What happens if experiments do NOT allow even quantum realism?

First, I accept Hal’s suggestion, seconded by Chris, that I should use the word “ultraweirdism” to refer to any theory of how the cosmos works outside the families of theories I have called “Einsteinian realism” and “Fockian realism.” Ordinary quantum dynamics, as in mainstream Fock space, is already weird enough; something weirder than that should better be called “ultraweird” than “weird.” Since I personally attribute about 1/3 probability to each of the three main possibilities, I should pay more attention to ultraweirdism than I have lately, just to keep a balance. Also, as Stan has hinted, a careful analysis of ultraweird possibilities may be relevant even to an Einsteinian or Fockian cosmos.

That really came home to me a few weeks ago when my old friend Yeshua, who is starting up one of the experiments, stressed: “you should let the chips fall where they may.” Logically, if the relevant new experiments do NOT support time-symmetric statistics as I defined it in my IJTP paper (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf), that would imply that Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism are both false. For a few days it seemed as if it MIGHT come out that way, raising the question of what the alternatives might be.
(For a slightly more technical version of this, see https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/12/is-idea-of-objective-reality-still.html.)

One major difficulty with ultraweirdism (which does not disprove it!) is that there are so many, many possibilities. Most of those in the literature come from biased sources down through the ages, limited in many ways, usually not internally consistent or truly coherent. (Some are collections of words which do not really answer crucial questions about how it works and what it really means for us.) If I were forced to accept ultraweirdism, there are only two possibilities which I personally (in my ignorance) would look more into now: (1) the Great Mind or Idealism idea, the idea that the greater cosmos is … something like a dream generating system..; and (2) the Subset idea, the idea that everything we experience (in “Process 2”) is just a subset, a kind of emergent subset, of the larger true cosmos. Ultraweirdism 1 is certainly similar in spirit to what Deepak Chopra, many Buddhists and many Cabbalists (and others) have been saying. Certainly I remember the time when Roger Penrose, at a younger age, standing next to Karl Pribram, echoed the idea that “the universe feels more like a Great Mind than a Great Machine … so what is the mathematics of mind?” Since I think I know something about the mathematics of mind, and have also had lots of first person experience with incredibly weird things, I have wondered about the great Mind possibility for some time, mostly not pushing too hard or getting very far… but a week or two ago after the email from Yeshua, I tried to push just a little further.

When I visited Nepal last year, there were at least two really seriously weird experiences in Kathmandu, one of which shook me up, enough that I was very grateful to Bhakti Muni for helping calm me down more than I was able to on my own (though I did try very hard, with SOME degree of success). The next stop was to the shrine of the sleeping/dreaming Vishnu, said to be dreaming up the entire universe or cosmos. That image also comes to mind when I think of Great Mind ideas, though of course I do not attach all the mythology to it. But even when I hold onto Einsteinian realism, I do respect the reality of Jungian archetypes as objects in the local “great mind” of the noosphere of our little solar system. So I was grateful to accept a little help from Vishnu as well as Muni that day.

The most .. traditional… forms of the Great Mind cosmos idea… would say that our experiences of “Samadhi” (as defined by high Japanese esoteric Buddhism) are not JUST connections to the local noosphere (and its connections), but also, if elevated enough, to the Great Mind of the cosmos itself, dreaming up everything which exists, with power to make and unmake our local physical realities more than any mere dark matter could. Ultraweird enough?

I can imagine some folks saying, “Wait a minute. Would verification of the Born rule, asymmetric as it is, imply stuff as weird as this?” That reminds me of a poem which my girl friend in high school once showed me: if one little pebble in your back yard suddenly just shot up into the air, with no magnets or anything else to explain it, would you just say “Oh THAT little pebble happened to feel like jumping up that morning?” I forget how the poet explained it… but the point is, when something clear and simple substantially violated everything you thought you knew about how things work (“Process 2” as Henry or Grundlagen would say), … logically it is like Pandora’s box. Ignoring it is like ignoring climate change, but worse.

Great Mind people might say: “You are not discovering the laws of physics with your experiments. You are just making them up as you go. It’s really just a contest of which dream is stronger. Even if realism works in your experiments, all it proves is that you are a stronger dreamer. You shouldn’t consider it as proof that realism is true.” So now, as new more definite data appears supporting realism, I remember that.

During the 2016 elections, I remember when a hard core math/physics friend said to me: “I used to just laugh at those theories that life is just a dream. But now when I look at the TV news… it seems more and more real as a possibility… hard to avoid… this can’t really be real. And is the dreamer crazy now?”

This leads into one of the difficulties with the Great Mind idea. Back in the early 70’s, I remember reading one of the canonical kabbalah texts while standing up in a local bookstore. Their theory was that there is just One Great Mind, but that it fragmented long ago into the little pieces or sparks like us. Our mission, it said, is to bring the sparks together again, and unify our mind. So, looking at this idea objectively, it seems to say that a lonely mind floating around in sensory deprivation (no external stimuli) just fragmented into pieces, as one would expect, and that the most we can achieve is to put it back to that original state of emptiness and loneliness. A beautiful metaphor, useful in its way, but clearly not a solid enough foundation for those who really build on their beliefs. (I’d say that Zen has similar problems.)

More compelling to me was a book called What Dreams May Come, by Matheson, which was later made into a movie with Robin Williams. I have the impression that it reflected a Swedenborgian school of thought, which did regard our mundane world as a subset of a larger astral plane, such that the dreamlike nature is more visible in other parts of this larger cosmos. A key message was that dreaming good dreams leads to good outcomes (outcomes we like), and dreaming bad dreams can produce something like a living hell. (It is interesting that Donald Trump really is a sincere believer in positive thinking, but it seems he has not yet mastered the art of how to avoid a living hell.) Many years ago, I gave a friend a copy of Seeing With the Mind’s (Eye? I?), by Samuels, a beautiful color paperback which I found for only $10, which gets very deep into the first person issues of visualization and positive visualization: not just Belief in dreams but praxis. And of course, LaBerge’s book Lucid Dreaming is solid science and relevant.

But: how is it possible to engage with the realities of human life as it is today and still engage in thinking which is both realistic and positive? In truth, this is the number one struggle I face in my own life lately. Everything else does seem to be part of that.

Years ago, when I tried to put Matheson’s ideas on a more precise, mathematical footing, it pointed toward certain equations by Kohonen. But there was a very disturbing… arbitrary quality to it, which was not entirely convincing.

More recently, in the great movie Inception, I saw clues both about how we as people might test ultraweirdism versus (weird) realism and about a few of the real practical challenges before us on this planet right now.

But as Stan has hinted, testing is hard, since a careful review of Lagrangian mathematics does allow for a whole lot of weirdism. I suppose that it is more important that we figure out how to adapt to the phenomena themselves, wherever they may come from. 

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Addendum: one important practical point about positive visualization. Years ago, I had a lot of contact with Barbara Marx Hubbard, who accomplished a number of very solid and real things, and also taught people a lot about positive visualization. Some would summarize: "Be VERY CLEAR about what you want, but don't worry about HOW." That works fine for some managers, who have the right kind of people working for them, but SOMEWHERE the "HOW" must also be addressed. In the present state of the earth, competence in visualizing HOW in a coherent viable way is ALSO a crucial ingredient.  Lack of it may well result in extinction of the species.