Pluribus, An Apple+ Show: The Science and Metaphysics

In the TV series Pluribus, scientists receive a coded message from space that ends up being a formula for a virus like substance that infects people upon contact. Within a short time nearly all of mankind is infected with a weird hive mind that both keeps people in constant telepathic contact with one another and suppresses individuality. The infected people talk as one voice and appear to be happy and considerate, not willing to harm any living things or the immune individuals who resisted the infection.

As a parapsychology journalist, I couldn’t help but compare that to the actual science. How does this scenario of all of mankind merging its consciousness into a single mind and how does it stack up against what we know of psychic ability and biology? Is it even possible to do something like this?

Let’s get into it:

The scenario given to us in this show necessitates a universe where consciousness is fundamental to reality because telepathy doesn’t exist in a material universe. While the show suggests that EM fields are responsible for the connection, this is a physical impossibility. The human body doesn’t emit waves strong enough to be received over many miles; only telepathy can serve this function because of its non local nature. A conscious universe also adds some dimensions to the telepathy that the show doesn’t and probably never will cover. This also requires the brain to operate as a filter of consciousness, not as a generator of it.

The Brain is Wired for Telepathy

It’s entirely conceivable that the brain could be wired for this kind of massive increase in telepathy. Counterintuitively, you don’t enhance parts of the brain to do this, you suppress them. Psychedelics do this, there are studies of people with specific brain damage and researchers have also induced temporary suppression of the left medial middle frontal lobe and that has been shown to increase psychic ability. But all this comes with serious caveats, which I will address later.

Since the series describes the conversion as reversible, we know that the virus thingy is suppressing, not destroying, that part of the brain. Since psychedelics already do something like this, it’s not entirely out of the question for some sci fi engineering feat to pull this off. The virus thingy also leaves the infected unable to cope with strong emotions. This is a realistic effect of increasing psychic ability. The virus thingy is massively reducing some filtering that the mind normally does, and it could conceivably have a side effect of removing the filtering (aka shielding) that we do with other people when they have strong unpleasant emotions, which could explain the hive’s strong reaction to Carol’s anger and pain.

Pluribus Veers Off into Sci Fi

When it comes to completely suppressing the personalities of all these people and disconnecting their consciousness from their bodies while also enhancing their psychic ability, that’s where things veer off into Sci Fi magic. Humans aren’t designed to operate with a hive mind like termites or bees. (In termites this is called Swarm Cognition. Some informal experiments suggest a psychic connection.) There are very few different types of hive minds in nature and all of those species survive by having a lot of different hives. Most insects, reptiles, birds, fish and mammals are hard wired to have individual agency which means that it’s a fundamental part of the wiring of the minds of most creatures. Hives are a different evolutionary track entirely. The Pluribus virus thingy would have no ancient part of the mind to alter. There’s never been anything there to tinker with.

​In the show, the Hive members act like people with individual agency while not actually having it. They retain the memories and abilities of people who are disconnected from their bodies. According to theories where consciousness is fundamental to reality, the brain acts as a filter which means that the hive mind is using billions of consciousness filters, all with quite a bit of variety, as its input and somehow channeling this into a single overarching mind that processes all of it into a single thought pattern. This bit of sci fi magic reminds me of a quote from Time Magazine when Michael Okuda was asked how Heisenberg Compensators worked on Star Trek. He replied, “Very well, thank you.” It’s the same sort of thing on Pluribus.

This is a TV show though, and these things are absolutely allowed because the objective isn’t perfect scientific accuracy, it’s entertainment. What the show accomplishes is that it allows us to see science from a different angle by asking the question, “What if?” And then follow it up with the question, “Is this even possible?” And we can then have a look at what would happen in real life if something like the virus in Pluribus actually did exist and this is where it gets interesting.

Enhanced Connectedness and Telepathy

Does giving people extreme telepathy greatly enhance their feelings of connectedness? Are those things related? Is it joyful? There are people who have had near death experiences and others who have had intense psychedelic experiences who report back these types of experiences and feelings. There are also scientific theories such as Morphic Resonance that explore collective consciousness and experiments that show effects of collective consciousness. The show is not pulling this stuff out of thin air. But people also come back from these experiences with their individual agency completely intact.

The reality of kludging a hive mind onto a human brain is that it would never work as flawlessly as it does on the show if it could be done at all. As I mentioned earlier, humans have no built-in biological mechanism to support that kind of suppression of self within a greater consciousness, and we would therefore expect all sorts of weird reactions to it because a substantial number of people would never completely disassociate from their bodies.

Our consciousness and our bodies are arguably fine tuned for each other and some of the individuals that make up the collective would almost certainly resist the suppression of their agency. This would probably occur without outside assistance.

The show does a good job of showing the downsides of the entire human race acting with one (very passive aggressive) mind. The fate of the entire human race in Pluribus depends on a mind with 100% intelligence and 0% wisdom. ​(An interesting choice by the showrunners. The Hive cannot harm any living thing. As all creatures require the consumption of things that live or lived to survive, this poses the problem of starvation in the show.)

