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Introduction
This topic was originally suggested for an
AAAS Symposium by the late Professor Wilbur Frank-
lin of Kent State University, and it was only
after his recent untimely death that I agreed to
take over as organizer and moderator of the panel.
Unfortunately, I was not privy to Professor Frank-
lin's original conception of the subject, nor to
his plans for the membership of the panel. From
his most recent research activities and articles
in the field of psychokinesis, one might assume
that he would have focussed fairly explicitly on
the direct interaction of human consciousness with
physical systems, but that is only my personal
suspicion. Thus, the assembly of the panel and
the circumscription of the topic had to be my own
responsibilities and probably differ from those
he envisaged.
My sense of the subject is somewhat broader
than that just mentioned. Let me state it via
this complex question: As the mind of man pushes
inexorably forward with its ever more elaborate
and abstract formalisms and its ever more precise
and powerful experimental equipment into ever more
remote and exotic domains of physical phenomena,
may we continue to presume that those phenomena
invariably remain passive to our inquiry, simply
waiting, as it were, to be labeled and catalogued,
or is there the possibility that to some degree,
insignificant in many situations, but potentially
controlling in others, we may create our own
reality in the process of observing it?
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nificent accomplishment in the modeling of physical
phenomena, are moderately comfortable with such
quasi-philosophical dilemmas as the wave-particle
dualities, and the "role-of-the-observer" in quan-
tum mechanics, but tend to discount psychic exper-
imentation because of the illusiveness and irre-
producibility of the phenomena, the intangibility
of some of the parameters, and the difficulties it
presents for established formalisms. Yet many of
these same physicists have faithfully followed the
trail of fundamental particle theory down to such
present-day enigmas as "quarks, " anti-quarks, " and
"gluons." Currently touted as the basic ingredient
of the physical structure of matter, quarks are now
characterized by various permutations of three
"colors," five "flavors," and one "charm." Sidney
Drell admits, with others, that these are particles
which may never be observed, and which might in
some sense be compared to poetry, in that they need
not "mean, but be"; that one should not ask "what"
they are, but "when" they are.3 In this he is
reminiscent of Werner Heisenberg who, shortly be-
fore his death, reflected that the question "what
do nuclear particles consist of" may be illegiti-
mate, and will happen to yield sensible answers
only if those particles can be broken into compo-
nents by investing energy significantly smaller
than their rest mass.4 Fritjof Capra puts it even
more boldly:
"Quarks are not particles at all,
but events. "5
Lest all of the suspicion be laid on the
quarks, consider their bizarre relatives, the
"tachyons." As Jayant Narlikar reminds us, these
particles routinely travel faster than light, have
an imaginary rest mass, lose energy when increasing
speed, can approach infinite velocity, in which
condition they have zero energy but finite
momentum. 6
Nor do we need to stay in the sub-nuclear do-
main to find such difficult conceptions.
If we
turn our human eyes to the other extreme -- to as-
trophysics, cosmology, and the dynamic universe,
and follow our scientific formalisms carefully,
albeit courageously, we ultimately encounter simi-
lar strains to our comprehension. Most notable is
the palpable distortion of our fundamental space/
time grid forecast by general relativity theory to
derive from intense concentrations of mass.'
This
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distortion reaches its climax in the "black hole, "
the most powerful of physical entities, character-
ized only by charge, angular momentum, and, once
again, by mass, and for whose interpretation a
special "black hole physics" has been propounded. 8
May we not at least muse that if this space-
and time-distorting property we call "mass" ulti-
mately traces down to particles we are forced to
experience, rather than to observe, to describe in
quasi-poetic terms, to regard as events rather than
substance, then we have indeed allowed human con-
sciousness to enter the structure of physical
reality?
Indeed, it may not even be necessary to go to
these extremes of physical concept to identify par-
ticipation of subjective perception in the defini-
tion of reality.
The wave-particle dualities men-
tioned earlier, whether of electrons or of light,
or the Bohr atom with its striking dismissal of
classical rationality, also hint at some interjec-
tion of consciousness into the physical process.
So, too, with the full superstructure of electro-
magnetic theory, built upon the totally intangible
concepts of electric and magnetic fields. Perhaps
if we were humble enough, and honest enough, we
might even be driven to reopen our dialogue with
Newton himself, to question precisely what we do
mean by a "force," a "distance, " a "time," or a
"mass. "
Clearly none of these questions, nor any other
facets of the subject, are settled by this symposi-
um. It does, however, bring together considerable
insight from the domains of basic and applied
physical science, and of modern parapsychology -- in
some cases embodied in the same human conscious-
ness, in others separately. If the multivaried
ideas and experiences that are here presented and
allowed to reflect off one another do not produce
certain conclusions, they unquestionably do illu-
minate this intriguing topic from divergent points
of view. The question is far from answered; but
it has now been fairly asked.
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References
1. E. D. Mitchell, "A Look at the Exceptional,"
proc. Electro 77 Professional Program, The State of
the Art in Psychic Research, New York, April 19-21,
1977, pp. 1-5.
2. J. A. Wheeler, "The Universe as Home for Man, "
American Scientist, 62, November-December, 1974,
pp. 683-691.
3.
S. D. Drell, "When is a Particle?," Physics
Today, 31, June 1978, pp. 23-32.
4. W. Heisenberg, "The Nature of Elementary Par-
ticles," Physics Today, 29, March 1976, pp. 32-39.
