The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Altered States of Reading (Part 2): Pynchon and the Psi Reflex

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Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling unfinished 1972 novel Gravity’s Rainbow centers on an American army lieutenant, Tyrone Slothrop, whose amorous conquests around WWII London infallibly predict German V2 rocket strikes in an otherwise random distribution throughout the city. Slothrop’s weird ability puts him under the scrutiny of “Psi Section”—a division of military intelligence—who link his strange gift to Pavlovian conditioning he experienced as an infant in the laboratory of a legendary mad-genius professor, Dr. Laszlo Jamf.

One of the unwritten rules of literary fiction has always been: Thou shalt not use ESP seriously as a plot device.

Over two decades earlier, Jamf had (it is suggested) used the infant Slothrop’s erections as the “target reflex” tied to an unspecified conditioned stimulus “X.” If not reinforced, conditioned responses (like having an erection when presented with whatever X is) tend to diminish or “extinguish”—albeit often not completely. However, a theoretical possibility suggested by Pavlov in a letter to Pierre Janet is that the conditioned response could extinguish more than completely, or “beyond the zero.” The idea in the novel is that Slothrop’s adult sexual response is the result of his infant conditioning extinguishing beyond totality and into a mysterious negative “transmarginal” realm, and this is the object of much speculation in the 760-plus pages of the novel.

I call Gravity’s Rainbow “unfinished” because no one who starts the novel ever gets to the end. What starts out as fascinatingly crazy becomes boringly crazy about half the way through, and the reader’s interest, so to speak, detumesces. Revisiting the book recently, however, I confirmed what I had already suspected, which is that the secret of Slothrop’s condition(ing)—the mysterious X—remains unanswered all the way through to an increasingly ambiguous outcome, in which the character descends into madness, and even the circumstances of his childhood—including the very existence of Dr. Jamf—are called into question.

This is to be expected: One of the unwritten rules of literary fiction has always been: Thou shalt not use ESP seriously as a plot device. Writers breaking this rule quickly get relegated to the ghetto of SF, which up through Phil Dick’s day remained very much a “trash stratum.” The genre gods exist to serve the dominant mechanistic paradigm. Pynchon scrupulously avoided Dick’s fate by keeping the real nature of Tyrone Slothrop’s “gift” ambiguous, and surrounding that character with materialists (e.g., Dr. Pointsman) bent on explaining it away rationally.

v2ascendingYet Pynchon clearly had a genuine fascination with parapsychology—he also wove PK experiments into his previous, much shorter novel, The Crying of Lot 49—so his ambivalence produced a kind of literary neurosis: Without descending into tepid realism, the only acceptable literary alternative is to postpone the answer, and keep postponing, in an endless spiral. The result is the kind of wordy symptom always produced by inability to be rid of a fascinating-yet-repellant remnant of the Real: A profusion of words and ideas that circle endlessly the void at its heart. (This unwillingness to accept or acknowledge the paranormal implications of the Real also accounts, I believe, for Slavoj Žižek’s descent into frenetic wordy repetition over the course of his career, but that’s another story.)

Yet neuroses can create a secure terrarium environment in which prophetic jouissance can sprout and even bear very interesting fruit; somehow Pynchon managed to quite uncannily precognize (or at least, anticipate) some of the most interesting modern developments in a theory of psi, which partly emerged from research conducted in the 1970s in California at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

Standing at Attention

For example, at SRI and in his time on the Star Gate program, physicist Edwin May noticed that when remote-viewing targets somehow involved high-energy discharges like nuclear tests, electromagnetic pulses, or rocket launches, the viewers were almost always dead on—much more accurate than with other targets. As a result, May has theorized that psi either orients toward, or is actually carried by, signals of extreme entropy change, things moving rapidly from a state of order to a state of disorder. May has also argued that, even when it seems to take other forms, psi is always basically precognition.

The behaviors that become associated with presentiment in adulthood may be culturally conditioned reflexes associated specifically with the repression of our psi functioning during the first few years of life.

The idea that psi is linked to entropy gradients could, May suggests, find some theoretical rationale in classical physics, where time itself is often understood as tantamount to the inexorable increase in entropy dictated by the second law of thermodynamics. Interestingly, in The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon had already homed in on the key entropy-vs.-information aspect of psi with his “Nefastis Machine,” a perpetual motion device whereby “sensitives” raise the internal temperature of a box and move a piston inside by focusing their attention on a picture of physicist James Clerk Maxwell affixed to its side. But the linkage of Slothrop’s premonitory organ to V2 strikes—which, because the rockets are supersonic, actually precede any audible warning—is a purer (and really, genius) expression of this linkage.

May clearly has hit on something important about psi. I’ve noticed that my most uncanny precognitive dreams and other premonitory experiences usually involve an entropy gradient of some sort, such as deaths, landslides, rocket launches and mishaps, explosions and fires, and breakages of household items. My life isn’t actually very exciting, fortunately, so more often than not I seem to be keying in on news reports of these events, or their signs and traces, not the events themselves (except for the breakages). This leads me to think that our unconscious preferentially attends to information about entropy gradients, whatever sensory channel we get it from, because it is relevant to our survival, and thus is part of a primitive threat-vigilance orientation.

