Precognition Causality Quantum Theory and Mysticism

So you thought you would pass your affliction onto me huh? A headache shared is a headache doubled....... . Thanks! If there is but one timeline then the sort of "loop" you describe would seem to be all but inevitable. But Kaku (rightly or wrongly) is invoking many worlds and avoiding this sort of thing. As I understand it.The timeline that your travelling self goes into 2010 on is not one that involves any time travelling. That is until the point that you turn up in 2010. So any self you meet would not have time travelled. But when you go back to 2009 and start raving about 2010 you create a different branching timeline that does involve future knowledge. But that is not the timeline you visited. Or something like that.Kaku explains all this in terms of energy being sucked into wormholes rather tha people visiting themselves (but I think your scenaro is frankly more interesting and brain killing as an idea than his more physicsy one). In your scenario using his explanation there would be an ever increasing amount of energy cycling through time. In his many worlds interpretation this doesn't happen. Frankly dude there is a high posibility that I am talking utterly out of my arse here. To an even greater extent than someone invoking this sort of thing who actually claims to understand it.I'll try and find his wormhole energy example if you think it will help at all?

But this isn't just about words. It is about those who claim a genuine scientific foundation for their particular brand of new age bollocks. In particular those who invoke quantum theory to justify their multi-million dollar "self help" empires.Wiccans who cite "energy" in the context of "magic" are not claiming a scientific quantum basis for their particular brand of unevidenced belief. Thus they are not part of this thread in that regard. Deepak Chopra and his "quantum healing" and Sheldrake and his "morphic fields" are indisputably examples of such quackery and charlatanism. I would have thought that this distinction was obvious from the OP? You seem to be complaining that we are attacking something that is not actually being attacked whilst agreeing that the thing actually being criticised is worthy of criticism.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

Then I suppose I was mistaken on what was being criticized. I agree with you that people who use science to try to justify their beliefs and make money off those justifications are charlatans at best. Certainly, I like to try and imagine a scientific explanations for certain things, but I would never think of advancing any idea that wasn't falsifiable although I have, as a topic of light discussion, talked about some of my thoughts with friends.And I'll be honest, I have had a few spooky moments that I couldn't readily explain. Mostly, I just chalk it up to coincidence. For example, and this goes to precognition, I had left my cell phone in my car overnight without realizing it. The next day, I was in my home when I thought someone was calling me. I couldn't find my phone and it was at that moment that I realized I had left my phone in my car. I went out to my car and got my phone and looked at the missed calls. Apparently just a couple of minutes before, around the time I had thought someone was calling me, someone had called me. I don't chalk it up to the supernatural, but if it was a coincidence, which I mostly believe, then it was a pretty strange coincidence at that.Or perhaps I have the power of precognition. Or maybe Q just told me someone was calling.

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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

Ahhhh. And it is her claims regarding precognitive abilities in posts directed at me also in those threads that partially prompted this thread. I had just missed her specific references to Sheldrake and his morphic field theory. According to Wiki there has been an experiment to test this theory. Do you have any knowledge of this experiment at all?

Or maybe humans are deeply prone to see meaning, pattern and significance where in fact objectively speaking none exists?Edited by Straggler, : Spelling

I have been thinking about this and was hoping you could clarify. Are we saying that because there is in fact no "particle" as such that it is not just an inability to measure the two quantities (position and momentum) without affecting one or the other as is often implied. Instead it is because there is in fact no definite values of these quantities to even measure? Because QM is inherently probabalistic. Therefore it is just a "probabalistic smudge" rather than an actual particle that we are in fact considering?Is that what you meant? Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

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.

Of course, that's why I chalked it up to coincidence. It doesn't help me to think that I have predictive powers and it could be extremely harmful.

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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
----------------------------------------
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
----------------------------------------
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

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And it is her claims regarding precognitive abilities in posts directed at me also in those threads that partially prompted this thread. I had just missed her specific references to Sheldrake and his morphic field theory.

