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REMOTE VIEWING
IS IT REALLY A COMMUNICATION SKILL?

By Jan Pilgenroeder

Jan Pilgenroeder Editors note: Remote viewing has been described by HRVG President Glenn Wheaton as a communication skill. That explanation got Jan Pigenroeder thinking. Jan is a remote viewer in Germany. He started writing a reply to Glenn, and it developed into this article.

Some say that RV is a communication skill and explain that “the understanding of communication systems sometimes takes a great deal of caution.” I know the use of the word communication comes from an electronics /engineering point of view. And from this point of view the electrical currents that transmit signals from one part of the brain to another do look a lot like electrical currents in phone lines. Thus the talk of communication and communication system looks pretty straightforward.

But from the point of view of a sociological theory of communication systems (Social Systems by Niklas Luhmann), things look quite different, and there are a number of problems that are invisible to the electronics engineering point of view.

Let me give a very brief (brief compared to the hundreds of pages sociologists usually take up) explanation of this theory of social systems and then we can apply this to RV and communication.

The theory of social systems builds on differences. The main difference used in this theory is the difference system/environment. A system is something that is different from it’s environment. Then there is a special type of system that reproduces itself by using it’s own elements to produce new elements of the same type.

Living organisms are this type of system. They use their cells to produce new cells. And even though those organisms eat other organisms they don’t just incorporate cells from those organisms, they break them up and make entirely new cells of their own. So when I eat a steak, I don’t become part cow. I am still made up of only cells that where produced by my own cells. This is called operational closure. The system is open to matter and energy, but it keeps itself different from it’s environment because it has it’s own way of operation (the division of the cells).

The same is true for another types of systems: sense processing systems. The operations of this type of system are producing differences and use these differences to spawn further operations. And these differences are not just taken out of the systems environments, they are products of that system. This is quite obvious when you look at the difference between ugly and beautiful, less obvious when you look at colors. For example where does red end, and orange begin? Or consider species of animals. Some different species cannot inter-breed, some only get sterile offspring, and some species can breed and have offspring that can also breed.

There are also a lot of differences that seem so natural that it feels strange to think of them as constructs. Unfortunately good/evil still is one of those. One key difference of sense processing systems is the difference of actual/potential. Without the ability to process this difference we don’t really have a sense processing system. Let me give an example:

When I tell you “The sky is blue” you get something that is actual. Although it is just a normal sentence it marks a difference -- blue sky/whatever. It just marks what I actually said and leaves other possibilities open. But when you want to make sense of it, you need to get beyond what I actually said. You ask yourself, “Why did he say that? Why didn’t he talk about something else? What if the sky was grey?”

That’s the difference of senseprocessing systems and merely signal processing systems. When you type “The sky is blue” into your computer it accepts it as an actual piece of data, but does not wonder about what else there might be about it. It can’t make sense of it.

A single operation does not really make sense on its own. The sense is produced by a chain of operations, and each new link to that chain changes the sense that is produced. Sometimes new links are added somewhere in the middle of the chain and start a new branch, and sometimes there is an irritation that offers an opportunity to start something new. That’s what makes up a system.

One more important aspect about this sense-making business is there are always many different possibilities of applying differences to make sense of something, and not all the possible differences can be used. So, sense-making is always selective. Just pick up any old kind of object and try to describe all of it’s aspects. The system needs to figure ways to deal with the fact that it has limited capacity. It needs to structure itself, so it does not always have to try to consider all the possibilities but can keep it to an amount that it can handle. The only problem is that the system can only build those structures by itself, and there is not only one structure that works out, but there are endless possibilities. Therefore, the main problem of sense-making is the reduction of the possibilities that have to be considered.

There really is no difference if such a system processes a previous operation, or if it processes a perception (well, if it can perceive). So this operation of sense processing systems is called observation, no matter if it was something coming from the system or if it is coming from the environment. Actually, it's not always that clear if something has to be attributed to the system or rather it’s environment. This is also a decision that has to be made by some observer (which may be the system itself).