The Wisdom Problem in Pluribus

It is a problem that people with agency would easily solve, but the Hive mind does not seem to be able to manage it. Wisdom is a holistic, right-brained type of intelligence; it requires the ability to take a step back and see the big picture, weigh priorities and make hard decisions. The Hive mind however, can’t refuse any request from the uninfected no matter how destructive, leading to the conclusion that it can’t use the collective wisdom of the entire human race to perform basic reasoning tasks.

Perhaps the show is deliberately demonstrating a serious drawback of removing consciousness from it’s tether to individual bodies. Or perhaps this collection of individual minds cannot cope with hearing everyone and feeling everything all at once. That is a known problem of connectedness. While a lot of people seek out feelings of overwhelming connectedness, there are a not an insignificant number of people out there struggling to turn it off.

The hive mind is necessarily made up of the minds of all of humanity because otherwise it would not have access to everyone’s memories, experience and expertise. The people are still “in there” so to speak, so it stands to reason that they are going to react in different ways to being part of the Hive.

Now I finally come back to the problem of having truly strong telepathic ability: it comes with some very interesting side effects. Telepathy has no material basis; it is not a signal like EM waves. It appears to be instantaneous and does not appear to be affected by distance or obstructions. This is why current theories are consciousness, not material based. It demonstrates a deeper reality beyond time and space where information, not objects, are fundamental to reality. The reason I bring this up is that this doesn’t stop at telepathy. Precognition, psychometry, mediumship, ghosts and other non physical beings and the like all come into play. The hive mind would be aware of discarnate souls and non human telepathic beings. Once psychic ability is going full blast it’s far more than mere telepathy, it’s the whole ball of wax.

The Real Telepathic People

We have a group of people right now that communicate telepathically with each other. They are non speaking autistic people, who are intelligent, but lack much control over their bodies and whose paths to communication are otherwise very limited. Some of them use spelling boards, (which I’ve discussed in this article) and what they have to say tells us quite a lot about all the things that come with telepathy. This all comes to us via Ky Dickens and her wildly popular Telepathy Tapes podcast.

I think that this is what makes Pluribus popular. It speaks to a reality that deep inside we already know about. On the one hand we want to be part of it, but on the other hand it comes with the existential fear of losing ourselves in it. We are drawn in by the joy of the deep connectedness, but it is also the death of the self. Personally, I am fascinated by this show and its metaphysical implications.

The Practical Side of a Conscious Universe

This article is a follow-up to the recently published: Your reality is in fact, a conscious universe

We are used to seeing our universe as something physical, that always behaves in predictable, physical ways which we can describe with math and physics. And we depend on things staying that way, such as with the fundamental physical constants and our morning coffee.

But we have minds, which can throw quite the wrench into our tidy vision of a physical universe. As I described in my previous article, our universe, the one we experience, cannot be physical in the way we understand it. A better explanation is that we seem to have a physical reality scaffolding over a timeless, spaceless reality, which means that separateness isn’t a fundamental property of the universe.

Everything is Entangled

The only explanation that we are left with, when all else has been ruled out, is that our physical reality can best be described as a collective product of consciousness and the most likely explanation of its seeming permanence is that our entangled connectedness with everything is what holds our physical reality together. It’s not something that we individually created, and we cannot easily alter the established rules of our physical reality because it’s bigger than us.

We currently have a kind of ad hoc way of dealing with our reality that mostly works. We tend to act as though we’re in a completely physical world, but with exceptions here and there.

For example, the events of our lives aren’t normally arranged chronologically in our memories, but rather by their importance to us, be it positive or negative. Places that we have visited seem close, those we have never visited seem farther away. Our minds easily soar with imagination, and we regularly deal in concepts utterly foreign to our physical world such as time travel and magic. The mind isn’t as closely tethered to our physical existence as we tend to think.

We Act Like our Universe is Conscious

This leaves us with all sorts of practical inconsistencies and the universe can seem chaotic and nonsensical if we’re not working from a good model. To start with, our minds are not wired for a strictly physical reality. Our eyes get fooled by perspective, by assumptions and expectations and by optical illusions. Our sense of time and space is quite malleable as is our hearing and taste. Sometimes it all just mashes together, such as with synesthesia.

This ability for our senses to be fooled is often used as an argument against the paranormal; the assumption being that “believers” are fooling themselves, (with the rather arrogant assumption that debunkers are somehow immune to this), but it’s actually an indication that everyone’s view of reality is inseparable from their values, attitudes, ideas and beliefs. We can all look at the same things, but they are very colored by our individual perceptions of them, sometimes to the point where people can’t agree on what they are seeing.

This is predicted if reality is consciousness based: we are unable to separate reality from our own consciousness because they are the same thing. It’s not weird, it’s normal.

The Practical Side of a Conscious Universe

This brings me to the point of this article. Assuming that our physical universe is made of consciousness, so what? At first glance this seems about as important as debating the usefulness of lightsabers and whether a non-force user should ever use one. I have strong opinions on this, but are those opinions really worth sharing? I think not.

A conscious universe isn’t an important concept to anyone without an advanced degree in nerdiness unless it comes with practical applications. Does knowing that the universe is conscious change anything? Yes it does.

