The Collective Placebo Effect? Collective Belief & Disbelief?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Tor

Is it inconsistent with known physics? I'd say that modern physics is open to such effects. Delayed choice experiments can be interpreted as retroactive effects. In physics, the whole concept of time gets blurry when you start to pick at it.

The entire presentiment business is much more complicated than everyone makes it out to be. Here's a paper on its complexity:

http://m0134.fmg.uva.nl/publications...ias_PA2002.pdf

There are also replication failures:

http://www.parapsych.org/papers/02.pdf

It is premature to assume that the presentiment experiments demonstrate something spooky.

~~ Paul

[Tor]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

The entire presentiment business is much more complicated than everyone makes it out to be. Here's a paper on its complexity:

http://m0134.fmg.uva.nl/publications...ias_PA2002.pdf

There are also replication failures:

http://www.parapsych.org/papers/02.pdf

It is premature to assume that the presentiment experiments demonstrate something spooky.

~~ Paul

Your first link doesn't work (Bierman's old publication page is probably down), but I think this is the paper you linked?

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/...esentiment.pdf

As to replication failures, the only way to get any form of certainty is by a lot of independent replications. A few on each side won't do it. There have been quite a lot of replications (here is a list, probably not complete, but illustrative), and I personally feel the evidence is in favor of a real presentiment effect.

But my initial point was that our current understanding of physics isn't closed to the possibility of retrocausal effects anymore (check this link for an overview of a 2006 physics-conference on retrocausation). This is the case independently of the presentiment effect.

[David Bailey]

Tor,

Thanks for the link to Bierman's paper - I had followed that dead end too! Your 'list' link was very encouraging (at least if you think a real presentiment effect would be more fun than an artifact!) - Paul you should go there. Unfortunately I can't get at the retro-causation papers without payment. Do any of those papers report actual experimental results?

A real presentiment effect might go a long way to explain Libet's results because the delays in neural processing can be compensated by advance knowledge!

Paul would probably classify a real presentiment effect as physicalist - but who cares, it would certainly push this whole subject a lot further forward!

I also wonder if presentiment is somehow involved in certain sports played at a high level. For example, a snooker player will watch the ball intently after it has left his cue and is no longer under his control. I do seriously wonder if he gets a good feeling from the future as he lines up the cue (the task looks almost impossible). It would be interesting to fit a player with glasses that could be opaqued electrically after the ball had left the cue - my bet is that his performance would drop on those trials (selected randomly) when the glasses went opaque so that he was deprived of the instant feedback of how well he had done!

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Tor

Your first link doesn't work (Bierman's old publication page is probably down), but I think this is the paper you linked?

No, that's not it. Let's try again:


http://m0134.fmg.uva.nl/publications...ias_PA2002.pdf

The title is "A COMPUTATIONAL EXPECTATION BIAS AS REVEALED BY SIMULATIONS OF PRESENTIMENT EXPERIMENTS"

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David

Paul would probably classify a real presentiment effect as physicalist - but who cares, it would certainly push this whole subject a lot further forward!

If science could explain it, then yes.

You guys are too easily convinced.

~~ Paul

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

If science could explain it, then yes.

You guys are too easily convinced.

~~ Paul

No we are not - we simply want the normal process of science to swing into action and explore some of these observations to exhaustion!

I don't want to believe in anything if it is not true - hell, that is why I stopped being a Christian while I was an undergraduate - but I hate the way in which an attitude of perpetual scepticism substitutes for more (and slightly better funded) experiments.

BTW, I am just reading "The Mind and the Brain - Neuroplasticity and the power of mental force" by Jeffrey M Schwartz and Sharon Begley. They are strong supporters of Stapp's ideas, and relate them to various ways of treating OCD and similar disorders.

It is interesting to read how sceptically the idea of neuroplasticity was treated - for many, many years. One postgraduate student had his PhD delayed for some time out of spite because he had uncovered evidence for neuroplasticity. The whole saga is incredibly reminiscent of the fight over Ψ.

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David

No we are not - we simply want the normal process of science to swing into action and explore some of these observations to exhaustion!

I think the operative word here is exhaustion. The proponents of the ideas are the ones who have to become exhausted. The rest of the scientific community is not required to drop their research and pay attention.

I don't want to believe in anything if it is not true - hell, that is why I stopped being a Christian while I was an undergraduate - but I hate the way in which an attitude of perpetual scepticism substitutes for more (and slightly better funded) experiments.

Don't blame the scientists for lack of funding. Funding tends to follow those ideas that can lead to technological progress. We're still using remote cameras to remotely view remote places.

