Precognition Causality Quantum Theory and Mysticism

Yet you illustrate none apart from the talk about post-hoc.
The data from Sheldrake's and Wiseman's experiments clearly shows that Jaytee was at the window much less often before Pam left for home than when she made the decision to go; in the case of Wiseman, 4% vs. 78%. The results are still unambiguous when you take all "noise" at the window into account, as the graph shows, which would seem to indicate that your idea of isolating the experiments so that there are no outside distractions is not necessary, though minimising such distractions is no doubt helpful. Can you explain how this might be a false positive?Secondly, Sheldrake knew beforehand that he was looking for the dog to be at the window more often when Pam was on her way home than when she wasn't. If you look at the data, this pattern is clear. Wiseman was not happy that his own data matched Sheldrake's and he accused Sheldrake of doing a post-hoc analysis of it. Here is what Sheldrkae said: Source
It is also clear that Wiseman ignored other data from the experiments because public comments that he made were erroneous. I was wrong about this happening in 1999; it was 1996, which means that it was 11 years that Wiseman was claiming that he had "debunked" Sheldrake before he admitted that his results were congruent. Most scientists might be a little bit bothered about someone doing this with their work but since it's a well known skeptic declaring paranormal research to be fraudulent, that seems to be OK with a lot of people.The experiments could be performed the way you outline but I would ask if it's necessary. Again, Sheldrake predicted that Jaytee would be waiting at the window more often when Pam decided to come home and thereafter. The experiments were videotaped and the dog's behaviour was analysed not by Sheldrake or anyone else working with him, but by people working blind who were uninvolved with the rest of the experiments and didn't even know what they were about. They were simply asked to record when and how long Jaytee went to the window. Their analyses were checked by others and there was close agreement. When these results were matched with the actual times that Pam was away and coming home, the overall results as plotted on the graphs were highly significant statistically.It is typical of skeptics of paranormal research to demand that parameters need to change or that there were experimental flaws, even if they can't specify -- there had to have been, because a positive result is impossible, according to their world view. So, the statement that might be something you want to think honestly about. This sort of statement is almost always followed by, "but it isn't/it's impossible/there's no evidence so I cannot even consider such a thing." There is actually evidence, and we're looking at some here. It seems to be highly uncomfortable for a number of people. Maybe it's because my name came up, then it was mentioned that I'd said things about Sheldrake elsewhere, then when I made some initial comments you wrote post after post about what a kook he is because of his morphic fields idea. My position is that "I don't know." The reasons for this have been discussed elsewhere. It saddens me to see people openly ridiculing things that seem irrational to them, be it field theories or precognition, because, well, we know it's all nonsense don't we. With this sort of bias, it takes a long time (if ever) for legitimate phenomena outside of these boundaries to be recognised and accepted.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Exactly. So pretending you know what the cause is, and giving it a name which implies it has certain properties - is bullshit, yes? There is at least one thing to be said - there is no evidence for the existence of morphic fields so trumpeting them as an evidenced phenomena and singing and dancing about them with the confidence Sheldrake clearly does is misleading at best. I know, its insane. There are people in this thread that are willing to concede that telepathic dogs exist in order to discuss whether Sheldrake's proposed hypothesis for the phenomenon is warranted or whether it is misleading.There are people who say "maybe there is an effect, but the experiments so far run haven't been able to rule out some more common explanations - difficulties that often crop up in any kind of experiment".I think we are all agreed that there is a phenomenon in play. We awful, naughty, bad, wicked pseudoskeptics have proposed a number of causes for which there is evidence and which have yet to be ruled out.Sheldrake has proposed a cause for which there is no evidence, which can not be tested for and can not ever be ruled out.And you seem to be sympathetic to Sheldrake for some reason, while being unwilling to discuss the central theme of the thread: Why are these people making up pseudoscientific sounding words to describe the phenomenon if it isn't an attempt to borrow some of science's well-earned credibility? It's not that I don't want to talk about them - it's that the thread is about the explanations behind the results not the experiments themselves. If you don't want to discuss how many 'mystical' phenomena attempt to bask in the shade of the credibility of science by invoking 'quantum' concepts and 'information fields' when they have no evidence that their concepts have anything to do with reality, then whatever you want to talk about is technically off topic - or an interesting side topic to be talked about in the same posts as the main topic is discussed.You could always start a new thread, if you want to discuss the experiments themselves.

