My attention returned to the Jesus simulation running in my mind.
Okay, I thought to myself, what if I change the configuration of the system? What if Jesus has to turn water into wine in front of an audience of normal people?
I placed five people in the room with Jesus, then let the computation run. Jesus still changed water into wine, but the audience received a massive prediction error in the process. Jesus' certainty had to be even stronger to overcome the momentum of the audience's limiting expectations.
I continued playing with the little simulation running in my mind. I let the five audience members leave the room. They immediately ran outside to recount their experience to anyone who would listen. "Jesus turned water into wine!" they yelled. Everyone called them crazy or delusional, which restored homeostasis to the system. When an audience member said something counterintuitive, labeling them 'crazy' was a more efficient way of reducing surprise than actually investigating the claim.
Frustrated by this phenomenon, one of the audience members went to the press with her story. She wanted the whole world to know what she saw. The newspaper told her they couldn't print something that crazy with only personal testimony to rely on. Determined to prove her claim, the lady returned to Jesus with a couple of scientists, a video camera, and all kinds of measuring devices. She was going to perform a scientific study on Jesus' abilities.
I let the computation run in my mind and noticed something peculiar. Even though there were only three people in the room observing Jesus, the free energy distribution in the system had changed significantly. It was now exponentially harder for Jesus to overcome the limiting expectations of the system and turn the water into wine.
Why?
I thought about it for a moment and then realized that the measuring devices and formal structure of the study were to blame. If this experiment was run in a controlled setting, and scientific measurements were being captured, that information could be distributed to the scientific community, and then the whole world. The results could potentially entangle with billions of other observers, giving them prediction errors, too. A man turning water into wine, in an incontrovertible setting with incontrovertible, repeatable measurements, would contradict everything we collectively believed to be true about the world.
Therefore, the observers weren't just the people in the room — they were the people in the room, and the people that the information could potentially flow to once a measurement was recorded. The system also took into account all the future chaos that would occur as a result of information flowing to these observers. It had calculated every possible configuration of the universe and used that map to decide which reality to manifest in the present moment.
It became apparent to me, then, that Jesus was actually fighting the momentum of billions of people's limiting beliefs. He was fighting against the momentum of all that expected free energy in the future. And yet he could still perform his miracles in front of crowds. Why? It was something more than just his inner conviction. What was it?
Hmmm…
Before the answer could come to me, my mind was whisked off in another direction. I realized that the free energy principle explained why psychic or 'supernatural' phenomena were so difficult to reproduce in controlled scientific environments. Materialists would always laugh and say, "Well, if you really can do telekinesis, then prove it in a lab!" When the participant subsequently couldn't perform the feat under controlled conditions, he was labeled a fraud. The materialist's hubris was assuming that the world is fundamentally material, and therefore that the configuration and intention behind the experiment were not affecting the results.
Although it's a crude example, I likened it to rape. I imagined a woman living in a perfect utopian society where nothing horrible ever happened. I then imagined that woman walking up to a scientist and saying, "Sir, I was raped."
The scientist laughed at her and said, "That's impossible. Look around at our perfect utopian world. Rape doesn't exist!"
The woman placed her hands on her hips in indignation. "Except that last night, I was raped. A man held a gun to my head and raped me. I experienced it first hand. Rape exists."
"You're delusional! You should really get that mental illness diagnosed and treated with some meds," the scientist replied, neatly minimizing his own free energy. If he took her claim seriously, he would create a gap between what he believed to be true, and what the information coming into his senses told him was true. It was cognitively easier to label her a crackpot to minimize his own surprise, instead of actually getting curious about the situation.
"Why won't you believe me?" she cried.
"First-hand experience is not evidence. If rape really does exist, then you'll need to prove it under controlled experimental conditions."
She looked at him, dumbfounded. "But if I'm raped under controlled experimental conditions, then it will no longer be rape. You will simply observe consensual sex and then declare that rape doesn't exist because it wasn't measured. Observing the phenomena under controlled conditions changes the very nature of the thing you are observing!"
The scientist shook his head. "If it can't be observed under controlled conditions, we have to assume it's not true. If something is true, we should be able to reproduce it reliably."
"You do realize how faulty your logic is there, right?" she replied. "Your worldview is based on the assumption that everything 'true' can be measured under controlled conditions, and the configuration of the observing system is completely independent of the thing being observed. Therefore, the data you've amassed over centuries of science is the result of selection bias. You're only observing phenomena that will repeatedly manifest under controlled conditions.
This selection bias has led you to believe you are living in utopia, because dystopian acts can't be observed under controlled conditions. People only act dystopian when they aren't being observed. When they are being observed, they act completely differently.
