Sittings with Eusapia Palladino, by Everard Feilding, documents a series of séances with a controversial Italian medium. The book includes journal entries by the researchers, a highly experienced team who, among them, had successfully debunked more than one hundred mediums of Palladino’s type—so-called physical mediums, who, in darkness or dim light, apparently caused objects to move, breezes to blow, and musical instruments to play. Palladino was known to cheat—she even bragged about it—so the researchers no doubt thought it would be easy to add her to their list of fakes. They found, however, that if they took the trouble to secure Palladino in such a way that cheating was impossible, a variety of dramatic phenomena still took place. For the first time they found themselves confronted by séances they could not explain.

Even when Palladino’s hands, feet, and knees were securely held, the table at which they sat would levitate, sometimes remaining aloft for a full minute. In an attempt to force down the table, one or two men would climb onto it, but it would remain suspended in air, bobbing like a raft, even as another man crawled underneath with a lamp to guard against fraud. More than once, Palladino, still in her chair, was levitated onto the table and, once, even above the tabletop, as the researchers passed their hands between the surface of the table and the legs of the hovering chair. Items of furniture moved freely around the room at a long distance from the medium, and one small table sometimes climbed atop a larger one. Inside a curtained-off area called a cabinet, musical instruments—a banjo, music box, bell, tambourine, and guitar, among others—would play by themselves, occasionally emerging from the cabinet to play in different parts of the room. Invisible hands would clutch the researchers even when Palladino’s own hands were restrained.

In their journals, the researchers reported their frustration and confusion, but also a more interesting fact—that after a day or two, the most dramatic and persuasive effects produced by Palladino had somehow vanished from their memory. When reviewing contemporaneous notes taken during each session, they were often surprised to discover how many astonishing feats Palladino performed just a couple of days earlier.

With regard to one of the first sittings, Feilding notes:

My mind was not prepared to accept the phenomena which occurred, and yet I was unable to suggest any loophole for fraud in the production of any of them ... We were still fresh at the game, still alertly suspicious of every movement of Eusapia; somewhat annoyed, to speak frankly, at our failure to detect any fraud at the first séance, and determined to get even with her. We tied her feet, and then presently forgot that we had tied them, and ... did not even remember it the next day.

Of the third sitting, Feilding writes:

On reading through, last night, the translation of the shorthand notes of the third séance, we [i.e., Feilding and colleague Herewood Carrington] were both surprised to find what an entirely different impression we had retained of what had taken place from that which we derived from the notes. All the more remarkable manifestations had receded in our memory ... and if, before reading the notes, we had been asked to give an account of the séance, we should certainly have said that it had been almost barren of results ...

During the third séance, [the table] remained motionless for long periods together, and the impression upon our minds was that the use of [a device to secure the table] had floored the medium. The notes, however, show that several complete levitations did, in point of fact, take place ... We had completely forgotten a great portion of [various other phenomena] until we read the notes.

In a supplementary comment written later, Feilding says that his original, early notes

exist as a record of our critical, indeed hostile state of mind. The first two séances had in fact left no enduring mark upon us. They had astonished us, puzzled us, vexed us ... The ordinary effect of the sudden confrontation of a fairly balanced mind with a merely bizarre fact is a reaction: the mind rejects it, refuses to consider it. And the more bizarre the fact, the stronger the reaction ... Tables, we knew, or thought we knew, do not go into the air by themselves; curtains do not bulge out without some mechanical agency; and although we saw them do so, we still refused to believe that they did.

In his memoir Travels, Michael Crichton includes an account of a so-called PK (psychokinesis) party in which guests tried bending spoons and other pieces of metal by the power of the mind. Naturally, Crichton was skeptical, as was his friend, Anne-Marie.

Rubbing her spoon, Anne-Marie said, “I don’t think this is going to work. This is silly. I just don’t see how it can work.”

I looked down at her hands. Her spoon was bending.

“Look, Anne-Marie ...”

Anne-Marie laughed. Her spoon was like rubber. She easily twisted the spoon into knots.

Crichton thought his own spoon would never bend, until another friend said, “Congratulations.”

I looked down. My spoon had begun to bend. I hadn’t even realized. The metal was completely pliable, like soft plastic.

After bending the bowl of the spoon in half with minimal pressure, Crichton chose a fork, which “twisted like a pretzel.” He did this with a few more items. After which, something even more remarkable happened.

I got bored. I didn’t do any more spoon bending. I went and got coffee and a cookie. I was now far more interested in what kind of cookies they had for me than anything else.

His interest did not return. “The room was full of people doing the same thing, and it seemed very ordinary. Kind of boring.” He adds that “this sense of boredom often seems to accompany ‘psychic’ phenomena. At first the event appears exciting and mysterious, but very quickly it becomes so mundane that it can no longer hold your interest.”

Then there is the curious case of Miss Z. This young lady was the subject of experiments conducted by parapsychologist Charles Tart in the early 1960s. The test subject, known in the literature as Miss Z to protect her privacy, said she often had out-of-body experiences (or OBEs) while asleep. To test this claim, she agreed to sleep in Tart’s laboratory, hooked up to EEG monitors. The EEG results were highly unusual; in The End of Materialism, Tart writes that “one of the world’s leading authorities on sleep research, psychiatrist William Dement, ... agreed with me that it was a distinctive pattern, but we had no idea what it meant.” More interesting, though, was that Miss Z correctly identified a target number hidden in the room, which she had seen while out of the body. Although there is a very small chance that she could have seen the number’s (exceedingly dim) reflection in a wall clock, she could not have seen the target directly from her bed, nor could she have gotten out of bed without unhooking the monitors; moreover, the period of her reported OBE corresponds to the unusual EEG activity. Odds against simply guessing the number are 100,000 to 1.

