Would The Afterlife Be After Life?

Someone, who knows who they are I think, made a stimulating comment on here which I picked up on this morning and I thought it might be worth responding to, so here it is.

First of all, I should probably point out that when I say “afterlife” it could equally well apply to future reincarnation, and in fact I want to mention what’s on my mind regarding that too. I’ll start with an experience I had shortly after becoming Christian.

The high-control faith organisation I became part of at eighteen was very conventionally evangelically Christian, and people within it set out their own views regarding a Christian’s fate, and at this point a surprise might be in order because it wasn’t like the conventional views of Heaven and Hell. In fact, I’ll start with that. The “demotic” culturally Christian understanding of the fate of human beings is something like, if you have enough good deeds, when you die your soul leaves your body and goes to another realm immediately which we call Heaven, and if you’re bad enough, your soul leaves your body and goes to another realm immediately which we call Hell. Heaven is an eternal place of reward and Hell an eternal place of punishment. Human experience continues after death in this form.

The above is basically never what reflective evangelical Protestants believe. There may be recent converts who do believe that or perhaps people who don’t particularly involve themselves in Bible study, small groups, quiet times and the like, although it seems likely to me that people in their church are likely to pick up on that and encourage them. It’s also possible that since I’m of a more philosophical, and therefore perhaps surmised to be a more theological, bent than my born-again Christian peers at the time, the discussion may have led me in that direction and it’s actually very common for them not to have reconsidered this idea, but it seriously is not found, so far as I know, anywhere in evangelical fundamentalist Protestantism. There’s also the rather silly idea that Heaven is above the sky and Hell below the ground.

It’s more like this, as I understand it. Humans are widely considered to be new creations at conception and to persist until death as a combined living soul and body unit. They are once again new creations if they make a commitment to Christ, i.e. become Christian, and some believe that humans are soul and body before conversion and become soul, spirit and body afterward. On death, there is an interval during which individuals have no experience and are effectively asleep, a period referred to as “soul sleep”. At the Day of Judgement, humans receive a resurrection body which is perfect and incorruptible, which again is accompanied by their soul. They have memories of their life on Earth and proceed to be judged by God. If they have been saved, or would’ve been saved if they’d heard the Good News but didn’t, or had it distorted in some way, God conveys them to a non-Earthly realm where they live forever in bliss. If not, they are conveyed to another realm where they suffer forever. In either case, the soul is a new creation at conception which continues to be conscious, except when asleep, comatose or temporarily dead, experiencing time sequentially with a past, present and future whose quality does not change after death. In other words, they believe in an afterlife.

I can’t guarantee that I’ve got this right and there’s likely to be a fair bit of variation between views within evangelical Biblically literalist Protestant Christians. Some of them probably believe exactly this, others don’t. Another set of beliefs about this is arguably more Biblical, and it’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. This is that humans are created, possibly from conception, as physical conscious beings who continue in consciousness until death. After death they cease to be conscious until God chooses to resurrect them if they have died before the Day of Judgement, then they are recreated as physical conscious beings in perfected bodies. After being judged, if they are not saved in the JW sense, and I’m not sure what that is incidentally, they simply cease to exist. If they are saved, they inherit the Earth as an earthly paradise and as physical conscious beings. There are some other complications, but that’s basically it as I understand it, and again it involves sequential consciousness. After being resurrected, we will recall our former lives as having happened already and our experience will continue after the gap which began with our deaths, providing we’re saved of course. Jehovah’s Witnesses give the impression of being fundamentalist and conservative nowadays, but back in the day they were, as conservative evangelicals in the late 20th century CE have pointed out, actually liberal Christians, or rather descended from them. They don’t believe in a place of eternal conscious torment, that Jesus was divine or in a different heavenly realm. The Kingdom of God is on Earth for them. This is also reflected in their cosmopolitanism: JW Kingdom Halls are notable for their very representative congregations in ethnic terms, you can expect the same proportionof Blacks, Whites, South and East Asians among them as in the communities they’re in, and they are also truly global rather than being restricted to the English-speaking developed world. They are of course also wrong and a high-control spiritual organisation. Many would call them a cult. They’re sexist and homophobic. In my years-long discussion with JWs, the longer I conversed with them, the more convinced I became that they were wrong, both in terms of how they interpreted the Bible and in more general terms. There is also much to admire in them, for instance their pacifism.

Getting back to my involvement in the high-control religious group when I was eighteen, I found myself encountering recurrent major problems with their beliefs. I may write about this elsewhere, but it’s not important here. In terms of the way justice was served, I had a couple of major problems. One is that I felt, and still feel, that saving souls for Jesus becomes a substitute for actually doing good in the world. Another is that too much emphasis was placed on repentance, to the extent that Hitler could repent and be saved but some paragon of virtue could go to Hell for not being Christian. Consequently, I decided to revive my old belief in reincarnation. I had a model of the spiritual universe like this: space-time extends infinitely, or at least vastly, in all dimensions, in this case meaning the three of space and the one of time. Outside that realm are souls, which for the purposes of the model are points. From these points radiate lines to every incarnation each soul ever experiences, a bit like a spider with a colossal number of legs. From each of these lives, they learn important lessons and their position outside space and time is informed by the sum total of their experiences. That’s how I saw spiritual reality at the start of my adulthood.

There are problems with this model. The most important one I perceived at the time was the problem of why we don’t seem to have experienced previous lives as aliens or remember our future lives. If the enlightened oversoul to whom we are connected in our incarnate lives doesn’t experience time the way we do, and if we live in such a vast Universe the chances of being reincarnated in the immediate future or past as a human on this planet are extremely close to zero, yet we don’t seem to remember lives spent on different worlds. Moreover, since our eternal oversouls are not within time and reincarnation is not consecutive, there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping us from remembering future lives unless we are in general blocked from remembering other lives. Although there are said to be cases of people remembering former lives, I’m not aware of anyone claiming to remember their own future lives, although there do seem to be cases of premonition.

I stopped believing in that model fairly early on. It was mainly an attempt to make sense of life and the world spiritually in a hostile environment, so when I left that I was able to let go of that belief. For a while I was dualist, i.e. I believed in a soul and a body which existed in the same sense, i.e. two concrete, equally real entities which interact. The problem with that view may be that it’s “not even wrong” – it can’t be discussed rigorously because it falls apart under the most cursory examination. I don’t object to the idea of a soul, but I don’t think it’s a ghost in the machine, and it’s worthwhile digressing here into what I find a fascinating set of views held by some Christians.

Some Christians are physicalist, and I’d venture to say that some of them don’t realise they are but would if they thought about it. The problem with soul sleep after death followed by resurrection and consciousness with memory of a former life is that there’s apparently nothing connecting the resurrected person to the historical figure they are supposed to be the same as, and therefore that there’s no justice in either rewarding or punishing them, or saving or damning them which is unfortunately not the same thing. God creates someone and they live out their life, alternatively either being a good or bad person or becoming Christian or refusing to do so. Then they die, and eventually nothing physical remains of them. At some point in the future, God recreates a seemingly identical person with a perfected body, the same personality as before and with accurate memories of a former life. But this is, in a way, just God playing a game. This new identical creation has not committed the sins or done the good deeds of the previous person because there’s nothing linking them and they’re not the same person. They don’t deserve either good or bad treatment based on that previous person’s life and no justice is served. Without a soul of some kind, there can be no justice because it means death is the end. Therefore, most Christians would probably say there is such a thing as a soul, and they’d probably tend to think of it as a kind of phantom reflecting the person as they are in life, or perhaps a brilliant point of light or something. To their credit, my main interlocutor in the high-control group would not be drawn on defining the soul despite some suggestions I gave him, and with hindsight that could be the right attitude, although it might also mean he was worried that close examination would disintegrate his ideas. But as I said, Christian physicalism exists. Such Christians argue that Christian anthropology, i.e. its view of the nature of humans, has been inordinately influenced by Plato with his idea of the separation of the soul and body. They further see the Bible itself as supporting the view that we are living souls, i.e. that the references to us being “living souls” in the Bible actually refers to our embodied, living selves rather than something our bodies contain or are in some way connected to while we’re alive. Many would also claim that at no point is a disembodied human soul depicted in the Bible. Demons are of course, and I’d also raise the question of Saul attempting to talk to Samuel’s soul via a medium, that soul being identified as Samuel rather than a deceptive demon pretending to be him. They also see all this as being more aligned with the findings of modern science and medicine. I don’t personally think they’ve succeeded in making any connection between the original body and the resurrection body, which if I were to try that myself I’d probably say is the same person created from something like a Platonic form, so it’s like there’s the number 2, the word “two”, the digit “2” and the Roman numeral “II”, all of which refer to the objectively existing and unique number 2, but it’s not up to me to defend really.

