What happened next was the most informative event of all. They began to explain what had happened. This person may have needed longer with the shield — shields can spend at least four weeks rebalancing some people. This person had become more relaxed even with a fake shield. Over lunch we talked more — they seemed disappointed, but only slightly so. They were sure there was some explanation, and they never seemed to entertain the possibility that the shields do nothing at all. Later we did the full analysis and sent them the results.
Indeed, she kindly had a new set of 3 real and 3 fake shields made especially. Using these we carried out two further experiments to find out whether the shields protect people from the weakening effects of holding a mobile phone cell phone.
I had started this study with the opinion that someone somewhere was maliciously and greedily making false claims to take money from vulnerable people.
I ended up with quite a different view — that well-meaning people were selling a product they genuinely believed in to people who also believed in it and felt better, even though the specific claims are false. One final example concerns a psychic claimant, David Spark; a quietly spoken man in his late thirties who just turned up one day in our lab. David claims to be able to predict the outcome of horse races, not by knowing the form or juggling the odds though he is very good at that but by using his psychic powers.
Nick Rose and I agreed and asked him what he could do. He said he could tell the suit of playing cards, so for six weeks I hid a playing card in a filing cabinet and he rang in with his guess. He was quite successful with this task, getting three out of six guesses right, but said he preferred the horses where you have a list of names to look at.
So we devised a new test using lists of words chosen by him. He made 14 guesses and got none right. Yet he was sure that if he could get more relaxed, or improve his sleep and diet, or find a task more like horse racing, the results would improve. Nick then wrote a programme which displayed a simple horse race on the computer screen, and between April and May David made 10 guesses from home. Again the results were below chance and again David came up with numerous reasons why he had failed.
Finally we invited him to come to the lab for properly controlled tests, and after each experiment I recorded an interview with him.
In the lab David could work in his own time, predicting the outcome and then running the race when he was ready, as often as he liked up to a preset number of trials. In the first experiment we decided on trials several weeks work with anything between 5 and 15 trials per session and David predicted he would get about half the winners right.
In fact he got just 6 — fewer than the 10 predicted by chance. Afterwards I asked him about these results. I was totally pleased with them because one of the things I said was sort of linking some of the numbers up … like one, two and ten together; three, four and nine together, and five, six, seven and eight together. He did indeed make a graph, and a chart of results, and numerous calculations.
His understanding of probability was far sharper than mine, and yet he seemed always to conclude that he had succeeded, when I thought he had not.
The problem, as so often in psychic claims, is looking for patterns after the fact. If you study the results of any such experiment you can always find interesting patterns, and we did. The question is — are they chance or real?
The answer is — if they are different every time, and only visible in retrospect, then they are probably chance. As we explained, if he could predict in advance that he would get, say, more hits on positions seven and eight — or indeed any pattern he cared to predict, then we could test that.
We eventually carried out five experiments of this kind. In the later ones we gave him toy money with which he could bet a different amount on each race. The results of these experiments were fascinating. None of the individual results was significant for first place hits. Overall David completed trials with ten horse races, and obtained exactly 21 hits. In other words it appears as though there is nothing but chance guessing operating.
Nonetheless, he came out with a small profit on his winnings, a sum of ranks significantly below chance which suggests something other than chance going on , and a conviction that his powers were real. After each experiment he explained why he had failed, and maintained great optimism about his achievements. In our final interview I was quite straight with him. I knew him fairly well by now and really wanted to understand what was going on in his mind.
When the results were not as they expected they did not consider the possibility that their whole paradigm was false, but instead preferred to patch it up with ad hoc explanations for every failure. Although James did change his mind in important ways, he did not abandon the idea that aliens were abducting him.
But then imagine how hard it would have been for him, or any of them. The way I live my life. That experience was absolutely crucial. My mother was quite a committed Christian — C of E, which was normal in the Fifties.
My dad was never particularly keen, but he certainly believed in life after death and some sort of idea of God, I suppose. Oh, I had wonderful arguments with my mother. I also went to a Methodist boarding school. Wretched, wretched, wretched years I spent there — absolutely miserable! We had to go to church twice on Sundays and once on normal days, but the only purpose for the chapel, as far as I was concerned, was as a place where you could go and cry without anybody discovering you.
But it does mean I have a pretty fair Christian education. I can still almost recite the communion service by heart. Oh, there are lots of ways. The simplest kinds of experiments are on various kinds of extrasensory perception: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition.
