Precognition Causality Quantum Theory and Mysticism

So we take a wormhole and accelerate one end of it. This creates a time dilation effect at one end. Now we have a wormhole where the entrance is in 2009 and the exit is 2010 (we the experimenters would be in 2010). We read a newspaper for April 25th 2010, step through the wormhole and then go on live television and tell the world what happens on April 25th 2010.Voila - we've 'predicted' the future.Not an easy experiment - and if Hawking is right about the chronology protection conjecture - then it wouldn't work and the thread is basically over. But I suppose, one could hypothesis naturally forming wormholes with time differentials that some people can discern information coming out of. Or something?Oh - and incidentally - in the news today is a story about physicists postulating that the LHC is sabotaging itself from the future. It contains some interesting quotes like this one from Neils Bohr: Or Einstein: You can read one of the crazy LHC papers hereEdited by Modulous, : No reason given.

It's a shame - I kind of like Easter mysticism better It seems that this is the perfect thread to talk about Rupert Sheldrake? - "one of the world’s most innovative biologists" who explains telepathy and other 'psychic' phenomena through 'morphic fields'?

LindaLou mentioned him a few times in some of those threads. Morphic fields have the peculiar property of only being empirically detectable through poorly designed experiments it seems. That is to say - they themselves cannot be detected...only their effects. That is: Sheldrake contends there exists some kind of telepathy and instead of using words like "aura" or "soul" he uses 'morphic fields' to explain telepathy. They seem to me to be essentially interchangeable terms - he might as well have used P J Farmer's "wathan" as a name:

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Wathan: a ball of tendrilous, colored energy that hovers invisibly above every person's head; the soul; holds all information about a person's life, including memory, personality and the condition of the physical body; inexorably drawn to only a body that matches the original in every way, will wonder the universe aimlessly until its body is resurrected for it.

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(emphasis mine) But it is scientifical! How else can you explain the fact that people can detect when people are staring at them without using their eyes? Sheldrake points out that some people used to think that sight was an active process like radar (we fire 'rays' out of our eyes that 'feel' the world giving us sight, rather than rays coming into our eyes from an external source) - Sheldrake contends they were at least partially right.Unfortunately for him, he can only indirectly detect these morphic fields. No morphic field detector has been generated, but I imagine Sheldrake sees it like this (A GDV picture of a finger tip) Erm - so yeah...I'm a betting man and I'd be perfectly happy laying 100-1 that he is just using bogus terminology to sound vaguely scientific when in fact his theory essentially amounts to "magic".Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Did you read the article in the footnote?^*

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Our standard model involves a passive avoidance protocol in which day-old chicks, which tend to peck at bright objects in their field of view, are offered a bitter-tasting bead. Having pecked once, the chicks remember the characteristics of the bead and avoid similar but dry beads subsequently. Incidentally, this paradigm has by now been in use for more than two decades and tens of thousands of chicks in three continents. Yet new-hatched day-old chicks offered the bright bead still peck at it within ten seconds of presentation. Not so much sign of morphic resonance here!

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In our joint experiment, described by Sheldrake, we chose a slightly different paradigm, that of conditioned taste aversion (GARCIA et al 1966). In this situation, the chick is offered and pecks at a dry, coloured bead and half an hour later is made mildly sick by intraperitoneal injection of lithium chloride. Chicks which have been treated in this way will subsequently tend to avoid pecking at beads resembling those they first pecked. The implications of conditioned taste aversion for learning theory are quite interesting, as they imply that the animal must form and retain, for at least half an hour, some type of neural representation of the bead even although it is non explicitly paired during this period with either an aversive or rewarding experience. Conditioned taste aversion is thus a form of learning which does not conform to conventional Hebbian or associationist criteria, and for this reason I have been interested to explore the extent to which it involves similar neural mechanisms to those involved in clearly associationist learning (BARBER et al., 1989; ROSE, 1991b).

