http://phys.org/news/2011-08-dark-illusion-quantum-vacuum.html
(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics is that galaxies and galaxy clusters rotate faster than expected, given the amount of existing baryonic (normal) matter. The fast orbits require a larger central mass than the nearby stars, dust, and other baryonic objects can provide, leading scientists to propose that every galaxy resides in a halo of (as yet undetectable) dark matter made of non-baryonic particles. As one of many scientists who have become somewhat skeptical of dark matter, CERN physicist Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic has proposed that the illusion of dark matter may be caused by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum. “The key message of my paper is that dark matter may not exist and that phenomena attributed to dark matter may be explained by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum,” Hajdukovic told PhysOrg.com. “The future experiments and observations will reveal if my results are only (surprising) numerical coincidences or an embryo of a new scientific revolution.” Like his previous study featured on PhysOrg about a cyclic universe successively dominated by matter and antimatter, Hajdukovic’s paper on a dark matter alternative is also an attempt to understand cosmological phenomena without assuming the existence of unknown forms of matter and energy, or of unknown mechanisms for inflation and matter-antimatter asymmetry. In the case of the fast rotational curves of galaxies, he explains that there are currently two schools of understanding the phenomenon. “The first school invokes the existence of dark matter, while the second school invokes modification of our law of gravity,” he said. “I suggest a third way, without introducing dark matter and without modification of the law of gravity.” His ideas (like those in the previous paper) rest on the key hypothesis that matter and antimatter are gravitationally repulsive, which is due to the fact that particles and antiparticles have gravitational charge of opposite sign. (Though like matter, antimatter is gravitationally attractive with itself.) Currently, it is not known whether matter and antimatter are gravitationally repulsive, although a few experiments (most notably, the AEGIS experiment at CERN) are testing related concepts. “Concerning gravity, mainstream physics assumes that there is only one gravitational charge (identified with the inertial mass) while I have assumed that, as in the case of electromagnetic interactions, there are two gravitational charges: positive gravitational charge for matter and negative gravitational charge for antimatter,” Hajdukovic explained. If matter and antimatter are gravitationally repulsive, then it would mean that the virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that exist for a limited time in the quantum vacuum are “gravitational dipoles.” That is, each pair forms a system in which the virtual particle has a positive gravitational charge, while the virtual antiparticle has a negative gravitational charge. In this scenario, the quantum vacuum contains many virtual gravitational dipoles, taking the form of a dipolar fluid. “We can consider our universe as a union of two mutually interacting entities,” Hajdukovic said. “The first entity is our ‘normal’ matter (hence we do not assume the existence of dark matter and dark energy), immersed in the second entity, the quantum vacuum, considered as a sea of different kinds of virtual dipoles, including gravitational dipoles.” He goes on to explain that the virtual gravitational dipoles in the quantum vacuum can be gravitationally polarized by the baryonic matter in nearby massive stars and galaxies. When the virtual dipoles align, they produce an additional gravitational field that can combine with the gravitational field produced by stars and galaxies. As such, the gravitationally polarized quantum vacuum could produce the same “speeding up” effect on the rotational curves of galaxies as either hypothetical dark matter or a modified law of gravity. As Hajdukovic explains, the effect of the stronger gravitational field can be understood by looking at what happens when an electric field rather than a gravitational field causes polarization. He gives an example of a dielectric slab being inserted into a parallel plate capacitor, which results in a decrease in the electric field between the plates. The decrease is due to the fact that the electric charges of opposite sign attract each other. But if the electric charges of opposite sign were repulsive instead of attractive, then the electric field would increase. Back to the quantum vacuum scenario, since the gravitational charges of opposite sign are repulsive, the strength of the gravitational field increases. In his paper, Hajdukovic also presents equations in support of this scenario, one of which allows calculating the effects of the gravitational polarization at different distances from the center of a galaxy, which are in good agreement with observations. He also derives the famous Tully-Fisher relation as a consequence of the gravitational repulsion between matter and antimatter. This relation is an empirical law based on numerical data collected by numerous observations of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and is still unexplained in the framework of dark matter hypotheses. Overall, Hajdukovic’s proposal lies in contrast with another concept proposed in the past few years by physicists Luc Blanchet and Alexandre Le Tiec. Although that idea also involves a dipolar fluid composed of