In Martin Gardner’s book Good science, bad science, and bogus (1989) there is a chapter on Targ’s ESP experiments (written in 1960ies), and naturally Gardner discards ESP, as seems to be is the scientific consensus. I, as naturally as is my habit, searched what the Internet has to say about this, as the book is quite old. I found an interesting guy, Daryl Bem, and the following article:
Daryl Bem,Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron, and Michael Duggan
Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events. Version 2. F1000Res. 2015; 4: 1188. Published online 2016 Jan 29.
The article claims that presentiment is verified: it mentions tests where the test persons were allowed to watch some dull pictures and a computer is every now and then inserting an erotic or otherwise disturbing picture, which naturally results into a response. The problem is that the response comes some seconds before the picture appears, even before the computer has selected what picture to show.
The new content of the article is a metastudy of repetition studies of Bem’s 2011 tests. In total there are 90 tests in this metastudy. Bem’s tests were measuring if test persons were more likely to respond to inputs that will be reinforced in the future. This is time-reversal of a psychological law that people respond more to inputs that were reinforced in the past. The time-reversed test of Bem requires presentiment. In the test the person selected a curtain and after that the computer selected randomly one of the curtains. If the test person had selected the one the computer selected, it would open to an erotic picture. In another test the curtain opened to a gruesome picture. We would expect that the test persons could not possibly make more than a random choice, but the tests showed the ability to guess the erotic picture and to avoid the gruesome picture. As these tests were repeated in 60 places, we can forget the possibility that the computer program does not choose randomly. (Or can we? I would initially suspect fraud. If the result is correct, it would mean that a person can predict a pseudorandom number that a number generator produces. The generator may have a deterministic but changing seed, or the seed may be taken from a reasonably random activity of the computer. If people could predict such a number, why are there not more lotto winners?)
I have not read the paper carefully, and maybe will not, but the results of the metastudy do support the existence of psi, especially high are the results of the above mentioned test. Bem’s set of tests has a few other tests as well, and they also give positive results.
My interest to this problem is that Bem at the end suggests that some quantum physical effect (reversibility of time) may be behind it. The authors quote Richard Feynman:
“Do not keep saying to yourself… ‘but how can it be like that?’ because you will get…into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”
Feynman. A lot of paraphysicists try to explain psi with quantum physics, but quantum physics itself is very unclear in certain places. I have been looking at the way Feynman evaluates the path integral and there seems to be some problem. The integral is over paths (1-dimensional, a dense set), yet Feynman integrates over the four-volume and then gets infinities, which are removed by renormalization. Feynman apparently changes the 4-dimensional integral to 1-dimensional by rotational symmetry (which is OK), but I still do not get the same result. I have to return to this in a later post by equations. So far this is not clear.
Naturally there should be an explanation for psi, if it exists, and it would be good if it would come from quantum physics, but I do not see it there. Let us go to the early history. People have always believed they can (or some people can) see some of the future. But that was because they believed that there were gods who influenced the future and sometimes told people what would happen. There were some differences: people did not predict pseudorandom numbers, that’s for sure. There was a human in a loop in a different way.
I read two very interesting books by Maciej Popko of Hurrian and Hittite magical practices. What was characteristic in them was that in order to get any answer from gods, the priest had to be clean. That is, the clean and unclean division, the same as in Second-temple Judaism. Both Hittites and Hurrians, as well as Greeks of Troy, used to split a dog puppy or a human to halves and walk between the halves so that the blood would clean them. (I suggest you do not do that. This is old superstition.) When I read of this in Popko I immediately thought of the failed ESP tests and why God does not answer to prays. It would not be any mystery to Hittites: gods naturally cannot answer if the person or the place is unclean, and skeptics certainly make any place ritually unclean. Hittite gods often went away in disgust to uncleanness and they had to be searched and tempted back with sacrifices (again this sweet smell of burning flesh thing).
What is interesting in Bem’s tests is that there was no ritual cleanness requirement (apart from the usual nonritual one, I guess the test people were normally clean). Apparently we can drop the ritual cleanness conditions, at least if the goal is only to see some erotic pictures. (I wonder if the god in this case is the Abrahamic God or some erotic devil.) There was also no human in a clear way in the loop, as there is when predicting from a liver of a sacrificed animal, or from the flight of birds.