In other words, I doubt the actual psi signal is somehow carried from the future via entropy or changes in entropy; in terms of May’s “multiphasic theory,” this would mean entropy gradients belong to what he calls the neuroscience domain, not the physics domain. (I discuss this question in the current issue of EdgeScience magazine as it applies to 9/11.) Recent advances in quantum computing provide a plausible (albeit still hypothetical) mechanism for how the brain could exchange information with itself through time, which I will discuss in a future post.

Pynchon was also prescient in linking psi to the most unconsciously willed of reflexes, the sexual response. Another big advance in parapsychology in recent years is the “first sight” theory of James Carpenter, a clinician and researcher at the Rhine Center in North Carolina, who assigns psi to the unconscious/preconscious realm as part of our basic adaptive mechanisms. Carpenter describes psi as the “leading edge” in our perception, and underscores how it operates in tandem with PK as really the root and basis of our engagement with the world. Carpenter doesn’t link it to sex per se, but his theory makes good sense of why psi seems to manifest itself most clearly in rewarding flow states and skilled engagement, a kind of enjoyment for which Slothrop’s compulsive amorous activity is a perfect metaphor.

v2courseAs argued in the previous post, it may not be accidental that the most prophetic writers have also been the most frenetic, churning out creative material at a rapid pace in order to bring in a meager income—which suggests that they (a) love it and (b) don’t have any better job prospects and (c) cannot be thinking too much about what they are doing. (An extreme form of this principle is automatic writing—or in our day, automatic typing—which is an exercise that can produce very interesting unconscious and precognitive material.) Again, this would link precognition specifically to the reward system of the mesolimbic areas of the brain, and to the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is released in these areas precisely to entrain our attention and activity on “the next thing,” whether threatening or rewarding.

Dopaminergic circuits are also involved in Pavlovian conditioning—the substitution of new behaviors and stimuli for more basic rewarding or aversive behaviors. As may have been the case with Tyrone Slothrop, the behaviors that become associated with presentiment in adulthood may be culturally conditioned reflexes associated specifically with the repression of our psi functioning during the first few years of life, when normal socialization (parental reward) compels us to be linear and reasonable in our thinking. Psi is both driven into the unconscious and possibly also somatized, leading to the hypothesis that many “hysterical” physical symptoms such as those Freud investigated in his patients could actually be precognitive signals that lack more straightforward expression. More generally, such signals could take the form of the completely nonverbal and non-verbalizable behavioral complexes that psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas called the “unthought known.”

Feed Your Psi Dolphin

Thus we shouldn’t associate “prophecy” solely with intellectual work and creative achievements like books or art or dreams; and it also isn’t remarkable or rare. Paranormal foreknowledge manifests unconsciously, unintendedly, and constantly in our lives, but often in ways we don’t want or intend, and almost always it gets lost in the chaos and noise. We are most in tune with it, though, whenever we are engaged in whatever skilled activity we are best at and most enjoy—whatever puts us in that Zen flow state that shuts down the critical mind. In Slothrop’s case, that is sexual seduction, but skilled physical activities of all kinds may be a fertile ground to look for psi. Esalen founder Michael Murphy wrote of transcendental and psychic experience in sports (including golf), and my guess is that it is in sports and martial arts that the most consistent and constant psi manifestations probably occur, yet we are not likely to become aware of them because these activities do not usually leave a paper trail. Athletes and fighters are generally not served by reflecting analytically or intellectually about what they are doing, the way writers are.

Precognition may not be seeing the future or knowing the future or even feeling the future, but instead producing a behavior that is tied to a forthcoming reward.

Acting, singing, playing a musical instrument, and other kinds of performances, when likewise engaged in with skill and complete immersion, are probably similarly conducive to psi. In the ancient world, prophecy manifested in song, for example, and this could help explain much of the psychic aspect of modern spiritualism and shamanism, as well as the overlap between genuine psi phenomena and stage magic, another highly skilled and semi-high-stakes activity that ought to take the critical left hemisphere offline temporarily. “Mixed mediumship” is the term for the oft-noted admixture of possibly real psi phenomena with stage trickery; Uri Geller, who impressed nearly all scientists who actually worked with him that his talents were genuine, nevertheless also used trickery in stage perfomances, which made it easy for pseudoskeptics like James Randi to call him a fraud.* SRI physicist Russell Targ reported to Jeffrey Kripal (Authors of the Impossible) that he received what he thought was real telepathic information while performing stage magic. It may not matter what the activity is, simply performing skilfully some behavior that consumes the left hemisphere’s attention, ideally with some physical component, seems to open the psi channel.**

