If you skim through YouTube, you’ll find videos on the nature of reality. Some are very good. Among the good, I count those like the discussion at Dartmouth between physicist Sean Carroll and Buddhist authority Alan Wallace. Good? Because it recalls a topic that underlies most previous human discussions on reality and hints at the concept Descartes held, i.e., the mind-body duality.
Is the world “real,” or do we just “think” it’s real? Framed another way, the question centers on whether or not either mind or body exists independently. If neither does, then which one is dependent.
Incoming Old Man’s Anecdote Alert: Dive, dive, dive
I didn’t have the typical high school life. I chose to enter a Catholic boarding school that encouraged meditation before the crush of daily study, lectures, and recreational activities clouded students’ minds. Up and meditating at 5:30 AM for about a half hour daily in my teen years was a process that convinced me that we are not, as Sean Carroll seems to argue in the video, merely physical entities composed of interworking subatomic particles and quantum fields driven to act under the influence of the four fundamental forces in Nature—and maybe some forces or fields we have yet to discover. Although I do agree that those physical entities are at work, I have long suspected that mind is more than brain and more than the gut bacteria that seem to exert some control over who we are.
Mind exists separately in my view and in spite of experiments on “readiness potential” that show our awareness of acting proceeds only after the brain works to initiate an action. And, “No,” before you ask, I do not think my mind preceded my having a brain or those gut bacteria. Additionally, “No,” I do not believe in a Star Wars Force that in a tradition similar to Buddhist thought permeates the physical universe and allows telekinesis. Finally, “No,” I also don’t think the ancient Greeks’ nous (νοῦς) warrants a belief in anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις). Whatever I share with others is neither a matter of deja vu nor a matter of a priori. But I will admit to humans having inner and reptilian brain segments that drive some behavior like the instinctual reflex to ducking one’s head after a sudden unexpected loud sound. However, I do think that minds can intertwine themselves even when brains are separated though I have no proof other than…
The Experiment
With classmates similarly trained (practiced) in meditation, I sometimes found myself practicing mind games, such as staring at the back of someone’s head in an assembly and suggesting merely by thinking that he should turn around. To our collective and to my individual surprise, the process seemed to work as efficiently as getting others to yawn by yawning but unlike the latter, accomplished without direct observation. In running the experiment we had to ask whether we were giving away our intention by some physical activity like breathing heavily or twitching in our seats as we stared or that one of us was caught ij the subject’s peripheral vision. Possibly we were giving some physical sign, but we made an effort not to do anything physically save staring and thinking. And at times, I performed the experiment alone with equal success. With no way save repeated attempts to verify the effect of one mind on another outside sensory experience, I have to admit my conclusion is possibly faulty, very faulty. Yet, the experience seems virtually universal as script writers have revealed when they give a character the line, “I think someone is watching us.”
Telepathy or Experience?
And then there’s that reading someone’s intention or even completing someone’s sentence that you might have done. I acquired that latter ability through those hours of quiet contemplation to the annoyance of numerous speakers whom I rudely interrupted mid-sentence. How could I know the exact words they were about to say? Was it, as I believe anyone could reasonably argue, simply a matter of knowing the language and the common-speak? Anyone familiar with idiomatic expressions knows standard combinations of words, phrases, and clauses. Everyone shares a basic 20-40,000 word vocabulary. Let me illustrate: “She’s the apple of….” You completed that, of course, with “my eye.” That one goes all the way back to the biblical story of Eve and loose interpretations of the famous Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden as an apple tree. (Leave it to parochial westerners to think “apple” and not “fig” or “date”)
All well and good for idioms and common English similes and metaphors, but I found myself capable of completing even those expressions less frequently used, those I might call unique to the circumstance of the moment, before—I’ll emphasize BEFORE—a person expressed a thought in words. Sometimes, I said the sentence as a person began to speak. Strange, but again, explicable as a simple response to the context of a conversation in the limited idiom of a single, familiar language.
