B E R K E L E Y ' S M E T A P H Y S I C S
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WHAT IS REMOTE VIEWING?
Remote viewing
For two and a half decades, from 1972 to 1995, a secret programme of research into psi phenomena was carried in the USA, with funding from federal government agencies. The primary objective was to use telecognition for spying. For instance, a remote viewer would sit in a darkened room in California and mentally observe the layout of an embassy in Moscow. A secondary objective was to use telepathy for secret long-distance communication, again for intelligence-gathering purposes.It was at first carried out at Stanford Research Institute in California, funded initially by the CIA and later by other government agencies. In July 1995, the US government declassified 270 pages of documents from the project, which has since received considerable publicity, usually in connection with `remote viewing' (the military term for clairvoyance). The material released so far, however, is probably only the tip of the iceberg: "It is estimated that more than 80,000 pages of program documents remain highly classified" according to the Society for Scientific Exploration. In addition, it has been reported that a large number of documents were shredded before the closure of the program in 1995.
Modelling telepathy and telecognition
An ordinary mind is closed under normal operations of mental access. To achieve telepathic exchange, that closure must be breached. Some experientia must, in effect, become included in the minds of both telepaths.Telecognition operates on a different basis. I have suggested earlier that in normal perception the following events occur: a request signal' is conveyed from the percipient to the metamental engine, which directs it to the appropriate metamental object; that in turn will produce a response signal' containing the experientia appropriate to perceiving the corresponding object; and it will convey that response signal back via the metamental engine to the percipient. This communication is managed by the metamind, in two ways. First, the metamind attaches to the request signal some details of the observer's whereabouts, so that the metamental object can generate imagery for the correct perspective; and the metamind will synchronise request signals from different senses, so that e.g. you can see and hear someone talking at the same time. Second, it will handle the returned response signals, organising them into a coherent, synchronised pattern.
In telecognition, the person will by-pass the metamind. She will convey the request signal directly to the metamental object, and she will then handle the returned response signal herself.
Targetting is a key problem in telepathy and telecognition. If person A wants to convey a telepathic message to person B, how does person A specify the intended destination? By what navigational mechanism is the message steered to the correct mind? How does person B know which messages are intended for her? Likewise, if a subject wishes to telecognise a remote site, how does she specify that site? By what mechanism is the request signal navigated to the target site? How is the response signal steered back to the originator?
Two hypotheses may be entertained to explain navigation in acts of telepathy and telecognition. I shall call them the soup model' and the spaghetti model'. In the soup model, the metaverse is thought of as an unstructured, directly content-addressable soup of mental stuff: to pick out a telepathic target or a telecognitive target, you just focus your mind on some distinctive detail of the required target, and it will be selected by a universal pattern-matching power, and the target will automatically respond. On the other hand, in the spaghetti model, to locate a target, you must trace a path through the intentions of other minds to the target.
Although it seems to be popular, I do not see how the soup model could ever work. In order to pick out an individual telepathic recipient, you would have to have a very clear mental picture of her, in order to differentiate her from possibly hundreds of other people on the Earth who have a similar appearance. Moreover, there are many experiments in which the telepath or telecognant is given only the barest of information. For instance, in the remote viewing programme initiated by SRI, the target for telecognition can be given geographic coordinates, or encrypted coordinates, or a random number looking like coordinates, or the word Target", with equal degrees of success.
Therefore, I propose the spaghetti model. To see how this works, consider the remote viewing experiments as an example. The monitor has a mental intention of the target, and it is evident that the remote viewer picks up on this. That, however, is clearly not enough, for the viewer must then navigate from the monitor's intention to the target itself. In the monitor's prior experience there must have been some direct or indirect contact with site. For example, she might have seen a photograph of the site, which might now be in a folder beside her. The viewer must therefore pick up on that picture, and from that picture link to the target itself. The existence of those spaghetti-like connections requires that every act of perception or volition leaves a permanent and navigable psychic link.
Those links are implied by the basic Berkeleian model of perception. Recall that, according to the Berkeleian ontology, things exist only when perceived. So, you must tell objects when you are observing them, so they will know to render themselves in perceptual form, which you can then perceive. Consider, for instance, the desk in front of you. Your visual perception of it exists only when you are looking at the desk. The perception is not just sitting there wait for you to experience it. Therefore, when you open your eyes and look at the desk, you must send a signal of some sort to the metamind (which will be directed to metamental object of the desk), to trigger its generation of the requisite perceptual experientia. So, whenever you perceive something, you must convey a request signal' to its metamental object, which then conveys back a response signal' containing the experientia that make up your perceptual sensations. In order to deliver that response signal, the metamental object must have a return route: so the request signal must have created a link, by means of which the metamental object can direct its response back to you. (Otherwise, how would you ever receive the experientia that the metamind has generated for you?)
In the extratemporal domain of the metaverse, those links are always accessible. Hence a subject can at any time connect into any such links that have been established, and follow them to their targets.
So, the model of telecognition is that the subject makes a direct connection to to some pre-existing link; and, rather than sending a request signal to the metamental engine in normal manner, she sends the request signal along that link, directly to the metamental object. The metamental object neither knows nor cares whether it has received this signal from an ordinary observation or a remote observation. That object then uses the same link to convey the response signal back to the subject, again bypassing the metamental engine, and thereby delivering perceptual experientia.
This model has clear implications for testable experiments. I will outline two experiments here, to illustrate a research avenue that I think would be worth while pursuing.
© Peter B. Lloyd, 1999. Last modified 28th February 2000.
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