Quote:
Originally Posted by Arboretor  <snip>
So they did indeed not replicate the PEAR results in the sense that they did not find the same anomalies, but
they did find other structural distortions ( "comparably anomalous").
Interpreting this result as a refutation of the original study is, well, perhaps a bit misleading.  |
Yes, it does seem misleading not to mention that. I do accept that all parties tend to see the bits they want to see, and either deliberately or accidentally (or non-linearly
) cook the books!
Quote:
It also interesting to read what they have to say about replication and falsification of such experiments in general (p. 543):
<snip>
This paper actually gives me some more confidence that there might be something out there which merits closer investigation.
|
Maybe. I think the whole subject is fascinating. I have to admit that I have a very poor grasp of many of the concepts involved in experiments of this kind. Hardly any of us, probably, would understand the finer details of the physics or the maths enough to form educated opinions. I need someone to translate most of it, and that doesn't help when we're also interested in making up our own minds and not just believing what other people tell us!
I gather you understand these things much better than me, and I'd be grateful if you point out any errors that you spot.
I think I get a sense of some of the problems. As I understand it, when you get down to measuring small effects (as some have suggested exist when people try to influence the random events generated by a machine with their mind), there arise questions about what exactly a random event is. Computers generally deal in
pseudo-random events, for a start, which (strictly speaking) is another way of saying they're not random at all. While it may be very difficult to tell what number might come next out of a computer-generated number sequence, deep down there is a logic to the sequence. So when we're dealing with critical measurements, little things like that become very big philosophical problems that can't be discounted.
Translating it into the problem of tossing a coin makes it easier to understand. If I demonstrated a flair for tossing heads to the point of astonishing everyone, we could not conclude that I had a psychic power that was influencing the final position of the coin after it leaves my hand. Feasibly, there is a direct physical cause of the result, the exact velocity and angular momentum at which I spin the coin, and it is perfectly possible that I have developed the necessary muscle control rather than mind control.
In some of these particle physics experiments, they are getting to much more fundamental problems. One, of course, is the question of statistical or experimental significance, which, to my mind, has no purely mathematical resolution. That is to say, significance is intrinsically a human concept. There is (or may be) nothing equal to it in nature. The fact that people are suggesting that psi works on micro-levels means that already they have rejected the normal measurements of significance and are essentially saying we need to look closer and longer to see patterns that are 'deeper' so to speak.
This would be like a 'believer' saying, after a thousand people have posted here and we got a result that satisfied the sceptics, we just need another million people to take part and you'll see, it'll show a significant result...or vice versa, sceptics rejecting significance with a thousand and requiring more people.
There is another fundamental philosophical problem that I think is raised by the paper you quote: at the end of the day, if the proposition is true, that human minds can influence material reality at a distance, doesn't that scupper all scientific probing into the question? Or, to put this another way, whatever the results are, someone can suggest that the human minds that created the experiment might have influenced those results in some way.
There's a new idea creeps in, almost like the universe might have a mind of its own, might even be playing tricks. As far as we know, psi phenomena might not be letting us discover their reality in the lab. And in this paper - something odd happened that we weren't seeking to investigate directly (allegedly).
It does come to something, though, when experimenters fail in reproducing results, gather coincidental data, and begin to postulate that this coincidental data and their failure are significant. For one thing, their explanation requires a departure from the principles of scientific research themselves. For another, the words "clutching at straws" come to mind.
The more I learn about it, the more I feel inclined to believe that we're just getting more and more sophisticated in our sleights of hand, pushing statistical significance to the point where no-one can actually be sure what it was we're supposed to be looking at anymore. I tend to think that if psi is so shy that we're devising the most unbelievably sensitive experiments to try to measure it and still arguing about whether we can see shapes flitting about in the shadows or whether we've imagined them, we are probably imagining them.
But there's the crux of it - the proposition allows for there being no difference between seeing and imagining. Science gets off the bus at that stop.