James Randi Challenges Skeptiko’s Telepathic Dog

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by davidsmith73

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'.

Not quite right. Its true that the measurements are of the (neural correlates) to the psychological (emotional) effects that the targets have on the subject through the perceptual system. That it happens to be through the sensory system is incidental. I would expect pretty much the same response when, for example, someone suddenly figures out that something dire may have happened that they were blissfully unaware of. The presentiment experiments are studying emotional responses, not perception.

The ordinary emotional reaction serves a purpose -- flight or fight response preparation among other things. Anticipating the response serves the same purpose.

[David Bailey]

Topher,

I think there are a lot of ways to put this jigsaw together. Some people reject all Ψ as 'woo woo', some of us see it as indicating the need for a new upheaval in scientific thinking - as we have already discussed - and you clearly see a third way. Inevitably, each of us achieves this by dismissing some evidence and concentrating on other bits - I guess only time will tell who is closest to the truth.

Incidentally, I was not even thinking particularly of veridical NDE accounts - just the 'ordinary' kind. The idea that neurones dying from lack of oxygen and glutamate poisoning (plus the anaesthetic which must often be present) suddenly produce a complex hallucination that is remembered far better than most dreams or even everyday life seems utterly improbable. Yes, it is possible to dismiss this fact as of no importance, but I suspect it is a rather important piece of the jigsaw.

David

[davidsmith73]

Originally Posted by Topher Cooper

Not quite right. Its true that the measurements are of the (neural correlates) to the psychological (emotional) effects that the targets have on the subject through the perceptual system. That it happens to be through the sensory system is incidental.
I would expect pretty much the same response when, for example, someone suddenly figures out that something dire may have happened that they were blissfully unaware of. The presentiment experiments are studying emotional responses, not perception.

Well that's true. In the most fundamental sense, presentiment relies on a change in nervous system activity in the future, according to my understanding. It just so happens that external stimuli have been used to cause a change in future activity. Internal sources of change such as memory may cause presentiment, but it hasn't been tested. I would bet on the possibility though.

I think the main point is that presentiment, so far, seems to mirror normal nervous system responses to external stimuli in every way, so I'm still not sure how you can say that the targets are irrelevant. Surely, the targets are a source of patterned information. If the targets are different, this will cause different patterns of future nervous system activity and therefore different presentiment responses. Or am I missing your point?

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Topher

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.

Yes, agreed. And clairvoyance is supposed to work by some sort of out-of-body presence at the remote site, isn't it? I guess not. It's just supposed to work.

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).

Sorry, I just don't understand how I can perceive something without using a sense. Even if I am somehow cognizing information out of thin air, it's still a sense. But anyhoo, it's just a quibble with definition.

"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).

Sounds good. It means we did a parapsychology experiment and we don't understand the results. I don't think most people use the term that way, but I'll try to. It's similar to the way people use the term UFO.

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Topher

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.

Then there must be some mechanism that presents the target to my brain, fully formed, as if it were the downstream result of seeing an image of the target without actually seeing anything. Or as if it were the downstream result of reading a description of the target without actually reading anything. Something has to interpret the bits in the computer.

The other possibility is that there is a representation of reality, including the target, "in the ether" (akashic record?) that results in both the computer's internal representation and my cognizing the target. Now we need an infinite number of mechanisms to interpret the akashic record.

Either way, we have a hugely complex piece of machinery to discover. And I didn't even mention the temporal aspects of it.

~~ Paul

[Chris Noble]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Sorry, I just don't understand how I can perceive something without using a sense.

Maybe you can perceive something using a nonsense?

[David Bailey]

The whole presentiment experiment seems interesting because it is fairly robust, and ties in with Libet's neural timing results. These are often used as an excuse for claiming that consciousness has no real effect in decision making.

I seriously wonder if consciousness is a phenomenon distinct - at least in part - from the brain that is somewhat delocalised in time.

Topher, I think when thinking about Ψ, you should admit far more things as possibilities. Once you admit Ψ at all, you are into territory that has been very little explored theoretically.

David

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by davidsmith73

I think the main point is that presentiment, so far, seems to mirror normal nervous system responses to external stimuli in every way, so I'm still not sure how you can say that the targets are irrelevant. Surely, the targets are a source of patterned information. If the targets are different, this will cause different patterns of future nervous system activity and therefore different presentiment responses. Or am I missing your point?

If I implied that the targets are irrelevant than I apologize -- that was not what I meant. What I did mean was that the targets' very real relevance is indirect.

