2003: SMN at the British Association’s ‘Festival of Science’ at the University of Salford

Science at the Frontier or Beyond the Fringe?

10th September, 2003

Paul Devereux, Gloucestershire, England

The British Association for the Advancement of Science held its 2003 science festival at Salford between 8 - 12 September. SMN mounted a day of challenging lectures at this prestigious event, a noteworthy achievement that came about primarily due to the industrious efforts of MARTIN REDFERN, who had to wear both his BBC radio producer and SMN Council Member hats on the day. The thrust of the event was that responsible and accountable research into aspects of consciousness was at the frontier of science rather than beyond its pale. Considering that there were numerous concurrent events taking place throughout the day, the audience sizes for the range of SMN presentations were quite respectable. The speakers had only 30 minutes each to make their cases - quite a challenge.

First up was Professor BRIAN GOODWIN of Schumacher College speaking on “Health and a Science of Qualities”. His theme was that while mainstream Western science focuses on measurable matters, on quantities, in the living of our daily lives we are more aware of what he called “qualities”. He explained how the separation between quantities and qualities dates back to the 16th Century, the first stirrings of the Age of Enlightenment. Quantities were fine, Goodwin acknowledged, but why was it necessary for science to restrict itself to the quantifiable? He then asked - what would be the methodology for systematically studying qualities? He pointed out that quality was not some abstract factor but could be quite readily identified - even from photographs. To prove this, he showed a series of slides. One showed free-range pigs, which was contrasted with pictures of pigs in factory farm pens. It did not require rocket science to be able to detect the differences in the quality of the pigs’ existences. Goodwin and other researchers have suggested that the methodology already exists to study qualities in a systematic way - there are techniques such as “free choice profiling” used in industry, for example. He further claimed that the public could sense a violation of nature taking place by the way our science-based technology proceeds; there was a subtle intuition that factory farming, the production of GM crops, and other corporate methods of managing food production were unhealthy. And all our Bills of Rights were for humans, but what about non-humans - even forests and mountains?

Perhaps the picture that most effectively summed up the gist of Goodwin’s talk was a photograph of a vast field of sunflowers at sunset in the south of France. The woman who took the picture had been passing by and had felt a sense of oppression. She wondered why until she came to realise that the sunflowers had been so carefully cultivated for quantity that their heads had developed and become too heavy for the plants to follow the course of the sun through the sky, as all sunflowers should. So here, at sunset, the entire field of sunflowers was facing east.

Professor ROBERT MORRIS of the University of Edinburgh was next, and he spoke on “Beyond the Brain: New Research into Telepathy”. His presentation epitomised the careful and cautious way in which parapsychological research is conducted these days. He defined telepathy as “intimations by means other than the recognised sensorimotor channels”. One major research problem involved interpretation: it is all too easy to assume telepathy has occurred if there is no rigorous assessment of other factors such as coincidence, poor observation, poor storage and retrieval of the information involved, self-deception, deception by others, and so forth. There was quite a list that had to be checked off before telepathy could be securely assumed, and there had to be meta-analyses of experimental studies to check for methodological flaws.

Morris commented that it was now realised that experimental work is enhanced if a “receiver” in a psi experimental set-up is helped to focus his or her attention internally, because we may all too readily overlook the full range of what we are receiving - the sensory din, the dizzy dazzle around us, can blot out subtler information reception. To this end methods such as the Ganzfeld procedure, meditation, hypnosis, relaxation programmes, etc., are useful. He continued on to describe the work at Edinburgh, starting with the layout of their laboratory, which had been designed to minimise potential flaws. The Edinburgh team had also consulted stage magicians and suchlike to help them guard against trickery. Between 1993 and 2003 six out of nine major experimental studies had produced statistically significant results. Errors still creep into the work, but they are gradually being cleared out.

New research directions include experiments in which the receiver is given a concentration task (such as focusing on a candle flame) during which a distant sender randomly decides to augment the receiver’s concentration. The receiver presses a button when he or she feels this is happening. In this way the transmission of a different type of information can be tested for. Another strand of research is to look at psi in other, non-Western, traditional cultures that have a stronger acceptance of psi-type phenomena.

These first two speakers then took part in a short Q and A session. Among numerous questions, Morris was asked if he personally believed in telepathy. He replied that he just does the research. But he admitted that there is accumulating evidence indicating that it does occur. And why not, he asked - we are always finding out more about ourselves. (He had earlier commented that in psi research “we are perhaps studying nature, but in its fuller form”.)

