Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Precognition and Reality Part 1

                                                     Precognition and Reality  Part One
                                                                  by Robert Pollack

Prologue:
                Approximately forty years ago I had a pre-cognitive experience.   For that reason and several others, I became interested in the field of Para-Psychology.  After a while, I began to wonder how such a thing could be.  As a life-long puzzle solver I approached the problem as another puzzle and eventually came to a solution.  The purpose of this paper is to convey that solution to others.     


Introduction:
                    Let us say that you are leading a discussion in a room full of people and you pose the following question to them.  "A person has a pre-cognitive vision of a bridge collapsing  Six months later the bridge collapses exactly as he envisioned it.  When did the bridge "really" collapse".  Then you ask for a show of hands and ask, " how many believe it collapsed when he had the vision?" Maybe a few hands will go up.  Then you ask, " how many believe it collapsed when the people standing on the bridge felt it give out from under them?"  Probably the rest of the people will raise their hands.  However, there is a third possibility.  "How many believe it didn't collapse at either one of those times?"  This article will endeavor to explain why it is this third possibility that is the correct one.
                    One of the major axioms of physics is that all events are unique.  Therefore, the bridge can only collapse once.  So this is a situation where the same event is being observed at two different times and from two different perspectives.  This is the same scenario as Einstein's theory of special relativity.  As you may recall, he has one observer on the ground and another observer is on a train.  A ball falls from the sky and the observer on the train sees it somewhat later than the observer on the ground because he is moving away from the event.  Now, to me the important point is that the event, the ball dropping, takes place between the two inertial frames and eventually attaches itself to the inertial frame of the observer on the ground (discounting the possibility that the ball could fall into an open window on the train).  So now we have the collapse of the bridge occurring between two different inertial frames before attaching itself to one of them.  So the question is what are these two inertial frames?
               The only logical possibility is that there are two time lines.  One going from what we would call the future to the past.  And the one that we live on that goes from the past to the future.  These lines are somewhat parallel (explanation forthcoming) in the Lobachevskian sense; not in the Euclidean sense
                At this point I must digress.  To fully understand what I have to say, we must conjure up an image of the universe.  The best metaphor I can come up with is that of a giant balloon.  Imagine that all the planets, stars, solar systems, galaxies and whatever else is out there are all embedded in the surface of a giant balloon.  This balloon keeps expanding because God keeps blowing air into it.  If memory serves, I once read that the Hindus believe that the universe expands for about twenty-five billion years before it collapses back on itself.  When the universe stops expanding, I'm reasonably certain that  the effect will be like taking your finger off the valve stem of a balloon.  It will  probably                                     
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take the universe five hundred million years or less to collapse back on itself after it stops expanding.
            Now when you draw two non-Euclidean parallel lines on a flat sheet of paper it looks like the two end infinities are very far apart.  Keeping in mind that the universe is spherical, the two infinities are actually very close to one another.  When the universe collapses back on itself before the next "big bang" the two lines converge.  At the moment of the big bang, they diverge.  After that they become "parallel"  So now imagine the balloon where the time line we live on is coming around the front of the balloon and the other time line is coming around the other side of the balloon.  All things being equal, eventually these lines would meet and pass each other. However, the balloon (universe) is constantly expanding so there is always a gap between the two lines.  They never quite catch up to each other.
      So now, let us return to the collapsing bridge.  The collapse is first witnessed by someone who's consciousness was able to attach itself to the other timeline.  Then it was witnessed by people attached to our timeline.  But the event itself, took place between the two timelines and eventually attached itself to our timeline.  An important point is that there is a gap between the timelines.  So at the time of the pre-cognitive vision what is going to cause the bridge to collapse has not yet taken place on either time line.  Consequently, effects are fixed and determinate, but causes are indeterminate and probabilistic.  We can know what happened with certainty, but we can never know why it happened with any degree of certainty. 
      For example;  there are many possible causes that would lead to the collapse of the bridge.  Let us say that to the on site witnesses it was an overweight truck that caused the bridge to collapse.  In fact, the bridge had already collapsed before the truck ran over it.  So  rather than saying that the truck caused the bridge to collapse, it would be far more correct to say that the overweight truck was what enabled us to perceive the fact that the bridge had collapsed.
       This also enables us to understand why "psychically" derived information is of so little utility.  An astute practitioner may very well be able to "see" you in an auto accident.  That being the case, it is pointless to avoid automobiles because the accident has already happened and will eventually manifest itself.  However, what is going to cause the accident hasn't happened yet.   Since the chain of events leading to the accident is still undetermined the best one can hope for is amelioration as opposed to avoidance.

      In conclusion, we live in a universe where at least in some cases the effect precedes the cause and it appears that since effects are fixed, there may be multiple chains of causality which will lead to the same end result.

