Trigger alert, this post is long and wonky. This is not for the weak of heart or the potato of couch. Get children out of the room. Separate the dog from the cat. Put on the tea kettle. Gird up your loins.
In physics, WIMP is the acronym for weakly interacting massive particle.
Wikipedia describes physics WIMPs like this:
WIMPs are hypothetical particles that are one of the proposed candidates for dark matter. There exists no formal definition of a WIMP, but broadly, a WIMP is a new elementary particle which interacts via gravity and any other force (or forces), potentially not part of the Standard Model itself, which is as weak as or weaker than the weak nuclear force, but also non-vanishing in its strength.
This post is not about that kind of WIMP.
This is about something called DSD by some advocates, but maybe the acronym WIMP meaning weakly interacting mental phenomena is a better term. Why? Because DSD is an acronym for Descartian Spiritual Dualism that some people believe in today. Scientists tend to be mostly materialists. They are put off by trying to fit the concepts of dualism and a kind of spiritualism into mainstream modern science.
Why? Because materialism is a theory that the world is entirely physical, but dualism is a theory or set of theories that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the universe: mind and bodies. Dualists say that minds are not made out of physical stuff, and they are not subject to the laws of nature. Now you can see why most scientists would be hostile to the idea of turning dualism or spiritualism into mainstream science. Although not a real scientist, I had that hostility until I came to understand that DSD could be considered a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry.
Why might DSD could be considered a legitimate topic of scientific inquiry? Because:
(1) we still do not understand the mind, consciousness, free will, how sensory inputs trigger emotions, biases or beliefs, etc.; and
(2) humans are hard wired by evolution for spirituality, usually manifested as a formal religion such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and the like and all their variants, Catholicism, Protestantism, Mormonism and the like; therefore
(3) some people are going to keep trying to fit things like WIMP (or DSD) into modern science until we come to understand whether the dualism is real or not.
So, in the spirit of being open-minded, hopefully not feeble-minded, it is time for Dissident Politics (i) to wade into the muck to consider whether WIMP or DSD is the better acronym, and (ii) regardless of the label one uses, what the heck is WIMP or DSD?
-- End of context (thankfully) --
The blog post
dcleve is a believer in DSD. I suggested changing it’s name to WIMP to make the idea sound more like science than DSD. He described what WIMP is
in this rather long comment:
I will try to follow your suggestion and try using the term WIMP, instead of spirit or soul .... We can see how it goes.
The basic WIMP model is that our world is not monotonic, and there are two different and weakly interacting categories of things, mental and physical phenomenon. AND, that the “mystery” of consciousness can be solved by postulating that we humans (and all living things, at least in my version) are DUAL entities, in which aspects of the physical, and aspects of the mental , are interacting.
Most people think in WIMP terms, but rarely try to think thru what the WIMP assumptions imply. You want to know, so I will try to flesh it out.
1) WIMP holds that there are likely to be non-physical mental objects. These would most likely be entities, but maybe there can be non-entity mental objects too.
1a) The possibility of non-entity mental objects is something that should be very high on the “to investigate and figure out” list for WIMP advocates. I have not made this a priority for myself, and perhaps should.
1b) The investigation of non-physical entities has been a major focus of WIMP research. I have had significant first person experiences supporting the existence of discarnate entities. How to do first person empiricism is should also be a significant priority for WIMP advocates.
2) Living things operate under evolutionary processes. If living things are dualist, then the development of that dualism had to have some benefit to the beings that acquired it.
2a) I have found several mind theorists who have come up with plausible evolutionary explanations for why life developed consciousness. Karl Popper postulated that it was so living things could develop models of our reality (access hypotheses from world 3), so they could run simulations of actions before doing something that might prove fatal. Nicholas Humphreys postulated that life already did models, and needed to distinguish models from reality, and a STRONG IMMEDIATE experience could be distinguished from the weak sauce of modeled reality. Mark Solmes postulates that we need some way to maintain homeostasis in novel environments, and qualia about how we feel was the way life did this. Note, all of these extend consciousness to the most basic of living things, which need to model reality to learn, and which need to maintain homeostasis in novel environments.
My WIMP proposal is for the same bacterial origin that these other thinkers use, and it is to postulate that agency, self- identity/priority, and willing were useful for bacteria, and those that had the ability to become dual WIMP entities had a strong advantage over their peers.
3) And our consciousness has become highly tuned, indicating it is supremely beneficial evolutionarily. We should expect that the WIMP interface to ALSO have been tuned evolutionarily.
3a) There are several implications to this:
3a1) WIMP interactions are weak, so they would need to be leveraged massively. The brain is where this interaction would take place, and the brain IS massively leveraged, such that very small energy inputs into a few synapses, could cause brain states, which can cause macro body movements, This is MANY orders of magnitude of leveraging.
3a2) WIMP interactions are possible outside of brains and life. But they are weak, so will be rare, and hard to detect.
