Introduction: You know something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is.

Bob Dylan

Don't you want somebody to love? Don't you need somebody to love? Wouldn't you love somebody to love?

You better find somebody to love. Jefferson Airplane

ou may have heard this as a joke: Late at night a passerby comes upon a man on his hands and knees under a streetlight, looking for the

keys to his car. Wishing to help, the Good Samaritan asks where he thinks he may have lost them. When the man on his knees gestures toward a car parked in the shadows some distance down the block, the passerby asks why he is not looking for his keys over there, where he most likely dropped them. Looking up incredulously, the man answers: “This is where the light is!”

We have all been that man at different times, restricting our search to well-lighted areas, although, in our more lucid moments, we know that what we are looking for may well be in the shadows. We are in good company: as Lawrence Krause (one of the cosmologists credited with the discovery of dark energy) points out, “much of physics is looking where the light is.”1

1 Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed, Basic Books, 1993, p. 19.

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This book is the result of my decision many years ago to abandon a place of seeming enlightenment to revisit the mysterious darkness from which we emerged and into which we inevitably return. It is the account of an ongoing struggle to construct a worldview that reconciles the findings of modern science with a sense of transcendence, with my conviction that the universe is alive, that it is sensitive to our wants, and that there are mysterious forces in our world that charge events with emotional content and meaning. This book is about what a person near to me once referred to as my “philosophy shit.” I am sorry, but I’m always surprised to learn that not everyone is occupied by questions that are of burning interest to me: I want to know where I came from, why I am here, what the meaning of it all is, and finally, what comes next.

The title is a reference to the terra incognita that cartographers of old would sometimes populate with dragons. The subtitle is a play on the word indifferent, underlying my conviction that the world—contrary to the default position of the scientific community is not indifferent to our being here. To the contrary, it is clear to me that we engage the world actively in a back-and-forth that is essentially a dialogue. The scientific method on which modern technology is based would not be possible if this were not true, if we did not have the manifest ability to put questions to the universe and to modulate our behavior and frame future questions in accordance with the responses we get.

This is the account of a personal journey. Although I describe encounters with ghosts and angels here, as well as arresting coincidences, the experiences I recount here are not remarkable in the sense of being in any way unusual. To the contrary, I insist that they are “remark-able” in the literal sense—worthy of being commented on—precisely because of their workaday commonness. I am convinced that many if not

all reports of similar experiences reflect aspects of the poorly-understood physical reality in which we are embedded. But if ghosts and angels are real, the reality studied by science must ultimately accommodate this fact. Contrary to the subtitle of the 1971 best-seller by Carlos Castaneda, there is no separate reality.

Logically, of course, disincarnate beings may not be real. Such apparitions may not be an objective part of reality. Reports of sleep encounters with disembodied spirits might well be based on illusions, artifacts our brains construct from sensory input, like a rainbow. But the unreality of ghosts and angels does not happen to be a scientific fact; their unreality is merely an assumption accepted as fact within impressive narratives that attempt to explain our experience of physical reality objectively in a self-consistent way.

In this book I stress the importance of distinguishing between scientific facts that are beyond dispute and the simplifying assumptions scientists cannot avoid making when constructing models of physical systems. My insistence on sticking to facts reflects my conviction that facts, by their very nature, cannot contradict experience. Our task as honest seekers after truth is to connect the dots between the subjective facts of personal experience and the objective facts of scientific discovery to create a consistent narrative.

