After the first Patreon prize draw in February, I was excited to announce the winner, Dr. Ian J. Thompson, a theoretical physicist who also happens to hold rather heretical views on the relationship between science and ‘magic’. After all, one central theme of Forbidden Histories is the problem of continuity: Contrary to popular notions according to which past examples of scientifically minded ‘occultists’ such as John Dee (the protagonist of the book of which Ian has won a copy) are mere anachronisms, the historical record shows a fairly unbroken line of entanglements of elite science with the ‘supernatural’.
Ian Thompson himself is an admirer of Emanuel Swedenborg – another major historical figure in which elite science and belief in empirically tangible transcendental realities has converged –, and Ian’s own case as a cutting-edge nuclear physicist who openly expresses highly unorthodox views is too interesting to simply pass over. I am therefore grateful for the opportunity of this informal Q&A session with Ian, who is willing to be interviewed by other historians and scholars of science and magic for more formally academic purposes (interested colleagues may email him at Ian AT kernz DOT org).
Biosketch: Ian is a New Zealand-born former professor of physics at the University of Surrey in the UK, and currently works at the Nuclear Theory and Modeling Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA. He has published around 240 articles in refereed journals, is the author (with Filomena M. Nunes) of Nuclear Reactions for Astrophysics (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and contributed the chapter on Coulomb functions to the new National Institute of Standards and Technology Handbook of Mathematical Functions. Ian is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London, and of the American Physical Society, and he has served on editorial boards of various nuclear and particle physics journals. His views on science and spirituality are expounded in two books, Philosophy of Nature and Quantum Reality (2010), and Starting Science From God: Rational Scientific Theories from Theism (2011). His personal website is http://www.ianthompson.org
.AS: What came first, your love of physics or Swedenborg?
IJT: The love of physics came first, since I had no religious background as a child: my parents were reacting against the religion of their parents. In my teenage years, I was fascinated by artificial intelligence, and tried to model thought processes on computers in 1971-2. But I soon realized the defects of relying on rules, so I started thinking about neural networks, but then again realized that this was all about ‘structure’ at the cost of mental ‘content’. I began reading the many books about parapsychology etc. that were common in that decade, including an article by Wilson van Dusen on Swedenborg.
Swedenborg promised to provide a mechanism (‘correspondences’) to link structure with mental content, so I read as much of him as I could. About this time (1975) I began my PhD research on quantum theory of nuclear reactions, so had also to learn naturalistic physics in earnest. After a while, my reading of Swedenborg was influencing my interpretations in physics, and my interest in physics was making me get more ideas out of Swedenborg. (I have also written a longer summary of these transitions that I can send to interested readers if they email me.)
AS: You make no secret of your beliefs and are the author of two books on science and spirituality. What are some of the typical responses by fellow scientists who learn of your convictions?
IJT: It is rather strange, or perhaps amusing, that my fellow scientists never appear to have learned of my other convictions! I would be happy to debate them, but there is never a need. I do discuss my ideas from Swedenborg with members of the Presbyterian church we go to (this is liberal Presbyterianism, which is not based on confessions or doctrine), and they are mostly interested, as long as I avoid the areas of conflict (such as about the Trinity or about Swedenborg himself). I have given a series of evening classes and discussions on my Starting Science From God book, but they rather easily forget the new ideas.
AS: How would you respond to folks who worry that your open advocacy of theological views might violate secular and naturalistic principles of scientific practice?
IJT: There is some worry from the religion side, that if I link science and theological concepts I might remove people’s freedom to have whatever religion they want. There is little complaint from the scientific side – but this could well be due to the fact that I only talk of these ideas to people who take the initiative to talk to me. Also, I am interested especially in the causal connections that link mind and body, so for me the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement does not go far enough.
AS: Have you ever had any unusual first-hand experiences which you felt supported your beliefs?
IJT: No, sadly. I am someone who concentrates on thinking and rational principles, and I believe the wider ideas because they all fit together rationally. (So I think the parts of my ideas are like parts of rock, not parts of sand – to use a well-known parable). I have had no visions or other transcendental experiences. My only ‘first-hand experiences’ are in creativity and thinking of new ideas. I find I can pose questions I want solved, and if I start writing out some beginnings of ideas that occur to me, this is the start of a thread that often leads to the answers I wanted (or, more strictly: those answers I need that I am capable of understanding). I think many people can do this. Occasionally to start with, lots of ideas come at once in a little ‘peak experience’, but such crowding is not always helpful. And sometimes, in lucid-dreaming states, I have conversed with someone who has offered me useful advice on what to do and write, and what not to do, but I do not know who or what they were.
AS: There is a strong but usually unchecked tendency to view empirical investigations of ‘occult’ phenomena by elite scientists as inherently motivated by spiritual or religious concerns. While investigations of spiritualism by physicists like William Crookes and Oliver Lodge certainly ended with their conviction that some of the alleged phenomena required a spiritual explanation, others such as Marie and Pierre Curie seemed primarily motivated by a wish to expand human understanding of the laws of physics. Again others, like the Nobel Laureate in physiology and outspoken atheist Charles Richet, came to firmly believe in the reality of most ‘psychic’ phenomena, but explicitly rejected spiritual explanations – a position that’s still fairly widespread among scientists reporting positive findings in parapsychology. How would you respond to such secular or positivist approaches to reported ‘occult’ phenomena?