Experience is a great teacher as we know, and as the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (New American version). How do we learn language, idiom, and culture? Immersion in the sea of repetitive examples is one answer. The brain records the thousands of leagues we spent under that sea and makes the seamounts, reefs, and life we passed available on Nemo’s demand or on the surprise blurting of a lowly seaman named Broca, “Cap’n, sir, we saw this last year. Remember?”
So, maybe I had no ability to read a mind in a non-physical sense. Maybe I had no ability to link my mind to another’s. Instead, I was simply recalling how I had heard words used to describe or explain something analogous, something very familiar. That is a legitimate thought given that we compose songs, write lyrics and poems, pen lengthy stories all on the bases of patterns like the six or seven basic literary plots, the frequencies on the standard music scale and 12 notes in an octave, common chords, and the rhythms like iambic pentameter and rhymes like “fish” and “wish” we have learned. If you need some anecdotal evidence on this, then I suggest you watch the YouTube video entitled “Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles).” Is there an alternate interpretation of my completing another’s thought? Maybe I was improvising with words as musicians do with notes in a Bourbon Street bar.
Certainly, I don’t use all English words. Definitely, a search of my last 2,000 blogs reveals I’m not the Bard whose plays contain 25,000 unique words. Willy would be the ultimate challenger in the game Scrabble, definitely one I could not beat unless I had by chance picked the “Q,” “U,” “X,” “J,” “C,” “H,” and “V” while he had only letters valued 1, like the vowels.
I know at least the average number of words, so anticipating what another average speaker might say could be attributed to mere guesswork and not telepathy.
Separating all we have experienced from all we might do is quite possibly impossible. A statement like “This reminds me…” is the most superficial of examples revealing the connections our brains make effortlessly. Nevertheless, I tend to believe I’m onto something legitimate in saying minds are nonlocal. I believe I have communicated with others in the sense of influencing their behavior as in the staring experiment.
What, then, Are We to Make of Empathy?
Was it Clinton who said, “I feel your pain”? Could he have been lying? He did, after all say, “I did not have sex with that woman, opening the linguistic door to all sorts of meanings for the word sex. Sorry, got distracted. “Feel the pain of another”? Is the validity of that statement as questionable as “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
And since I mentioned Shakespeare above, I should also bring up acting, the ultimate joining of one mind with another, even an imaginary other. Actors do this on two levels, one in their portrayal within a fictional world and the other in their connection to the audience’s world. Hey, I’ll admit, I got teary eyed when Spock died in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and during the scene in Interstellar when Coop visited an elderly Murphy who said her dad promised he’d return. I “felt” for other characters who experienced tragic moments. How was I connected? I especially ask, “How was I connected to fictional characters?” They weren’t “real” like a brick except in the minds of the writers, actors, and audience. Is the empathy simply an expression of an overwrought narcissism? “The world is nothing if not about me. That death could be mine as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.”
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
So, no connection to others save in their modeling what might happen to me? Spock’s death is my eventual death; Coop’s separation is mine. The empathy isn’t outward. It’s intensely inward. The inner brain simply reacts to a personal danger. And nothing is more personal than death, especially the first death we encounter, as Dylan Thomas writes, “After the first death there is no other.” And as the early existentialists obsessed, the dread or anxiety we experience lies in knowing that we, our friends, and family are all destined to die, our mortality binding our emotions to our reasoning, our minds linked in a common knowledge.
Mind Control
Those who argue the world is meaningless because it acts without mind rely on those fundamental forces, fields, and particles acting randomly. And then to confuse us, they throw in a puzzling fact. The fate of “particles” and wave phenomena seem somehow dependent on observation as though mind is interlocked with “body.” The analog is Schrödinger's cat whose life and death are in superposition and unknown until someone or some recording instrument opens the box. Just because phenomena occur doesn’t mean we conscious beings cause them to occur. What if we’re merely late to the party? The DJ had already announced the next song before we took off our coats and threw them on the bed.
