[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Topher

Nope, not true. You are still thinking sensorially. All that is necessary is that enough information enters your brain to bias your responses (both external, such as what card you call out, and internal such as what fragment of a memory ends up being associated with the next word you happen to hear) towards the desired outcome.

Yes, fine, it can bias my responses instead of presenting a complete image. In the case of remote viewing experiments, though, it's clearly more than a biasing, because I don't have a few specific targets from which I merely need to select. I'm supposed to describe my sensations of the remote target from scratch, in detail. In any event, something had to interpret the target and present the information to my brain. And the part of my brain that receives the information is a sense, unless you want to claim that my entire brain state is simply wham! reset to the answer.

The observational theories say, essentially that among the repertoire of responses that you might naturally have, the probability of certain ones that are positively reinforced at the time of feedback are increased and the probabilities of certain ones that are negatively reinforced at the time of feedback are decreased.

But for some remote viewing experiments, and for psychic readings, and for telepathy in general, the repertoire of responses is huge. Furthermore, it's not as if I have a repertoire of fully-formed scenes, say, which merely need to be biased. The repertoire consists of low-level components: ground, trees, buildings, fences, boats, clouds, etc., etc. To say that the information biases my selection toward the correct complex combination of all these low-level items is tantamount to saying that a fully-formed image is presented to my brain. (By "image" I did not mean visual image.)

I would say, rather, that in any case, we have a lot of rather counterintuitive mechanisms to understand -- as we did (and still do) with SR, QM and GR.

We have to discover the mechanisms before we can understand them. But I agree that it all comes down to science.

~~ Paul