There is also aviation, an occupation with notorious links to psi ability. As in athleticism or stage magic, piloting an aircraft requires senses attuned and alert, and puts the pilot in a thrilling, highly connected flow state. Flying also embodies and expresses precisely the bird’s-eye psychic view associated with threat vigilance. Examples of aviators claiming psychic phenomena are myriad—Amelia Earhart is reported to have used ESP to locate missing aircraft, for example. Some psychic aviators, fortunately, have taken up writing. One of the more naturally gifted psychics studied at SRI, for instance, was Richard Bach, pilot and author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who came to the attention of Targ and Hal Puthoff because that novel clearly indicated an experience with out-of-body travel, a common factor in the lives of the most gifted psychics (including Ingo Swann, Pat Price, and Joe McMoneagle).***

v2descendingMy point here is this: Because psi is best expressed as an unconscious reflex, it may be possible to adopt an ultra-reductive, behaviorist, even Pavlovian way of thinking about the problem, just as Pynchon does: Precognition may not be seeing the future or knowing the future or even feeling the future, but instead producing a behavior (it could be a dream, or a physical response, or an utterance, or a drawing, or a story) that is tied to a forthcoming reward. A premonition or hunch that pays off in a confirmatory action is part of a reward loop, entraining—literally, training, as in conditioning—the attentional faculty on future information. It may be that practices of skilled engagement ranging from aviation to stage magic to frenetic writing for the pulps not only open the door to psi by focusing the senses and occupying the critical, conscious mind but also simply condition the psi apparatus through providing constant rewards or payoffs that, via the magic of dopamine, propel us forward to the next reward in an ongoing chain—like feeding sardines to your psi dolphin.

Completing the loop with a confirmation, providing those payoffs, is key. Psi needs to be seen as one half of a dual system, the other half being our everyday actions and perceptions that serve to confirm—or not—our unconscious presentimental instincts or conscious precognitive hunches. (Elsewhere I’ve suggested that psi specifically trades in probabilities coexisting in a state of superposition prior to confirmation through physical measurement—a quantum version of this idea.) The result is, I believe, a literal form of what Alfred Korzybski called time binding: reaching forward into the future and drawing ourselves toward those confirmatory nodes, those confluences where our psi is “judged” against a real state of affairs. Social time has a “cellular” structure, built around these bound symptom-loops of psi and jouissance. And creative writers, who are unknowingly copying from their own dimly intuited future works and those of other writers, are conveniently adumbrating for us, like a gravestone rubbing, this basic time-binding structure humans and all social animals, and probably even all living things (even bacteria) are engaged in.

Unfortunately, as a culture and probably as a species, we are deeply fearful of prophecy, and thus engage in elaborate mental gymnastics to disguise the living future as something else—which will be the subject of the next installment.

NOTES:

* One personality trait typical of psychics (as well as performers) is extroversion, although in some cases histrionic might better describe it: a high emotionality and attention-neediness. There may be a link between need for external validation and the emergence of psi abilities in childhood, which the trajectory of someone like Geller, or probably any number of lesser-known spiritualist mediums, shows. The extroversion of psychics (and their sometimes frustrating lack of critical thinking about what they are doing) may contribute to the overall scientific distrust of psychic displays. Scientists are mentally rigorous (and often, pretty dull) people, after all, and no matter how compelling a bit of mind reading or spoon bending might seem to a layperson, scientists are likely to be biased against most such displays because they are, quite simply, cheesy, obviously calculated to get attention.

** Given its link to spontaneous and even frenetic engagement, I would hypothesize that some of the most talented psychics—probably unknowingly—would be improv actors. Improv is a very Zen activity that rewards not thinking, just doing, and probably generates prescient scenes that may also capitalize on the group effects known to facilitate psi. Some enterprising young parapsychologist (if young parapsychologists exist) ought to systematically record improv performances and compare them to news headlines over the following two days. My hunch is this would produce extremely interesting results.

In an improv course, one is taught to follow a single overriding rule summarized as “yes, and…” (or “yes, let’s…”). To support their team members (it is thought of as a sport, not comedy) and learn to count on their support, improv performers adopt the constant attitude of total agreement with the reality already constructed on stage and contribute by adding something new that does not undo or contradict it. The result can be highly exhilarating and surprising. This habit of saying yes and honoring the world already created in an unfolding open-ended performance very much resembles the ritual of honoring psi successes I wrote about in my article on “yes-saying” in psi, and probably also can connect psi to the efficacy of “new thought” systems of positive thinking. The point is not just having a sunny positive attitude and expecting your wishes to change the world; the point is building an expectation that positive results will be honored in the future, which entrains the unconscious mind toward those outcomes. You are essentially building a habit of rewarding positive outcomes into your life, which, if you are interested in psi, coaxes unconscious psi abilities into the light of day like a shy animal.

*** Martin Caidin, a WWII bomber pilot who became a prolific writer of sci-fi techno thrillers in the 60s—including the novel Cyborg, on which the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was based—believed himself to have psi (specifically PK) abilities and also famously wrote the novel Marooned in 1964, about a space capsule malfunction in orbit; to coincide with a movie version in 1968, he revised the plot to center on an Apollo mission requiring help from ground control and a daring rescue mission. I have not read his novel, but it is supposed to have uncannily prefigured the Apollo 13 disaster two years later. A reader sent me an article on an additional fascinating ‘synchronistic’ angle to this story: One of the NASA engineers helping solve the problem reported that a creative solution for recharging the crippled capsule’s battery came to him as a result of coincidentally seeing the film version of Marooned on the very evening he got the call about the real crisis unfolding in space.

