The wisdom of Robert Morningstar

James Concannon writes...

        More laughs with Morningstar. Today he posted a 1:42 excerpt of one of his lectures at the Edgar Cayce NYC Center. The audio quality was utterly appalling but after several runs I came up with the following transcript, which I believe is accurate apart from a few minor elisions.

"Remote viewing  [and]  out-of-body experiences  are the natural processes of the human mind, and soul.   Science, over the last 150 years, has... er... suppressed them, and quashed them, and repressed it, and tried to convince us--the public--that if you believe in these faculties you are superstitious. Ahhh... you are... ahhmm..ignorant. And that there's no basis in fact...[?]      Because they believe in a totally materialistic, linear, one-directional time concept of reality. Which is the real falsehood. The idea that life unfolds like a stack of dominoes--just hit one domino and inevitably all the dominoes will fall.   Well, that's not true. Ahhh.. because you're not logical. The universe is not logical.  We now know..[?]...     the last 100 years as well.  The arrival of quantum physics...    relativity...    has shown us that we live simultaneously in a matter-antimatter universe. And the matter universe is the after-effects of the antimatter universe."

        Only seven audience members are visible in the Youtubery, but we must assume that many more had paid decent money to hear this. I have a couple of comments, since I know at least as much as AM* about quantum physics--which is to say, not very much.

1. Science has made no efforts that I know of to suppress or quash remote viewing. Indeed, I don't know how it would go about such a project even if it wanted to. Science has simply said "Show me the money." In other and better words, "Let's see some consistent results from RV that are repeatable and clearly better than guesswork." A 1995 evaluation^{note 1} by a blue ribbon panel did find a statistically significant RV effect under some conditions, but it cautioned  "It is unclear whether the observed effects can unambiguously be attributed to the paranormal ability of the remote viewers as opposed to characteristics of the judges or of the target or some other characteristic of the methods used." As for the usefulness of RV in formal intelligence gathering, the panel nixed that completely, and as a result the DIA's $20 million Stargate project was shut down.

A follow-up report by Wiseman and Milton^{note 2} found four methodological problems with SAIC's "Experiment One,"  which the 1995 panel had found compelling, and reported that it could not be repeated. Repeatability is, of course, a requirement for scientific acceptance.

More on the anecdotal side, the celebrity remote viewers who have turned up on the radio show Coast to Coast AM over the years have shown how wildly adrift most of this work can be.  Ed Dames can't seem to get anything right (we're still waiting for his "killshot" to wipe out the human race.) Courtney Brown remote viewed an artificial object trailing Comet Hale-Bopp and was indirectly responsible for the suicide of 39 members of the cult group Heaven's Gate. His "artificial object" was never detected.


So I don't think it's at all unreasonable for the science community to reject the claims of RV-- and rejection is not the same thing as suppression. Ray Hyman, in an article in Skeptical Inquirer, put it succinctly:

"What seems clear is that the scientific community is not going to abandon its fundamental ideas about causality, time, and other principles on the basis of a handful of experiments whose findings have yet to be shown to be replicable and lawful."^{note 3}

2. Quantum physics has not shown what Morningstar says it has shown. Its essential usefulness is in explaining three of the four fundamental forces that make everything happen. It also sheds much light on the wave-particle duality of light. It has little or nothing to say about anti-matter.

Parapsychologists have fallen in love with quantum theory because of the phenomenon of entanglement, per which sub-atomic particles that are very far apart can affect each others' states instantaneously. They speak of "consciousness entanglement" as a possible or probable explanation for RV, but there isn't even a whisper of evidence that such a phenomenon exists, let alone has any practical value.

Now what?
        Well, speaking of practical value-- what, I wonder, does Morningstar think his lecture audiences are going to do with the information he supplies? Storm the gates of the National Acadamies demanding that science get more lenient with parapsychological claims? Remote-view the lottery numbers? Only if they could actually perform the latter trick would they have got value for their money, I fear.



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[1]  An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications. American Institutes for Research September 29, 1995

[2]  Experiment One of the SAIC Remote Viewing Program: A critical re-examination by Dr Richard Wiseman and Dr Julie Milton. J. Parapsychology 62 (4): 297–308

[3] The Evidence for psychic functioning: Claims vs. Reality. Skeptical Inquirer March-April 1996.