It is logically possible that a consistent narrative incorporating all facts might be constructed on the basis of the assumption that every report of an encounter with a ghost or an angel is based on an illusion, but this narrative has not yet been written. In this book I consider a narrative that can be developed on the assumption that subjective encounters with such beings have an objective correlate. I explore the possibility that the universe may be constrained to be the way it is by the assumption that it has a purpose, and that the purpose is to engender beings capable of participating in ever-

more-perfect love relationships. I formulate this idea in terms of something I refer to as the Perfect Anthropic Hypothesis (PAH) and the closely related Perfect Anthropic Principle (PAP), which I discuss briefly in the final chapter and which I develop at greater length in several follow-on volumes that are currently works in progress.2

It is important to understand that I do not insist on the truth of the PAH and the PAP, but only on the usefulness of these ideas for creating space in which meaningful scientific theorizing may be conducted. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed by the physicists David Bohm and B. J. Hiley3 that “our thought is always a limited abstraction from the indefinitely great subtlety of the implicate order as a whole. We can extend it, but then it will always still be limited. And beyond these limits, there is always indefinitely more that

2 Here is a caricature of the PAP, of which I am the author: You are God, omnipotent and omniscient, but, like the song says, you

want somebody to love, somebody, that is, with whom you can share a genuine love relationship. Such a somebody could not be under your control. A puppet just won’t do as a partner in a true love relationship. The right somebody has to be capable of telling you, as it were, to go play in the traffic. Perhaps, since you are God, you want no end of such relationships. But how do you create independent beings capable of participating in genuine love relationships? It’s really tricky, but God, being omniscient, figured it out. He created a very special universe that engenders such independent beings, which He accomplished by constraining the infinite potential of His being in a very specific way. When we know what constraints He chose to cause such a universe to emerge from the weightless gravity of infinite potentiality, we will know the laws that govern the universe of our experience. I think of this set of constraints as the Word, the logos, John talks about “in the beginning.”

That’s the PAP. The PAH is a falsifiable scientific hypothesis that states that science will never discover laws or empirical facts that cannot be woven seamlessly and compellingly into such a narrative.

3 In the last chapter of The Undivided Universe: An Ontological interpretation of Quantum Theory, 1993, Routledge, London and New York, p. 389.

has not been grasped in thought.” I also agree with Bohm and Hiley “that through the human being, the universe is making a mirror to observe itself,” except that I would modify that provocative sentence to read more provocatively still: According to the PAH, the universe is purposefully making conscious beings capable of experiencing the love and the longing that called the cosmos into existence.

Reputable scientists, despite their stature, could hardly risk such a statement in the current intellectual climate. The purpose of developing this narrative, given the objective facts discovered by science, is to establish the utter reasonableness of such a belief.

It has not been easy going. The reader will soon understand why I refer to a lifelong struggle. In addition to the relentless pressure of confusing subjective experiences— anger, jealousy, empathy, pleasure, moral outrage, and so forth—there are a lot of scientific facts to consider, none of which comes with a label attesting to its relative significance. Most important, perhaps, is the practical difficulty of distinguishing between scientific facts, on the one hand, and, on the other, assumptions that are so central to our best scientific theories that they are considered to be facts.

In the 1980s I did a lot of work outside the U.S. as an economic consultant on foreign aid projects. There was a lot of traveling involved, a lot of restaurant meals, and a lot of checking into and out of hotels. It happened on more than one occasion that I woke up in a hotel room in Africa, South America or Southeast Asia with the realization that I did not know where I was. Resisting the temptation to turn on a light, and without opening my eyes, I would try to figure it out. Where am I? Where was I yesterday? What am I doing? Where am I going? It was usually possible, with some effort, to reorient myself. There were usually enough non-visual environmental clues to allow me to recreate the mental

picture. I would listen for sounds, attend to smells, feel the texture of the bed and the pillow, and monitor my own internal state. On one occasion I determined that I was in a motel on Interstate 75 in Georgia, a not-unfamiliar place for me to wake up in those years of constant travel. I even remembered that my motorcycle was parked just outside the door. But for the life of me I could not remember if I was traveling south, from Illinois to Florida, or the other way around. Turning on the light, however, produced a flood of information that immediately answered the question. Instantly I remembered where I had been the day before, and where I was headed.

