A grab-bag of brief items …
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In an email to me, Michael Tymn, who wrote an introduction to Pierre Emile Cornillier's The Survival of the Soul (discussed here), noted my concern about the emphasis on suffering in the book's mediumistic communications. He said,
What you call "suffering" I would call overcoming adversity. I see that as the key to spiritual evolution.
Actually, I think this is a good way of looking at it. If there is no adversity to overcome, there can presumably be no progress. And perpetual existence without challenges — without "adversity" — would probably be both pointless and boring.
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Brian Whitworth reports that Chapter V of his project on "quantum realism" is now complete. The first five chapters of this work-in-progress are an in-depth application of the rules of computer processing to the observations and paradoxes of quantum physics. On his website, he explains:
In physical realism the physical world is real in itself while in quantum realism it is the output of quantum processing, i.e. virtual.
The material is pretty technical, but I've found it of great interest.
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On a related note, Marcus Arvan has posted two essays speculating that "the physical universe is a timelessly existing array of information comprising a vast, possibly infinite variety of branching 'time-lines,'" and that free will is possible because consciousness chooses which timelines to experience. He writes,
The joint choices of all conscious observers "collapse" possible paths through the multiverse at every given instant to a single, intersubjectively experienced (or "actualized") reality….
[This theory] takes the most plausible aspect of the Everett [many-worlds] interpretation – its assertion of numerous physical universes, to account for quantum indeterminacy – while denying its most implausible feature: its implication that all universes in the multiverse are equally “actualized.” [The theory] accomplishes this by assigning to consciousness the role of “universe actualizer.”
He analogizes the situation to a peer-to-peer networked computer simulation such as certain online multiplayer games, in which
each game console contains and plays a game DVD. Each game DVD consists of an array of information containing a vast range of possible “pasts, presents, and futures” within the game…. Each player’s choices on their own game console are processed by the network so that the joint choices of each player – choices not causally determined by any “physical law” within the simulation – lead each game console hooked up to the system to read complementary lines of code on the DVD to ensure that the physical laws of the simulation are not broken. This allows each player on the network to experience the same virtual environment from different points of view.
His essays "A New Theory of Free Will" and "A Unified Explanation of Quantum Phenomena?" are worth a look. They were brought my attention by our commenter "doubter" in the comment thread on this post.
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I've now read Mary Rose Barrington's article on Geraldine Cummins in the June 1966 issue of The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, and I think it was somewhat misrepresented by a commenter who said it "debunked" Cummins. Barrington does suggest ways in which Cummins might have known or guessed some of the material she "channeled"; some of these suggestions are more plausible than others, and a few seem like a stretch. But in the end, she is impressed by the sheer wealth of detail related about Cummins' subject, Mrs. Winifred Coombe-Tennant. She writes,
How has the very convincing, three-dimensional Winifred been built up from glimpses of newspapers and reference books, and from casual gossip? Quantity must surely count for something, and the sheer amount of fact, the effortless flow of background knowledge, and the apparent consistency of characterization must make one pause and wonder how much of Miss Cummins's life could have been spent in listening to idle talk about Mrs. Coombe-Tennant, in whom she had no particular interest. Assuming any normal source of information, how could Miss Cummins have come to know that when she was young Winifred 'used to think the prayer in our prayer-book to deliver us from sudden death an odd and mistaken supplication. It was one in which I never joined'. Has Miss Cummins read this somewhere in a newspaper or magazine? Or has some friend happened to say to her 'Mrs. Coombe-Tennant, who's a friend of mine (but not of yours) once told me that until the death of her daughter she never used to join in the prayer for delivery from sudden death etc. etc.' If unamusing anecdotes of this sort were told about Mrs. Coombe-Tennant, she must have been one of England's most thoroughly talked about women.
Barrington concludes with a more general caution against hyper-skepticism, or (as we like to call it) Skepticism:
Frequent references to improbability and unlikelihood in the last few pages prompt a short consideration of what meaning can reasonably be attributed to such words in the context of psychical research. On one view, anything is more likely than survival (or indeed any other paranormal process), and it matters little whether the event taken into comparison amounts to fraud by men thought to be honest, stupidity by men thought to be clever, malobservation by experienced observers, unaccountable results obtained using reliable apparatus and materials, multiple coincidence, gross misreporting, or all these improbabilities occurring together. On this view we should be bound to reject the evidence of several dozen reputable scientists who all declared that jointly and severally they had seen apples falling upwards; so long as the phenomenon remained unpredictable and unrepeatable, their observations would always have to be deemed delusions, conspiracies, jokes, or whatever, because these natural eccentricities were more probable than behavior contrary to the known laws of gravitation.
It seems to me that the flaw in this way of thinking is the attempt to assess the likelihood of paranormal states and events, and I would argue that a classification in terms of likelihood is meaningless except when applied to familiar situations. … To say that however improbable the ways and means, survival must be considered even more improbable is not meaningful.
I would not call this a debunking, even though some of the details channeled by Geraldine Cummins have been challenged. As Barrington says:
This does not, however, dispose of 'Swan on a Black Sea'. There remain the personality of Winifred, the mass of background knowledge, and a handful of details some of which are noted here; others may well occur to other readers.
Unfortunately I don't think this article is available online.
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Finally, I was struck by a particular dialogue exchange in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. The narrator and his companion witness a monk confess to horrendous crimes committed in his younger days:
"And we burned and looted because we had proclaimed poverty the universal law, and we had the right to appropriate the illegitimate riches of others, and we wanted to strike at the heart of the network of greed that extended from parish to parish.… We killed to punish, to purify the impure through blood.… We had to kill the innocent as well, in order to kill all of you more quickly. We wanted a better world, of peace and sweetness and happiness for all.… We had to shed a little blood.… The fact is that it did not take much, the hastening, and it was worth turning the waters of the Carnasco red.… We had to hasten the course of events.…"
His whole body trembling, he rubbed his hands over his habit as if he wanted to cleanse them of the blood he was recalling. "The glutton has become pure again," William said to me.
“But is this purity?" I asked, horrified.
"There must be some other kind as well," William said, "but, however it is, it always frightens me."
"What terrifies you most in purity?" I asked.
"Haste," William answered.
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