After a break, the late morning session began with SMN president, Dr. PETER FENWICK, talking on “Evidence of Mind and Consciousness beyond Neurology”. He felt we needed to build time and space into our models of mind. As one example regarding time, Fenwick demonstrated on volunteers their response to various stimuli using galvanic skin response (GSR) as a measure. He then described some preliminary experiments in which a subject is presented with a randomised slide sequence in which blanks and pleasant images were mixed with shock/horror images. These experiments seem to show that subjects can have GSR reactions to the shock pictures before they are shown to them. Is this evidence that future information can be received by the brain - perhaps the vestiges of a biological survival mechanism? Fenwick pointed out that this sort of experimentation needs to be confirmed in many laboratories before we can be certain.

Regarding space, Fenwick referred to various experiments using prayer, describing one by Columbia University researchers who achieved a remarkable positive result in affecting outcomes at a Seoul IVF clinic, involving 219 patients over a four-month period. It was randomised and double-blinded - indeed, nobody at the Seoul clinic was informed about the experiment (because no one thought it would work!). From this and some apparently positive results from other experiments with prayer, which he summarised, there was at least a hint that something as fundamental as human intent could travel through space.

Another example involved those experiences in which a person emotionally close to someone on the point of death says that they have either seen them or have otherwise been aware of their presence. They have the impression that the person who has just died has come to say goodbye. Often the friend or relative does not even know that the person is ill, and may be far distant from them. When checked, the timing of the experiences always matches the time of death. We do not yet know how common these instances are but if these are confirmed in future study they would raise the question of mind being some kind of field. An associated phenomenon was what he called “approaching death experiences” which occur in the 24 hours prior to death - these also seem to involve the transcending of both time and space.

Finally, in his overview of types of evidence indicating that mind can perhaps extend beyond the physical bounds of neurology, Fenwick discussed the Near Death Experience. We only know about these, of course, from people who do not actually die. It was important, therefore, to find out when in the dying process the NDE occurs - as one falls into unconsciousness, during unconsciousness, or during recovery. Fenwick pointed out that an NDE has great clarity, the experiencer is fully engaged in it while it is going on, meeting and perhaps communicating with otherworldly beings, seeing fabulous landscapes and so on. This simply cannot be happening during unconsciousness after the heart stops, as all electrical activity in the brain ceases after a few seconds. During arousal from that state a person is confused and recovers consciousness only slowly. NDEs are too structured to be happening in any of these states. Our current models stipulate that no mental functioning can be occurring during the cessation of electrical activity in the brain, so if the NDE does indeed occur during that period (as experiencers believe it does) then a new explanatory model is required, and it will have to be one that will acknowledge the existence of consciousness beyond the brain. Fenwick described some experimental work that has been going on to try to instrumentally determine the exact time when NDEs occur, and outlined the difficulties involved in such research. He further outlined his proposed research project he wishes to institute if funding can be found: it involves fitting emergency rooms in a large number of hospitals with specific targets in such a way that they can be noted by a patient suffering cardiac arrest only if they truly leave their body - a common precursor sensation to an NDE.

The next speaker was Professor DAVID PETERS of the University of Westminster. His talk dealt with “Beyond Medicine: Values, Evaluation and Complementary Medicine”. While accepting that the “magic bullets” and high-tech treatments available through modern mainstream medicine are excellent, he wondered if we were losing sight of the big picture - whole body, whole mind. After all, illness happens to people, not molecules, and there are limits to a purely analytical approach. There is a popular notion abroad that when we are able to read the whole genome we will be able to understand everything about the human being. But we must question this, Peters insisted, for there is more to us than our molecules. He argued that we require a more complete medical account of the person, one that described the whole being from the biosphere down through the community and family into the organs, tissues, cells, etc. Such an account would also have to accept that we have co-evolved with other species, that we are entangled in the world, that self-regulation operates within the organism and that the whole body is intelligent within itself; that there is mutual interaction of mind and body, and that the individual is a dynamically adapting bio-psycho-social organism. He went on to detail some of these areas. During this, he explained that modern technology was allowing us to monitor the human body very closely, enabling us for the first time to observe subtle processes, such as how feeling states affect biological systems and interactions, or how people living together can develop similar biological rhythms, and that acupuncture can and does cause physical effects reliably and repeatedly.