This seems like a potentially breakthrough case, and we would expect Tart to have continued the experiments and replicated the results, while eliminating any possible source of information leakage, such as the faint reflection. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Miss Z relocated to another city, and Tart let the experiments lapse, even though, as he notes, “People who can have an OBE on demand are, to put it mildly, rare.”

Looking back, he says he finds his decision not to follow through somewhat peculiar. He notes the “long history of parapsychological experiments where powerful results were obtained in the beginning, investigators got excited, and then the results petered out for no apparent reason or the experimenter got involved in other things ... Sometimes it makes you wonder: Are we being led? Baited? Intellectually teased?”

People forget striking events they ought to remember; they lose interest just as things are getting interesting; they don’t follow up on groundbreaking experiments that could shift everyone’s perception. Why? What’s going on here? As long as we’re asking questions, let’s ask a few more:

* Why do we react in a panic to the very idea of experimenting with mind-altering chemicals, even throwing people in jail for doing so?

* Why do we pass laws penalizing psychics and mediums, or uphold religious injunctions against dabbling in the occult?

* Why do some intellectuals spend their lives, or at least much of their free time, combatting any suggestion that the paranormal has some validity?

* Why do so many people say they’re never really convinced, no matter how much evidence they see?

* Why do researchers who choose to study the paranormal find themselves ostracized, their careers sidetracked, their reputations maligned?

* Why do we reflexively dismiss and ridicule those who claim to be in touch with higher levels of consciousness?

Some people, seeing the marginalization of the paranormal, say the government or a secret cabal is behind it all. I don’t think so. Governments and cabals are notoriously inept.

George Hansen, author of The Trickster and the Paranormal, offers a more sophisticated take. He argues at length for the liminality (marginal nature) of psi. He points to the marginal status of shamans, medicine women, necromancers, and ghost hunters in most societies—including ours, which relegates the paranormal to horror stories, humor, and “woo.” This socially mandated liminality keeps us from accepting the paranormal or even taking it seriously.

This is probably true. But what is the nature of Hansen’s “liminality” and why does it seem to function as a built-in feature of the universe? One answer is that it actually is a built-in feature of the universe, a feature that helps to ensure our continued full immersion in our perceived reality by marginalizing anyone who starts to see “behind the veil,” and by sequestering and scrubbing our own memories before they can be preserved long-term. It’s equivalent to the steps taken in The Matrix to keep everybody believing in the shared illusion.

If you look at it this way, doubts and even denial in the face of intellectually convincing evidence may support the idea that our reality, the cosmos itself, is a kind of virtual-reality simulation—not literally, in the sense of being a rendered environment produced by algorithms on a laptop, but conceptually, in the sense that it is only an appearance and not the true underlying reality. It is Plato’s cave, in which the shadows of things on the wall are mistaken for the things themselves.

Moreover, this simulation is designed to be fully immersive, an experiential environment that envelops us completely and absorbs our full attention. To the extent that we become aware of nonphysical existence, we are less than fully immersed in this environment, and that’s not how the game is played.

In short, the world works this way because that’s how it’s set up to work. We are biologically hard-wired and socially conditioned to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. If we notice him anyway, we are inclined to forget. If, despite everything, we remember, then we risk our own social, professional, and intellectual banishment (a prospect that gives us an additional incentive to forget).

I forget my little moments of psychic intuition—or my teenaged self’s glimpse of a higher reality—because they threaten my full immersion in the role-playing game of my physical life. The researchers studying Eusapia Palladino forgot the most compelling moments of the séances for the same reason. Michael Crichton suddenly found spoon-bending boring, with the result that he didn’t pursue it. What Charles Tart calls being baited, led, and teased might be understood as a veil of ignorance imposed by the conditions of our incarnation itself.

Well, maybe. But if this were the only reason for picturing our cosmos as a fully immersive virtual-reality environment, it would not be very persuasive. Some form of purely psychological or sociological analysis would serve equally well. Is there any reason to think this model is more than an intriguing daydream?

I think there is, and it’s found in both parapsychology and mainstream science.

Anyone who’s studied the evidence for survival that has accumulated in the 138 years since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research knows that a basic picture has emerged. This picture is incomplete and contains some contradictions, which we’ll get to later. But in essence it goes like this:

Each of us is, as the popular saying goes, “a spiritual being having a physical experience.” The body and brain are used by consciousness to navigate the physical world. At death, the spiritual consciousness is liberated from this vessel and undergoes an out-of-body experience. The OBE typically begins in familiar surroundings but can move quickly into a transitional zone, sometimes visualized as a tunnel or as a void. Passage through this zone brings the spirit into another plane of existence, where all memories of the now-concluded lifetime are relived in rapid succession, with startling clarity. Insights gleaned from this “life review” help the spirit to understand where he or she chose the wrong path or failed to live up to his or her potential.

After a period of recuperation, the refreshed spirit, inhabiting a spiritual body similar to that of the earthly incarnation, is introduced to an earthlike environment where the next phase of postmortem existence will play out. This environment is an idealized re-creation of earthly habitats, and is understood to be the product of the collective unconscious of all the spirits making use of it. A multiplicity of such environments exists, ranging from paradise conditions to nightmarish hells, each corresponding to the overall level of spiritual development of its inhabitants. Because spirits of similar developmental levels cluster together, and because their environment is made up out of their expectations and memories, people will tend to experience what they want and expect to experience.

In his book 90 Minutes in Heaven, Don Piper, a born-again Christian, describes a near-death experience in which he found himself in a quintessentially Christian heaven, complete with “pearlescent gates,” streets of gold, and choirs of angels. He came back convinced that he had been to heaven, though he remained skeptical of other NDEs that encompassed different, non-biblical experiences. He was sure that only his version of the afterlife could be real. But there’s no reason to think it was any more or less real than any other experience, including the experiences of Hindus who often report being escorted to the afterlife by angelic messengers known as yamdoots, as recounted by Erlendur Haraldsson and Karlis Osis in At the Hour of Death.