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Hi Straggler,I'm mainly interested in Sheldrake's experimental evidence for the existence of so-called paranormal abilities. Some of his more well-known studies are on the telepathic abilities of animals, specifically a dog named Jaytee and a parrot named Nkisi (though the studies have been replicated many times by other people with other animals). I believe his studies do show that telepathy is real, and that it's a natural ability that evolved because it was of benefit for animals and humans before we had things like telephones. But I don't think this thread is the appropriate place to discuss these experiments because I think what they (and probably Izanagi's anecdote) demonstrate is the existence of telepathy and not precognition. Sheldrake then attempts to explain how this could work via his morphic fields hypothesis. I don't know a lot about this and it's difficult to conceive how it would be studied and verified, but a tenuous explanation doesn't erase good evidence; what's more, given that this seems to be a real phenomenon, Sheldrake recognises a need to try to explain how it might work. Maybe he's right, maybe not; maybe somewhere in between. I'm not sure how keen I am at the moment to debate all this elsewhere though. I'd rather have a straightforward conversation with someone with an open mind, than another long argument.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.Edited by LindaLou, : No reason given.

Hey, I just thought I'd give explaining this a go. If you start out with the hypothesis that position and momentum have definite values that you just happen not to know, you can create a probability theory to describe this. However any theory where probability arises in this way (that is through ignorance) makes fundamentally different predictions than QM. Experimental tests support QM and refute such theories. QM uses a different type of probability, a type of probability that is not the result of ignorance of the truth. What does it result from? That's basically part of the difficulties of interpreting QM.
Now the bit about position and momentum affecting each other is also true and relates to this point I've just made. In the type of probability that QM uses measurement of one quantity can destroy information you used to have about a previous quantity. So measuring momentum nullifies anything you knew about position. It isn't like usual probability where you can keep learning and hence reduce your ignorance of both quantities.If you want a way to think about I can offer you the opinion of Niels Bohr. In his mind, quantum particles do not have positions and momentums, they are simply something else we cannot imagine or perhaps not even discuss sensibly. However we must use these classical concepts to analyse them experimentally. When we measure position we are not learning about some objective quality of the particle, but rather using one way of projecting its existence into our classical world. To it put another way making a choice of a classical screen through which we view the quantum world. Then there seems to be a fundamental incompatibility between the position screen and the momentum screen. I cannot use both at the same time to capture an image of the quantum particle.However that was just Bohr's way of viewing it, there are other ways. However the first two paragraphs are the facts. QM uses a probability not due to ignorance, so there isn't a real position or momentum of the particle that we happen not to know. This new probability also implies that measuring the momentum of a quantum particle and hence making it give a value of this quantity to classical instruments, will mean it no longer will give the value of position you measured earlier.Some other views besides Bohrs are similar to what you stated in that the quantum particle is just a probabilistic smudge. Or put another way a quantum particle is nothing but a collection of probabilities for different values of different quantities to be observed. Reducing the probabilities of one quantity (by measuring momentum and seeing it have specific value) will increase them in another (position will now have probabilities for any location).
A final view (Rudolf Haag and others) is that position and momentum are properties of the interaction of the experimental apparatus and the quantum particle, not the quantum particle itself. So measuring a momentum with value "p", doesn't mean the particle has momentum "p", but rather that is delivered momentum "p" to the apparatus. Similarly measuring position "x" means that particle and the apparatus interacted with each other at "x", not that the particle is at "x".
This view connects with the idea that QM is not a theory of subatomic particles, but rather a theory of subatomic measurment.

My opinion is that it is utter nonsense. Firstly on the QM side there is absolutely no connection. No matter how wierd QM is, at the end of the day it is a theory concerning subatomic objects and has as much relation to telling the future as classical mechanics. In fact the brain is classical, so it has less of a relation.On the actual Eastern mysticism side there is also some ahistorical stuff. Hinduism, for example, is basically a polytheistic religion and has as much relation to energy fields and other "scientific" concepts as any other religion. It's obvious from reading histories of this stuff that it's entirely a modern invention, no different than if Hellenistic polytheism had survived and people claimed Zeus' lightning bolts came from nucleo-chemical reactions in his wrists and planned expeditions to Olympus to sit under the mountain and extract this energy from the rain.Edited by Son Goku, : Better title.