When I was doing my PhD, I was lucky enough to be asked to teach parapsychology to more than students and I used them as my subjects. No, never. For my PhD alone I did more than 30 quite large-scale experiments, some of them with hundreds of subjects, some with young children, some with twins, some with people who claimed a special connection with each other — and everything just fell to chance.
I slept in loads of haunted houses where no one had dared to sleep for 20 years, I investigated poltergeists, I visited mediums and spiritualists and psychics, I trained as a witch and learnt to read Tarot cards, I got a crystal ball and the I Ching, and I kept thinking: Somewhere there has got to be something.
I was obsessed. But then I thought: Well, I did have this amazing experience and I should try to understand it in some other way. And that led to a whole new phase of my life. No, absolutely not. One of the things I researched was why people believe in the paranormal, and that led to all sorts of interesting work on out-of-the-body experiences, alien-abduction experiences, sleep paralysis….
So, what am I talking about? Spirituality without spirit? Of all the things I tried in my youth, Zen meditation was the only one I really stuck with, and eventually I became a serious student.
I have meditated every day for over 20 years, I have been on many, many intensive retreats; I have a Zen teacher, who has been very helpful, and I have trained with other Zen masters as well.
In a very broad sense. This was a stunning thing to be saying two-and-a-half thousand years ago, when most people believed that spirits of various kinds ran the world, or that gods intervened or whatever. But of course that is how we now know it to be: the law of cause and effect is just physics. So, this is a really, to me, encouraging commonality between basic science and Buddhism.
What amazes me is how there can be scientists who are Christians or Muslims. We take the self to be a permanent thing, but it is impermanent like everything else. Yes, I suppose I could be. I mean, take reincarnation. One of the central insights that the Buddha had under the Bodhi tree was that, like everything else, the self arises and falls away and arises and falls away.
This is the problem. Suddenly it switches attention and a different self arises. Neither of those works. If you follow Descartes and you believe in a separate mind and a separate body, how do they relate to each other?
And this is one of many reasons that I find Zen so encouraging, because non-duality is right at the heart of it. Horgan: Have psychedelics given you any enduring insights into the nature of existence?
Blackmore: Yes. Horgan: Do you believe in the state of permanent mystical awareness called enlightenment? Have you ever met someone who seems to be enlightened? Blackmore: 1.
Rather it is a loss of, or seeing through, or letting go of, the delusions of self and agency, and the acceptance of impermanence, suffering and nonself.
Yes, some Zen teachers. So, I am not going to say any more. Horgan: For a serious scholar, you seem to have lots of fun. Is my view of you accurate, and if so, how do you pull it off? Blackmore: Hmmmm. Excitement yes, risk-taking yes, but fun—not sure. As a student I would spend evenings analyzing stats for my psychic experiments rather than go to parties or see friends.
Blackmore: No idea. I fear human nature makes us incapable of utopia. We are good at dystopias though. As a woman, living in an Islamic state under sharia law is the very worst I know of. Let us not ever descend to such depths. Companion website. Blackmore, S. Caruso, Lexington Books, Hofhuis, S. Meta-Post: Posts on Psychedelics. Meta-Post: Posts on Buddhism and Meditation. Rational Mysticism. For many years, he wrote the immensely popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American.
Follow John Horgan on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Horgan: Do you ever wish that you were less skeptical? How do you personally get that over to people to get through their resistance, to that idea?
Because for people that so often it's like, well, it's obvious that information can't want anything. That's obvious and they blocked their mind to it. Rhys : Yeah, that's a great question.
So I guess one of my answers is I haven't done that much of it. I haven't tried saying it that much. I haven't formed the idea that well, and battered it with lots of people. I think that my general thing is that I guess, what I say is something. I think that the nice thing, as you kind of know too, is that memes themselves, like internet memes, are a helpful way to talk about information wanting things. So you're just, okay, and like for me, as an example, me too, you can think about it as a, that thing spread so widely because it had based within it, it was content with distribution built in.
Everybody who saw that was like, okay, great. I also want to spread this more because it's kind of an invitation dish to share. So I think that something like that, or like challenges might be an example of TikTok dance challenges, where you come in and the challenge itself is saying, hey, spread me, spread me. Don't forget to spread me, so I guess I think that, how I do it is by, slowly getting people in with internet memes as a thing that has the spread me or copy me thing built into it.