Nineteenth-century spiritualist literature abounds in descriptions of the Summerland, a serene and beautiful environment enjoyed by most people after death. Gardens, cottages, and other homely delights are recounted in detail. People are said to create art, tend flowers, hold jobs, conduct research, and even—occasionally—partake of whiskey, cigars, and sex! Naturally, skeptics have had a field day with these accounts, but if the experience is a product of memory and expectation, then any earthly experience can be re-created with apparent reality. Yes, even whiskeys, cigars, and sex.

All such environments are temporary, serving as way stations that offer opportunities for learning and growth; eventually all spirits will move on, whether from paradise, hell, or one of the myriad spiritual planes in between. In the channeled book The Road to Immortality, the spirit of early psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers warns that Summerland is a plane of illusion, which he compares to the land of the Lotus Eaters in Greek mythology. The Lotus Eaters kept themselves perpetually intoxicated, existing in a hallucinatory state. Myers, as transcribed by Geraldine Cummins via automatic writing, insists that however attractive Summerland may be to its inhabitants, it is not ultimately real, and when an individual spirit recognizes this fact, he will be elevated to a higher plane.

The above story has been put together out of many different lines of inquiry. NDEs and OBEs, mediumship and automatic writing, deathbed visions and and the mystical experiences known as “cosmic consciousness”—all have contributed to the story, and for the most part tend to reinforce and supplement each other. There is as much coherence and unanimity among our various sources, dating back to the nineteenth century or even earlier, as we might expect from a couple of centuries of reports on a distant, inaccessible place—Timbuktu, perhaps.

Now let’s step back and look at all this from the standpoint of our virtual-reality model.

Imagine yourself playing a computer game. When you complete one level, you’re automatically transitioned to the next level. This new, higher level is similar to the previous one, but the rules are somewhat different, and you’ve acquired some powerful new capabilities. Your avatar (your on-screen persona) may look different. You must learn new skills or hone the skills you already learned.

For our purposes, this is not just any computer game, but a virtual-reality (VR) game—the sort of game where you wear a special headset that immerses you in a computer-generated world. Everything about you seems real; and it is real, but only in the sense that it is a real image, a real artificial construction. The underlying reality, which you don’t see, is very different. It’s a reality of ones and zeros, digital data, which are processed behind the scenes. The trees, mountains, and living bodies in your virtual environment have, as their underlying reality, a vast invisible sea of algorithms and binary code.

What happens if you take off your VR headset, or allow it to slip partly off? You are no longer immersed in the virtual world, no longer seduced by its imagery or caught up in its drama. You may say, as film critic Roger Ebert did shortly before he died, “This is all an elaborate hoax.”

What’s necessary to lift the headset is an altered state of consciousness. This can be achieved in many different ways.

Salvia divinorum is a psychoactive plant that is usually smoked or chewed. Known more commonly as salvia or just Sally, the plant is legal in some jurisdictions and has a long history of use in traditional societies. Here are excerpts from the experiences of various salvia users.

I took a big hit of Salvia ... I slipped out of the 2d [= two-dimensional] plane and was hovering over my body for a brief moment

.

Next thing I know my vision is getting saturated, literally like Photoshop effects, and then when I move my head even slightly it’s like everything is warping and stretching, like a graphical bug, with pixels not loading, stuff like that.

Everything gets depth and becomes pixels, the ground gets depth and becomes pixels and starts moving and carrying [me] around on the pixels, while moving [I try] to look in between the pixels into nothing, and [try] to feel in between them.

I couldn’t see anything at all. It was a kaleidoscope so intricate that the pieces were not visible to the naked eye. It was as if a computer took all of its pixels and scrambled them into some random configuration.

My vision seemed to be consistent [sic] of pixels like a computer, and all I had to do was turn away ... Turn away and look at the real reality, but I just couldn’t

Everything I was seeing was made of individual, single color pixels, like a TV screen, but the colors weren’t limited at all! And they didn’t have a definite shape, either. They were all roughly oval. Sort of pill-shaped, but I got more of the impression that they were like plant cells, with thin layers of membrane around each one that kept it binded [sic] to the others on the proper sequence.

The last friend I smoked it with had no idea what he was in for ... Straight away he seemed distressed ... Apparently he thought himself an icon in a video game, and he was trapped between planes of reality.

It’s like nothing exists and all is just ... like fake or something.

This is when I realize that all of reality and everything that I knew to be true was false.

Salvia unzipped myself in half and everyone around me morphed into laughing jokers, causing me to believe that the world had played a giant trick on me and that everything I knew was totally fake.

Suddenly everyone I’d ever known, all the places I’d been, my whole life, had been a lie. It had been just a game, a silly puppet show, and it meant nothing in comparison to the depths of existence beyond my life, way into the infinity of the universe ... All along my life has been this insane charade which God has now chosen to break down.

The only way I can explain it is that it’s almost like there are entities that are part of our subconscious mind and the collective unconscious. They are “behind the scenes” in making our objective reality. They are always shifting things to make them seem real and authentic, almost like this reality is just a sinister joke, or some sort of game we all play.

I was transported into another dimension where I FINALLY understood life and all of its concepts and a multicolored being came to me and presented himself and explained to me that all we are as humans are tiny pixels working our hardest to play out life for beings above us ... We are all tiny pieces to an indescribably large puzzle.

Salvia is the only thing I’ve done that has so completely shattered my reality and forced me to reassess my entire life and the way I live it.

My old vision of death as simple oblivion has been wiped away, and it’s very difficult for me to imagine death as anything other than a new transformation into the conscious energy we were before birth and will return to again.

Many of these people suffered intense psychological aftereffects as they struggled with the sense of having glimpsed a deeper reality that makes our normal, everyday experience seem like a game, a puzzle, “a silly puppet show.” One person said, “It will leave you doubting your existence for years afterwards.”

