Some Lines For Henry Stapp

Henry Pierce Stapp

SOME LINES FOR HENRY STAPP
(celebrating his 91th birthday)

The essence of quantum entanglement 
is correlated readiness to respond.
--  H. P. Stapp

Consciousness is our reward 
for collapsing the wavefunction.
--  H. P. Stapp

Light glistening thru the glassy air
Undulates like waves you float on
Until light strikes some open eye
Which turns it into actual photon.

This is the world of the Quantum Mechanic
Not the Butcher nor Baker nor Cook:
It's possibility waves when unregarded
It's an actual particle whenever you look. 

In utter darkness safe from leerers
Huge Waves of Maybe surged and swam
But when I turned to look at them
They turned to little Bits of Am.

But what means "looking"? Where to go?
You'll have to ask Professor Joe
And Joe asks Sue and Sue asks Dick
And he asks Ruth and she asks Nick
Who gives them all a dirty look
And recommends they buy his book.

Though looking any kid can do
Dumb physicists don't have a clue
How using your bare sense of sightness
You wrench real matter out of mightness.

In the land of Merely Possible
Every living thing would die
My cat must feast
On actual meat
And so must thee and she and I.

I cite Stapp, my Muse, Saint John and Wigner
We all assume what "looking" means:
That particles emerge from waveness
To satisfy some sentient creature's needs.

At whatever level life awakens
It lurks there feeling waves go by
Consults its belly, reaches out --
Then waves turn into apple pie.

Henry Stapp at Esalen Seminar on the Nature of Reality

Dark Pool of Light

Beaver (Invisible) Swimming Through Reflection of Moon, Manset, Maine

One afternoon in the late 60s, I walked into Ron Thelin's Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street--planet Earth's very first head shop. The bulletin board was filled with personal messages, ads for goods, services and rooms. Off to one side I spotted a sparse message that concisely expressed the spirit of the 60s. "I am looking for marvels," it said. Plus a phone number.

All my life, I have been looking for marvels too, not satisfied with the surface of things. I compulsively read science fiction and haunt used book stores, constantly searching for fresh ideas. During my graduate studies at Stanford I worked part-time at the EastWest Bookshop in Menlo Park (now in Mountain View) which at that time was the largest occult book store on the West coast. So I tempered my reading of the occult works of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac with large doses of Manly P. Hall, Arthur Avalon and Aleister Crowley. Somewhere in this potent mix of Eastern and Western wisdom texts I came across a journal called Io, edited by Richard Grossinger. Grossinger was looking for marvels too and was publishing in Io various essays by himself and others on such high-weirdness topics as "Alchemy", "The Doctrine of Signatures", and "Oneirology". I recently learned from Wikipedia that almost 50 different volumes of Io were produced.

Richard Grossinger has written dozens of books--all composed in the same marvel-seeking style reflected in the pages of Io. His numerous books include Planet Medicine, Bardo of Waking Life and the autobiographical New Moon. From New Moon I learned that Richard is a member of the clan that started Grossinger's resort in the Catskills, linchpin of the legendary Borsch Belt where famous performers such as Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers and Henny Youngman made their debuts. In 1977 Grossinger and his wife, poet Lindy Hough, founded North Atlantic Books to promote their own works and the works of like-minded friends.

Now Richard has turned his marvel-obsessed mind to the most profound unsolved mystery of modern times--the problem of consciousness.

Grossinger's newest book Dark Pool of Light approaches the phenomenon of human consciousness from a dozen different directions, biological, psychological, mystical, prophetic and indeterminate. Dark Pool of Light is a physico-poetic symphony of words informed not only by Richard's reading in science but by his experiences at the Berkeley Psychic Institute and his participation in several other maverick mind-science ventures from Maine to California. Dark Pool of Light is obsessive, excessive, poetic, confessional, exhausting, touching, boring and brilliant--all at the same time. A truly remarkable literary performance.

