In hmolscience, Frederic Myers (1843-1901) was an English psychical researcher noted, in cessation thermodynamics, for his 1890s arguments in support of scientific para-psychology, e.g. he used Maxwell's demon as support to explain seances.
Overview
In 1896, Myers, in his Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, a collection of his series of papers on subliminal consciousness, attempted to explain spirits, hauntings, telekinesis, and ghosts, etc., in terms of energy and conservation of energy, albeit in a rather contrived incorrect way.
Myers defined ghost or a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, for example, to be a manifestation of persistent personal energy or as a kind of force being exercised after death. Myers defines ‘ectoplasy’ to be an extrusion from the organism of vital energy.
Maxwell's demon
Myers, in his appendix, referencing Irish physicist James Maxwell’s 1871 Theory of Heat and William Thomson’s 1879 description of Maxwell’s sorting demon, to explain physical expenditure modified by spirit control, particularly séances, in a subsection entitled ‘control over individual molecules; resulting in abrogation of ordinary thermal laws, and in aggregation and disaggregation of matter’, so to explain spirit action on a living brain. The following is humorous quote from this section:
“To foresee or to guide the affinities of each several molecule would be for the physicist as great a step in advance as it would be for the registrar-general could he foresee or guide every impulse to wedlock in the United Kingdom.”
This quote, curiously, is germane to the logic of reaction matching.
James
Myers, supposedly, was a friend and colleague of William James. [2] Together, supposedly, the advanced some type of anti-reductionist transmission or filter theory of mind-brain dualism. (Ѻ)
References
1. Myers, Frederic. (1896). Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, Volume Two (personal energy, pg. 4; conservation of energy, pgs. 301-02, 510, 542; Maxwell’s demon, 529-38; quote, pg. 530). Longmans, Green, and Co, 1903.
2. James, William. (1901). “Frederic Myers’ Service to Psychology”, Psychical Research, 198.
External links
● Frederic William Henry Myers – Wikipedia.