Perhaps salvia has this effect on people because our mundane experience really is a game of sorts—shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, or icons on a screen. Perhaps the ancient Vedic texts are correct when they describe this world as Maya, a world of appearances that masquerades as the one and only reality, or when they speak of our lives as Lila, meaning play-acting. Beyond Maya there is Brahman, ultimate reality. But because the pull of Maya is so strong—because the game is immersive (and addictive)—you will probably find it hard to let go.

Sometime between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, Buddhist monks on the high plateau of Tibet worried about much the same thing. They authored a document known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It delineates various stages of postmortem existence, known as bardos. As is often the case with religious writings, the book is highly formalized, with successive stages neatly ordered in groups of seven and said to last for a specific number of days. Leaving aside these elaborations, the gist of the narrative is a set of instructions on how to best handle the dying process. You are told to expect a series of visions, both positive and negative, which are generated by your own mind but perceived as objectively real. You will find yourself fully immersed in these thought-forms, which reflect your deepest expectations, fears, and hopes, all the while cut off from your higher self. Only by realizing that the scenes before you are nothing more than a mental projection can you break free of the wheel of rebirth and avoid reincarnation. Most of us, not being spiritual adepts, can’t manage it; we remain entangled in illusion and are eventually shuttled back to earth for a new lifetime.

Seeing past the illusions of the bardo is analogous to lifting the VR headset and emerging from the simulated reality that entraps you. Remaining caught up in illusion is akin to leaving the headset in place—which is so much easier.

Even in a typical postmortem experience, there are moments when the headset is lifted at least a little. Near-death experiencers commonly report an encounter with an intense light that contains or embodies all knowledge. They often equate the light with God. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, calling it “the clear light of being,” identifies it as your own higher self. This is also a view put forward by prominent NDE researcher Kenneth Ring in his book Life at Death. However we understand the light, those who temporarily merged with it and then returned to life report that they were flooded with a complete knowledge of the universe.

Mystics report similar epiphanies. In 1901, Richard Maurice Bucke wrote an influential book titled Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. The book is a compilation of accounts featuring persons both notable and unknown who underwent mystical experiences that uplifted their thought and character—essentially what psychologist Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences” and what Hindu tradition calls “kundalini experiences.” My own reaction to the guided meditation about Jesus may possibly qualify as a case of this sort, at least to a certain extent.

Many of Bucke’s best accounts were provided by his contemporaries—ordinary people whose lives were changed by a transcendent sense of oneness with the cosmos lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. One such case involves a woman identified only as C.M.C.

After a lifelong search for spiritual meaning, C.M.C. experienced “the supreme event of my life ... the outcome of those years of passionate search.” Worn out by “the pain and tension deep in the core and center of my being,” she submitted to a higher power and let go of herself entirely. The result was “a feeling of perfect health” and a new appreciation of “how bright and beautiful [was] the day.” She goes on:

The sense of lightness and expansion kept increasing, the wrinkles smoothed out of everything, there was nothing in all the world that seemed out of place ... The light and color glowed, the atmosphere seemed to quiver and vibrate around and within me. Perfect rest and peace and joy were everywhere, and, more strange than all, there came to me a sense of some serene, magnetic presence—grand and all pervading ... I was seeing and comprehending the sublime meaning of things, the reasons for all that had before been hidden and dark ...

I felt myself going, losing myself. Then I was terrified, but with a sweet terror. I was losing my consciousness, my identity, but was powerless to hold myself. Now came a period of rapture ... The Perfect Wisdom, truth, love and purity! And with the rapture came the insight. In that same wonderful moment of what might be called supernal bliss, came illumination. I saw with intense inward vision the atoms or molecules, of which seemingly the universe is composed—I know not whether material or spiritual—rearranging themselves, as the cosmos (in its continuous, everlasting life) passes from order to order. What joy when I saw there was no break in the chain—not a link left out—everything in its place and time. Worlds, systems, all blended in one harmonious whole. Universal life, synonymous with universal love! ...

How long the vision lasted I cannot tell. In the morning I awoke with a slight headache, but with the spiritual sense so strong that what we call the actual, material things surrounding me seemed shadowy and unreal. My point of view was entirely changed. Old things had passed away and all had become new. The ideal had become real, the old real had lost its former reality and had become shadowy. This shadowy unreality of external things did not last many days. Every longing of the heart was satisfied, every question answered, the “pent-up, aching rivers” had reached the ocean—I loved infinitely and was infinitely loved! ... 

Out of this experience was born an unfaltering trust. Deep in the soul, below pain, below all the distraction of life, is a silence vast and grand—an infinite ocean of calm, which nothing can disturb; Nature’s own exceeding peace, which “passes understanding.” (all emphases in original)

At the risk of interpreting a sublime experience in dispiritingly mundane terms, C.M.C.’s rapturous flood of knowledge could be described as a data dump. No longer focused on appearances, she was, in a sense, shown the source code behind the rendered images, the database that underlies the simulation. For some timeless interval she enjoyed direct, unfettered access to this source, and could see the whole pattern: the universal plan and order, the laws and constants, everything. She saw the components of the universe “rearranging themselves, as the cosmos ... passes from order to order,” perhaps in a manner similar to the changes on a computer screen, where one ordered pattern is replaced by a new ordered pattern every time the screen refreshes. She peered behind the veil, saw through the illusions.

But it was only temporary. The headset slipped down again, and she was back in the familiar, rendered, virtual-reality world.

In the VR model, our perceived experience can vary from level to level in the game. Very rarely, we emerge from the game altogether. These brief escapes are peak experiences, mystical transports, episodes of cosmic consciousness, spiritual epiphanies. They form the basis for religions, philosophies, art, music, morals, culture. In these moments we—like Melville’s Ahab—“strike through the mask” of our false reality, penetrating nearer to the heart of things.

