For anyone unfamiliar with Rudy Rucker, he's a computer scientist and sci-fi author among other things. Many credit his book "Software" (first of the four part "Ware Tetralogy") as the first real work of cyberpunk (1982) (imo it works for many definitions, but Neuromancer is closer on general vibe and came out in '84). In any case, he's got a unique style full of interesting ideas and characters.
Got this book in the 90s when I was a wee lad...it really got me thinking about the mathematics of dimensions > 3. Still have this book, and some others from RR, on my shelf.
He edited the only Mathematics ScFi anthology I seen, Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder.
He has two stories in it, like all anthologies some stories good some bad (From my 20 year recollection, some really stuck with me though, "The Tale of Happiton" by Douglas Hofstadter is like "Don't Look Up" for mathematicians, so missing the partisan "Basket of deplorables" about the wrong side and more about human nature and mathematics)
Those are themes for thought experiments more than things the author defends (as one would expect with a foreword from Martin Gardner who was a strong skeptic):
> This, finally, is the essence of synchronicity: the world we live in is filled with harmonies and coincidences that have no explanation in terms of cause and effect. It is fruitless to seek after hidden forces and occult powers. The world is a given — it is just as it is, full of cause and effect, full of synchronicity.
>
> Some people have taken these new developments to mean that such psychic feats as telepathy and psychokinesis are now firmly established scientific realities. This is not correct.
Thanks for pulling this quote out - I just skimmed the epub and it's actually a really lucid and grounded set of claims for something I've often thought, that just as there's causal influence going forward in time, so might there be patterns in arbitrary other dimensions of automata-like processes in higher dimensions.
Something like a time crystal, but in other dimensions of higher space.
Anyway, such things are probably unstable at the scale we'd need to perceive them as meaningful coincidence (I think of them as atomic coincidences) and in any case the book goes on to argue that the world is simply overloaded with symbolism and in such an environment, synchronicity abounds, and that's all you need to explain it.
Somewhat sadly I agree, though I'd like to think there's a slight nudge toward coincidence from the laws of physics, and that not everything we'd deem meaningful is purely emergent.
I’ve personally experienced phenomena where telepathy and ghosts were respectively the most parsimonious explanation of the observables. However, by far the strangest was when I was instantly healed of a muscle injury from weightlifting by transferring that exact injury to another person by touch. I know that sounds far-fetched and I wouldn’t believe me either if I hadn’t experienced it myself. My counterparty was ticked off to say the least.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
>instantly healed of a muscle injury from weightlifting by transferring that exact injury to another person
Could you elaborate on that? It sounds... useful
I've had exactly one experience that involved an unexplainable phenomenon but it was extremely mundane and uninteresting, and since memories fade I sometimes have to mentally slap myself into recognizing that it really did happen. But 99% of "paranormal" info is fake garbage so I don't really dig into the topic
> Could you elaborate on that? It sounds... useful
Not much. It was a moderately severe strain of the intercostals on the left side of my ribcage. It’s a really unpleasant injury because it hurts badly whenever you perform an action that involves the ribs.
As for the transference itself, it was a complete accident. The other person was attempting to provide some relief via manual therapy. This being a very light touch intervention, not the kind of activity that could easily cause a strain. And it worked surprisingly well. The other person then had the same debilitating injury I'd had for about a week, which was about my projected remaining recovery time. It’s very much not something I’d do intentionally. I follow what you mean by useful, but someone who did such a thing regularly would belong in a horror novel and not out among decent people.
It’s practically a defining characteristic of these phenomena that we don’t know how they happen or how to consistently produce them, which makes systematic rigorous investigation difficult if not entirely impossible.
I still try to view the world rationally though. It's a powerful tool for pragmatically grasping most phenomena. I'm just cognizent that it's an incomplete paradigm. Also, for what it's worth, these paranormal phenomena, or whatever you want to call them, are relatively rare.
I know it's a meme at this point but I wonder if Deep Learning could possibly brute force patterns in the 150 years of data that the Noetic sciences have accumulated.
They keep finding a small but statistically significant effect and even performing every possible means to tamper or bias proof the experiments, the effect remains. On top of that, there is absolutely no coherent scientific model to account for this so currently the most probable explanation is still that there is some unaccounted for environmental influence causing the effect.
It's frankly frustrating which is why I kind of fell out of interest in the entire field.
