Psionics

Psi-SF?                                   

No one knows what this word really entails and no one so far has produced a satisfactory explanation as to what the abilities that are fabulously (as in old meaning) are contentiously attributed to it; never the less, as a unknown, unproven phrase heading, it may perhaps now or will soon take on some disquieting consideration as saps modify their understanding of the interrelationships being created in the development of mind psyche biomechanics, gene therapy, hi density cpu compaction, quantum computing and quantum physics. 

So for the sake of debate what is or might psionics be? It is a term that is not in common usage other than as a descriptive term used by a few investigating parapsychologist to frame debatable unscientific abilities claimed by proponents and mastered in game play, films and books; often depicted as forms of psychokinetic’s, telepathy and other tele’s, for influencing something or other ‘at a distance’. In this context all the deemed attributes are safely locked in the realm of fantasy and run as far as the mythical proponents want to play with, as the heroes and villain. Other than in fantasy there is no pretence that such abilities are remotely practical, obtainable or scientifically feasible. So it is fascinating for SF to be expansive to play with the idea 

In general the idea of psionics is, as a concept within SF, more acceptable as a form of influence attached to human willpower, as it seems to have a source and a controllable element to it i.e. it is emanating from the human mind. In this it is a force that in its use is to have an impact on material things or biological elements that are already in existence, giving it a hypothetical sense of the possibility of its reality. In this context it is different in its application than a comparable term like magic, as it has an elemental biological link to a mind condition. Whereas magic may be viewed as a power that is external to human will and eliciting actions that have no interconnecting force beyond the actual effect of producing some action or thing out of nothing.

It is easy to dismiss all such facets of psionics or magic on the basis of being unscientific and not in accordance with any known laws of any science. This stance is understandable but not useful for even though elements of current science have unproven hypothesis to envelop gaps in knowledge, hypothesis and theorems do allow tentative qualified examination into scientific unknowns. With both ideas of psionics and magic, there is a certain power in believing either is possible but there is no factual way of satisfactorily establishing that one is more ‘real’ than the other or at all; whatever force description is attributed to strange occurrences, it is to be always illusive and tenuous, that is its mystery and its strength. Perhaps it is why it can only be applied to just works of fiction.

In fictitious terms the idea of psionics is not new and one connection exploring the theme can be found in an old book: - The Forever Machine.

This title comes from a book written in the 1954, by Clifton & Riley. Reviews at the time and subsequently seem to berate this book as an undeserving winner of the Hugo book prize. Such views are obviously a matter of singular opinion and do not constitute an actual attitude poll of all that have read the book, never the less, critically slated as it was and having previously read this book, one could find no reason not to like it; written as it was in pre-technical era without the advantage of any knowledge of future ‘clever computers’ that are now taken for granted. In the same regard, the book was of its time and hence was indeed without the insight of the importance of DNA and genetic engineering for correcting genome ‘errors’, even the idea of installing superior sense facets for the betterment of human biology was not a consideration.

In a simple way the book could be viewed mainly from the position of holding some measure of hope for the future of humans in self development. The essential elements of the plot was in using an unexplained purported telepath character and a machine metaphorically called Bossy as the catalyst for a way of allowing for physical and mental improvements to the human race. It may be also looked on as a allegorical story of the way humans load their lives with unhelpful prejudices and adopted attitudinal behavioural patterns that hinder the full development of their nature i.e. they learn how not to learn by indoctrinating themselves with handicaps and mental blocks that obstruct them from accepting new ideas, modes of behaviour and learning. This is on the basis that humans have natural conditional lifestyle tendencies, many culturally inculcated to ‘fit in’ so much so that they would rather hold onto their prejudices and fixed ideas no matter how unhelpful or unhealthy their behaviour may be and furthermore ‘unwittingly’ set up mind blocks that hinder their ability to learn or reframe mind patterns that limit potential achievements. All such inherent negativity is gained by long term social and nurture conditioning, which is of course is an integral part of the human nature inclining them not to obviously question the usefulness of such traits but adhering to them rather than give them up, hence the original title of the book ‘They’d rather be right’.

The story, the forever machine, however bad, was written in 1954 before the now widely known public advent of DNA (Watson & Crick 1953) or the later genome project and the subsequent attempts of genetic engineering. The publication of the story revolved around the creation of a machine (BOSSY) that is wholly logical but with a superior grasp of human emotions and drive. Together with a somewhat vacuous telepath it retunes the mind of supplicants to overcome the limitation of inappropriate behaviour that stops the mind from using its full capacity and in doing so unlocks the potential of the mind to bring into being new, neglected or dormant capacity. In the book, the story purports the scenario that this retuning allows the mind and body to harmonies and with the remapping of the whole person brings about physical healing and as an aside psychic ability. It does, in this setting, draw reference to the things that cannot be scientifically proven to exist but that keep popping up, a bit like the idea of déjà view, intuition, premonition, feelings, the tele* ghosts in the machine of life. The book works on the premise that over time a human being is overlaid with social mores and created psychological blocks that stop the full application of the mind to function. By adopting the unintended mind blocks which starts at a young age with parental training (nature / nurture) with good (or bad) intent, the ability to examine the veracity of a statement of proposed facts are taken uncritically and such conditioning slows or stops progression towards a different cerebral dynamic.