gravitational dipoles, instead of being composed of virtual baryonic matter in the quantum vacuum, the dipolar fluid is a new form of dark matter. The dark matter is gravitationally polarized by the gravitational field of baryonic matter, such as massive stars and galaxies, which results in a stronger gravitational field. In other words, Blanchet and Le Tiec propose that dark matter in the form of gravitational dipoles of unknown nature can reconcile dark matter and Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) theory, a modification of gravity; on the other hand, Hajdukovic proposes that virtual gravitational dipoles in the quantum vacuum can lead to a stronger gravitational field. In the end, Hajdukovic notes that much more work needs to be done before claiming that this possibility is the correct one. For one thing, the rotational curves of galaxies are not the only phenomenon that can be explained by dark matter. Observations of the cosmic microwave background, gravitational lensing, supernovae, and other data can also be better explained by the existence of dark matter than without it. With many scientists currently investigating dark matter and other alternatives, Hajdukovic hopes that new answers will continue to be discovered. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00907/full
Opinion ARTICLE Front. Psychol., 22 August 2014 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00907 Future directions in precognition research: more research can bridge the gap between skeptics and proponents Michael S. Franklin1,2*, Stephen L. Baumgart2 and Jonathan W. Schooler1,2
Perhaps most central to the recent debate regarding the existence of precognition is work by Bem (2011). Bem (2011) time-reversed several classic psychology effects (e.g., studying after instead of before a test; being primed after, instead of before responding) and found evidence across nine experiments supporting precognition. Given the sound methodology and publication at a high-impact mainstream psychology journal, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, this work has prompted the attention of psychologists; and, not surprisingly, the response has been skeptical (Rouder and Morey, 2011; Wagenmakers et al., 2011). While we acknowledge skepticism and close scrutiny is vital in reaching consensus on this topic, given the equivocation surrounding the results, we propose that more research is needed. In particular, we suggest that applied research designs that allow for the prediction of meaningful events ahead of time can move this debate forward. Since it is not obvious how experiments that do not require explicit “guessing” of future events could be used for this goal, we give a general overview of two methodologies designed toward this aim. Physical Implausibility It is not unexpected that psychologists are most skeptical of precognition (Wagner and Monnet, 1979). This is likely due to their knowledge of the many illusions and biases that influence perception and memory. However, putting these cognitive biases aside, this work is often dismissed out of hand under the assumption that precognition would require overturning basic and essential physical and psychological tenets. Schwarzkopf (2014) illustrates this position: “… the seismic nature of these claims cannot be overstated: future events influencing the past breaks the second law of thermodynamics… It also completely undermines over a century of experimental research based on the assumption that causes precede effects” Some clarification is needed here. From a physics perspective, except for several processes studied in high-energy physics (such as B meson decay), non-thermal physics is time-symmetric, perhaps allowing the possibility of precognitive effects. The formalism of time symmetric physics has been used, for example, in the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory of radiation (Wheeler and Feynman, 1945) as well as in the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics (Cramer, 1986), in which quantum wavefunction collapse is described as being due to an interaction between advanced waves (traveling backwards-in-time) and retarded waves (traveling forwards-in-time). With regards to precognition, Bierman (2008) has proposed that coherent conditions present in the human brain allow the fundamental time symmetry of physics to manifest itself. Some quantum mechanical experiments can be interpreted as showing retrocausal influence where a decision at a future time seems to affect a past time. One example is Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment in which the way a photon travels through an interferometer (wave-like or particle-like) appears to be affected by a measurement decision made at a later time (Wheeler, 1984; Jacques et al., 2007). However, information transfer into the past (retrocausal signaling), as opposed to influence without information transfer, remains controversial since it has not yet been demonstrated experimentally. That said, there is no physical law which precludes retrocausal information transfer. There has been some effort put into experimental realization of retrocausal signaling. Cramer proposed that standard quantum mechanics allows the construction of a retrocausal signaling machine using quantum optical interferometry (Cramer, 2007). Though Cramer's work has reached an impasse (Cramer, 2014), an approach of using entangled systems for retrocausal communication may reveal a physical explanation for precognition. Lastly, it is worth noting, that ultimately whether any given theory can accommodate precognition or not is irrelevant; what