from now on yes yes so good morning good morning this is pushing bound there is a podcast about pioneering research breakthrough discoveries and unconventional ideas I'm your host Dr Thomas arbuni my guest today is Dr Bob Rosenberg who who has a PhD from the University which university was it it was in Johns Hopkins Johns Hopkins okay uh in the history of Science and Technology he spent two decades at Rutgers University then worked at John Wiley and Sons for some years Bob has continued to pursue his interests as an independent scholar he has contributed chapters to two very important books irreducible mind in 2007 and I should not irreducible mind I was involved in its production but oh I did not contribute a chapter okay correction taken and what about Beyond physicalism did you contribute to that I did not again I was involved only in the discussions that led to its production okay but yes the third one Consciousness on that yes that I do have a chapter in wonderful and that chapter is on precognition right yes it is okay so let's start there uh may I call you Bob please uh let's start there what is precognition well take as much time as you like I mean that's um interesting it is the cognition part implies that precognition is a little more than premonition which is a preliminary warning a monition uh it's not um uh what Dean Raiden and and Daryl bem were studying which was um thank you now the word has gone from my head but which is just the um subliminal sense that of something that is going to happen kind of vague not not definite right yes and often not even specifiable uh in the sense that the work that um Dean has done is I don't mean to be overly familiar but the work that he's done uh is only determined and determined by statistical analysis in the sense that the work that JB Ryan did for so long was determined after the fact by statistical analysis whereas a precognition is something that has risen to consciousness uh it might be a dream the idea the way people have approached this who've studied it is that the information comes in subliminally to use Myers term very deliberately it comes in subliminally and as it comes to consciousness it is then recognizable as a vision or even a scent or a sound but it's something conscious and in coming to consciousness as I see it yes um it acquires it acquires information or a slant or a take that is part of the personality of the person experiencing it it is occasionally a precognitive episode involves something very clear almost film-like and when the event occurs there it is exactly is foreseen but more often it's a little vague around the edges or it doesn't happen exactly as foreseen and although that can be taken to mean that maybe there are probable Futures and the percipient saw one and in fact a different one happened and the the question of how one can see a future that then doesn't happen because you've changed it is one of the fundamental questions about precognition but do you want shall I just go yes please it's very interesting yes there is an episode that Myers Frederick Myers was uh principal figure in the society for psychical research in England in the later last 20 years the 19th century and wrote a magisterial work called human personality and its survival of bodily death he had he related an episode that a woman related she had had a dream a very Vivid dream that her Coachman had fallen off the coach and hit his head on the pavement crushed his hat on the way back from a visit she had made um and the next day when she was preparing to make that visit she was very apprehensive about a Coachman and he assured her he was fine and they went and then on the way back she could see other people on the street staring at her Coachman and so she told him to stop she saw that he was pulling back hard on the reins for no apparent reason she grabbed her child jumped out saw that he was swaying on an on the Box on the front of the broom and call the policeman who caught him before he hit the ground he never did crush his hat he never did hurt his head it turned out he was ill and dehydrated and just fainted basically there are several interesting things here the principal one of course is that she foresaw something that didn't happen because she called the policeman over however they were going the wrong way on the street they weren't going the way she had seen in the dream so are we to assume that this alternate future started when he went the different way on the street it seems to me a much more reasonable interpretation of this episode and in fact almost all episodes where there's an intervention that she had the vision of him falling off the box and hitting the street she had the vision of him falling off the box that happened but the part about hitting the street and which way they were going on the street was supplied by her conscious mind as this information came up from her subliminal mind and so it doesn't involve uh alternate futures what it involves is her interpreting this information as he came up now this is a given for apparitions for ghosts for all kinds of other phenomena in the field where it's understood that there are two players there's the person seen and the Seer that is the recipient and the agent or however one wants to put it and I mean sometimes one sees an apparition of a person wearing the actual clothes they are wearing sometimes one sees an apparition of someone in familiar clothes that have nothing to do with what they're wearing or they have a beard when in fact at the present time they don't have a beard but the percipient was familiar with him with the beard and the way this has been interpreted by people who have covered the field far better than I is that in fact we have the