In anticipating and then saying the sentence another person was about to speak was I in control or being controlled? It is possible that the other’s mind influenced me to utter words that after uttering, I attributed the process to my telepathy. Was I merely taking visual or audible clues to their logical end? Maybe I merely anticipated that the road was either a cul-de-sac or an Interstate.
The Big Nous
Not a Force as in Star Wars, but an omnipresent Deity? I think of statements like Christ’s “Before Abraham was, I am.” Or of Yahweh’s “I Am Who Am.” Both statements hint at an overriding and suffusing Mind, timeless. Existence Itself aware of Itself. This is, of course, a root western thought that personalizes Nous and sits at the heart of Creation. The Cosmos is the product of Omniscient Mind, not of the quantum vacuum and unconscious Nothingness. The delicately balanced forces that enable life and consciousness could not have been random unless an untold number of universes exist, most unfavorable to life; most unfavorable to Mind, but one—this One—uniquely primed to foster its potential.This one imbued with mind by Mind.
The physicists reject this. But isn’t rejecting an act of mind? The mind can’t, as Augustine of Hippo pointed out in De Trinitate, deny its existence. What would do the denying? Any denial is itself a confirmation.
Out of Body Experience
In the YouTube video of Carroll and Wallace’s discussion, Wallace calls for a science of mind, postulating that a number of people devoted to meditation and examining mind gathered over an uncertain number of years could arrive at a science of mind. But “science” entails quantification though there are many who now argue the validity of qualitative research, especially those in the social “sciences.” The problem for those who would establish a science of mind as distinguished from, say, the “science”of psychologists and neuroscientists, is that both of those document behavior and electro-biochemical reactions clearly observable in some manner (e.g., direct observation or fMRI) whereas there is no current indisputable way to measure, for example, out-of-body episodes (OBE) other than through reports on psychedelic drug use or chance fMRI imaging during an unpredictable OBE driven by some Shirley McClain trip to the Andes.
Where Does This Leave Us?
It’s a personal matter, this mind business. I know by experience that I seemed at times to have connected to other minds, and one of those connections was far more dramatic than any of the others. My spouse and I experienced an intertwining that seems impossible and inexplicable. In the college dining room in the midst of clinking silverware, dishes, and glasses punctuating others’ loud conversations, we had for a moment a joint OBE, an experience that we both describe as being somehow above our physical nature, somehow sparkling and twinkling above us at the apex of a triangle formed with our two heads at the base angles, a kind of pyramid of joining, not some dollar bill eye at the top, but our minds and those proverbial “bells” people mention. It didn’t last long, but while it did, the “outside world”—that “objective one” through which we move the way matter becomes matter by interaction with the Higgs boson—faded away. We were minds interlocked.
Was it chance hormonal activity driven by the proximity of pheromones? It didn’t seem so. It seemed both at the time and in retrospect a real “joining” of minds that we still speak of occasionally.
But nothing in my personal experience with mind can be quantified like matter under the influence of fundamental forces, particles, or fields. Not vector definitely, but scalar possibly? I’ll grant that latter designation because the experience we had in the dining room was certainly “intense.” So, if Wallace’s volunteers of mind-students can develop a science of mind, the measurements will probably be scalar, the measuring devices like thermometers not speedometers.
The acknowledgement that mind exists separately from body, the door is open for mind to exist beyond body, even beyond death. Could its continued existence account for ghost stories, communication with the dead, the efficacy of prayer? The Afterlife?
Personal experience has opened me to accepting a universe of possibilities I cannot quantify. It opens me to accepting a level of or type of existence best described as spiritual. Unlike the physicist, I cannot relegate myself to a dull atheism with regard to the origin of mind, dull because it cannot admit its own contradictory tenets that allow a mind to deny its existence as different from brain activity.
