Post made to Michael Shermer's blog entry entitled "The Demon-Haunted Brain." (I polished this up a bit -- the original was more raggedy.)

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Michael Shermer wrote: "In fact, there is no paranormal or supernatural; there are only the normal and the natural."

Wrong. Quantum physics, possibly THE most exhaustively tested area of physics, shows us that our consciousness directly creates and affects (effects/affects) physical reality on a very microcosmic level, instantaneously, with no physical intermediary.  By any common sense yardstick, that is quite a paranormal-like event.  Mind non-physically affecting matter -- what would you call that?

One example of this paranormality -- this consciousness-initiated event outside of physicality (i.e., metaphysical event) --  is spooky action at a distance, aka non-locality.  Again, this is one of the most extensively tested and verified phenomena in physics.  Non-locality is a phenomenon wherein information about one particle's position is INSTANTLY transmitted to another particle across a distance of any length.  And, the initial piece of information that triggers this instant response in a distant particle can be created by the mere conscious focus of an observer, with no physical intermediation required (or possible!) -- no photons, no nothing.  This sounds metaphysical to me.

If this information transmission event were physical, it couldn't occur. If it were physical, it would have to obey the speed of light, and the transmission could not, then, be instantaneous.  But, since it entirely non-physical -- since this information is entirely a process determined by non-physical consciousness -- it doesn't follow the rules of physical matter and the speed of light; and, thus, can be instantaneous.  And it is.  This has been so exhaustively tested that it can be sensibly considered to be part of a set of laws -- the laws of quantum physics.  And these laws show us that consciousness, independent of the laws of physical matter, effect changes in matter, instantaneously, via non-physical transmission of information.

That sounds pretty metaphysical and paranormal to me.

This is so NOT pie-in-the-sky, that commerce is placing huge bets on research into harnessing these metaphysical phenomena for commercial use, particularly in the area of data processing.

Get real.  Get metaphysics.