A box of crackers features the tagline, “Conscious eating.” An artistic subgroup embraces the Burning Man ethos: “Conscious music.” This self-declared genre arises from the same set that talks about techniques for “higher consciousness.” In every instance, the sentiment is obvious: my product is better than yours because there's something deeper going on over here.
Consciousness, from their perspective, is like a ladder descending into an unfathomable abyss. This depth can be penetrated, through meditation, through breathing exercises or austerities, through faith or sheer willpower or a combination of the two, or through, apparently, eating crackers. For some, higher consciousness is handed down at birth, from a past life, or bestowed by a teacher, as in the Indian idea of shaktipat. Whatever the method, everyday consciousness only scratches the surface. Something deeper exists, waiting to be mined by the steadfast observer.
A deep sigh of relief washed over me when reading that Nick Chater called the notion of higher consciousness “nonsense on stilts.” The British behavioral scientist doesn’t mince words in his new book, The Mind is Flat. While many believe consciousness to be a hidden mystery few can access, Chater's take on this evolutionary phenomenon is quite pedestrian. What you see is effectively what you get.
No amount of therapy, dream analysis, word association, experiment or brain-scanning can recover a person’s ‘true motives,’ not because they are difficult to find, but because there is nothing to find. The inner, mental world, and the beliefs, motives, and fears it is supposed to contain is, itself, a work of the imagination.
This is not shocking if you consider consciousness in its most fundamental regard. By definition, consciousness is simply what you’re paying attention to at the moment, which can amount to no more than four or five things. You can refine from there: the goal of meditation, for example, is to focus on one thing—a mantra, a candle flame, your breathing, something basic and accessible. Whether you’re an expert meditator or chronic multitasker, the effects on consciousness are physiological, not mystical.
Yet that’s not how we feel, which is why Chater’s book is likely to rattle many mental cages. An emotion, he says, is an interpretation of a physiological change in your body. He’s not the first thinker to posit this; Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote an entire book on this topic. While this will not square well with those who claim they know something to be true because they feel it, Chater’s point should not be dismissed. Anecdotal interpretations have the habit of often being wrong.
We actually have a limited set of feelings. Think about the innumerable issues that cause a stomach to churn. Context matters, and in this sense, our brain contextualizes the physical sensations based on past experiences. Memory is fluid but based on prior events. Essentially, Chater states that we're just making it all up as we go along.
We crave narrative and go to great lengths to fill in incomplete stories regardless of the validity of assumptions being made. This is why Chater thinks the role of psychotherapy is dated. He calls the Jungian notion of a collective unconscious “the astrology of psychology,” rather fitting given that Jung speculated that UFOs are psychic projections from our hidden collective drive. To Chater, comparing Jungian analysis to psychology is akin to relating astrology to astronomy. One exploits patterns of thought and behavior in an attempt to derive coherence, while the other relies on data to pinpoint exact locations and predictable patterns.
Chater believes psychotherapy feeds the illusion of a hidden depth and claims the industry is on the outs.
[Psychotherapy is] doomed by the fact that there is not a deep inner story that is hiding from you. Rather, you’ve got the first draft or a set of incoherent notes for a novel. You’ve got an incoherent muddle. And we’re all incoherent muddles to some degree. But when some of those incoherencies cause us problems, when we’re terrified of something we very much want to do, even something as narrow as a fear of spiders, these are conflicts in our thinking and reactions.
In his latest book, The Strange Order of Things, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes that feelings are “for” life regulation. They provide essential information to help us remain in homeostasis. If something is out of whack a feeling lets us know. Again, context matters. Our stomach gets jittery if we’ve eaten something rotten and when we’re courting a romantic partner. As Damasio states, feelings alert us to potential danger as well as potential opportunity. There is nothing metaphysical about the process.