I do not believe in the human experience of sequential time except in waking life. I see our experience of time as one moment following another in order to be confined to the sequence of days we live through awake, starting with our birth or perhaps before and ending with our death or an irreversible loss of any kind of consciousness at the ends of our lives. However, it isn’t that simple and you’ve probably noticed that I’m obliquely referring to other states of consciousness, where matters are entirely different. The anti-theistic philosopher Daniel Dennett, of whom I’m not generally much of a fan, did make an interesting observation regarding sleep, which is that we don’t know that we’re experiencing dreams. It could just be that dreams are messes in our sleeping brains which our waking brains try to make sense of, although I don’t think that can be true because of the existence of lucid dreams and things like people talking in their sleep, sleepwalking and so forth, apparently acting out their dreams as they occur. Nonetheless, I have had an experience which suggested to me that dreams are not as they seem, which is that I dozed off with the radio on, woke up a few minutes later and my dream began with radio sounds when I woke up and ended with sounds from it as I dropped off. The only way I can make sense of this in conventional terms is that my dream consisted of assembled and confused information present in my brain resulting from sleep when I woke up, and that was my brain assembling that in the wrong order.

However, I don’t think it’s either/or, and I’m not the only person to believe this. Dennett’s belief that lucid dreams, i.e. dreams where the dreamer becomes aware they’re dreaming and takes control of it, are not experiences strikes me as the result of his dogma about the nature of consciousness forcing him to absurd conclusions and probably also reflects on how he accounts for all consciousness, i.e. very badly. All that said, I think you can have it both ways, and here’s why: wakefulness has one attitude to reality and dreaming has another. It’s also feasible that all states of consciousness have their own unique attitudes. In particular, time doesn’t operate the same way in dreaming as it does in everyday life. I don’t want to go into too much depth here, but I once had an extremely detailed dream in which I see places and people whom I had no idea existed at the time, and this is a single and particularly notable incident of many such. Dreams, I think, actually do sometimes foretell the future, and the only way I can make sense of this is to understand them as presenting temporal events in a different way to how they occur to the waking mind. This is certainly true in the case of past events, but my more extraordinary claim is that they also present events which haven’t yet occurred. All that said, judging by how our thinking and consciousness as waking people operates, dreams are indeed not temporal events at all but just arbitrary patterns in our minds which we make sense of when we awake, but that presentation and understanding is that of a wakeful, living brain and is not more true or more valid than the experience one has in another state of consciousness such as dreaming. It’s more like a three-dimensional cube being projected onto a flat surface and looking like a square or a hexagon. Our minds when awake simply can’t do anything else with the experience. For that reason, I also think that dreams don’t occur while we’re asleep, which is one reason I narrate them in the present tense. What actually happens is that a conduit opens to experiences which are no less valid or real, in their own terms, at a particular point in our waking lives. There was never a time when the dream someone has at the age of forty wasn’t there: it exists outside sequential time.

J W Dunne took this approach, which went on to influence J B Priestley and Olaf Stapledon among others. In his ‘An Experiment With Time’, published in 1927, Dunne claimed on the basis of prophetic dreams that there are two time dimensions, only one of which governs our lives. Another level of consciousness occupies the other time dimension, and there is an infinite regress into higher and higher time dimensions. This is interesting but not quite how I see things. I think that when we’re both alive and awake, we experience time sequentially, but that only makes sense within that state. Beyond that state, time is different and possibly indescribable and incomprehensible to us as we are now. Dreams are clues to this, but there’s a lot more to reality which they only hint at. Hence the question “what happens after we die?” is based on false assumptions about time. Death only occurs to our waking selves, and in fact it doesn’t even do that because as far as that mode of our consciousness is concerned, we always have a past, present or future. Death is not something we experience. I also find it entertaining, though maybe meaningless, to think of my life as an endless loop, which is however only operating in a general sea of consciousness and not limited to it, so maybe we live through our lives and go on to experience amnesia combined with death and rebirth into the same life repeated infinitely. As well as the other people I’ve mentioned, the author Ian Watson has expressed the idea that the “afterlife” is a dream state in which Hell is the inability to dream lucidly and Heaven is lucid dreaming, which can however be induced in the damned, liberating them from Hell by doing so.

Now for reincarnation. There seem to be two views of this. In one, we progress or regress in each life and are reincarnated accordingly. In another, we simply reincarnate without any particular plan or direction. The former is the southern and eastern Asian view on the matter, and it’s possible that their view of reincarnation is more valid because of the Valeriepieris Circle:

This circle represents half the population of the world. More people live inside this circle than outside it. Interestingly, to me anyway, it includes the main area where people take the existence of reincarnation for granted. The reason this is interesting is that this area is also the one where people are most likely to be reincarnated if it is true, so if there’s any evidence that people have lived before, for instance memories of former lives, that’s the area where they could be most easily verified or supported. If reincarnation is true, the most likely places religions or other belief systems which accept that are to arise is within that circle, and that is in fact what’s happened. It doesn’t prove anything of course. People would be less likely to experience it in large areas of tundra, desert or on oceanic islands, and of course the Abrahamic religions did arise in desert areas. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t believe in it elsewhere but it could be seen as evidence for it.

I’m not going to question the reality of people being able to remember things they “couldn’t” because they appear to have happened in someone else’s life. I’m prepared to accept that as at least a theoretical possibility and I’m more interested in what it might imply. The most common interpretation of this taking place is that someone’s soul lived out a life in one body which then died and they’re now in another body, often that of a small child, who can remember some events which occurred in the previous life. However, that isn’t the only explanation and it depends on the existence of a soul or persistent self which may not be real. David Hume, some other Western philosophers and of course Buddhists have the idea that there is nothing you can point to which is “I”. Instead, there are simply experiences in a stream linked by memories and anticipation. I don’t agree with this for two reasons. One is that I believe that total loss of memory which didn’t otherwise injure a person, or if you like cloning or duplication, would still be followed by a person with a very similar personality. There are cases of identical twins separated at birth who have ended up almost duplicating each other’s lives unwittingly, even to the extent of getting a dog of the same breed and calling him the same name. The other is that you are the person others relate to or see you as, for instance their parent, sibling, boss, mentor or favourite musician. These kinds of identity are real. However, they’re not the same as having a soul, and for that reason I think it makes as much sense to suppose that it isn’t the soul who is reincarnated but their various memories and experiences are reassembled, probably as a collage from many lives, in a new person. However, there is one proviso here: those experiences might only exist as part of someone’s whole life, and if that’s lived with integrity that would lead to a larger chunk of someone being reincarnated, and perhaps ultimately as the whole person undergoing that process. This is odd because it kind of means that the better life one leads, the more likely one is to be reincarnated rather than the other way round.

So to conclude, there have been two themes in this post.  One is the nature of identity and time, and the other is what can be said to happen beyond this life.  In that, I’ve committed myself to discussing only religious views, but it’s also possble that these thoughts can be adapted to more non-religious views. Some of them are inspired by Heidegger and existentialism, after all. Let me know what you think. It really isn’t that deep.

Dream Time

Daniel Dennett is quite annoying. His view of consciousness is completely absurd, for example. I’m not going to defend my position here because this isn’t exactly what this post is about.

In case you don’t know, Daniel Dennett is a major analytical philosopher, the English-speaking tradition of philosophy dating from the late nineteenth century CE with the rejection of Hegelian idealism, continuing today and apparently also including Polish philosophers for some reason. Bertrand Russell is a good example. It was once described in ‘Radical Philosophy’ like this: a Heideggerian says something like “Die Welt weltet”, and analytic philosophy comes along and says “Where is this Welt, and when exactly did it start welting?”. It is actually mainly my own background and I have a lot of respect for it, partly because I think postmodernism is a good way of making excuses for how things are politically and socially without coming up with a solution to them, and that comes out of the continental tradition. I’d also distinguish analytic philosophy from other viable philosophical approaches taken by anglophones such as that of William Blake, who is unsurprisingly an outsider and apparently linked to the Muggletonians, about whom I know very little. Sarada is the expert on Blake, but for what it’s worth I think of him as an English Romantic. I don’t know if that’s fair.

