Interview with a quantum physicist. . .

Here is a fascinating interview where a parapsychologist interviews a quantum physicist. Here are a few excerpts:

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here. You know, as a parapsychologist I find it fascinating that of the various academic disciplines that are interested in psychic phenomena, there seems to be the most interest from quantum physicists such as yourself.I wonder if we can begin the program tonight by having you explain to our viewers just what is quantum physics, and why would you find the phenomenon of consciousness to be so interesting?

HERBERT: Well, quantum physics started out in the twenties to explain the interaction of light with atoms. It focused on that, but now it's extended to explain the interaction of anything with anything. It's basically the physicists' theory of the world these days, and it's been very successful. So there are two reasons, I think,why quantum physics and consciousness have some connection. One is that quantum theory, as most people know by now, is very strange. It has very weird properties. . .

MISHLOVE: Subatomic particles. Typically we hear that this sort of stuff [knocking on furniture] is no longer solid; it's mostly a vacuum in quantum physics.

HERBERT: Not only is it not solid, is it mostly empty space, but it's also probabilities -- just fuzzy, not even totally real.

MISHLOVE: In other words, particles aren't even particles anymore.

HERBERT: Particles aren't even particles anymore. That's one of the connections with consciousness -- that the solidity of matter is dissolving away in light of these theories, and becoming more and more like the fuzziness that's inside our heads.

MISHLOVE: And that's the basic, most fundamental theory in all of physics.

HERBERT: Yes, that's the basis of everything that we do in physics anyway, in quantum physics.

MISHLOVE: And physics is in fact the basic science of all the sciences. So the most fundamental theory of all of science is that the basis of reality is fuzzy.

HERBERT: Is fuzzy, is crumbling, and it is ambiguous -- that's a word I like to use. Somehow there's a basic ambiguity at the center of the world -- the center of the inanimate world, the unconscious world. . .

MISHLOVE: A term that I keep hearing is quantum interconnectedness, and the notion that separability doesn't exist -- that somehow all is one, the way the mystics used to say it.

HERBERT: Yes. There is a peculiar feature in quantum theory called quantum interconnectedness, and it was discovered right when quantum theory was discovered. It was found that in the quantum description of two objects, when two objects briefly interact and then you pull them apart, in the description at least they never come apart; there's a kind of stickiness that connects them together, so they're bound together forever in the theory. They never separate, even though they're not interacting anymore. It was thought that this was just a theoretical artifact; it was nothing that existed in the real world. Physicists noted it, said this is very strange, and then they promptly forgot about it for about fifty years. But recently, due to something called Bell's theorem, new interest has been rekindled in this interconnectedness. Bell's theorem proves that this connection is not a theoretical artifact, but actually exists in the real world.

MISHLOVE: I should mention for the benefit of our viewers, Nick, that you are probably one of the world's foremost authorities on Bell's theorem; that's what you specialized in. Bell's theorem seems like the crack in the cosmic egg, in a way; it's the one part of quantum physics that's almost turned everything upside down.

HERBERT: One of my claims to fame is that I have produced the shortest proof of Bell's theorem in existence. It's about three lines.

MISHLOVE: Now, Bell's theorem, as I understand it, goes back even prior to Bell -- to Einstein, and Einstein's disagreement with quantum physics, back in the early days. He made his classic statement, "God doesn't play dice with the universe," at a time when Einstein himself felt he disagreed with quantum physics, as I understand it. He felt that if quantum physics were true, it would have these horrendous implications which it now turns out are true.

HERBERT: Yes, Einstein was never comfortable with quantum theory, and he basically had three gripes with it. The one gripe was that quantum theory is a probabilistic theory. It just describes things like the world is essentially random and governed only by general laws that give the odds for things to happen, but within these odds anything can happen -- that God plays dice. Einstein didn't like that, but he could have lived with that. The second aspect that Einstein didn't like was the thinglessness, this fuzzy ambiguity -- that the world isn't made of things, it's not made of objects. It was put by Paul Davies -- the notion that somehow big things are made of little things. Quantum theory doesn't describe the world that way. Big things aren't made of little things; they're made of entities whose attributes aren't there when you don't look, but become there when you do look. Now, that sounds very, very strange.

MISHLOVE: Like an illusion.

HERBERT: Like an illusion, yes.