Different Fundamental Assumptions

In a physical universe, the following assumptions usually come along for the ride:

1. Determinism: Everything, including human action, is ultimately determined by external causes and not free will.
2. Separateness: Our thoughts are completely separate from other people and the physical reality around us.
3. Randomness: Events in our lives are often random and beyond our control. i.e. life happens to us, and we have little control over it.
4. Mechanistic Reality: Only physical reality is real and that the mind is illusory.
5. Life is purposeless: Meaning is illusory and life doesn’t happen for a reason.

In a conscious universe, the assumptions are different:

1. Free Will: We decide our future. It is not predetermined.
2. Entanglement: Everything and everyone is connected.
3. Intent, conscious and subconscious: Our will, both conscious and subconscious, play an important role in what happens in our lives.
4. Information Reality: Reality is information/consciousness and physical reality is part of that.
5. Life has purpose: Life creates its own purpose and meaning.

We live in a universe full of meaning and purpose. We do not live for no reason; we do not experience our lives for no reason, we do not have emotions for no reason. We are constantly learning, growing and changing and to a certain extent, we decide what is meaningful for us. The world is not an inherently cold and sterile place; it’s what we choose to make of it.

Thoughts Have Power

The most important realization of a conscious universe is that our thoughts have a certain amount of power. Our values, attitudes, ideas and beliefs have an impact on our lives and the lives of those around us. The connectedness of everything shields us from the worst of our thoughts, but does not shield us from all of it all the time. Persistent belief and intent will gradually steer us in that direction and keep us there.

We are part of a unified, collective consciousness and our own free will within it isn’t absolute, but more like a negotiation within the connection. The farther we stray from the expected norm, the more difficult the task is to accomplish.

Using this model of reality can help us adjust our expectations with our lives and decide where to put our energy. Instead of seeing the universe as a random, brutal place where we have little agency to change things, or imagining that our every thought brings us fairies and unicorns if we just believe hard enough, we instead find ourselves in a world where change is difficult, but not impossible. Persistence, intent and resolve will move the needle over time.

Positive Thinking Isn’t How It Works

Positive thinking, then, doesn’t automatically lead to fame and riches, but rather we each have our own starting points that go in the direction of our values, attitudes and beliefs, and we need to change those, (a fairly difficult task) in order for things to change for us. A super rich person might become significantly less wealthy through bad decisions or a poor person might work their way up to living comfortably, but the super rich don’t become poor and the poor don’t become super rich except for the extremely rare outlier.

An easier example to perhaps understand is that we get the romantic partners that reflect us. Our values, attitudes, ideas and beliefs lead us to people who match us in those areas. People with a strong sense of self-worth tend to find themselves with partners who share that attribute. Likewise, low self-worth leads to low self-worth partners.

You are generally not going to find any long term pairings of people who are not equal in emotional stability and maturity. There are, of course, outliers. There are always outliers.

We will tend to find ourselves either rising or sinking to our normal state of affairs and changing that will typically be rather slow. Nor are we exempt from the realities of the society in which we live because that is part of our own collective consciousness. Thriving in a society where most people live in a struggle is harder than living in a society where people normally thrive.

Information, Not Physical Objects

In a conscious universe, it’s more accurate to say that we’re dealing with information rather than physical objects, which explains a lot of paranormal phenomena. Telepathy? We’re all connected, so this is to be expected and is probably constant on a subconscious level. Clairvoyance? Precognition? Our minds are timeless and spaceless, so it’s just a matter of accessing that information. Hauntings? Information embedded in physical objects that not everyone is aware of. Ghosts and apparitions? Consciousness that either projects while someone is alive or possibly dead.

Reincarnation? Consciousness is fundamental, so survival of death is assumed, rather than something that “breaks physics.” Synchronicity? Well, we’re all connected, so that sort of thing is to be expected sometimes. The placebo effect? It would be predicted.

A benefit of correctly identifying consciousness as fundamental to reality is that we stop dismissing experiences that don’t match materialism’s expectations. Because information and experience are basically our reality, we no longer question their existence or importance. We move on to the practical application of the knowledge.

It’s All About Connectedness

Connectedness tells us something important about our place in the world. We’re all in the same lifeboat and what we do affects other people just as surely as what they do affects us. Working together will produce the best results over time and working against each other will produce worse results. Society functions better when we recognize the connectedness.

Introduction to Zeta Communications

For the past several years, we have accumulated a number of interviews with extraterrestrial beings speaking through Paul Hamden, the medium. To make a connection, beings from the Zeta race create a preparatory state for Paul. When he enters into this state, they take over and the Zeta or another ET speaks through him using his speech apparatus. Most often the ET is from the Zeta race, but other races come through as well. Each brings a distinct energy into the room that even some sitters can distinguish. Of all the races, the Zeta beings bring the most information and will answer almost any question they are asked. The complexity and consistency of the responses are part of the evidence an outsider can use to judge whether or not the contact is an external entity.
Unusual phenomena associated with the Zetas offer further evidence that they are not merely the expression of a suppressed personality. When he was younger Paul was visited up close, in the presence of witnesses, by aRead more...