Communion Of Dreams

[This last part of this post contains mild spoilers about Communion of Dreams. You've been warned.]

I tend to look at things with a skeptical eye. For all that I would love for magic, or psychic abilities, or even religion to be real, there is very little good, reproducible evidence that it is so.

Still, I do like to poke around in this stuff. One off-beat website I check occasionally is The Daily Grail (TDG). And today they had a link to this piece:

IT’S HAPPENING PRESENTLY

We use words such as premonition and precognition with certain belief systems attached. These belief systems come in two forms. First, that they imply foreseeing the future; and second, that they are a specific type of phenomena.

I dislike these approaches. Rather, I feel that often an answer can be found in the present; and they do, infact, cover a multidude of possible causes. In this essay I will explore just one of many possible explanations, found in the present.

It’s an interesting essay, and I would encourage you to read the whole thing. The author comes down on the side of rational explanation, but leaves some thought-provoking ideas out there.

I’ve always considered that people looking for psychic abilities were going about things somewhat incorrectly by focusing on the individual. Why not take a statistical approach to such research?

[OK, here come the spoilers.]

This is why in Communion I have Seth, the AI ‘expert’ who aids my main character, seek out possible patterns in discussion fora and in published articles which would indicate an up-tick in dream references which may be tied to the discovery of the alien artifact on Titan. My thought there was that a type of ‘leakage’ was occurring, though the characters in the story would not understand the full ramifications of what was happening.

Why do this? Well, because I am intrigued at how often certain ideas will seem to spring up simultaneously in wildly divergent individuals in a culture. Or how something like a meme will suddenly pop up and spread like wildfire in society. It is almost like we are all connected to some common source beyond our conscious level. This idea fits in perfectly with the underlying reality of Communion - which I will not explain, just in case someone who wanted to risk mild spoilers still wants to be surprised by the book.

Jim Downey

(*with apologies to Steely Dan)

So, a couple days ago, I was hitting some of my usual haunts, and on MeFi came across a link to something truly amazing: the most advanced personal energy system available today!

Personal energy system? Huh? Some kind of new sports drink? Maybe a reworked diet fad? Or a new way to charge your, uh, personal massagers?

Nope. They’re talking Sympathetic Resonance Technology! Wow! Even the name is impressively scientifical! What is Sympathetic Resonance Technology? I’m glad you asked:

The Q-Link’s fundamental technology can be understood by imagining a tuning fork that vibrates at a certain pitch. Similarly, the Q-Link’s Sympathetic Resonant Technology™ (SRT™) is tuned to optimize the human energy system through resonance. As it interacts with your biofield, it leads to a rebalancing and restoration according to your individual needs.

Oh-oh. Woo alert! Woo alert! How does this supposedly work?

The body creates and sustains its own energy system. That system can be drained and interrupted by rival signals from other electromagnetic systems (e.g. computers, hairdryers etc).

The QLink is encoded with Sympathetic Resonance Technology or SRT™, a pioneering branch of quantum physics. This makes it act as a tuning fork that resonates with the ideal note at which the body’s energy system should hum.

The body responds positively to this ideal note and pitches itself to it so that, in time, the ideal and the actual note become harmonised.

See, it’s a “pioneering branch of quantum physics”, so it must be good, it’s so technological and sciencetific. Cool! But what exactly is you get with this QLink thingee? Let’s ask a geek person who understands all about electronics and stuff:

Here in the sunshine, some of the nation’s cheekiest electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any “frequencies” emitted, with no joy. And then we did what any proper dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open. Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it.

The eight copper pads do have some intriguing looking circuit board tracks coming out of them, but they too, on close inspection, are connected to absolutely nothing. A gracious term to describe their purpose might be “decorative”. I’m also not clear if I can call something a “circuit board” when there is no “circuit”.

Finally, there is a modern surface mount electronic component soldered to the centre of the device. It looks impressive, but whatever it is, it is connected to absolutely nothing. Close examination with a magnifying glass, and experiments with a multimeter and oscilloscope, revealed that this component on the “circuit board” is a zero-ohm resistor.

…

And that’s it. No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is connected to nothing. I contacted qlinkworld.co.uk to discuss my findings. They kindly contacted the inventor, who informed me they have always been clear the QLink does not use electronics components “in a conventional electronic way”. And apparently the energy pattern reprogramming work is done by some finely powdered crystal embedded in the resin. Oh, hang on, I get it: it’s a new age crystal pendant.

A QLink pendant will set you back at least a hundred bucks if you order it from the manufacturer, and they have models up to about a thousand bucks, even some little pendants for your pets, because “Animals have energetic systems too!” And of course, there’s one for the golfers out there, to help improve your game!