But come on. How can mysticism tell us anything about reality? That’s what science is for, isn’t it? What we need is not metaphysics, but physics.

Okay, let’s look at physics.

I begin this excursus with a caveat lector (reader beware): I’m not a scientist and can only report what I’ve read in books and essays. Moreover, there are many differing interpretations of quantum physics, all of which are correct in terms of mathematics, but none of which has attained a consensus as the final, authoritative explanation of how things work. Victorian author A.W. Kinglake thought churches should have the words “Important if True” carved over their entryways. Perhaps this section of the book should have a similar heading.

In the scientific community, there is a small but vocal  faction arguing that the space-time universe actually is grounded in pure information. The late physicist John Wheeler, who came around to this position, summarized it as “everything is information” or, more pithily, “it from bit.”

Why would anybody think such a crazy thing? Much of it has to do with the oddities and paradoxes of the quantum (subatomic) realm. Experts have long known that a subatomic entity can behave like either a particle or a wave, which is not how objects in everyday life behave. In fact, it’s not consistent with the behavior of objects as such. It’s more consistent with the way information works.

The basis for particle-wave duality, also known as quantum indeterminacy, is the famed double-slit experiment, which has been repeated and confirmed countless times. Electrons beamed through a pair of slits will, if measured one way, produce an interference pattern consistent with a wave, but will, if measured another way, produce a scattershot pattern consistent with individual particles. The pattern on the screen depends on which measurements are taken—and yet taking the measurements has no physical effect on the photons. We can be sure of this, because the result holds true even if the decision about how to measure the electrons is taken after the experiment is over (but before any results are known).

Take a moment to digest this: The actual physical result is determined by our decision on how to make the measurements, even after the fact.

Again, this is not at all how objects behave, but it is the way information behaves. Our decision on which calculations to perform will determine what mathematical outcome we end up with, just as our decision on which measurements to make will determine whether the electron is expressed as a particle or a wave.

When we talk about a wave in this context, we’re really talking about a probability wave—a distribution curve representing all possible positions that the electron might occupy at a given moment. And what is a probability wave except mathematical information? It is a graphical representation of all possible outcomes. What is a particle? It is one point on the graph—the one particular outcome that is actualized in any given case.

Things get even weirder. In The Hidden Domain, Norman Friedman observes:

If we duplicate this experimental [double-slit] arrangement throughout the world with many experimenters, each firing just one electron at a given prearranged time, with each individual photographic plate showing the arrival of the one electron, and the results from all the plates are added together, then, amazingly, the interference pattern shows up again! These experiments are arranged so that no signal can travel between them at less than the speed of light, so there can be no physical communication between the electrons. Just how does each electron know where to strike the plate so that the interference pattern appears?

In a computational universe, the electrons know where to strike the plate because the calculations have already been performed at the level of information processing. The fact that the experiments are being carried out in different labs is irrelevant, because the source code is nonlocal. Since it is all one experiment (albeit broken up into different parts), the outcome is determined by a single set of calculations behind the scenes.

In other words, an electron behaves like a wave of probabilities when its position is not determined, and it behaves like a particle when its position is determined. What, then, is an electron? An object—or a mathematical construct, a bit of data?

There is more to the story. Every probability wave is essentially a menu of possible outcomes, each of which has an equal reality until the wave function “collapses” into a single outcome, which we call a particle. As long as the wave function is uncollapsed, its possibilities can branch out in a variety of possible futures. This branching or ramifying occurs in “virtual time,” as distinct from the “real time” with which we’re familiar. All of this is quite consistent with the computer model, in which all possible outcomes of the program exist in the source code but only one pathway can be followed by any given player.

Some physicists, troubled by the wave function’s collapse, argue instead that all pathways are actualized in a constantly expanding collection of parallel universes or “many worlds.” Like Alice’s White Queen, I can believe six impossible things before breakfast, but to think that whole universes sprout into being to match every possible path in a network of probabilities is more than I can swallow. What seems far more likely is that these alternate universes exist only in utero, as potentialities inherent in the source code; the informational pathways are real at the computational level, but most of them are not actualized at the experiential level. This would certainly be a lot more efficient than generating millions of new universes every second! As Elon Musk, quoted in Rizwan Virk’s recent book The Simulation Hypothesis, puts it, “Quantum indeterminacy is really an optimization technique.”

Another fascinating feature of the subatomic realm is quantum entanglement. Two electrons, once paired, will continue to affect each other no matter how far apart they travel, and can affect each other instantaneously—too fast for any signal to pass between them. If the spin of one electron is altered, the spin of its counterpart will be simultaneously altered in a corresponding way, even if the two electrons are at opposite ends of the universe.

If we think of electrons as objects, quantum entanglement is baffling. But if we think of them as pixels on a computer screen, the paradox disappears. A computer screen refreshes many times each second. The computer is constantly processing information, and with each screen refresh, the icons and graphics on the screen will be redrawn to reflect the latest calculations. The computer doesn’t care if pixel A is on the extreme left side of the screen, and pixel B is on the extreme right side. The physical distance between the pixels is irrelevant to the information processor’s calculations. If the “rule” is that a change in pixel A necessitates a complementary change in pixel B, then as soon as that calculation is made and the screen refreshes, both pixels will be appropriately altered.

Interestingly enough, the computer analogy also gives us a way to solve one of the world’s oldest logical paradoxes—Zeno’s paradox of the arrow. Zeno argued that motion is impossible. To prove it, he asked us to consider an arrow in flight. The arrow’s path can be broken down into smaller and smaller units, and in the smallest of these units the arrow will be standing still. How, then, can it ever get anywhere, if its apparent motion consists ultimately of static positions? How can movement arise from immobility?

