“Consciousness is a phenomenon that is part of the physical world, although some people don’t like to think of it as physical at all.” - Sir Roger Penrose, mathematical physicist at Oxford.Ah, yes, I think you're right, Roger. They don't like it at all. It makes them nervous. ;)
A Quote for the Day
A Letter From A Reader
From one Mr Lin:
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Hi Mr Wang,
Thanks for your reply, and sorry for taking so long to continue correspondence.
About NLP, mindhacking, etc. The more I think about the subject, the more I realise it's one of those "facts of life" that is quietly moved into the metaphorical closet, along with all the other skeletons that mankind hid because they are too "irrational" or too "unscientific".
From young, we are told that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to, which is a very primitive version of mindhacking. However, much like how we eventually grow to learn that Santa Claus does not exist, our experiences tell us that we "can't" accomplish everything we want, because we're very much limited by supposedly natural laws imposed on everyone. We try to rationalize our inadequencies, if only to make ourselves feel better and accept the situation that we are in.
Eventually, humans reach a stage in their growth that they cease to believe. They sneer at those who choose to continue to believe, instead choosing to be cynical (or as they claim, scientific).
Which leads to your current predicament, if I may call it that. While you are trying to expose and expound on a "truth" you've discovered, a truth that many successful people use to reach their current positions in life, people are calling heresy because it sounds about as concrete as castles on clouds.
It leads me to think that maybe humans are just not ready. The Jews supposedly condemned Jesus to be a heretic because He claimed to be the Son of God (because the concept is just too far out from their mainstream ideology). Galileo was called a nutcase for suggesting that the Earth was round (again, because they weren't ready yet).
A hypothetical wager, maybe? If mindhacking had been repackaged into self-motivation, if a couple of other auxiliary concepts such as hard work and perseverence were thrown in to smoothen the rough edges, I dare say that there would be less people who would contest you, but more who would say that this is old news.
Interesting that humans would believe that success needs to be exchanged, but fail to grasp the idea that the key is not hard work, but the simple belief (true, unwavering belief) in oneself's success.
When one has true unwavering belief of something, one has a direction and a goal. If it is a real true unwavering belief, that person needs no other motivation to act on that belief. If so, that person would naturally put in the hard work required, and succeed.
Even in the past, Leonardo da Vinci wanted man to fly. He put in hard work, worked around our physiological issues, and created the first flying machine (based on design, anyway). The Wright Brothers too had that dream, and put their determination into action and made it work.
We can't fly, not by our own bodies anyway. We are highly doubtful of psychics and mind reading now, because it seems so implausible. But if someone had enough motivation to dig into flying and work around problems to result in the jumbo jets of today, who's to say it's impossible for us to work around our current problems to reach psychic mastery?
I doubt my interpretation of mindhacking and NLP is accurate, but I feel that it's a stepping stone. A middle ground, if you will. I just feel that what's happening to you right now is the reason why hermits stay far away from other human contact - because only those who can accept will approach them for advice, while the rest will simply ridicule or slander him.
............
A question: people claim that many people go through life without ever knowing their direction, and end up doing fine still. How true is that? I find the idea of aimlessly floating through life both wasteful and scary... :(
The RAS at Work
In my earlier post on goal-writing, I had provided various links. One of them was to an article which mentioned the reticular activating system (RAS) in the human brain. In the present post I will discuss the RAS.The RAS is the part of the human brain that deals with motivations. Although there is no scientific consensus on this point yet, some people believe that one of the functions of the RAS is to direct a person’s attention towards things in his environment that are relevant to his motivations and interests. Simultaneously, the RAS will filter out things in his environment which are judged not to be relevant.
For example, suppose a man enters into a big room full of strangers, walks around for ten seconds, and then leaves the room. If you then ask him to describe all the people he just saw, he may be able to describe just a few of them. But there’s a very high chance that he will remember the sexy young lady with the big breasts and the long legs. In fact, he probably noticed her almost immediately upon entering the room, instinctively picking her out from a big crowd of faceless strangers. This is his RAS at work.
Here is another example. You take your time to read the newspapers on a leisurely Sunday. When you're done, you would have read, say, fifteen full articles in detail (because these articles were interesting to you). However, there could be another twenty articles which you had skipped completely, because they were not interesting to you and you did not want to read them at all.