agent and the percipient and they are contributing like a playwright and a director to what is being perceived and it strikes me that that's what's happening in precognitive episodes so the episode that you described about the woman and her Coachmen yes um in my experience I myself have not had any precognitive dreams or fantasies or whatever but several of my friends have and it seems that they have always occurred between people who are very very close to each other like a really meaningful relationship between these two people so one person would dream about the other one but they were very closely associated has that been your experience uh uh no no no that's okay it's one of the fascinating things about precognition it it defies categorization there are utterly trivial episodes in a person's own life there are tremendously meaningful ones one of one of my favorites and I seem to have a lot of favorites yes I use this one in the chapter because it's striking a woman woke up she was boarding in a small room in London and she woke up opened her eyes and is facing a cabinet of drawers all of a sudden she sees in front of her this very Vivid scene of two men now she's a White English woman she sees who grew up in India or spent part of her youth in India she's now in England she sees two dark men talking to each other one of whom looks at her and has beautiful teeth she notices and then this man walks in front of them and she jumps out of bed yeah knocks her head on a corner of the bureau and when she opens her eyes it's gone nothing gone it was so striking that she told the people that morning at breakfast about it and then when she went home to her family some days later sometime later she told them years pass and she's in India again in the station to use the British word where she had grown up she went to a club as only the British have clubs and as she walked in the door there were those two guys standing in front of the same fireplace and she stopped and a man walked in front of them and she started just started in the old sense he was startled and she bumped into someone who laughingly asked as had happened in her little vision why she was so eager to get anyway she learned that these two guys were students had eaten when she had the vision the club hadn't even been built it meant absolutely nothing and it was clear as a bell and her she was mystified about why it happened yeah but if it had any meaning because it didn't um and it's good to have things like that now my general approach yes to psi maybe to life I don't know is is a sort of negative way not this not this and in the case of precognition theories every Theory I've encountered Founders on some case or other that simply refuses to fit a given understanding of the phenomena and I think the reason for that is that in theorizing people are working from concepts of time personality that are common sensical and clearly wrong from the phenomena if we start with a phenomena and look at what happens uh ordinary time has to go out the window I quote half a dozen or eight people from Ian Stevenson and Myers and Mrs Sedgwick Eleanor Sedgwick uh Robert thulis people who spent a lot of time looking at this sooner or later they all say well if we can't make sense of this with our concepts of time so much the worse for our concepts of time and I think that's true there's so much evidence that the nature of time needs to be utterly rethought if we are to make any sense of this at all well at a meeting in June of this year you gave a paper probing causality and the nature of time um and in it you say between case histories and recent experimental work it is clear that we must take precognition seriously so could you tell me a little bit about the experimental work that would support precognition as as a serious subject to study okay um JB Ryan in his work in his laboratory which he very deliberately narrowed to ESP cards um I have some I could hold them up um yeah sure let me uh now that I've said that uh all right um he had these developed and people would guess them here's one okay yes right and I feel like I'm doing a concatric okay this is the cross yes I've I've nicely arranged these so they all make sense okay uh then there's a square so the waves the cross the square a circle yes and a star got it the idea being that they're different enough yeah and he would have people guess these one way or another uh there's a deck of 25 and he would he might just put the deck down on the table and say tell me what order they're in or he might turn them over one at a time without looking at them or buy and have the same time have someone look at them right so that would be more es speed and precognition right extra sensory perception that's telepathy or clear points yeah right and then he tried saying well okay guess the order of a deck of cards that we're going to shuffle tomorrow ah right the problem is that when you do that you have the possibility that someone is messing with is shuffling if you were to allow psychokinesis PK which he also experimented with largely with dice right through yeah 25 Dice and see if it could affect the other yeah um what happened was a fellow named Bob Morris did an article that basically tore into I I don't mean to make it sound that adversarial he analyzed all the work that Ryan had done with precognition and said there was pretty much nothing that couldn't be explained by a combination of Clairvoyance telepathy psychokinesis and the laboratory work that Ryan did was only so good then we started getting work more sophisticated stuff instead of using cards they used images it was a famous dream telepathy study at maimonides laboratory in Brooklyn uh Montague Omen and Chuck Connerton and Stan