Recently, Dennett was involved in a movement referred to as the “Brights”, whose aim was to further metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is often treated as if it’s synonymous with atheism, but in fact it’s a specialised form of atheism which is radically different, for instance, from Marxist atheism and the South Asian Samkhya and Carvaka. I had a conversation with a White bloke the other day who was atheist because of karma, a view also found in South Asian thought. The basic idea there is that because karma is a universal law governing the working of the Universe, there’s no need to suppose that God exists. Although I’m theist, I do find this interesting on an intellectual level, mainly because it’s so unlike metaphysical naturalism but still strongly atheist. Metaphysical naturalism is the idea that only natural forces and laws operate in the Universe, i.e. there is no supernatural realm and therefore no God or other deities. Obviously I don’t agree with this, but that isn’t why I find Dennett annoying.

The Brights were founded by Dennett and Dawkins, among other people whose names don’t come to mind right now. Other metaphysically naturalistic atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, have criticised the name as appearing to imply intellectual superiority. It reminds me a bit of the stereotypical Mensa attitude. To be fair, I’m not sure this was the intention so much as an attempt to come up with a positive-sounding name. Brights use the word “super” to describe people such as myself who have supernatural and/or mystical elements as part of our view. This actually makes me sound like Wonder Woman or something, so it’s okay really. Nonetheless, the Brights believe themselves to be right and us to be wrong. It isn’t an unusual position to see oneself as correct by contrast with others whose opinions differ, so that is also fine.

One of Dennett’s more bizarre positions is that lucid dreams are not experiences. This strikes me as a kind of ideological commitment resulting from it being a logical conclusion of his other views about consciousness. However, it’s also an elaboration of another, simpler position of his with which I actually do agree, in a sense: that dreams are not experiences in general. I do differ with this view but also think it captures something significant about the nature of consciousness, particularly wakefulness. Looking at them from a position of being awake, it seems to me that dreaming could well represent the wakeful consciousness attempting to make sense of the “junk” present in one’s mind on waking. There are some reasons why this may not be true, but others which are hard to reconcile with it not being so. For instance, someone I know once dreamt that she, note the tense in this phrase, has to cry three tears to save a toad’s life, and I could hear her trying to do this several minutes before she woke up. On the other hand, I was once dreaming while the radio was on and the sequence of events on the radio is time-reversed in my dream. The dream ends with something happening on the radio which in waking experience happened before something which starts the dream, which can be explained if dreams are false memories created during REM sleep.

The idea that lucid dreams are not experiences is kind of arse-about-face. It’s a conclusion Dennett is forced into due to his expressed view of consciousness which is counter-intuitive to me, and I’d think to most other people. There is an odd phenomenon in consciousness where immediately prior events are “re-written” by memory. For instance, MP3 files when played back often have periods of silence in them before loud notes which the listener doesn’t notice because they’re eclipsed by the slightly later event. Dennett uses a similar illusion called the “phi phenomenon” where lights of two colours flashed in succession leads to the perception that a single light is moving back and forth and changing colour. He offers two explanations for this, which he calls “Orwellian” and “Stalinesque”. In the Orwellian hypothesis, like Winston’s experience with the fingers (or Picard’s experience with the lights in ‘Star Trek’, which is a direct steal), perception is revised after the fact of being experienced. Stalinesquely, the forthcoming experience is revised before reaching consciousness like a show trial whose verdict is pre-decided. These two versions of what happens don’t require any difference in the model of what’s going on in the brain. The only difference is in when the perception becomes an object of consciousness. The claim is then that the reason there is no difference between the two is that this account of consciousness as emerging at a certain point is an error based on the legacy of misunderstanding consciousness as Cartesian – that is, that living humans consist of two substances, the soul and the body, whereof the former is conscious and dimensionless and the latter occupies space and is not conscious, with the two interacting, according to Descartes within the pineal gland. Dennett believes that we are still too attached to this kind of account, although we don’t literally believe it any more, and that consciousness is not a special, circumscribed state, has no subject of experience (I have sympathy with this bit) and is actually the flow of information from place to place.

Applying this to non-lucid dreaming, information flow would occur on waking. With lucid dreaming, we only have illusory choice and experiencing in the moment according to this account, which also applies as far as Dennett is concerned to waking life. Dreaming and lucid dreaming are primarily useful illustrations of his general theory here rather than objects of study themselves.

Obviously I think he’s wrong. He also casts doubt on the existence of qualia, which are the essential qualities of experience whose existence cannot rationally be doubted. Qualia, put another way, are what people refer to when they say things like “your red might be my blue”, which captures the notion well but doesn’t actually work in detail because of the network of experiences and how they relate to one another. It’s important to decide what are and aren’t qualia, because once one declares something as a quale it’s placed beyond question and that restricts possible arguments. For instance, Nkechi Amare Diallo could claim that her Black identity is a quale, at which point White people identifying as Black suddenly becomes sanctified in some realm beyond criticism. I actually do think the mental perception of the possibility of becoming pregnant is a good example of a quale which is not intuitively so, because it sometimes leads to radical departures of opinion regarding the ethics of reproductive choice, and that does in fact correspond to “no uterus, no opinion” as the position is sometimes rather crudely expressed. However, the existence of quale cannot be doubted, and if someone is led into the position where they can make such a claim, it comes across to me as a weird ideological commitment to an untenable position rather than something which can be attached to an account of consciousness.

From wakeful experience, we tend to perceive dreaming as something which occurs while we’re asleep, and individual dreams as prospects which occur in the future of our wakefulness before we fall asleep and in the past of our wakefulness when we have woken up. With closer examination, we might conclude that dreams are not experiences but attempts by a wakeful mind to make sense of the clutter present in our minds when we awake. Although I think this is incorrect, it does work well as an illustration that the chronology of dreams is not what we might assume. Lucid dreaming is said to be encouraged by always recounting dreams in the present tense. This is somewhat confused by the fact that not all languages have a present tense, and this raises a further question: are there languages which have a way of expressing dream time?

Before I answer this question, I want to outline my understanding of states of consciousness. I believe it makes sense to say there are six states of consciousness: wakefulness, dreaming, dreamless sleep, hypnosis, meditation and Ganzfeld. There’s also a very strong tendency to prioritise wakefulness above the others, to the extent that it’s seen as the only realistic state of consciousness and the state which dictates the nature of time. Dream logic is not seen as proper logic. A friend of mine recently observed, interestingly, that although I had recently dreamt about the King, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t still be Queen dreams. My own attitude towards states of consciousness is rather different. I believe that several or all of those states are of equal, or perhaps incommensurate, status. The list I’ve just made was from a wakeful state. It’s equally possible to dream of a completely different list. I’m not convinced that hypnosis is a valid state of consciousness but I do believe it’s neither dreaming nor dreamless sleep. There are “state” and “non-state” views on hypnosis. The state view is that a hypnotised subject has entered an altered, more suggestible state of consciousness, which is supported by their alleged inability, in some cases, to recall the events which took place during it. The non-state version is that hypnosis is a form of role-play in a kind of theatrical setting, which doesn’t just apply to stage hypnotism but also the likes of hypnotherapy. That idea is not supposed to contradict its efficacy as a therapy, incidentally. Ganzfeld is the other state which could do with a bit of explanation. This can be introduced by relaxation and sensory deprivation although it also occurs at one’s bidding, perhaps with a bit of practice. It may not may not be a healthy state.

Insofar as each of these is a valid state of consciousness, none has priority over any others. Each has unique features. As I’m mainly contrasting dreaming and wakefulness here, taking them equally seriously, the wakeful mind can have a view of dreaming that is either the detritus of dormancy or a sequence of experiences which occur between successive experiences of wakefulness, but this is only the view of the waking mind and is no more valid than that of dreaming. There is still a relationship between dreaming experiences and the senses, for instance because a cold night might be associated with dreaming of the Arctic or because some experience one had the previous day influences the dream. From the perspective of dreaming, wakeful consciousness influences one’s experience but there are oddities about its temporality because with dreams of any length, it can often be difficult to locate a moment when the dream begins and, as I’ve said before, some of my dreams involve things like “having always sat on the roof”, i.e. my dream is of climbing out of a bedroom window onto the roof just like I always have for years. From a dreaming perspective, whatever waking life makes of them, dreaming consciousness is very different in terms of the passage of time and even if it turns out that dreams are squished-up false memories of stuff happening immediately before waking from a daytime perspective, this has no more or less validity than whatever the dreaming mind thinks of wakefulness.