is relevant are the data. Reliability Concerns Although it appears premature to rule out precognition from a physics standpoint, there have been concerns regarding the reliability of precognitive effects. In essence, the question boils down to whether there are in fact small, yet real, precognitive effects that are hard to pin down and require further study to isolate, or, whether the evidence for precognition is based on false-positives emerging due to biases in the research process. For a recent overview of these issues in psychology see the November, 2012 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science. Interestingly, a recent commentary (Jolij, 2014) notes the similarity between precognitive effects and those in social priming research. Indeed, both research areas report small effect sizes, replication difficulty, and specific “boundary” conditions (covariates) that moderate the effect (Wilson, 2013). Although researchers point toward meta-analyses to bolster their position, meta-analyses are also susceptible to bias and rarely lead to headway in controversial areas (Ferguson, 2014). The resemblance between precognitive effects and those seen in the mainstream psychological literature has been used to leverage support for precognition (e.g., Cardeña, 2014); however, the difficulties of replicating other paradigms in psychology seems a dubious source of solace for the challenge of replicating precognition findings. Moreover, even if precognition results were robustly replicated as some meta-analyses have suggested, there is always the concern that there is some artifact driving the effect. As such, we suggest new directions for future research in precognition; one that can simultaneously address concerns about the robustness of the effects and the possibility that they are driven by unrecognized artifacts. Future Directions in Precognition Research What would provide the most compelling evidence for skeptics? Ultimately, we realize that the most convincing demonstration would be to show tangible effects applied in real-world settings. If a paradigm can make accurate predictions about events that people consider important and are incapable of predicting using standard means, then the significance of the paradigm becomes self-evident. Perhaps most compelling would be if an experiment could be devised to predict games of chance and/or the whether it will be a good or bad day on the stock market. Although a few reports exist in the literature of precognitive applications, in particular those that utilize associative remote viewing (predicting silver future: Puthoff, 1984; stock market; Smith et al., 2014), there has not been a single replicable methdology that has translated into consistent winnings in games of chance. Below we give a brief overview of two experiments designed to predict the outcome of random1 binary events in real-time (specifically, the outcome of a roulette spin, black vs. red, excluding green; see Figure 1). FIGURE 1 Figure 1. The left side displays the experimental design of two-phase Go-NoGo precognition task: (A) 4 random polygons are displayed individually on screen for 1 s at a time. Shape A is (arbitrarilly) associated with RED, and Shape B is associated with BLACK. During phase 1 all participants are told to press the spacebar only when shape A and B appear (the “Go” shapes, colored green), and withhold responses to shapes C and D while these responses and reaction times are recorded. In phase 2, particpants only respond to one “Go” shape. As seen in (B) the phase 2 shape is determined by a roulette spin outcome2. As such, the precognitive influence of phase 2 practice on phase 1 performance (e.g., improved detection of the shape practiced in the future) would allow for a real-time prediction of the future practice shape, and hence the future roulette spin outcome. On the right, is an overview of the experimental design of the “applied” EEG presentiment experiment: (C) Short duration visual or auditory stimuli are randomly presented to participants (equal probability). For the purposes of roulette spin prediction, each stimulus type is arbitrally associated with an outcome (Visual—RED, Auditory—BLACK) (D) EEG is continuously recorded from occipital electrodes (O1/O2). Prior to assigning a stimulus, a prediction is made based on a comparsion of the pre-stimlus interval to the baseline. Specfically, if voltage is positive relative to baseline, predict VISUAL (bet RED); if voltage is negative relative to baseline, predict AUDITORY (bet BLACK). The left side of Figure 1 presents a general overview of one approach. This experiment is based on work designed to examine whether extended future practice in some domain can extend backwards in time to influence prior performance. The original experiment designed toward this aim used a novel 2-phase Go-NoGo experiment (Franklin, 2007). In phase 1 of the experiment, all participants complete an identical Go-NoGo task in which individual shapes are presented for a second, one at a time, on a computer screen. Each stimulus either requires a response (“Go”) or not (“NoGo”). Participants are told to respond (using the spacebar) to shapes A and B and withhold responses to shapes C and D. In phase 2, participants are randomly divided into 2 groups with each group responding exclusively to a single shape (A or B). The rationale is akin to the subtraction method/additive factors methodology (Sternberg, 1969). If phase 1 performance is influenced by only past experience, then there should be no difference in reaction times or accuracy based on future condition