kribner and then Chuck otterton started working on something that he called gunsfeld work and it could be used for telepathy or Clairvoyance but it could also be used precognitive consult means whole field and they would put ping pong ball halves on someone's eyes put them in a very relaxing chair in a very relaxing room with nice music or not and bathe their faces in gentle red light so that all they saw was this whole red field Horizon and then they were supposed to get impressions of images yes not just cards but images their response when they're what did you see well I had a feeling I was in a field there was a river there was a camel and whatever there was yeah well you know how people are about animals yes um and that it had the advantage of first of all moving away from simple cards and having images which people seem to be quite good at and also getting away from precognitive work spontaneous work in dreams which are problematic in a lot of ways getting reports I don't know about you but my dreams are hideously nonsensical and non-linear and only occasional can I occasionally can I pull anything from them that's coherent but some people have nice linear narrative dreams like a short story I envy them but they they can do better with the precognitives anyway um some of Chuck Connors work the gansfeld the work was precognitive then Dean Raiden started working on uh the word was pre-sentiment that I was looking for which is more of a feeling a sentiment right and he would he had people sit in front of a computer and they were to guess for example which side of the screen was going to have a pleasant image as opposed to an unpleasant one or vice versa right often for his work often enough the target wasn't chosen until after the subject we'll say made the choice you can do that with a computer it's very easy computers are fast right right so you press the button the computer makes a choice and shows you okay a man named Daryl bem who was an internationally renowned psychologist at Cornell and a proponent quietly of Psy research replicated those experiments nine different flavors of this experiment and found that in fact there were pretty strong statistical effects undeniable significant um when that hit the news in 2011 there were people who were quite sure it was the end of Science in full caps uh it wasn't but there was tremendous upset and anger in fact there were people who felt that maybe we should stop using statistical significance at all because look what it resulted in this kind of nonsense yeah now another line of research was uh started out at these Stanford Research Institute 60 70s a man named Russell targ and his co-experimenter how put off and they were experimenting with what they called a remote viewing which was effectively Clairvoyance maybe telepathy and often precognitive in which someone in a laboratory you're in the laboratory as the agent and they found people who were very gifted at this um someone once said that if you want to have the fellow out at Stanford said if you want to win the high jump with your track team you don't get seven people who can jump one foot you get one person who can jump seven feet and and uh Target putoff found some very to say sifted yeah they found some very talented people who were astounding at this and sometimes it involved you you're sitting here with me you're The Talented fellow I'm the experimenter with you and we send two other people out and they get out and they open an envelope that has been randomly selected and they follow that and go to the place and then they sit there for five minutes while you try to tell me where they are or what not even where they are you tell me your impressions of what's going on right and those were just as good there was another group doing it at Princeton there's just as good when it's in the here and now and in the then and there it might be that you give me your impressions and the target is selected in three hours or tomorrow or next week or in Paris or in Tokyo um all fairly seem to be fairly irrelevant distance in time had little effect on the results that these people could acquire um two examples there was an episode where they were given the latitude and longitude of a very specific place in fact it was the vacation home of the professor and it was in the hills in Virginia and what they came up with in fact about a quarter mile away and it was a hidden NSA bunker much to the unamused reception that it got from the people who had asked them because this was all being done for the intelligence Community right they they really wanted to know if there was anything in this yes yes and there are books about it now uh the Gordon has been removed and a lot of it is no longer classified so so what is your working hypothesis as to an explanation for how these things work uh scientifically if that's possible at all I don't think it is certainly not yet um I think an understanding of this is going to have to get beyond the simple Insanity that we find in Pre and retro cognition because In fairness there are people who see the past as readily as they see the future now the past somehow doesn't seem as bothersome since we know it's already happened and we're used to the idea of memory the problem is that when these people have these perceptions they're exactly the same as their precognitive um experience except it's in the past they're seeing things from a third person point of view there was a man named Stefan osivecki the 20th century a Polish psychic who was astonished tested again and again and again same kinds of results but you would give him a letter in an envelope you might not know anything about it he would take it and he would hold it and he would rub it in his hands