Intelligence and the Cosmos: Some Barely Restrained Musings

I’ve long been interested in “Occam’s Razor” — the scientific maxim that maintains that all things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the correct one. But who gets the honor of defining “simple”? It’s a lot like Carl Sagan’s “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

What, exactly, is “extraordinary”? “Extraordinary” to who? Are the criteria subject to change?Paranormal researcher Albert Budden nailed the problem when he pointed out that it’s not science’s goal to determine the “simplest” explanation; science should properly strive for the correct explanation.

All of which sort of leads the way to my new theory about UFOs and where they come from. I’ve been dissatisfied with the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis since encountering Jacques Vallee. But sometimes musing about a nonhuman “psychosocial control system” just seems too abstract, too vague and obtuse. Vallee himself pointed out that the prevailing materialist interpretation for UFOs is quintessentially American; Americans like to “kick the tires.” But could the phenomenon be both a physical, nuts-and-bolts reality as well as metaphysical? Arthur C. Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology would appear indistinguishable from magic” certainly applies. But even Clarke was postulating arbitrarily advanced forms of known technologies; judging from his fiction, I doubt he invested much hope in “impossibilities” like telepathy and nonlocal consciousness — both of which, I suspect, are slowly but certainly encroaching on the scientific arena.

One of the most interesting books I’ve read recently was Michael Cremo’s exhaustively researched “Human Devolution.” Cremo argues that the Vedic concept of the human soul is validated by various phenomena, including documented episodes of “psychic” activity and unexpected archaeological findings. Cremo’s book is disappointing because he fails to synthesize his research into a coherent paradigm; it’s fascinating reading, but his conclusion is little more than a thinly disguised rationalization for his personal religious beliefs.

I think the evidence demands a bolder revision of our role as sentient beings. By redefining human consciousness — a process that 21st century neuropharmacology will almost certainly hasten, probably assisted by cybernetics — it’s possible to envision an Earth so utterly unlike conventional models that it may as well be alien.

My own thesis is both absurd and simple: We’re sharing the planet with a home-grown intelligence that took a critically different evolutionary route in our own prehistory, exploiting consciousness itself as a technology while the recognizable “we” contented ourselves with the immediate, tangible world of physical matter. These others — call them “aliens,” simply for lack of a better word — can access our own level of perception if they choose, but they don’t inhabit a “parallel universe” of the type considered by theoretical physicists such as Michio Kaku. Our own universe is probably big enough for a far-flung ecology of nonhuman beings; we’re just limited to an incredibly small portion of it, for reasons both biological and “spiritual.” (John Keel’s electromagnetic “superspectrum” is an especially useful metaphor, if nothing else.)

Maybe the reason we don’t hear the incessant chatter of extraterrestrial radio transmissions or see megascale engineering works etched onto the dome of the night sky isn’t because alien intelligences have uploaded themselves into addictive virtual environments; perhaps they’ve shed their physical forms, but in an altogether different fashion. They might inhabit a previously undetected cosmological substrate, enmeshed in the universe’s deep structure as we twitch feebly on the surface, so many bacteria in an intergalactic Petri dish. The familiar boundaries of space and time would be radically different to a being existing within this hidden order (what physicist/philosopher David Bohm termed the “implicate”).

Interactions with lowly forms of intelligence like ourselves might be maddeningly cryptic; perhaps our only clues would take the form of Fortean anomalies: dark waves lapping silently against the shores of consciousness and batted furiously away if by some chance actually noticed. This sort of cosmos is upsetting to Western science because it implies that consciousness is pliant and mutable, not necessarily dependent on a physical substrate.

The implications are disturbingly theological: What purpose do we serve in this vast, secret world — if any? Hindu texts, which describe a spectrum of conscious forms, forcibly suggest that humans are akin to larvae. If so, what are we to make of the myriad “humanoid” and UFO “occupant” reports that invariably surface year after year?

Maybe we can safely dispense with notions of interstellar visitors and wormholes. Our apparent visitors may not be “visiting” at all; conceivably, we are the newcomers.

Mac Tonnies

April 10th, 2009 by admin | Posted in UFO | Comments (0)

UFOs, Mythology and Plausible Deniability

There are two competing theories that propose to account for the close-encounter experience throughout human history. The first holds that nonhuman encounters found in folklore — such as interaction with the “little people” that populate the Celtic fairy faith — are misreadings of encounters with extrasolar aliens. Since the witnesses to fairies and their activities lacked a suitable technological vocabulary, their descriptions were naturally prone to the “supernatural.

“The second theory maintains that the modern extraterrestrial hypothesis, in which evident nonhuman intelligences originate from other star systems, is at least as fictitious and misleading as the notion that humans share the planet with fairies. According to this view, the core phenomenon adapts to fit the reigning zeitgeist when in truth it is something altogether different — possibly even immune to comprehension. (One wonders what form close encounters will take once we have assumed the role of space travelers we now casually grant to “ufonauts.”)

In both scenarios, the UFO intelligence retains plausible deniability. Since we necessarily comprehend it in mythological terms, it could vanish and leave our civilization largely unscathed. The contemporary UFO phenomenon has demonstrated that it is capable of assuming a physical form at least partly amenable to empirical investigation. But its liminal nature seems designed to leave room for doubt; lacking conclusive proof of nonhuman visitation, we will always be able to chalk the enigma up to various misidentified natural processes.

The phenomenon’s raison dtre seems to be to remain hidden, all the while functioning in an evasive “standby” mode. Although this strange behavior could be explained by a variety of esoteric models, it’s equally possible that we are, after all, seeing “nuts and bolts” visitors from elsewhere in the galactic neighborhood. Of course, one could argue that a civilization capable of bridging the distance between stars could remain absolutely and indefinitely hidden, in which case we would have no global tradition — however distorted — of nonhuman contact. So our visitors — if “visitors” is an applicable term — would seem to have an abiding interest in keeping their presence known to us, even if that presence is confined to our mythology. That the UFOs fail to make open contact indicates an equally stubborn need to remain hidden.

Indeed, their home turf appears to be the periphery of human consciousness. All of this suggests an agenda. I don’t think “they” are patiently waiting for us to make some gesture of ultimate recognition; rather, I propose that the UFO/contact experience — whatever its goal — is well underway.

Mac Tonnies

(photo credit: todd huffman)

April 7th, 2009 by admin | Posted in UFO | Comments (0)