assignment. If, however, phase 1 performance is influenced not only by past experience, but future experience as well, systematic differences in performance based on phase 2 condition assignment should emerge. As seen in Figure 1B, by mapping shapes A and B to outcomes of the roulette spin (RED and BLACK), it should be possible (assuming a genuine precognitive effect) to use phase 1 performance to predict the roulette spin outcome before the wheel is spun. Next we describe an experiment using EEG to detect predictive anticipatory activity (PAA; Mossbridge et al., 2014); also known as presentiment, the finding that various physiological measures of arousal are higher preceding the onset of emotionally charged vs. neutral pictures that are randomly presented (Bierman and Radin, 1997; Radin, 1997; Bierman and Scholte, 2002; Spottiswoode and May, 2003; Mossbridge et al., 2012). The specific methodology below extends work reported in Radin (2011), in which the pre-stimulus EEG activity of experienced meditators was found to differ significantly in response to light flashes and auditory tones. As seen in Figure 1, by mapping the light flash and auditory tone to a binary target (RED vs. BLACK roulette spin) and by evaluating baseline and pre-stimulus EEG potentials in real-time, it should be possible to predict the state of a future random target, allowing above-chance retrocausal communication. Similar to the first experiment design, the results of the prediction can be compared against chance (50%) with an exact binomial test. Currently, pilot testing with this basic design is underway, along with additional testing to assess whether a stimulus (flash vs. tone) triggered by the appropriate symmetric pre-stimulus response (a “neurofeedback” condition; e.g., flash delivered when occipital EEG increases) can condition response patterns in anticipation to random stimuli determined by roulette spin; allowing for a retrocausal Brain Computer Interface (BCI). The design presented in Figure 1 has the benefit of more protection against anticipation/learning strategies (there is only one future event). Also, extended exposure to the future stimulus may strengthen the effect and allow for more time between the prediction, bet and outcome. Although the EEG experiment relies on fewer data points for each prediction, this method could lead to BCI applications and be more powerful due to the large number of trials collected within and across participants. Altogether, there appears to be no inherent confound in either design given sufficient sample size—i.e., we know of no conventional confound that could lead to consistent above chance prediction in real time of a roulette spin. As such, both designs are worth exploring in future research. Final Thoughts Despite the accumulated data, and recent positive findings in the literature, significant controversy remains regarding the interpretation of the evidence for the existence of precognition. Proponents find the combined results as compelling evidence in support of precognition, with similar (small) effect sizes to those reported throughout the psychological literature. Skeptics, however, question potential methodological and/or analytical confounds in those studies, as well as the physical plausibility of precognition. Both, however, agree regarding the profound implications if these bold claims are true. We suggest that although the current state of evidence does not quite merit proponents' strong claim of having demonstrated replicable precognition in the laboratory, the accumulated experimental evidence, combined with advances in theoretical physics, warrant further research. We believe the most effective way forward is through the development of paradigms that use software in real-time to predict meaningful future outcomes before they occur. As others have noted (Mossbridge et al., 2014) a new technology that uses behavior and/or physiology to consistently predict random future events above chance would certainly be a “game-changer.” Conflict of Interest Statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Footnotes 1. ^Although there is an important distinction between truly random vs. pseudorandom selection, since any genuine precognitive effect of future stimuli on past behavior/physiology should be independent of selection method, we do not distinguish between these for the purposes of this overview. 2. ^If the ball lands on green, re-spinning would occur until it lands on either black or red. References Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. J. Pers. Soc. 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Wilson, A. (2013). Social Priming: of Course it Only Kind of Works. Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists. Available online at: http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2013/09/social-priming-of-course-it-only-kind.html Keywords: precognition, retrocausality, psi, skepticism Citation: Franklin MS, Baumgart SL and Schooler JW (2014) Future directions in precognition research: more research can bridge the gap between skeptics and proponents. Front. Psychol. 5:907. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00907 Received: 26 June 2014; Accepted: 29 July 2014; Published online: 22 August 2014. Edited by: James M. Broadway, University of California Santa Barbara, USA Reviewed by: Imants Baruss, King's University College at The University of Western Ontario, Canada Daryl J. Bem, Cornell University, USA Copyright © 2014 Franklin, Baumgart and Schooler. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. *Correspondence: [email protected] French, English and Latin.
