How does remote viewing work?

[OC68]

Assuming it's legit, what do you think is taking place that allows it to occur?

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by OC68

Assuming it's legit, what do you think is taking place that allows it to occur?

Excellent question, hopefully everyone who replies will assume it is legit for the sake of the discussion.

I suppose my best guess is that we all have some dim awareness of a huge collection of human knowledge, and remote viewers access that. That concept of a huge collective unconscious seems to correspond with the experience of the various savants who can in extreme cases:

Access a list of huge prime numbers without even being capable of basic arithmetic.

Play and write music really well while mentally handicapped, and often initially with little training.

Produce high quality artwork.

That dim collective unconscious, may also play a part in some creative acts by other people - the flash of intuition.

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

But remote viewing a site without an assistant viewing the site does not involve anything we could call "unconscious." There is no human consciousness involved at all. There is no ancestral experience that could form the imprint for the remote viewer to access.

It has to be something more like an objective akashic record that the remote viewer has access to.

~~ Paul

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

But remote viewing a site without an assistant viewing the site does not involve anything we could call "unconscious." There is no human consciousness involved at all. There is no ancestral experience that could form the imprint for the remote viewer to access.

It has to be something more like an objective akashic record that the remote viewer has access to.

~~ Paul

Most if not all sites - such as the various Soviet installations - were obviously familiar to many humans! You would have to organise a remote viewing of the contents of Lake Vostok, or the putative seas on Titan, to test this - and the answers would not come back for a few decades!

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David

Most if not all sites - such as the various Soviet installations - were obviously familiar to many humans! You would have to organise a remote viewing of the contents of Lake Vostok, or the putative seas on Titan, to test this - and the answers would not come back for a few decades!

I don't think the collective unconscious is supposed to be a complete memory of everything humans have ever seen. But then again, it's a ridiculous concept anyway.

~~ Paul

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I don't think the collective unconscious is supposed to be a complete memory of everything humans have ever seen. But then again, it's a ridiculous concept anyway.

~~ Paul

So you think events being store with/in time is a ridiculous concept?

Paul, if I recall correctly you have a soft spot for the Many World Interpretation .... is that not more far fetched?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

So you think events being store with/in time is a ridiculous concept?

Yes. Where is the store? Where is our interface to it?

If we're going to speculate that the remote viewer has access to some sort of akashic record of everything that has ever happened, we might as well speculate that he can simply "see" the physical remote location. The latter requires no more magic than the former; in fact, probably less.

Paul, if I recall correctly you have a soft spot for the Many World Interpretation .... is that not more far fetched?

No, because it falls out of a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics. But it is the result of an interpretation, which certainly puts it on thin ice. I'm not going to basing my life's philosophy on MWI without some serious evidence.

Not all unproven hypotheses are equally reasonable.

~~ Paul

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I don't think the collective unconscious is supposed to be a complete memory of everything humans have ever seen. But then again, it's a ridiculous concept anyway.

~~ Paul

From a materialist point of view, both remote viewing and the collective unconscious are ridiculous concepts, but if you want to explain remote viewing on the assumption that it exists, you clearly have to step outside the limitations of materialism. I was implicitly doing just that in my original post.

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David

From a materialist point of view, both remote viewing and the collective unconscious are ridiculous concepts, but if you want to explain remote viewing on the assumption that it exists, you clearly have to step outside the limitations of materialism. I was implicitly doing just that in my original post.

Yes, that's fine. I said it is a ridiculous concept because even if we want to use it to explain remote viewing, we can't come up with a coherent definition. And we say "it's the akashic record," or some such thing, then what? The conversation isn't very interesting if we can't take another step.

~~ Paul

[davidsmith73]

Originally Posted by OC68

Assuming it's legit, what do you think is taking place that allows it to occur?

I think it's helpful to frame this question in two ways.

The first is to ask how someone 'receives' any kind of information about a remote target in the first place. This is more to do with fundamental physics, of which I know very little.

The second is to ask what kind of information is acutally 'received' in the mind of the viewer and how is it subsequently used to generate the mental impression of the target. This is more to do with psychology. For example, it may be that the remote viewing procedure essentially primes certain memory representations pertinent to the target which are then subsequently brought into consciousness, rather than conscious impressions being directly 'injected' into the mind of the viewer. Consistent remote viewers like Joe McMoneagle may simply be very good at selecting these primed memory representations from the noise, but not necessarily in a purposeful way. Obviously, much more research is needed to figure out the psychological mechanism.