Entangled Minds

I just finished my article for this upcoming symposium. Here's the abstract: Predicting the Unpredictable: 75 Years of Experimental Evidence Abstract. From time immemorial, people have reported foreknowledge of future events. To determine whether such experiences are best understood via conventional explanations, or whether a retrocausal phenomenon might be involved in some instances, researchers have conducted hundreds of controlled laboratory experiments over the past 75 years. These studies fall into four general classes, and each class has generated repeatable evidence consistent with retrocausation. The statistical results for a class of forced-choice studies is associated with odds against chance of about 10 24 ; for a class of free-response studies, odds about 10 20 ; for psychophysiological-based studies, odds about 10 17 ; and for implicit decision studies, odds about 10 10 . Effect sizes observed in the latter three classes are nearly identical, indicating replicati...

On retrocausation, with Daryl Bem, Jonathan Schooler, and Sam Moulton. Thanks to MickeyD for mentioning this video.

SOCIETY FOR SCIENTIFIC EXPLORATION 30th Annual Meeting , Boulder, Colorado 9-11 June 2011 www.scientificexploration.org Program Committee: Bill Bengston, Chair, Dick Blasband, Courtney Brown, Adam Curry, Brenda Dunne, Robert Jahn, Dominique Surel. Local Arrangements: Dominique Surel WEDNESDAY EVENING, June 8 - Millennium Hotel Gardens, Boulder, Colorado 6:00 pm - Opening Reception and Registration. Poster set-up THURSDAY MORNING, June 9 - Ballroom Theme I: IMPLICATIONS OF NON-LOCALITY 9:00 Welcome and Introductions 9:10 Pamela Rae Heath , Diverse Perspectives: What Distant Healing, Remote Viewing, and the Afterlife Suggest about Non-Locality 9:50 Jane Katra , After Death Communication Involving the Ongoing Work of Two Bonded Parapsychologist Healers 10:10 Walter Semkiw , Advances in Reincarnation Research: A Tribute to Ian Stevenson 10:30 Gary Schwartz , Photonic Measurement of Apparent Presence of Spirit using a Computer Automated System 10:50 BREAK 11:10 Larry Dossey , Precogn...

THEN: This video is from a TV program on the physics of mind-matter interaction, shown in the UK in the early 1980s. The interviewer's conclusion: "I think a scientist would have to be massively ignorant, or a confirmed bigot, to deny the evidence that the mind can make connections through space, time and matter in ways which probably have nothing to do with the ordinary senses. And also that he would find it difficult to deny that these strange effects are compatible with current thinking in physics, and may in the future become part of an extended science, in which they're no longer regarded as paranormal, but as normal." (Video uploaded by Brian Josephson.) NOW: This is a talk by Rupert Sheldrake at Cambridge University on February 9, 2011 . (Also uploaded courtesy Brian Josephson.)

Here is an example of a presumably well-meaning but in reality a horrendously ironic example of how mainstream academia regards psi research. Horrendous because it is aimed at science educators and students, so one would hope that the information is correct (it isn't), and ironic because it does indeed reveal how science really works, as their tag line proclaims, but probably not in the way that they intended. The website "was produced by the UC Museum of Paleontology of the University of California at Berkeley, in collaboration with a diverse group of scientists and teachers, and was funded by the National Science Foundation. " It is not simply that the information is at least a half-century out of date, but to add insult to injury it cites a single article which is known to be flawed in support of its conclusion! The unintended educational point is that the way science aspires to work is not the way it actually works, but unfortunately anyone visiting that website ...

Continuing what may turn into a 12-round prize fight, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers was kind enough to send me a link to his team's response to the Bem, Utts & Johnson reply: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018886/ClarificationsForBemUttsJohnson.pdf

Daryl Bem, Jessica Utts, and Wes Johnson have written a reply to the Wagenmakers et al Bayesian analysis of Bem's precognition experiments. You can download it from here . It explains why Wagenmakers et al's conclusion of a null effect is, well, just plain wrong. Utts and Johnson are statistics professors at U C Irvine. Both are authors of popular statistics textbooks, including one on Bayesian methods. In general, if Bayesian and frequentist methods lead to wildly different conclusions about the same underlying dataset, then something is out of whack. In most cases one likely reason is that the Bayesian enthusiast has selected impossibly low Bayesian priors. Bem, Utts and Johnson clearly show that this was the case for Wagenmaker's article, and that a more reasonable choice of priors leads to strong evidence in favor of precognition.