[Paleopsych] one more red pill -- posted at p57.blogspot.com

[Werbos, Dr. Paul J.]

At 03:23 PM 9/24/2004 -0700, Steve wrote:
>What are your best candidates for future heresies?

Good question. I wouldn't call it heresy to take a stand that half of 
humanity already takes, loudly.
Nor is it a new heresy to smoothly extend a previous heresy. But --
black and white politics, dinosaurs, drug policy, parapsychologists and 
time technology.
Quarks. (I need to list it to avoid forgetting stuff...) (I forgot 
Helgoland, but that's as well for now.)

I do not believe in either side, Conservative or Liberal, or Fundamentalist 
or Atheist
or Establishment, in the main ideological battles of our day. I do not believe
in the black or the white -- but I believe that the fuzzy grey in-between
is even further from the truth, and sometimes even more dangerous, though 
usually more stable.
It seems to me, in a war between black and white, that the truth is more 
often a matter of colors,
more vivid and more alive than the purest blacks and whites.

In 1999, my Japanese host asked me to give a two line "koan" to summarize 
my plenary talk at
the United Nations University Headquarters. (At arXiv.org, not physics, 
q-bio 0311006).
"Reality is strange but real. We need more color in our lives, and less in 
our quarks."
Bosonic dyons...

On drug policy... I don't feel such deep conviction. It's not science. I 
have already
posted some possibilities to this list, which would offend both black and 
white -- and grey.

Dinosaurs  ... again, not such strong conviction... but I tend to doubt 
that the main cause
of their going extinct was a comet. Nor will such an out-of-the-blue event 
be the real cause of human
extinction if we go down that path. Nor were falling trees the main cause 
of the big Northeast blackout
awhile back. The falling trees were like a spark falling on a big pile of 
dry wood... the real cause was the accumulation
of the dry wood, which would have led to a big fire sooner or later anyway. 
Weakness of the electric power
grid. For the dinosaurs, the "dry wood," in my view, was the evolution of 
the modern mammal brain --
something George Gaylord Simpson talked about (consistent with Per Bak's 
cartoon model of
evolution), but forgotten by later authors who try to get credit for about 
half of his ideas while letting
the rest sink into obscurity (not the rarest phenomenon in human 
intellectual history). The evolution
of the modern mammal brain was an event of huge significance, and it is sad 
how much we underestimate
and misunderstand it.

Parapsychologists -- this is real heresy. Yes, I admit there are hosts of 
charlatans and psychopaths out there,
as well as folks who are well-meaning but as confused as .. whatever. But I 
do think there are some bits and
pieces of stuff out there that are basically real, even if they are just at 
a surface level of that reality.
The remote viewing stuff and most of the presentience stuff seems basically 
valid, in my view, and even
"Phillip the imaginary ghost" might be (though I haven't looked at it as 
much). Jesse Helms won the day
politically, but I don't see that as a victory for the spirit of truth or 
for the scientific method.
Now THAT'S grade A heresy, no? But I also don't believe in Puthoff's thing 
about
the Casimir effect and zero-point energy, even if it has penetrated such 
mainstream places as Hawking's
talk about whitened black holes and politically correct time-asymmetry.

But I could imagine a more extreme possible future heresy. As of this very 
moment.
If it should be true (as now seems most likely) that
it is possible to extract free energy from heat after all... (I regret that 
it would violate a few
rules for me to elaborate at this moment; please forgive; this is not a 
scientific journal, and I am
not asking for your belief right now...)... then I can see how this might 
connect to
prior stuff I had at arXiv.org, in physics, in quant-ph 2000 and 2003. If 
we can convert
heat energy to FORWARDS-TIME free energy (the only kind we normally see in this
region of the galaxy), we might be able to extract BACKWARDS-TIME free energy
by building the time-inverted kind of apparatus. How could one conceive of such
an apparatus? Well, awhile back, I asked how the ideas of Huw Price could
be translated into more workable real apparatus, able to image 
backwards-time-flowing
macroscopic regions if they exist (which is not at all obvious to me -- a
situation which reduced my interest in pursuing it further). There are some
very tangible ways to do it... and those designs might be adapted to the 
new situation.
Maybe. But I do not feel any conviction at all about it... but the 
technical questions
involved are beyond the scope of a blog. Maybe a future heresy, maybe not.
Maybe I will have time to find out; maybe not.