I don't believe he is pretending he knows what the cause is. He is attempting to validate a hypothesis. I don't believe that the "Dogs that Know" experiments necessarily validate morphic fields, but they do give evidence of a phenomenon that requires explanation. One problem on this thread is that everyone wants to jump to ridiculing woo-woo beliefs without taking the first step of looking at the actual phenomena. I think it does make a difference if you want to laugh at the explanations if you don't even believe that the phenomena could be real -- it just becomes, "Let's have a laugh at these mystic hippie idiots."I also think it is specious to be doing this to the morphic fields idea when no one here really even understands it. Straggler apparently has looked at a few websites, which apparently qualifies him to have a giggle. I've got Sheldrake's book "The Presence of the Past" next to me but it is ponderous and I haven't got the time to read it and talk on this thread. But I think the least anyone can do, if they're going to intelligently criticise this, is find out what they're actually criticising.Apparently the concept of morphogenetic fields was first studied independently by 3 different biologists in the 1920s (Hans Spiemann, 1921; Alexander Gurwitsch, 1922; Paul Weiss, 1923). They proposed that in living organisms, morphogenesis is organised by fields; they called the fields developmental, embryonic or morphogenetic. The idea was that they both organised normal development and guided the process of regulation and regeneration after damage. The specific nature of the fields, according to Weiss, means that each species of organism has its own morphogenetic field, although fields of related species may be similar. And within the organism there is a nested hierarchy of fields within fields.Sheldrake's morphic fields encompass these morphogenetic fields, plus other kinds of organising fields: of animal and human behaviour, social and cultural systems, and mental activity for example. He believes that the fields are inherited and that they evolve. He says in his book that the fields may have nothing to do with quantum fields or quantum physics. His general writing style seems to express curiosity and exploration rather than proselytising.While this clarifies his position a little (and I'm doing a very poor job because I don't understand it well myself), I don't think this gets us any further in the discussion. However, there are IMO some interesting aspects that these ideas try to address:We don't understand why embryos develop the way they do.
DNA alone does not account for all of the complexity of an organism (a disappointment for those who thought that decoding genomes was the holy grail of genetics).
There are patterns in the body (i.e. the structure of some proteins) and in nature (i.e. the way fish move in a shoal) whose organising principles we don't understand.
We don't know where fields come from or in essence what they are. We do know that they have the property of organising matter and energy.
We don't understand the nature of consciousness.
If telepathy and other paranormal phenomena are real, we don't understand how they occur.That's a big list of stuff we don't understand. I am in support of people's attempts to explain some of it. Personally I see Sheldrake as someone who has different ideas and has the courage, enthusiasm and resources to pursue them. I'd like to see others doing the same. With more people taking those attitudes to science then maybe we'll start getting some answers to the above.Curiously, this thread is about deriding people who posit fields to explain certain phenomena. We don't really know what fields are or how they originate but we don't have trouble accepting that there are quantum and gravitational fields. Why can't there be other fields, why is this such a hilarious notion?I'm not advocating any of these ideas myself, because "I don't know." What I would question is those who think they do know because they've decided beforehand that it is all nonsense. Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Really? Did you read my post? You are dismissing my suggestion of blinded prediction over biased interpretation as irrelevant! Wow! Just wow. POST HOC
By post-hoc I mean that all of the analysis and interpretation was done in full knowledge of all of the data, for both cause and effect, and with the hypothesis in mind. No blinding of any sort to ensure objectivity. PREDICTION
Prediction rather than interpretation is the superior and most objective measure of verification. In examples such as this telepthic dog experiment where a causal relationship is being claimed we should be able to predict the pattern of cause from the pattern of effect. And vice versa. The researcher should not need details of both the cause and effect sets of data. They should need only one set of data and be able to predict details of the other based on their hypothesis. Predicted results can then be independently compared with actual results negating the opportunity for over zealous interpretation of data either for or against the hypothesis (yes it works against bias in either direction - increased objectivity is the entire point here) BAD SCIENCE
However Sheldrake seems resolutely determined to ignore this basic component of the scientific method in order to instead apply post-hoc interpretation to both sides of the data in order to maximise his chances of finding a correlation. In doing so he maximises the subjective component of his conclusions and greatly enhances the chances of "proving" himself right by virtue of biased interpretation and false positives. This is very bad science indeed.You are aware scientists are supposed to try and falsify their hypotheses yes? That encouraging false positives and interpreting data so as to ensure that it fits your hypothesis is the very antithesis of the scientific method. Yes?Why are you so dismissive of my suggestion? Well exactly! It sounds like Wiseman followed Sheldrake's flawed methods so faithfully that he fell into exactly the same trap of post-hoc interpretation himself. I have no more faith in his results or conclusions than I do Sheldrake's to be honest.Prediction eliminates this "but my interpretation is just as valid as yours is nah nah nah nah" nonsense. That is why we should design experiments with this in mind.