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I am a science writer and armchair Fortean based in Washington, DC. Write to me at eric.wargo [at] gmail.com.

23 Responses to “Altered States of Reading (Part 2): Pynchon and the Psi Reflex”

  • Certainly, the critical mind must be shut down, because the critical mind is committed to consensus reality. And therefor, lots of the speculation in this article – forgive me – also ought to be shut down as irrelevant.

    We have at present no physical models for these phenomena. They happen, and the less in most cases we force them the more often and vividly they occur. They are most often spontaneous, like walking and breathing. They happen because of a strong need in the person who experiences them.

  • Re: Pavel:

    There is also the opposite force: the more we try to supress them, the more they maximize their power to emerge and grow, and often in (the most) unusual and unexpected places.

    Suppression (as is thus well known) unleashes a force, that is near exqual to, and opposite to, the suppression. Nothing can be forever suppressed (or contained, or maintained, or negated) forever.

    Energy and spirit doesn’t ever dissolve or come to an end. It only morphs into other stages and phases. Consciousness and mind and the spirit of life, will always find some kind of way, to (b)reach on through. Even if at the current time or place, we cannot see it.

  • A wide-ranging post, perfectly suited to a discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow. Some random thoughts.

    No doubt some readers have merely thought that Pynchon was indulging a penchant for mysticism with his notion of ‘beyond the zero,’ but I understood it, I think, when I read the book, as the inversion of that causal arrow time. The usual notion is perhaps casual error, since I’ll hardly be the first to point out the time-symmetrical nature of many physical formulae. Perhaps we need to think of causes and effects as mutually dependent? There is, naturally, little point of speaking of ’causes’ in isolation; one would merely call them ‘events.’

    Looking forward to a discussion of the psi ‘taboo’ if that’s on the docket. Is it as simple as the need to emphasize rational processes in the development of the individual and society? Or does it extend so far, as Eisenbud proposes, as a fear of the efficacy of the death wish? Currently interested in George Hansen’s (‘The Trickster & the Paranormal’) similarly wide-ranging, anthropological approach to psi at the moment: Why exactly, as he wonders, does psi tend to ‘erupt’ in later life, and among other personal disturbances? Too many questions for a commenter to address…

  • You likely know that there is a fair body of psychological literature on the “predictive” nature of vision. I looked for, but was unable to find an article that referenced elite athletes and the need for the nervous system to predict where objects were *going* to be, rather than where they “are” (or actually, “were”); I wonder if in some way this is related to the experience of precognition.

  • This is exactly what Carpenter is arguing — that psi is the “leading edge” of our engagement, always seeing a little bit ahead of our physical senses. It fits with any experience of skilled engagement, though, or of being in the zone — that Zen feeling of working in and from a position a little bit ahead of yourself in time. I experience it with driving, cooking, writing, martial arts, etc. I’d suggest it’s not just a cognitive illusion. I think that an acknowledgement of psi functioning in this way would require a complete revision of how we think of prediction and its mechanisms.

  • For some years I was cultivating a habit of having a cigar when I was in a state of mental turmoil that didn’t disappear by itself. Smoking that cigar provided a strong focus for the senses, some kind of an aesthetic meditative experience (the curling smoke…), and a very clear mind at the same time. This forbidden pleasure (for a non-smoker) regularly left me with some insights that felt very valuable, but were in some way ahead of me. I couldn’t make anything of them and my attempts felt very clumsy. So I came to think that I was “stealing them from time” and stopped that habit. – Now I’m stealing them while in the prolonged hypnagogic states (“head-cinema”, yeah) that are the naps I take several times a day due to severe sleep deprivation (spell: kids). My attempts to comprehend them still feel clumsy, but I think I’m getting better.

    I like that behavioral model of precognition a lot. While UFO-encounters are meant to lead to communicative actions that peak into a ‘scene of condemnation’, the average lunatic conditions his past self to have a better sense for rewarding ideas. – This could be a quite common mechanism.

  • The cigar is a great idea, HP. Rituals like that are perfect for coaxing psi into the open, I find. I like that phrase “stealing them from time.”

  • Hi MD,

    Looking forward to a discussion of the psi ‘taboo’ if that’s on the docket. Is it as simple as the need to emphasize rational processes in the development of the individual and society? Or does it extend so far, as Eisenbud proposes, as a fear of the efficacy of the death wish?

    It’s those things and a lot more. I find that, although “prophecy” sounds like an awesome idea on the surface, there’s a lot I don’t want to know, and a lot I’d be afraid of having to take responsibility to act on if I obtained suspected premonitory information. Dossey writes about the various inhibitions against heeding premonitions.