If Zeno had owned a PC, he might have solved his own paradox. The pixels on the screen never actually move. They are static. But because the screen is constantly refreshing, and because the pixels are drawn in different positions with each new refresh, the appearance of motion is created. The cursor appears to move across the screen, but it is really a series of still pictures being redrawn at a very high rate.

Let’s say Zeno’s arrow is equivalent to the cursor on the screen. As Zeno correctly stated, it is never actually in motion. But at a deeper level, our cosmic information processor is performing the necessary calculations and refreshing our space-time reality “screen,” and it is those calculations and the resultant changes in the arrow’s position that create movement as we know it.

This argument implies that all motion originates in the informational field, and that all apparent movement in our experiential reality is the result of “state transitions”—abrupt jumps from one state to another.

Quantum jumps and quantum tunneling are well-known examples of state transitions—discontinuous changes, in which a particle shifts its energy level or its position or from one state to another without passing through the intervening state. It would be like a person aging from ten years old to twelve years old without ever passing through age eleven, or like someone traveling directly east from New York City to Europe without crossing the Atlantic Ocean. It’s not something that happens in our familiar reality, but it is easy enough to understand if the transitions reflect calculations taking place in an informational field. The particle does not need to pass through the intervening states, because it simply shifts from one state to another as a result of a behind-the-scenes calculation. The new state shows up as soon as the virtual-reality screen is refreshed.

For this to work, time itself must be “quantized”—there must be a minimum duration, corresponding to the length of time between screen refreshes. It is generally agreed that such a minimum duration exists. There is, first of all, a minimum physical distance known as the Planck length. Since the speed of light is unchanging, it is possible to calculate the time it takes light to travel one Planck length. This figure equals the Planck time constant, the shortest possible interval of time. In our model, the Planck length is equivalent to a single pixel on a computer screen, while the Planck time is equivalent to the time it takes to refresh the screen.

The speed of light, by the way, has also been singled out as an argument for the informational model. In his essay “The Physical World as a Virtual Reality,” computer scientist Brian Whitworth asks, “Given the speed of light is a universal maximum, what is simpler, that it depends on the properties of featureless space, or that [it] represents a maximum network processing rate?” He suggests that the dilation of time predicted by Einstein’s relativity theory can be seen as the information-processing system reaching the limits of its processing load.

The computational model can even be used to describe the origin of our space-time universe in the Big Bang. Whitworth observes that the Big Bang is not dissimilar to the “sudden influx of information” observed when a computer boots up. Maybe it should be called the Big Boot.

It has often been noted that the mathematical formulas necessary to describe our reality are confoundingly simple. Kepler’s laws of motion and Einstein’s E=mc2 are remarkably elegant equations. There’s no obvious reason why physical reality should be expressible in such terms. But if all physical things can be reduced to information, and if all physical events are the result of processing that information, then we might expect the basic rules governing the system to be as simple as possible. After all, these calculations would have to be performed untold quadrillions of times every second; simple formulas would clearly be better.

Now, I’m not saying our universe actually exists on the hard drive of somebody’s laptop. (If it does, I hope it’s a Mac, because they don’t crash as much.) This would be a purely materialistic interpretation of the idea—a way of locating the ground of being in some physical object, in this case an extradimensional or extraterrestrial (but physical) computer. I think the reality is far more subtle. Some of its nuances are caught in a famous quote from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”

I suggest that what breathes fire into the equations is consciousness.

The data in a computer would just sit there, useless for game-playing purposes, unless the computer was able to render the data as images and sounds. By what means do  we “render” our world? The most straightforward answer is: via our minds. Not our brains—brains are physical objects and thus part of the rendered, multidimensional, multisensory imagery we call reality. It is our minds that translate the informational code into the world of experience.

If so, then each individual mind renders its own “virtual-reality” world out of the same information matrix. And each “world” will be slightly different from all the others, because it will depend on our particular point of view—our focus, our choice of what to tune in and what to ignore.

If this idea sounds familiar, it may be because you’re acquainted with the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant divides reality into two realms—the phenomenal realm, or the world of appearances, and the noumenal realm, which consists of “things in themselves.” For us, the phenomenal realm is the space-time cosmos, and the noumenal realm is the informational field.

Modern philosophers have been happy to accept Kant’s phenomenal world, with its subjectivity and limitations, but are less interested in his noumenal world. The result is that Kantianism has given rise to modern epistemological skepticism, with no counterbalancing weight of the noumenal to ground it in a larger reality. In effect, philosophy has focused solely on the world of appearances. But I think Kant was closer to the mark. His bisection of the world into the noumenal and phenomenal realms is probably as close as we can get to understanding, in philosophical terms, what reality is all about.

In its entry on Kant, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes the important point that “Kant denies that appearances are unreal: they are just as real as things in themselves but are in a different metaphysical class.” Similarly, in our model, it is not that the space-time cosmos is unreal; it is real for us. But it is not ultimately real; it is dependent on an informational field that is beyond space and time.

Kant wrote of “the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given objects).” This profound statement encapsulates the often overlooked fact that all experience is subjective, and that what we call “physical things” are ultimately sensory images in our private field of awareness. Those sensory images—which include all perceptions, not just visual images—would not exist without an observer to perceive (“cognize”) them. The informational field, on the other hand, exists regardless of any observer.

As the encyclopedia puts it,

Whenever appearances do exist, in some sense they exist in the mind of human perceivers. So appearances are mental entities or mental representations ... These appearances cut us off entirely from the reality of things in themselves, which are non-spatial and non-temporal. Yet Kant’s theory, on this interpretation, nevertheless requires that things in themselves exist, because they must transmit to us the sensory data from which we construct appearances.

This passage would require very little rewriting to apply to the VR model.

We all live in our own subjective bubble of experience, but we all draw on a common source. Each mind takes pure information and translates it into an experiential world, a world that is subjective but grounded in objective data. By objective, I mean that the informational field exists independent of the observer; by subjective, I mean that the rendered environment exists only in respect to the observer.