Then from there, kind of going deeper and deeper with people into the like rabbit hole of, okay, we can think of things like religions, like that, but instead of having really good copy me, attributes, which they do, they have, you know, like Catholicism is really good at having more kids.
But also religion and other things are really good at getting themselves into the financial infrastructure and accessing money and energy, and so whether it's them, or maybe again for the kids these days, something like Bitcoin or WallStreetBets, you know, something like Bitcoin is a meme with kind of retention built in where you kind of you have Bitcoin as a meme and it is good at spreading, but it's also really good at people who have it make more money or whatever.
So they are, it can kind of like self perpetuate instead of falling out like so many other memes do. So I guess what I do is use current day things. Susan : But, but everything you're saying there The difficulty is I think to move from we made all these memes. We made this machinery, the computers and the servers and everything to do it.
The shift people have to make, to really engage with this is a shift to, ah, we're agents, they are agents, the memes and the genes. These are agents all competing to throw information around their kind of, they're not exactly equivalent to us, but in that sense they are. That leads you into something else that terrifies people. I know this from, you know, 20 years or however long it is of talking about it.
The thought that our wants and decisions and so on are just information going on in a clever brain. And, you know, it's not because we've got this soul or spirit that wants things, you know, some sort of, you know, inner self that is the power that has agency and makes the choices that we have free will, we have free will, but the memes don't.
Is the simplest way of putting that response, and of course, I'm very, very happy to say, and we don't have free will, all this stuff, this isn't the machine. This thing here, my desk is a machine and it's throwing stuff around and the difference is only in complexity and structure and so on. Not in its fundamental nature of agency. Rhys : Yeah, I like that.
I think you're right to push back on. And even as I said, I think it was like, yeah, I'm still kind of centering the human as much. And so it's like, you kind of want to go from centering the human talking about the internet memes to like, wait a second, let's think about, you know, a catchy song and see the world from the catchy songs perspective. If you're a non catchy song, well, you just don't get into people's minds, you know, and so you die off, but if you are a catchy song then you're transmitting from mind to mind and you're excited by that.
Then people are going to remix you and you get pop music or whatever. So I think that starting to talk from the perspective of the information or the meme is a crucial reframe. Then I think, I don't think it's, you're saying here that makes me think about how your work might relate to my work is that I think yours is connected, you know, given the curiosity and perplexity that you have, is more connected to like the consciousness and free will and philosophy of mind side.
I think for me, I think that my work is more directed towards how to moderate a social media platforms, and how we should think about information flowing on them. And so it's less kind of, so hopefully, this to say, I might try to dodge the like free will question and might try to like lead people towards the, instead of thinking about social media platforms as a bunch of humans, let's think of it as the information on the platforms and what the information self wants and how we should like moderated or sensor it or whatever.
Does that make sense? Susan : Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It does make sense. Yeah, good for you because I couldn't do that. I am not engaged with social media or in the modern world, you know, in some ways I'm just, you know, old out of touch person, which is odd, given my enthusiasm for everything we're talking about. Where do people find time in their lives to do this stuff?
I don't know. I think I've got better things to do. Rhys : That's a better, that's a better use of time. I mean, so how do you think about, one thing, I think, I mean, and maybe part of this conversation is this, you know, not, not extraction, but you know, like thinking about all the stuff that you know, and like connecting you into that world of the Gen Z, TikTokers or whatever.
How do you think about the memes in a thing that you have thought of this idea of these tremes, these technological or this third replicator with bits? And that's something that I've been thinking about too. It's like, okay, you have these memes that go from mind to mind, but then you also have this like arrangement of bits in computers and like that can be transferred as well. So tell me how you think about tremes and how they connect to memes.
Susan : What you just said is actually a very good way of, I mean, you make it easy for me to answer by what you just said because I think what happened to me and over many years, and I came to this idea after all in , that's when I gave my TED lecture and it was just before that, that I was asked to write for a NASA book on cultural evolution in the cosmos.
And I, you know, one of those emails you get, you know, and will you write a chapter on, what, how could there be cultural evolution in the cosmos? And that's set me thinking and out of that came all these ideas, but the spark before that was, I was beginning to worry what you said about the digital bits and the, how do they relate to mind to mind psychological information.
