Retropsychokinesis

[BeholdTheTruth]

Anyone know anything about Retropsychokinesis per http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/experiments/intro.html ? (I think this guy invented Auto-Cad!)

[Jekyll]

Yeh.

There are two ways of looking at this.

Either:
1)Both General Relativity and Quantum physics are fundamentally flawed and you can go and win next weeks lottery with the numbers you'll transmit back to yourself sometime in the week after.

2)That Psi researchers have such a flawed methodology that they can detect significant abnormal trends in uniformly distributed random data.

Every one here is going to swing for the second option, so why don't you set about winning the lottery and show us how wrong we are?

[BeholdTheTruth]

I must protest your insinuation.

I did not say it was correct. A real smart dude who started Auto-CAD seems to think its worthy of study. And I'm wondering how people here would go about punching holes in it, not attacking the messenger?

Yeh.

There are two ways of looking at this.

Either:
1)Both General Relativity and Quantum physics are fundamentally flawed and you can go and win next weeks lottery with the numbers you'll transmit back to yourself sometime in the week after.

2)That Psi researchers have such a flawed methodology that they can detect significant abnormal trends in uniformly distributed random data.

Every one here is going to swing for the second option, so why don't you set about winning the lottery and show us how wrong we are?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

How will they know if it's RPK or remote viewing of the stored bitstream followed by simple PK?

~~ Paul

[Jekyll]

I must protest your insinuation.

I did not say it was correct. A real smart dude who started Auto-CAD seems to think its worthy of study. And I'm wondering how people here would go about punching holes in it, not attacking the messenger?
Oops. My bad. Let me rephrase.

For it to be true, General relativity and quantum physics would have to be incorrect. It is almost certainly based on a faulty analysis of statistics which would explain why no infomation transmition has been managed with the system and no one has won the lottery using it, and then annouced their method, gaining both fame and a nobel prize.

How's that?;)

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Okay, thinking about this some more, I realize I don't understand the experimental procedure. Can someone explain it to me?

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Ah, I found a description:

http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/hallscience/X0008_RetroPsychoKinesis_P.html

I don't even need normal PK. I simply need to remote view the stored bitstream and then say I was influencing it in the direction I viewed.

~~ Paul

[BeholdTheTruth]

Interestingly, the author of the retro... site mentions Brian Josephson, who I believe DID win the Nobel Prize, and now seems to be investigating this kind of suff. BTW, Robert Laughlin, who also won the Nobel, does per his book, A Different Universe, seem to think that there is more to physics than relativity and QM portray. Note that I am not saying that they are right, but only that they both got Nobels and fame first, and then went on to seeking to know more than what conventional modern physics dictates a post-modern scientist ought to be seeking and open to.

Oops. My bad. Let me rephrase.

For it to be true, General relativity and quantum physics would have to be incorrect. It is almost certainly based on a faulty analysis of statistics which would explain why no infomation transmition has been managed with the system and no one has won the lottery using it, and then annouced their method, gaining both fame and a nobel prize.

How's that?;)

[ceptimus]

A couple of years ago, I attended a seminar about 'psi' phenomena at which Brian Josephson was a speaker. Paul Anagnostopoulos paid my entrance fee.

I wrote a brief report on the event: http://www.mround.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/JREF/psi/psi.html

[BeholdTheTruth]

You wrote what seems to me to be a thorough description of what was discussed at the event, although there is no way for me to know if and where it is accurate and/or not.

A question: what are your prejudices?

A couple of years ago, I attended a seminar about 'psi' phenomena at which Brian Josephson was a speaker. Paul Anagnostopoulos paid my entrance fee.

I wrote a brief report on the event: http://www.mround.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/JREF/psi/psi.html

[ceptimus]

I'm very skeptical about psi. I think that all the speakers at that event were deluding themselves. Being a genius in one area is no guarantee against being gullible in others (in my opinion).

However, when apparently intelligent and articulate people state that they believe something is true, then it's only polite to listen to them and try to understand what they're saying. They may turn out to be right.

What they need to do to convince skeptics like me is to show their evidence. All the theory in the world is useless if it only attempts to explain things that don't actually exist.

[BeholdTheTruth]

I completely agree with your focus on evidence! It is interesting to me that anomalies are sets of what is wrong about a right theory, not what is right about a wrong one.

I'm very skeptical about psi. I think that all the speakers at that event were deluding themselves. Being a genius in one area is no guarantee against being gullible in others (in my opinion).

However, when apparently intelligent and articulate people state that they believe something is true, then it's only polite to listen to them and try to understand what they're saying. They may turn out to be right.

What they need to do to convince skeptics like me is to show their evidence. All the theory in the world is useless if it only attempts to explain things that don't actually exist.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I don't even need normal PK. I simply need to remote view the stored bitstream and then say I was influencing it in the direction I viewed.
Or, if that's too difficult, I can use precognition to watch the bits coming down the wire, then decide whether to shoot for 0s or 1s.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I completely agree with your focus on evidence! It is interesting to me that anomalies are sets of what is wrong about a right theory, not what is right about a wrong one.
You just have to be careful that the anomalies aren't sets of what is wrong with a naive view of the right theory, but in fact are nothing more than expected anomalies.

