Abstract

This is another one of those “let’s see how we can misuse the insights of modern physics to justify a crackpot theory of the universe” type of books. The most worthy such attempt known to me is. It is difficult to take seriously an author who claims that Nazism is an “astral epidemic”, who sees trinitarian implications in the American constitutional system of checks and balances, who accepts without qualification the statement of another researcher that subjects under the influence of LSD were able to recall events in the womb, who is enthusiastic about reincarnation, going so far as to claim that “…we are living within the vortex of all the previous cultures”, and who alleges that the full meaning of a symbol is to be grasped through meditation that removes the opposition of the cognizer and the cognized, through entering of the essence of the object and complete merging with it”. Skepticism toward any of this, moreover, is treated as a sign of latent mechanism, the product of “…a scornful attitude toward human inner experience”, and analogous to the disbelief which at first greeted the Wright brothers. If you like Jung, particularly the theories of archetypes and collective unconscious, you will love Nalimov. He is a talk show host’s dream: full of stories and experiments [sic] similar to those concocted by Targ and Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s—all of which have been thoroughly discredited by. His sincerity is undeniable; he is just an incredibly bad, or else naive, scientist, at least concerning this motley collection of subjects. He is also prone to gobbledygook, for example: when characterizing the difference between humans and computers, he writes “…an illusion is semantically meaningful. We call this semantics illusory only because we are ignorant of the mechanism of interaction of the unconscious myth-like images with the manifestations of consciousness”. Or, talking about “bimodal distribution functions” for a set of exclusive disjunctions, the author alludes to “…the increasing informational entropy of concepts” which creates “…smoothed bimodality”. Very impressive, but what does it mean in plain English—or plain Russian, if the translator is to blame?