A New Science of the Physical Nature of the Mind

The ontological view concerning the mind–body relationship has been roughly falling into two typical categories: the monism and the dualism. The former denies the autonomous mind that is independent of body and the latter tends to link the mind to the impassible soul.

Nonetheless, since the ancient times, many have paid attentions to the physical nature (in addition to the more commonly interested intellectual nature) of the mind, without caring at all about whether the mind is ontologically connected to an immaterial soul or not. This has been reflected in the controversial modern psychokinetic phenomena or the phenomena of the so-called human paranormal abilities.

There is an ancient adage saying that “the authentic would be treated as fake after the fake has been used to pretend to be authentic”. To a certain degree, the controversy around the so-called paranormal abilities or the psychokinetic phenomena is a manifestation of that ancient statement. Some cases of cheating when claiming the paranormal abilities have been reportedly caught in the past by people presumably of scientific background, and then some people from the scientific background started to use them as examples to deny the possibility for any meaningful paranormal ability. In the meantime, ironically, some of the accusers not only gained more fame than those that they accused as cheaters of fake paranormal performances but even could make a living by doing this kind of things as a profession.

However, there have been two common logical defects in that kind of professional activity of exposing fake paranormal performances:

1) They only used a few examples of cheating that they have been able to collect to refute the paranormal performances in general. By this logic, we might claim all scientists are liars since there have quite a few caught for manipulating data.

2) In many other cases, the accusers would design some simple tricks by themselves and claim that whatever they do would be exactly what have been done by those paranormal performers, which itself is more fiction than scientific.

Meanwhile, the second type of defective logic in the above mentioned scenarios has often been used for magic shows as well, but in a very different tone. Similar to the abovementioned accusers, some people have also created simple tricks to imitate the real magic shows and then use them as the proofs that anything appearing to be scientifically impossible in magic shows is simply illusions. However, unlike the embarrassed paranormal performers, magicians do not seem to be embarrassed but rather enjoy those comments; they even often acted like those critics to use dumb tricks to demonstrate that there is nothing is supernatural in their performances, although they would never expose the real their real tricks for high-end shows.

Nonetheless, in the past few decades, more and more high-end magic performances have been recorded by high-speed digital cameras, and broadcast in real time to thousands or even billions of people around the world instantly, and many of them have violated the known physical laws in definitive ways. Accordingly, more and more magicians have openly claimed that their shows are indeed supernatural. The credibility of this supernatural realty in magic shows would obviously imply that the existence of supernatural processes in events other than magic shows is equally possible[1], for which many performers have reported that ordinary people could do what they did after some training.

The abovementioned observations could very well indicate that human mind can potentially trigger certain mechanism in space-time so as to exert physical impact upon objects inside or outside the host bodies, and the investigation of it would obviously not be a religious endeavor, but instead belong to a special science, which we might call as the Physics of Mind Power, or simply Mind Power Physics. Accordingly, I would use the term supernormal (which does not have a strong attachment to the existing known cultural domains as natural or supernatural or paranormal do) to denote the domain of the subject matter for this new science.

Furthermore, this new science of the physics of mind power should not be confused with other general studies about the mind, including the physics of mind[2], which studies abstract manifestations of mind activities by imitating the methodology of physics.

Despite that the lack of scientific testing capability would be a big challenge (and the most obvious one) to any attempt of implementation for this new science, the current utmost hindrance would be the lack of the social zeal to discover and develop the needed scientific testing means, instead of the lack of the means itself, due to complicated social psychocultural reasons including the ignorance of the true nature of science[3], the admiration of social prestige, the negative reports about paranormal performances in the past, etc.

But on the other hand, the practical implementation of this new science requires a multidisciplinary social endeavor, which means it needs an extensive social support and cooperation.

Fortunately, we are not starting with empty hands in terms of intellectual understandings about the subject matter. For example, as Dai[4] reported in a story that was based on real life experience, by following steps written in a book openly sold in the market, the author experienced something that appeared to be part of the nature programmed inside humans, but beyond scientific explanation. Besides, for the past century, it has often been envisioned by people of very different backgrounds, from the theoretical physicists, to fiction writers, to paranormal practitioners, or even philosophers, to relate paranormal phenomena to the Quantum Physics theories, or its avant-garde version, the M-Theory. Although there has not been any convincing evidence to link them together, some known quantum phenomena (e.g. entanglement) do share some similarities to the macroscopic paranormal phenomena.

Even though as mentioned previously the validity of this new science is indicated from countless practical examples of supernormal phenomena, people with scientific background might still assume that the existing science of physics could handle it if supernormal physical forces are indeed involved in mind power, and thus we don’t need to have an extra new physics.

But on the other hand, as a matter of fact, even with the seemingly invincible modern science, humans are still far from a good understanding of our own nature, including why those abovementioned supernormal phenomena would happen to humans, which could be an indication that we are still far from producing them in the labs with the most advanced equipment and far from being able to model them with the most sophisticated mathematical tools. Therefore, the best possible way for us to produce those supernormal phenomena would be through trained human subjects.

However, the new science would come with a dual impact for both good and bad. On its positive side, it would enhance human capacity of doing many good things. But on its negative side, in addition to the possibility of using the very technology to do bad, more importantly, it might increase the load on the already cracking foundation of our civilization, which is our mainstream philosophy system.[5]

Closing Remarks

One special category of scientifically unexplainable phenomena has been identified as different from any intelligent intervention which characterizes spiritual or supernatural actions, and also learnable by ordinary people after training following certain prewritten instructions. The best way (and might be the only way) now for us to investigate this supernormal domain is through a special marriage between human subjects of strong mind power and the modern scientific means, even though it might be seemingly unscientific according to the traditional concept of science.

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