Remote Viewing

This is a truly fascinating subject. Remote viewing is a method that anyone properly trained to perform, can see, feel, touch and taste places and items anywhere in the world or space by simply being given a target. This is not supposed to be based on supernatural abilities but rather scientific principles regarding the human brain and its abilities which are not yet known to Science. Any person can be trained to do that but, like with every other human activity, some people are more capable than others. The remote viewer has no information regarding the target asked to view. He is simply given an alphanumeric code, which is supposed to represent a specific location, and then he is asked to visit this location with his mind and describe what he sees. He uses a pen and paper (or a blackboard), and he writes what he experiences, sometimes answering to specific questions by a person who monitors him.

Is this real or fantasy? Some people claim that it is real, and others say that it does not work and what remote viewers describe is a creation of their imagination. Remote viewing was developed to a specific process in the United States in the seventies by a team of people working for the CIA as part of a top-secret project called Stargate which is no longer classified. A similar project was also active in the Soviet Union but not much information is known about this effort. For these governments to be interested in remote viewing, one must consider the possibility that it is based on a real phenomenon. The American programme was terminated after some time and those involved started teaching the method of remote viewing to anyone interested. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1VX_W32mNM

One of the strange abilities that remote viewers claim to have is to see targets not only in the present but also in the past and in the future. They can be asked to see a target as it is now, but they can also be asked to go back in time and describe it as it was in the past. One can find many different videos on YouTube of remote viewing sessions conducted by people who have been trained in various techniques.

Is there any scientific basis for remote viewing? Certainly not based on our current level of scientific knowledge regarding the way the human brain works. Remote viewers think that what they do is to mentally travel to the location of the target and then experience it. They leave their physical body and travel, a process that some people call astral projection. The problems with this idea are the following:

1. What is it that leaves the body and travels? Is it the soul? Is it the consciousness? But, if this is the case, and before we get into the question of what the soul and consciousness are, we have another problem. If it leaves the body how come the remote viewer keeps on living and thinking as before? If his soul or consciousness leave the body, then surely, he can no longer be alive.
2. If what leaves the body is travelling to the target, then it cannot move faster than the speed of light and so how is it possible for a remote viewer to visit locations light years away from Earth instantly? And how does it travel in time while sending information to the remote viewer back on Earth instantly?

If remote viewing is indeed possible then I think that we should look for different explanations such as the following:

1. The fabric of space and time is more complicated than what we currently know. Perhaps, every single space-time location is somehow connected with every other space-time location in the Universe so that one could, in theory, access information about any space-time point from any other space-time point instantly. If this is true, then there is no reason for a soul or consciousness to physically move to some specific location in order to see what is there. The remote viewer can simply tap into the information he seeks from any other location in space-time.
2. The human brain has abilities we are not yet aware of. We can see and measure the brain’s chemical, electrical and electromagnetic operations and we can even affect them using drugs for the purpose of curing mental problems not only related to the brain tissue but also its electrical activity. What if the brain has some other activities which are not chemical or electrical, but they involve operations at a quantum level? What if the human brain can tap into an information gateway at quantum level and therefore be capable of extracting data from there?

Assumptions 1 and 2 make scientific sense to me since they do not use any supernatural concepts and they are not violating any known laws of Physics. Such an explanation could also be the basis for explaining many other brain activities that some people claim to have with no need to reference the paranormal or supernatural to explain them.

Remote viewing sessions are conducted so that the remote viewer has no prior knowledge about the selected target which could be absolutely anything and at any time period. Under these conditions the remote viewer cannot be influenced by the target chosen for him to examine and start imagining things. He must first demonstrate the ability to identify the true target and then provide information about it. I have seen remote viewing sessions on YouTube where the remote viewer is given a target in space, such as an asteroid, and asked to describe what he sees. In these cases, the remote viewer quickly realises that he is looking at an object that has no atmosphere and then starts describing the rock formations and other characteristics that can be seen on photographs obtained by spacecraft sent for planetary exploration with a high level of detail and accuracy. According to some remote viewers who have conducted sessions on Mars and its history, the planet was once inhabited by intelligent beings, but it was destroyed and became uninhabitable by some type of nuclear catastrophe.