But we perceive it to be other, as Chater writes. Instead of a perception refined by years of experiences, we come to feel that the deep well of the unconscious is simmering below the surface, like the famed kundalini energy at the base of the spine. Hyperventilate enough and you unleash its fury. Well, true, Chater might say—hyperventilate enough and your nervous system is certainly going to react in peculiar and dangerous ways.
Does this make psychotherapy useless? Not so fast, Chater concludes. First off, talking to another is proven medicine. Chater also says creativity is an important aspect of our humanity. Ingenious solutions can be worked out between a therapist and patient, provided it's understood as a metaphor. His contention seems to be assuming metaphor to represent reality as stated. Constructing new patterns of thought and behavior has therapeutic utility; uncovering unconscious motives or beliefs is not only counterproductive but dangerous:
The reason I think the unconscious is a dangerous metaphor is because it gives you the impression that mental things that are unconscious could be conscious. This whole idea of uncovering things from the unconscious and making them conscious has the presupposition that they are of the same type.
He compares this yearning for a hidden depth to Freud's iceberg: consciousness at the top, the real story under the surface, which Chater says is a mistaken analysis of how our brains actually work.
The things we’re conscious of—experiences, thoughts, fragments of conversation—are completely different in type from the things we’re unconscious of—all these mysterious brain processes, which lay down and retrieve memories, piece fragments of information together, and so on. The brain is doing lots of unconscious work—but it is not thought in any way we understand it.
What is unconscious can never be made conscious because the information is inaccessible by design. I’ll never be conscious of my liver detoxifying my blood, but if something goes wrong in that process I’ll certainly feel the result. If the unconscious could be made conscious, we’d never need a doctor to diagnose an illness; our body would tell us.
We’re just not as deep as we think, which is fine: we have plenty of work to do on the surface. Perhaps if we stop taking so many metaphors as reality, we’d get along much better, with ourselves and those around us. There’s plenty to see when we open our eyes. Closing them to seek a treasure causes us to miss the treasure right before us.
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U.S. Navy ships
The U.S. Navy controls patents for some futuristic and outlandish technologies, some of which, dubbed "the UFO patents," came to light recently. Of particular note are inventions by the somewhat mysterious Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, whose tech claims to be able to "engineer reality." His slate of highly-ambitious, borderline sci-fi designs meant for use by the U.S. government range from gravitational wave generators and compact fusion reactors to next-gen hybrid aerospace-underwater crafts with revolutionary propulsion systems, and beyond.
Of course, the existence of patents does not mean these technologies have actually been created, but there is evidence that some demonstrations of operability have been successfully carried out. As investigated and reported by The War Zone, a possible reason why some of the patents may have been taken on by the Navy is that the Chinese military may also be developing similar advanced gadgets.
Among Dr. Pais's patents are designs, approved in 2018, for an aerospace-underwater craft of incredible speed and maneuverability. This cone-shaped vehicle can potentially fly just as well anywhere it may be, whether air, water or space, without leaving any heat signatures. It can achieve this by creating a quantum vacuum around itself with a very dense polarized energy field. This vacuum would allow it to repel any molecule the craft comes in contact with, no matter the medium. Manipulating "quantum field fluctuations in the local vacuum energy state," would help reduce the craft's inertia. The polarized vacuum would dramatically decrease any elemental resistance and lead to "extreme speeds," claims the paper.
Not only that, if the vacuum-creating technology can be engineered, we'd also be able to "engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level," states the patent. This would lead to major advancements in aerospace propulsion and generating power. Not to mention other reality-changing outcomes that come to mind.
Among Pais's other patents are inventions that stem from similar thinking, outlining pieces of technology necessary to make his creations come to fruition. His paper presented in 2019, titled "Room Temperature Superconducting System for Use on a Hybrid Aerospace Undersea Craft," proposes a system that can achieve superconductivity at room temperatures. This would become "a highly disruptive technology, capable of a total paradigm change in Science and Technology," conveys Pais.
High frequency gravitational wave generator.