and he'd walk up and down for two three fifteen minutes and then he would tell you about the person who wrote it about the room they wrote it in about the people who interrupted him about what he was having for lunch and he would tell you their states of mind he would tell you things that just well I say they were out of the ordinary it's all rather out of the ordinary um but that is as extraordinary as anything precognitive right he's putting himself in a location he's never been with people he's never met he knows nothing about he might as well be seeing something in a year in the future and he's not I've had I've had experiences like that yes yes I once remember I once remember seeing a patient for the first time and um he told me about these extraordinary talent that He has and I kind of looked skeptical and he said give me your wallet please so I gave him my wallet and after a few minutes he started describing my home that he had never seen and then he continued describing the inside of the home then he went to describe the living room then he described the grand piano by the window and then he said if I'm going to be your patient I don't want to see anymore that's interesting because of course usually it's the Doctor Who takes the patient's wallet right that's a different problem that's very good but but okay now you've you've touched on something that is related uh and I bring up one particular episode Another favorite having to do with what's called psychometry right the reading of objects yes you give the give the Gypsy your watch and she tells you you know and you never get your watch back because at all we know how gypsies are um yeah well careful careful well um in this episode a man named osti a Frenchman in the early part of the 20th century we was working with half a dozen uh very gifted um he called them sensitives um for about a dozen years one of them he uh someone came to see him one day knowing that he had these people around and this person said look I live on this big estate and in France there are big Estates that are very regular they're just Forest yeah yeah hundreds of Acres perhaps yes dozens anyway this old man who was winter time he lived in a small house by himself and he disappeared and everyone was worried that he'd wandered off and gotten lost and died well said the sensitive can you um bring me something of his the person came back with a scarf that had been in the cabinet yes at the guy's house yes and the medium took it and sensitive took it and held it for a while and then said okay he left the house and he turned left and he walked down the road about a quarter mile and went into the woods and he's fallen and he's lying in a small clearing with these big rocks and described they went to look and they couldn't find it they came back and they said can you be more specific because it's too regular we don't we can't specify the police so they got a more specific reading they looked again and they couldn't find it came back can you do better okay she did better they went out I'm sorry I think it was a a male sensitive they went out and this time they found yes in that environment with the rocks in the clearing and all that now what happened because he wasn't wearing that scarf it was in his house just sitting in the cabinet while he was out getting lost and dying and lying on the ground so the idea of psychometry like your wallet has somehow containing that information doesn't wash but what osty felt was that we all contain our lives past present future and when we have things that are close to us or even sometimes that we just touch they can be used as a conduit to get back to us now this guy was dead so it's even more complicated than that but that was his basic idea we contain our lives and things that we possess that we touch that we hold um can be used to get to us and to all that information so how did you who started who started with a ba in history and science from Harvard University right right and then you got a masters in physical sciences from Stanford University yes and then you worked at Rutgers University I believe for 20 years and the staff of the Thomas E Edison papers yes so how did you move from that which seems so far away from what we have been talking how did you move from there into this whole other mysterious uh field of precognition and all the other stuff so the truth is uh I don't have the fortitude of people like Ed Kelly and Dean Rayden and Bob Morris and Bill roll to completely commit myself to the field when I was at the A4 Center Harvard January of my senior year one of my friends came back from the library and said you know I was at the library and I saw a journal of parapsychology and I said really because I'd heard of Ryan but I assumed that it all ended this is 1972. January I assumed it all ended long before right and the idea that there was a journal I found astonishing so I went up to the library and by God there wasn't one there were three or four right there now it was my good luck to be at Harvard for two reasons one is Harvard's library has almost everything I mean it's really in a class with the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress it's an astonishing collection of millions of items so they had those journals and then I went back into the stacks at this point I didn't know about William James connection to the field but I found out um but there was a collection of several thousand volumes on the Shelf and I started reading and I read some very good stuff and I read some nonsense right it took a while as often it happens when you dip into this field to figure out which was which right the guy writing this book was some fraud up in Montreal right never been any of the places he said