~~ Paul

[69dodge]

What the difference between saying that a person's choice retroactively influenced the random numbers and saying that the random numbers influenced in the usual manner the person's choice? Aren't they just two different ways of describing the same situation? (This is basically Paul's point, taken to the extreme.)

Suppose we give the same random numbers to two different people. Obviously they can't both influence the numbers in opposite directions: there's only a single set of numbers. Will each of their supposedly free choices about how to influence the numbers turn out to be similar to the other's choice (because both are similar to the numbers)? If so, wouldn't everyone describe this situation by saying that the numbers have influenced them, and not the other way around?

Suppose we instruct the two people to try to influence the numbers in opposite directions? What happens to the numbers?

How can we distinguish between a good random number generator that is being influenced by people from the future, and a bad random number generator? (Naturally, we shouldn't trust the results of experiments done with a bad random number generator, so it's important to know whether it's good or bad.)

Retroactive causality does not seem to be a very useful way of thinking about the world.

...

So, after thinking of all sorts of reasons why it's unlikely to work, it finally occurred to me to check whether it does work:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/experiments/summary/

It doesn't. (A z of 0.6 standard deviations is way insignificant. ETA: And it's 0.6 SD in the wrong direction, to boot.)

So, what is there to discuss?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

What the difference between saying that a person's choice retroactively influenced the random numbers and saying that the random numbers influenced in the usual manner the person's choice? Aren't they just two different ways of describing the same situation? (This is basically Paul's point, taken to the extreme.)
What do you mean by "in the usual manner"? Are you suggesting that the random bits can retroactively effect the subject's choice as they come down the wire to his browser? That's a whole different kettle of psi.


Suppose we give the same random numbers to two different people. Obviously they can't both influence the numbers in opposite directions: there's only a single set of numbers. Will each of their supposedly free choices about how to influence the numbers turn out to be similar to the other's choice (because both are similar to the numbers)? If so, wouldn't everyone describe this situation by saying that the numbers have influenced them, and not the other way around?
It's a fight!


Suppose we instruct the two people to try to influence the numbers in opposite directions? What happens to the numbers?
They are retroactively confoosed.


How can we distinguish between a good random number generator that is being influenced by people from the future, and a bad random number generator? (Naturally, we shouldn't trust the results of experiments done with a bad random number generator, so it's important to know whether it's good or bad.)
After these experiments are run, all results and references to the study are discarded so that people in the future can't screw with the findings.


Retroactive causality does not seem to be a very useful way of thinking about the world.
Who said anything about useful? :D

~~ Paul

[Ziggurat]

BTW, Robert Laughlin, who also won the Nobel, does per his book, A Different Universe, seem to think that there is more to physics than relativity and QM portray. Note that I am not saying that they are right, but only that they both got Nobels and fame first, and then went on to seeking to know more than what conventional modern physics dictates a post-modern scientist ought to be seeking and open to.

I think you misunderstand Laughlin's point. He's not claiming that there are some basic laws of physics other than relativity or quantum mechanics. What he's talking about is what's sometimes refered to as "emergent phenomena". One way to sum it up is "more is different". Quantum mechanics is an excellent descriptor of single particles and two-particle interactions. But just as with Newtonian mechanics, when the number of particles in your system get large enough (and for matter, we're talking 10^20 or more), EVEN IF all those interactions happen according to quantum mechanics, from a practical standpoint, we can't figure out what's going on using quantum mechanics. So that's the first part: not that quantum mechanics is wrong, but that practically speaking we can't get what we want from it. The second part is that there seem to be properties, commonalities, and perhaps even laws which apply to such large systems which we can study, learn, and use to predict and model systems, but which we cannot derive directly from quantum mechanics because it is simply too complex to deal with 10^20 particles using quantum mechanics. This is the "emergent phenomena" part. It's not that anything contradicts quantum mechanics, or that quantum mechanics is wrong or incomplete, but that we have to work with higher-order effects produced by collective interactions which we cannot directly tie to quantum mechanics because of practical limits we may never break.

In a sense, that's really not so surprising, and other scientists have been doing that for a long time. Take natural selection, for example: it's a very good model for evolution, we have every reason to think it's correct, but nobody even tries to derive it from quantum mechanics. It's not that we think that biological systems don't obey quantum mechanics, but rather that (1) they're so complex that we cannot trace things from the ground up, and (2) they follow their own emergent laws (such as: animals don't reproduce after they die) from which we can draw further conclusions. Laughlin is basically saying we need to do something analogous in physics: find emergent laws that let us deal with complex systems which we cannot model from quantum mechanics directly.

In other words, none of what he's saying (last time I checked) suggested in any way that paranormal effects might be anything other than a fraud.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I'm getting a feeling about this similar to the one I get when pondering prayer studies.

~~ Paul