Stepping back from presentiment for a moment, lets think about a more traditional "forced choice" experiment. Stepping back even further, lets look at a conventional sensory experiment that is similar. Suppose you have a set of Zener card images that you touch to indicate your call. Let's say that I flash on a screen an image of one of the five symbols, the "target". You then make your "call" by touching one of the five in front of you. It will take you a certain amount of time to perform this action, and you will make mistakes at some rate. Now say I flash, instead of the images themselves, a word or short phrase describing the target ("wiggly lines", "square", etc.). To match the target with the call indication requires some cognitive processing -- translation. As a result you will take longer to make your response and you will have a higher rate of errors. We can lump these two changes together by just saying that your task performance is lower.

We could, however, design an ESP experiment that is identical except that the screen on which the names are flashed is covered and in another room. In this case, as long as the two conditions appear identical to the percipient (they are just told, for example, whether their call was right or wrong, or the correct call indicator lights up) there does not appear to be any change in the percipients' task performance.

This independence of the complexity of the relationship between the supposed stimulus (the target) and the appropriate response (the call) is one of a number of characteristics of psi that are summarized by saying that psi is "goal oriented"; that it is the outcome that matters rather than the specific characteristics of the target (of course, the outcome is dependent on the target, so the target is not irrelevant).

This is simply a way of describing a number of results that have shown up consistently in parapsychological experiments. The observational theories are based on these and essentially say that it is the specifically the act of feedback, and the psychological/emotional response to it, that is the "true" target (they differ in exactly this comes about).

There are a number of results that seem to contradict or at least limit this concept, especially in relation to free response tests. There various characteristics of the target have been shown to be relevant, e.g., dynamic targets work better than static ones, targets with a high "visual entropy" work better than those with low, etc.. But free response tests add an additional step to the process (or, more precisely, make what is a fairly trivial task into a complex one) -- that is the process of "judging," of comparing the "call" to the content of the target. In free response, the nature of the target will inevitably influence how easy the call material (mentation, sketches or whatever) is to produce, how well the judging process will work, and the response of the percipient to the material during feedback. So while these dependencies cannot be said to support goal orientation they do not contradict the idea either.

Now presentiment blurs lines here, in such a way that goal orientation can be either said to be trivially true or indistinguishable. This is because, in a very direct sense, the target is fairly explicitly the percipient's response to the feedback. So the presentiment experiments do not obviously either support or contradict goal orientation.

The point here is that arguments that telepathy is impossible from a physicalist perspective because every brain is different and the task of interpreting these individual differences makes the task impossible are based on a misconception about psi. The error comes from considering ESP as being "sensory" rather than as a different means of perception. The term "sensory" carries implications that are just plain, demonstrably, inappropriate. To refer to "extra-sensory perception" as being a different kind of "sensory perception" is a poor way to think about it.

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Topher, I think when thinking about Ψ, you should admit far more things as possibilities. Once you admit Ψ at all, you are into territory that has been very little explored theoretically.

David

I think you may need to read what I have said more carefully.

I am quite open to very many possibilities. I am open to the possibility, for example, that consciousness has a special role in the universe, that may best be described as non-physical, and that psi is a manifestation of its extra-physical character.

Part of my responses are objecting to people limiting the possibilities about psi inappropriately. When someone says "psi is incompatible with physicalism" or "psi means that the mind is independent of the brain" then I will object to that narrowing of possibilities. Of course I have my preferences and judgments about relative probabilities, and when asked (or for purposes of illustration that other alternatives are possible) I will give those possibilities. Without firm evidence to the contrary (and psi gives little or no such evidence) I prefer physical explanations to extraphysical explanations (which are frequently, though not always, actually no explanation at all), and comparatively moderate changes to the structure of existing laws (moderate changes are less likely to be contradicted by existing evidence, after all) than sweeping ones that throw everything out.

[Topher Cooper]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Then there must be some mechanism that presents the target to my brain, fully formed, as if it were the downstream result of seeing an image of the target without actually seeing anything. Or as if it were the downstream result of reading a description of the target without actually reading anything. Something has to interpret the bits in the computer.

The other possibility is that there is a representation of reality, including the target, "in the ether" (akashic record?) that results in both the computer's internal representation and my cognizing the target. Now we need an infinite number of mechanisms to interpret the akashic record.

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. 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.

Either way, we have a hugely complex piece of machinery to discover. And I didn't even mention the temporal aspects of it.

~~ Paul

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. That is in no way an argument that discredits the evidence. A demonstration of our ignorance makes some people uncomfortable, but the universe doesn't give a d**n about that.

Topher