and that the woman writing this book Eileen Garrett was one of the most gifted mediums of the 20th century and had been studied and vetted and all that but eventually I got a better idea of what was real and then in May I saw a little notice on a bulletin board saying that that evening in this room there would be a demonstration of I don't gotta help me I don't remember exactly what it said but it was basically a demonstration of parapsychology and I went and a fellow named ed Kelly was accompanying a fellow named Billy Delmore Ed had gotten his PhD the year before at Harvard in psycholinguistics and gone to work down at Ryan's lab for reasons which he has described here and there and Billy Delmore was a student at Yale law school and was sent down the Ed by a fellow named Irv child with whom it had studied at Yale and be because Billy had wanted to take a year out from law school and find out a little more about himself as a psychic Ed brought him up to Harvard because the Harvard psychology department had something called the Hodgson fund which had been started by William James and Ed wanted to get some money to support Billy for a year down at Ryan's lab which he did despite the fact that BF Skinner was just no he was still there I think until 74. um and he was in William James Hall which is amusing in its own way but Ed came up with Billy and Billy was mind-blowing um he there were about 30 people 30 students in the room and Billy just was Billy Billy just did things um hard to describe what they were like but being around him yes was upsetting and uh so that summer after some thought I went to the parapsychological association meeting which was in Edinburgh I found my way over there and I met the people in the field and I was duly improperly astonished and I wound up going down to North Carolina built roll invited me to work down at the psychical Research Foundation which was a spin-off from Ryan's lab that was devoted to the question of survival of some aspect of human personality and I was there for about a year and a half two years then I got married and I left and um those were life altering years for me I complete I went from being a good materialist scientist to being completely mystified human being um I still believe that 101 was two and all that but I also didn't believe for a second that what I'd been taught about a human being was correct because Billy was down there I spent a lot of time with him a great deal of time with Ed Kelly um Jim Carpenter Bob Mars I could drop names until the cows came home but I then took what I had learned and tried to digest it wound up out in California my wife and I moved out there and I wound up almost by accident at Stanford with a wonderful older fellow uh whose picture is up there but you can't see it um who was extraordinarily tolerant to a chemist who is about to retire and then after that I went to Hopkins and it rapidly became clear I was not going to be able to do any work with psychical research parapsychology or anything like that so I got a degree and I went to work at the Edison papers but I always I remained friends with a number of people stayed in contact went to a association meeting every five or seven or eight years um and then when I got out to California in 2001 um Ed Kelly contacted me because they were trying to digitize Myers the two volume uh set and I had done a great deal of that at the Edison papers and Ed knew that and he got in touch with me and so I helped them with that he had been involved he had he and his wife Emily and Mike Murphy had a couple of other people had started sir Sam the survival seminar out at excellent in 98 I believe and I got involved through the work on the digitization and then I was invited to participate which I did for 11 years and that that was more fun that was so much fun I probably should have been illegal uh it was what we'd all like graduate school to be a continuing a week-long intensive seminar where the conversation never stopped and you had people from literally well if not around the world certainly from across the northern part of it some people from uh I believe we had a couple of people from uh Brazil one year but physicists psychologists psychiatrists students of religion philosophers it was fantastic and it resulted in those three books uh hey there up there yes the reducible mind and Beyond physicalism and Consciousness Unbound which uh had really spearheaded with a tremendous amount of work from other people so what does what does life uh look like to you ahead of you like what's what's on your what's on your plate for the next 10 years wow uh well right now I've had this interesting opportunity the man I studied with at Hopkins is retiring and another professor who worked with him is retiring and so their students are putting together pardon my German a fetch script yes that is a celebratory collection of essays by their students they worked together and and individually for some time on the idea of place in science both the laboratory what a laboratory is like this is something that is occupied historians of science for some time now and borders on the sociology of science the philosophy of science and even technology but the internal workings of laboratory the situation financial and physical of a laboratory the larger setting Silicon Valley Route 128 in Boston attempts to replicate those things in other countries so there's a great deal that has been written and that can still be written well I had two choices I could do Edison yeah invented research and development in his laboratory but a great deal has been written about him by some very competent historians and most most of what I might say could probably be inferred from what they've done