A very interesting aspect of remote viewing is the fact that the remote viewer is not given any specific or even vague information regarding the target but instead he is simply presented with an alphanumeric code which has been associated with the selected target. This could simply be a combination of letters and numbers chosen in random by the person who provides this code to the remote viewer that he has created for the target he has in mind. The target could be a photograph of a specific location hidden from the remote viewer with this code written in the envelope it contains it. It could also be a code one obtains from a web site which has prepared a set of targets for remote viewers to experiment with and test their abilities. There is nothing in this code that somehow defines the identity of a target e.g., GPS coordinates, date, encrypted code for the name of the location etc. It is a truly random number. The only correlation between the code and the target is the result of someone’s decision to make this correlation, and this could even be a computer generated code for each location name or photograph it contains in its archives. Based on this, it is difficult for someone to explain how the remote viewer identifies the target. Something must direct him to extract information from whatever is available out there but only for the target of interest and not something else. Of course, if someone tries to explain a strange phenomenon like remote viewing using the supernatural or the paranormal as the basis of the explanation then he explains nothing. In any case, if remote viewing truly works, I think that this is a subject that deserves research by scientists of many different disciplines and at the same time by people who know how to identify scammers.

The purpose of a remote viewing session is not just to correctly identify the target but to analyse it. The remote viewer is supposed to be able to get inside the target, if that makes sense, describe parts of the target not visible by people, see if there are people or other entities inside and even receive impressions regarding their state, thoughts and feelings at the specified time period. The information he supplies can also relate to the known senses such as visual or auditory impressions and even taste and the feeling one gets from touching the target with his hands. As if some yet unknown part of the brain communicates with something that either contains the requested data or it can access it in some manner. I can only imagine a quantum level operation as the way for the brain to obtain information on such very different targets spread all over space and time. I suspect that the key for the remote viewing process, and perhaps other phenomena we have seen in the past regarding people with knowledge they cannot possibly have, is a property of our physical reality we can simply call an information field, as paramount and basic as space and time.

We are interested in ways to manipulate and use information from a technological perspective but we have not considered the possibility that information is something built into our natural world and therefore it must be considered together with space and time in order to be able to form a complete and accurate picture of the physical reality. If there is substance to the remote viewing process and the claims of people knowing things they are not supposed to, then perhaps for anything that exists in space and time there is also data that describes, or even defines it, stored in an information field. This process is similar to the way computer programmes work. For any object that one sees on the computer screen there is some piece of code in a programme running in the background that fully describes it for the CPU and GPU to be able to generate it. There is nothing on a computer screen that is not the result of some code running in the computer. Now, there are two ways for someone to observe an object displayed on the computer screen:

1. Look at the computer screen. That means that one has to physically move to the location of the monitor and using his eyes directly see and experience the computer-generated object of interest.
2. If you are an experienced programmer, then you can examine the source code running on the computer and find the programming instructions which create the object in question. Then using your imagination, you can reconstruct in your mind the object displayed on the screen. Of course, this image being the creation of the mind cannot be as detailed and exact to the real one displayed on the computer screen, but it can be close enough.

This seems to be compatible with the way remote viewing appears to be working. The human brain somehow manages to tap into the information field, the code that describes the physical world, and then using its facilities and senses it tries to interpret and reconstruct the physical reality in the mind of the remote viewer. For this to happen the human brain must have an organ capable of doing that, an additional sensor to the sensors we know we have. For example, the eyes are sensors that receive electromagnetic radiation, a small part of the full spectrum, and then the mind interprets the received data by reconstructing a visual image which reveals the physical world around us. Perhaps our brain contains yet another sensor, which we currently are not aware of, which can access this basic property of the physical world, the information field. We could describe this information field as the software behind the physical reality, the definition of anything in space and time including the physical laws. It is possible that we all have this sensor in our brains, although some people either have the sensor working better than others, or they have the ability to better process the data coming from this sensor, or both. In any case, this sensor must operate in the same manner as the other sensors of the brain. It must be able to send the data it collects for processing so that the brain can then reconstruct an image or create sensory reactions. It is quite possible that this is a capability of the brain developed by the process of natural selection and it represents an evolution of our species. Perhaps this is already the case for advanced species on other planets and this is what they use for visiting far away locations and establishing contact with other civilisations.