Then just when you think he's done, he's not. Richard can't seem to get off the stage. The last dozen pages he calls "Deleted Scenes" consisting of snippets that were cut from the main text but considered too good to throw out. I read these gems first. I'm glad they were included.

There's something in this book (which runs to 3 volumes) for everyone--something to complain about and something to adore. Dark Pool of Light is like an astonishing high-wire performance at Grossinger's Catskills resort--you really want to keep watching this crazy-risky guy just to be there when he falls on his face. Well worth the price of admission.

But I'm not entirely unbiased concerning Richard's audacious intellectual high-wire act. The forwards to this book--the opening acts for Spielmeister Richard Grossinger--are short riffs by Nick Herbert and Jeffrey Kripal. Grossinger's Borsch Belt--it is alive and well!

Jabir Meets Earth's Underlords

JABIR MEETS EARTH'S UNDERLORDS

No, we really don't live on zeta reticuli
We wallow in human lives and in your deaths.
We really don't run saucers from alpha centauri
We are as near to you as your breaths.

When he lowered his shields
by taking psychedelic mushrooms
we came inside Jack Sarfatti
and gave him his skit about hitler.

We give you hunches, insights, dreams and stock tips.
We are Muse, demon lover;
we are Lord and Lady Luck.
We can make you king, tycoon, genius or president.
And we can really fuck you up.

To connect with us and do us homage
Nick Herbert smokes too much marijuana.
But we are responsible for most of his physics
and for every single line of his poetry.

(Including this.)

Our daily meat is human passion
We feed on greed, religion, fear and fuck.
We help the predator kill his bloody breakfast
We help the prey escape thru bloody luck.

Thru his submission to the Golden Dawn
and thru the automatic writings of his wife
we fed splendid metaphors for Irish poetry
into the hungry mind of William Butler Yeats.

(Twas we not he what won Willy's Nobel Prize.)

Roman Catholics called us guardian angels
and evil demons tempting innocents to sin.
But every ruler, every genius owes us gratitude
And we originated all atrocities that's ever been.

We on a whim disguised some few of us as "Seth"
took over Jane Roberts' beautifully submissive larynx,
and with her and husband Rob's permission
dictated lots of best-selling manuscripts.

Is there a God? Ask Richard Dawkings.
(We ourselves don't really know.)
Is there a Satan? Ask the Pope.
You want personal contact with a billion alien beings?
Then join a holy roller church in Oakland.
Or smoke some killer dope.

(Write it down, Nick: This too is a door.)

You're sure you want to meet inhuman aliens?
You're brave enough to risk your ego's death?
Then strip off your bloody armor, man. Invite us in.
We're closer to you than your breath.
We've always been.

Four Preposterous Devices

Metaphase Typewriter Hardware

But will she Lunarate on the first date?

The goal of quantum tantra is to open up new connections with Nature, using insights derived from quantum physics, to join human minds with one another and with the myriad invisible minds around us. There are hints of quantum tantra in the works of Schopenhauer, Wordsworth, and many science-fiction stories, but few have so concisely expressed the aim of the quantum tantrika better than deep ecologist Ted Roszak in his book Where the Wasteland Ends:

Suppose this ability we have to find something of ourselves in people should be expanded so that the same personal transaction occurred with animal and plant.

Suppose that ability began to reach out further still, discovering a reality of inventive pattern and communicative vitality even in what we once regarded as the dense, dead stuff of the world.

Suppose the whole of creation began to speak to us in the silent language of a deeply submerged kinship.

Suppose we even felt urged to reply courteously to this address of the environment and to join in open conversation.

Ah yes, what then? In my search for radically new communication channels with Nature, I have conceived, built and tested four Preposterous Devices, four real quantum machines whose premises are so silly that they almost certainly will fail to work. However, if even one of these devices strikes gold, it would change our concept of the Universe in a big way. I am encouraged in my quixotic quest by the fact that although we know a good deal about how matter operates, we know almost nothing about the way our own consciousness works and are supremely ignorant about non-human forms of awareness. And each one of my Preposterous Devices, which include the Metaphase Typewriter, the Quantum Metaphone, the Stellerator and the Lunarator, depends for its alleged operation on the X factor of consciousness.