So where does the forever machine come in? In some way the forever machine is in existence now and it is in the structure of the DNA genome. It has been immensely successful in adapting the raw material of its make up to establish the form that now is extant in the human beings, the nature nurture and survival of the fittest tenets of evolution in which telomeres carry out crucial replication functions, yet over time some ‘errors’ in the replication map have crept in and had the overvalued natural selection theory run its course, these perhaps unbeneficial errors would have been written out. It might appear maybe; that the reason why they have not been corrected or new ones moved in might be because of the nature of humans to safeguard life and nurture those that might not have survived in harsh times. Over the last two centauries this preservation of life has become more available and it might be argued that as medication has got considerable more advanced; unwittingly humans have propagated more of the faulty DNA structures that give rise to afflicting ailment of today. The human ability to fight off disease attack has diminished particularly with the overuse of antibiotics and also where extensive effort has gone into the emotional unavoidable application of medicinal cures. Medicine has got better at treating symptoms and in many areas offered cures but the genetic faults that afflict mind and body are more extant, some have become very expensive to deal with, some impossible to cure just now, some are life style creations but all give rise to the expectation that the system will expend every effort to keep the life alive, it is in those areas that the worst weakness of the DNA structure may be found, there is no opportunity to see self correction over time or ability to make improvements. The story suggests that to achieve greater self awareness, control and perception; one has to reduce concealed mind blocks, to learn how to question, examine, and test for usefulness and truthfulness of the reality one is in and of course if in doing so takes one onto strange philosophical discourse.

An example of questioning, for instance, is the widely held belief that nothing can travel faster than light is taken as a fundamental law of physics, yet is only true using the current known factors that are held as being true and absolute with all the supporting evidence of physics. Also anything that cannot be replicated as in a science experiment is not truthful, it must be suspect and is considered unworthy of further serious investigation, again only using tools that are limited in their preconceived application. Likewise the beliefs in say gravity manipulation or teleportation are impossible as there is no scientific evidence to support their exploitable existence; they are again looked on as less than figment of imagination – science fiction and defiantly not to be taken serious. However on just one of these flights of fancy, so far as teleportation is concerned, there are some disconcerting indications that this indictment of scientific impossibility may be suspect given the evidence of experiments in quantum co-location. With these open questions like many others of unscientific nature, it has to leave available, a what if?  

Yet what if someone comes along and had not taken on board all of life’s indoctrination that may have caused a limit to the ability to step outside of the realm of created reality, to think the unthinkable and believe that it just may be possible to construct a different actuality and in doing so opens up the creative materialisation that bring forth the first essence of a new state of being, a new way of looking at current reality to challenge the way things work, i.e. create new perceptual addition to the ‘fundamental laws of nature’. In such situation therefore, perception of laws can be change, it is for the sake of this construct, a subjective matter of having the required vision that overrides pre-conditioned factual acceptance of what reality is and what is possible - anything that is not proven impossible is possible and anything that has been commonly accepted as impossible just might be temporary within the construct of accepted reality for there may be answers to unasked questions that we cannot frame as the vocabulary required to put the question and provoke an answer has not yet been created. This dichotomy conundrum of probing unknowns is very difficult to break, even if the questions could be composed without an element of conditional bias in the first place but into this perceptual void of unknowns might step the chimera. Yes this is an improbable to impossible game with no known way of seeing how such a manifested paradigm step can be made.     

All that can be done is to keep asking questions. For example if one takes the saying physician heal thyself (Luke 4:23) what does this mean? There are many interpretations that one could place on this saying. Should a physician not need to be treated by another? Do they not require another to heal them? Or is it a command to note that they have the ability to actually heal them-selves as they purport to heal others? Or take the rise of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) or EQ (Emotional Intelligence) or Mindfulness (Buddhist meditation) and all such skills that lean one to be in control of themselves and how these methods help reframe and be in command of, if not master, the human abilities to be a whole self manage person. Persons adopting these skills are not subjecting themselves to a type of self delusion or ‘brain washing’ but take part in a guided self analytical approach to gain awareness of how the mind is composed that causes behaviour and response to environs, to gain a more functional attitude. In this there is evidence that developing a reframed mind modal offers some beneficial effect on the physiology of the body and different functional parts of the brain, previously thought as being permanent, has now been shown to be more fluid and repairable.

Just now much is made of the ‘miracle’ of decoding the genome and the benefits it may bring in manipulating and constructing cures for the next generation of humans. So far everything is based on the mechanical application of modifying the DNA to achieve a desired outcome. In order to do this the process needs to know how every single element of the DNA structure is impacted on the gene sequence; this certainty of positioning is far from the case as there is a great measure of uncertainty in exactly what part of the genome does what to what effect. It is assumed that once the full implication of the mechanics of the genome are known, that it will just be a matter of snip, patch and stitch and disease can be cured or new wo/man can be created.