Given all that, this is the question I am mainly interested in answering here: how do we refer to dream time? English uses the present tense to refer to “tenseless” things, such as saying that “one plus one is/equals two”. We don’t usually say “one plus one used to equal two” or “one plus one will be two next Thursday” unless we’re trying to make some kind of rhetorical point about eternal verities. I have said in the past, from a waking perspective anyway, that the events of dreams should be referred to in the aorist. This is in fact a somewhat inaccurate way of describing what I’m doing when I seem to use the present tense.

The word “aorist” originates from the Ancient Greek “ἀόριστος”, which breaks down as “ἀ-” – not – and “όριστος” – definite. In other words, “indefinite”, “undefined” and also simple – the unadorned, plain form of the verb. In English, we might identify this with the simple present indicative except that in English this usually puts an S, an “-eth” or “-est” on the end, so it isn’t usually unadorned. As an ahistorical, perhaps an aorist, word, it seems to work quite well as a way of describing events which do not occur in the waking passage of time, but in fact the Ancient Greek usage is to refer to the past. It’s used as a narrative tense, so it does make sense if dreams are retold as stories to use the aorist, but in certain circumstances can also refer to the present or future. It’s also worth mentioning that there is aspect as well as tense involved here. Aspect is how the action described by a verb occurs over time, i.e. whether it’s a one-time short term event, a repeated action or a continuous one. For instance, “I rowed” and “I sowed” might involve grabbing the oars just once and sculling briefly and putting a single seed in the ground, or they might refer to rowing across a river or walking across a field broadcasting a full bowl of seed. English seems to have lost the ability to distinguish easily between these, but many other languages actually focus more on that element of time than on tense. Hence aspect is still relevant to dreaming as experience, or perceived experience but tense may be misleading.

Sanskrit also has an aorist, which is relevant because it happens to be used to discuss consciousness a lot. In fact I almost used the word “samadhi” to describe what I called “meditation” just now. There are two aorists in Sanskrit, one which is simply preterite indicative, like our own simple past, and an injunctive mood, which is also found in Homeric Greek, which could be used as an imperative or subjunctive, usually for prohibitions in later Sanskrit.

Hence the problem is that although there is something out there called the aorist, which is not in any case present in English, it actually tends to express the past although it technically needn’t and the literal meaning of the word “aorist” is not perfectly reflected in the actual meaning of the word. From the perspective of wakefulness, I would want to express dreaming experience as occurring in a kind of abstract time. Imagine a three-dimensional line graph. The space within that graph could be said to be located in a particular place in the sense that it might be on the page of a book or a computer display, but there need be no region of the Universe consisting of a graph, which can in principle be visited. Time and space in dreaming are virtual. Events can be located relative to each other temporally only within the dream, but need to be referred to outside of it, but referring to them in the past tense doesn’t do them justice.

Calling this post “Dream Time” makes it sound like a reference to the idea Australian Aboriginals are said by Western anthropologists to have about the primordial state of the world, but as usual it’s important to examine this critically. If it turns out that the kind of wakeful consciousness we have today in the West is highly contingent, maybe our lives are surrounded temporally by a sleep, not in the sense of absence of consciousness but as a different kind of consciousness. I know very little about this and feel it would be culturally insensitive to say too much about it, as well as inappropriate for the cultural and environmental milieu I live in, but the term itself suggests to me an entirely valid concept of a kind of timeless eternity out of which our wakefulness condenses. I have no idea whether this is what anthropologists mean by it or whether it even exists in any Australian Aboriginal culture, but it does make sense although it might give dreaming unwarranted priority. At this point I could of course read what Wikipedia says about it and pretend I know what I’m talking about, but that doesn’t do it justice.

Behind all this while I’ve been writing is awareness of a particular form of dementia called Lewy Body. This is associated with Parkinsonism, and involves the mixing of dreaming and wakefulness. Although it would seem insensitive to regard this as anything other than a pathological state, it is interesting that this occurs towards the end of waking life. We tend to think of dreaming and wakefulness as sharply differentiated, although when I had B12 deficiency early signs of my psychosis there was some such mixture. Prisoner’s cinema, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, phantosmia and possibly some forms of tinnitus and hearing voices also seem to have things in common with this. Prisoner’s cinema is more like Ganzfeld, and in fact it leads me to wonder whether states of consciousness are to each other like different gears on a car, with Ganzfeld intermediate between dreaming and wakefulness.

People have been known to enter a state of meditation as a prelude to their death. More often, the state of mind immediately before death as monitored by instruments resembles dreamless sleep and this continues immediately after death, with a sudden flash of activity a few minutes later. Once again, it may be inappropriate to refer to these phenomena temporally, as any subjectivity may not experience them in this manner.

This post, I hope, will make a good companion to tomorrow’s, written on International Yoga Day.

The Queen Is Dead

Since the death of my father, I haven’t posted here much although there has been a lot going on in my life worthy of comment. There was the funeral, the probate, a holiday near Scotland, a visit to an old friend near Cambridge, our son going to the States and moving out. I’ve even worked on a post about Satan. However, none of it has yet persuaded me to set digits to keys until now.

The quote is, slightly paraphrased, “anyone’s death diminishes me”. I’ll start with my father’s and get on to the Queen’s later, as the two are, for me, psychologically related. My father was radically unlike me in many ways. He was a lifelong Tory, an atheist and quite aggressive, and also very good at making money. He worked in nine-to-five jobs for more than forty years until his early retirement at the age of sixty. By contrast, I am very left wing, with the proviso that I think it would be nice if a catholic economy was feasible but I don’t think it is, very peaceable and a depressive and anxious person, strongly theistic and religious and appalling at making money. Ironically, I’m the one with my own business and he was the one who worked for an employer. So there is a clash of values, beliefs and a vastly different skill set. All that said, we did have a few things in common, such as our apparent neurodiversity and interest in science and maths. He was also notable as being one of the two non-deaf people I’ve ever encountered with absolutely no interest in music, which places him apart from almost everyone in the hearing world.

Even so, his death is a loss to me. In many ways other children’s loss of a father is bound to have openly upset them far more than this seems to have affected me, but it’s not true to say it hasn’t done that at all. That man who read all those hundreds of books in the bookcases downstairs, derived a big enough income to buy a large house in rural southeast England with his largely mental labour, gained a degree from the Open University, published academic chemistry papers, was the metrication officer for his workplace and sat on International Standards Organisation boards for drawing instruments, is now reduced to a pile of ashes in a casket and a large amount of water and carbon dioxide in the water cycle and biosphere. This is a surreal and major landmark in my life, not least because, as I’m sure you can relate to, the death of any person is a memento mori.

The Queen’s death is also a reminder of one’s own mortality, as is anyone’s. Like my father, the Queen had little in common with me. She was a billionaire for a start. In particular, it has to be noted that I’m republican. I don’t believe in the monarchy as a political system, constitutional or otherwise. However, I am only quite weakly republican, mainly because I don’t think the existence or otherwise of the monarchy has much bearing on British politics. A situation where we had a figurehead president, like Ireland’s for example, wouldn’t really be that different to the situation we have now. It doesn’t really matter to me if laws are assented by a president or a monarch. Nor do I consider the monarchy to be particularly expensive compared to other things the government spends its money on. I also think it would be difficult to end the monarchy, because even if it officially ceased to exist, the people involved would still be in the minds of the public and be thought of as holding the positions they currently do in law, unless there were a major groundswell against them. However, I would prefer a republic. I just don’t think it’s really worth our energy to achieve one. I also say this in full knowledge of the plausible claim that the monarchy secretly has a hand in drafting our laws. I’ve discussed the actual issue of the monarchy in political terms elsewhere on this blog.

None of this has any bearing on the emotional import of the situation. Just as my father was largely opposite to me in values, beliefs and character, and I have much to resent him for, so was the Queen in many ways the polar opposite to what I think is best for the country.

I’d like to illustrate what I mean with reference to bloodsports.