The purpose of the Metaphase Typewriter (now retired due to decay of its radioactive core) was to provide a communication channel for discarnate spirits. The premise behind its operation is that quantum processes are so Heisenberg-uncertain that they can be manipulated by spirits. (Perhaps you too are a spirit manipulating your body via quantum processes in your brain.) The Typewriter consisted of a radioactive source, a Geiger counter and a computer interface. The quantum-random Geiger pulses were used to drive a typewriter whose operation was biased by second-order English language statistics. (We got these statistics from an unclassified NSA publication.) The Typewriter was tested in many "high-psychic-energy" environments--most notably an all-day event in San Francisco to contact the spirit of Harry Houdini. As one might expect when dealing with random events, several amusing coincidences occurred in these experiments but never any prolonged clear text from the other side.

The Quantum Metaphone uses the same quantum-random hardware as the Typewriter but is hooked to a Votrax speech synthesizer and biased with second-order English speech statistics. Robert Anton Wilson described the output of the Metaphone as sounding "like a Hungarian reading Finnegans Wake". The one psychic we exposed to the Metaphone (Matthew Manning) found it irritating and opted to influence (unsuccessfully) the quantum text generator.

Both the Stellerator and the Lunarator are attempts to quantum-entangle two human minds by exposing their eyes to coherent light. (The silly premise here is that quantum-entangled retinas might lead to quantum-entangled brains which in turn might entangle the associated minds.) The intent is to experience new forms of intimacy not accessible to those still mired in classical ways of thinking about the world. Since looking at laser light might be dangerous, I decided to use safer and more natural sources of coherent light, namely the Moon and the stars.

Visible stars possess a "radius of coherence" of several feet or larger so that when you and your partner look up at a star (and are close together) you are standing inside that star's coherence radius. But you are also standing inside lots of other star's coherence discs. The Stellerator is merely a hollow tube which allows you and your partner's retinas to be excited by light from the target star and no others. Does communal consciousness ensue when two or more people look thru tubes at the same star? The Stellerator was first tested by a gang of happy amateurs immersed in an Esalen hot tub on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean under the starlit sky. No huge increase was observed in our already high level of conviviality.

The alleged effect of the Stellerator depends on the LARGE coherence radius of visible stars while the operation of the Lunarator depends on the SMALL coherence radius of moonlight. The coherence discs from the Moon are small enough to fit inside the light-adapted pupil of the human eye. In the Lunarator, moonlight is split by a half-silvered mirror so that half goes into his eye and the other half goes into hers. There is a sense in which you two are both competing for the same photons. I have built a version of the Lunarator but have not yet tested it. One a priori reason for doubting the possibility of Lunarator-induced empathy is that even if the Lunarator only induces a common mood (no signaling), it is easy to show that the presence or absence of such a mood could be used for signaling, and that signaling could, in principle, be superluminal.

I present these brief notes on Preposterous Devices to give some notion of the direction of research at the Quantum Tantric Ashram and hope that others may be inspired to develop even more preposterous quantum machines that will succeed in changing the consciousness of the experimenters in new and entirely unexpected ways.

Could you be
my quantum mate?
Let's go outdoors
and Lunarate.

Sun and Allan test out the Stellerator

Does Consciousness Create Reality?

Schrödinger's Cat: 1/2 alive and 1/2 dead at the same time?

Does consciousness create reality? Seems like a big topic for a little blog post. But because I will be considering ONLY EXPERIMENTAL ATTEMPTS to answer this big question I can skip almost all the philosophical verbiage and cut to the chase.

When we wake up and open our eyes, there's the world. But was it there before we looked? The notion that consciousness creates reality (called subjective idealism) has a long history but only recently with the advent of quantum physics has there been any opportunity to put this important question to experimental test. Unlike classical Newtonian physics which appears compatible with objectively existing substance, certain features of quantum mechanics (QM) do indeed suggest that consciousness might play an essential role in bringing the world into existence.

