James Randi Challenges Skeptiko’s Telepathic Dog

[davidsmith73]

Originally Posted by alextsakiris

This whole thing is really pretty simple:
1. run a lot of trials.
2. apply reasonable controls for routine and cueing
3. see if the dog waits more when the owner is coming home.

It's also possible you may be dealing with precognition of the owner arriving home rather than telepathy with the owner. If it's precognition, it may be more to do with the dog anticipating it's own excited reaction to someone coming through the door rather than making contact with the owner's thoughts. In which case you might not expect the waiting behaviour to correlate so well with the start of the return journey compared to a telepathy type model. Just a thought. The method of analysis suggested by Chris wouldn't take this into account, and so like David said, you need a method that can explore related issues like this.

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Indeed. To follow your lead, we know people can hear things far away, but they can't see through buildings and hills.

Hey, I look out my window at night and I can see through a building and see things over 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away.

Your super-hearing hypothesis requires the dog to be able to detect sounds that over flat open ground without any intervening structures and the air acting like an ideal, frictionless fluid would be about 35 times softer than the minimum intensity believed possible for humans or dogs at the optimum frequency. The dogs have managed to carefully hide this phenomenal ability by, apparently, not only resisting the temptations of avoiding reward or punishment when they hear something softer than the level they are "supposed" to have, but by suppressing brain-wave activity associated with its perception. This is truly phenomenal because the known limits to human (and canine) hearing are very close to those allowed by quantum uncertainty (in fact, a famous, deliberately naive "bees wing" type analysis appeared to demonstrate that the ear must be kept close to absolute zero to show the sensitivity it does).

But of course, the ground is not flat, there are trees and hills and buildings and walls further attenuating the sound, the air itself is not frictionless so greater attenuation than simple inverse square occurs in reality (very much so at the higher frequencies where dog hearing is actually better than human hearing). So we are talking about much, much more than 35 times the accepted sensitivity.

All this is just talking about the minimal detectable limit for sound under conditions where other sounds have been shielded out. But the task is not minimum detection but discrimination. Not only is this sound way, way too quiet to be heard at all, but it needs to be reliably distinguished from all the sounds produced within that same 10 mile radius, including many, many that are much louder and probably hundreds (cars in the area) that are virtually identical. Much, much easier discrimination tasks than that have been demonstrated to be mathematically impossible, so I have very little doubt that this would also.

So we are definitely talking about something only slightly less radical than the "super-vision" you deride. You are basically proposing that instead of being merely one more of a long line of demonstrations of psi, that Sheldrake may have made a Nobel Prize level experimental discovery.

No, it should be taken into account quite seriously. Remember, I said that I don't think super-hearing or super-smell is the explanation. However, our alternatives are mind-reading dogs, dogs that can remote view, dogs that are prescient, etc. I just can't completely toss off the super-hearing thing, even with centuries of hearing research, in favor of these other completely nonunderstood choices.

Translation: it is much preferable to believe that something that appears to be well understood by science on the basis of centuries of experimental evidence is completely and totally "nonunderstood" than that something that is only "supported" by being a long held assumption might be mistaken -- something, I might add that this is only the latest in a large number of experiments to demonstrate that it is not true.

Or to put it another way, given a choice between evidence and belief, you apparently prefer the belief. This is referred to as "faith", and I'm all for it, but it is neither science nor skepticism.

From the video: "Tommies telepathic link with his owner ..." I guess we have to use the alternate definition of telepathic also.

Well, yes, you probably don't understand what the term "telepathy" designates scientifically, but ...

No we just have to distinguish informal speculation about what might underly the observed phenomenon, from what was actually demonstrated. Rhine realized in the 40s that telepathy is not (at least at the present state of knowledge) scientifically distinguishable from clairvoyance. It is a convenient way of looking at certain phenomena, essentially a description of one psychologically but not scientifically circumstance under which anomalous information transfer may occur -- specifically, when one potential source of the information is a brain-state rather than some other physical system.

Okay then, I'll start using the term psi to refer to research involving interesting sensory experiments with unknown explanations. But as soon as I hear someone make a statement in which he is assuming a "paranormal" explanation for the experiment, I'm gonna holler. I'd say that "Dogs who Know" video deserves a loud shout.

