One of the more entertaining characters at Jeff Pulver’s 140conf shows is Monte Farber (@MonteFarber), the psychic. He and his NEA award-winning fine artist wife Amy Zerner have written over 45 book/kits on ESP, Astrology, Tarot, etc., and have sold two million books in 14 languages. Together they are among the world’s foremost designers of interactive question/answer systems (“divination systems”) many of which appear to be a foil to jostle and otherwise “rev up” one’s own intuitive and decision-making capabilities. Farber and Zerner are also expert book packagers, and can advise a company on everything from marketing to public speaking. They are not just a supremely successful brand—they are a successful multi-faceted brand.
Their website is www.ESPservices.net which stands for Executive Strategic Planning. As for Farber’s actual psychic abilities, he claims to be “one of the world’s best psychics who recently got six out of seven predictions right regarding major financial indicators for www.TheStreet.com.” Indeed, Farber says he mainly psychically “reads” for the rich, the famous and investors, having made over two years’ worth of videos on Jim Cramer’s website. However, he also does psychic readings on Twitter in real time (“The challenge is to get them down to 140 characters,” says Farber.) He also does it on their Facebook page, called The Enchanted World.
Pressed for time, Farber answered some “yes/no” questions called out in rapid-fire succession by audience members.
“Will I have a full time job by the end of the summer?” asked one woman.
“Just after the end of the summer,” replied Farber.
“Where are you going next?” asked audience member Geo Geller.
“I don’t know, I’m not that good!” joked Farber.
Farber admits that he has some limitations. “I’m as bad at sports as I am at picking the sex of unborn children. I mean, you flip a coin and you’ll be more accurate than I am.”
Psychic phenomena have always been one of those bugbears that plague science. Many scientists will privately state their belief in it or in fact have had so-called psychic experiences themselves, but publicly they tend to side with the skeptics.
For the record, psychic phenomena falls into four categories: Telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis.
Telepathy: This is the most palatable form of psychic phenomena for most scientists. Even many skeptics will admit that, if there’s any truth to psychic phenomena at all, telepathy will be the “winner.” Since telepathy at first glance appears to be a simple communications phenomenon, scientists in Russia years ago managed to get funding to research it by calling it “Mental Radio.” Interestingly, the great political and social writer Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) became interested in psychic phenomena when he discovered that his wife had the ability. He performed some experiments with her, and published a book about it in 1930, also called Mental Radio.
Precognition: Also called “second sight,” the ability to perceive future information that cannot be deduced from presently available information or the laws of nature. For this to work, one needs some form of retrocausation, or the ability of an event in the future to cause an effect (e.g., an image or emotion in the brain of the psychic) in the past. Some theorists have speculated that faster-than-light particles (tachyons) are real and are responsible for precognition.
Clairvoyance: The ability to gain information about a contemporary object, person, location or physical event through means other than the known human senses. Remote viewing, used by various intelligence agencies, is a subset of clairvoyance. Trying to explain this from a scientific standpoint is a nightmare. For example, a red card is hidden in an envelope. The clairvoyant psychic, in another room, correctly says that “there’s a red card in the envelope.” Is there a “quality of redness” that can be picked up by the brain (instead of seeing it directly)? Does the brain send out a sort of radar to determine this? The most interesting possible explanation is that, since at some point in the future the red card is removed from the envelope to determine the accuracy of the prediction and the clairvoyant then becomes aware of the result, the clairvoyant in the present moment might retrieve this information by reading his or her own mind existing in the future. Thus, clairvoyance could be “precognitive telepathy.”
Psychokinesis: Also called telekinesis, is the alleged ability of the mind to directly influence a physical system in a way that cannot be accounted for by the mediation of any known physical energy. This would include moving or distorting objects with the mind (bending spoons, ‘a la Uri Geller) or influencing the output of a random number generator.
During the 1960s the American physicist Helmut Schmidt built what he called an “electronic coin flipper” operated on the random decay of radioactive particles. This decay is governed by the weak nuclear force (which along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force, are one of the four fundamental forces in nature). As the unstable radioactive isotope decays, the radiation is emitted at rates unaffected by temperature, pressure, electricity, magnetism, or chemical change. According to the current laws of physics, such emissions of radiation are supposedly completely unpredictable and cannot be manipulated by fraud.
Schmidt hooked his radioactive coin flipper to a light bulb and suspended it above a cage of newly-hatched chicks placed on a table in a cold room. When the light bulb was on, the chicks were warm and happy. When the bulb was off, the chicks were cold and upset. Although the light was controlled by the random decay of a radioactive substance, and should have been on about 50 percent of the time, Schmidt noted that the light bulb was consistently lit more than half of the time. It was as if the chicks’ desire for warmth was somehow affecting the weak nuclear force and therefore increased the rate of radioactive decay!
Thus, psychokinesis is a goal-oriented, unconscious phenomenon. When you decide to get up from your chair and walk across the room, you don’t consciously concentrate on moving every muscle and balancing yourself along the way—no, you simply have the goal of getting to the other end of the room, and all sorts of “background processes” occur to make it happen. Similarly, when those chicks had the goal of being warm, something was (amazingly enough) taking care of all the details of changing the physical laws governing the radioactive decay of an isotope so that that goal of warmth could be achieved.
What’s so exasperating about psychokinesis is that, in the case of the human brain, even if all of your neurons fired at once, it would only produce about 10 watts of energy, not enough to do much. Whatever psychokinesis is, like other forms of psychic phenomena , it has deeper roots in physics, in quantum mechanics. Scientists will tell you that quantum mechanics is a complete theory and has no room for anything like psychic phenomena, but that’s not exactly true. The color “red” is a quality perceived by consciousness, not just a frequency of light. Quantum physics takes for granted that a conscious observer of the world exists, but it doesn’t explain what the observer is.
This has all been lumped under the unfortunate term, “Parapsychology.” It should really be called “Paraphysics.”
About 20 years ago, while we were sitting at the Port Authority Bus station in New York City, I once mused to the physicist Nick Herbert that psychic phenomena could be explained if perhaps the underlying substrate of the world wasn’t “matter” in the form of particles, but rather “mind.” I based this idea on some scientific papers I had read while visiting the late Dr. Carl Schleicher’s “far-out” Mankind Research Unlimited organization back in the mid-1970s.
Herbert then ran off and wrote the book, Elemental Mind: Human Consciousness and the New Physics, in 1993. In this book he writes of his belief that the mind is not local to any individual, and that the mind, or consciousness, is a force that interacts with the whole world, like gravity or electromagnetism. As he writes in his introduction: “I believe that modern mind scientists are making this same medieval mistake by vastly underestimating the quantity of consciousness in the universe. If mind is a fundamental force in nature, we might someday realize that the quality and quantity of sentient life inhabiting just this room may exceed the physical splendor of the entire universe of matter… I confess that I do think that consciousness will turn out to be something grand—grander than our most extravagant dreams. I propose here a kind of ‘quantum animism’ in which mind permeates the world at every level. I propose that consciousness is a fundamental force that enters into necessary cooperation with matter to bring about the fine details of our everyday world. I propose, in fact, that mind is elemental, my dear Watson.”
As for whether or not Monte Farber represents the cutting edge of financial divination, only patient, inquiring minds can figure that one out. In the world of ESP, empirical evidence is the only thing one can ultimately rely on to judge its veracity.
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Richard Grigonis (@EditStateofNow) is Editor-in-Chief of Jeff Pulver’s State of NOW / #140conf community website.
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