Encounters: Experiences with non-human intelligences
DW Pasulka
St Martin’s Essentials, £21.99, 256 pages
It is tempting to dismiss this as a very silly book. Its style manages to be both breathless and repetitive as the author tries her utmost to persuade you that she is about to reveal something momentous. Unsurprisingly, given the principle subject matter (unexplained phenomena like UFOs), there are no revelations and there is nothing of moment. Such value as Catholic scholar of religion Diana Pasulka’s Encounters has lies elsewhere, however. What it shows is that the world, and notably the West, is well advanced along the road to a wholehearted re-enchantment. This is characterised, among other things, b irruptions of so-called non-human consciousness into the natural world via encounters with the “non-human consciousness” of extra-terrestrial beings, angelic figures and, most recently and most presciently, through the apparent consciousness of some AI.
To understand how such encounters are indicative of a general re-enchantment of the world, we need to be clear about our terminology. Strictly, enchantment refers to a state of beguilement by incantation. But here it speaks to the re-emergence of the dii minores, the minor deities traditionally associated with such natural phenomena as fertility and the weather, along with things like trees, rivers, lakes and mountains. Today they are encountered not just in these but also in the experience of, among others, psychotropic drug users and computer scientists. There has been growing speculation in the scientific community that AI is close to attaining self-consciousness.
To those of us who accept the teaching that God created the world ex nihilo, it does not seem surprising that the scientist who looks at the natural world long enough and hard enough must, sooner or later, come up against features of it that cannot be explained – a fact to which Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle draws attention. This principle says that the more we know about a given particle’s position, the less we know about its velocity and vice versa. Most interpret it to mean that the quantum world is a closed system and, ultimately, indeterminate. That is, there are no facts about the world until consciousness, in the form of an observer, encounters it. The cat in his colleague Schrödinger’s box is neither alive nor dead until the moment someone looks inside.
A few, however, conclude that both Heisenberg’s principle and Schrödinger’s thought experiment show that the quantum world presupposes consciousness. On this view, there is always a fact of the matter. The cat is either alive or dead. For this to be true, it is necessary that consciousness precede matter because consciousness is what has been shown to collapse the wave function that, as it were, joins the quantum world to the world of classical physics. Whose consciousness? The obvious candidate is that of God – which is, of course, why most scientists and, indeed most people who consider the question, prefer indeterminacy. Most people, like most scientists, are materialists. According to them, consciousness is simply a brain process or, if up to date with fashionable thinking, that it is an emergent property of matter.
But while the battle lines are clearly drawn between those who accept the pre-existence of consciousness and those that don’t, it is true there are also large numbers of spiritual Johnsonians wanting to have their cake and eat it. Many would wish to preserve their disdain for a personal God and yet to leave room for “the supernatural”: a kind of third way between the dualism of the creation story and the monism of materialism. Alas for them, it has to be one thing or the other. The “experiencers” (those who encounter aliens, angelic beings and so forth) of this book are said to be harbingers of a new and emerging religion which putatively bridges the gap between what transcends (God) and what is immanent (the world). But they are not. Rather they testify to the re-emergence of something both very old and wholly unredeemed.
Should there remain any doubt that this gathering re-enchantment of the world is diabolical, we need only consider its fruits. Encounters tells of people whose lives have been “transformed” by their dealings with non-human consciousness and who have thus attained “deep spiritual insights”. Yet, in spite of these transformations, of the hungry fed, the thirsty given drink, the naked clothed, the sick tended, the stranger welcomed, we hear not a word.
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