Furthermore, isn't it interesting that nine in ten physicists are men, but nearly all the people experiencing rape are women? The chance of one of your scientists being raped, and experiencing the phenomena first hand, is incredibly low. You are never going to be confronted with evidence that you are wrong, simply because of the innate characteristics of being a scientist. You guys all think the same and have more-or-less the same belief systems, and yet you're standing here claiming that rape doesn't exist as if your world view is correct. What if the underlying assumptions that have formed your worldview are wrong? What if you're wrong, not me?
But of course, no one can tell you that you're wrong. If one of your colleagues speaks up and wants to investigate rape, you'll vilify them and call them a pseudoscientist because you and your super-smart scientific buddies already know that rape doesn't exist. Your scientific system is therefore optimized to reach a local maximum, not a global maximum. You might find bits and pieces of the Truth, but you'll never find the whole Truth if you continue thinking that way."
The woman turned on her heel and walked out of the room.
The scientist rolled his eyes, muttered "crackpot" under his breath, then resumed his work as if nothing had ever happened.
This exchange reminded me of an article I'd read a few years ago. A quick Google search retrieved the piece in question, written by John Horgan in Scientific American: Scientific Heretic Rupert Sheldrake on Morphic Fields, Psychic Dogs and Other Mysteries.
For decades, I've been only dimly aware of Rupert Sheldrake as a renegade British biologist who argues that telepathy and other paranormal phenomena (sometimes lumped under the term psi) should be taken more seriously by the scientific establishment. Since I'm one of those fuddy-duddy establishment doubters of psi, I never bothered to examine Sheldrake's work closely. But I was intrigued, and amused, by the vehemence of his critics, notably John Maddox, the long-time editor of Nature, who once called Sheldrake's views "heresy" that deserved to be "condemned."
Scientific American
I chucked. Heresy, eh? That's awfully religious language for a scientist. It's almost as if materialism is a... dare I say it... religion.
Sheldrake probably provokes such strong reactions in part because he is a product of the scientific establishment — more specifically, of Cambridge University. He earned his doctorate in biochemistry there in 1967 and became a fellow and director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology. He gradually became dissatisfied with current theories of biology. He presented an alternative framework — involving his theory of morphic resonance (explained below) — in his 1981 book A New Science of Life, which Maddox, in a now-famous Nature editorial, called "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years."
Scientific American
I laughed. This John Maddox guy is exactly what his name suggests — mad, I thought. Morphic resonance makes perfect sense when you combine it with Friston's free energy principle. If you're looking for the best candidate for burning, tie materialism to a stake and set it on fire.
I skipped ahead.
At one point Sheldrake, alluding to my 1996 book The End of Science, said that his science begins where mine ends. When I asked him to elaborate he said, "We both agree that science is at present limited by assumptions that restrict enquiry, and we agree that there are major unsolved problems about consciousness, cosmology and other areas of science… I am proposing testable hypotheses that could take us forward and open up new frontiers of scientific enquiry."
I remain a psi doubter; my doubt was reinforced by psychologist Susan Blackmore, a psi believer-turned-skeptic whom I interviewed for my 2003 book Rational Mysticism. But now and then I still doubt my doubt. In a post here two years ago, I point out that many brilliant scientists — from William James and Alan Turing to Freeman Dyson — have been open-minded about psi.
I conclude, "I’m a psi skeptic, because I think if psi was real, someone would surely have provided irrefutable proof of it by now. But how I wish that someone would find such proof!... The discovery of telepathy or telekinesis would blow centuries of accumulated scientific dogma sky high. What could be more thrilling!"
Scientific American
The article articulated the scientific community's faulty assumption perfectly: 'If psi was real, someone would surely have provided irrefutable proof of it by now.'
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I recalled a relevant passage from Conversations With God.
But if You did something that would evidence the truth of who You are beyond doubt or question…
…there are still those who would say, it is of the devil, or simply someone’s imagination. Or any cause other than Me.
If I revealed myself as God Almighty, King of Heaven and Earth, and moved mountains to prove it, there are those who would say, “It must have been Satan.”
And such is as it should be. For God does not reveal Godself to Godself from or through outward observation, but through inward experience. And when inward experience has revealed Godself, outward observation is not necessary. And if outward observation is necessary, inward experience is not possible.
If, then, revelation is requested, it cannot be had, for the act of asking is a statement that it is not there; that nothing of God is now being revealed. Such a statement produces the experience. For your thought about something is creative, and your word is productive, and your thought and your word together are magnificently effective in giving birth to your reality. Therefore shall you experience that God is not now revealed, for if God were, you would not ask God to be.
Neale Donald Walsch
Of course, the free energy principle provided a mathematical explanation for this phenomenon: Therefore shall you experience that God is not now revealed, for if God were, you would not ask God to be. We don't see incontrovertible evidence of miracles because our very disbelief prevents it. The evidence won't clearly manifest until our consciousness collectively evolves and allows it to.