whereas I could also write something about Ryan's laboratory when he started and the most interesting thing about place in Ryan's laboratory is it it was very hard to figure out where the walls were when you had subjects who could be moved a hundred feet 100 yards or a mile and a half and you've still got the same results and yet you wanted to maintain this scientific air of the laboratory right anyway with the release of Ryan's letters in the last year and books that have been written about him and about his laboratory and about the work in general I think given that this will just be a paper and not a book that's first that's first and second is something I've had a lot of trouble getting myself really engaged with although God knows I want to do it and that is I want to do a book on the field for young adults ah before as Ed Kelly said before hardening of the categories sets in or hardening of the arteries right well when I was a kid about seven years old my parents gave me a book called our friend the atom and it was a Disney book that was going to be some kind of feature film made that was never made but it was 1957. and the atom was still very scary and the idea that you might be able to use atomic energy in a peaceful way was a hard sell in a lot of quarters and that I'm reading back into this I don't know actually about the book but reading it now is an adult that's what I see that they're trying to persuade the reader that yes we know how it has been used but it can be better than that and I was utterly taken by this this was a great introduction to science for me and I want to do that for kids I want to write a book about the development of the field if there's anything I learned in college it was that the history of science is a great way to really engage with the deep meaning of Science and I would like to in write a historical introduction to the field so it's wonderful sounds wonderful so you have come well you have had a very interesting journey I mean you've had a very interesting life uh dipping into all kinds of Sciences and parapsychology uh much more metaphysical so my question is what have you learned about yourself during this journey well um that's uh the years in my two years in North Carolina right after college um I did a tremendous amount of yoga three four hours a day I was meditating once twice even three times a day um I had known the woman I married since we were 16. and finally I think I grew up enough for her to marry me so I learned a lot about myself in those years and I've always said I recommend anybody to take copiers off after college and really just spend your time thinking and encountering people and whatnot um since then ah my God that was really the formative developmental stuff that was what exactly do I think I am and as I say my inclination is to go the negative way and I have pretty good idea what I'm not but um I really don't know um it's been I am I am pretty sure that something happens when and after one dies I think the evidence is extremely strong I don't know you're probably aware of the Bigelow contest that took place over the last couple of years I think some of the essays submitted for that were were very clear and very strong pretty good um I think the evidence is pretty clear yes I've learned that you can't go stand on the corner and talk about it um in fact it can be really hard to talk about on an individual level my father died a few years ago and he knows what I've been doing all these years into one point a couple of weeks before he died um he said what do you think and I said well I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised no but the problem is even with that evidence forget precognition there are so many ways to interpret the media Mystic information than your death experiences The Reincarnation information uh what you can do is amass this evidence and see that it points to something but exactly what is is very hard to say um I I would say that I envy people who've arrived at some certainty but I don't really because I I think that to arrive at certainty in these matters you have to ignore other evidence right and I don't think that's a good thing uh saying you saying that something exists and saying that you understand it all right very different things yes I think there is no doubt that precognition and the other phenomena that are psychologists psychical researchers have studied uh they're no doubt that those things are real what they mean beats me and I just hope we can find a way to investigate it for precognition it's time I think we have to elevate the epistemological status of mystical experience so that people take it seriously and that includes near-death experiences and all kinds of things but there's a kernel of important Truth About Time buried in there and we have to get to it well thank you thank you we could go on for many more hours it's a delight thank you thank you I think I would like to do this again if it's okay with you perhaps in a few months to revisit this subject okay would that be okay it would be okay you're asking an academic to talk that's that's not that's easy um I will have to maybe set this up so I won't just be repeating myself no no of course not of course not but thank you thank you for the opportunity it's really been a pleasure thank you likewise and let me just say that next week my guest will be Dr Gerald D say Quicken he's the author of Eastern thought and the Shiva Sutra of wazoo gurupta um and we shall discuss some interesting questions which go very much along our discussion today uh some of the questions we'll be discussing is what is thought what is space-time what is life this so please tune in and thank you again Dr Rosenberg thank you my pleasure