    Also the permeability of the future implies the permeability of the past, which can be existentially unsettling. What is interesting is that many cultures and thinkers have devised “halfway house” concepts that allow us to think about possible causal loops and such (e.g., Karma, synchronicity) without encouraging close scrutiny of the mechanisms involved.

  • The point about responsibility for psi is well taken, and as you have pointed out elsewhere has broad implications.

    I think Dean Radin has given the best indication, with his presentiment experiments, that psi is always ‘on.’ His evidential books (surveys), while hardly sexy, might flesh this out, and provide some suggestions (I am not familiar yet with Dossey & Carpenter) for theory. For instance, if extraverts seem most naturally adept at psi functioning, why are they also most likely to disclaim and depreciate it? But is it at least anecdotally the case, though, that our extraverted friends seem more likely to lead ‘charmed’ lives?

    To Ahk’s point, unless I have taken it amiss, in professional baseball it is impossible to do anything but swing at a guess. There isn’t time for anything else. ‘As you brace for the pitch, you must evaluate it quickly—extremely quickly. You must determine its speed and spin in about one-seventh of a second. In the next one-seventh of a second, you decide whether to swing and—if you decide yes—where and when to swing. That leaves just one-seventh of a second—if the pitch is a fastball—to swing the bat.’ Of course, the best hitters may merely be physiological/perceptual freaks of nature.

  • Permeability of the past. Perhaps prophets that remember all the way back, and then some, would be more concerned about unintended permutations.

    I think gravitational information just is, and time space usually agrees by remembering.

    Parts can be haunted, and that does whatever. Free will is like a lot of stuff, very sloshy. Waves are not really mechanical.

    I mean ripples in space time are not detectable, when the encryption is personal.

    Sometimes the physical remembers the other part.
    Happens all over. Mostly looks like lifeforms that have relocated.

  • I think Dean Radin has given the best indication, with his presentiment experiments, that psi is always ‘on.’ His evidential books (surveys), while hardly sexy, might flesh this out, and provide some suggestions (I am not familiar yet with Dossey & Carpenter) for theory.

    Radin’s work is central. Julia Mossbridge is doing similar, very important work in this area, and is the subject of this week’s Skeptiko podcast. In fact the subject of her most recent study, about “men who need to be right” scoring better on presentiment tasks and having higher arousal as much as ten seconds before a hit than female subjects who feel less of that need, fits perfectly with the themes of my post … although I don’t think it means women are less good at psi. At the risk of falling into stereotypes about the sexes’ different cognitive styles, I do wonder if psi in males manifests more in “threat vigilance” and competitive or risky contexts whereas in females it might manifest more around anticipating others’ needs and desires. Just a hunch.

    For instance, if extraverts seem most naturally adept at psi functioning, why are they also most likely to disclaim and depreciate it? But is it at least anecdotally the case, though, that our extraverted friends seem more likely to lead ‘charmed’ lives?

    Why do you think they are more likely to disclaim and depreciate? That doesn’t necessarily fit my experience.

  • **This is exactly what Carpenter is arguing — that psi is the “leading edge” of our engagement, always seeing a little bit ahead of our physical senses. It fits with any experience of skilled engagement, though, or of being in the zone — that Zen feeling of working in and from a position a little bit ahead of yourself in time.**

    …I’ve been thinking about this in relationship to “the feeling of being looked at” and that makes perfect sense in terms of an answer to the question “what is psi good for?” as well as making sense to me in terms of my felt experience. This aspect of psi is pre-linguistic; humans didn’t “invent” it; we “simply” built on top of it. Psy is good for *decisions in the moment that may have large rewarding _or_ punishing consequence* (in terms of last posts’ discussion re: divination works best when it’s about stuff that’s happening super-soon or which is “overdetermined” in the future. I would posit further that the “entropy gradient” stuff mentioned – that it’s relatively easy to remote view rocket launches and nuclear explosions and suchlike – might have something to do with the experience of awfulness (awe-fullness)/awesomeness/overwhelmingness; being in the presence of something almost unimaginally extreme (I remember reading somewhere that one cold-war era general, on hand to witness an atomic test, turned and ran screaming, hands to the sides of his head, on witnessing the blast.)

    As mentioned elsewhere, I spent a good deal of time the past few months thinking about dual-processing theories in cognitive psychology. The one I paid attention to (S. Epstein’s) with a linguistically/logically based “cognitive” system and an imagistic/embodied/emotional “experiential” system puts attention on the implications of what we share with non-human animals (a huge amount of which is “stuff that isn’t language”) as much as it puts attention on stuff we have that they do not.

    This kind of basic psi has to be part of the stuff we share.

    I remember somewhere over the last 9 mos. or so you made some remark about the linguistic/narratizing “I” “parasitizing” the rest of the stuff. I’m shooting from the hip here, memory-wise, and don’t want to misquote or misrepresent you, but I think a more apt term would be “symbiotized.”

    Does turning off one part of a symbiote leave a “pure” experience of the other part? If I meditate successfully and ‘stop my mind’ do I have an experience akin to non-human sentients… or not? Or “yes and” or “yes but?”