Now here’s an interesting question. In this scenario, what is the role of physical space? Matter and energy are rendered from data. Data are nonphysical. The minds that do the rendering are also nonphysical. The resulting rendered sensory images appear to be physical, but they are only experiential constructs, the equivalents of avatars and icons on a computer screen. What exists in this model is not physical space but only information and consciousness. What we understand as physical space is only the shadow-show of mentally constructed images arising from an informational substrate.

It would appear that people like C.M.C. who have episodes of cosmic consciousness are able to temporarily break out of their mental bubble and tap into the informational field directly. In so doing, they feel they are exposed to all knowledge, which would be the case if the informational field constitutes all the data and programming that underlie what we call “the world.” But they cannot retain most of the details when they return to ordinary consciousness, because they are back in their subjectively rendered mental space with its inherent limitations. Moreover, they are not meant to retain the details; they must remain fully immersed in the virtual-reality experience (Maya) so they can continue to participate in the cosmic play (Lila).

It is probable that many psychic events take place because the mind is able to tap into the informational field in a small way and access the source code directly. The source code, being nonphysical, is also nonlocal; information readily accessible in the matrix may pertain to physically separate and quite distant “objects,” just as information in a computer may pertain to any object in any part of the screen. In this scenario, remote viewing and telepathy become quite possible and not “anomalous” at all.

Another implication of this notion of consciousness as the “render engine” of subjective reality is that each of us renders only that part of the world we perceive in any given moment. To conserve processing power, computer programs do not render images that are not currently on the screen. If you are playing a computer game and looking “north” at a mountain, the computer will render the mountain in all its detail, but it will not render the city behind you, to the “south.” If you turn to face south, the computer will obediently render the city, but it will no longer render the mountain. In a virtual-reality environment, to be is to be perceived.

Does this mean that in the “real world,” mountains and cities disappear if you’re not looking at them? Logically, it does seem to follow that they do disappear from your particular reality bubble, your personal, subjective mental space. Your mind is not rendering those particular data into imagery at that moment. However, if the mountain or city is being observed by some other mind, then it is rendered in that mind’s personal space. Moreover, the data that are the ultimate constituents of the mountain or city always exist in the source code, independent of any observer.

To ask an old question: Does the moon disappear if no one is looking at it? If literally no mind anywhere is observing the moon, then the moon is not currently being rendered in anybody’s mental space, and in that sense it has “disappeared.” But the data that give rise to the moon in the first place, the data of the informational field, are still there and are ready to be rendered by any mind at any time. So the moon is still there in the noumenal realm, but it is not presently being rendered in the phenomenal realm.

As the Zen master Yung-chia Ta-shih put it,

The one Moon reflects itself wherever there is a sheet of water,

And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one Moon.

This idea ties in with, and may help explain, quantum indeterminacy. An electron’s probability wave branches out into myriad pathways or “potentia,” each representing a possible future. These pathways exist only at the computational level. Which future is actualized? Whichever one a mind selects. Once a mind has made the selection, the ramifying pathways collapse into a single defined value (an event known as “the collapse of the wave function”). This defined value will then be true for all observers—i.e., true in the rendered subjective environment of any mind. The defined value will be “reality.”

Rizwan Virk envisions individual minds interacting in much the same way as the players of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Such games have

the ability to store and track the state of a large number of simultaneous characters ... and the state of the shared, persistent game world as information. The information, which is the basis of everything that goes on in the virtual world, is stored somewhere outside the rendered world—on cloud servers that are invisible to those inside the world and rendered as needed ...

Not only is a virtual world in modern MMORPGs larger than we can see on one screen, it isn’t fully rendered into pixels until and unless it’s necessary ... Only those places in the world where there is an observer get fully rendered as pixels ...

MMORPGs are still rendered on individual computers—as such, a “shared rendered world” doesn’t really exist. Each computer renders what is happening in your scene. If my character is present and yours is present, then both of our CPUs/GPUs will be rendering the scene based on shared information. Where is this information? It is both decentralized and centralized—it is sent from the client machines based upon every choice you make and then synchronized and sent to the other people that are in the same place that you are.

So here we are, nearing the end of our exploration of the first model. We can imagine our world as the product of a cosmic information processor—a nonphysical system existing outside of our space-time universe and governing the universe by means of the calculations it performs. Our everyday reality is analogous to the artificial reality of a computer game—except that, being fully immersed in it, we’re unaware that it’s a mere construct. Even our own bodies are part of this constructed reality and serve as our avatars, allowing our consciousness to explore and interact with this ever-changing environment.

There is no reason why the particular reality around us should be the only one that can be generated by the cosmic information processor. Indeed, most computer games have various levels of constructed reality; as you develop more skill, you advance to progressively higher levels, perhaps adopting a new avatar in order to better interface with new environments. And perhaps you reach a point where you no longer need to play the game, because you’ve seen through all its illusions. Perhaps you will take off the VR headset and delve into the source code directly, and in so doing, you will—to hijack another famous formulation of Stephen Hawking—“finally know the mind of God.”

Maybe.

No doubt some objections have occurred to you as you’ve plowed through the above. I’ll try to address the ones I’ve encountered when writing about this model on my blog.

The first objection. Haven’t researchers proven that computers cannot create a simulation as complex as our cosmos?

Yes and no. Researchers have determined that quantum processes are too complex to simulate using classical computers. Since our universe is chock-full of quantum processes, this discovery rules out a giant classical  computer crunching data behind the scenes. But when has anyone said that the simulation of our space-time cosmos has to be run on an old-school classical computer?

More important, our argument is not that the universe is literally created by a supercomputer, but rather that the world of appearances relates to an underlying noumenal reality in ways that can be analogized to a virtual reality world rendered from a program.