MISHLOVE: Or the Hindu concept of Maya, something like that.

HERBERT: That's right. The world exists when we don't look at it in some strange state that is indescribable. Then when we look at it, it becomes absolutely ordinary, as though someone were trying to pull something over our eyes -- the world is an illusion. Einstein didn't like that. He felt that the big things were made of little things, as the classical physicists thought.

MISHLOVE: The Newtonian view of billiard-ball-like particles -- that if you could only understand the momentum and position of each one, you could predict everything in the universe.

HERBERT: Everything in the universe, yes, a comfortable sort of view.

MISHLOVE: You mentioned three things that Einstein objected to; then there must be one more.

HERBERT: Well, the third thing is this interconnectedness. Einstein said the world cannot be like this, because this interconnectedness goes faster than light. With this quantum interconnectedness, two objects could come together, meet, and then each go into the universe, and they would still be connected. Instantaneously one would know what the fate of the other one was. Einstein said, now that can never be; that's like voodoo -- in fact, he used the word -- it's like telepathy, he said; he said it's spooky, it's ghostlike. Almost his last words in his biography were, "On this I absolutely stand firm. The world is not like this." He died in '55, and ten years later Bell showed that the world must be like this. It's kind of ironic. Bell himself said, "My theorem answers some of Einstein's questions in a way that Einstein would have liked the least."

MISHLOVE: And Einstein created a very strange picture of the universe as it is, almost time travel, in his theory of relativity.

HERBERT: Yes, but even Einstein's mind wouldn't go this far, to accept these instant connections, which now we believe really must exist in the universe.

MISHLOVE: The notion of instant connections almost implies that space itself is an illusion.

HERBERT: Yes, that distance is an illusion.

MISHLOVE: That distance is an illusion -- that you and I and our viewers and the chair are all somehow intimately connected with the most distant part of the galaxy.

HERBERT: Yes, that we're all in one place, that there aren't any places.

MISHLOVE: And the notion the mystics sometimes say, that you and I, we're not really separate individuals, but at a deeper level we're like fingers; we're all connected. Or we're like islands connected. There's that sense of connectedness as well. . .

MISHLOVE: Well, you mentioned earlier that you believe quantum physics is at the basis of consciousness. I wonder if you would come back to that point and elaborate on it.

HERBERT: Yes. Right now there are two main approaches to consciousness, I believe. They are studying the brain, looking at how the brain does it -- the one machine in the world that we know is conscious for sure -- and then trying to simulate cognitive things on computers. I think this is where the smart money is placed these days. I think these are a good place to do research.

MISHLOVE: Trying to simulate brain functioning on the computer.

HERBERT: On computers, and looking at brains. And I think we learn a lot about brains and computers there, but not very much about consciousness.

Fraud-proof experimental design demonstrates PK effect. . .

The entire paper is available from this site.

Here is the abstract:

The author summarizes five experiments in which he studied the psychokinetic (PK) effect (the mental influence on the outcome of chance processes) under tight supervision by independent observers. Through the use of prerecorded random events as targets, the observers could evaluate the results independently, without having to trust the reliability of the author or his equipment. The total of these five studies, which represent all the work done under external supervision, produced an effect deviating by 3.67 standard deviations from chance expectancy. The odds against such an outcome are about 8,000 to 1. Thus, the results support the extstence of a PK effect on prerecorded random events, in agreement with previous experiments. The observed PK effect is inconsistent with current quantum theory. It shows that the theory is not correct when applied to systems that include human subjects. Furthermore, the existence of a weak mental effect on the outcome of chance events cautions the physicist to be careful in the interpretation of results that are based on relatively few chance events.

This is very impressive. Schmidt designed a protocol which allowed outside observers, including a skeptic of the phenomenon, an essential role in demonstrating the PK effect.

Great discussion thread over at Dean Radin's blog

Dean wrote a post about books on psi phenomena, however the comments have veered into an extended discussion of variously meta-analyses of Ganzfeld studies.

We had a good debate on this topic on the old AMNAP with Andrew Endersby and some other folks, and I hope the participants in that discussion will go to Dean's blog and weigh in. . .

Non-paranormal non-phenomena. . .

Today I saw a link that looked intriguing on one one of the "weird stuff" websites about an entire village that had disappeared.