The human mind can be seen as this type of sense producing system, and it is also operationally closed. When different minds are fed with “The sky is blue” they will all make sense of it in their own way (which also includes the possibility to ignore this irritation altogether). Every mind has it’s own history, it’s own preconceptions. Sometimes they make sense of things in quite similar ways, sometimes the differences are quite obvious.

Usually communication is seen as something that human minds do. But there are some good reasons to view communication as a sense processing system of its own. First of all, the operation of communication is in some aspects different from the operation of thought. There is a choice of communicating something or shutting up. This choice is usually not achievable in thought. If I tell you not to talk about pink elephants, you have no problem complying. But when I ask you not to think about pink elephants, you will fail miserably. And since this is an additional difference, it offers an additional opportunity for sense-making. One can not only wonder about the things that where said, but also about the fact that they have been said.

Also, there is usually no problem in identifying thoughts as thoughts. You don’t normally wonder “Hey, did I just think?” But quite often there is a problem with identifying communication as communication. Such as when someone looks at you with a grumpy expression -- you wonder if his face naturally looks like that, or if it was something you said. Fortunately, the use of language is usually good evidence as to the type of communication that is going on.

“The things one experiences are much less vivid than perceptions of our immediate environments, and they generally feel more like thoughts about perceptions.”

So, in language communication there are two more differences made than in thoughts. There is not just “The sky is blue” (versus “The sky is not blue”) but there is also the difference if someone made an utterance/did not make an utterance (and that offers a further opportunity for sense-making), and the difference of this was recognized as communication/this was not recognized as communication.

The recognition of communication as communication is the minimum requirement for communication to keep going. When two people speaking different languages meet, they can start talking to each other and even though they may not understand a single word there is communication going on, even though this communication may not be communicating anything besides “This is an attempt at communication”. Very often people talk to each other for hours even though they don’t really understand each other. And sometimes behavior is recognized as communication even though it was not meant to be communication in the first place (like when a guy just hangs on to his own thoughts and then is suddenly shouted at for being mean even though he didn’t say a word).

Well, as we have just seen the operation of communication is different from the operation of thought. But it still may seem bogus to view communication as a sense processing system of it’s own. The human mind can work on it’s own for quite a while. You can look at the sky, then think to yourself “Hey, the sky is blue” and then keep to your thoughts about what that means to you, if you should go surfing or rather stay in the shade. You can also think about the physics that make clear air look blue in the sky but not make everything else you look at seem blue. You can build thought on thought all by yourself and only every once in a while perceive your surroundings and maybe turn your thoughts to something else because something else catches your interest. Communication does not seem to work that way. It can’t keep going on it’s own and it does not have any means to perceive it’s physical environment on it’s own. There always needs to be someone talking or else communication eventually stops. But as we have seen, the sense-making is achieved by continuous operation. So, when there is a discussion, the different utterances by the different participants don’t make sense by themselves, but the sense is produced in the process. And since no single participant can really control the operations that follow, the communication system takes on a behavior of its own. You then have a couple of psychical systems (mind) that each process sense their own way and a communication-system (or social system) that also processes sense.

Sometimes the minds and the social system work things out quite similarly and come to the conclusion that there is consensus. Sometimes the social system works in a way that suits only one of the psychical systems, while the others dissent (they loose, and then they maybe lie about their dissent so they can get over with this mess). Sometimes there is consensus about dissenting minds, and quite often communication turns up with some sense that none of the participants minds can make sense of.

The nice thing about the theory is that the sociologist can focus on looking at communication. Society is contrary to more orthodox models not seen as a bunch of humans (all with their own hidden thoughts), but as the big communication system. You don’t need to speculate about motivations or thoughts that are visible to you but can just try to figure out how the communication-system structures itself. There are segments that are separated, even though they are quite similar to each other, and cater to the same functions like tribes or families. In modern times a new type of differentiation becomes more important when there comes operational closure of systems when a different function comes into play, like the science system or the legal system. They use different differences for process sense. Science uses true/false. The legal system uses legal/illegal. And both are exclusive of each other (although they may irritate each other, but both process sense in their very own special way).