You can use the term any way you wish, but that is neither correct usage nor what I said. First off, I said nothing about "sensory experiments". One of the major divisions of psi phenomena (ESP) does involve something that acts operationally like the senses (i.e., it involves the transfer of information from the environment to the mind), but that doesn't mean that it is literally sensory.

Second, I did not say that the explanations are simply unknown. I said that they require violation of what is understood to be possible according to current scientific understanding. The philosopher C. D. Broad spoke of "basic limiting principles" in science. These are generally not tested but are considered so basic that they are assumed without question. Phenomena which violate those basic limiting principles -- that require fundamentally new principles for explanation -- are paranormal. Having a dog able to "hear" and recognize a signal many orders of magnitude below the noise level is within that range of phenomena, though less clearly than much of the great body of experimental evidence for psi.

I see no reason, by the way, to suppose that the revisions to scientific understanding that will be required to explain psi phenomena will be as scientifically as radical as those truly "paranormal" theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Its only that they are less comfortable to many people philosophically -- it implies a fundamental problem with our understanding very close to hand rather than at very small scales, very high energies, very large speeds, or near very large masses.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Topher

So we are definitely talking about something only slightly less radical than the "super-vision" you deride. You are basically proposing that instead of being merely one more of a long line of demonstrations of psi, that Sheldrake may have made a Nobel Prize level experimental discovery.

I agree that it is only slightly less radical. Actually, though, the super-seeing thing came up because I mentioned remote viewing, which is not supposed to work by seeing from where you are to a point far away. It's supposed to work by some sort of out-of-body presence at the remote site, right?

Translation: it is much preferable to believe that something that appears to be well understood by science on the basis of centuries of experimental evidence is completely and totally "nonunderstood" than that something that is only "supported" by being a long held assumption might be mistaken -- something, I might add that this is only the latest in a large number of experiments to demonstrate that it is not true.

Your use of "much preferable" is somewhat hyperbolic, no? I much prefer to believe that the answer does not lie in any of these super-senses.

Well, yes, you probably don't understand what the term "telepathy" designates scientifically, but ...

Ah, so Alex was using it in some formal sense that all the other viewers of the video understand.

No we just have to distinguish informal speculation about what might underly the observed phenomenon, from what was actually demonstrated. Rhine realized in the 40s that telepathy is not (at least at the present state of knowledge) scientifically distinguishable from clairvoyance. It is a convenient way of looking at certain phenomena, essentially a description of one psychologically but not scientifically circumstance under which anomalous information transfer may occur -- specifically, when one potential source of the information is a brain-state rather than some other physical system.

So Alex is telling us that Tommy has a telepathic/clairvoyant link with his owner, possibly involving remote viewing the brain-state of the owner. The dog has potentially evolved the ability to remotely view the neural net of a human brain and parse out information about the human's intended activities.

You can use the term any way you wish, but that is neither correct usage nor what I said. First off, I said nothing about "sensory experiments". One of the major divisions of psi phenomena (ESP) does involve something that acts operationally like the senses (i.e., it involves the transfer of information from the environment to the mind), but that doesn't mean that it is literally sensory.

I think anything that transfers information from the environment to the brain is a sense, almost by definition. But let's not quibble.

Could you define psi for me? I'm obviously not getting it.

~~ Paul

[Chris Noble]

Originally Posted by alextsakiris

Exactly!... lotta over-thinking by dogmatic Skeptics.

This whole thing is really pretty simple:
1. run a lot of trials.
2. apply reasonable controls for routine and cueing
3. see if the dog waits more when the owner is coming home.

You really don't seem to get it at all.

If the dog starts waiting ten minutes after the owner leaves then it will always spend a greater proportion of time waiting when the owner is returning than during the main period.

This will occur even with perfect controls.

If the dog simply repeats this behaviour for every trial then you will get a statistically significant result.

A totally non-paranormal behaviour of the dog will generate a statistically significant "effect" according to the criteria used by Sheldrake.