IJT: To start with, it was dissatisfaction with naturalistic accounts of minds and thinking that drove me to investigate a wider range of alternatives. I had somehow the guiding principle that ‘hidden in the counter-cultures, there are good ideas that need to be found’. It was only after still being dissatisfied (about 1978) that I decided to read Swedenborg again from his point of view. That process led me to a more religious position than ever before.
Still, it is possible to have a psychology with only structures and not conscious content, especially if you can describe at least some of the causes which produce changes in the structures. This is the ‘naturalistic’ project common today. I think there will always be a ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, and can even imagine a recalcitrant scientist finding himself surviving death, only to try to describe beings in a spiritual world as non-conscious zombie-like systems of energy and force. One of my grandfathers might be a candidate: the one whose bible was Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer himself had a near-death experience, but repudiated its significance. Likewise, if my grandfather is still around ‘on the other side’, I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried to makes sense of his continued existence within a strictly physicalist framework.
AS: You are exceptional in yet another respect, i.e. you have published in the (mainstream) philosophy of science. Why would you disagree with the famous verdict attributed to Richard Feynman, according to which the philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds?
IJT: Much philosophy of science is, indeed, the classification of methods of conventional science. But in 1972 in my final undergraduate year at Auckland, I took a first-year philosophy unit as extra, and was treated to Paul Feyerabend for one winter term when he visited during the northern summer.
AS: You attended lectures by Feyerabend? What was he like as a teacher?
IJT: Paul Feyerabend came for the winter term at Auckland University (for his summer salary I presume), and lectured twice a week for 10 weeks to the first-year philosophy class. The other philosophy professors came to the lectures too, but Feyerabend was unlike any of them in talking without notes, and taking delight in explaining, for example, how the early modern discourse on witchcraft was just as rational as the science of Galileo. Maybe more so, when he compared the theoretical and observational details in Malleus Maleficarum with Galileo’s predictions, which amazingly predicted only one tide per day! Obviously wrong, but Galileo never admitted it.
This was the time of Feyerabend writing his book Against Method. He took delight in showing us that philosophy of science often just followed science, because scientists made up their methods as needed when they went along. Many of the arguments of scientists were more rhetorical than logical, he demonstrated, and certainly did not follow just the evidence of the senses. That was very useful for me breaking out of unnecessary constraints. That is, from him I realized I should never be constrained by any rigid methods from philosophy if I want to make new science.
Later, however, I found that ideas in philosophy – especially metaphysics and ontology – are very useful if they are thought out and argued clearly. I guess I was impressed by the clear logical structures of Aquinas’ writings (even if I did not agree with his premises). I still think that ideas such as substance and form, cause and effect, potentiality and actuality, desire and planning and acting, love and wisdom and action, are good products of philosophy. All need to be within a consistent overall framework of philosophy. That kind of ontology is philosophy that is very useful in advancing the science I want to do. To Feyerabend, I would say that I should be free to choose which rules or framework to follow.
AS: Feyerabend has been a big influence on my work as a historian of science as well. After all, his and Thomas Kuhn’s exposures of certain sacred but unhelpful myths of scientific practice were based on the study of history. By reconstructing the ‘occult’ past of science as it happened (opposed to how it is widely supposed to have happened), I try to follow similar methodologically maxims. But my impression is that most people simply don’t want to talk about these things, unless specific findings happen to confirm their own prior beliefs or disbeliefs. How did you come across Forbidden Histories, and why did you choose to become a patron?
IJT: I found your blog posts using Google alerts for various keywords, many of which occurred on your pages! I was very interested in your presentations, but puzzled about your own position. Eventually I think I saw your desire to understand the historical connections between naturalistic and non-naturalistic streams of thought. Understanding those connections I see as valuable investigations that should be supported. If you are truthful, what you produce will be informative to both sides.
AS: I appreciate your caution. A lot of people seem puzzled about my position, which I think is why I’m struggling to find an audience. In a nutshell, without at all denying that the question whether there might be something to ‘real magic’ is fundamental for an understanding of ourselves and the world we live in, I don’t think it’s the only meaningful question we can ask. My own journey actually started when I had some weird experiences as a teenager, and the following decades during which I tried to make sense of them put me through a wide spectrum of positions ranging from uncritical belief to extreme scepticism. During these years I experienced more than once how painful and emotionally distressing a loss of meaning and orientation can be, which belief as well as programmatic disbelief can provide. And both can produce serious blind spots.
Studying the history of science and magic has taught me that such blind spots can become part and parcel of whole cultures, and are usually based on unquestioning acceptances of supposed authority. It has also convinced me that if we want to stand a chance of overcoming outdated science-magic ‘conflict’ narratives, we need to actively learn to put ourselves in the shoes of those whose positions we might not immediately understand. So apart from your support of Forbidden Histories, I’m grateful for this opportunity to better understand your story and way of being in the world.
IJT: It would be nice if there were no conflicts, but there are still discrepancies between various belief systems that are real, even if erroneous ‘conflict narratives’ had not been invented. The devil is in the details. Naturalistic, non-naturalistic and in-between theories give rise still to different kinds of details. The challenge of science is to see which provides the most logical, coherent, and useful explanations. We have work to do.
© 2019 Ian J. Thompson & Andreas Sommer
Fascinating conversation! Thanks for letting us “listen in.”
Troy