Regarding Magical Models - Part Four

This is Part Four in a series. Part One can be found here, Part Two can be found here, and Part Three can be found here.

Now that we have taken a look at some of the basics of quantum physics, we can move on to examining the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is a vital component of every magical operation, and because we still do not really understand how it works, the same is true of magick. While we have no current instrument to measure consciousness, I expect that if such a thing were ever developed we would be able to generate an accurate model of magical processes with a few years of dedicated research, if that.

Consciousness studies is a relatively new discipline that brings together experts in the various fields that contribute to cognitive science, along with philosophers and even a few esotericists here and there. The discipline is currently trying to unravel what is called the "hard problem" of consciousness, and has been at it for over a decade. Simply stated, the hard problem has to do with going from the biochemical "machinery" of the brain and nervous system to the subjective experience of self-awareness.

I have some ideas about that, which I will be touching on in this section, but I want to be clear that none of those ideas can currently be objectively validated, because of the lack of a consciousness measuring instrument that would let us examine the phenomenon experimentally. The first piece is what has been dubbed "quantum consciousness," which refers to the idea that consciousness is somehow related to the brain and nervous system interacting with quantum-scale events.

I'll repeat the same caveat as last time. Even if some form of quantum consciousness turns out to be the best model, it does not prove that consciousness works the way esotericists like me think it does. There isn't necessarily anything paranormal about it at all. I believe that there is based on my experiences as a magician, but "quantum" doesn't make it paranormal. Quantum simply refers to scale in this context, without implying anything else.

And just as a point, it's a bit annoying that there's so much nonsense and misinformation out there about quantum physics and the paranormal that I have to keep going over this, but it's really important because so many people don't seem to understand the concepts clearly.


So one of the most advanced models of quantum consciousness is called the Penrose-Hameroff model, or its formal name, Orchestrated Objective Reduction or "Orch-OR" for short. The basic idea was proposed by British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose in his 1988 book, The Emperor's New Mind. At the time it wasn't clear how a full model would work, because many researchers were convinced that the activity of the brain and nervous system did not rely on structures that would be small enough to exploit quantum effects.

Penrose teamed up with anesthesiologist and psychologist Stuart Hameroff to identify possible neural structures that might interact with the quantum realm, and hit upon structures called microtubules that seemed to fit the bill. According to the Orch-OR model, microtubules essentially perform quantum computing tasks that affect the firing of synapses in a non-computable fashion based on wavefunction collapse. Some of the predictions made in the 1990s by the model have since been disproved, but it was updated in 2013 to address those results.

So is it right? Probably not, at least not one hundred percent. It's an early model of quantum consciousness, and usually early models turn out to be wrong in some significant sense. At the same time, I think Orch-OR is probably the closest anyone has gotten to proposing a physiological mechanism related to solving the "hard problem." We still are left with the mind-body problem that has endured since Descartes' time, but there is some controversial research out there that might help us unravel that as well.

The research in question was conducted by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Laboratory by Dean Radin, Robert Jahn, and their associates. PEAR essentially looked into parapsychology, under the more respectable term "engineering anomalies." What they found was that the human mind seemed to be able to exert a small effect upon random number generators called quantum diodes. These are devices that produce a value of either one or zero based on the decay of a radioisotope within the diode.

The effect was tiny - 0.2 percent, or two trials per thousand. Nonetheless, the statistical results were extremely robust and held up under subsequent trials. Skeptics argue that the laboratory must have been stopping sampling once they had what they considered a positive result, but if you look over the experiments themselves you can see that just isn't true. The samples used were of a fixed size, because that's the only way you can be sure that you aren't biasing the sample by stopping once the results vary in your favor - which has been a significant problem in a number of previous parapsychology studies.

This, right here, is the point upon which the "quantum paranormal" depends. It is possible that there's a problem with the PEAR data, and if so, most of the rest of this article would need to be reconsidered. Specifically, the result is not "paranormal" by virtue of being "quantum." If you were able to follow the last installment of this series, it should be clear that the two concepts aren't even related. The only real connection is that because these effects happen at the quantum level they are hard to measure, and that makes paranormal effects more difficult to detect.

But assuming the PEAR data is accurate, here's why it matters so much. This research seems to show that consciousness alone can act directly upon the wavefunction of a particle. The effect is small, but in magical terms the conditions of the experiment were terrible. There was no connection of any sort between the subjects and the diodes, so effectively what was being done was magick without a link. So the effects were tiny, but they were there. It is reasonable to think that the connection between the consciousness of an individual and his or her nervous system would be more robust.

Given that, combining the PEAR studies with the Orch-OR model, we can arrive at a simple solution to the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem asks how the mind, which appears to be non-physical, can control the body, which is physical. A lot of modern psychologists and neuroscientists try to get around the issue by stating that the mind is an epiphenomenon or byproduct of physical processes, but this does not take into account a solution to the "hard problem" at all. The argument that "it doesn't really exist" completely fails to hold water in my opinion, given that it entirely contradicts our direct experience of having a distinct mind.