Putting your head in the sand and ignoring this will not make it go away.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Topher Cooper

I see no reason, by the way, to suppose that the revisions to scientific understanding that will be required to explain psi phenomena will be as scientifically as radical as those truly "paranormal" theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Its only that they are less comfortable to many people philosophically -- it implies a fundamental problem with our understanding very close to hand rather than at very small scales, very high energies, very large speeds, or near very large masses.

It is fascinating that you say that, and I know you have said similar things before, but I just don't get that. As things stand we have a fundamental physics that makes absolutely no reference to consciousness (except of course (depending on interpretation) to collapse the wavefunction!). Ψ is, more or less by definition, about conscious beings doing things that don't fit into that standard picture. That physics is supposed to apply equally to a brain receiving or transmitting Ψ signals or involved in precognitionn, or whatever as to a rock.

You can't just tweak conventional science - there are far too many experiments that appear to fit the orthodox position and pin it down - removing the wiggle room. This is entirely analogous to the transition from Newtonian gravity to General Relativity. The known examples of anomalous behaviour at the time - such as the precession of the orbit of Mercury - were tiny deviations from expected behaviour, but in a technical sense they 'brought down' Newtonian gravity - even though it is so accurate that it is still used for most purposes.

I would be very interested to hear what sort of revision to science you could imagine being adequate to explain Ψ.

David

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

It is fascinating that you say that, and I know you have said similar things before, but I just don't get that. As things stand we have a fundamental physics that makes absolutely no reference to consciousness (except of course (depending on interpretation) to collapse the wavefunction!). Ψ is, more or less by definition, about conscious beings doing things that don't fit into that standard picture. That physics is supposed to apply equally to a brain receiving or transmitting Ψ signals or involved in precognitionn, or whatever as to a rock.

Absolutely, the laws of physics apply equally everywhere. But they do not observably manifest the same everywhere. You can observe a bottle of water however you want and never find a trace of ferromagnetism -- that requires iron or related substance below its Curie temperature. Or that rock you spoke of at room temperature and never see any trace of superfluidity or superconducting -- those requires cryogenic temperatures and being made of the right substance. And, of course, you can observe an ordinary desk for however you want and it will never show sophisticated symbolic computational ability -- that requires a complex and precise arrangement of many different substances such as in a PC.

You can't just tweak conventional science - there are far too many experiments that appear to fit the orthodox position and pin it down - removing the wiggle room. This is entirely analogous to the transition from Newtonian gravity to General Relativity. The known examples of anomalous behaviour at the time - such as the precession of the orbit of Mercury - were tiny deviations from expected behaviour, but in a technical sense they 'brought down' Newtonian gravity - even though it is so accurate that it is still used for most purposes.

Precisely -- GR refined the concepts of Newtonian gravitational theory. That it was a refinement is shown by the fact that the latter is, as you say, still used for most purposes. This was a pretty big tweak to science as a whole -- but a tweak it was. No one proposed that all previous science should be discarded, GR was part of the cumulative aspect of science.

As I've said before. There is nothing that we have observed in psi that requires that its explanation include a special, fundamental, causative role for consciousness. The manifestation of the underlying explanatory principle that we have observed in psi experiments is linked to what we think of as conscious systems (i.e., people and sometimes animals). But that may be because we don't know where else to look. Until the last century, for example, it was believed that organic substances could only be produced by living things, because it had never been shown otherwise, and that this demonstrated the truth of vitalism. Then uric acid was synthesized from inorganic precursors and that proof (after many accusations of fraud and error) for vitalism vanished.

On the other hand, we have only observed psi in relation to arguably conscious organisms, and we really don't know what it is, so I wouldn't pretend to rule out the possibility. If you are looking for a manifestation of a fundamentally distinct consciousness in the physical world, psi is an excellent, fully rational, place to look.

I would be very interested to hear what sort of revision to science you could imagine being adequate to explain Ψ.

David

If I had a clear answer to that, there wouldn't be a mystery. However, Stapp believes that a small non-linearity introduced into quantum mechanics would do the trick (to the extent that I understand his arguments, I don't think that it covers all the demonstrated phenomena, but I could easily just not understand). Others have proposed that using complex numbers or quaternions instead of scalars in our formulations of time would make the desired changes. I proposed once that the ability for a physical system to modify the amplitude of the part of the Schroedinger wave that it is a part of would explain most of what we have observed in psi phenomena, including some of their most apparently non-physical aspects (e.g., goal orientation, independence of system complexity and immunity to physical barriers or time).