Are you as dismissive of MWI as you are of telepathy? If you aren't, then why aren't you dismissive of MWI?

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It's just some things you never get over. That's just the way it is. You go on through... best as you can. - Matthew Scott
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Marge, just about everything is a sin. (holds up a Bible) Y'ever sat down and read this thing? Technically we're not supposed to go to the bathroom. - Reverend Lovejoy
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You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe. - Marcus Cole

And Sheldrake made the point that all published experimental data is post-hoc. Does that negate the point of publishing data?If you think his graphs of the data are wrong, then please explain how. If you look at how these simple experiments were set up and how the results were analysed, I don't see that there's a problem. Crying "post hoc!" in this case sounds to me like another attempt to get around the fact that these experimental results were positive. Either the dog was at the window or he wasn't; either Pam was on her way home or she wasn't.Prediction is simple to look at here too. Sheldrake was testing the validity of dog owners' claims that the dogs show anticipatory behaviour when the owners are coming home. Pam's dog Jaytee would wait at the window for her. The hypothesis was simply that: that Jaytee would be at the window more often when she was on her way home than when she was not. This is what the data from the experiments showed. It's difficult to see how the data could be saying anything else, because Sheldrake controlled for other possibilities, i.e. that Jaytee was smelling her, reacting to subtle cues, or that he was acting out of routine.Bad science? IMO, just more refusal to accept that these experiments produced positive results. They suggest the reality of a paranormal phenomenon, so there must be something wrong with them somewhere, right? Whatever the procedures were, there was something wrong with them. Whichever way Sheldrake did it, he should have done it differently.I used to think that denial was the territory of people who were clearly deluded, such as creationists. But actually we're all prone to it when new data emerges that doesn't fit with what we think should be "so." Would you or Onifre or anyone else here take a moment to consider that this may be happening with you, and why the possibility that telepathy is real may be such a disturbing concept? Does it suggest to you that we know less about reality than we think we do?

Not at all!!!Actually I think a sort of highly untuned sort of telepthy might well be possible. In principle at least. And therefore as a technological possibility at some point in the future.MRI scans are a blunt tool but if they can be refined and the associated images interpreted then some degree of "reading people's thoughts" (perhaps more accurately strong emotions or other activities that invoke a strong reaction in defined parts of the brain) might be possible. Albeit as rough indicators rather than a refined means of communication. More empath than telepth perhaps.I also understand that it is possible even now to induce experiences and visions of colour etc. in subjects using electrodes attached to certain parts of the brain. But I would have to look this up if challenged as I could be getting carried away with wishful thinking and scifi conflations.In short I see no reason why the electrical activity in the brain cannot in principle be utilised to make real some very limited forms of "telepthay".But I still see no evidence that points towards actual telepathy taking place now. No evidence that is not the result of flawed and biased experiments and a mass of wishful thinking anyway. As much as I would genuinely like to believe otherwise.

Are you denying that the validity of these experiments would be massivley improved by "blinding" and comparison of prediction with result rather than mere interpretation of result?

