Metaphase Typewriter 2.0: a Preposterous Proposition

Nick Herbert: who will be first to heed his proposition?

  Metaphase Typewriter 2.0: A Preposterous Proposition

In the early 1970s I designed and built the Metaphase Typewriter, a machine intended to communicate with spirits, based on the assumption that somehow consciousness, human or otherwise, arises at the quantum level and that an open quantum channel producing human speech or text might be able to be “possessed by some discarnate entity" in a manner similar to the way trance mediums can be taken over by alternate personalities. The Metaphase Typewriter was inspired.by Jane Roberts's Seth books. I actually communicated through a friend with Jane's Seth entity asking if Seth could recommend some physics-savvy beings on the other side that might be motivated to speak through my new quantum-based channel. Perhaps some discarnate physicist might even aid in improving the typewriter's design. Seth replied that he was interested only in people not machines. No help there. 

 

Metaphase Typewriter 1.0

Pictured above, the MT 1.0 consisted of radioactive Thallium 204 exciting a Geiger counter (both inside yellow plastic tube) plus hardware (and software) to link the Geiger counts to a Data General Eclipse minicomputer, vintage 1974 (not shown).

As recounted in my Elemental Mind and David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics, we operated the MT in several “high psychic energy” environments, inviting notable local psychics to influence its pseudo-random text outputs, inviting a few recently deceased friends who knew about the Typewriter to reconnect if they could. An all-day session on a borrowed computer at UC San Francisco Medical School on Parnassus Ave was held on the 100th anniversary of Harry Houdini's birth, inviting the famous escape artist to perform one final trick via the new quantum channel we had supposedly opened up. Several remarkable synchronicities occurred during some of our sessions which suggested we might be on the right track but never did any understandable text or speech appear in the hundreds of pages of MT output. A taste of our metaphase efforts can be found here and here. And a typical MT printout looked like this:

WIRN OF ACERIONINE SE IND BE B WHAD ATHE OROVESSOUNDRO MAT PIND ASPAS HESUN UR D T CORE G LVIDESPANOUMO BIMARNAGLES HSTEAF NNAN A AITHIDIF PUTAMSUBENES T QUALOA ASELOTNULARE INE T THAPE ALLIGACAZOF WANE HT F A T G R ATHE FOVA WHISERDEM INOT ACRYRYIVESSTHENEMBOFO OR W WO WOMAD FORDISP AS HE WHA CO T T PLE F T OWRUS INIAIDITHE COR NITAL PIS D BEANSTO ARERS THESITIVENOVERLASESTEWONM IST MIGHIPOF A DUNKISHENT ISEAD RIENDUBE THERROIN.

It almost looks here as if coherent text is just about to emerge. But nothing like that ever happened.

From time to time during the fifty years since the Houdini Breakout Challenge I had wondered how the Metaphase Typewriter might be improved. Recently I was inspired to take up this question again after reading Irreducible, a new book by Federico Faggin (FF) who is famous for designing and building one of the first computers on a chip. In this remarkable book, Faggin does not merely vaguely speculate that consciousness is somehow quantum, he devises an explicit system in which Consciousness Is First and creates both matter, living systems and everything else for the purpose of experiencing, expanding and loving the One Big Wholeness out of which emanate humans and all other conscious beings. A very ambitious book, Mr Faggin.

Irreducible by Federico Faggin

Faggin distinguishes two level of conscious being. There are simple beings that possess only subjective experience whom he calls “thought forms” that play little part in the cosmic drama. Then there are beings, called Consciousness Units, or CUs, who possess, in addition to subjective experience, Seity and Agency. Seity (rhymes with deity) is a sense of selfhood and Agency is the ability to freely act, primarily by exchanging symbols with other Seities. Such conscious beings, possessing selfhood and agency (of which you and I are examples) are busy putting this world together, bit by bit, each in our own particular way.