Now, if you were then asked to put aside your newspaper and say something about those 20 articles, you would struggle. You would not even know what it is that you cannot remember. The funny thing is that when you were going through the newspapers, at some unconscious level you MUST have noticed these 20 articles. Otherwise how were you able to judge that they were uninteresting and should be skipped?
What happened here is that your RAS automatically filtered those 20 articles away and out of your field of perception. Your unconscious / subconscious mind took note of those 20 articles, decided that you shouldn’t waste your time on them and directed your attention elsewhere. Your conscious mind played no part in this. In effect, you had no choice. Therefore you can neither remember anything about the 20 articles you skipped nor understand why you had skipped them.
Most of us know what we like, and what we are interested in – therefore we know what are the kind of things we notice. What we don’t know is what we don’t notice. What we don’t notice is probably a heck of a lot of things. But that’s mostly unconscious to us.
That’s because our RAS works on the basis of our subconscious / unconscious mind. A heterosexual man does not have to tell his RAS, “Please direct my attention to sexy young ladies in my physical proximity.” A newspaper reader interested in professional golf and Australian politics does not have to tell his RAS, “Please direct my attention to newspaper articles about professional golf and Australian politics.” It all happens automatically.
Since the RAS operates on the basis of our subconscious / unconscious mind, the beliefs and thoughts that we hold at these levels in effect decide what we perceive about the world - every minute, every hour, day after day, month after month, year after year.
So for instance, if you subconsciously believe that you are a useless idiot, your RAS will constantly direct your attention towards all available evidence and events in your physical environment that indicate or suggest that you are a useless idiot.
If you subconsciously believe that hard work is the only way to succeed (and you want to succeed), your RAS will constantly direct your attention such that the only route to success that you can perceive is through hard work.
If you subconsciously believe that it is very possible to make lots of money, your RAS will constantly direct your attention such that you keep perceiving many possible opportunities to make a lot of money.
If you subconsciously believe that you are great at solving difficult problems, then your RAS will constantly direct your attention such that you keep perceiving difficult problems, AND keep perceiving great ways to solve them.
If you subconsciously believe that you are too young / too old / too weak / too poor / too lazy / too unlucky / too disadvantaged / too busy to do _____________, then your RAS will constantly direct your attention towards perceiving evidence that you are indeed too young / too old / too weak / too poor / too lazy / too unlucky / too disadvantaged / too busy to do _____________.
As I’ve said before, your reality is basically (a) what you perceive about reality, and (b) your interpretation of your perceptions. In the end, your reality is totally constructed out of your thoughts. Things which are deeply against your deepest beliefs will simply not be perceptible by you.
For example, the staunch atheist will look around the universe, the stars, the sun, the seas and the moon and say, “I cannot see any evidence at all of the existence of God!”. While the religious believer will look around the same universe, the stars, the sun, the seas and the moon and say, “I see God everywhere! What kind of fool one must be, not to be able to see this!”. Both of them are absolutely correct, within their respective realities.
There is no escape! Your mind is your universe. Change your mind, and you change your __________.
Well, This is Unfortunate
I actually welcome disagreement and vigorous discussion about my posts - I always have, it is one of my charming characteristics as a blogger.
But unfortunately two or three particular individuals have degenerated into passing insulting remarks of an ad hominen nature and making personal attacks etc etc.
Such remarks (1) don't add any value to the discussion, (2) adversely affect the quality of the overall exchange between readers in the comment section and (3) also create an unfriendly atmosphere that intimidates other readers who genuinely want to post questions or comments.
So I'll have to turn on the comment moderation function.
Readers who sincerely disagree with me on any point should feel free to post comments indicating their disagreement. I give my assurance that these comments will continue to be published if they are genuine comments addressing the subject matter of my posts (as opposed to comments calling me a "fork-tongued lawyer"; a "retard" etc).
Oh, that includes those two or three individuals as well (or rather, the two individuals, one of whom has been masquerading as two separate individuals). You're still welcome to post comments if you refrain from bad behaviour.
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But unfortunately two or three particular individuals have degenerated into passing insulting remarks of an ad hominen nature and making personal attacks etc etc.
Such remarks (1) don't add any value to the discussion, (2) adversely affect the quality of the overall exchange between readers in the comment section and (3) also create an unfriendly atmosphere that intimidates other readers who genuinely want to post questions or comments.
So I'll have to turn on the comment moderation function.
Readers who sincerely disagree with me on any point should feel free to post comments indicating their disagreement. I give my assurance that these comments will continue to be published if they are genuine comments addressing the subject matter of my posts (as opposed to comments calling me a "fork-tongued lawyer"; a "retard" etc).
