models for telecognition.
(An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning, 1995.)
By the fundamental axiom of radical empiricism, outside of conscious experience there is no existence. Therefore, there cannot be any transmission of signals between minds. Therefore, in the Berkeleian model of perception, messages are exchanged by direct overlap of the mind and metamental module. This overlap is driven by the semantic content of intention: it is not restricted by the notional distance of the associated physical target.
The mechanism by which you perceive nearby objects - precisely the same mechanism can be employed to perceive remote or hidden objects. You do not see with your eyes: you see by communion with the object you are looking at; and that communion is independent of how far away it is.
This is why, in telecognition, the mind perceives just as if it were in proximity to the target. For example, visual images can be seen even though there is no lens to form an optical image at the remote site.
Experiment: An electronic random number generator produces a sequence of 1s and 0s, which are recorded onto a magnetic tape. No conscious being observes the sequence. The tape is locked in a safe overnight. The next day, a telekinetic subject projects the intention to increase the number of 1s, or the number of 0s. The results show a statistically significant effect. The same magnitude of effect is found when the telekinesis is done in real-time. (Helmut Schmidt, 1987)
Model: According the postulate of economy, the metamind does not model the recording of the random digits until the recording is observed. At that time, a mind can send messages to the metamind, intending a deviation from random chance. The fact that the recording took place in the past in physical time is irrelevant. Physical time is notional: only mental time is real. The telekinesis took place in the present, as far as real, mental time is concerned.
Metaphor: In a virtual-reality game, you are in a virtual building. A door is closed and you have never been inside. You decide to go in. The game lets you take a tool: you choose a key. When you go in, you find a treasure chest, and the key fits perfectly. Yet the treasure chest is covered with years of dust. How could your choice of the key have caused the chest to have been placed there long ago? Easy: the chest's existence and the time it lay there are purely notional. The computer created its model of the contents of the room in response to your choice of the key.
Soup model: The mind scans through the world in some way, perhaps like a psychic radar. Whenever it finds an object, it applies a pattern recognition to it: does it match the characteristics of the sought object?
Spaghetti model: Objects and minds are interlinked with a tangled network of mental vectors. The telecognitive mind follows the strings of mental spaghetti back to the intended target.
The Berkeleiain theory predicts a spaghetti model.
Take a disused warehouse in the desert. Place distinctive objects between ten randomly chosen identical doors. Paint five of the doors blue, and five red. Take a photograph of one of the five identical red doors. Ask a remote viewer to ascertain what is behind that door. By the typical success rates of remote viewing, we would expect a few per cent of reports to be correct. According to the spaghetti model, the correct door should be hit most often; by the soup model, all the five red doors should be hit equally often; by scepticism, all ten doors should seem to be 'hit' equally often.
© 2000, Peter B Lloyd