Ok, now finally to the main point: Is this theoretical approach useful when you look at RV?

Well, let’s take a very short look at this through our communication-as-transmission-of-signal glasses. You have an input (the target) and the transmission (the Remote-Viewing) and then you have output (the stack of paper the viewer turns up with). An electronics engineer can measure the input and the output (which are usually both electronic signals) and then figure how much the output differs from the input and calculate a signal to noise ratio.

But unfortunately things are not that simple. First of all we don’t have a very well defined input. Even when the target cue is set up very carefully, there is still too much potential input that should probably be taken into account, but one can only gather so much data in 45 minutes. Unlike the transmission-model, this theory tells us that there is some selection to be made (well, transmissions only use a certain bandwidth of the spectrum, but let’s discount this as a technical detail). Then the output of the session is some sketches and words on sheets of paper. Unlike the comparison of two similar electrical signals, this comparison of a real place or event, and this data poses some real problems. You need to compare two things that are quite different and can not really be measured in identical ways. So the sense-making of the results can not be as highly structured as the transmission-model suggests. Low-level analysis is an attempt aiming in that direction (and it is probably as good at that as any attempt can get). But this process still leaves much of the problems of sense making to the systems that observe the results.

In that way RV is communication. Someone is making an utterance and somebody else is trying to make sense of it. There are two rules that become quite interesting in this context: One, that whoever produced the data should never rate his own session, and the analyst should never view the target. As I have explained above, one major aspect of communication is the taking into account that someone is uttering the things that are said for a reason. But these rules keep the viewer from explaining why he did things in a certain way. Through our social-systems glasses it looks like these rules are meant to promote transmission of data but make sure it does not turn into communication. Usually the question, “Why did the viewer tell us this?” only comes up when the data turns something up that does not seem to fit the picture.

The internal processes in the mind of the Remote Viewer have been described as communication. From what has been said so far it would be more appropriate to talk of thinking instead of communication since this is taking place within a psychical system and not a social system. In some ways the thought processes that occur during Remote Viewing might have some similarities to communication, though they don’t become as prominent in everyday thinking processes). Usually we just think and don’t care much about where those thoughts come from. As long as everything goes smoothly we hardly ever stop to wonder “Who was thinking that?”. When we perceive anything in our normal lives we usually don’t wonder about the source either. There are things out there, and we have eyes to see them. When we are thinking we usually have no problem attributing it to ourselves (the psychical system) and when we see or hear something we usually have no problem attributing it to our environment. So, we don’t have to worry all the time where our thoughts and perceptions come from. Thoughts are just our thoughts and perceptions are just things that are out there, and unless we study philosophy we usually have no problems with that.

But, (at least in my experience) this really is different while Remote Viewing. The observations while Remote Viewing are really hard to sort into this system/environment difference. The things one experiences are much less vivid than perceptions of our immediate environments, and they generally feel more like thoughts about perceptions.

So, there are two questions: Did I just make that up, or was this good data? This problem is quite similar to the problem of recognizing behavior as communication. Was this RV or was this just me? Assuming we did not make it up there is another question: This is not like a real perception but more like an idea of a perception. I did not really have a vivid sensation, so where does that idea come from and what would the real life experience be like. This question is almost the same question one might ask about a participant in communication. So in some ways Remote Viewing is again quite like communication. But again the rules are: move quickly, don’t think about it, record everything. The viewer is not allowed to ask those questions while RVing. Again these rules are meant to promote transmission and not have it turn into something that becomes like communication.

All this does not really seem to support the talk of RV as a communication skill. RV methodology deals with key-features of communication (or things that are similar to key-features of communication), but only by shoving them aside.  


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