Oh, that includes those two or three individuals as well (or rather, the two individuals, one of whom has been masquerading as two separate individuals). You're still welcome to post comments if you refrain from bad behaviour.
How to Write Down Your Goals
For background, first read this and this. My present post is written for three categories of people: (1) those who believe that thoughts do affect reality, and wish to experiment with goal-writing as a specific means to alter their reality in specific ways;Depending on which aspects of mindhacking you prefer to emphasise, there are several ways to go about writing down your goals. Bear in mind that the common principle is to plant the desired goals as deeply as possible into your subconscious mind. In future, I will describe some of those different ways. For now, let's stick with one simple exercise.
(2) those who do not believe that thoughts can affect reality in any "magical" way, but want to experiment with positive affirmations as a possible method to motivate themselves, generate creative ideas or focus their energy; and
(3) those who feel unsure or undecided about whether thoughts affect reality, and just want to experiment and investigate this possibility.
Through constant repetition by writing, you're programming your unconscious mind to accept that your goals are possible, or likely, or realistic, or even already fulfilled. Then your unconscious mind will start bending reality to make your goals come true.1. The best times to do this exercise are early in the morning, soon after you've woken up, or late at night, shortly before you go to bed. (This has something to do with your brain wave functions, but let's not get too technical). Otherwise, just pick a place and time that's quiet and peaceful and where you know you won't be interrupted or distracted for the next 10 to 15 minutes.
2. It's important to do the exercise with a clear mind. In other words, don't do this when you're angry or upset or busy or worrying about other things. Your writing exercise will last only 10 to 15 minutes, so during this short time, focus properly on it.
3. You'll need a single, blank piece of A4 paper and a pen. Personally, along the lines of Tony Buzan's mindmapping principles, I like to use pens of different colours, but these are frills, moderately useful but not strictly necessary.
4. Once you start writing your goals, do not stop until you finish the exercise. You do not need to write fast, but you simply must not stop. Keep writing steadily. The reason is that if you pause, you will start to analyse logically, and doubt will creep in. In other words, your conscious mind will have time to kick in, and you will start thinking, "Hey, this goal is not realistic. How could I really double my salary? Maybe I'll just aim for a 30% or 40% increase." Do not allow this to happen - just keep writing steadily, without pausing to analyse whether your goals are plausible or not.
5. State each goal in a single sentence. Write down whatever goal comes into your mind - it could relate, for instance, to your studies; your career; your family; your health; your personal habits; your hobbies; your sex life, and so on. Choose goals that are personally important to you and which would really make a difference to your life if they were achieved. As soon as you've finished stating one goal, move on to stating the next one.
6. Overstate all your goals. Make them very ambitious. If your goals are modest, then there is a strong likelihood that they could be achieved even without any special mindhacking methods. As a rough rule of thumb, just take what you think is a "realistic" target and then give it a significant bump upwards. For example, if you "realistically" think that you will score about 2 A's and 2 B's in your next exams, just bump it up into 4 straight A's.
7. If you face mental resistance towards writing down huge, ambitious goals (eg mental doubts such as "How am I possibly going to be able to achieve this?"), just tell yourself, "I permit myself to imagine and daydream. For the next 10-15 minutes, I will just let myself be foolish and pretend this is possible."
8. Wherever possible, state your goal in the present tense, as if it had already happened. For instance, do not write: "My goal is to earn $120,000 a year, by next year". Simply write "I am earning $120,000 a year" as if this goal had already come true. By tricking your unconscious mind in this way, you will cause your reality to bend more rapidly to make your false, unconscious belief true.
9. As far as possible, be clear and specific. Do not say: "I lose weight and become slim." Say "I lose 5 kg and weigh 50 kg, my ideal weight." Frame your goal in positive terms. Do not say: "I learn not to be so shy." Say: "I am a confident, sociable person, comfortable around other people."10. End the exercise when you've finished filling up one A4 page, or when you've listed at least about 20 goals.
11. Put away the piece of paper in a folder. Do not throw it away. Retain it for your future records.
12. In the initial stages of this experiment (eg the first three weeks), do this exercise about twice a day, every day. It also works if you do it less frequently, but it will take more time before you see the results. Later on, as you become more experienced with how this works, you can cut down on the frequency.