The second objection. Doesn’t every generation try to model the world after current technology? When clockwork mechanisms were brand-new, the clockwork universe was in vogue. When holography was an exciting new field, we heard about the holographic universe. Now everything is computers and the Internet, so naturally we think of the universe in those terms.

There’s a lot of truth to this. The clockwork universe did reflect the advanced technology of its day. But it also represented a considerable advance over earlier models. Perhaps as our leading-edge technology becomes more sophisticated, it more nearly approaches the underlying truths of cosmology. At the very least, it allows us to think about cosmology in more sophisticated terms.

The theory of the holographic universe popularized by physicist David Bohm is not all that different from the computational model. A holographic plate consists of wave-interference patterns. You can convert waves into data, or data into waves. It’s possible to create a holographic plate by writing data on a computer, converting the data into wave functions, and engraving the waveforms on a plate. The process is known, logically enough, as computer-generated holography.

The point is that both the holographic model and the computational model see the space-time cosmos as an image projected or rendered out of an informational substrate. The exact nature of that informational source is still up for grabs.

The third objection. This whole idea is just too counterintuitive to be true.

Quantum physics itself is highly counterintuitive. Famed physicist Niels Bohr reportedly said, “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” (Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond)

Even classical physics presents us with a startlingly different picture of our world. We may think of an object, such as a table, as a cluster of atoms bunched together, but in actuality the atoms are more like miniature solar systems widely separated in space. By far the greater part of the table is sheer emptiness. The table feels solid only because the atoms are bound together by electricity. When you touch a table, your body’s electric field bumps up against the table’s electric field, creating the impression of contact and solidity. There’s a reason David Bohm called matter “condensed or frozen light.” (Nichol, Essential David Bohm)

Any model of reality that takes classical physics, much less quantum physics, into account will necessarily be counterintuitive.

The fourth objection. Isn’t it insensitive to compare the tragedies of life to a mere game? And how could any intelligently designed system allow for so much pain and suffering?

Life on earth is hard. There’s no getting around this fact. Dr. Pangloss’s encomia in Candide to “this best of all possible worlds” simply do not ring true for most of us. The “problem of pain” has vexed spiritual seekers of all descriptions. Why would a loving God or a beneficent universe allow so much suffering? The usual explanation, that original sin and plain old human cussedness are responsible, doesn’t account for natural calamities such as earthquakes, tidal waves, and malarial mosquitoes. And human-caused evils like war and tyranny plague the innocent. So what’s it all about?

One possible, though not altogether satisfactory, answer goes like this: How interesting or instructive would a role-playing game be without obstacles, hazards, and challenges? We seek conflict and drama in movies and novels—why not in the ultimate fictional story we’ve devised, the story of our own lives? As I can attest from personal experience, an author doesn’t shrink from making things difficult for his characters; he knows that the more they struggle, the better the narrative. Our higher self, with a kind of pitiless creativity, lays traps and snares for us as we navigate the virtual environment of our personal drama. To us, it may seem like sadism, just as an animal may perceive nothing but hostile intent in the jab of the veterinarian’s needle. It takes a higher intelligence to know that the pain of the injection is the necessary price of avoiding rabies—or that the pain of life on earth is necessary to teach us what we need to learn.

Here’s another possible answer, which I prefer: While the game is planned in some respects, it may not be planned out in detail. If free will is real, then we, the players, can and will make pivotal decisions, writing our own script, which may deviate significantly from what the planners had in mind. Sometimes our higher self will nudge us back on track when we threaten to go too badly off course; other times, we’re on our own. Like children learning to walk, we have to be allowed to fall.

But perhaps the best answer to the problem of pain is that the game, however real it seems while we are immersed in it, is only a game, and a brief one at that. It’s a cliché that as people age, they look back on their lives and wonder where the time went. All those years look like only a moment; a lifetime seems like little more than a waking dream. I think this perception is correct. It is only a moment, only a dream.

The fifth objection. There’s no such thing as a field of “pure information.” Information exists only if there is a mind to perceive it.

This is how most of us think of information, but it’s not how information theorists think of it. According to an online dictionary, information theory defines information as “a mathematical quantity expressing the probability of occurrence of a particular sequence of symbols, impulses, etc., as contrasted with that of alternative sequences.” Mathematical quantities exist whether or not a mind conceives them. Or at least it can be argued that they do.

But doesn’t information involve telling us something? And doesn’t this necessarily involve a mind? Not exactly. Information theory got its start studying the transmission and reception of messages, but today it is understood that the message in question does not need to be sent or received by a mind. Messenger RNA, as its name implies, delivers messages, but that doesn’t mean the ribosomes that receive the information have minds or understand what they’re doing. Such messages can be compared to a key that fits a particular lock; the key does not know which lock it fits; the lock does not know that a key will open it; but when the right key finds the right lock, the “message” has been received.

In short, consciousness is not necessary for information to exist, when the term “information” is used in its technical sense.

The sixth objection. Maybe so, but the information still has to exist somewhere—encoded in DNA or in the pages of a book. Where is this alleged primordial field of pure information encoded?

It’s true that an information matrix with no physical reality is inconceivable, in the sense that the human mind cannot visualize it. But then, we can hardly be expected to visualize anything outside the space-time universe in which we are fully immersed. If there is a deeper level to reality, that level is outside of space and time and is not definable in mundane terms.

Still, we could argue that there is another sort of “place,” beyond genes and books, where information resides—namely, the mind. Imagine a cosmic Mind that eternally holds the entire source code in its field of awareness. This Mind (Brahman) would be the ground of being; the informational field is the content of this Mind; our personal consciousness is a small offshoot of the Mind; and our moment-to-moment experience of the physical universe is rendered out of the informational field by our consciousness as needed.

The seventh objection. I don’t like this approach. It feels cold and impersonal.

Well, stay tuned! There are other models. In fact, “stay tuned” serves as a fitting segue into model number two.