| Everyday experience of the world presents us with an array of independent objects, separated in space and time. From this common sense perspective we develop mechanistic models of the world that involve concepts like causality, force, and a stable reality that persists whether or not we are looking at it. This worldview, which might be called “classical reality,” is learned early in life, it’s reinforced by Western education and society, and it’s taken for granted by most adults as self-evident unless something powerfully unusual comes along to challenge it. One such challenge has been the development of quantum mechanics, which has seriously questioned all of the basic assumptions underlying classical reality. Another challenge is the commonly reported and scientifically controversial realm of human experience known as psychic phenomena.
This workshop considers the possibility that psychic phenomena are the human experiences of quantum reality. To examine this proposal beyond superficial similarities, Part 1 of the discussion will focus on whether there are any scientifically justifiable reasons to believe that psychic phenomena exist, Part 2 will consider the ontological differences between classical and quantum realities, and Part 3 will explore how elementary quantum effects might scale up to include human experience. |