A shared vision

 Hello everyone and welcome back:

I would like to let you know that today I am going to launch one of the ideas that I am sure you will notice is more daring, because in principle it specifically clashes with certain concepts and notions that we have about our perception of the world and the events (anomalous or not) that occur. they happen. But to open your mouth, we are going to talk about what is called “folie à deux”, since I consider it to be a good starting point.

The folie à deux or shared psychosis is a rare mental pathology, where two people share the same disorder and that has been transmitted from one person to another: in turn we can say that it can be simultaneous (if it appears in both individuals at the same time). ) or imposed (when one of the two individuals is dominant and imposes his disorder on the other). This disorder sometimes has a difficult differential diagnosis with other processes such as mass hysteria, for example. But as far as this article is concerned, we are not interested in the fact of mental pathology but in the fact that from this picture I plan to propose an idea that I don't know whether to describe as disturbing. To continue describing our “materials” we have to go to another part that has nothing to do with the previous one; We are going to talk about signal repeaters/amplifiers.

I am sure that everyone knows the concept of a repeater and/or signal amplifier: I am not going to get into the technical intricacies, but we can basically say that a repeater is a system that collects a signal and allows its range to be increased; What an amplifier does is (and here is the key) increases the input and output power of the signal. This is very important, because the amplifier has an interesting part, since it increases the power of the input signal.

Now we move on to our latest material, which I'm sure if you've read anything else I've written you know, but if not I'm going to describe it to you. It is the integrated information theory of consciousness. Just as a reminder, this theory indicates that consciousness is based on the ability to integrate the information that surrounds us, and that therefore, it has its origin precisely in that act, the integration of information from sensory data. (or not, we will discuss it later) collected from what surrounds us.

Once we have the ingredients for the “recipe” we are going to generate the dish. Let me just remind you of something: remember that what follows is an idea, so it should be taken as such: it does not even aspire to be a hypothesis, because I still don't know how I could design an experimental model to test it, but in the meantime As I say, I would like you to think that it is just that, a somewhat extreme idea that can be somewhat shocking.

Let's imagine that two people witness an anomalous phenomenon (it doesn't matter what it is). We will use two people to simplify the model. It is not even necessary for this observation to be simultaneous, although the order in which this encounter occurs is important. First of all we are going to take our ingredient which is the concept of amplifier/repeater together with the integrated information theory of consciousness. From what this theory says, people who are capable of having an anomalous experience have previously integrated the information generated by it, that is, they have made it conscious. Now with the concept of amplifier, which we remember was the system that increased the power of the input and output of the signal, an idea occurs to me: what if certain types of people were no longer only capable of integrating the information of these anomalous events (we leave the mechanism of this integration for another entry), but that they were also capable of acting as amplifiers/receivers of that signal, and therefore making this anomalous phenomenon detectable by other people?

That is, that sensitive person would be able to “alter” the anomalous signal, and by passing it through his or her consciousness, this signal would acquire the individual characteristics, such as culture, archetypes, etc., that that sensitive person has. And this amplified (and altered) signal would be more easily detectable by other types of people who did not have this ability. In any case, not all people sensitive to anomalous phenomena would have this ability to amplify/repeat the signal, which would explain why certain people are able to see something while people who are next to them do not feel anything. The groundbreaking thing about this idea is that the anomalous phenomenon undergoes a certain alteration (distortion in homage to the great Caravaca), and that this distortion is not generated by the anomalous phenomenon, but by its integration and not always.

He left them with a pending task: what experimental model can they think of to be able to transform this idea into a testable hypothesis? How about you help me with my homework? Thank you if you've made it this far and see you next time.