Look at the data yourself. It isn't complicated. I told you what the prediction was and you can see Sheldrake's graphs. You are making assertions about these experiments in your previous post that have little to do with reality.Maybe the fear is that this kind of telepathy may require an explanation that re-assesses what we know about reality, as I said before. Maybe this suddenly makes the world seem like a frightening place over which we have little control -- certainly not the confident control we thought we did. This is different from machines reading "brain waves" -- but of course the cause of telepathy (if one accepts its existence) is one that is openly in question.

Yes, they have assumed they've been witness to a paranormal phenomenon explainable only by telepathy.If you conclude that it's possible (telepathy) then you've accepted telepathy as something valid.However, no one has any idea what telepathy is, how it works, what forces it works on, fields it may use to function, so how the F does anyone know that some animal or human could be telepathic? Wouldn't you need to first establish what telepathy is, and how it works, before you can run a test on a dog for telepathy? Making a hypothesis true? I don't get it.Mathematical models support the hypothesis, especially in cosmology and questions of origin where mathematical model are not only needed but required. Sorry, but that's incorrect. Dark matter/energy represent the "force" behind the current accelerated expansion of the universe, which is observed. There's nothing hypothetical about it.What you may be thinking about is "what they're made of" not being known; they're a hypothetical particle WIMPS and MACHOS.Read the links, are you comparing this to telepathy for real? That's a load of crap, sorry. And they have. Not that I'm an expert or anything close, but for Dark Energy/Matter there is observed effects (accelerated expansion), for String Theory/M theory, it predicts gravity within it's equations, so it's made real world predictions.What does telepathy have to support it, a dog that goes to the window? Once again, this is a load of crap, sorry. Note: Relativity is just a mathematical theory, what makes it true is that it makes predictions that can be tested, observed, etc. String predicted gravity in it's equations; gravity is a pretty well observed thing.- Oni

Analysing your data in such a way as to meet your prediction is not science LindaLou. Pretty graphs do not change this fact. Making a "blind" prediction which can be objectively tested against the unbiased data is the epitome of scientific verification. Why would anyone resist this? Why do you call it "little to do with reality" when this is the entire point of randomised double blind trials?I find your position on this truly astonishing. Maybe your fear is that experiments that are designed to minimise bias and maximise objectivity will contradict what you want to believe? Maybe your view of me and what you think I want or fear tell us more about your own prejudices than mine?I am genuinely all for researching the paranormal but the study you have cited, the other examples of Sheldrake's experimental work discussed in this thread and Sheldrake's irrefutable "somethingsupernaturaldidit" explanations are examples of everything that can be described as "bad science". Nobody who is a geuinely open minded skeptic can fail to see this. However those who have a priori concluded that "there must be something" on the flawed and circular basis of thinking that if enough people believe something it must have an element worthy of belief, will continue to advocate the work of this quantum quack charlatan. Yet again it all comes down to the circular reasoning of considering belief as a basis upon which to justify belief.Some things will never change.