    It’s interesting to ponder the differences and similarities between “vigilance for threat” and “vigilance for reward,” two basic categories our “first sight” likely would fall into. There is a well-constructed argument out in the personality psychology trait theory literature that high extraversion is associated with “being relatively more rewarded by reward” and that high neuroticism is associated with “being relatively more punished by punishment.”

    So, in terms of “vigilance for reward,” the observation that extraverts are more likely to be psychic is consistent. Would we also expect people who are relatively high in neuroticism also be relatively high in precog for negative stuff? Another thing that’s in the trait theory literature: Folks high in neuroticism acutally have more bad stuff happen to them.

    Maybe that aversion to punishment might make someone more likely to ignore psy ‘warnings’ (especially if they don’t have much extraversion). You note that young childrens’ natural psy propensities get pushed out of conscsiousness by an insistence on logical/linear thinking. There’s also the strong tendency for kids that age to be required to learn that there is stuff “right out in the open” that we’re not supposed to talk about, “elephant in the living room” kind of stuff, and we’re not supposed to admit to our premonitions and the implied malleability of the future and the past the same way we’re not supposed to hear Uncle Malvern slapping around Aunt Hippolytee when they get in their cups.

    **SRI physicist Russell Targ reported to Jeffrey Kripal (Authors of the Impossible) that he received what he thought was real telepathic information while performing stage magic. It may not matter what the activity is, simply performing skilfully some behavior that consumes the left hemisphere’s attention, ideally with some physical component, seems to open the psi channel. **

    It’s interesting that professional physicist and amature stage magician Russell Targ can own up to this, while professional magician and amature thinker James Randi cannot! This, along with HP’s comment about the ritual he makes of smoking a cigar, brings to mind Vodoun and other trance-utilizing and trance-possession religions. I have never been to a Vodou ceremony, but Maya Deren’s films (along with stuff I’ve seen out of some trance-cults in Francophone Africa, which btw makes me think “Mesmerism was an influence) leave me with the impression that something interesting is going on.

    Neither have ever attended a regular service in a tongue-speaking church, but a couple of years ago I attended a wedding in a tongue-speaking congregation, and the pastor got into a groove just for a brief little bit. To my perception, there was a definite “change in the air” that I suppose would be analogous (but distinct from) the ‘temperature drops’ I mentioned in comments to the previous post.

    This was definitely a post that took two reads for me to “get”. Really strong stuff. Look forward to what’s next.

  • Lots to reflect on here, but briefly …

    I would posit further that the “entropy gradient” stuff mentioned – that it’s relatively easy to remote view rocket launches and nuclear explosions and suchlike – might have something to do with the experience of awfulness (awe-fullness)/awesomeness/overwhelmingness; being in the presence of something almost unimaginally extreme (I remember reading somewhere that one cold-war era general, on hand to witness an atomic test, turned and ran screaming, hands to the sides of his head, on witnessing the blast.)

    I agree, and this is why I gravitate to the term “jouissance,” as it is closely linked to the aesthetic mood of the sublime, which is precisely a reaction of ego-shattering awe coupled with excitement.

    Does turning off one part of a symbiote leave a “pure” experience of the other part? If I meditate successfully and ‘stop my mind’ do I have an experience akin to non-human sentients… or not? Or “yes and” or “yes but?”

    When you stop your verbal/conceptual/intellectual mind you are no longer in a place where you can make distinctions or answer those questions. It’s a condition of radical unknowing. All you can do is suppose … I suppose this is what it’s like to be a [fill in the blank: cat, dog, fish…] but we can’t know. I suspect that most meditative states, whatever the meditator might claim, are nowhere near true concept-free/language-free experience of the Real, just closer to it (which is why I like describing it as the ‘vicinity’ of the Real).

    Good point about distinguishing vigilance for threat from vigilance for reward. These would probably express themselves in very different types of precognition/presentiment.

  • Another fascinating, insightful article. Right about Gravity’s Rainbow, I never even got halfway through it (and I tried to read it more than twenty years ago) but I still have a copy and mean to read it and finish it some day.

    As far as syntropy is concerned, it is worth remarking that in the growing field of Information Theory (and there are several kinds of information of course) this syntropy is increasingly being taken seriously by a fair few mathematicians and some biologists, but from another angle. That is a law of information – manifest in Nature – is now being put forward independently of the physicists’ syntropy, more relating to biological complexity and genetic complexity, cohesion and order (this is obviously controversial because of its philosophical, even theological implications). The information richness of the genetic code and living organisms that is, that far far surpasses our most powerful supercomputers and man-made software.

    As far as the psi thing goes, yes this makes sense: perhaps as there is an increase in entropy (nuclear and rocket explosions, landslides or what have you), Nature kicks in her complement of syntropy for balance, so information is plunged into the ‘system’ to make up for its loss elsewhere in the ‘local environment’. That system being related to the mind and brain (being the informational organ par excellence) and its interaction with the environment. Hence as you say, perhaps why there is so much premonition associated with ‘sudden tragedies’ that are quickly over, such as 9-11 and the Titanic. But slow-winding worse tragedies such as genocide, much less so… Because of course genocide over years does not entail a sudden change in entropy states. Of course we may also block out premonitions of ineffable genocide tragedies because we don’t want to know.