*sigh*

You know, what really gets to me with this kind of crap is how they’re perfectly happy to use scientific terms in a techno-babble stew which would make Star Trek scriptwriters proud. And yet, you can just bet that if you called them on it, they’d backpeddle pretty damned fast (and do, according to Ben Goldacre of Bad Science). Furthermore, a lot of the people who buy this crap will likewise diss science given half a chance, saying that either science doesn’t ‘have all the answers’, or that their religion somehow supercedes scientific principles.

And meanwhile, the Shamen and the scam artists rake in the money. It’s very depressing.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to UTI.)

When I was a kid, I just loved the idea of psychic abilities - just about any variety that I came across in the science fiction I read made me jealous, wanting that power, wondering whether or not there wasn’t some such latent skill in all of us, waiting to be tapped. That’s one of the reasons that I construct a plausible explanation for psychic abilities (and why they haven’t been reliably manifest) in Communion of Dreams - it’s just such a great idea, and so deeply embedded in most human societies, that it almost seems like there has to be something to it.

But wishing for it does not make it so, of course. And I remember when this guy named James Randi first came to my attention, when he showed just what a fraud one of the most popular ‘psychics’ of the 1970s - one Uri Geller - was. Ever since, I’ve been a fan, and when I came across this nice long clip of Randi via MeFi, I had to share:

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to UTI.)

As I mention in the post below, one of the technical weaknesses of the novel is in the biology behind Ling’s genetic make-up and what happens when people come in contact with the alien artifact.

[Spoilers ahead].

This is largely due to my own lack of a solid background in biology, so I would not be in the slightest bit surprised to discover that I made some errors in the ‘explanation’ in the book about how genetic manipulation was used to reach back into the human genome’s history and pull out some traits which are no longer apparent in modern humans.

Then again, such things as residual genetic coding manifesting in oddball body structures are not really that rare, as this recent article in Discover demonstrates.  From the article:

Nearly a century and a quarter after Darwin’s death, science still can’t offer a full explanation for why one outdated anatomic trait lingers in the gene pool and another goes. Modern genomics research has revealed that our DNA carries broken genes for things that seem as though they might be useful, like odor receptors for a bloodhound’s sense of smell or enzymes that once enabled us to make our own vitamin C. In a few million years, humans may very well have shed a few more odd features.

In reading this article yesterday, I was surprised not by the amount of useless genetic information remains in our genome, but just how prevalent the actual expression of such material is in humans.   There are substantial variations in the human body in terms of who has what kinds of left-over ‘useless’ body parts:

PLANTARIS MUSCLE 

Often mistaken for a nerve by freshman medical students, the muscle was useful to other primates for grasping with their feet. It has disappeared altogether in 9 percent of the population.

THIRTEENTH RIB

Our closest cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, have an extra set of ribs. Most of us have 12, but 8 percent of adults have the extras.

***

PYRAMIDALIS MUSCLE

More than 20 percent of us lack this tiny, triangular pouchlike muscle that attaches to the pubic bone. It may be a relic from pouched marsupials.

A personal aside: I was born with an extra toe (complete with additional metatarsal structures) on my left foot.  This was likely due to some small hiccup in my embryonic development rather than either a mutation or the expression of residual genetic material.  Nonetheless, it still gets interest from any doctor, and was one of the reasons for my assumption that there is greater ‘uniformity’ between human body structures that there actually is.

So, when you read that part of the book, cut me a little slack - maybe there really is something lurking in the “junk” of our DNA which would allow for Ling’s psychic abilities…something which the artifact could ‘activate’, allowing humankind to have the ability for psychic/faith healing.

Jim Downey

…require extraordinary proof” was a favorite line from Carl Sagan, one of my favorite authors. Simply put, while the idea of psychic abilities or faith healing is very appealing, it hasn’t been documented scientifically (as written up wonderfully in this post by Skeptico). Does that mean that it doesn’t exist? No, of course not. It just means that we haven’t found scientific evidence for it. That could mean that it doesn’t exist, or it could mean that our science and technology isn’t up to detecting it as of yet. And in that possibility lies room for plenty of good fiction, if the author is willing to take a little trouble to work around what we do know.

[Spoiler alert.]

I tried to do that with Communion, though the full ramifications of it take a long time to unfold within the context of the story. Having the alien artifact be not just proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, but part of an isolation field that has supressed our natural psychic abilities, is how I do this. But I try to play fair with my reader, and with science, by having the key to unlocking these mysteries all resort back to the physics breakthrough by Stephen Hawking. In other words, I am saying that this new development in one area has allowed for seredipitous discoveries in other areas, as is frequently the case with science and technology. Science may not hold all the answers, or solve all our problems - but it’s the way to bet.

Jim Downey