In the graphs, on the X axis, he has 10 minite periods number 1 through 23. There would be 24 of them in 4 hours. If you notice, Jaytee goes to the window in every instance (except the one where he never went) in a cluster around the 14th then minute period. Sometimes as early as the 10th and sometimes as late as the 16th. He waits until the 16th on some early beeps and waits until the 16th on some late beeps. He goes as early as 12 on some early beeps and at 12 on some late beeps.The only test, as far as I can tell, where the time frame wasn't very close was the very last...and there was a "false positive" where Jaytee went to the window during the 12th ten minute period, then back again at the 20th.Considering a dog is going to be less than perfect in tim keeping, shows a very tight cluster of window watching centered around 140 minutes or so. Before he brought out his equipment, he was made aware of PS's belief that Jaytee was predicting her arrival. He then had her and her parents keep logs. Those logs are what brought him out. The logs, I think, are very poor ways to determine if he shold investigate since PS and her parents had a vested interest in "proving" their claim, and could have, whether consciously and intentionally, or unconsciously and accidentally, fudging the numbers.The data Sheldrake presents is from the videos, granted, but he didn't vary the times enough to get any statistical difference, and Jaytee's window watching wasn't significantly changed based on late beeps or early beeps, so he doesn't show a pattern of following along with PS at all. He goes to the window around 140 minutes after she left. Part of this is from the limitations of the tape, it could only record for 4 hours. If he used newer cameras and hardrive storage, he could get much wider ranges and get some separation between return times and we could start to see if there's an actual phenomenon here, or whether it's an artifact of the limitations of the experiment itself. At least 10s if not 100s would be preferred, and as double-blind as possible. He doesn't really have any controls here. No tapes where Jaytee's owner didn't come home at all. No dogs who have shown no "telepathic inclination".And the current numbers don't show any statistical difference between them, it's a rather random distribution around 140 minutes, with no corelation between late beeps and early beeps. It's very possible to get a false positive when you take just a couple trials and try to extrapolate from them. You could roll 5 sixes on a die and think you're "on a roll" but it's just the statistics of high numbers. If you keep going, it's going to flatten out to 1/6 for any given number. The more trials you have, the more statistical your numbers become, and by only running a few, you run the risk of unintentionally stacking the deck, so to speak.Ultimately, there have been hundreds or thousands of tests on telepathy, precognition, and telekinesis. Most famously by the CIA and by Harvard. Both of those were cancelled when they showed no deviation from random chance over a long period of time. Humans are very good at finding patterns that aren't there and extrapolating a huge cause to a statistical blip. In order to weed out our own ingrown biases, we need a lot of data, and I just don't see how this small sampling can compete against the mountains of data we have on the other side.If Sheldrake really wants to prove this, he has better technology now that can be used to get a better sampling. He could also use other dogs whose owners claim have this ability, as well as "control" dogs who haven't given anyone the impression they have the ability.

Tech: Sir, we have detected a kind of telepathy. How could that work?
Dr: Some kind of morphic field of information that resonates between two people and transfers some information across the fields which then subsequently makes its way into the mind.
Tech: Great. Do we have any evidence that these fields exist?
Dr: We should do an experiment to confirm our hypothesis!*later*Tech: Sir, we have detected a kind of telepathy.
Dr: Excellent: this confirms our hypothesis!I appreciate it isn't quite as severe as that - but it certainly sounds that way. I agree. There are some things for which there are evidence that can cause the effect in question. I don't see that there is anything which seperates Sheldrake's morphic field hypothesis from Tachyonic Flow Regulation or Synchronised Wave Resonance or any other technobabble. And I think you are being way oversensitive and you immediately jump to the conclusion that we are jumping to ridicule woo-woo beliefs. I see no reason to avoid doing both.But I'm not saying let's laugh at mystic hippie idiots. I'm saying let's criticise the practice of using technobabble to explain phenomena. I don't understand distial cognitive temporal mechanics, but that's because it doesn't mean anything. The question is, does the concept of 'morphic field' actually mean anything?With a few minutes of time I can learn some fundamental things about magnetic fields that were uncovered shortly after it became of interest to scientific study. Can anything remotely similar be said of morphic fields because whenever I read anything about them it just reads like obfuscatory technobabble? If it can, then I'm happy with that - we can move onto Deepak Chopra's quantum channeling or whatever it is he does. And they told us that the fields were of 'cells' which communicate using biochemistry. We know cells exist and communicate using biochemistry. Can we say the same of morphic fields? See what I mean? He has all these specific properties of how these morphic fields work that sound all sciencey. Yet I'm still unclear as to what they are, and whether there is any evidence that they exist, that they are inherited or that they can evolve. How do they evolve? What is the method of inheritance? Do we know anything about morphic fields at all? You can see Sheldrake as someone with courage and enthusiasm. And I have no objection with him researching this subject. But I think he has unwarranted confidence in what results he has found and his morphic field hypothesis is a looong way from being slightly confirmed but reading what he has to say it seems that he believes that there definitely is something non-mundane occurring in his experiments and that morphic fields are an excellent explanation for it. Rene Descartes drew a magnetic field in 1644. I am not deriding anybody for positing fields to explain certain phenomena. I am criticising someone for positing a type field that has not been detected (and seems to be defined to be undetectable) to explain a phenomena.So no - that is not what this thread is about. It is about using technobabble to explain things when there is no reason to connect the technobabble explanation to the phenomena (there is no mechanism proposed that explains how these fields are formed, how they work, what they are composed of, what medium they permeate...).It's the kind of thing a doctor in Star Trek would say as a preface to explaining the plot. Not the kind of thing I expect in science. When Sheldrake's morphic fields have the kind of evidence we have for other fields then I'd be interested. If we were able to map them, do maths about them, make specific predictions about them, and so on - then I'd be incredibally impressed. No one is saying there cannot be other fields, or that the concept that there are is any way humourous. Your oversensitivity aside, why must they be fields? Why not information carrying particles or radiating waves? I haven't decided 'beforehand' that it is nonsense. The evidence that has been presented to me would indicate that Sheldrake's fields are no more evidenced than a slew of equal hypotheses and anybody that claims it must be one or other has undue confidence in their own ideas.I also claim that if you don't know what's causing an effect - you say you don't know. If you think might be as a result of a certain thing - you go looking for evidence of that thing. I argue that it is misleading to create a name for your hypothesis that sounds sciency and implies certain things, then give it certain properties and abilities but be unable to verify any of these properties while still maintaining them. It gives the idea undue credit.I mean - is it so implausible that a scientist might become overly attached to his own 'pet theory' that he disregards criticisms at best - or twists them into supporting his idea or he uses the criticisms as evidence that the scientific mainstream is biased against him (the classic crackpot position, incidentally - "They laughed at Columbus! They persecuted Galileo!" It's true, but they also laughed at Gene Ray)?