Clicking on the link to the story on ufoarea.com, I discovered this article. Here's an excerpt:

How can an entire village with 1,200 people simply disappear without a trace? The Royal Canadian Mountain Police has been asking that question for many years. . .

This remarkable incident took place in the winter of 1930s in Canada. A trapper Armand Laurent and his two sons observed a light crossing the northern sky. According to Laurent's description, the object was cylinder-shaped and it was heading toward the[sic] Lake Anjikuni.

Some days later, Laurent was visited by a couple of Mounties who were on their way to Lake Anjikuni where they said there was "a kind of problem". Not yet knowing what had happened in the village, Laurent related the sighting he had a few days ago. At that time, the police did not the reveal what was later classified as one of the most mysterious disappearances in Canadian history. . .

Another trapper named Joe Labelle called the Royal Canadian Mountain Police to the crime scene, if we can use the term. Labelle noticed that [the] village of the[sic] Lake Anjikuni was unusually quiet. There was not a person moving in the streets, no smoke from the chimneys, boats and kayaks were still tied up at the shore, but the village was empty.

The police noticed a couple of strange things. To begin with, it seemed as if the residents had been suddenly interrupted by something. In many houses, meal was still standing at the table. Additionally, rifles were left at home, which is very usually [sic] as the men always take the rifle when they go out. The most peculiar discovery was yet to come.

At the Anjikuni burial ground, they discovered that graves were opened and bodies of the dead were gone! Someone had removed all the corpses. . .

The case remains open to this day. The village residents were never found, neither [were] the corpses stolen from the graves. How can 1,200 people simply disappear off the face of the earth without a trace and who would be interested in acquiring bodies of dead [people]?

Hmmn. Intriguing, I thought, if this is true.

So I went to Wikipedia and made a quick search for Lake Anjikuni. Wikipedia is of course not an authoritative source on any topic, however it is often a useful starting point. But not in this case. . . Wikipedia returned my query with this message:

No results found. For help on searching within Wikipedia, please see Wikipedia:Searching.

Alternatively, you may be able to use an external search engine such as WikipediaSearch to find what you are looking for and/or identify misspelled words

I clicked the link "search Google for Lake Anjikuni" and this time came back with some hits. From the search engine summaries, a bunch of the results appeared to be relaying the same story as ufoarea.com. However, the very top of the results referenced the RCMP website. That looked promising. Here is what the RCMP has to say:

Historical Notes — Anjikuni

Anjikuni

The story about the disappearance in the 1930's of an Inuit village near Lake Anjikuni is not true. An American author by the name of Frank Edwards is purported to have started this story in his book Stranger than Science. It has become a popular piece of journalism, repeatedly published and referred to in books and magazines. There is no evidence however to support such a story. A village with such a large population would not have existed in such a remote area of the Northwest Territories (62 degrees north and 100 degrees west, about 100 km west of Eskimo Point). Furthermore, the Mounted Police who patrolled the area recorded no untoward events of any kind and neither did local trappers or missionaries.

So there you have it. Unless someone can come up with convincing evidence that the RCMP is lying, and some good primary sources, this one ought to be filed in the "tall tales" folder. Apparently ufoarea.com isn't the only one media outlet to flub this story: according to the australian Skeptic, People Magazine was also taken in. . .

Taboos in science. . .

Here is Rupert Sheldrake talking about taboos in science:

I hope Lewis would also say something about that because … I think it is a taboo subject. It’s an extraordinary thing that scientists who claim to be rational or rationalists, get extraordinarily irrational when it comes to the subject of telepathy. The belief in evidence just goes out of the window. It often arouses deep emotions, and I often wonder, why is it that people get so upset at the possible existence of telepathy? Why is it something so deeply disturbing?

I think the reasons are historical. They go back at least as far as the ‘enlightenment,’ when the idea of the agenda was to push forward the science and reason and reject religion and superstition, credulity, folklaw and so forth. Somehow, telepathy - at that time, not called telepathy - but somehow, these psychic phenomena got put into the compartment of ‘superstition,’ and ever since then, rational people have been supposed not to believe in them. I think that’s why (as a sociological fact) you won’t find serious articles about this in broadsheet newspapers or on Horizon programmes on BBC, because these are beyond the pale of rational discourse, and educated people - not just scientists, but most university graduates - know that they’re meant to be part of this ‘enlightenment’ project, and at least in public, are supposed to deny telepathy, or at least, not talk about it. The penalty for doing so is to be thought credulous, superstitious or stupid and no one wants to lose intellectual cast.

