Note from Paul Werbos, October 12, 1999

Dear Paul (Prueitt)

In our conversation of last weekend, you asked: "if the physical potential exists for backwards time processing of information, shouldn't biology have discovered it?"

Then I mentioned a story -- either a comic strip or a Sufi fable, I forget which -- about a fish who devoted his life to finding the greater universe (which other fish didn't believe in), who came back to say: "I have now clearly understood the greater universe and our place in that universe -- we are lunch." (Or breakfast, if they are trout?)

But I never explained the connection.

The point is that there is biology and there is biology. There is indeed a potential for biology to exploit oxygen breathing from the air, or temperature gradients in deep ocean trenches. But that doesn't mean that fish -- a particular line of biology -- can exploit those sources of free energy. Certain sources of free energy really encourage a totally different sort of physical/biological apparatus.

The human brain and body both rely on a specific type of physical organization that is based on a subset of QED, quantum electrodynamics. (I.e. plain ordinary chemistry.) **IF** backwards time effects could be mobilized effectively by certain kinds of weird nuclear forces... I wouldn't expect a QED sort of life form to have mastered them, necessarily, especially not at a stage of evolution which has just barely begun to use technology.

By analogy -- human-like life forms, like lions and wolves, have developed all kinds of great QED-based techniques for defense and offense, like claws and fangs and so on, but NOT nuclear weapons. One would NOT expect to find nuclear creatures wandering around the earth just yet -- not even nuclear ants and bees, even though ants and bees are otherwise quite capable of terrorist self-sacrifice in war. (Now that I think of it, the fire ant would make a nice symbol for some of the desert terrorist groups. But nuclear fire ants are probably as nonviable, in the end, as trilobites.)

The circumstantial evidence so far (as in the longer email I sent out to the quantum mind folks) is that backwards time effects cannot be exploited usefully in QED, any more than "remote viewing" effects can be -- even if one adopts a theoretical position which takes these effects as part of its foundation.

**IF** one postulates a "soul," a component of the human being which is based on a different kind of physical substrate than is the body and brain, then there is no reason apriori to assume that this soul would be constrained by the same limits as a QED-based biology. Nor is there strong apriori reason to believe it is unconstrained. It is a question mark. It is not really part of science, because science refers to something built on shared, common experience; large parts of the serious scientific community have no conscious experience at all that would support the idea of "soul," let alone ascribe specific characteristics to it.

The evidence regarding QED is still not entirely decisive, as I said in the email, because there are subtle issues of second-order thermodynamics involved. In an ideal world, I would spend some time poking around those issues... but my time is limited, unfortunately. Maybe I'll try a little.

Best of luck, Paul W.