Some of them are easily readable, some of them are not. "Text on seven herbs and seven planets Text on seven herbs and seven planets. The text describes the therapeutic properties of the seven planets. In the manuscript tradition it was ascribed to Alexius Affricus, Flaccus Africanus or to the tradition of the Liber Kyranidarum Kyrani. Incipit 'Solsequium herba est omnibus nota collige ergo huius herbe flores', explicit: 'nulli reueles est vir sotil wil were he þat had him in hande, Explicit / salgia'. " Full list of manuscripts beyond Alchemy: http://britishlibra ry.typepad. co.uk/digitisedm anuscripts/ 2013/07/fancy- a-giant-list- of-digitised- manuscript- hyperlinks. html Collection of chemical, alchemical and medical recipes and texts on techniques and technology of various arts http://www.bl. uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay. aspx?ref= Harley_MS_ 3915 Miscellany of medical, culinary and alchemical texts and recipes http://www.bl. uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay. aspx?ref= Harley_MS_ 2378 Composite miscellany relating to medicine, alchemy and mathematics http://www.bl. uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay. aspx?ref= Harley_MS_ 3353 John Crophill, Commonplace Book including astrological prognostications, cookery recipes, medical and alchemical treatises and recipes http://www.bl. uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay. aspx?ref= Harley_MS_ 1735 Miscellany including medical treatises and recipes, alchemical recipes and charms (imperfect) http://www.bl. uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay. aspx?ref= Harley_MS_ 1602 Collection of chemical, alchemical and medical recipes and texts on techniques and technology of various arts http://www.bl. uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay. aspx?ref= Harley_MS_ 3915 A treatise on alchemy and medicine, and the Livre de Sydrac http://www.bl. uk/manuscripts/ FullDisplay. aspx?ref= Harley_MS_ 4486 Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces.
I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British university English department’s website. It includes details of assignments and a week-by-week reading list for the optional module ‘Postmodern Fictions’, and if the university is to remain nameless here it’s not because the module is in any way shameful but that it handily represents modules or module parts which will be taught in virtually every English department in the land this coming academic year. It assumes that postmodernism is alive, thriving and kicking: it says it will introduce “the general topics of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’ by examining their relationship to the contemporary writing of fiction”. This might suggest that postmodernism is contemporary, but the comparison actually shows that it is dead and buried. Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift – and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production. Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted. The reason why the primary reading on British postmodernism fictions modules is so old, in relative terms, is that it has not been rejuvenated. Just look out into the cultural market-place: buy novels published in the last five years, watch a twenty-first century film, listen to the latest music – above all just sit and watch television for a week – and you will hardly catch a glimpse of postmodernism. Similarly, one can go to literary conferences (as I did in July) and sit through a dozen papers which make no mention of Theory, of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. The sense of superannuation, of the impotence and the irrelevance of so much Theory among academics, also bears testimony to the passing of postmodernism. The people who produce the cultural material which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to, have simply given up on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will appear, to widespread indifference – like Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park – but then modernist novels, now long forgotten, were still being written into the 1950s and 60s. The only place where the postmodern is extant is in children’s cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers. This is the level to which postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop culture aimed at the under-eights. What’s Post Postmodernism? I believe there is more to this shift than a simple change in cultural fashion. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever. There is now a gulf between most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in the late 1960s, but not for the same kind of reason. The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them. Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far). Let me explain. Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening). By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenes physically in them. Great Expectations will exist materially whether anyone reads it or not. Once Dickens had finished writing it and the publisher released it into the world, its ‘material textuality’ – its selection of words – was made and finished, even though its meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its material production and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – only the meaning was the domain of the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of the programme – the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big Brother what it is, is the viewer’s act of phoning in. Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player. The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs). If the internet and its use define and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new era has also seen the revamping of older forms along its lines. Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer. Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money. It also favours phenomena like Ceefax and Teletext. But rather than bemoan the new situation, it is more useful to find ways of making these new conditions conduits for cultural achievements instead of the vacuity currently evident. It is important here to see that whereas the form may change (Big Brother may wither on the vine), the terms by which individuals relate to their television screen and consequently what broadcasters show have incontrovertibly changed. The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way. A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future. The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert. Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adapt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time. The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years dominated by postmodernism. Dance music and industrial pornography, for instance, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (dance much more so than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of their ‘reception’: dance music is to be danced to, porn is not to be read or watched but used, in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation. In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete. To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them. There have long been very ‘active’ cultural forms, too, from carnival to pantomime. But none of these implied a written or otherwise material text, and so they dwelt in the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts – whereas the pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the central, dominant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatised as ‘passive’ against pseudo-modernity’s ‘activity’. Reading, listening, watching always had their kinds of activity; but there is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a necessity to his or her actions as regards the composition of the text, as well as a domination which has changed the cultural balance of power (note how cinema and TV, yesterday’s giants, have bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first century’s social-historical-cultural hegemony. Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual, but ephemeral. Clicking In The Changes In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980. Those born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem elitist, dull, a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them. Those born before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity. Hence the name ‘pseudo-modernism’ also connotes the tension between the sophistication of the technological means, and the vapidity or ignorance of the content conveyed by it – a cultural moment summed up by the fatuity of the mobile phone user’s “I’m on the bus”. Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock. Along with this new view of reality, it is clear that the dominant intellectual framework has changed. While postmodernism’s cultural products have been consigned to the same historicised status as modernism and romanticism, its intellectual tendencies (feminism, postcolonialism etc) find themselves isolated in the new philosophical environment. The academy, perhaps especially in Britain, is today so swamped by the assumptions and practices of market economics that it is deeply implausible for academics to tell their students they inhabit a postmodern world where a multiplicity of ideologies, world-views and voices can be heard. Their every step hounded by market economics, academics cannot preach multiplicity when their lives are dominated by what amounts in practice to consumer fanaticism. The world has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity – monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold. Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists. This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded. © Dr Alan Kirby 2006 Alan Kirby holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Exeter. He currently lives in Oxford. http://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond The Big Idea: Werner Loewenstein’s ‘Physics in Mind’ Feb 8, 2013 4:45 AM EST Former Columbia University physiology and biophysics professor Werner Loewenstein tells us what physics and quantum computing have to do with the brain in his new book, Physics in Mind.
Alfred Pasieka/Getty What's your big idea? How cells in our body transfer information to each other has been an old fixation of mine. Here, in Physics in Mind, I address the question of how information is transferred inside our most complex organ, the brain. I present an amazing set of molecules which achieve what the avant-garde of our computer scientists is only now hoping to: quantum computing. These molecules have been at it for eons—they were engineered in the oldest workshop on earth: evolution. And they wield unheard of computing power; they manage to harness the immense amounts of information inherent in quantum waves. Quantum particles can behave like particles or like waves—all elementary particles will behave that way, including small atomic nuclei. And as waves, they will produce characteristic interference patterns caused by waves arriving out of step or in lockstep. It’s in the latter state, when their peaks and troughs all coincide, that these waves hold immense information amounts. And this is the state—a unique state of energy and matter quantum physicists call quantum coherence—that those remarkable molecules exploit. Strategically located in sensors of the brain, they extract information from the environment and run it through round after round of quantum computations—they are the brain’s windows to the world. ‘Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain’ by Werner Loewenstein. 352 pp. Basic Books. $29. Against that backdrop, I put forth the hypothesis that quantum coherence is at the heart of the parallel information processing that goes on in the upper reaches of the brain and allows our minds to almost instantaneously deal with the staggering information amounts coming in through our senses. A quantum computer is a natural for that: by virtue of its very mathematical structure, it is a parallel information processor—a processor that is ultrafast and, given a sufficient information supply, virtually indefatigable. Up in the cerebral cortex, the neuron networks typically have multiple inputs, and the information coming from many different sensory channels gets processed in parallel. That part of the brain’s hard-wiring has been known for some time through the elegant work of neurophysiologists, probing the cortex and other brain regions with microelectrodes. It is this parallel information processing that the hypothesis addresses. A quantum-computing neuronal web will do this hands down. Rather than going