Here's a better solution. If we propose, based on PEAR, that (A) the mostly non-physical mind can shift quantum wavefunctions, and, based on Orch-OR, that (B) quantum computing processes form the link between consciousness and physical actions, we arrive at a model where (C) the brain and nervous system essentially behave like an "amplifier" that turns tiny probability shifts into larger-scale biochemical activity. Much like the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment, it translates quantum effects into macro-level biochemical events.

How the brain and nervous system can do this is explained by another idea that gets thrown around the magical community a lot, chaos theory. I find it remarkably disheartening when I see people completely misunderstanding that "chaos magick" actually refers to chaos theory, not "yay anarchy!" but that's a topic for another day. The idea behind chaos theory is that it explains how large-scale order can arise from tiny perturbations with highly variable systems.

Weather is the classic example. A mathematical model of weather systems has proved extremely difficult to develop, simply because there are so many degrees of freedom within the system. A degree of freedom describes an individual point within a larger system that is subject to significant fluctuation, and as degrees of freedom multiply, a deterministic model becomes more and more difficult to develop. The "butterfly effect," another term that gets thrown around a lot, refers to the potential of a tiny fluctuation in the air such as the flapping of a butterfly's wings can eventually produce a storm system on the other side of the world, given enough time.

So a process like deciding to move your arm, and then moving it, could look something like this: consciousness arrives at the decision to move the arm, and acts by affecting quantum scale particles within the microtubules of the motor cortex. These, presumably, would have evolved to interact with neurons at critical points, where small fluctuations can be magnified into increased biochemical firing. This, in turn, sends the signal to move the arm, which then moves. And we're done - the whole process can be thus explained.

In addition to the solution to the mind/body problem, though, here's what you also get - since quantum effects include a degree of non-locality, it means that the ability of consciousness to influence probability does not end with the brain and nervous system. As PEAR showed, it can affect external objects as well. And that, right there, is how we get to magick. People who are particularly good at this sort of probability manipulation can develop it into the ability to affect the physical world using magick.

PEAR had a small sample, but they tagged the range of ability among their subjects at between 0.1 and 0.5 percent, with the average subject working out to 0.2. My hypothesis would be that somebody towards the top of that range is what we would call a talented magician. One thing PEAR never did try to do was study people who practiced magick, to see if there really was a relationship between quantum diode probability shifts and esoteric work. That would be a very useful experiment to conduct at some point.

Another interesting experiment would be to check the activity of microtubules in conjunction with simple decision-making. What I would predict based on the information laid out here is that, in the arm example, we should see heightened microtubule activity in the motor cortex before the motor neurons fire. If we don't, it implies that the model is missing something, at least in terms of the mind-body connection. Maybe the quantum-level structures we are looking for are elsewhere, or maybe the whole model needs to be re-examined.

Under this model, the "hard problem" resolves itself as well. The mind may be represented as a complex field of quantum information. It can modify itself without difficulty, and through the mechanism of wavefunction shift can modify the actions of the material structures - neurons - to which it is most closely bound. In addition, it can affect structures beyond those bounds, though with greater difficulty and producing smaller shifts. Those first two cases are what magicians would term microcosmic magick, whereas the latter qualifies as macrocosmic magick.

So in effect, the whole process of practical occultism is all about turning tiny probability shifts into bigger ones. Fortunately for us, just like the brain and nervous system, the external world is filled with degrees of freedom, and much of nature can be best represented by models derived from chaos theory. That means a tiny push can produce a big result, so long as you push in exactly the right spot. Energy work is the process by which we develop the ability to push harder, and information clarity combined with the right focus directs the push to the best possible point.

The specific quality of consciousness developed by magical practice is what Ervin Laszlo termed "coherence" in The Connectivity Hypothesis, published in 2003. Coherence has two principle properties. The first is consistency - that is, a highly coherent field of information contains no points which are in conflict with each other. The second is self-reference - that is, such a field has the capacity to "look back" on itself and reflect upon its own contents.

Basically, most of the goals of mysticism can be boiled down to the creation of greater and greater levels of coherence within the information structure of our individual fields of consciousness. Some form of meta-awareness is necessary in order to facilitate this, and in fact we find an early reference to this in Christianity. The word in the Gospels translated to "repentance" in English is actually the Greek metanoia, which directly translates as meta-awareness. This is similar to the idea of the awakened mind in Buddhism, as just one example, and shows a continuity between many religious traditions.

And really, that's what a religious tradition should be - a system for cultivating meta-awareness. Everything else is tribal identification, social control, and bunch of other interwoven peripheral aspects. These may be important from a community perspective, depending upon the circumstances, but they are not particularly relevant to what should really be the central goal of spirituality. This is especially important for the practical magician, because coherence is the foundation on which he or she stands to direct the forces of nature.

The more coherent the mind, the better the magician. Or at least, that's what the model predicts. A coherent mind is more capable of directing attention to a single thought by virtue of its consistency, and more capable of connecting with macrocosmic forces by virtue of its self-referential interrelatedness. This may seem a little counter-intuitive, but as we go further we will see how this dynamic plays out.