There seems little doubt that there will be many incidents where the knowledge of the genome and how to manipulate it will be initially beneficial in correcting supposed defects in the DNA to promote greater health and to avoid prevalent diseases. However what is debatable is the intrinsic nature of life that exist within the construct of the genome which has been built up over millions of years and may have acquired a construction map of its own in the DNA / RNA mitochondrial telomeres etc construction, to guide it through the challenges of the environment sufficient to shape the human evolution to its current primacy status. These is no certainty as to how this came about, that this is wholly evolutionary may not be ultimately satisfactory. This comes back to the idea of there being a ghost in the machine, one that does not show up in the ‘simple’ mechanics of believing that how the genome works is a biological mechanical process, one that can be interpreted correctly and altered; rather it may be like a jig saw puzzle in which one piece can have a role and effective function located in its place but located in another area and it has an entirely different consequence, as its relationship within the whole has changed and generates no certainly what the final outcome may be.

It can also be sparingly extrapolated from the story that a change can be willingly influenced on one generation to the next. This idea is not without some foundation for there is an ongoing theory of ‘epigenetic inheritance’, were there is the idea that environmental causes can affect the genes of one’s children and grandchildren. A recent study by a research team at New York’s Mount Sinai hospital showed a “demonstration of transmission of pre-conception stress effects resulting in epigenetic changes”; the study was base on the effect of holocaust survivors and offspring’s. The idea of influenced genetic change, although provable is controversial and taken cautiously with substantial environment factors being accepted as the natural external cause of gene modification. Although there is some comfort in nominating environment causes as an epigenetic inheritance gene adjuster, as it is assumed that environment issues can be seen, quantified, assessed etc. The metaphysical pressures are more difficult to deal with; reliant on some extreme induced or unintentional psychological stress cannot be deliberately applied to humans as a replication test.The mind and body are closely connected, as one thinks so one is, so how far can one go with this knowledge of self construction.

From all this one might think that there is a Anthromorphical Bossy wrapped in the DNA and it may be waiting to be released, who’s to say where it will take humans if it is real, how will the old humans cope with the future new?  

Part of that new future might be encompassed in the terms psionics and magic. They may be unacceptable as they stand outside any rational explanation for in both cases the hypothetical weird activities seem to transpire outside the laws of science. Where very limited examination has taken place, in those areas of claims of psychic abilities, neuroscientists are generally the most hostile to investigating parapsychologist, especially when experiments to attempt to prove psychic abilities at a repeatable and higher than average rate generally fail replication but the problem of psi susceptibility is not going to go away. Therefore is the idea of psionics potentially important?

The human brain has an electrical output of 10/25 watts and although as yet there is no link that can be made between the brain and any affect it has on any external artifact, in philosophical terms and linking into the many problematic ideas of physics and quantum mechanics which suggest that one can know were an element is or what it is but not both at the same time and that in observation an item can be in two places at the same time and arrive at a juncture before it has left a transmitter. So likewise although there is no provable connect between the brain and the affect on objects in the real world, can a potential effect be disregarded safely if there is no certainty in quantum ambiguities? Are there risks with the continual compression in scale of computer bits? Or with the potential of creating a biological computer, or the possibility of the human brain at some point being able to interact with or interfere with sophisticated computers as one or both of them becomes greatly enhanced?

Medical development has shown that by attaching brain wave detector to a subject and getting them to think of an activity, a certain part of the brain ‘lights’ up and from this an external physical action can be put in motion. With the advent of cat scans and imaging techniques it is becoming possible to see just how the brain attends to task. Although there are clear signs that the brain has a preference for locating task in certain parts of the brain, along the lines of left hand right side hemisphere functions, there is now sufficient evidence that the brain is malleable in so far as with concentrated level of ‘training’ it can be reprogrammed – neuron and synapse reform to make new connection in line with what is being demanded of it. The mind is also malleable; it can be reframed and is open to new operating principles that may serve the needs of its owner’s survival. It is also known that the subconscious mind plays a much greater role in the behavior of a person than previous thought, so much in fact that it often forms the thought and action process before the conscious mind is aware of impending required action which it puts in place. This knowledge is leading to the application of bio mechanical operating systems that allows the motivation of mechanical attachment to be utilised just by thought albeit it is the electrical activity within the brain CNS / cortex that is picked up by BCI (brain computer interface) and stimulates servo-systems to operate. Simple experiments now can link a thought to an external action via electronic interface to an output effect some distance away.

At the moment there is no scientific basis that is acceptable to give serious consideration to the idea of psionics. There are no reliable scientific studies on the subject and the very term psionics is not recognised in scientific circles. It is not a provable fact nor is there a reliably demonstration to point to as a dependable possibility. It resides in the annuls of science fictions only, kept safety there by endemic qualified prejudice and in the imaginative sphere of books and films in which any number of forces can be made to interact with unexplained progeny however this does not seem to stop strange things happening in reality, things ‘rational’ people are very reluctant to open up to, particularly within academic professional disciplines.

Best to ignore it all, it just may go away.

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© Renot

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