I used to go hunt sabbing every Saturday and sometimes on Boxing Day. I strongly object to foxhunting, and of course the Royal Family has been heavily involved in it. I expended a lot of energy in doing what I could to disrupt foxhunts non-violently. Many friends of mine were passionately involved in this action. At the same time, there was an animal rights stall in town on Saturdays. After a few years, it occurred to me that if a single carnist individual, say in her early twenties, was persuaded to go vegan by the actions of the animal rights people by the Clock Tower in Leicester, that single success would be likely to save the lives of more vertebrates than a whole lifetime of hunt sabbing. That is a very low bar to clear. Imagine five hundred days on that stall and one person being persuaded in all that time. In the meantime, five hundred days of freakishly successful hunt sabbing would save fewer than a thousand animals. In other words, it isn’t primarily about the animals or animal rights, but class struggle. Appalling though foxhunting is, the motivation of many hunt sabbers seems to be to ruin the enjoyment of the sadists who pursue the uneatable, and notably the thousands of anglers who go down to the canal on a regular basis and cause immense suffering to large numbers of fish generally, but not always, carry on unchallenged, because they’re not upper class, and somehow this is supposed to make it better? I think hunt sabbing is a worthwhile thing to do, but I can’t get on board with the class envy aspect of it. The common juxtaposition of a rough sleeper kipping down next to a lavish portrait commemorating the Queen’s death speaks volumes, but do you really think if we were a republic that guy wouldn’t be there? Not if it wasn’t socialist.

British socialist groups on Reddit are unsurprisingly anti-monarchist, and of course I’m also anti-monarchist. However, a lot of the posts are particularly focussed on the monarchy rather than other things about which socialists might be expected to care, and I find it a distraction. It’s similar to the focus, either from a supportive or oppositional stance, on trans issues: what are we not discussing or campaigning on while we’re talking about those? Yes I’m against the monarchy, but really, does a country like the US or France really seem more socially just than this one? How much difference would it really make to most people if we were a republic? It seems to me that the animosity expressed towards the ultra-rich bloodsportspeople who are nominally running this country is not really about achieving a better world.

There’s a rather disconcerting prelude to Owl City’s song ‘Galaxies’, which is about the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in the form of a sound clip from Ronald Reagan’s speech on the matter. The associations many left wingers of a certain generation have with that despicable individual make this seem quite distasteful, but when it comes down to it, all he was doing was acting as the Head of State and speaking for the nation about a tragedy, and since he was a Hollywood actor, he was actually quite good at it. The associations, I presume, do not exist for Adam Young, since he was only two when Reagan left office. It could have been Walter Mondale speaking for the nation and the situation would’ve been the same, because the president, overtly politicised though the rôle is, also speaks on behalf of the country in a non-politicised way. Our own head of state is covertly politicised but can do the same thing.

I have recently lost a parent, my father. Those two words refer to an office which to some extent transcends the characters of the people involved, and it’s the same with the monarch, because a monarch is often the Head of State. The Queen’s head is on our notes, coins and stamps. Her initials are on the post boxes and the throne. In France, Marianne used to have the same function and in the US there’s the eagle and the Statue of Liberty. Our symbols of nationhood are oddly mixed. One of them happens to be a real person, but there’s also a unicorn, Scotland’s national animal, and a Turkish-Greek bloke killing a dragon. People are unlikely to get worked up about the unicorn but they have been known to take exception to a supposèdly animal-loving country having the slaughter of as magnificent a beast as a dragon as one of our symbols. That’s probably fictional (I suspect it’s based on a watering hole with a crocodile living in it, but that’s another story), but it’s still a figure representing the country, which is also what the Queen was. Unlike George or the unicorn, she could actually speak and interact with the people.

‘Out Of Africa’ is a film which annoys me because I get weepy about the death of Denys Finch Hatton, an upper-class big game hunter, at the end. The reason that happens, apart from the clever emotional manipulation of the people involved in making the film, is that we are all human and we cannot help but be moved by such things. That’s rather specific for me, but it will probably be someone else for you, another fictional character. This is the same kind of phenomenon as I experienced the other day when Sarada came home and I said I should do an emergency big shop just in case the Queen died, and found myself, to my amazement, choking up slightly inside. It does annoy me that I’m more influenced directly by the Queen’s death than my father’s in this way, and is cause for concern, but in fact I wasn’t just crying for the Queen but for all my losses, and the losses others have recently experienced, and I haven’t had that many, and for the very general experience of bereavement as part of life for us all. I felt the same thing more recently when I heard people sing “God save the King”. And I am absolutely not a monarchist. It isn’t about that. It isn’t even about specific respect for the Queen and King, except insofar as they are human and therefore worthy of respect, a respect moreover I wouldn’t confine to humans.

Diana comes to mind here. To us at the time, the reaction to her death seemed quite fake and excessive, but we had friends who had been more affected by the AIDS crisis than I was, and really, I was affected quite enough by it thank you, who were authentically touched because of her challenge to the stigma. Right now, although I’m getting on with my life, I do actually feel quite affected by it, so I’m on the other side of the situation this time. This is probably because of recent bereavements experienced at first and second hand.

In fact, the people on the other side this time are responding to her death just as much as most other people as a symbol. For them, she and her heir represent everything that’s wrong with this country, and that’s a fair take, but for me that is inauthentic. I don’t generally believe individuals are politically influential as such, but simply end up in the positions they are and have their behaviour determined by economics. The monarch before her didn’t even get to decide when to die: he was, it’s said, in a sense killed by his doctor so that the news could make the papers the next day. I don’t think there’s a much clearer demonstration of how little freedom he had, and the freedom of a monarch is if anything more restricted than that of the average well-off middle class person. I can’t generate the degree of animosity some other people seem to feel towards the over-privileged, and to pretend I felt that would be dishonest even if I talked myself into thinking that’s really how I felt about her death or her as a symbol. I just don’t.

When it was common practice to write cheques, many people had the experience of accidentally putting the wrong year all through January and having to cross it out. Even though that year was Anno Domini, now often referred to as “Christian Era”, writing that year, or getting it wrong on the cheque, didn’t imply they were Christian. It’s just the dating system we use here in the West, with a few exceptions such as on Jewish tombstones, for the Islamic calendar and Julian dates. This, for almost all of us, is what the Queen’s death is like. It means we’ll soon have the King’s face on notes, coins and stamps, “C iii R” on any new post boxes, QCs will become KCs and people will be singing “Send him victorious”. All of this is odd and disconcerting, and will take some getting used to, not least because most of us weren’t even born the last time it changed. But for my mother, this is her fifth monarch. A person born on 11th April 1471 who lived to be eighty-eight would have seen ten monarchs, for instance Thomas Carn of London, who lived to be 107. We are relatively exceptional in British history not to have seen multiple kings and more rarely queens even in our fairly long lifetimes. This alone makes it exceptional and historic, and just as it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian or not when you cross out the wrong year on a cheque, nor does it matter if you’re monarchist or republican, or for that matter anarchist, if you recognise this as a disconcerting historical event. I would of course acknowledge fully that this is a great time to bury bad news, but there’s more to it than that.

There are also specific sadnesses resulting from the fact that we had a Queen. Although it’s a birthright rather than a position one could work to reach, I don’t believe it was any bad thing that generations of girls grew up with the knowledge that the Head Of State was a woman. We also had a situation where a young woman in her twenties became Sovereign in contrast to all the relatively old male presidents and dictators around the world, and eventually became older than them all as well, so there were two lengthy periods in her life where she was demographically exceptional in two ways at once. She has now been replaced by the rather less exceptional, and this is not to malign him for characteristics he can’t do much about, man in his seventies. We’ve ended up, just now, with a much less remarkable figurehead in that respect, and this will probably be the case next century too. Next Christian century.

It’s said that the most common dream people have in this country has been the Queen coming to tea. A third of the British population has had this dream, including me. This happens without respect to the political beliefs of the people concerned: you can be a red-blooded Communist and have this dream just as easily as a true blue Tory. The details also tend to be similar. It’s all the more remarkable that I’ve had it because I never drink tea, so for me the beverage is just something I make for someone else and I don’t partake of our national identity by either being a monarchist or having a nice cup of tea and a sit down. But there it is, because in this dream both the Queen and the tea are symbols of national identity which exist even in the minds of non-nationalistic republican coffee-drinkers. Also, for a long time as a child, and I don’t think I’m unusual in this respect either, I associated the Queen with my mother. I used to think they looked similar, for example. Given this perhaps comforting significance, it makes sense that people might wish to deny the less palatable aspects and allegations made against the Royals, regardless of their veracity.