QM describes the world in two different ways, depending on whether the world's looked at or not. When it's not looked at, QM represents the world as mere POSSIBILITY WAVES. When it's looked at, some of these possibilities become ACTUAL EVENTS.

Unfortunately physicists do not agree about what it means "to look"--and we call this fraternal disagreement the "quantum measurement problem." The physics majority believes that what is necessary for looking is "a machine that makes a record". But how does one go about building a solid record-making machine using only possibilities as parts?

Some physicists believe that "something extra", something outside of quantum mechanics is needed to resolve the measurement problem. Some have suggested that consciousness might be the magic trick that turns airy-fairy quantum possibilities into hard actuality. An impressive minority of physicists including John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Pascual Jordan, Henry Stapp, Robert Mills, E.H. Walker, Euan Squires, Fred Kuttner & Bruce Rosenblum have argued that consciousness plays a fundamental role in the quantum picture of things.

The mascot of the measurement problem is Schrödinger's Cat who is placed in a box with a quantum device that has 50% possibility for killing the cat and 50% possibility for feeding the cat. According to Schrödinger's own quantum equation, the cat is 1/2 dead and 1/2 alive until somebody looks in the box.

In the case of the cat, the measurement problem reduces to the question: "Does a conscious being need to look in the box, to make the cat alive or dead? Or is that question already decided inside the box itself by an irreversible process (record-making device) such as the breaking with a hammer of a jar of poison?

In the past few years at least three experiments have been proposed to test whether or not consciousness is necessary to collapse the wavefunction. The first is a thought experiment due to Bedford and Wang from University of Natal in South Africa. Instead of a cat, B & W imagine a situation in which a quantum system either opens slit A or slit B in an optical interference experiment. In the case where the quantum odds are 50/50 both slits are open at the same time in the same manner as the cat is 50/50 alive and dead. Because both slits are open, an interference pattern should be observed. However if someone looks at the slits, the wave function collapses, only one slit is open at a time and no interference is observed. If B & W are correct, this setup unlooked at produces optical interference but when a mind intervenes the interference vanishes.

A bunch of us including Amit Goswami, Saul-Paul Sirag, Casey Blood and Ludvik Bass (Schrödinger's last graduate student) considered this problem for many months. We called our quest the AMY Project. After much discussion and calculation, the AMY team concluded that Bedford & Wang were wrong. No matter what happened in their experiment--looking or not--no interference would ever be observed. The B & W experiment, we decided, fails as a crucial test for mind-created reality.

A second approach to catching the mind in the act is due to Abner Shimony and his students at Boston University (see "the Boston Experiment" in Elemental Mind) and Dick Bierman at the University of Amsterdam. Shimony and Bierman propose the existence of a perceptual difference between you personally collapsing the wavefunction and you merely witnessing a wavefunction that some other mind has previously collapsed. To test this conjecture, they set up an experiment (see diagram below) in which two observers are looking at identical detectors and a hidden switch decides which observer gets to see (and presumably collapse) the quantum event first. This imaginative test of the mind-created reality hypothesis has so far yielded inconclusive results. If minds create reality, these minds apparently do not find it easy to perceive what this creation process feels like.

A third approach to testing the mind-created reality hypothesis is due to Roger Carpenter & Andrew Anderson at Cambridge University (pdf). In the C & A test, two observers both look at the same quantum system but Observer A gets a random output and Observer B gets an output that tells whether Observer A's result is true or false. Thus the putative mind-created reality does not come into existence UNTIL BOTH OBSERVERS SHARE THEIR DATA. So C & A have two separate channels by which consciousness can create reality: 1. break the code by sharing data or 2, directly observe the quantum system. In a wholly quantum world, there is no reason why these two separate methods of looking should lead to the same reality. But they always did--which led C & A to conclude in favor of an objective collapse model of reality.