    So I get what you are saying about how we may unconsciously block out future premonitions. Given the scary state of the world, I don’t want to know the future!

  • The cigar-story was also meant as an indicator for the psi-tech of probably most 20th-century sci-fi-writers; smoking. There’s rarely a photography of writer and typewriter without a cigarette. Smoke is an important part of ceremonies and rituals around the world. And the second thing is a back and forth between here and ‘there’, active and passive, in and out, speaking to the audience and gathering information from the other side. You can see this in shamanism, voodoo rituals, and even in psychotherapy. Let’s see wether I can model this, just for the sake of trying:
    A) writer sits down, lights a cigarette, inhales the smoke => focus here and now, disentanglement from mundane concerns…
    B) exhales => sinks into the inner realms to watch possible scenes unfolding…
    A) inhales => comes back to the here and now…
    B) exhales => sees the possible text(ure) emerging…
    A) inhales => straightens his back, preparing for writing…
    B) exhales => actually starts typing…
    A) inhales => pausing…
    B) exhales => goes back to the inner realms to check the consistency of the written and seen and to explore further…
    (…)

    Of course you can include as many repetitions as you want at any place over any span.

    And there’s possibly another A/B-structure behind this construct:
    A
    => A)
    => B) imagination
    B
    => A)
    => B) text

    Which is more of an (A|AB–BB)-form, since A is more or less the common ground, the common point of transition, even if there are two different transit-vectors, so to speak.

    Ok, that’s just the way my mind works, and it’s just a fast sketch to conceptualize a smoke-mediated writers-trance.

  • Na, not an ‘indicator’. More like a pointer, maybe a hint, maybe not even this. It was simply something I had in mind while writing the cigar-comment, but didn’t made it to an own remark.

  • Thanks, Lawrence. Re: Syntropy — yes, I agree, it is worth taking seriously from the information angle, specifically because of recent developments in quantum physics. It is lately becoming accepted that apparent randomness is particle behavior caused by future measurements/entanglements (Aharonov) and that entropy is actually entanglement (Lloyd). This changes everything: The future is affecting the present, but in ways we simply cannot predict (except in special circumstances).

    My previous reactions to Syntropy theory were premature, on this basis. Although I still think it’s kind of a placeholder for a future theory that may specify the role of psi.

  • Re: Cigar story

    It should be noted as well, that nicotine has established effects to stimulate concentration and focus of thought. Nicotine also releases great blounds of dopamine — the motivation and learning neurotransmitter.

    Perhaps a lot of learning and information retrieval are things that we also gain from the future. Learning itself is an act or a process that brings us ever-closer to the future from knowing less to knowing more. In a way, then, our learning is a way to move us forward into the future. Expanding our knowledge, expanding the possiblity field, or our minds and time. By us growing in knowledge and information—forwards and outwards in space and in time.

    At the very least, new information entails that we’re moving closer to the future. Since the act or knowing and learning means to move us from knowing less to knowing more. To reach into the future of information and knowledge and mind.

    Then this thing about movietation. Motivation inherently suggests a move-ment towards the later, or the future. Movivation to strive, and seek, and think, and act, and do, and even to know.

    It seems that motivation (will, intention, direction, forward motion-in-ation, and drive of our being) and together with learning seems to be inherently inter-connected. Without motivation, not much learning. And yet: action and striving are in themselves often a thing that has been learned; Even conditioned and triggered. By the past? Or by the future? Maybe even them both?

    And all of this learning, and knowing, of course brings as all back to the mystery of informatics. Precognition may very much be an event, and it may be a process, as well, something that is happening and growing and shifting and moving about, and even blossoming and sprouting—something alive and forever deep in our being and experience of living, as something participated and sense-ational and alive; and yet: still something intentioned and performed and preformed as an action. Not just just tranferrence, of any old in-formation, but also our action and doing. Not just senses; but even hands, bodies, inter-actions and tongues. And yet, yet still, it is also very much loudly a thing that must be recieved and precieved and recieved. Information’s delivery annd retrieval. Transformation and transferrence of both our information and the senses.