through the tedious processing of information one piece at a time as ordinary digital computers do, a web exploiting quantum coherence will handle myriads of pieces simultaneously, saving precious time and brain space—in principle, one processing unit operating in the parallel quantum-computing mode is capable of doing what would require myriads of units operating in the sequential mode of standard digital computers. So the name of the game in the brain is quantum coherence. The state of coherence is short-lived—it is rapidly destroyed under the onslaught of countless quantum particles in the environment. In the quantum-computing molecules I mentioned, it lasts only a 10th of a trillionth of a second. But in the minute quantum world that’s enough. It is thanks to that instant of grace that we can see even the faintest glimmer of light. In what direction is our theory of mind going and will physics play a crucial role in it? In other words, what does the future of neuroscience look like? The question—What is the mind?—has for centuries been lying uneasily at the border of philosophy and science. But recast in modern times as the brain-mind problem, it has become more and more scientists’ territory, and these days, it is a natural meeting ground for biologists and physicists—it is the ultimate science frontier. And as I look at things from the common ground floor, the quantum bottom, I see the traditional boundaries between the two sciences vanishing into thin air. But I also am reminded of what Chairman Mao once said in the 1960s when asked what he thought of the French Revolution: “It's too soon to tell.” http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/bousso-susskind-hypermultiverse.html
The Bousso-Susskind hypermultiverse Leonard Susskind and Raphael Bousso are creative guys and famous physicists. Both of them are well-known for some papers about holography, too. Of course, the first scientist is still a bit more famous. They have just released a preprint to show that they're on crack and they are greatly enjoying it: http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.3796 The Multiverse Interpretation of Quantum MechanicsThe ordinary multiverse with its infinitely many bubbles whose possible vacuum states are located in 10^{500} different stationary points of the stringy configuration space was way too small for them. So they invented a better and bigger multiverse, one that unifies the "inflationary multiverse", the "quantum multiverse", and the "holographic multiverse" from Brian Greene's newest popular book, The Hidden Reality. Yes, their very first bold statement is that parallel universes in an inflating universe are the same thing as Everett's many worlds in quantum mechanics! ;-) Sorry to say but the paper looks like the authors want to stand next to Lee Smolin whose recent paper - as much crackpottish as any paper he has written in his life so far - is about "a real ensemble interpretation" of quantum mechanics. Bousso and Susskind don't cite Smolin - but maybe they should! And in their next paper, they should acknowledge me for pointing out an equally sensible and similar paper by Smolin to them. ;-) Just like your humble correspondent would always emphasize that the "many worlds" in Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics are completely different "parallel worlds" than those in eternal inflation or those in the braneworlds, these famous physicists say - On the contrary, they're the same thing! However, at least after a quick review of the paper, the drugs seem to be the only tool that you can find in the paper or in between its lines to convince you that it's the case. ;-) It's a modern paper involving conceptual issues of quantum mechanics, so it treats decoherence as the main mechanism to address many questions that used to be considered puzzles. Good. However, everything that they actually say about decoherence is a little bit wrong, so their attempts to combine those new "insights" with similar "insights" resulting from similar misunderstandings of the multiverse - and especially the way how outcomes of measurements should be statistically treated in a multiverse - inevitably end up being double gibberish that is cooked from two totally unrelated components such as stinky fish and rotten strawberries. “God Helmet” Inventor, Dr. Michael Persinger Discovers Telepathy Link in Lab Experiments December 16th, 2009 alex Neuroscience Researcher and Laurentian University professor, Dr. Michael Persinger, demonstrates telepathy under laboratory conditions.
Claims of telepathy, ESP and other psi phenomena are a mainstay of popular culture but taboo in neuroscience research circles. Fortunately, Dr. Michael Persinger of Canada’s Laurentian University has never been afraid to venture where other researchers fear to go. In the 1980′s Persinger made headlines with his “God Helmet”, a device that stimulates temporal lobes with a weak magnetic field in order to produce religious states. Now, Persinger has discovered the same type of brain stimulation can create metal states conducive to human telepathy. “What we have found is that if you place two different people at a distance and put a circular magnetic field around both, and you make sure they are connected to the same computer so they get the same stimulation, then if you flash a light in one person’s eye the person in the other room receiving just the magnetic field will show changes in their brain as if they saw the flash of light. We think that’s tremendous because it may be the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection, or so-called quantum entanglement. If true, then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical applications, for example, in space travel.” While Persinger’s experiments could prove groundbreaking, he remains doubtful about his controversial findings reaching his colleagues, “I think the critical thing about science is to be open-minded. It’s really important to realize that the true subject matter of science is the pursuit of the unknown. Sadly scientists have become extraordinarily group-oriented. Our most typical critics are not are mystic believer types. They are scientists who have a narrow vision of what the world is like.” http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/1795-accelerating-universe-dark-energy-illusion.html |
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