I know I have not resolved all you might have hoped for. I have not reached a definitive answer. I might even have infuriated you. I’ll say it once more: If I have given you a point of departure for your own thoughts, I’ve done my job. We might never have a meeting of the minds. That’s all right—except just saying that hints that we have minds.
Is the world “real,” or do we just “think” it’s real? Framed another way, the question centers on whether or not either mind or body exists independently. If neither does, then which one is dependent.
Incoming Old Man’s Anecdote Alert: Dive, dive, dive
I didn’t have the typical high school life. I chose to enter a Catholic boarding school that encouraged meditation before the crush of daily study, lectures, and recreational activities clouded students’ minds. Up and meditating at 5:30 AM for about a half hour daily in my teen years was a process that convinced me that we are not, as Sean Carroll seems to argue in the video, merely physical entities composed of interworking subatomic particles and quantum fields driven to act under the influence of the four fundamental forces in Nature—and maybe some forces or fields we have yet to discover. Although I do agree that those physical entities are at work, I have long suspected that mind is more than brain and more than the gut bacteria that seem to exert some control over who we are.
Mind exists separately in my view and in spite of experiments on “readiness potential” that show our awareness of acting proceeds only after the brain works to initiate an action. And, “No,” before you ask, I do not think my mind preceded my having a brain or those gut bacteria. Additionally, “No,” I do not believe in a Star Wars Force that in a tradition similar to Buddhist thought permeates the physical universe and allows telekinesis. Finally, “No,” I also don’t think the ancient Greeks’ nous (νοῦς) warrants a belief in anamnesis (ἀνάμνησις). Whatever I share with others is neither a matter of deja vu nor a matter of a priori. But I will admit to humans having inner and reptilian brain segments that drive some behavior like the instinctual reflex to ducking one’s head after a sudden unexpected loud sound. However, I do think that minds can intertwine themselves even when brains are separated though I have no proof other than…
The Experiment
With classmates similarly trained (practiced) in meditation, I sometimes found myself practicing mind games, such as staring at the back of someone’s head in an assembly and suggesting merely by thinking that he should turn around. To our collective and to my individual surprise, the process seemed to work as efficiently as getting others to yawn by yawning but unlike the latter, accomplished without direct observation. In running the experiment we had to ask whether we were giving away our intention by some physical activity like breathing heavily or twitching in our seats as we stared or that one of us was caught ij the subject’s peripheral vision. Possibly we were giving some physical sign, but we made an effort not to do anything physically save staring and thinking. And at times, I performed the experiment alone with equal success. With no way save repeated attempts to verify the effect of one mind on another outside sensory experience, I have to admit my conclusion is possibly faulty, very faulty. Yet, the experience seems virtually universal as script writers have revealed when they give a character the line, “I think someone is watching us.”
Telepathy or Experience?
And then there’s that reading someone’s intention or even completing someone’s sentence that you might have done. I acquired that latter ability through those hours of quiet contemplation to the annoyance of numerous speakers whom I rudely interrupted mid-sentence. How could I know the exact words they were about to say? Was it, as I believe anyone could reasonably argue, simply a matter of knowing the language and the common-speak? Anyone familiar with idiomatic expressions knows standard combinations of words, phrases, and clauses. Everyone shares a basic 20-40,000 word vocabulary. Let me illustrate: “She’s the apple of….” You completed that, of course, with “my eye.” That one goes all the way back to the biblical story of Eve and loose interpretations of the famous Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden as an apple tree. (Leave it to parochial westerners to think “apple” and not “fig” or “date”)
All well and good for idioms and common English similes and metaphors, but I found myself capable of completing even those expressions less frequently used, those I might call unique to the circumstance of the moment, before—I’ll emphasize BEFORE—a person expressed a thought in words. Sometimes, I said the sentence as a person began to speak. Strange, but again, explicable as a simple response to the context of a conversation in the limited idiom of a single, familiar language.