Basically and very naturally we should find some psi, but maybe not what the article found. Humans have believed in this stuff always, probably some 100,000 years or so. Why would a skeptic, like Gardner, be correct and not the past generations? Something there should be.
The argument that something must be is very simple and the logic can be easily be repeated, so I give it here. Let us take a researcher interested in showing scientifically something like psi. Then he most probably is a man, as women would not see a point in showing something as obvious (for many women). As a man he can notice that he is conscious: he cannot deny that he is thinking (at least sometimes). By analogy he can generalize the observation to other men as they are so similar in every important respect (like beer drinking and hunting women). It is not too much of an anthropomorphism to extend the same observation to women: so women also have consciousness. Also children, and if we go so far, the same applies to dogs and as dogs are just wolfs and wolfs are just mammals, it is true for all mammals, and birds most probably also, and maybe to some other animals. But these animals, including humans, have not been there always, so how did this consciousness appear? Assuming that our male researcher had ever done some computer programming, he would be quite sure that programs cannot be given consciousness. Something is missing there, there is no such subroutine and no way to write one. Thus, this consciousness appeared form somewhere. It is in some lifeforms, but it is not a result of having a brain, as computer program does simulate a brain quite well many in other aspects. This consciousness must therefore be external and it must have existed before these lifeforms, as consciousness cannot be born from brain (brain being simply a computer). Which explains the problem in the first part of evolution: how the first living cell appeared? As we must have this consciousness anyway, and it does influence materia in our brain, it is just as well to assume it influenced materia in the beginning and evolution was not any random process. So, that is what we call gods or God or something. No way around this logic: something there must be. Maybe there is a way to get some information from these gods.
This solution, by the way, solves one old theological problem: why does God allow bad to happen? Assuming that gods can influence inorganic materia and create a living cell in some 2 billion years, they could do something now without human assistance, but it would take maybe 2 billion years (or not quite so long, but far too long). That is why any faster effect must come through gods influencing existing lifeforms. They could create a new species to solve our problem, but that would take some 10 million years. Thus, the only way they could solve our problem now is by influencing a human, but humans are just as we are, and will not obey, or even believe in gods. And that’s how you have gods, who are good and who can do everything, but who cannot stop bad things from happening now, as they can do everything but it takes a very, very long time.
This simple problem was easy to solve, but Bem’s experiments give a different problem: how to explain psi? I do not yet have any answer to that (especially as I suspect fraud). I noticed that some people tried to explain away Bem’s results by saying that they simply show that all psychology (and sociology and all soft sciences) are rubbish since Bem uses research methods that are accepted in those field, yet gets a nonsense result that ESP is true. Hard sciences (apart from mathematics) are almost as hazy, at least theoretical physics. We just have to accept that if something is correctly measured and repeated experiments show the same, then the phenomenon is real. Then you need a theoretician who can explain it. You should not deny a verified phenomenon.
But there is fraud. Many skeptics, like Martin Gardner, were no scientists. Many of them, just like Gardner and Randi, were magicians. Of course, there is the possibility that Bem does cheat on purpose and later will try to claim that he only wanted to show how easy it is to cheat in psychology. It is always easy to cheat in science. The issue is not to do it, and especially not to do it imagining that you are doing anything good.
I have to add that, of course, I have one explanation to Bem’s tests (if it is not fraud): just assume that the past changes, if some compelling reason (like Bem’s strong believe in psi) is incompatible with the past, then past must change. Recently I have dropped this changing past theory as I noticed that the ERP problem was only a consequence of Bohr’s wrong definition of the probability as visible probability and Bell’s theorem is a mistake, but I can go back to the changing past theory. The theory of changing past is quite simple. Assume a man lost his leg and then by a miracle got a new leg. Naturally later, when investigating the issue, it turns out that the man never lost his leg. So, did he lose or not, or did the past change?
There is some indication that past changes. History seems to change quite often. I have a recent experience of this type, I reread Paul von Marten’s Nemesis, lika for lika (2004) and was sure that there was some part where the content of books in the library change. There was nothing like that, only a discussion if God punishes for the sins in this world to the third generation, a version of the question why God allows bad things to happen to innocent people. It must have been in another book, or the past does change. Hard to say. My memory may not be infallible any more. Getting old.