On Carving Reality at Its Joints: Black Holes and Process, People, and an Experimental Challenge.

Black hole event horizons provide us with an image of what the world looks like when it has been reduced to its smallest spatial components and all process has been squeezed out of it. It appears as a vast sheet of tiny, random dots. Since time is at the basis of 'process', the image highlights questions about temporality that also exercised philosophers, notably Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. Following a strategy suggested by Whitehead's approach to the questions leads to a possibility, which is also at the basis of a particular panprotopsychist theory ('SoS theory'), that the 'time' to which we ordinarily refer in everyday language may have two ontologically distinct but equally 'real' components--(a) the 'objective' metric spacetime of general relativity which refers to the organization of classical, causal relationships and (b) a 'subjective' sequence of 'nows' providing a basis for conscious experience--albeit 'nows' to which (usually very brief ) objective durations can be attributed. If true, it is to be expected that macroscopic, conscious mind-related violations of energy conservation should occasionally manifest. There is a wide range of anecdotal evidence from 'psychic' phenomena suggestive of such violations. The main aim of this paper is to point to the potential value of investigating the energy budgets of candidate phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]