13. Each time you do this exercise, do not look at the previous pages of goals that you've already written. Just do the exercise afresh. Most of the goals that you wrote about previously will therefore be repeated again and again (in slightly different wording), Each time you do this exercise, it's perfectly ok to omit a few previous goals or add a few new ones.
After doing the exercise, you can just get on with your normal routine. If you suddenly feel new motivation to take personal action towards your goals, by all means go ahead. If you do not, just carry on with your usual daily life. Do whatever feels right. You don't have to put any unnatural pressure on yourself to behave in any particular way.
If you want to compare the goal-writing exercise to the Rosenthal experiment, it is as if the teachers are being told twice a day, every day, that Student A is smart, and Student B is stupid, and Student C is average, and Student D is smart, and Student E is stupid ...... . The teachers are told these things so often that at some unconscious level, the teachers start believing those things about those students.
And you know the rest, about what happened in the Rosenthal experiment. Whatever the teachers believed just started coming true. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Whoever is believed to be smart, becomes smart. Whoever is believed to be stupid, becomes stupid. No extra effort or action needed by the teachers, even if they had actually had any concrete ideas on what they should do.
The 13-step process I've outlined above is shaped by my personal experience. Others, like Scott Adams, will have slightly different takes. For example, he will write the same goal 15 times a day, but I would prefer writing a list of many different goals in many different areas of life, just once a day. To some extent, these are just differences in personal preferences. My preference simply reflects my personal view of the meaning of success in life.
Some other people's takes on goal-writing exercises are here, here, here and here.
If you really want to thoroughly investigate whether thoughts affect reality, then quite apart from doing the writing exercises every day, you should also keep a diary to record significant daily events or occurrences in your life. Pay attention especially to synchronicities that crop up in response to your written goals.
The term synchronicity was coined by Carl Jung, one of the founding fathers of modern psychology. It refers to the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally inexplicable to the person or persons experiencing them. Jung's own definition was the "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events."
For example, suppose you write these goals - "I have very good friends" and "I find a new job that I really love, in interior design." Two days later, you bump into an good old friend whom you had lost touch with and hadn't seen for 10 years. While you're happily chatting with him, he suddenly says, "Hey, I'm now working in an interior design firm. We are looking to hire a new person. Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested?"
This would be an example of how reality reacts synchronistically to your thoughts. You will, of course, be inclined to dismiss it as a strange but random coincidence ... until you see it happening again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Record all these down, so that you can review them later and analyse the probability that in fact it was all random.
If you do your recording faithfully, I believe that you will soon realise that reality is constantly shifting and bending to make your thoughts to come true. If your thoughts are focused on your goals, then reality will constantly shift and bend to make your goals come true.
This is related to what Buddhism calls karma, and that's why Buddhism emphasises the importance of thinking good thoughts. Whatever you think will translate back into your personal reality. More on this Buddhist angle, another time. Meanwhile, go on, try the goal-writing exercise. Don't be shy now.
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This post is dedicated to Mr G Singh. All the best!
How to Make Millions of Dollars By Drawing Pictures Even Though You're Very Bad at Art
I received a couple of email queries about my earlier post "Writing Down Your Goals". I had explained that it's mainly about impressing your goals onto your unconscious mind. And I had said that thereafter your goals will start coming true, even if you don't consciously know how to make them start coming true. Some readers wanted to understand more about how this works. As I'm a little pressed for time, I'll just share with you Scott Adam's take on this. Scott is the creator of the tremendously well-known cartoon strip Dilbert. He is also a long-time practitioner of "thought affects reality" theories (his earliest accounts of his "thought adventures" go back to the time when he was nine years old).
I don't agree with every single point which Scott makes in his article below, but by and large, I agree with the "big picture" of his explanation:
Scott Adam has often written about "thought affects reality" theories. He had been doing so long before they became topical again due to the release of that controversial new video ("The Secret") that some of my readers have been mentioning.Several years ago, in the closing pages of my otherwise humorous book titled The Dilbert Future, I told a weird little tale of how I used a technique called affirmations in my attempts to achieve a number of unlikely goals. Since then, I’ve received more questions on that topic than on anything else I’ve ever written. So I know this will pin the needle on the blog comments.
The idea behind affirmations is that you simply write down your goals 15 times a day and somehow, as if by magic, coincidences start to build until you achieve your objective against all odds.
An affirmation is a simple sentence such as “I Scott Adams will become a syndicated cartoonist.” (That’s one I actually used.)