So, I think that this taboo got established quite early on and it’s somehow been in place ever since then. If you look at the controversies in the late 19th century, they were the same as today, the same kinds of arguments. The people in favour, said, “Here’s all the evidence.” The people against, said, “It’s impossible, the evidence is all not credible, etc.” It’s very strange in science that some new ideas are perfectly acceptable. For example, David Deutsch who is a Physicist in Oxford has written a book on Time Travel. He’s also written a book on Multiple Universes, the idea that every time a physical observation is made, the universe splits, and there’s billions, trillions, quadrillions of parallel universes, completely unobserved. He holds down a respectful position in Physics in Oxford. There’s no evidence at all for this postulate, and yet, this is quite tolerable within Physics. However, when it comes to the subject of telepathy, David Deutsch says very much the same as Lewis Wolpert. “It’s total rubbish, not a shred of evidence.” I know he hasn’t studied the evidence, but somehow the same person can have totally wild theories about parallel universes and yet, this complete taboo against telepathy, co-existing in the same person. . .

Telepathy Debate: Wolpert and Sheldrake

Here are some excerpts of a debate between Lewis Wolpert and Rupert Sheldrake at the London Royal Society for the Arts held in 1994:

Rupert Sheldrake: Thank you. Well, Lewis Wolpert and I agree on one thing, which is that we think the nature of science is based on evidence. He thinks there’s no persuasive evidence for telepathy. Of course, that depends on how easily it is to persuade somebody. There are many creationists who think there’s no persuasive evidence for evolution. If you have a closed mind and if you’re convinced you’re right, then no amount of evidence will make the slightest difference. I think that the question really is, what is the evidence for telepathy and that’s what I’m going to talk about. I, myself, think there’s a lot of persuasive evidence for telepathy, and I think that the experiments that have been done to test it have been far from pathological. . .

Professor Lewis Wolpert: . . .I have in front of me a paper by Richard Wiseman, Matthew Smith, and Julie Milton, actually done with your dog … (sorry, no, Pam Smart as your collaborator), with your dog, Jaytee, which you claimed, knew when (I think it was you) who were coming home, and their analysis of the behaviour of the dog, Jaytee, shows that the dog didn’t have a clue. It would go outside for all sorts of reasons, and, you know, there was somebody passing by, there was a cat in a nearby tree. It didn’t have a clue when you were coming home. So, here is a people, trying to replicate your experiment, and simply falsifying it. . .

Rupert Sheldrake: Well, I noticed that when the parrot film was showing, Lewis wasn’t looking at it! That film was shown on television … and in early stage of our investigations, he did the same then. They asked a sceptic to commentate. Lewis appeared on the screen and he said, “Telepathy is just junk … there is no evidence whatsoever for any personal, animal or thing being telepathic.” The filmmakers were surprised that he hadn’t actually asked to see the evidence before he commented on it, and I think, this is rather like the Cardinal Bellarmine, and people not wanting to look through Galileo’s Telescope. I think we have a level here of just not wanting to know, which is not real science … I’m sorry to have to say it, Lewis.

Let me come to his specific points. He said that in the telephone experiments we didn’t bother to find out the effects of distance. Yes we did. If you read the paper, we deliberately recruited people in England who had relatives living in Australia and New Zealand and South Africa. We tested it at distances right up to the Outer Hebrides, precisely to find out, is it distance-dependant. It’s not … distance had no effect. . .

Now, when we come to the case of the psychic dog, Jaytee, - the dog that belongs to Pam Smart who is here this evening - what we found in our experiments was that the dog - here are some averages from these experiments the dog … these are 10-minute periods after Pam went out … these are the number of seconds at the window, evaluated from the videotape by a third party who knew nothing else about the experiment in an objective measure at the time it went to the window. That is the first 10 minutes of her homeward journey, from at least five miles away. These are medium-length experiments and these are short ones. The dog did sometimes go to the window, when she wasn’t coming home, to bark at passing cats or look at commotions or disturbances outside or people arriving in cars, but it went to the window far more when she was on the way home and it started waiting, in the 10 minutes before she started off home, when she decided to come home or when she got a random signal on a pager to go home. It was highly significant it was at the window most when she was on her way home and it wasn’t just that it waited a certain time and then went there, because in these short experiments, you see it was at the window at long time, whereas at the same time after she went out here, it wasn’t. These results are highly significant, highly repeatable. We’ve done lots of them.