Precognition and Reality Part 2

                 Precognition and Reality Part 2

                           by Robert Pollack


     I'm not sure if it is in the original volume, "The Teachings of Don Juan" or in a later book                       
 of the same series but at some point Don Juan tells Carlos Castaneda that we never get to the present, "we are always one jump behind".  This is a short-hand way of saying that our sensory organs are constantly taking in input from our environment, sending this information to the brain through our nervous system,  then the brain gives us a picture of our environment, and the amount of time it takes to do this is finite.  I gave this a great deal of thought and wondered what if the reason that we can never get to the present is that the present doesn't exist?
      The first metaphor I came up with is that of a moving picture.  Everyone knows on an intellectual level that there are gaps between the frames that are imperceptible to the viewer.  What if the universe is actually a series of still pictures with minute gaps between them that are synchronized with our brains in such a way we can't perceive them?  Then I came up with a somewhat better metaphor.  Let's say that you had a searchlight and every night you would turn it on and people would stop by and look at your light.  Then one day you call Cal Tech or MIT or some other such place and you ask them to send over their best engineer.  Then you have him or her make a switch that will turn your light on and off a hundred times a second.  (This is a number I pulled "out of my hat".  Later on I will explain how to determine the true "flicker rate" of the universe.)  So that night people gather around to look at your searchlight.  And what do they see?  A continuous beam of light.  The only people who know that they are really looking at a pulsating beam of light are you and the engineer.
     Since the two beams of light look identical to any observer, the question is what difference does it make?  Our entire technological civilization is based on our ability to compute certain quantities.  Length, area, volume, velocity and acceleration.  (I may be incorrect but no matter how abstruse the mathematics it still comes down to finding one of these quantities).  We think of all of these quantities as continuous variables.  If in fact, I am correct and we live in a pulsating universe that is constantly re-creating itself, then all these variables are discontinuous, phenomenological constructs  that do not exist in reality.
      Let me give a couple examples.
       A) You call a carpenter and ask him to make a shelf for you.  He takes out his measuring device (laser pointer, yardstick, etc.) and measures three feet.  He finds a board and measures off three feet.  He puts up the shelf and it fits perfectly.  There is only one problem.  At the point in time where the shelf would be exactly three feet long, the universe doesn't exist.  So rather than being an exact measure, we have to think of the quantity of three feet as a limit.  So the board is infinitely close to three feet in length,
 but not exactly three feet long.
       B) I am driving down the highway in Virginia and my speedometer says I am going eighty miles an hour and the officer who pulls me over tells me his radar gun clocked me at eighty miles an hour.  I patiently explain to him that I could not have been going eighty miles an hour because at the point where I would have been going exactly eighty miles an

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hour, the universe doesn't exist.  In fact I was going at a speed infinitely close to eighty miles but not exactly eighty miles per hour.  (Of course if I had really said that I'd probably still  be locked up in Virginia, rather than writing this from my home in Vermont)
       So now the question is, "what difference does it make?"  For all practical purposes, none whatsoever.  But there are two places that I know of where it does make a difference.
      I have read that physicists know that electrons change orbits but have never been able to detect an electron traveling between orbits.   This is because they don't travel between orbits.  Let's say there is an atom with 20 electrons in three orbits of eight, eight and four electrons.  What happens is, is that the atom flickers out of existence.  When it flickers back in, it knows that is has twenty electrons but doesn't care which orbit any particular electron happens to occupy.  So  the amount of time it takes an electron to change orbits is equal to the amount of time it takes the atom to  flicker out of, and then back into existence.
      The second place where it matters is the "speed" of light.  The measured speed of light is 186,000 miles per second squared.  If I am correct this is a phenomenological construct, just like any other velocity, and should be thought of as a limit, rather than an absolute value.  This means that in reality, the "speed of light" does not exist.  It is just another limit.  And as we pass through the limit of eighty miles per hour to get to the limit of eighty-five miles per hour, we can pass through this limit to some higher velocity.  Thus star travel  becomes a technological problem rather than a violation of the laws of physics.
       Astronomers are fond of telling us that when we look at the night sky we are seeing light from stars that existed billions of years ago and which may no longer exist.  If I am correct, every star we see in the sky exists right now and should a star cease to exist, it would immediately disappear.
       Before concluding I would like to say something about space travel.  If you were to ask someone the distance from New York to Chicago they would probably say about 950 miles.  Whether you walk, ride a bicycle, drive or fly the distance would be about the same.  However, there is a way to go from New York to Chicago and only travel two hundred miles.  You can get in a rocket, fly straight up one hundred miles. Stop. Wait for the Earth to rotate underneath you, and when Chicago is right below, fly straight down one hundred miles.  Now it is quite possible that it might take months or even years before Chicago is right underneath you.  In the meantime more distant places like Moscow or South Africa might only take days to get to.  I have the strong feeling that if we ever attain the technology for star travel what we will find is that stars that appear to be relatively close might be very difficult to get to while stars and even galaxies that seem impossibly far away, may prove fairly easy to reach.
       My final thoughts are these. If I am correct, it would be one of the great ironies of our age that all the "objective" concepts  we use to manipulate and modify our environment are phenomenological constructs which exist only in our brains while those "subjective" constructs which we dismiss as existing only in our brains, such as truth,

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justice, and beauty prove to exist in reality,  independently of our perceptions of them.