Sarfatti believes that his model is a real alternative to Frank J. Tipler's famous Omega Point scenario, postulated in the controversial book The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead (London: Macmillan, 1995), which is a closed universe and relies on the strong AI that Roger Penrose objects to. Tipler suggests that the fast-track evolution of information processing and the appearance of nanotechnology reveals a process of exponentially increasing computational capacities which will extend over hundreds of trillions of years of the universe's lifespan until a final gravitational collapse will densely compact this information into an omniscient point of ultimate knowing. Essentially, God will come to know God, and humanity evolved as a mechanism for the universe to perceive itself. Sarfatti hopes his model will endure the wrath of fundamentalist Christians and sceptic atheists that Tipler faced.

"It looks as though my 'back-action' theory of matter on its pilot quantum wave, which generates consciousness, and my physics/consciousness model predicts VALIS in the far future of an open universe, which continues to expand forever. My superluminal theories and cosmology are compatible with Penrose's recently published works."

Quantum Physics and the 'Meanings of Life'

The presence of Roger Penrose's neo-Platonism - or recent mystically inclined cosmologies - has come under attack from scientists uncomfortable with such tendencies, including Daniel C. Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), Nicholas Humphrey in Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles and the Search for Supernatural Consolation (New York: Basic Books, 1996) and notably Carl Sagan in The Demon Haunted World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997). These books highlight the dangers of 'degenerative mysticism' on the edge of the scientific frontier.

Sarfatti believes that behind some of these criticisms is a political agenda: "Many scientists like Sagan, while brilliant, have not escaped their early red diaper toilet training since most of them have Leftist if not Stalinist backgrounds. That is where the anti-religion bias comes from in most of them." Sociopolitical factors played a crucial part in determining the durability of established scientific facts and approaches, he says. "[Marxist sociologist] Herbert Marcuse suggested that Big Science is dominated by mean-spirited men who have a problem with 'the vision thing,' which results in a limited one-dimensionality. The Communist Party dominated Robert J. Oppenheimer's crew from the 1930s including most of my professors. Luckily many of the top physicists today are religious in some sense, which is a good thing."

Heuristic pursuers of knowledge need to avoid "the double edged sword of scientific morality and social immorality," Sarfatti believes, "if we want to avoid tyranny and dogma." Echoing Socrates, Sarfatti demands that "we should not allow political and moral considerations to impede the search for scientific truth. There is a delicate balance here between the extremes of Nazi and Stalinist types of corruption of Science on the one hand, and complete disregard of scientists for the public welfare, on the other."

"We have a strong tendency to dismiss vigorously any ideas that are contrary to the official line," says Brian Josephson. "Scientists distrust intuitions, except in the case that they agree with their own 'gut feelings'."

The Non-Lethal Warfare Imperative

The major testing ground for this morality may well be the current non-lethal psychic-warfare research being conducted by the military intelligence community in search of a 'Manchurian Candidate.'

"Non-lethal psychic warfare using the distant manipulation of the consciousness of the 'enemy' will be an important factor in the 21st century," Sarfatti believes. "But it is preferable to the old means of war. The potential for these techniques of mind-control to be used in the field on unsuspecting naive populations in 'non-lethal warfare' are awesome to behold and contemplate. They can be and will be easily misused by authoritarian immoral power structures. These techniques not only involve manipulation by drugs and ordinary electromagnetic, sound and kinaesthetic signals - as in subliminal television broadcasting and virtual reality transmission via the Web - but also purport to involve quantum action at a distance in the reports on psychokinesis, telepathy and remote viewing."

Despite the SRI controversies during the 1970s, Sarfatti believes that " there is still great interest," which is proven, he feels, by the gathering of such heavyweight physicists, neuro-psychologists, and cognitive-science researchers as Paul Davies, Roger Penrose, David Chalmers, Michael Lockwood, Brian Josephson, Henry Stapp, Daniel C. Dennett, and Sarfatti himself at the Tucson II Conference on Consciousness held in April 1996, in Tucson, Arizona.

"Most of the funding can be traced to spooks. If I were head of CIA or DIA I would put a few billion dollars into consciousness research."

The 1996 U.S. defence authorisation bill earmarked $37.2 million to further investigate non-lethal technologies. Colonel John B. Alexander of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Major Edward A. Dames of PSI TECH Inc, Willis Harman of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, and other 'spooks' maintain links between military intelligence, physics researchers and the New Age community, claims Sarfatti.

"We have had a few talks on PSI [ESP] topics at the Cavendish," says Brian Josephson. "They are very well attended and in the very short term people were impressed, but they very quickly forgot about the talks, which might just as well not have been given. However, attitudes are not as negative as they once were.

"I gather the evidence is that precognitive remote viewing tests work," says Josephson. "Not with 100% reliability but with more accuracy than standard CIA guess work. I gather that the CIA research was stopped for sociopolitical reasons rather than because it was discredited - or maybe they just felt it had been tested enough."

Edwin May of The Laboratories for Fundamental Research recalls: "The company that conducted anomalous-cognition research for DIA was Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Since I was the director of the contractor effort in the government's activity in PSI research since 1985, I have some understanding of what they did. At SAIC we did not conduct a single precognition experiment. In fact, except for two studies, one of which Puthoff and Targ published in their Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers article, we have not been studying precognition since 1972."