So far, these conjectures are all fairly abstract but then Faggin gets specific by identifying each CU with its own quantum state. FF's conjecture reminded me of my own speculations along these lines inspired by Heisenberg's description of the quantum wavefunction as a “possibility wave”, half way between an idea and a fact. Consciousness does seem to feel like fuzzy waves of possibility that now and then condense into a definite fact. Faggin compares quantum statistics with the letter statistics of a language and notes that the meaning of an utterance is not in the statistics but in the unique utterance itself. In Faggin's model, the world is, in effect, spoken into being by many little quantum minds, which was the exact notion I invoked as inspiration to build a quantum-operated typewriter.

The quantum part of the MT is a sample of radioactive Thallium 204 emitting beta rays (fast electrons) into a Geiger counter. The statistics of the intervals between counts are combined with second order English language statistics to generate something that approximates English text. But I have often wondered whether my source was really “quantum enough” to connect with souls. 

First of all, a collection of decaying Thallium atoms is not a coherent quantum system such as the brain might be but is merely an accidental collection of independent actors who say one word on stage and then die. Better (more quantum?) would be some complex system that stayed on stage and could be interrogated again and again.

Secondly, the decay of an isotope does not fit the textbook model of a quantum measurement of how something (still mysterious) called a "measurement" turns quantum possibility waves into a single classical actuality.

A textbook measurement works like this. Given a particular unobserved quantum system you cannot simply ask “what's happening now?” because most quantum attributes cannot be simultaneously known. To do a quantum experiment you must choose a particular question: asking for position means you can't ask for momentum, and most other quantum attributes are as equally mutually exclusive or more so, than position and momentum. Choosing to measure this means you can't measure that. This necessary choice of what to measure is called the Heisenberg Choice.

Now that you've chosen what question to ask (and deployed the physical machinery necessary to ask it), then Nature's response to your question is called the Dirac Choice. If you asked about position, the wavefunction contains many possible positions, only one of which can be actualized, in a still mysterious (to physicists) process we call “the collapse of the wavefunction.” 

The decay of a collection of radioactive isotopes does not seem to follow this two choice format except perhaps in the sense that Nature might have already asked the Heisenberg question: At what particular time will this Thallium atom decay into Lead? And Nature answers the Dirac question  too by choosing, for each atom, one particular decay time. In the literature also, "time" is regarded by some as a dubious quantum attribute.

Borrowing Faggin's terminology, I was inclined to regard radioactive atoms as mere "thought forms" rather than small quantum souls possessing seity and agency. 

So for several such reasons, I remained unhappy about my choice of a radioactive source as the “quantum part” of the spirit typewriter. Atomic decay, I suspected, was simply "not quantum enough" to connect with the quantum souls that underlie ordinary reality. But I was never so imaginative to concoct a better quantum alternative nor so lucky to find a ready-made source that consisted of several coherent quanta that could be treated as a "seity" in Faggin's sense--a single quantum seity that could be interrogated (measured) again and again in the textbook style of making Heisenberg and Dirac Choices.

Until just a few days ago. Then motivated by reading the words of Federico Faggin, I suddenly realized that there already exists a perfect example of a system that precisely fits my specifications, a system that appears "quantum enough" to drive a very much improved metaphase typewriter.

Here is a photograph of such a real and presently operating physical system located not far from where I (NH) live, which houses a beautiful, robust and “fully quantum part” seemingly made in heaven to work as the “beating quantum heart” of Metaphase Typewriter 2.0. Thank you, Google, your plasmon-based 53-qubit Sycamore quantum processor is about as "quantum" as you can get in 2024.

Coogle's quantum computer

Nick's preposterous proposition is the conjecture that today's quantum computers are not really computers at all (sure, they can--noisily--compute) but these systems may actually be better suited to operate as easy gateways to new kinds of quantum soul to soul connections. connections that are difficult today for us to even imagine, so deeply hypnotized are all of us by the materialism-is-everything trance. The interfacing will certainly be a bitch, but your children will appreciate the essential part you played in transforming their humdrum lives into complex experiences beyond present human recognition.

With new orifices, apertures, holes, 

new meanings, new purposes, goals, 

we've opened our hearts

and our new private parts
to an invisible network of souls 

 

with our tantric antenna array 

we find new things to hear and to say 

to our lovers in bed

to the recently dead

to old minds with new kinds of play.