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The reasons for choosing this model to test the Sheldrake hypothesis were that the experimental design would allow chicks to demonstrate morphic resonance, if it occurred, at the time of their training experience and without any actual test manipulation. By training the chicks in a novel and hopefully unique environment (a brightly coloured and patterned pen) and using a "bead" - actually a yellow LED - of a colour that previous generations had not specifically experienced, at least in our laboratory, Sheldrake and I agreed that we would maximise the chance of finding any effect. The actual experimental design was as Sheldrake describes it in his paper, and the hypothesis that we were testing was also clearly understood between us; that if any effect which might be attributable to morphic resonance occurred, there should be an increasing reluctance of successive hatches to peck at the neural yellow LED which previous generations had come to associate with sensations of sickness. This increasing reluctance should be expressed in a cumulative increase in the latency to peck at the yellow LED by successive hatches when offered it during the "training" period of 30 s, whereas there should be no such increase in the latency to peck at the chrome bead. In addition to measuring latencies to peck during the training period it was also important to show that the chicks which had pecked the yellow bead and were then injected with LiCI did develop an aversion to it and therefore avoided the bead on test.

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Sheldrake's version is here

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^* That sounded like I was berating you. I was just asking because that's all I know about it, but it doesn't quite come across that way in text. I left it in there as a way to remember that very thing.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

If we designed the experiment so that the future exit of the wormhole wasn't in a position to make an empirical observation that can be confirmed in the past which could not easily have been predicted in the past, then we're in trouble. Are you suggesting that this has to be the case?Why can't both ends of the wormhole be on earth in a lab next door to a newsagents with a contract with said newsagents to always deliver daily newspapers on time.

There are a number of ways to do it (in principle) - one could make it a round a trip or one could use the gravity well of a blackhole to assist things along. Wiki's brief description.

I think they are being treated with the seriousness that they deserve. Sheldrake is not entirely obscure, is certainly more famous than most biologists like those that have to make do with investigating less sexy things like the mechanisms behind HIV or onco-genes or the like. I'll attempt to replicate his experiements and take them further. Whose going to pay my wages to do this?I suppose I could fudge the results to make it look like something is going on - or just obfuscate the results with complex language, and try and convince the untrained masses to buy my books and videos. I'm fairly sure that's within my capabilities.
I could sell my good name by claiming that I am one of the world’s most innovative biologists or something.But - on topic. Do you think that, assuming that the phenomena are real, Sheldrake has any reason to jump to 'morphic fields' as an explanation? Or is he just making up clever sounding but ultimately meaningless phrases?

I think you read all the wrong things into my post.Of course, Sheldrake might be personally involved in shenanigans, I don't know. My main point was that in order to do research, there needs to be money. Unfortunately, there isn't a great deal of funding in funding research into the paranormal. It has been the subject of testing for centuries and nothing conclusive has come out of it, and a lot of people think its a dead end and won't pay the salary of someone who continues to research it.There is a market, however, for books that give credibility to mystical ideas such as precognition and telepathy and we should be aware of this when looking at this subject. I'm more inclined towards believing in the impartiality of researchers who don't have a reasonable financial motive for reporting findings in a certain direction.That isn't just on paranormal research, but any research. Global warming research, the health impact of smoking tobacco research, fossil fuels and the environment, medical research, anything. The experiments are technically off topic here. The topic isn't really about the experiments or the results but in the explanations provided for the results and whether they are pseudoscientific flim-flam. Do you agree that he has no evidence that morphic fields actually exist? As far as I can tell he doesn't describe how they actually work, how they cause the effect he hypothesises they cause. In fact, it isn't really hypothesis since it doesn't actually explain anything. He might as well say that telepathy/precognition is caused by garulachambra.From what I can tell - Sheldrake postulates there is a phenomena. And his explanation is essentially 'something is the cause of these phenomena above and beyond experimenter effect, poor control mechanisms, predictable tests etc etc'. I'd be more open-minded than that and say the experiments are valid or invalid regardless of the explanation he or anyone else comes up with.But this thread is about the validity of the the explanations not the experiments. I'm not saying that one shouldn't perform experiments to learn about the world. I'm just saying that proposing explanations that don't explain anything but use sciencey sounding words is misleading and dishonest.I used to be a fervent believer in Ouija boards. I have a small collection of them here at home. My favourite was The psychic circle board. But nowadays its the Parker bros one.Anyway - we used to use this all the time and were thoroughly convinced it gave us spiritual guidance about our lives. But then I heard a hypothesis about the ideomotor effect and so I controlled for that effect (blindfolded participants and had a nonparticipant randomly select a board and randomly orientate it) and suddenly the board starting spelling out gibberish.Maybe the spirits were angry that they were being tested. So we started asking the board to identify where things had been hidden by a non participant in another room. And it failed. And so on and so forth.I concluded that I had spent a lot of money on a load of nonsense, but I still kind of liked the boards ascetically and played with them from time to time still.The point - I'm all for performing experiments around paranormal subjects. And I'm not entirely against small scale informal experiments being performed to see if things are worth investigating further. Right now - I don't think the experiments Sheldrake has put forward show that there definitely is something 'spooky' going on. There is something going on, but without being able to rule out more common explanations, it is wildly premature to accept the result is as a result of undetectable 'fields' that transmit information using some undefined method.Now, undetectable 'fields' are minimally counterintuitive. They take a concept we're all aware of, fields and gives it a minor tiny twist by making them undetectable fields that convey information from one mind to another.However, this theory has precisely as much evidence as 'undetectable beams' or 'undetectable waves' or 'undetectable particles' or maybe even 'undetectable telegrams'. So why has he specified they are some kind of 'information field'? Why can he not just say it is as the result of an 'undetectable something'?

