Project #2: Phil
I had been thinking about my friend Phil, and what happened to him, since the beginning of the class, but I didn't know exactly how to incorporate him into a project (I still haven't, arguably). When Sandy sent out an e-mail mentioning Nick Herbert and his attempts to channel entities like Seth through the Metaphase Typewriter, I knew I had to talk to Phil, especially because of this comment: "A relevant thing here is that Nick himself, living out the quantum principles he espouses, simultaneously believes and doesn't believe the entire phenomenon -- which, IMHO, is the whole point of the exercise."
Phil and I went to high school together in McLean, VA. We graduated in 2001, and I came to UT while he went to MIT to study neuroscience. We stayed in touch, but only saw each other a couple times a year. It seemed to me his mood would change dramatically with the seasons: when I saw him over Christmas break he would be despondent, when I saw him during the summer, ecstatic. Last summer, 2004, he was especially manic and was professing a whole bunch of scattered ideas about reality and consciousness. Several of them came from Seth. I guess you could say he had become a sort of quantum mystic.
Phil has always been a very cognizant guy, and very playful with his ideas. But the ideas he was toying with now required his commitment. Even though he would constantly say things like, "I don't really believe this, I'm not really sure what I believe, its just fun," I think he found that he had to buy into his ideas completely in order to test them out. And he ended up having a psychotic episode. I interviewed Phil over the phone about what happened to him. We talked a lot about belief and the power of ideas and such, but I lost most of what we recorded. It didn't sound right when we tried to have the conversation over again. What I did manage to get, however, was Phil telling the story of what happened to him between the beginning of the "episode" and when he ended up in McLean Hospital. It's a strange story. When I showed it to the class, not everyone believed it.
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