5. F. Capra, Paper LBL-796, Lawrence Berkeley Lab-
oratories, University of California, Berkeley, Ca.,
1978.
6. J. V. Narlikar, "Cosmic Tachyons: an astro-
physical approach, " American Scientist, 66, Septem-
ber-October, 1978, pp. 587-593.
7. L. L. Smarr and W. H. Press, "Our Elastic
Spacetime :
Black Holes and Gravitational Waves, "
American Scientist, 66, January-February, 1978,
pp. 72-79.
8. S. W. Hawking, "Black Holes in General Rela-
tivity, " Communications in Mathematical Physics,
25, 1972, p. 152.
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Chairman's Note:
The formal presentations reproduced above were followed
by an animated period of questions, answers, comments and
discussion which included many of the audience, as well as
the panel members themselves. No attempt will be made here
to replicate the details of that discussion, other than to
note that it dealt preponderantly with the issue raised by
Professor Wheeler in the appendices to his talk concerning
the validity of AAAS affiliation for the Parapsychological
Association.
As editor, I have mused for many months what response,
if any, should properly be made to that statement in the con-
text of this volume. On the one hand, the issue was clearly
tangential, if not irrelevant, to the stated topic of the
session, and one could quarrel with the propriety of its
original introduction into this forum. On the other hand,
once introduced, it dominated the discussion, engendered
immediate and substantial coverage in the public press, and
was the basis for a number of articles, letters, and re-
sponses in various magazines. Several of the panel members,
including the chairman, took immediate exception to both the
style and factual content of the statement, and their sub-
sequent considered study of it provoked further reservations
on their part.
Of the several options: abstaining from further comment
on the matter; attempting reproduction of the many elements
of rebuttal proferred by the panel members and audience; ex-
amining in detail the factual bases of the statement; etc.,
I have elected simply to reconstruct the spontaneous remarks
with which, as chairman, I closed that session. In so doing,
it is my hope that further debate on the issue, if any is
needed, could be kept in dispassionate perspective and car-
ried forth with the same high professionalism, openness of
mind, and humility before valid data that characterize all
other aspects of this program, of the Society which sponsored
it, and of good science in general.
Tapes of all presentations and the entire discussion
are available from AAAS under the title "Role of Conscious-
ness," (Cassette numbers 79T4891-4893).
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Chairman's Summary
In bringing this vigorous discussion to a
close, I would like to invoke the chairman's pre-
rogative for a final comment on what clearly has
been the most contentious item in the various
presentations.
I am sure that Professor Wheeler
anticipated this when he raised the issue, and
that he will not be surprised by my response to it.
In the technical body of his talk, John dealt
with an important physical topic in a scholarly
and instructive fashion.
He focussed on well-
defined experiments, interpreted in terms of spe-
cific theoretical models, and I for one learned
much from his insight.
I was less persuaded by the
substance and logic of the argument presented in
his Appendices. While I fully agree with his
criteria for any scientific endeavor, and with his
sense of responsibility for the AAAS to protect
itself from exploitation and from providing a haven
for fraudulent pseudo-scientific work, the case he
presented against psychic research was, in its
generality and lack of accurate and relevant evi-
dence, much less convincing. To my mind, agglom-
erating such disparate topics as the Bermuda Tri-
angle, the multi-headed Hydra, some fraudulent
work to which friends had been subjected, concerns
about inappropriate expenditure of public funds,
and the sincere scholarly work of his companions
on this panel is not a productive way to address
such a difficult issue. If there is a case, it
should be developed in terms of specific pieces
of work that have been presented to this Society,
accurately represented and vigorously contested in
the traditional form of responsible, critical
dialogue.
Nor can I concur with his recommendation that
work such as some of our speakers presented here
should be totally relegated to the appropriate
specialist societies. As I understand it, the AAAS
is not intended as a linear combination of special-
ist organizations; it does not simply provide an
alternative route for specialist presentations.
Rather, it is meant to establish a forum for ex-
change of knowledge and ideas across traditional
disciplinary lines, and as such its concern should
be more for the clarity, rigor, and interdisciplin-
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ary significance of the work presented, than for
the heritage of a particular field.
Finally, on his allusion to the cyclical
nature of the enthusiasm for, and frustration with,
psychic experimentation as indicative of a funda-
mental invalidity of the field, I would offer the
following observation:
true scholarly study of
such phenomena is barely one century old, and over
that period, in comparison with most fields of high
science and technology, the resources deployed for
this study have been miniscule. Given the complex
and elusive character of the phenomena proposed,
their immense significance if validated and compre-
hended, and the recent availability of instrumenta-
tion and data processing techniques of sufficient
sensitivity to sort out various possible implica-
tions, modest but incisive continued effort by
sincere and able scholars does not seem to me
inherently ignoble.
For my part, I would far rather an organiza-
tion like AAAS assume some risk of accommodating,
in its generosity of scientific spirit, some in-
consequential, incorrect, or even fraudulent re-
search, than assume the far more insidious risk
of categorically excluding an entire domain of
sincere scientific inquiry, regardless of how
tawdry its history, or how provocative its subject
matter may be. If our concern is indeed for the
truth, it is less likely to be found by relegating
conscientious investigators to their own provincial
hovels than by exposing their work to the open air
of just such disciplined discussion as this panel
has provided.
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