I never met the Queen although I strongly suspect I once met her son, now King. Other than the fact that she’s head of the Church and I am C of E, I don’t feel the need to pay obeisance to her or the King in a visceral or profound way. However, if I met the King under different circumstances than I actually seem to have met him in (everyone needs a break sometimes), I would follow the usual etiquette as I understand it simply because it would be embarrassing not to, it would probably make him feel awkward or angry as a person one to one with me, and there’s not really any need to do that.

All that said, yes, Scotland and England should both be republics, but this has got nothing to do with current historical events, and 2022 will go down for me as the year my father and the Queen both died.

The Haunted BBC Micro?

I used to have an Acorn Electron. The thing about Electrons is that they think they’re BBC Model B microcomputers. Their system software is pretty close to or actually identical. However, when you come to actually use them, it becomes clear that they aren’t. They lack MODE 7, the Teletext mode, only have one sound channel and only have an edge connector as an interface. The CPU running both models of computer lacks specific I/O ports, unlike the Z80, and therefore peripherals have to be mapped directly onto the memory. Due to the hardware shortcomings of the Electron compared to the BBC B, there are unused spaces in the memory where the interface chips would’ve been.

One day I was looking through the Electron’s ROM (system software) and wrote a program to print out the printable bits of these regions. If you just look at memory contents and output them as characters, you end up changing the graphics mode, position of the cursor and so forth, and the colours on the screen, and while that’s entertaining for a bit it isn’t conducive to actually finding out what’s in the computer. This is because the ASCII control characters don’t actually print, and the BBC/Electron version of the character set is substantially used to communicate with the display hardware in quite sophisticated ways, probably because the BBC hardware is supposed to be adaptable as a terminal for the second processor. This second processor was ultimately to be the famous ARM whose descendants run today’s mobile phones. Hence the BBC is very much about telecommunications in that sense as well as many others. Anyway, if you blank out the most significant bit of the bytes in the memory and also only print out values above 31 (1F in hexadecimal), every character written to the screen will be printable. If you then look at the area of memory which is used on the BBC for peripherals, you find a list of acknowledgements for the people who designed and built the Acorn Electron. For some reason it isn’t stable and the longer it’s been since the computer’s been turned on, the less legible it is, so it’s a race to get to see it, but it’s there. I don’t know why it degrades. Doing a reset doesn’t restore the data either: you have to turn it on again to do that.

I seem always to back losers. For instance, I was a Prefab Sprout fan. If I like something it’s the kiss of death for it. Therefore, unsurprisingly, as well as the unsuccessful Electron I also had an even more unsuccessful Jupiter Ace. I used to do something similar with the Ace’s memory, dumping it to the screen. This is simpler with an Ace because it has fewer control characters. The 3K of static RAM in the Ace, as opposed to the dynamic RAM in the RAMpack, has a load of apparently random values when you turn it on, although like any other computer it also has system variables, and like many others it has working areas, video RAM, character shapes and the famous PAD FORTH uses for text manipulation, and of course the parameter stack as it’s a FORTH computer. The dynamic RAM of the RAMpack has blocks of zeros and hex FFs (255) in eights, I think, all the way through the unused map, which I assume to be an artefact of the hardware, although presumably the CPU does that thing of writing bytes every 256 locations or so to work out how much memory the computer has. Every time an unexpanded Ace is turned on, it has the same junk data in its RAM.

This phenomenon of nonsense in RAM and defining a word which displays it on the screen gave me the idea I hold to this day of the nature of dreams. It would be possible to get an Ace to turn those data into words. I’ve got it to produce random words in Finnish, for example, mainly because Finnish is an easier language to get a computer to produce than almost any other. English is a lot harder. I could’ve linked the two things together and got the Ace to turn all its random data into Finnish. I didn’t do this because I decided to go cold turkey on computers in about 1985 because I don’t trust my own interests and they seem a bit obsessive and unhealthy, but if I had, I wonder if it would’ve produced different Finnish for every Ace in existence, or if the random data were the same for all Aces. It didn’t happen on the ZX81 by the way. That just has zeros all the way through its unused memory. Anyway, this is my hypothesis about dreaming. When you wake from a dream, your memory contains random data like an Ace’s memory, and your consciousness is like the Finnish converter. It attempts to make sense of these data and you get the impression that you’ve just had an experience, although you usually know you haven’t. This is one of the reasons I always refer to events in a dream in the present tense, because the events in them did not happen in the past. However, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that they are invalid. Dreams are like tea leaves. They can be interpreted as a way of approaching reality with the added benefit that they’re already partly in this state when we receive them.

In I think February 1984 CE, economics teacher Ken Webster took a BBC Model B Micro home from his school to his seventeenth century cottage in the Cheshire-Flintshire border village of Dodleston. I’m going to be fairly brief about the details of this case, which is extensively written up elsewhere, including in his book ‘The Vertical Plane’, because I want to concentrate on something else. There were three people in the house: Ken, his girlfriend Debbie and a musician who lived upstairs whose name I can’t remember. That night, he left the computer on and the house was vacated when they went to the pub. On coming back, a poem had appeared on it. Over the next sixteen months a series of messages appeared to which he and some other people responded. Here are a few screenshots from a dramatic reconstruction:

I shall explain. There was an apparent dialogue between Ken and Debbie and a person appearing to live in the sixteenth or seventeenth century called Tomas Hardeman (living in the time before standardised spelling so his name is uncertain) who initially claimed to be a graduate of Jesus College Oxford and later Brasenose. There are both historical and grammatical inaccuracies in the messages purporting to be from the past. Tomas Hardeman is arrested for witchcraft and only released after the Ken threatened the sheriff who arrested him, who was apparently also communicating. The messages are then interrupted from a source known only as “2109”, possibly a year, which is more threatening and claims to be made of tachyons. Its spelling is also a little peculiar, with single consonants where we might put double ones and the “-tion” ending being spelt “-cion”. At the same time, there was poltergeist activity in the house, particularly the kitchen, where utensils tended to be piled up, and on one occasion Debbie came back to the house to find the cats nervous and all the furniture piled up in one corner of the living room. Brasenose College helped with the research and it emerged that there was indeed such a person who was expelled from the college for refusing to remove the Pope’s name from certain books in the library, which confirmed what had appeared in the messages. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) then got involved, typed a number of questions into the computer without disclosing them to anyone, sealed it in the room for an hour, then deleted the messages, and got a reply which implied that “2109” was aware of their content. David of the SPR proceeded to ask the “entity”, if that’s what it was, the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem, which was only found in 1994. It replied that the answer was only to be given if the questioner was prepared to lose soul, mind and body, so they didn’t proceed. “Harman” then said that he would write a book about the events to prove that they had happened and hide it somewhere, so that when it’s found it will be demonstrated that this was not a hoax. 2109 mainly seems concerned not to cause a temporal paradox. Oh, and the house was on a ley line, but then so was mine so that’s not unusual. Harman also mentioned that his house was made of red stone, and foundations of a building made of red stone were later found in the garden, so the house which stood there before was like that and Harman complained about the alterations made to the house in the intervening four centuries.

The mistakes made in the grammar and history were attributed by “Harman” to interference by “2109”. Both the SPR and more general sceptics agree that it was a hoax, but Ken and Debbie, particularly Debbie, insist that it wasn’t and it’s still unclear how it was done. Debbie has been very up in arms about it and expressed her annoyance at being accused of faking. She said she couldn’t understand why people thought so because she was not motivated to do such a thing. There are, however, textual similarities between Ken’s own writing and Harman’s. For instance, 26% of nouns are preceded by adjectives in both sets of text compared to an average of 32% taken from contemporary texts composed by other people, and in Ken’s case the sample is very large as it consists of his entire published book of 374 pages. Although this seems like more than a coincidence it doesn’t rule out the possibility that he was either doing it unconsciously or that the poltergeist was associated with him in some way, but I’m still basically convinced it was a hoax. Nevertheless there are some enormous difficulties in explaining how it was done.