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I agree that it is only slightly less radical. Actually, though, the super-seeing thing came up because I mentioned remote viewing, which is not supposed to work by seeing from where you are to a point far away. It's supposed to work by some sort of out-of-body presence at the remote site, right?

Not right. Some people think that is the case but that is just speculation. Remove viewing is a kind of protocol for clairvoyance -- a way of eliciting psi phenomena.

Your use of "much preferable" is somewhat hyperbolic, no? I much prefer to believe that the answer does not lie in any of these super-senses.

Nope. You seemed to be pretty clear that you found it much preferable. I didn't say that you didn't prefer still other alternatives (like, "there must be something wrong with it", which is an "effective" answer to any collection of evidence contrary to someones beliefs) better.

Ah, so Alex was using it in some formal sense that all the other viewers of the video understand.

I have no idea -- you were arguing with me.

So Alex is telling us that Tommy has a telepathic/clairvoyant link with his owner, possibly involving remote viewing the brain-state of the owner. The dog has potentially evolved the ability to remotely view the neural net of a human brain and parse out information about the human's intended activities.

Again, I have no idea what Alex is telling us. I think that it is pretty clear that psi does not involve "parsing out information" or "viewing" in any literal sense.

I think anything that transfers information from the environment to the brain is a sense, almost by definition. But let's not quibble.

Its not a quibble, but an important point that underlies a source of confusion that underly many of your arguments (e.g., requiring that the dog "view" and "parse out" the information from the "neural net" of its owners brain). Terms frequently have a general and a specific sense. Because of the specific sense, the term "sensory" carries a whole load of assumptions that are demonstrably inappropriate to ESP (which stands for extra sensory perception -- perception outside of sensory means).

Could you define psi for me? I'm obviously not getting it.

~~ Paul

"Psi" is a label for the unknown explanatory principle or principles that underly the results found in parapsychology experiments. These results, in turn, are evidence for information transfer occurring sometimes under conditions that would preclude such transfer under current scientific understanding (I could swear I have defined that previously in this discussion, but I won't spend the time to look).

[David Bailey]

Topher,

I think part of our disagreement is superficial. I certainly agree that:

1) Any new theory must reproduce the results of the existing experiments within experimental error.

2) GR is a very minor numerical tweak as manifested within the solar system.

However, GR represents a massive shift in underlying formalism. In particular it replaces the normal notion of space and time with a truly bizarre curved spacetime. To me, it is hard to believe that the incorporation of Ψ into scientific theory will be less dramatic in this sense.

This is the bit I really disagree with: "There is nothing that we have observed in psi that requires that its explanation include a special, fundamental, causative role for consciousness."

From the conventional viewpoint, consciousness is just the operation of neural nets, each of which develops by a statistical process which makes your neural net representation of the concept "water" completely different from mine. If that concept of consciousness is roughly correct, then telepathy seems impossible in principle unless conceivably it were somehow transmitting the sound of the equivalent words. I wonder if anyone has tested for telepathy between people that do not share a common language.

Stapp endlessly discusses his idea of the quantum zeno effect - whereby repeatedly observing a system that is in an eigenstate, prevents it being perturbed into another state or a superposition. Fine, but why on earth would a consciousness described as above have this special role?

Consciousness is a phenomenon that has proved very hard to explain conventionally, and my hunch is that Ψ is needed as part of that explanation, and that what we call Ψ phenomena are just fringe effects from the operation of consciousness. Presentiment seems to point in that direction.

We also need to think about Ψ phenomena such as NDE's that seem to hint at the idea that consciousness can exist separate from the brain.

I think the important - and obvious - point (on which we agree) to make is that Ψ would only invalidate existing science in the very technical sense that GR invalidated Newtonian physics.

David

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

This is the bit I really disagree with: "There is nothing that we have observed in psi that requires that its explanation include a special, fundamental, causative role for consciousness."