Turning on the light is very seductive. The amount of visual information that we process effortlessly is overwhelming. We, the fortunate sighted, can scarcely imagine having to navigate the world in darkness. In fact, the blind can navigate the world only to the extent that it has been structured by the sighted. But what if the option of turning on the light involved turning off the other senses? What if I could see my lover, but I could not smell the fragrance of her hair, feel her body against mine, hear the sound of her voice, taste the wine on her lips. It would be like watching a silent movie.

A leitmotiv in this book is that math, the language of science, is like light. Scientists able to turn on this light grasp things with their mind’s eye that those of us blind to its ultraviolet wavelengths cannot see. We, the math-challenged, navigate a world that has been structured and prepared for us by scientists and engineers who see things that we cannot comprehend. But we should not allow the mathematics-based power of modern technology to confuse us as to what’s going on. We should never be tempted to confuse a model of a real system—no matter how elegant and sophisticated it might be—with the sweaty reality of our immediate experience, any more than we would accept a

silent movie of our lover for the experience of holding him or her in our arms. The map, as Korzybski noted, is not the territory.

****************

Frank Wilczek, Nobel Laureate in Physics, wrote: At Brookhaven National Laboratory, on Long Island, and at

several other centers around the world, there are special rooms where people rarely tread. Nothing much seems to be happening in these rooms, there’s no visible motion, and the only sound is the gentle whir of fans that keep the temperature steady and the humidity low. In these rooms, roughly 1030 protons and neutrons are at work. They have been organized into hundreds of computers, harnessed to work in parallel. The team races at teraflop rates, which means 1012—a million million—FLoating point OPerations per second. We let them labor for months—107 seconds. At the end, they’ve done what a single proton does every 10-24 second, which is figure out how to orchestrate quark and gluon fields in the best

possible way so that . . . 4 It’s enough to incline us math-challenged to throw in the

towel. If scientists know things like that, they really must know what’s going on, right? I thought so for a long time, but recently I received an invitation from the former chair of the Physics Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to formulate my own conclusion regarding what is “happening here.” It was not a personal invitation. In the last paragraph of his eminently readable The Quantum Enigma,5 Professor Bruce Rosenblum, with his colleague Fred Kuttner, was simply hammering home a point. “Since the quantum enigma arises in the simplest quantum experiment, its essence can be fully

4 On the Lightness of Being, Basic Books, 2008, p. 113. 5 Oxford University Press, 2006.

comprehended with little technical background. Non-experts can therefore come to their own conclusions.” In other words, we, the non-experts, are encouraged to develop our own worldview, one that hopefully reconciles our direct experience, which we expand vicariously to include “the simplest quantum experiment,” with the models of physical realty that theoretical physicists have developed.6

It was an invitation I was glad to accept. I have been attempting unsuccessfully to crash this party for more than thirty years; I would always shrink away from the velvet rope at the last moment under the painful knowledge that I do not have the mathematical and scientific credentials to engage theoretical physicists on their own turf.

But what is happening here? What are those hydrogen nuclei up to with such frenetic internal activity? Atoms, which may have scores of protons and neutrons at their core, are clearly not the hard little billiard balls careening through emp-ty space we might imagine them to be when learning in high school chemistry about the Ideal Gas Law, or later, when trying to understand the statistical derivation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Why do protons and neutrons ceaselessly engage in furious activity? According to Wilczek in the passage cited above, they are working to . . . orchestrate quark and gluon fields in the best possible way so that . . .

6 For readers who may need to be reminded, the “simplest quantum

experiment” refers to the famous “double slit experiment” which defines the quantum measurement problem. According to the near-unanimous interpretation of the results of double slit experiments, the quanta under investigation—typically photons—seems to know whether they are being observed and how the experiment designed to probe their nature has been set up.

