This is a streaming video of an informal talk I gave recently at an Irish pub and cafe located near our office in Petaluma, California. The talk itself is about 40 minutes, followed by about an hour of Q&A.
You inspired me a new blog based on mind to mind interactions. The idea is to share a piece of information between online participants (an image) and see what it inspires to them. There is no real emitter here, everybody is the emitter, or the slit.
Thanks for a great talk, Dean. I hope that one day you will be invited to talk in churches and national parliaments. The self-appointed gatekeepers (pseudoskeptics) must be bypassed if any large-scale, meaningful public communication can take place. Yes, I am over-simplifying!
I do have a different opinion than you regarding anecdotes (i.e. unpublished experiences). There certainly is a significance to anecdotes. The catch is that they are unable to tell us anything very specific; and that they must be abundant, from independent sources.
The better the record keeping the better, of course. Notarization is better still. Of course cynical critics will not accept any of it. They prefer the one experiment that doesn't work to the two that do work. That's how they roll.
I don't discount anecdotes. After all, personal stories provide the motivation to perform these experiments in the first place. But there are so many competing explanations for anecdotes that they aren't persuasive as evidence, at least among scientists who haven't personally experienced similar episodes.
Mr Radin, any updates about the slit experiments? I probably tried 20 times. Is this experiment (the collapse of the probability function under an observer's attention through internet)really different from an attempt to influence the macroscopic outcome of many coin's flips? there will always be a statistical deviation and you will always have the burden to prove that this deviation is not within normal range or is not due to a biais in the coin or in the experiment. But at least you try, i give you that. Every time i do this experiment (the slit), i think that it's impossible and at the same time, i remember that if the 'mind' is really an immaterial entity, then somehow this entity can interact with the material brain...therefore mind-matter interactions must exist. But I have the sentiment that this interaction is only possible with infinitively complex systems and does not involve any energy or transfer of energy. By analogy with a black hole, perhaps the brain, when it reaches a certain level of complexity, creates some sort of singularity that introduces infinite terms in the description of itself and its information content...
Apologies for being off topic, but I couldn't find your email address.
Your attention is invited to a paper by Persinger and Dotta entitled Temporal Patterns of Photon Emissions Can Be Stored and Retrieved Several Days Later From the “Same Space”: Experimental and Quantitative Evidence.
A pdf is located at http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/467.
Dean I finally got a copy of 'Entangled Minds' and finished reading it yesterday. Even though I knew about a lot of the content already of course, and I realize the book is for a popular audience and doesn't go into very technical details, my mind is still reeling.
I would like to nominate you to speak at Ted, but they require me to list your email address and phone number. Is there one that you use for this sort of thing? Is this something in which you'd be interested?
Or perhaps you could nominate yourself...? Although I think more nominations means higher probability of getting invited.
Thanks. Done. Hopefully the number of nominations will eventually reach critical mass. Maybe we should ask everyone on this forum to go there and nominate you?
Before Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem published an article on precognition in the prominent Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, it had already (and ironically given the topic) evoked a response from the status quo. The New York Times was kind enough to prepare us to be outraged . It was called " craziness, pure craziness" by life-long critic Ray Hyman. Within days the news media was announcing that it was all just a big mistake . I wrote about the ensuing brouhaha in this blog . But the bottom line in science, and the key factor that trumps hysterical criticism, is whether the claimed effect can be repeated by independent investigators. If it can't then perhaps the original claim was mistaken or idiosyncratic. If it can, then the critics need to rethink their position. Now we have an answer to the question about replication. An article has been submitted to the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology and is available here . The key
Excerpt from a January 2008 item in the UK's The Daily Mail newspaper: In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected. Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow. She says: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established. "The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments." Of course, this doesn't wash with sceptical scientists. Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing. He says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area
Critics are fond of saying that there is no scientific evidence for psi. They wave their fist in the air and shout, "Show me the evidence!" Then they turn red and have a coughing fit. In less dramatic cases a student might be genuinely curious and open-minded, but unsure where to begin to find reliable evidence about psi. Google knows all and sees all, but it doesn't know how to interpret or evaluate what it knows (at least not yet). In the past, my response to the "show me" challenge has been to give the titles of a few books to read, point to the bibliographies in those books, and advise the person to do their homework. I still think that this is the best approach for a beginner tackling a complex topic. But given the growing expectation that information on virtually any topic ought to be available online within 60 seconds, traditional methods of scholarship are disappearing fast. So I've created a SHOW ME page with downloadable articles on psi a
Comments
based on mind to mind interactions.
The idea is to share a piece of information between online participants (an image) and see what it inspires to them. There is no real emitter here, everybody is the emitter, or the slit.
http://ganzfeldinterference.blogspot.com/
I do have a different opinion than you regarding anecdotes (i.e. unpublished experiences). There certainly is a significance to anecdotes. The catch is that they are unable to tell us anything very specific; and that they must be abundant, from independent sources.
The better the record keeping the better, of course. Notarization is better still. Of course cynical critics will not accept any of it. They prefer the one experiment that doesn't work to the two that do work. That's how they roll.
Is this experiment (the collapse of the probability function under an observer's attention through internet)really different from an attempt to influence the macroscopic outcome of many coin's flips? there will always be a statistical deviation and you will always have the burden to prove that this deviation is not within normal range or is not due to a biais in the coin or in the experiment.
But at least you try, i give you that.
Every time i do this experiment (the slit), i think that it's impossible and at the same time, i remember that if the 'mind' is really an immaterial entity, then somehow this entity can interact with the material brain...therefore mind-matter interactions must exist.
But I have the sentiment that this interaction is only possible with infinitively complex systems and does not involve any energy or transfer of energy. By analogy with a black hole, perhaps the brain, when it reaches a certain level of complexity, creates some sort of singularity that introduces infinite terms in the description of itself and its information content...
Oh, really? Hmmm...
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-god-particle-m,0,4435571.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews+%28L.A.+Times+-+Top+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
Your attention is invited to a paper by Persinger and Dotta entitled Temporal Patterns of Photon Emissions Can Be Stored and Retrieved Several Days Later From the “Same Space”: Experimental and Quantitative Evidence.
A pdf is located at http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/467.
Scientists in laboratories do puzzling experiments to show the future, writes Bob Holmes
http://www.omantribune.com/index.php?page=leisure_details&&id=6414&heading=Special%20Features
I would like to nominate you to speak at Ted, but they require me to list your email address and phone number. Is there one that you use for this sort of thing? Is this something in which you'd be interested?
Or perhaps you could nominate yourself...? Although I think more nominations means higher probability of getting invited.
http://www.ted.com/nominate/speaker
Tony
My contact information is noted on this page at the IONS website: http://noetic.org/directory/person/dean-radin/