And yet you have still made no attempt to support this accusation. You will not tell me how you believe that the data was misinterpreted and the graphs are wrong. Your clear accusation is that Sheldrake analysed the data in a way that introduced bias. Please tell me how this could happen when he was looking at when the dog was and wasn't at the window, and when Pam was and wasn't coming home, keeping in mind that the people (not Sheldrake) who were watching the videos and noting the evidence were not involved in the actual experiments or informed of their purpose. Also please tell me what was wrong with the controls he put in place. You seem to be getting confused with drug trials. Many other kinds of science cannot be done with double blind trials. "Double blind" means that the researcher does not know who got the active drugs and who got the placebos, and nor do the patients, and who got what is random. It's a little comical to think how you could shoehorn the "Dogs that Know" experiments into this scenario.We'll let others reading this thread decide whose position they agree with, since you and I consistently have this fundamental disagreement wherever we post together. At least one person seems to be open to some of the evidence here.

Hi Linda Lou, The same as I require for all theories that try to explain a phenomenon.My suggestion: first, define telepathy by means of a force, a particle, a wave, something. Show that something is actually happening, before you make a hypothesis which includes it as the answer.It's similar to the god answer:How did existence come about? God did it.What is god? I don't know.Then how do you know he could do it? If that's the bar being set too high, then fine, it's high. There's enough garbage passing for actual science these days, maybe we need a higher standard. At least for me, I don't accept someones work based on their name, I accept it on the quality of the work itself. If Steven Hawking, tomorrow, claimed he thinks a dog may be telepathic, and he gave the work that Sheldrake gave, I wouldn't believe he is right anymore than I don't think Sheldrake is right. Sure, how does telepathy work, how does it function, what is it? Is it a particle, a wave, an energy field... what exactly is it that the dog is doing?I think the rest of your questions fall under the above as well.No one even knows what telepathy is/works/functions/etc. They just claim "it's the transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals." But there is no mechanism by which telepathy can work, so what people are claiming is being transfered has no means by which to transfer.Telepathy needs to be explain BEFORE any experiment (such as Shelrdrake's) can be considered. He explained what the dog did, when it did it, the times it did it, and that's fine. I have no problem with how he did that. That's why I said he seems to have done honest work. But when he claims "this may be telepathy," I have to stop it there and ask, "what's telepathy?"Sure, it's commonly used and thrown around in anecdotes, in sci-fi, in books and movies, etc. So it's a word that we know. But, what it actually is and how it works, and what mechanism it uses to do it all with, is anyone's guess.Further, due to this lack of description, how could anyone claim they've just witness a phenomenon that may have happened due to telepathy?I think it's bogus.- Oni