I’ve seen some annoyingly naïve descriptions of how this was done, so I’ll go into the situation as it was then. Both the internet and email existed at the time. However, although it would be possible to connect a BBC micro to the internet (not the web of course) or to a Bulletin Board System, this computer was not connected in this way. BBC micros do have local area network connectors in the form of Econet, but again this one was not connected, at least while it was in the cottage. The SPR suggested that signals were being sent along the earth line of the plug and socket through the wiring of the house. Other than ROM, this BBC had no persistent memory. As it happens, this particular model was being used to run EDWORD, a sideways ROM for word processing, at the time. It was linked up to a green screen monochrome monitor, presumably without a Faraday Cage, and there was a 5¼” floppy disc drive with discs available.

The frustrating thing about the investigation is that as far as I know, nobody seems to have examined the hardware involved. The fact that the monitor was presumably unshielded means that it would’ve been possible to detect the signal and read what was on it from nearby using a scanner of some kind, so the content of the questions the SPR guy typed wouldn’t have been secure by the standards of the time. There was a dialogue, or at least it appeared to be interactive, and although the BBC micro could easily run a program like the Rogerian psychotherapist simulation ELIZA or the paranoid “patient” Parry, the sophistication of the responses means it has passed the Turing Test, which would be quite an achievement for a 2 MHz 6502-based micro with 32K RAM and the same ROM.

I regard all this as a puzzle to be solved by naturalistic means, because of the grammatical and historical errors. For instance, in the screengrab at the top, “BEHALTHE” is a spelling mistake which would never have been made by an English speaker of that era, and “WOT” is also incorrect because Midland English at the time strongly distinguished “WH” and “W” in speech, although Southern English didn’t. These would’ve been easy to fake and they seem to be poorly faked. There is, however, a claim that 2019 had a hand in the apparently older messages, which would explain the historical and linguistic inaccuracies. It’s also likely to be a valid excuse that telling the SPR the answer to Fermat’s Last Theorem would cause a temporal paradox, although it could presumably be stored in a sealed envelope and the people could be sworn to secrecy. But I think strong corroboration of backwards time travel would lead to a paradox anyway, meaning that there could only ever be vague references easily refutable or impossible to corroborate, so this is exactly what one would expect from a responsible message from the future.

The idea of the earth pin is interesting. Although it seems to have been suggested ignorantly by someone who didn’t know much about computers, it would in fact be possible with some hardware modification. The back of the BBC Micro looks like this:

Power is on the right, and likely to carry an earth line. Even if it doesn’t, one could be used. One of the other interfaces could be connected up to the earth, although I’m not sure which would be best. The cassette port is able to transmit data at 1200 baud along a single line, so wiring the in and out to the earth internally and having a way to switch remotely between the two is possible. Alternatively, a faster connection could be made between the Tube and the earth, and depending on how the Econet works that might be another option. The RS423 is, however, the obvious choice as it’s a communications interface. There would then need to be something connected to the wiring of the house, possibly something like a radio mike, which could then transmit and receive to another computer or terminal fairly nearby. But all of this would obviously involve modifying the hardware inside the case. The presence of a sideways ROM makes it feasible, although Edword would then have to take up less than 16K to allow for the software. Having said all that, I think the comment about signals entering and leaving via the earth is probably just a sign of being uneducated about computers.

The reason for this explanation is of course the need to look for a cause other than communication with someone living several centuries ago and an entity apparently 124 years in the future. The other options seem to be that there was communication with an entity in the future, communication with a timeless entity or communication with someone living in the past and someone else living in the future, or just talking to a ghost. “Harman” mentions a “boyste” of “leems”, I think in his fireplace or chimney, which could be the computer itself or something else. It’s also possible that voice dictation was supposed to have been used at his end because of how it’s described, factually or not. “Leem” means a glimmer of light and “boyste” appears to mean box, which could refer to a CRT monitor. It feels rather away with the fairies to say this, but it was possible to dictate to microcomputers at that time, although I suspect it didn’t work very well. When I say “at the time”, I mean the 1980s.

It really does seem like a hoax, and the biggest issue is really how it was done. Although I’ve mentioned one feasible way, there could be others, and it makes more sense to seek an explanation in hardware hacks than the supernatural or time travel. But that doesn’t mean that there is no paranormal or time travel, and the poltergeist isn’t explained by any of it.

States Of Consciousness

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This was almost about near-death experiences (NDEs), and may still go on to include them, but primarily the task I’ve set myself today is to describe states of consciousness and their possible relationship with reality. This has been of interest to me since soon after I started meditating, which must have been over forty years ago, and my thoughts on the matter are not necessarily particularly up to date because I’ve thought about them in a fairly piecemeal manner. This may in fact be the first time I’ve actually expressed myself clearly on the matter.

Okay, so there are maybe about seven clearly separated states of consciousness which may blur into each other. These are: wakefulness, REM sleep, NREM sleep, samadhi (meditation trance), dreaming, hypnosis and Ganzfeld. Of these, hypnosis may not exist, something which I’ll cover later. Ganzfeld probably needs some explanation. The Ganzfeld Effect is what happens when one is deprived of sensory stimulation, as in a floatation tank or with special blindfolds in an anechoic chamber, and involves the projection of hallucinations into one’s subjective space. As such, it seems to resemble Charles Bonnet Syndrome. More on that later. Each of these is characterised by particular brainwave patterns. There are also intermediate states such as sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, false awakening, near-death experiences and dementia with Lewy bodies. My own experience of B12 deficiency suggests that it can be quite similar to the dementia, and schizophrenia and delirium might also belong there. Therefore, a bit like the gender landscape, it might make more sense to think of consciousness as a plain with peaks representing the different states.

Most of the time I’m focussed on the distinction

Most of the time I’m focussed on the distinction between dreaming and wakefulness. I try to avoid prioritising one of these states over the other, because I think that phenomenologically both are equally valid and represent different relationships with reality. I also talk about dreaming in the present tense, although this is substantially because I don’t think English has a tense which can refer to dreaming accurately. Dreams are timeless in the same way as numbers and abstract concepts are, so if there’s a language with a way of expressing verbs timelessly, so that for instance the “is” in “two plus two equals four” is not in the present tense, I’d be using that method. It’s also supposed to make lucid dreaming more likely if one does this. I mentioned yesterday that Dennett has the view that dreams are not experiences but false memories. That is, on awakening one has a particular brain state which the waking mind interprets as consisting of apparent past experiences which occurred after falling asleep. But it’s the waking state that perceives it this way. Because dreaming and waking are equal, this fact, being a product of wakeful consciousness, is no more valid than dreaming experience.

Years on the Halfbakery ideas bank, have convinced me that ideas are discovered rather than invented, and that discovery and invention are the same thing. Hence at some point in the distant past people discovered the wheel. This makes sense, for example, when one thinks of Charles Fort’s idea of “steam engine time”. There is apple blossom or cherry blossom time, when all the trees of a certain species come into blossom at once even if they’re thousands of kilometres apart. Similarly, at least three civilisations have independently developed the steam engine because it was the right season for doing so. The various pieces of the jigsaw fell into place and the shape of the gap remaining became apparent. Likewise people come up with remarkably similar novels without apparent connections, such as possibly ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ and ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ or ‘The Hermes Fall’ and ‘Lucifer’s Hammer’. Likewise, dreams are “out there” waiting to be had, perhaps only by one particular individual. Hence they don’t happen on a particular night but one wakes up having discovered a dream which was always, and will always be, there, though more strictly outside spacetime, wherever numbers and steam engines dwell before we open a conduit to them and our world. Somewhere sub specie æternitatis, Everyperson is having tea with the Queen. The reason lucid dreaming, conscious control of dreaming, is important is that it amounts to Heaven, whereas nightmares amount to Hell.

I don’t want to make this post entirely about dreaming, although I have more carefully developed ideas about that state than others. That said, there are supposed to be tests for dreaming, one of which I try in a recently remembered dream. I took a shard of mirror and looked at myself through it, and not only was part of my face clearly reflected in it but it moved appropriately when I held the shard at different angles. This detail has caused me to doubt that the tests are reliable, and it also amazes me that my brain is able to produce an image that realistic, although I’ve successfully done that in Ganzfeld.

I will say just one more thing about dreaming and wakefulness. There are mixed states where both are involved. For instance, when I had B12 deficiency I began to enter a psychotic state involving phantosmia and anosmia. I constantly hallucinated the odour of peppermint and sometimes confused dreams and wakefulness when I first woke up in the mornings. Objects and people in my dreams appeared in the room I was sleeping in (which was the living room incidentally, but that’s another story). This is similar to dementia with Lewy bodies, where older people cease to distinguish clearly between dreaming and waking life. Bearing in mind that these people’s lives are approaching their end, it raises questions about near-death experiences. Finally there’s Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where deteriorating vision leads to patterns or even detailed scenery involving people and places. This is similar to the phantom limb phenomenon in my opinion, and also to tinnitus and hearing voices in some ways. All of these are somewhat dreamlike.