If a remote viewer is capable of looking at events of the past and the future by accessing an information field, then this field must contain a description of the current and previous states of physical reality but also data regarding the possible states in future times. Then, a remote viewer would be able to mentally reconstruct the past and even provide an impression of a possible or most probable future. I think that what quantum theory describes is the fact that chance and randomness are elements built into the natural reality at its smallest scale and therefore the future is not fixed and it cannot be predicted with accuracy. Given enough information we may be able to predict probable future events but not with 100% certainty as the future is always in flux. I would think that a physical reality that can be precisely predicted is one that cannot be affected by anything including decisions and actions of intelligent beings. In this case I see no purpose in the Universe, life or anything for that matter. But of course, trying to find purpose is a human way of thinking which may have nothing to do with reality. Although certain predictions are possible because they have a very high value of probability there are other predictions that we are unable to make with confidence and therefore we can think of possible future timelines, but we cannot say which one we will eventually follow. So, all a remote viewer should be able to do is follow the currently most probable timeline and describe what he sees but we must always keep in mind the fact that this may very well change, and we may end up in a different timeline.

As for Physics, it would be an amazing discovery to learn how this information field defines physical reality in combination to space and time. In a computer the software code is executed by a processor which performs the operations that the software describes. So, what is the equivalent of the CPU for the case of the physical reality? What is reading the information field and then generates the physical world? Perhaps this is a two way process: the information field is both read and written at the same time in order to always have a complete description of the physical reality. The reading process, together with the application of the physical laws, results in the creation of reality while the writing process records the generated reality in the information field.

It is possible to use this concept in order to explain various paranormal phenomena such as ghosts. A ghost is supposed to be a dead person who haunts the house he used to live. So, the people who now live in this house report seeing this person in some strange form, a clear indication that he is not part of the physical reality. But since the person lived there we can assume that his presence and actions were recorded in the information fabric of the physical reality and so someone with special mental abilities could be capable of accessing this recording and process it with his mind and senses. And the result is to have a visual representation of what we call a ghost as well as the hearing of peculiar sounds and voices. Perhaps, this is an ability that only a few people have because of a special sensor in their brain which is capable of reading the information field or perhaps anyone can see these ghosts because something makes the recorded information to start playing back generating objects from the past as a kind of a physical anomaly.

Is it possible to build a machine capable of performing remote viewing sessions? Can we design a device with the ability to access the information field, read it and then interpret it so that the requested target can be presented on some computer screen without having the raw data filtered by the human brain? If we can identify the physical mechanism behind remote viewing I think that the creation of such a device is possible. It would allow us to examine in detail past events and therefore provide answers to many questions we have regarding historical events. But it will also allow us to predict possible future events and make plans to avoid mistakes which can lead to major catastrophes.

There is one thing in remote viewing that I find really strange: there are cases when the remote viewer looks at a target in the past and during the session he sees a person there who suddenly realises the fact that he is being observed by a remote viewer from the future and he reacts. How is such a thing possible? It is equivalent to travelling to the past, make your presence there known by doing something and then return back. Is this an event that can change the future? The fact that you did something in the past must surely have an effect to the timeline and cause a chain of changes. Then, what is the case with remote viewing the past and making your presence known, even if this is only a mental process? Does it have the potential to change the current timeline?

There are those who explain the remote viewing process in terms of consciousness. The assumption is that consciousness is something external to the human body and its biological structure so that it can survive death and travel away from the body. This is simply a modern redefinition of the religious idea of a soul coupled with quantum physics as the assumption is that consciousness operates on the principle of non-locality and therefore it can perceive objects in the physical reality beyond the known restrictions of space and time. The problem I have with this description is the concept of consciousness as being something separate from the brain. Consciousness is essentially the feeling we have of being individual beings, independent from the environment, who are alive and capable of experiencing the world with our senses. It is the feeling of being an external and separate observer of the physical reality while being able to communicate with other similarly independent observers. Our current knowledge indicates that consciousness is a creation of our brain and therefore it can be affected by its operation. For example, when we use drugs to put our brain to sleep for an operation we do not dream and we have no concept of time. We simply switch off and on again in the blink of an eye as we recover from the effects of the drug. When we use hallucinogenic drugs then our brain finds itself in a different world, an artificial environment of our wild imagination. Of course, there are those who believe that under these conditions the brain accesses realms of reality beyond our physical world but there is no proof for that. In any case, our consciousness seems to be affected by the operation of our brain and therefore it is more likely a creation of the mind rather than a separate property.

Is remote viewing real or a creation of our imagination? I hope that one day scientists take this subject seriously and perform a proper investigation because it has the potential for a deeper understanding of Physics and our place in the Universe.