Skeptic agrees that remote viewing is proven
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 ...
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In my own experience I've been able to quite strongly feel the "bubble" (for the lack of a better word) that surrounds the body of another person that has been doing intensive practise. In one case I could step in and out of this bubble/field and to my perception it had a diameter of about 4 meters. At times like that I wish I there were some cheap and accurate sensors available that could just be plugged into my smart phone to do some basic measurements and recordings. It would be interesting to measure what kind of field this sensation is correlated with.
The Green et al study (Subtle Energies 2,1993) is the only one I know of who examined something like this (measuring voltage bursts on the bodies of healers, up to around 300 V in the most extreme cases).
I enjoyed the Electric Universe conference. I'm not an astrophysicist, so I don't know which of the ideas presented will stand the test of time. But I enjoy open discussions of alternative theories in all domains, however controversial they may be. If we've learned anything from the history of science, it's that ideas can easily become entrenched even though they are mildly or even flatly wrong. The only way to break the inertia of theories that have gone beyond their expiration date is to suspend disbelief and to seriously concern their merits. Some new ideas will fail empirically and be discarded, others will become tomorrow's received wisdom. The fun is watching the process unfold.
Oops. I meant to write "consider," and not "concern."
For example, animals may use presentiment to flee from natural disasters. There are many reports that animals fled away from shore before the great 2004 tsunami while humans stayed put, leading to much loss of life. If we humans had some sort of presentiment-based warning system for such events, perhaps using skilled meditators, many children would still have their parents and many parents, their children. Much suffering could have been avoided. I think this ties into a philosophical criticism of Buddhism, in that a single-minded pursuit of no-self, can, in its own way, be selfish as one withdraws from society.
What are your thoughts?
But in a world with 7 billion people there are countless events happening every day that would benefit from an advance warning. A person with exceptional psi skills would quickly be overwhelmed by paying attention to these events and would be forced to resort to triage. You'd have to continually decide is it better to sound an alert that might save say, 1,000 people from some disaster, or better to alert one person who, from a psi perspective, will be more important to future history?
In either case, how would the psychic provide such warnings? Government agencies charged with public safety are flooded with warnings and threats all the time. They don't have any way to vet them all, so messages of this sort would automatically be filed under "yet another psychic" or worse, filed under "potential terrorist." And how would you warn a total stranger of some upcoming danger without them thinking you're crazy?
Beyond all this, there's a potential karmic element (assuming it exists). By saving someone from a disaster you take on a certain responsibility. Those responsibilities might be karmic bonus points, but perhaps not depending on how the future is altered through your actions.
In sum, while it might seem selfish to not be actively saving people, from a pragmatic viewpoint it is unrealistic. It would be an all-consuming task, and it would more likely get you into trouble rather than be viewed as beneficial.
This theme is sometimes explored in superhero comic books. I.e., Superman is always engaged in saving people from one disaster or another. But between the major battles that are portrayed in comic books, and during them, there are presumably millions of smaller crises where he presumably could have saved someone or some thing. But even Superman isn't capable of that.
On another thought, there is a recent paper on the arXriv by Albrecht and Phillips (2012),'Origin of probabilities and their application to the multiverse' which argues quite well that all probabilstic effects, including macroscopic effects, can be traced by to quantum uncertainties. They attempt to quantify the number of interactions in various systems after which this becomes significant. For a bumper car ride they estimate 25 interactions as the threshold, for example. This made me think about the macro-PK experiments various people have done and specifically the cascade experiment that Jahn and Dunne et al did at Princeton. This had always been very puzzling to me as I couldn't see how you could begin to get quantum level effects in such a macro-scopic system. This paper may be a clue, and potentially might offer a test in that short cascades may not be long enough for the effect to show, whilst it may do so in longer ones (assuming all the above assumptions are right!). Not sure if there is any existing data on this sort of thing which may be applicable, or if I'm talking total nonsense
The problem with the 2004 Tsunami is that they didn´t warn people about it in time. Some people wouldn´t have cared since they were on a vacation having fun perhaps but many lives would be saved for sure.
Have you discovered what happened over at Frontiers regarding the disappearance of the Non-Local Mind research topic? It seems quite a long time for a technical fault...
What we learn from this episode is that ironically Frontiers isn't interested in controversial topics, despite the historical fact that the frontiers are exactly where new ideas can be found, along with the controversies that inevitably accompany them.
So in a way, you are quite wrong when you think that high IQ people are better off dealing with psychosis than low IQ people. A person can believe anything depending on what comes to his mind, so he is at the mercy of his memory processes.
In some sense you may right, in that once the psychotic episode has passed, high IQ people may be better able to come to terms with their experiences. But I'm doubtful of even that. It may be the low IQ people for whom it is easier to stop thinking about and dismiss memories of unbelievable synchronicities or other things that, if considered honestly and intelligently, would make the person so doing form beliefs that would appear as crazy to most people, at least in today's West. In many cases an unfamiliarity with parapsychology and/or quantum mechanics would probably result in the person, howsoever intelligent, starting to believe there is a conspiracy against him, because no other conclusion involving the paradigm of a mechanistic universe would be likely to be true from that point of view. I guess that would depend more on the person's tendency to dismiss ideas he doesn't want to believe than on his intelligence. But intelligence, grasp of probabilities and such things, would also play a part.
I've written more about this topic on my blog, which consists of a single blog post outlining my theory of paranoid schizophrenia. You may be interested in it. If so, here is the link to it:
http://mctps.wordpress.com/
I think you mentioned ramifications for free will at some point in your book. Very relevant to my ideas there.
I wondered about this too. Frontiers was in discussions with NPG for a year, so the editors would have known about this.
On the IONS website we have a bibliography that lists over 6,000 studies related to meditation:
http://noetic.org/meditation-bibliography/bibliography-info/