The case of Richard Wiseman and his colleagues is a very interesting one. Wiseman is one of Britain’s leading media sceptics. He is an informed sceptic, in the sense he reads the literature and knows what’s going on and he actually does experiments. However, he is a very committed sceptic who believes these things are basically impossible, and Wiseman went along to do these experiments with Pam Smart. He invented a criterion for the success or failure of the dog, which was, that it should go to the window, for no reason apparent to Wiseman … the first experiment it was 60 seconds. Then he changed the criterion to being two minutes for no apparent reason. If the dog went to the window for no apparent reason when she wasn’t coming home, it failed the test.

He published a paper in the British Journal of Psychology, saying it had failed the test. There’s the paper. He put a Press Release. It was in all the science correspondence that most of our broadsheet newspapers are committed sceptics (most of them). They’re very credulous when it comes to claims of sceptics. The papers were full of it. ‘Psychic dog fails test … Psychic dog fails to give scientists a lead,’ and so on! It was on the radio, it was on the television … the whole phenomenon was totally refuted and everybody bought it (who wants to believe that) and we’ve heard from Lewis, a categorical statement.

However, if you plant Richard Wiseman’s data on a graph, which he didn’t do in his papers, even though I sent him graphs before he submitted it, his data corresponds very precisely with my own!

Mind and Body

This study provides more evidence that much of medicine is based on the body's own healing abilities being marshalled through a placebo effect. In this case, the "treatment" consisted only of informing hotel housekeepers that their work amounted to a substantial amount of physical exercise which provided health benefits. The control case was only different in that they were not provided the same informational program that explained the work they were already doing was healthy exercise.

The group informed of the health benefits of their job lost weight, improved their blood lipids profile, and showed a number of other beneficial health effects all of which were statistically significant changes versus the control group. Three of the measurements showed strong statistical significance to the .001 level, or 999 out of 1000 against the null hypothesis. And remember, the only difference is that one group was informed that the work they were already doing counted as "healthy exercise" and the other was not.












Hat tip: Robin Hanson.

Update: Robin also references this study showing that most of the effects from antidepressants are placebo effects.

Vacation. . .

I'll be on vacation for several days. See you all when I get back. . .

More quantum mechanics. . .

Ulrich Mohrhoff, author of the Pondicherry interpretation of quantum mechanics has written a fascinating essay describing his interpretation of what quantum theory tells us about reality. I've excerpted from his essay below:

[M]atter, which we can now define only as that which satisfies the laws of physics, may be spirit insofar as... the spirit conforms to the mental operations of distinguishing and objectifying. We can explain causally... precisely to the degree to which spiritual reality can be objectified; in this objectified form it is called... matter.

[I]n the history of philosophy this identity has been variously expressed by asserting that the final reality is spiritual; what... we call matter is the mode in which this final reality is perceived by itself as alienated from itself.

--C.F. von Weizsäcker

In the 1999 Hollywood blockbuster film The Matrix, an enigmatic character called Morpheus tells Neo, a computer programmer and night-time hacker: "The world has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." Adi Shankara could have said that. To bring home his point, Morpheus asks Neo: "Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream. How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?"


How indeed would we know that this world is not a virtual reality created by something or someone beyond it, by whatever means, for whatever purpose? There are two ways to find out. One is a spiritual awakening to "That which being known all is known", yasmin vijñāte sarvam vijñātam. The other is to take a close look at this dream world, this world that has been pulled over our eyes.

Mohrhoff goes on to describe the findings of quantum mechanics and why he believes they indicate that reality is an indivisible whole. Certainly some will disagree with his interpretations, but it's interesting reading nonetheless. Go check it out.

Those interested in the non-dual implications of Mohrhoff's interpretation of quantum mechanics (or who enjoy landscape photography) might enjoy my other blog. . .

The unskeptical skeptic

Michael Prescott uses his rapier wit to skewer noted professional "skeptic" and former parapsychologist Susan Blackmore.