They’re also similar to Ganzfeld. This is a state of consciousness which results from uniform sensory stimulation or the lack of stimulation entirely, and is sometimes sought by people in floatation tanks and anechoic chambers, as mentioned above. The brain amplifies neural noise and turns it into complex visual impressions, I would imagine very similar to Charles Bonnet Syndrome. It can also be done using white noise, which I’ve tried myself and found I could hear music in it after about half an hour. It also constitutes a second way into lucid dreaming, so I’m told, because apparently if you lie still in bed in a cold dark room for at least half an hour you will begin to have these impressions. I don’t know how easy other people find lying still, or lying still without falling asleep, and I know that I’m supposed to be genetically predisposed to moving around a lot during sleep and to having restless legs, so it’s unlikely that I will find a way in this way. There is a Tibetan Buddhist practice known as mun mtshams (I cannot currently write this in Tibetan script but it might be མུནཚམྶ​), involving shutting oneself away in the dark alone as practice for dealing with བར་དོ and realising  འཇའ་ལུས་, thereby, I presume, avoiding reincarnation. This is rather reminiscent of the use of lucid dreaming for a similar end.

And that brings me to samadhi, समाधी. I should point out at this point that my own opinions and experience of समाधी seem to be different from what other people say about it. This is the meditative state of Raja Yoga, and I expect Sarada will have things to say about this. My understanding of how to enter this state is that it tends to be easier in certain asanas, such as Padmasana of course but also others such as Sukhasana, then one practices Pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses, followed by focussing on a mantra or other object of thought and grasping its essence, then removing that essence entirely, leaving consciousness in a non-intentional state. I’m told that this is not what Samadhi is, and that the Christian understanding that this is in fact the nature of Samadhi is a major reason for seeing Yoga as Satanic. The fact, phenomenologically speaking, that for me it’s a state of consciousness without an object of consciousness has made me sceptical about Brentano’s analysis of mental states, where he insists that they are a number of things I do agree with, including incorrigibility (cannot be doubted) and having a number of other properties including “aboutness”, which is in fact generally considered the most important quality of mental states. This is what’s rather unhelpfully referred to as Intentionality (with a capital I, constrasted with “intentionality”) and may or may not be the same as intensionality with an S, which is to do with meaning and contrasted with extensionality. Presumably Pratyahara could also be used to enter Ganzfeld if one was so inclined. I understand that other people use the word samadhi to refer to a consciousness of unity with the object of meditation or even the Cosmos or God, and I’ve experienced that too but tend to perceive it as pathological, for me anyway. It’s unwelcome and seems unhealthy to me. In Buddhism, this state of consciousness is the last element of the Noble Eightfold Path. I can’t really do justice to all of this here, partly because I’m using words but also due to wanting to describe other states of consciousness. Because I try to balance the value of different states, the idea that this is a higher state is hard to come to terms with, but its role within dharmic spirituality has always been prized. The reason many Christians disapprove of it is that they believe an empty mind, which is how they see this, invites Satan or evil spirits in. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that I don’t respond to psilocybin, the only psychedelic I’ve taken, so this may reflect my atttitude towards samadhi.

Hypnosis may or may not be a state of consciousness. My own view is that it’s stateless and a form of role-play, although that has a function as serious as many others in spirituality and other aspects of life. I’m also suspicious of hypnosis being misused because I think many symptoms are there for a reason and removing them outside the context of hypnotherapy would be likely to lead to the underlying cause being manifested in a different and unpredictable way. Interestingly, Sarada thinks exactly the same thing about lucid dreaming. Having said that, I do believe hypnotherapists are usually professional and take pains doesn’t happen. I used to practice hypnosis for fun when I was about twelve, quite successfully, but that was probably reckless and irresponsible, and I’ve also done self-hypnosis. An early non-state definition of hypnosis was offered in 1941 by R. W. White: “Hypnotic behaviour is meaningful, goal-directed striving, its most general goal being to behave like a hypnotised person as this is continuously defined by the operator and understood by the client”. That said, there are changes in brainwave activity in some hypnotised individuals, and the question of how it causes amnesia occurs to me.

The seventh state, which I have yet to discuss, is NREM sleep, also known as dreamless or orthodox sleep. This is in some ways the odd one out, as it seems to involve the absence of consciousness. There is no paralysis and the parasympathetic (P for Peace) nervous system is dominant during it. The EEG shows theta waves and sleep spindles, which are rapid bursts of electrical activity building to a crescendo and then declining. Theta waves occur at four to eight times a second. Delta waves are prominent. There are also K-complexes, which are the highest voltage physiological spikes of electrical activity in the human brain. I have more of these than most people because they’re associated with restless legs syndrome, but have no idea what their significance is. It doesn’t seem possible to describe NREM sleep phenomenologically because it seems to lack phenomenology entirely, but since I’m panpsychist this is either a challenge to my beliefs or means I must assert that consciousness is there, just as it is everywhere else, but in a similar way to how it would inhere in an organism with nothing analogous to a nervous system. To be honest I don’t know what to do with NREM.

On the subject of brainwaves, it’s probably worthwhile describing this kind of activity with respect to the other states. Dreaming is closer to wakefulness than NREM in this respect, hence its other name, paradoxical sleep. Theta and gamma activity is widepread and the brain stem seems to initiate activity in this state, suggesting to some that dreaming is an attempt by the conscious mind to make sense of vegetative neural processes in the absence of sensory stimulation of other kinds, which makes sense because so many dreams involve frustration and paralysis of some description. In meditation, alpha and theta waves are more active, and with habitual meditation it used to be thought there were permanent changes but recent findings have not shown this to be so. However, habitual meditators’ brains do age more slowly with respect to memory. The possibly related mindfulness is said to have a number of disadvantages, including over-exertion, ignoring intuition, exacerbating anxiety and triggering depersonalisation. It isn’t clear to me how close mindfulness and samadhi are to each other though.

Hypnosis shows more active alpha waves, but these are often used in imaginative states so it may not indicate that it’s a separate state of consciousness.

Another possible approach to consciousness is to see them as phases like those of matter, which can perhaps be shown on a graph. This has been done, for example, with meditation. Denis Postle has attempted to model the different states of consciousness on the butterfly catastrophe graph, which has four axes. Unfortunately I can only remember arousal and relaxation. Catastrophe theory has gone out of fashion nowadays because although it’s valid, there are few situations which can be reduced to only a few significant parameters. Whether that’s true of consciousness I don’t know. Even so, the idea of there being some kind of space or hyperspace with regions corresponding to different states of consciousness seems to be a good one.

There are also other states of consciousness which we may potentially have but don’t experience in everyday life. For instance, there is a case of a hiker who fell off a path in a remote area and was found alive long after he could be expected to have succumbed to exposure, and it’s thought that he may have entered an obscure state of hibernation. There is one known species of primate who does hibernate, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur. It is of course much more common in other mammals, but for humans this state could be useful for long haul space travel, so if we were ever going to do that, and we aren’t of course, it would be worthwhile looking into. Speaking of space travel, the question of out of body experiences as a separate state of consciousness arises. Is astral travel a distinct state or is it more like dreaming or Ganzfeld? Then there are NDEs. Soon after the heart stops, the brain enters a state whose electrical activity resembles that of NREM sleep, followed by a final burst of sudden activity as the neurones cease to be able to compensate for their increasingly hostile environment and lose their polarisation. That could also be a separate state of consciousness in its own right.

To conclude then, I haven’t really done this subject justice in the limited time and attention span available, but one final thought does occur. Is it right for me not to prioritise any state of consciousness over any other? Most people would probably say samadhi is a higher state than the others, but on the other hand Tibetan Buddhism appears to employ Ganzfeld as such a state, and there are also trance-like ecstatic states used in other forms of spirituality which might correspond more to hypnosis, if that is indeed a state. Whatever is the best way to arrange these, it certainly seems worthwhile to consider their relationships with each other and also with reality. I feel I’ve done this quite thoroughly with dreaming and wakefulness, but not the rest, and it definitely seems like a valuable exercise.

What do you think?