Alright, you’ve got my attention: So that . . . what? And best according to whose criteria? Wilczek’s answer is suggestive but not completely

satisfying: Protons, he tells us, are laboring to “keep the Grid

satisfied.” It’s important to keep the Grid satisfied, he continues,

because she “is a harsh mistress.” Perhaps you have never heard of the Grid; before reading

The Lightness of Being I never had. The Nobel Laureate tries to bring us math-challenged

somewhat up to speed with a few qualifiers: “She’s complicated,” he writes. “She has many moods.” I find his personification of the Grid as a feminine being

with moods and expectations most interesting. I’m not sure about the gender or the moodiness, but over the years I have grown comfortable thinking of what is “out there” as a moral being that engages me in a back-and-forth. It seems to me that theoretical physicists have painted themselves into a corner with their elaborate abstract models. Wilczek’s stretching for the proper metaphor to describe what his mathematics is saying lands him in a place where mathematics—quite explicitly and by design—has nothing to say. Mathematical models are completely objective. A being with moods and expectations (“she is a harsh mistress”) necessarily has its own subjective point of view that cannot be captured in the model.

So what is going on down there? What are these protons trying to figure out? What moving target could they be trying to hit?

Here is a possible answer, though it may not be the final answer. How could it be, given the mystery of experience? But it is an answer that, while leaving the mystery intact, gives meaning to experience.

The frenetic activity physicists have discovered at the sub-

atomic level reflects the universe continuously rearranging itself to respond optimally to the shaping force of our wills—my will, yours, the momentarily sharply-focused will of the stray dog down the street, and all the others.

It’s a difficult on-going exercise that should be considered

a measure of just how magnificent and un-dead a universe capable of accommodating free will would have to be. This conjecture may sound farfetched to some, but to my way of thinking it makes more sense than the image of quarks in the thrall of an abstract mathematical object such as the Grid—which leads me to a question that has occupied me for more than three decades:

How would the assumption that the universe accommodates free will constrain it to be?

My gut feeling is that applying this constraint to the near

infinity of theoretically possible universes considered by many physicists—the number 10500 is bandied about by string theo-rists—would return a world isomorphic to ours in all significant respects.

If it is not intuitively obvious to you that a lawful universe that rearranges itself in response to the ongoing and unpredictable input of a gazillion wills of varying force and intensity would have to perform something like the enormous ongoing calculation7 suggested by the cited passage, hopefully

7Calculation may not be an adequate concept here. What I have in

mind is the mysterious capacity the universe possesses to enforce the Second Law of Thermodynamics and other foundational physical precepts such as the principle of least action. We don’t know how the universe accomplishes what it does—entropy in a closed system never decreases, water always flows downhill, and so forth—but physicists have to calculate

this book will help you develop the intuition that makes this statement an obvious implication of the assumption that we have free will. If we do, the ongoing acts of a gazillion agents will continually confront the universe with new boundary conditions, eternally new initial conditions on which the laws of physics operate to produce the evolving menu of options from which those same gazillion wills choose anew. If we have free will, the universe is alive; it responds to us as teacher and parent. If we don’t have free will, the universe is not merely dead, which would imply it was once alive: it is inert.

In the case of an inert, non-organic universe, a classical reductionist approach—which holds that a complex system is “nothing but” the sum of its parts—may suffice to write the narrative that describes it exhaustively. The fact that reductionism has proved to be such a powerful methodology for teasing out the relationships between the parts of systems has led many thinkers to conclude that, if pushed far enough, it will provide answers to every interesting question. After all, scientific reductionism has underwritten the explosive development of modern technology, with no end in sight. But when examined closely, reductionism merely discovers how things work, not how things are, nor why. In view of the bright future that technology paints of our growing ability to struc-ture the world for our benefit, asking what and why has come to seem a bit old-fashioned—a looking backward, rather than boldly to the future. Asking why is no longer considered a legit-imate scientific question.

The strength of the scientific method is that it provides for the establishment of consensus among investigators, and that

furiously to check the predictions of their mathematical models against what the universe accomplishes effortlessly at the quantum level.

it allows the universe itself to be the final arbitrator in answer-ing questions of fact. One of the facts established by this methodology is that, when the obvious “stuff” of the universe (matter) is examined closely, there is nothing (no thing) there at the micro level— nothing, at least, with extension in space and time. Moreover, even the elusive “non-things” that may be cornered by powerful instruments and forced to divulge their secrets do not appear to have secrets to tell until a proper question is put to them.