Prior to my Dilbert success, I used affirmations on a string of hugely unlikely goals that all materialized in ways that seemed miraculous. Some of the successes you can explain away by assuming I’m hugely talented and incredibly sexy, and therefore it is no surprise that I accomplished my goals despite seemingly long odds. I won’t debate that interpretation because I like the way it sounds.
But some of my goals involved neither hard work nor skill of any kind. I succeeded with those too, against all odds. Those are harder to explain, at least for me, since the most common explanation is that they are a delusion. I found my experience with affirmations fascinating and puzzling, and so I wrote about it.
At this point, allow me to correct a mistake I made the first time that I described my experience with affirmations. If you only hear the objective facts, it sounds as if I believe in some sort of voodoo or magic. That’s not the case. While I do think there is something wonderful and inexplicable about affirmations, I have no reason to conclude it is any more than a pleasant hallucination. But if it is a hallucination, it’s a totally cool one. When I have flying dreams, I know they aren’t real, but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of them. And so it might be the same with affirmations. Affirmations might be nothing more than a wonderful illusion that you can control your own luck.
Skeptics have suggested – and reasonably so – that this is a classic case of selective memory. Perhaps I tried affirmations a bunch of times and only remember the times it seemed to work. That’s exactly what I would assume if someone told me the stories I’ve told others. But working against this theory is the fact that affirmations leave a substantial paper trail. It would be hard to forget writing something 15 times a day for six months. And if it turns out that this is what happened to me, it’s fascinating still, because it says a lot about how the mind works.
My best guess about what really happens when you use affirmations is that several normal phenomena come together to create what seems abnormal. I’ll describe a few theories of what might be behind affirmations. Maybe there are more.
There’s a book called The Luck Factor, in which researcher Richard Wiseman describes studying people who considered themselves lucky, to see if they had any special powers along the lines of ESP. It turns out that they don’t. But he did discover that people who expect luck have a more powerful ability to notice opportunities in their environment. Optimistic people’s field of perception is literally greater. And the best part is he discovered that when you train people to expect luck, their field of perception increases accordingly. I think part of the mystery of affirmations has to do with the fact that it improves your ability to notice an opportunity. And when you do, it seems like a lucky coincidence. In my case, about half of my seemingly miraculous results with affirmations could be traced back to my noticing something important.
I’m not sure if optimism is what inspires a person to go through the effort of writing affirmations, or if the affirmations cause the optimism. But in either case you would expect that people who are writing affirmations would more readily notice opportunities than the average non-optimist.
I also wonder if affirmations are one way in which the subconscious (if such a thing exists) communicates with the rational part of your brain. Writing affirmations takes effort. Perhaps your subconscious only allows you to spend that much time on goals that it feels you have a chance of obtaining even if your rational mind does not. For example, my rational mind didn’t believe I could become a syndicated cartoonist with no experience and virtually no artistic ability. But maybe some other part of my brain knew it was a realistic goal.
Viewed in this light, if you can write a goal 15 times a day for months, there’s a good chance that some part of your brain views the goal as achievable even if your rational mind doesn’t see how. Writing affirmations also helps you focus on your goal, moving them from wishful thinking to something in which you are willing to invest yourself. If you have ever managed people, you know that your staff’s level of commitment makes a huge difference to their success. Perhaps affirmations are a way to manage your own level of commitment. In effect, you are brainwashing yourself, and this might help you get through the tough patches that come with pursuing ambitious goals. When I started Dilbert, I didn’t take a day off for ten years. You only work that hard if you fully expect something good to come from it. I did.
My favorite explanation for the power of affirmations also has the least evidence to support it, i.e. none. The idea behind this explanation is that human brains don’t have the capacity to understand all the complexities of reality, and so our brains present us with highly simplified illusions that we treat as facts.
In this model, affirmations are a lever on some entirely natural chain of cause and affect, but not a chain that our brains are capable of comprehending. While this view is unlikely to be correct, it has the advantage of being totally cool to think about.
Since the publication of The Dilbert Future, I’ve received thousands of e-mails from people recounting their own experiences with affirmations. Most people seem to be amazed at how well they worked. I heard all kinds of stories of people changing careers, marrying the person of their dreams, making money, and starting businesses. I also heard stories from people who claimed affirmations didn’t work for them, but the failure stories were the minority. To be fair, the people who had success were more likely to get excited and write to me about it, so the most that I can conclude is that lots of people BELIEVE affirmations worked for them.