BTW, I am just reading "The Mind and the Brain - Neuroplasticity and the power of mental force" by Jeffrey M Schwartz and Sharon Begley. They are strong supporters of Stapp's ideas, and relate them to various ways of treating OCD and similar disorders.

Here's a great book by R.F. Streater, Lost Causes in and beyond Physics.

Amazon.com: Lost Causes in and beyond Physics: R.F. Streater: Books

One chapter is titled "Stapp's Theory of the Brain."

It is interesting to read how sceptically the idea of neuroplasticity was treated - for many, many years. One postgraduate student had his PhD delayed for some time out of spite because he had uncovered evidence for neuroplasticity. The whole saga is incredibly reminiscent of the fight over ?.

And yet! here we are talking about neuroplasticity. If psi has a day to get, it will get its day.

~~ Paul

[Chris Noble]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

Guys I've just suggested an placebo VS placebo experiment above that could monitor the effects....

'....testing a placebo 1 against a placebo 2 however tell the medical researchers performing single blind experiment that one of these is an esteemed drug with excellent results in prior (invented) trials, monitor the results. Then do double blind later, if the effect continues in the double blind stage, that is impossible in current scientific paradigm? ...

The prediction would be the highly esteemed placebo beats the normal placebo in single blind, continues to work better than the non-esteemed placebo in double blind trials ......until researchers find out the drug was a placebo then, then the esteemed placebo decreases.

If that occurs, only something like Sheldrake's formative causation could explain it IMHO

That's actually as good or better than most of Sheldrake's proposed tests. It is certainly several orders of magnitudes better and simpler than stuffing around with psychic pooches.

I still don't see precisely how this follows transparently from "Morphic Resonance" as it has not been described in a concise and consistent form. I'm not sure whether Sheldrake would agree as to whether "morphic resonance" in fact predicts this.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

And yet! here we are talking about neuroplasticity. If psi has a day to get, it will get its day.

~~ Paul

I suspect it will, but like previous scientific changes of heart, it will only happen because a lot of people bang on about it and get scoffed at!

Rupert Sheldrake (who is hopefully recovering from his ordeal) and others are needed to pick away at the orthodox scientific position, and ask questions such as just how it is that dogs seem to know when their owners are coming home, or just how it is that pigeons can be blindfolded, or even anaesthetised, and released several hundred miles away, but still find their way home. It needs Rupert to point out that even if pigeons have a magnetic sense, that is not enough to guide them home from an unknown place (a compass only helps if you know what direction home is).

My sense is that physicists are far more ready to discuss radical ideas - if anything, they are hailed for their imagination, even if the idea doesn't turn out. However, in the biological sciences I sense that there is a different atmosphere. Possibly the physicist Roger Penrose encountered the different culture head on when he wrote his books about consciousness (without even a word about Ψ). Even the idea that some DNA that does not code for proteins, but for RNA that has a direct catalytic role was considered heresy, because there was a 'dogma' that genes code for proteins, full stop!!

Possibly biological experiments can have too many extraneous factors - such as the placebo effect - that researchers are left with a permanent sense of unease that chunks of their work will turn out to be wrong - I don't know.

David

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by David

I suspect it will, but like previous scientific changes of heart, it will only happen because a lot of people bang on about it and get scoffed at!

And because a bunch of old farts die and young upstarts pay more attention. That's the way human endeavors work.

Rupert Sheldrake (who is hopefully recovering from his ordeal) and others are needed to pick away at the orthodox scientific position, and ask questions such as just how it is that dogs seem to know when their owners are coming home, or just how it is that pigeons can be blindfolded, or even anaesthetised, and released several hundred miles away, but still find their way home. It needs Rupert to point out that even if pigeons have a magnetic sense, that is not enough to guide them home from an unknown place (a compass only helps if you know what direction home is).

Not if you use the Earth's magnetic field as an inclination compass.

http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/199/1/29.pdf

SpringerLink - Journal Article

My sense is that physicists are far more ready to discuss radical ideas - if anything, they are hailed for their imagination, even if the idea doesn't turn out. However, in the biological sciences I sense that there is a different atmosphere. Possibly the physicist Roger Penrose encountered the different culture head on when he wrote his books about consciousness (without even a word about ?). Even the idea that some DNA that does not code for proteins, but for RNA that has a direct catalytic role was considered heresy, because there was a 'dogma' that genes code for proteins, full stop!!

Yeah, it was considered heresy for about five minutes. Then, amazingly, someone noticed RNAs floating about that are not translated. Voila! the 28 March issue of Science:

Science/AAAS | Table of Contents: 28 March 2008; 319 (5871)

Science is not the hegemonic closed-minded enterprise that you make it out to be. It's just a human endeavor with all the associated foibles. Hey, at least it's not politics.

~~ Paul