Experience is a great teacher as we know, and as the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (New American version). How do we learn language, idiom, and culture? Immersion in the sea of repetitive examples is one answer. The brain records the thousands of leagues we spent under that sea and makes the seamounts, reefs, and life we passed available on Nemo’s demand or on the surprise blurting of a lowly seaman named Broca, “Cap’n, sir, we saw this last year. Remember?”
So, maybe I had no ability to read a mind in a non-physical sense. Maybe I had no ability to link my mind to another’s. Instead, I was simply recalling how I had heard words used to describe or explain something analogous, something very familiar. That is a legitimate thought given that we compose songs, write lyrics and poems, pen lengthy stories all on the bases of patterns like the six or seven basic literary plots, the frequencies on the standard music scale and 12 notes in an octave, common chords, and the rhythms like iambic pentameter and rhymes like “fish” and “wish” we have learned. If you need some anecdotal evidence on this, then I suggest you watch the YouTube video entitled “Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles).” Is there an alternate interpretation of my completing another’s thought? Maybe I was improvising with words as musicians do with notes in a Bourbon Street bar.
Certainly, I don’t use all English words. Definitely, a search of my last 2,000 blogs reveals I’m not the Bard whose plays contain 25,000 unique words. Willy would be the ultimate challenger in the game Scrabble, definitely one I could not beat unless I had by chance picked the “Q,” “U,” “X,” “J,” “C,” “H,” and “V” while he had only letters valued 1, like the vowels.
I know at least the average number of words, so anticipating what another average speaker might say could be attributed to mere guesswork and not telepathy.
Separating all we have experienced from all we might do is quite possibly impossible. A statement like “This reminds me…” is the most superficial of examples revealing the connections our brains make effortlessly. Nevertheless, I tend to believe I’m onto something legitimate in saying minds are nonlocal. I believe I have communicated with others in the sense of influencing their behavior as in the staring experiment.
What, then, Are We to Make of Empathy?
Was it Clinton who said, “I feel your pain”? Could he have been lying? He did, after all say, “I did not have sex with that woman, opening the linguistic door to all sorts of meanings for the word sex. Sorry, got distracted. “Feel the pain of another”? Is the validity of that statement as questionable as “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
And since I mentioned Shakespeare above, I should also bring up acting, the ultimate joining of one mind with another, even an imaginary other. Actors do this on two levels, one in their portrayal within a fictional world and the other in their connection to the audience’s world. Hey, I’ll admit, I got teary eyed when Spock died in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and during the scene in Interstellar when Coop visited an elderly Murphy who said her dad promised he’d return. I “felt” for other characters who experienced tragic moments. How was I connected? I especially ask, “How was I connected to fictional characters?” They weren’t “real” like a brick except in the minds of the writers, actors, and audience. Is the empathy simply an expression of an overwrought narcissism? “The world is nothing if not about me. That death could be mine as Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.”
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
So, no connection to others save in their modeling what might happen to me? Spock’s death is my eventual death; Coop’s separation is mine. The empathy isn’t outward. It’s intensely inward. The inner brain simply reacts to a personal danger. And nothing is more personal than death, especially the first death we encounter, as Dylan Thomas writes, “After the first death there is no other.” And as the early existentialists obsessed, the dread or anxiety we experience lies in knowing that we, our friends, and family are all destined to die, our mortality binding our emotions to our reasoning, our minds linked in a common knowledge.
Mind Control
Those who argue the world is meaningless because it acts without mind rely on those fundamental forces, fields, and particles acting randomly. And then to confuse us, they throw in a puzzling fact. The fate of “particles” and wave phenomena seem somehow dependent on observation as though mind is interlocked with “body.” The analog is Schrödinger's cat whose life and death are in superposition and unknown until someone or some recording instrument opens the box. Just because phenomena occur doesn’t mean we conscious beings cause them to occur. What if we’re merely late to the party? The DJ had already announced the next song before we took off our coats and threw them on the bed.