From the conventional viewpoint, consciousness is just the operation of neural nets, each of which develops by a statistical process which makes your neural net representation of the concept "water" completely different from mine. If that concept of consciousness is roughly correct, then telepathy seems impossible in principle unless conceivably it were somehow transmitting the sound of the equivalent words.

First off, there has never been a rigorous demonstration of telepathy distinct from clairvoyance operating on targets other than the brain state in question. A telepathy experiment is one where the possibility that the source of the information that was anomalously transferred was another mind (or brain-state).

But even setting that aside: you are making the same error that Paul has been making in thinking of ESP as a kind of sensory perception. ESP is demonstrably goal directed -- it is the outcome that is relevant, not the details of the target. One of the ways that this can be seen is that there is no detectable dependence on the complexity of the purported target representation and the kind of response that the percipient makes to indicate their call. As long as the conventionally perceived situation is identical (psychological factors being important) it seems in no way more difficult to call a target that exists only as a complex pattern of electrons in silicon encoding the target choice as a cryptographic hash of an ASCII description of something, than if the target is an actual photograph of a scene printed on high quality paper and sealed in an opaque envelope in the next room (this isn't a description of an actual experiment but just something to get the idea across). Cognitive decoding and interpretation of some set of "sensory" data just does not seem to be part of the process.

This is part of the inspiration for the class of theories referred to as "observational theories" which place the emphasis on the percipients' direct or indirect feedback rather than on the target per se (my "modification of the wave function" theory falls into this category of theories).

I wonder if anyone has tested for telepathy between people that do not share a common language.

Not that I know of, but as I said, there really isn't any way to test for telepathy anyway. If there was, I don't think the language people use in their "stream of consciousness" would have any effect.

Stapp endlessly discusses his idea of the quantum zeno effect - whereby repeatedly observing a system that is in an eigenstate, prevents it being perturbed into another state or a superposition. Fine, but why on earth would a consciousness described as above have this special role?

I think you misunderstand Stapp. To him, consciousness describes any physical system that has that property -- it isn't a characteristic that is part of a complex category of things called "conscious systems". If a thermostat had that capability -- even if, for example, it had nothing that could be described as self-awareness -- then it would be conscious. Contriwise, if you were completely self-aware, complete with the famous "qualia" but do not have that capability, then to Stapp you are not conscious. Of course, he believes that the other stuff is a consequence of that property, but if this were shown to be incorrect then his fundamental physical theory would be completely unaffected.

Consciousness is a phenomenon that has proved very hard to explain conventionally, and my hunch is that Ψ is needed as part of that explanation, and that what we call Ψ phenomena are just fringe effects from the operation of consciousness. Presentiment seems to point in that direction.

Sorry, don't see how they seem to point in that direction. They show only that sometimes information appears in the brain (presentiment is unambiguously about brain state) a little bit before it actually exists in the world. It only differs from other precognition tests in the degree that it measures what is going on at distinct from the mechanical system of conscious "calling" of targets -- and, for that matter, distinct from what is conventionally referred to as "consciousness".

We also need to think about Ψ phenomena such as NDE's that seem to hint at the idea that consciousness can exist separate from the brain.

They may seem to but they do not, currently provide any real evidence for that. They only show (putting aside any arguments about the rigorousness of the evidence -- that's been thrashed out pretty thoroughly) that occasionally an NDE state is psi conducive. One possibility is that this occurs because of a physical detachment of mind from brain, but that is only one possibility, no more strongly supported than any other theory of psi. Furthermore, even if it were established that mind can exist separate from brain does not prove that mind can exist separate from any physical substrate -- that it is nonphysical.

Again, for those who are looking to find physical evidence that mind is fundamentally non-physical, the tiny percentage of NDEs (and other OBEs) that are veridical are a place to look, but its not there yet.

[davidsmith73]

Originally Posted by Topher Cooper

But even setting that aside: you are making the same error that Paul has been making in thinking of ESP as a kind of sensory perception. ESP is demonstrably goal directed -- it is the outcome that is relevant, not the details of the target.

Not sure I agree.

I can't see how this interpretation would fit with the results of presentiment experiments. Presentiment seems to be related to the psychological effects that the targets have on the participants perceptual system. Emotional targets produce a greater presentiment response than calm targets, in line with how the targets interact with the nervous system in 'real-time'.