Credit: Dr. Salvatore Pais
Another invention devised by Pais is an electromagnetic field generator that could generate "an impenetrable defensive shield to sea and land as well as space-based military and civilian assets." This shield could protect from threats like anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles that evade radar, coronal mass ejections, military satellites, and even asteroids.
Dr. Pais's ideas center around the phenomenon he dubbed "The Pais Effect". He referred to it in his writings as the "controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma) via accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration under rapid (yet smooth) acceleration-deceleration-acceleration transients." In less jargon-heavy terms, Pais claims to have figured out how to spin electromagnetic fields in order to contain a fusion reaction – an accomplishment that would lead to a tremendous change in power consumption and an abundance of energy.
According to his bio in a recently published paper on a new Plasma Compression Fusion Device, which could transform energy production, Dr. Pais is a mechanical and aerospace engineer working at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), which is headquartered in Patuxent River, Maryland. Holding a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Pais was a NASA Research Fellow and worked with Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. His current Department of Defense work involves his "advanced knowledge of theory, analysis, and modern experimental and computational methods in aerodynamics, along with an understanding of air-vehicle and missile design, especially in the domain of hypersonic power plant and vehicle design." He also has expert knowledge of electrooptics, emerging quantum technologies (laser power generation in particular), high-energy electromagnetic field generation, and the "breakthrough field of room temperature superconductivity, as related to advanced field propulsion."
Suffice it to say, with such a list of research credentials that would make Nikola Tesla proud, Dr. Pais seems well-positioned to carry out groundbreaking work.
A craft using an inertial mass reduction device.
Credit: Salvatore Pais
The patents won't necessarily lead to these technologies ever seeing the light of day. The research has its share of detractors and nonbelievers among other scientists, who think the amount of energy required for the fields described by Pais and his ideas on electromagnetic propulsions are well beyond the scope of current tech and are nearly impossible. Yet investigators at The War Zone found comments from Navy officials that indicate the inventions are being looked at seriously enough, and some tests are taking place.
If you'd like to read through Pais's patents yourself, check them out here.
Laser Augmented Turbojet Propulsion System
Credit: Dr. Salvatore Pais
Robert Erdmann, a senior scientist working for the Rijksmuseum, cannot help but smile when I ask him to explain — in as much detail as possible — how exactly he used artificial intelligence to recreate long-lost portions of Rembrandt van Rijn's most famous painting, The Night Watch (1642). "Most people just want the elevator pitch," he tells me over Zoom.
The Night Watch is a mammoth of a painting, and it used to be even bigger. In 1715, it came into the possession of the bureaucrats in charge of Amsterdam's Town Hall. In order to fit it on their wall, they sliced off all four outer edges of Rembrandt's priceless masterpiece, inadvertently creating the compromised version we know today.
Rembrandt's "The Night Watch," with the missing edges shown in black.
The missing pieces of "The Night Watch" were never recovered, but we know what they looked like thanks to Gerrit Lundens, a contemporary of Rembrandt who copied the painting when it was complete. These missing sections depict the top of the arch, a balustrade at the bottom, and two soldiers of Frans Banninck Cocq's militia company that stood at the far left.
Though the absence of these elements does not make "The Night Watch" any less impressive, their presence greatly alters the painting's look and feel. The balustrade emphasizes the company's movement forward. Together, the four missing pieces shift the principal figures — Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch — to the right, creating a more compelling composition.
Copy of "The Night Watch" by Gerrit Lundens.
As part of Operation Night Watch, a multimillion-dollar restoration mission, the Rijksmuseum set out to recreate these missing pieces of the painting to show visitors The Night Watch as Rembrandt had originally constructed it. One easy way to do this would be to upload the smaller Lundens copy into Photoshop, blow it up by a factor of five, print it out, and call it a day.
Easy, but far from adequate. As Erdmann puts it: "There's nothing wrong with using an artist like that. However, the final product would still contain traces of that artist's own style." For Erdmann, the only viable solution was to create a series of neural networks — software that mimics the human brain through the use of artificial neurons — to transform the Lundens copy into an "original" Rembrandt.