3a3) Brains are tuned to do WIMP interactions (see 3a1) so brains are plausibly good instruments to do experiments on WIMP interaction. Channeling and mysticism is doing this.
3a4) Developing mechanical instruments to do WIMP interaction is, however, plausible as well. One of the things that some psychic researchers tend to use are instruments with very low triggering energy. A radio tuned to a while noise station is the sort of device that is sometimes used.
4) The LACK of direct knowledge of the Mental realm for most of us is a challenging observation for WIMP. WIMP needs to be patched to address this observation.
Hmm -- I am running out of steam here, it is late. ALSO, people tend to be less good at identifying challenges to their worldview, than at identifying supporting evidences. We are all geared to do confirmation bias.
I will offer the critiques I assembled for an IDEALIST worldview, as a possible example for how to put challenges together for a non-physicalist model. Idealism is not widely held, but interestingly, most psi researchers are idealists, and the book review I will be referencing is for a team that includes psi researchers. A few of the questions I asked are evidence FOR WIMP as opposed to the Strongly Interacting Mental Phenomenon this team postulates (they hold by SIMP, in your terms). Here is the review, with critique questions:
Scientifically flawed
-- 7th inning stretch --
-- Germaine’s comments --
I remain significantly confused.
1, 1a, 1b) What experiment(s) could be devised to determine if there are non-physical mental objects and whether they are entities or non-entities? I presume that entity means something with some form of consciousness.
2) Whether beneficial or not, if we’re dualist critters, the immaterial thing(s) or WIMP(s) can’t be so detrimental that it causes dualist species to go extinct. Could it be weakly detrimental or neutral, or does it have to be more than trivially beneficial? If so, why? Sentience? Bias toward life? Are there any non-dualist life forms on Earth? How can we know?
2a) I’m baffled about what physical structure(s) is needed to enable or allow dualist life forms, especially ones without brains. Bacteria have sensors and can react to things and changes in the environment, but there is no brain. What kind of consciousness is there in life forms without brains? How can we know it is consciousness and not signaling the environment through means that are sometimes reasonably well known and understood? Humans maintain homeostasis in novel environments by mechanisms that I think are reasonably explained by physical biological phenomena. Is that not true?
3) How do we know that our consciousness is highly tuned, and if so, tuned by what, evolution, WIMPs or both? Why would we expect the WIMP interface to have been tuned evolutionarily. That seems to imply some form of two-way communication or interaction. Does that mean that life in Earth shapes and/or influences WIMP sources?
3a1, 3a2) I can see the leveraging argument is necessary to go from a weak influence to beliefs and behaviors. But is there evidence that WIMP interactions (i) are possible outside of brains and life, or (ii) why they are necessarily rare. By definition weak interactions are hard to detect, so that makes sense.
3a3) Assuming that brains are tuned to detectably respond to WIMP interactions then brains-minds can be studied. From the little I think I know, channeling and mysticism are not well understood.
Some researchers consider channeling might be a form of mental disorder or unusual mental process. But there is uncertainty. My searches turned up very few peer reviewed papers in mainstream science journals. Apparently, the human brain-mind can create perceptions of things that do not correspond to physical reality, e.g., hallucinations. Or are those things manifestations of WIMP interactions? There seems to be a heck of a lot of uncertainty and conclusions are usually posited tentatively,
with calls for more research, e.g., this:
Voice parameters were different between channeling and no-channeling states using rigorous controlled methods, but other physiology measure collected were not. Considering the subjective and phenomenological differences observed, future studies should include other measures such as EEG connectivity analyses, fMRI and biomarkers.
3a4) I’m unsure what instruments could be developed to detect and characterize WIMP interactions. How can alleged signals that human technology can detect determine if what is detected arose from the physical world or a non-physical source? It makes sense that detection instruments would need to respond to very low triggering energy because WIMPs are weakly interacting, but nonetheless the machine detects a signal from the physical world. Right? So, how can a radio tuned to a white noise frequency distinguish a WIMP signal from a physical signal? Aren’t radio waves physical universe things, not immaterial universe things? Do WIMPs elicit static radio waves from brains? I’m missing something here.
4) The lack of direct knowledge of the mental realm (WIMP? a soul or spirit?) is what my 3a4 comments are about. There is a fundamental disconnect between physical-material universe detection instruments that humans can build and the non-physical-immaterial signals they are trying to detect. Unless I misunderstand, humans and their technology are trapped in our physical universe. How can WIMP theory and research be patched to address this problem? I’m stuck at the point of the boundary of the two worlds. I don't know how or if anyone can cross it.
That’s all I’ve got. Mainstream science seems to still not accept the concept of WIMPs (souls, spirits or whatever), but at least the label feels to me to be both (i) easy and comfortable to use, and (ii) helpful in understanding the nature of the problem. But that’s just me. Maybe for most people, WIMP is little or no better or worse than DSD.