Well this thread is about the (mis)use of modern scientific principles to justify claims of the paranormal. Precognition was my preferred example because it has specifically arisen in previous coversations. But telepathy is a perfectly valid example if Sheldrake is citing things like quantum mechanics, fields, energy or resonance to justify his claims. I am interested in this too. Can you point me in the direction of some of this evidence? Doing some basic web searching on Sheldrake suggests that his experiments and his "morphic field" hypothesis are innately connected. Do you know if he came up with his theory before setting out to conduct experiments on it? Or if he conducted the experiments and then set out to explain the results? Which came first the parrot or the field?A fairly cursory search suggests that his experimental procedures, techniques and results are highly disputed at best. So there is much doubt even as to whether there is any phenomenon that requires explanation. By means of morphic fields or otherwise. Why do you think so many would consider this to be a really rather a bizzarre claim? Why do you think Sheldrake is accused of pseudoscience? Why do you think so many are so skeptical and "closed minded" about this? When he uses the term "field" what does he mean? Does he mean it in the same sense as physicists mean it? Or does he mean something else? How does he define the morphic "field" Fine. But if we cannot even establish what he means by the use of terms like "field" in this context then there really isn't much to discuss anyway. Either he is using the term scientifically or he isn't.As far as I can ascertain his "morphic field" is not a "field" by any definition relevant to modern physics. Thus I don't know what he is talking about. More to the point if he cannot explicitly define what he means by the use of the term "field" in any physical sense then I question whether he even knows what he is talking about in any scientific sense either.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

It might be harmful to be irrational about these things. Or it might be the acceptance of such irrationalities that is the only thing that gets some people through the day.But whatever or whoever may want or need to believe in such things should not decide what is the evidenced conclusion regarding such things.

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Well this thread is about the (mis)use of modern scientific principles to justify claims of the paranormal.

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Is it? Your OP stated that this thread was about precognition, fortune telling, and how some people attempt to use quantum physics to explain these. Rupert Sheldrake's work, IMO, doesn't fit any of these categories.

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Do you know if he came up with his theory before setting out to conduct experiments on it? Or if he conducted the experiments and then set out to explain the results? Which came first the parrot or the field?

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I have his book, The Presence of the Past, but was too ill to get very far into it when I bought it, and it is on my to-be-read stack. I'll let you know more about it when I get to it, which will probably be while since I have other priorities. However, it doesn't matter whether his morphic fields idea came before or after his experiments; the data stands for itself. Richard Wiseman tried to poke holes in the Jaytee experiments but got caught lying about his own data from the experiments he did with Jaytee himself -- which he ended up admitting. They are sound experiments though I still don't think this is the place to discuss them unless you want to divert the thread.

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Why do you think Sheldrake is accused of pseudoscience? Why do you think so many are so skeptical and "closed minded" about this?

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Because many in the mainstream still consider paranormal research to be pseudoscience. It doesn't matter how rigorously scientific the investigations are, there's still that prejudice against the subject. You can see how rigorous Sheldrake is by clicking Modulous' link to Sheldrake's comments on the experiments with the chicks.I'd rather not comment on your questions about morphic fields because I don't feel I know enough about them right now to debate about them properly.

I am not even asking for a debate from you at this point. I am simply asking if Sheldrake has ever defined what he means by the term "field" in this context. Is he using the term as used in modern physics? Or is he applying some other meaning?Do you know? Do you accept that this question is an important one to ask of his "morphic field" theory? Well fields are indisputably quantum phenomenon in terms of modern physics. And I don't see why Sheldrake's claims of describing the paranormal in terms of "morphic fields" doesn't meet the criteria laid out in the OP?