Since I know you are going to ask me a bundle of questions about affirmations, let me answer the ones I can anticipate:
1. If affirmations work, it’s probably because you are focusing on a goal. Therefore I doubt it matters exactly how you word the affirmation, or if it’s handwritten or typed, or if you keep them or throw them away, or if you stop for a few days and then continue. I won’t answer any other
questions about technique because I’d be guessing.
2. I’ve never heard of a “monkey paw” affect where you achieve your goal but something horrible happens to you to balance it out.3. I’m not doing any affirmations at the moment, mostly because I already have everything I want except a Nobel Prize. And even that wouldn’t change my life much. But I do visualize all of my goals and I always expect good luck, so I probably get the benefits of affirmations – even if those are only psychological – without the effort.
4. I don’t know how long you should try affirmations before concluding that they don’t work for you. But trying it for less than six months probably doesn’t give it a chance.
5. Affirmations have not worked every time for me. But the few times they did not work, I must say I wasn’t fully invested in the objective. For example, there are a few cases where if I had achieved an objective it would have caused a lifestyle change that wasn’t entirely positive.
6. If you want to read more about affirmations, Google it. I don’t have any particular book to recommend.
I know from my experience describing this topic that fully half of you reading it just concluded that “the Dilbert guy believes in magic.” The truth is that I believe in cool things that haven’t yet been explained to my satisfaction.
So here’s a good test of your personality. If all of your friends told you that they win money on the slot machines whenever they stick their fingers in their own ears, would you try it? Or would you assume that since there is no obvious reason it could work, it’s not worth the effort?
Of course, the nature of these "thought affects reality" theories being what it is, Scott has often been heavily criticised for sharing his views and personal experiences. The funny thing is that some skeptical people actually believe that these theories are some kind of new contraption recently invented by modern-day crooks like Mr Wang.
Actually, thoughts have always been affecting reality, and in different ways, there have always been some people at any point in time who knew that. For example, as far as the 16th/17th century, for example, a famous, wise and very accomplished man already wrote:
"... the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832).Time has put a vast distance between Goethe and Scott, but if you stop to think about it for a moment, you'll see that they are actually talking about the same thing.
In subsequent posts, I'll discuss Scott's comments in further detail. Gotta run now.
Little Science Lessons
"The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with Quantum Mechanics and with facts established by experiment." - Bernard d'Espagnat, director of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics and Elementary Particles at the University of Paris XI (Orsay) from 1980-1987.Mr Wang is busy at work and apologises to his readers for not responding to their emails (yet). To the reader who argued that "if thought can affect reality, then telepathy would be possible!", yes, in Mr Wang's opinion, your reasoning is logical.
Thus Mr Wang would refer you to Professor Brian Josephson, Nobel Laureate in Physics. He is currently a professor at Cambridge University, and a strong advocate of the possibility of the existence of paranormal phenomena. He is also the head of the mind-matter unification project at Cambridge.
Note that the non-local aspects of telepathy (for example, the ability of a person in one place to instantly read the mind of another person in another place) is not inconsistent with the nonlocality aspects of quantum physics (the ability of a subatomic particle to instantly affect every subatomic particle that it has ever entangled with, regardless of wherever they may now be in the universe). See this, for example:
"Nonlocality has been invoked as an explanation for telepathy and clairvoyance, though some investigators believe that they might involve a deeper level of nonlocality, or what Bohm calls "super-nonlocality" (similar perhaps to Sheldrake's "morphic resonance" (1989)). As already pointed out, if nonlocality is interpreted to mean instantaneous connectedness, it would imply that information could be "received" at a distance at exactly the same moment as it is generated, without undergoing any form of transmission. At most, one could then try to understand the conditions that allow the instant appearance of information."As a matter of fact, researchers are now working on possible technological applications of this phenomenon - for example, two computer systems employing quantum technology could instantly "teleport" encrypted information to each other.
Sir Roger Penrose, the world-renowned mathematical physicist at Oxford University, may not agree though. His argument appears to be that while thoughts may indeed affect reality and consciousness may indeed be required to collapse a subatomic particle either into a wave or a particle, the kind of consciousness that may be necessary to sustain the existence of the universe is not the kind of "consciousness" that any computer, no matter how advanced, could have.In other words, even if the universe was created by God, He was most definitely not a piece of software.
Stay tuned for more, Mr Wang will be back!
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