Humans, unlike computers, aren't able to make perfect copies. Faithful though Lundens' painting is — especially in its visual detail, for example, the number of buttons on a coat, plumes on a feather, or engravings on a halberd — it still contains a myriad of miniscule differences that prevented Erdmann from simply copy-pasting it onto the original.
Perspective was the first and arguably most important item on Erdmann's list. "The geometric correspondence is pretty good at the bottom of the copy," he says. "At the top, that correspondence starts to fall apart; the composition looks stretched out, supposedly because Lundens was unable to reach the top of the painting to get its precise measurements."
Lundens' copy, adjusted for perspective by the AI.
After creating a neural network that could identify corresponding elements in both versions of The Night Watch — from faces and hands to clothing and weapons — Erdmann made a second neural network that could stretch, rotate, foreshorten, compress, and decompress the Lundens copy so that its measurements matched the Rembrandt original as closely as possible.
According to Erdman, this step was "a guide to where we should place the figures on the left, because they need to be consistent with the extrapolation from the original Night Watch." Aside from aligning the two paintings, Erdmann's adjustments also transformed the facial structure of figures like Cocq, bringing them closer to Rembrandt's expert rendering.
Detail of the Lundens copy before perspectival adjustments.
Detail of the Lundens copy after perspectival adjustments.
Just as a painter must tone their canvas before they can work on composition and color, so too did Erdmann have to get the dimensions right before he could move on to the third and final stage of his coding process. Erdmann's next part of the neural network involved — to paraphrase his elevator pitch — sending the artificial intelligence algorithm to art school.
"Not unlike how you might translate a text from Dutch to English, we wanted to see if we could transform Lundens' painterly style and palette into Rembrandt's," he explains, comparing the learning curve to a quiz. To educate it, the AI was given random tiles from the Lundens copy and asked to render the tiles in the style of Rembrandt.
As with any pedagogical situation, Erdmann evaluated the AI's efforts with a corresponding grade. The closer its output matched the contents of the original Night Watch, the higher the grade it received. When grading, Erdmann considered things like color, texture, and representation (i.e., how well does this frowning face resemble a frowning face, or this sword an actual sword?).
"Once you've defined what makes a good copy, you can train the network on thousands and thousands of these tiles," Erdmann goes on. There are 265 gigabytes of memory of thousands of attempts stored, which demonstrates improvement in quality over a very short time. Within less than a day, the error margin between the AI and the real Rembrandt grew so small it became insignificant; the training was complete.
Lundens copy when adjusted for perspective and Rembrandt's style by AI.
Along the way, the AI had developed a thorough understanding of what made Rembrandt Rembrandt. When translating Lundens' copy, it used a less saturated color palette and thicker, sketchier brushstrokes. It even adopted the painter's signature use of chiaroscuro — a technique involving sharp contrasts between light and shadow.
Then it was time for the final exam. Using the knowledge gained from copying Rembrandt, Erdmann ordered the AI to transform the four outer edges of the Lundens copy — removed from the original Night Watch — into Rembrandt's signature style. The result, an unprecedented collaboration between man and machine, is now on display in the Eregalerij of the Rijksmuseum.
Detail of the completed "Night Watch." The two figures on the left were added from the adjusted Lundens copy.
The missing pieces, resuscitated by AI, were printed onto canvas and varnished so that they had a similar gloss to the rest of the painting. The pieces were then attached to metal plates, which were placed in front of the original Night Watch at a distance of less than one centimeter, thus creating an optical illusion for visitors without actually touching Rembrandt's work.
While conservation science is evolving rapidly, the achievements of people like Erdmann are still eclipsed by the artistic genius of the painters whose work they try to preserve, which is a shame because Erdmann's software can be just as inventive as Rembrandt's brushwork. At the very least, Erdmann's problem-solving skills would have made the master proud.