In anticipating and then saying the sentence another person was about to speak was I in control or being controlled? It is possible that the other’s mind influenced me to utter words that after uttering, I attributed the process to my telepathy. Was I merely taking visual or audible clues to their logical end? Maybe I merely anticipated that the road was either a cul-de-sac or an Interstate.
The Big Nous
Not a Force as in Star Wars, but an omnipresent Deity? I think of statements like Christ’s “Before Abraham was, I am.” Or of Yahweh’s “I Am Who Am.” Both statements hint at an overriding and suffusing Mind, timeless. Existence Itself aware of Itself. This is, of course, a root western thought that personalizes Nous and sits at the heart of Creation. The Cosmos is the product of Omniscient Mind, not of the quantum vacuum and unconscious Nothingness. The delicately balanced forces that enable life and consciousness could not have been random unless an untold number of universes exist, most unfavorable to life; most unfavorable to Mind, but one—this One—uniquely primed to foster its potential.This one imbued with mind by Mind.
The physicists reject this. But isn’t rejecting an act of mind? The mind can’t, as Augustine of Hippo pointed out in De Trinitate, deny its existence. What would do the denying? Any denial is itself a confirmation.
Out of Body Experience
In the YouTube video of Carroll and Wallace’s discussion, Wallace calls for a science of mind, postulating that a number of people devoted to meditation and examining mind gathered over an uncertain number of years could arrive at a science of mind. But “science” entails quantification though there are many who now argue the validity of qualitative research, especially those in the social “sciences.” The problem for those who would establish a science of mind as distinguished from, say, the “science”of psychologists and neuroscientists, is that both of those document behavior and electro-biochemical reactions clearly observable in some manner (e.g., direct observation or fMRI) whereas there is no current indisputable way to measure, for example, out-of-body episodes (OBE) other than through reports on psychedelic drug use or chance fMRI imaging during an unpredictable OBE driven by some Shirley McClain trip to the Andes.
Where Does This Leave Us?
It’s a personal matter, this mind business. I know by experience that I seemed at times to have connected to other minds, and one of those connections was far more dramatic than any of the others. My spouse and I experienced an intertwining that seems impossible and inexplicable. In the college dining room in the midst of clinking silverware, dishes, and glasses punctuating others’ loud conversations, we had for a moment a joint OBE, an experience that we both describe as being somehow above our physical nature, somehow sparkling and twinkling above us at the apex of a triangle formed with our two heads at the base angles, a kind of pyramid of joining, not some dollar bill eye at the top, but our minds and those proverbial “bells” people mention. It didn’t last long, but while it did, the “outside world”—that “objective one” through which we move the way matter becomes matter by interaction with the Higgs boson—faded away. We were minds interlocked.
Was it chance hormonal activity driven by the proximity of pheromones? It didn’t seem so. It seemed both at the time and in retrospect a real “joining” of minds that we still speak of occasionally.
But nothing in my personal experience with mind can be quantified like matter under the influence of fundamental forces, particles, or fields. Not vector definitely, but scalar possibly? I’ll grant that latter designation because the experience we had in the dining room was certainly “intense.” So, if Wallace’s volunteers of mind-students can develop a science of mind, the measurements will probably be scalar, the measuring devices like thermometers not speedometers.
The acknowledgement that mind exists separately from body, the door is open for mind to exist beyond body, even beyond death. Could its continued existence account for ghost stories, communication with the dead, the efficacy of prayer? The Afterlife?
Personal experience has opened me to accepting a universe of possibilities I cannot quantify. It opens me to accepting a level of or type of existence best described as spiritual. Unlike the physicist, I cannot relegate myself to a dull atheism with regard to the origin of mind, dull because it cannot admit its own contradictory tenets that allow a mind to deny its existence as different from brain activity.
I know I have not resolved all you might have hoped for. I have not reached a definitive answer. I might even have infuriated you. I’ll say it once more: If I have given you a point of departure for your own thoughts, I’ve done my job. We might never have a meeting of the minds. That’s all right—except just saying that hints that we have minds.
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