To this trio of mind-matter experiments I should probably add my own work with the metaphase typewriter which was a quantum system (Geiger counter and radioactive source) coupled thru speech statistics to an electric typewriter. Inspired by Jane Roberts' Seth Speaks, I had hoped that the MT might operate as a quantum spirit medium and function as a clear communication channel for a discarnate entity as talkative as Seth. But no spirits ever took over my metaphase device during the year or so that it was in operation.

Does consciousness create reality? So far there is NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE from quantum physics that supports this bold conjecture.

On the other hand, so far there is NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE for the Higgs boson or for even one of the many, many new particles predicted by the Supersymmetry conjecture. Yet physicists continue to look for these things.

I hope this brief review of experiments designed to test the quantum mind hypothesis will inspire others to improve on them. Coincidentally the primary quantum system in every one of these tests was a radioactive source and a Geiger counter, a 100-year-old technology which seems as primitive as a flint ax when compared with the sophisticated quantum systems now routinely available in today's physics labs. Seems to me it's time for the mind-created reality hypothesis to be probed by light-sensitive CCDs, electron-tunneling flash drives, Bose-Einstein condensates, phase-entangled photons and the Heisenberg-uncertain qubits in quantum computers. Physicists, put on your hi-IQ thinking caps. Ladies and gentlemen, start your quantum engines.

Diagram of the Shimony-Bierman Experiment

James T Culbertson (1912-2004)

For most of his life James T. Culbertson taught mathematics, computer science and philosophy at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA, but Culbertson's life-long passion was his struggle to discover how to give consciousness to robots and how to test for the presence of consciousness in beings, such as ourselves, who possess it naturally. His first book The Minds of Robots outlines his SRM (spacetime reductive materialism) model of awareness and his later books develop SRM in more detail. All of Culbertson's books are quirky, repetitive, difficult to grasp and have the feel of texts written by an obsessive genius. For many years my friends Saul-Paul Sirag, Jerry White and I corresponded with Culbertson, invited him to seminars and even spent a delightful few days in a trailer in back of Jim's house in SLO listening as the master expounded his eccentric model of mind. Jim once joked that I was the only one who understood his theory and he put the JTC stamp of approval on my bare-bones outline of SRM in Elemental Mind.

In Jim's model of mind, consciousness arises from causal networks in spacetime. And since most of spacetime is criss-crossed with causal networks, consciousness is ubiquitous. Culbertsonian mind is a species of panpsychism. But most of this universal consciousness doesn't go anywhere; it just sits there in spacetime as isolated bits of experience. No memories, no sense of self, no flow of time. But just as material atoms can be used to build complex structures, so can Culbertson's atoms of awareness be linked into more complex experiences somewhat resembling the kinds of consciousness we humans enjoy. Some of the details of how to build more complex minds out of elemental experiences can be found in Culbertson's Sensations, Memories and the Flow of Time (which JTC fans refer to affectionately as SMATFOT).

At present we are entirely ignorant as to how consciousness becomes present in the material world so Jim's elaborate guess is as good as any. Its complexity and quirkiness may argue against it but SRM has one attractive feature that sets it apart. It offers a mechanical method for testing for the presence and the quality of consciousness in other beings. In Culbertson's model it is possible to create a network of "clear loop links" between the networks that constitute separate minds in such a way that each mind will directly share the experiences of the other.

Thus, using what I have elsewhere called "Jim Links", Culbertson's model has solved in principle the philosophical problem of "Other Minds". Does a cat enjoy an inner experience? Does a blade of grass enjoy photosynthesis? With a Jim Link these questions could be answered directly. As Culbertson once put it, the privacy of inner experiences is a mere biological accident and could in principle be overcome by technological means. Whether Culbertson's theory is viable or not, it sets a high standard for any rival model of mind: does it satisfy the Culbertson Criterion? Can it be tested by constructing mind links between allegedly conscious beings?

A world in which Jim Links exist would surely make possible new forms of both eroticism and interrogation but I suspect that the Opening Up of Inner Space to Direct Exploration will be the most profound event in human history, changing the human species beyond recognition.