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.

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)?

Not just drug trials but basically all of the field of psychology uses double blind standards. One way to do it here would be for multiple people to 'return home' and the people that score the dog's reaction don't know which one is the owner and who is a 'placebo owner' (nor does anybody who is present during the scoring etc). It would also be a good control to measure how the dog's reactions when its owner is out of the country or something. You don't seem particularly open to the possibility that Sheldrake is a fraud or is simply employing experimental protocols that increase the error margin sufficiently to cause apparent confirmations.

I'm glad you brought up.Do you think Sheldrake's morphic fields have the same kind of support for the above? If so - I'd like to see it.Dark Matter: After observing that galaxies act as if there were more mass than can be detected visually (phenomenon) it was proposed that some matter exists that neither reflects enough light to be detected to us and does not give off sufficient radiation itself. Russell's Teapot classes as dark matter.Guess what? Dark Matter needs to be matter that has mass that causes gravitational effects. All of these things exist.Dark matter is not an exclusive hypothesis, and there are other possibilties. However Dark Matter is also predicted by other models of cosmology - and in the exact proportions that observation would indicate actually must exist.Similar things could be said about the others: They are specific enough to allow for a fully mathematical model that makes predictions that are consistent with observation. String theory requires strings which as of yet are not detected, and as such there is a lot of scepticism about their existence. But if they did exist, then they manage to solve many long standing problems with various cosmological models.So - what can be said of Morphic Fields that gives them the kind of, still rather tentative, status of superstrings or even the more supported Dark Matter?

So I repeat my question: do you think that Sheldrake's "Morphic Field" hypothesis has the same degree of support as string theory? Does it make any successful predictions (even if they are non-unique)?If Sheldrake's Morphic Field's had the kind of credibility of the examples of other 'bleeding edge' physics hypotheses then I'll happily move on to discuss another subject. But I fail to see that, it still sounds like impressive sounding technobabble without any meat to back it up to me.

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I might once have felt it prudent to keep silence, for I perceive that the race of men, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity; but just now, happily, in this breathing-spell of toleration, there are so many varieties of belief that even an unbeliever may speak out.
--Carl Van Doren, 1926

I'm not sure if this applies here, but I've noticed this tendency for people to think that by criticising an experiment setup that is somehow indicative that one is dismissing the possibility that the thing the experiment was testing for because it doesn't fit into some worldview.I've not dismissed telepathy in this thread, I've even attempted to give a theoretical account of genuine precognition in this very thread that is somewhat plausible within the fringe of physics (though is looking less likely today than it did when I first heard the idea). No leeway required. If a person follows the scientific method, then they are doing science. I've been arguing that there is a possibility of finding natural explanations for supposed paranormal phenomenon. It would be foolish to dismiss such known natural explanations that we have so far discovered - even if those known natural explanations imply that 'mind reading' is illusory.

The Skeptic's Dictionary does note that "Some were so phenomenal (e.g., Adam J. Linzmayer, George Zirkle, Sara Ownbey, and Hubert E. Pearce, Jr.) that skeptics assume there must have been cheating." and I'd suggest that the 25 in a row would be 'phenomenal'. Are you suggesting that the 25 in a row situation occurred during one of the more controlled settings? I'd appreciate a link to that if you have one. If it was during the phase where they accidentally used semi-transparent cards - then that's a little less impressive On the one hand you are saying the experiments were a rousing success, demonstrating some kind of ESP. On the other hand you suggest maybe the cards are dull or there wasn't a suitable empathic link.