This is the quantum enigma Rosenblum and Kuttner were talking about.

To make sure that we are roughly on the same page with respect to what science has discovered about the nature of matter at the micro or quantum level, I put on my seven-league boots here to review the history of our understanding of the “ultimate building blocks of matter.”8

Beginning with speculative atomic theory in ancient Greece, physical reality is thought to be composed of atoms and the space between them, that is, the “void.” Rutherford’s 1904 model of the atom showed that the “void” invades the interior of the atom. According to this model, substance (or mass) is confined to a tiny nucleus making up perhaps only one billionth of the volume of the atom.

By the mid-1970s, with the establishment of the standard model of particle physics, it was determined that the void extended even deeper into the interior space of the atom. According to the present consensus, almost all mass is confined to apparently point-like particles—the up and down

8 For readers wishing for a bit more detail, I take these boots off and

discuss the history of our understanding of the atom and the surprising discoveries science has made about these “ultimate building blocks of matter” in an appendix. There are, of course, many books covering these topics written by experts that will take the general reader as far as he or she may want to go down this road.

quarks that make up protons and neutrons, with a tiny fraction apportioned to the electrons that “orbit” the much more massive nucleus.

But here is an even more interesting fact: the mass concentrated in quarks and electrons does not actually inhere in these dimensionless particles, but is a result of what they are doing. What they are doing is moving very fast.9

So here is my question: Given these facts, why should we be particularly puzzled

by the Quantum Enigma? I mean, what if it was the other way around? What if what was “down there” at the micro level turned out, on close inspection, not to be what physicists actually found, but rather the hard, indestructible, impenetrable atoms of pre-scientific Epicurean speculation? In that case, we really would have an enigma. We would expect hard little billiard balls to have an objective existence; we would expect them to have what psychologists since Piaget have called object permanence. Psychologically, we would insist on it. If these lifeless little solar systems with their orbiting electronic planets were waiting on our observing them to attain their particular identifying features, something really would not smell right.

Fortunately, that’s not the case at all. Scientists didn’t find hard little things at the micro level. When they examined the micro world closely they found potentiality and a furious whir of activity that, according to the picture sketched by Wilczek, seems to be seeking the maximum or minimum or optimum value of some parameter. I like to think that these lively little potential moons are doing something like what he says they are doing: they are trying to “figure out how to orchestrate quark and gluon fields in the best possible way so that . . .”

9 As per Einstein’s famous equation, E = mc2, most of their

mass=energy is due to their energy of motion.

You may complete the sentence. With this piercing but incomplete picture of the quantum

world, the quantum enigma doesn’t seem quite so enigmatic. The world is mysterious, yes, but the mystery is present from the moment we achieve a level of consciousness that permits us to view events from a vantage point outside ourselves, to see ourselves as others see us, and to contemplate a world in which we someday will not be. Primitive man was aware of this mystery. What would be truly surprising, what would be completely unfathomable, what would be genuinely enigmatic, would be for us to discover that this physical world—this world that brought forth life, this endless whirl of energy that bends to life—did not itself somehow couple with life the way gravity couples with mass, the way the electromagnetic force couples with charged particles, and the way the strong force is believed to couple with quarks and gluons.

If my will—which reaches into physical reality to alter (albeit within severe constraints) the course of history—is a real physical force, and if the physical universe attends me, waiting for the forming imprint of my will before committing itself to one of a myriad of possible histories, why, then, would I not expect it to find purchase at the micro level as its sister forces do? Why, upon examining the constituent parts of this mysterious living cosmos, would I expect to find lifeless little moons insensitive to the effects of this force? Given the mys-tery inherent in experience, would not the discovery of a roiling sea of potentiality at the micro level be less surprising?