    Though sometimes, I must say, that a cigar is always forever more than just a cigar.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Psychoactive_effects
    “Nicotine’s mood-altering effects are different by report: in particular it is both a stimulant and a relaxant.[14] First causing a release of glucose from the liver and epinephrine (adrenaline) from the adrenal medulla, it causes stimulation. Users report feelings of relaxation, sharpness, calmness, and alertness.
    […]
    When a cigarette is smoked, nicotine-rich blood passes from the lungs to the brain within seven seconds and immediately stimulates the release of many chemical messengers such as acetylcholine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, arginine vasopressin, serotonin, dopamine, and beta-endorphin.[18][19] This release of neurotransmitters and hormones is responsible for most of nicotine’s psychoactive effects. Nicotine appears to enhance concentration[20] and memory due to the increase of acetylcholine. It also appears to enhance alertness due to the increases of acetylcholine and norepinephrine. Arousal is raised by the increase of norepinephrine. Pain is reduced by the increases of acetylcholine and beta-endorphin. Anxiety is reduced by the increase of beta-endorphin. Nicotine also extends the duration of positive effects of dopamine[21] and increases sensitivity in brain reward systems.[…]
    Studies suggest that when smokers wish to achieve a stimulating effect, they take short quick puffs, which produce a low level of blood nicotine.[24] This stimulates nerve transmission. When they wish to relax, they take deep puffs, which produce a higher level of blood nicotine, which depresses the passage of nerve impulses, producing a mild sedative effect. At low doses, nicotine potently enhances the actions of norepinephrine and dopamine in the brain, causing a drug effect typical of those of psychostimulants. At higher doses, nicotine enhances the effect of serotonin and opioid activity, producing a calming, pain-killing effect.”

    (So it seems, that even though many drugs may have one dominant neurotransmitter or chemically active substance, it’s still much too simplistic and reductionistic to try and reduce any one drug to just mystery substance X or why.)

    Even the amerindians, it should be noted, often used that non-wacky tobacco as a religio-spiritual, and even shamanistic herb, before it had been reshaped and co-opted by the big industrial and business and advertisement interests.

  • Perhaps a lot of learning and information retrieval are things that we also gain from the future.

    Yes, I think our brains are actually retrieving information from our future (as well as past). And yes, nicotine’s effects on dopamine would explain the smoking connection. All drugs interact with the reward system, albeit in different ways, leading to different precognitive effects I’ll bet.

  • I’m really enjoying this series. Have found my spouse in the extrovert’s visions with his positive outlook. While he has largely ignored his obvious (to me) adventures into silence and (according to him) envisioning possible solutions to a problem in his business, he is well known within his sphere of influence for predicting the outcome he feels will appear (or perhaps, chooses). He acts according to his vision and with great result. I’ve never taken a path of thought beyond to thoughts of reward as a loop and I’m still trying to process this. Talk about an entangled mind!

    I however, the introverted mother/wife, tend to sense the flow of abrupt change in a tighter realm through what is termed a mother’s intuition. If not, events I predict are always arranged around family members though I can remember events in writing as a young person. Those tapered off before adulthood.

    For a while, I could predict police cars suddenly appearing over a hill or around a corner. (“Slow down, honey. We don’t want to get a ticket.”) I thought I might be feeling their agitation because the events only resulted in those cars with their warning lights on, no sirens. Now I might have some frame of reference.

    I’ve often wondered why these warnings I felt bubble out of my mouth usually have to do, often, with abrupt danger or with possible unpleasant consequences. I am left wondering if we simply don’t hear from introverts often enough to include their range of experience or if they are constricted due to their tendencies to have less involvement in the world at large. Maybe it’s both?

    When l look back, my visions do come to me most often when in the company of my family and when conversation amongst us has dwindled to nil. The silence becomes rich with warning in the midst of entropy. There no denying it.

    I’m really looking forward to your next essay.

  • Thanks, Carol. I think “mother’s intuition” — precognition around family members and anticipating their needs — is a very real thing; we don’t know much about it, simply because most of the people studying this stuff are men.

    I agree with you about introverts: Both relative non-involvement and relative silence cause a bias. But I suspect it comes back to what is rewarding: Extroverts may be conditioned to produce psi for its social reward value; for introverts it will manifest more in privately rewarding things. Carpenter talks about how psi is social and best expressed socially; I see what he means, but in my experience (as an introvert), I find that psi most often manifests in solitary and hard-to-communicate contexts, such as reading and research.

  • Thanks so much for your response. I can somewhat relate to your experience of contexts. Makes me wonder if there isn’t gender bias associated within the process as well.

    Historically, men have participated in the role of envisioning governance and business, often leaving the details to be worked out by those more adept at implementing policy. My guess is that without the introverts, extroverts would have to work a lot harder!

    I’m joking, but there may be some truth in the rib. Carpenter shows us the value in his (perhaps) bias toward the social, but it sounds as though his (perhaps) bias away from the personal is a bit short sighted?

    Obviously, I haven’t read him and will have to do so. I may be reading way too much into what I suspect rather than what is the case, but my first impression upon reading your essays is that the rewards of time loops are necessary by whatever manner they are achieved and by whomever achieves them. Without the personal, the social rewards of psi are negligible and vice versa.

    Please forgive if I’m way off base. I do need to do more reading.

  • My guess is that without the introverts, extroverts would have to work a lot harder!

    That’s true in all kinds of ways. Introverts are a captive audience for extroverts. The terms ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ are misleading; it’s all about the economy of attention, need for attention, and ability to pay attention, and extroversion just reflects a strategy of attracting attention because of a greater need of it. Introverts have more to give.

    …the rewards of time loops are necessary by whatever manner they are achieved and by whomever achieves them. Without the personal, the social rewards of psi are negligible and vice versa

    Yes, absolutely.