Is it just more of the same or is it something different? Only suppose this was kind of early on in the internet memes phenomenon appearing, and I'm thinking, is this something fundamentally different, or is it just another kind of meme? Tricky in an academic writing point of view, do they need a new name? I mean, should I call these just, you know, digital memes and they're still memes, they're all memes, or is something different going on?
And that question I think was lurking in my mind for a long time before that question about the cosmos hit me and I really had to think it through. I went for a walk with my daughter, she lives on a narrowboat and the river was too high to go for a trip on the boat. And we ended up walking one behind the other on this narrow path for quite a long time. And I was just thinking and thinking and thinking, and the whole ideas just kind of bred themselves, if you like.
So where it went from there was to say, well, could there be another replicator? I mean, if you're going to give it another name, if there's something different going on here, I've got to have some principled way of thinking about being the difference because otherwise, I'm just throwing out names, people do that all the time, and it can be useless and then they fizzle out.
The only purpose of doing it would be for something fundamentally different going on. So I began to think about what happened when memes first appeared. Well, we know that in the sense that that's what meme theory is about. You have biology producing loads of different species and then one of those species becomes a copying machine. In other words, when early humans began to imitate each other and pass information, copy, vary, and select information, you know, fire-making techniques, or stone knapping techniques, whatever it might've been in the beginning, putting feathers in their hair, I don't know, whatever, that set off a new evolutionary process and that's what we call memes.
Could that process happen again? Well, when I thought about it that way, then it was immediately obvious to me I might be wrong, but that's what it seemed immediately obvious to me, that what has happened is of all these human meme machines, they began to produce books and cars and tables and glasses and pens and cups of tea and any endless things.
But then they kind of accidentally, because they wanted to, you know, write letters and do whatever they want and talk to each other, quite accidentally in a way they produced computers that were capable of copying information with variation and selection. So you've now got a new kind of copying machine, all the digital technology, but is that enough for a new evolutionary process?
But if it came about that the machinery we created was doing the copying varying and selecting without us, without us interfering. Then there would be a new evolutionary process taken off. I've tried lots. That's how I came to that idea. And when I did so, which is now nearly 15 years ago, I don't think it was true or if it was true, it was only very rarely or slightly true, but it's certainly true now. I mean, you know, such engines are a simple example, but you can go much further than that.
I think out there in cyberspace, there's all sorts of stuff going on that nobody has access to. There's stuff being copied, varied, selected, there are bits of code, you know, going all over the place.
We start started all off and control some of it, observed some of it, but there are unique things being produced, unique combinations of memes being produced all the time by the software that we've produced, and how much it can really take off without us seeing it? I'm not an expert on how those things work.
I hope some experts will tell me, but it leads to this really quite worrying thought could say terrifying, that there's a new evolutionary process going out there using all the stuff that we produced, still in a sense in the same way that we're dependent on genes and biology for the memes that they're building on these meme machines.
Rhys : Yeah, I think that was a good explanation. It's cool that like, you know, some of the nicest times when you're, when ideas come is when you're just walking around, you're like, okay, I guess I just got to walk with my own thoughts for a second and then it kind of emerges. I think you're right to say that there's, it is weird because in some ways, all of this stuff, you know, genes and memes and these like bits or these tremes or whatever you want to call them, that those are all, you can kind of, if you want to mess around with and kind of like collapse them all into one, or it's like, okay, you know, like the genes, technically the selection process is like natural selection, but now we have so much like unnatural selection with GMOs, like the ability to do bio, you know, bioengineering and mess with the DNA.
It's almost like how much is it, you know, how much are genes actually different than memes or whatever? Then also, similarly, how much are the memes actually different than, you know, this new kind of computer memes, like the tremes. And I think that, that question, I think your proposal is a relatively good one. It answers or it brings up the question that you said it was like, okay, if we have this new thing, which is instead of us actively choosing among them, which is how early internet stuff worked.
It was like, oh, I like this picture, I like that picture. But now we have this new set of, you know, AI or machine learning that is actively doing the kind of selection process and duplication and copying process itself. It's like, okay, that thing, is its own new kind of replicator, with its own new kind of, objective function, almost. And that's, I think what you're essentially doing is describing. What you're doing is describing from a memetic perspective, like AI safety concerns, like will this new replicator actually be aligned with human values or, how do we make, actually, make it the case that as it's going to go crazy, how can we make it aligned, you know, what do you think about that?
Susan : No, we can't. I think the answer is obviously no, and no.
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