The summary of Peters’ talk was that a new integrated form of health care taking into account whole mind-body processes is coming into view and will demand an extended description of the human being.

Professor CHRIS CLARKE, University of Southampton and former SMN Council Chairman, spoke next on “The Observing Subject in Science: Quantum Physics, the Mind and Reality”. He started off with the bold statement that there was no point in investigating telepathy, synchronicity, and the like, because we already know they are logically impossible in a universe like ours. Then came the big BUT - a lot of research has been showing that the universe isn’t really quite like we think it is. Clarke looked at how attempts have been made to use quantum theory to explain our macro-world of classical physics, but pointed out the problem of scale - no theory successfully overcomes the technical difficulties in bridging the gap between the sub-atomic, quantum level and our world of normal experience. If we believe that quantum theory (QT) only applies at quantum scales, then the sort of explanations such as non-locality used to explain phenomena like telepathy cannot be accepted.

But Clarke then began to set out his argument that if we change the interpretation of QT it can explain much more than we assume, even large-scale events. The supposition that QT can’t be used like this is simply because of the way it has developed over the century since its inception, interpreting quantum events in the context of a dominant classical physical model of the universe. The alternative (and somewhat startling) interpretation Clarke offered was that the physical, classical macro-world we know and love can in its entirety and at every level is described by quantum mechanics.

He then entered a technical phase in his presentation, somewhat difficult for a lay person (or, at least, for this quantum-physics-challenged reviewer) to keep up with, in which he looked at how a quantum universe might get to approximate a classical one. Among various elements of QT he particularly examined “decoherence” (the process by which the many probabilities existing virtually at quantum level are untangled producing a single version of reality at the macro level), “wave function” (a mathematical model to explain a quantum system; it has been found that every possible solution to the equation for the “wave function of the universe” describes a different possible universe and it is impossible to solve the equation so as to describe our particular universe), and the “histories” interpretation, relating to Richard Feynman’s argument that a quantum entity such as an electron would travel from point A to point B (perhaps through two apertures simultaneously as in the famous double-slit experiment) by every possible route at the same time. Each route is taken as a “history”.

Because the probabilities of each of these histories are not all equal, there is some interference between them like waves and most cancel out while others are reinforced, with the strongest approximating the classical idea of a trajectory in the macro-world, though not quite. (Don’t ask.) Clarke pointed out that one problem with the histories interpretation of how the weird and very small gets to be the (seemingly) normal and very large is that the theory implies some daft situations, as illustrated by Schrodinger’s celebrated thought experiment of a cat that was both dead and alive (“superposition”) inside a chamber of deadly gas until it was observed (“collapse of the wave function”) and became one or the other. One could only admire and at the same time feel intellectually humbled as Clarke explored, evaluated and critiqued these and other aspects of QT. The upshot seemed to be that Clarke was essentially challenging the assumptions of many workers in this field of research.

Clarke’s approach conjoined psychology and physics, for his suggested radical re-interpretation of QT incorporated another aspect, the proposal that everything in the universe has a subjective component, which this reviewer took to mean that there is as it were an “interiority” to the cosmos (see, for instance, Conrad Bonifazi’s The Soul of the World, U.P. of America Press, 1978) - an inside of the outside. In the case of human beings, he said, this was experienced as consciousness. He felt that the objective world emerges as a special case of this subjectivity. Taking a Kantian line, he stated that we pattern the universe as we observe. Overall, this proposal is in some ways similar to the essentially archaic worldview of “panpsychism”, which is becoming popular once more amongst some people engaged in consciousness studies.

The final presentation was by Professor BERNARD CARR, of Queen Mary College, University of London. His theme was “Beyond the Universe: Evidence of Other Worlds and the Limits of Testability”. In many ways, it was the sting in the tail of the day’s talks. He spoke about cosmology, which is trying to understand the entire physical universe, its nature, its origins, its extent, its ultimate end. In some eyes, apparently, cosmology is considered even now to be on the boundaries of “proper” science. Suspicion was always rife about cosmology because it has to incorporate philosophical and religious domains within its remit. Cosmology was not considered a proper science at all until the advent of General Relativity in 1915, when it took on the trappings of being a real scientific theory, reinforced with the discovery of the expansion of the universe in the 1920s and background microwave radiation in the 1960s.

The Big Bang theory finally established it as a study area worthy of mainstream acceptance, and predictions that cosmological facts would remain unknowable have been proven false because of the development of high technology and sophisticated instrumentation, allowing is to see far out into space and so far back into time, and to detect, monitor and closely examine radiations pulsing through the cosmos. Cosmologists now want to know what happened directly at (“time zero”) or immediately (say 10-42 seconds) after the Big Bang, and this involves theorising about quantum-level events. So cosmology now works on a canvas that extends from the sub-atomic to the inter-galactic. Theories about the origin of the universe have to be theoretical, mathematical, because the energies that would have been involved are so high as to be experimentally non-replicable - perhaps the only way to test such theories will be by the increased probing of the early universe by ever-advancing ways of seeing farther out into space.

The history of cosmology’s slow and begrudged acceptance as a science surely cautions against the premature accusation that a study area is not or cannot become a proper science. As Carr put it: “Perhaps therefore one should be prepared to change one’s view as to what constitutes legitimate science.” This argument becomes more acute when cosmologists consider the “Anthropic Principle” (AP). The AP is still considered fringe by many scientists, for in its various versions it basically says that the universe and life, including us human observers, share a unique and special bond, rather than life being a meaningless happenstance. We, life as we know it, can exist only because of a range of fine-tuned physical conditions - a series of cosmic coincidences. As one researcher has put it: “The universe must have known we were coming”. Anthropic interpretations of the universe’s fine-tuning for life range from the weak to the strong: from saying that given the laws of nature and the constants of the physical universe life would have to eventually emerge at a certain time in the age of the universe when conditions appropriate to its nurture came together, to suggesting that the universe was created with the intent that life should appear. The latter comes close to positing the existence of some kind of god-like being. When described in terms of “quantum cosmology”, the wave function of the universe requires consciousness to collapse it, so, in a sense, the universe only exists because we conscious beings observe it. You can’t get much more anthropic than that.

A batch of “multiverse” or “many world” models are now being considered in cosmology. These allow the idea that perhaps our universe is only one of many and that the conditions giving rise to conscious life in it may be peculiar to it, while the constants of other universes are tuned in different ways, have different relationships with one another. One theory emerging out of quantum cosmology posits that a new universe comes into being every time an observation is made - i.e. every time a wave function collapses. Another “many worlds” theory suggests that the universe expands and contracts in cycles measured in aeons, with the arrangements of the physical constants of each cycle being differently configured, only a few of which configurations allowing life to appear.

A third theory is that our universe is but a “brane” in a higher-dimensional “bulk”, and that there may be many branes existing in this directly unknowable higher dimensional state with collisions between them producing Big Bangs and so triggering new branes or universes. And there are more multiverse models being explored, any of which, if it could be proven correct, would be able to account for the AP coincidences. But Carr pointed out that even if one accepts that these anthropic fine-tunings derive from a multiverse selection effect there are still ambiguities about what determines the selection, or what qualifies as an observer. “Is it just human beings or life in general?” he asked. “Is some minimum threshold of intelligence required or does the mere existence of consciousness suffice?”

Most scientists would doubtless prefer that some fundamental theory like superstrings will determine the physical constants of our universe, squeezing out the need for AP-based solutions in favour of conventional models, but as Carr points out that wheel is still in spin, and may yet allow room for the AP in some form. “The most intriguing aspect of the anthropic principle is that it suggests that consciousness may play a crucial role in the physical Universe,” Carr comments in notes accompanying his presentation. Although consciousness is little considered by physicists, Carr argues that this is hardly justified considering that all physics is primarily concerned with observations which are at root conscious perceptions. There can hardly be a “theory of everything” if it does not take consciousness into account.

This day of intellectual heroism, in which issues of the sort SMN concerns itself with were given a powerful airing, was rounded off with a useful panel discussion. Psychologist Chris French, Goldsmiths College, University of London, joined the speakers to act as a constructive sceptic. The panel was chaired by Quentin Cooper and recorded for BBC Radio 4’s “The Material World”. An edited version of the discussion was broadcast on 11 September.

Paul Devereux is a research fellow of the International Consciousness Research Laboratory (ICRL) Group, Princeton, USA

Tapes of the day are available from Conference Cassettes. Enquiries: +44 (0) 1453 766 411 or email confcass@lineone.net