Virtual Reality Gaming System Tests for Telepathy

Big Ben writes "UK scientists have built a virtual computer world designed to test telepathic ability. Approximately 100 participants will take part in the group gaming experiment at the University of Manchester which aims to test whether telepathy exists between individuals using the system. The project will also look at how telepathic abilities may vary depending on the relationships which exist between participants." Note: for their sakes, I hope they succeed in proving anything paranormal's going on — if they can reproduce such a result, it could earn them the $1 million prize long offered by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Comments

Try the ESP Game

[Falkkin]

The ESP Game (http://www.espgame.org) has been on the web for a couple years now. It pairs you up with a random partner, and your goal is to type the same words as your partner in response to a series of pictures. It's a rather fun game that has convinced some users that they really do have ESP. (The real purpose of the ESP Game is not to discover users' latent psychic abilities, but to utilize human processing power to label images on the Web.)

Re:Tax payer money at work

[mangu]

Why exactly couldn't telepathy exist? Is there some fundamental law of nature which states that two people cannot communicate over a distance without sound or visual cues?

Two hundred years ago such questions would have made sense. Today we know there isn't any mechanism for that. We may not know everything there is to know about the human body, but we do know more than we did two centuries ago.

The fundamental law of nature that will not allow any communications without a physical channel is the theory of information. If you could store or send information without passing through a physical medium and without spending energy doing it, the second law of thermodynamics would be violated, time would not be unidirectional.

Re:Randi is viewed as a fraud by 'people who can'.

[nido]

I see. It's a pity that there's no evidence that these experiences actually took place in reality, not just in the participants' imaginations, don't you think? Because if there were evidence, someone would be a million dollars richer.

The U.S. government financed development of 'remote viewing' for over 20 years. It's said that the spooks hated the program, but because they got results, right from the start, they allowed it to continue until the soviet union broke apart.

Of course, when evidence conflicts with beliefs, beliefs usually win, even by those who fancy themselves of a "scientific" mindset. See The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (emphasis added)

For your consideration, concerning the facts about individuals being "able to demonstrate their alleged abilities under controlled conditions":

**

From the top of our system on down, there are many who could stand up and be counted regarding the efficiency of developed remote viewing, and even regarding superior natural psychics. It has been circulated in the intelligence community that successful remote viewing sessions probably saved the nation a billion-plus dollars in what otherwise would have been wasted, or misdirected, activities. Not a bad payback for the $20 million.

Why do they not stand up and be counted? For the most part, they are afraid of being taken apart in the press, afraid of being ridiculed for doing their duty in an area of threat analysis which was completely justified. This fear is not their fault. It is the fault of our unthinking and irresponsible popular culture.

**

I now direct your attention to "successful remote viewing," and ask you to wonder if it can exist. Begin by considering psychics who successfully help the police. Add to that success some quite good remote viewing training. Then consider that what is a bit possible in natural psychics might be understood, developed, and then trained.

Now assume that a "little-bit-psychic" can become a "whole-lot-psychic" -- and you come up with the "eight martini result."

Those of you who witnessed the Nightline TV show of 28 November 1995, will recall an individual said to be from the CIA, but identified only by the name "Norm."

Mr. Robert Gates had just finished saying that remote viewing was unpromising. But when it came "Norm's" time to talk, he began saying something like, "Well, if it's the Eight-Martini Results you want to talk about, I won't talk about them."

What, then, is an "eight-martini" result? Well, this is an intelligence community in-house term for remote viewing data so good that it cracks everyone's realities. So they have to go out and drink eight martinis to recover. Remote viewing does have its amusing aspects, you know.

**

-http://www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/Stateme nt .html (emphasis added)

Re:Randi is viewed as a fraud by 'people who can'.

[nido]

Well, I've already given one. Mr. Swann is known as the 'most tested guinea pig in parapsychology', or something like that.

Allison Dubois (inspiration for NBC's Medium) was tested by Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona.

There are plenty more, but you don't really care. You're just chest-pounding on the superiority of your belief system vs. those who allow for something more.

Re:Tax payer money at work

[aardvarkjoe]

So, if the human brain works on quantum principles, and one of those principles is communication at a distance, then that tells me that telepathy is possible.

The problem is that, in these "entanglement experiments", no information is being transmitted from the first site to the second. By measuring the state of the first electron, you can instantaneously affect the state of the second electron -- but according to all of the current theories, there is no way to actually use that to communicate. (If that sounds weird ... it is. Quantum theory is rather unintuitive.)

Re:Tax payer money at work

[Xyrus]

First, everything posseses some small measure of quantum entanglement, even in a vacuum. It's nature, it happens. So stating that the human brain works on quantum principles is sort of like saying that a rock is made up of atoms.

However, in nature, quantum entanglement happens over very very short distances barring some unusual events (black hole, super nova, etc.). In order for the scientists to see the quantum entaglement effect over a distance of 10 Km, they had to use extremely fine electronics and machinery to induce an artificial state.

Not too mention that it has been proven that quantum entaglement is useless for communication at a distance. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement for further info regarding this fact.

"So, if the human brain works on quantum principles, and one of those principles is communication at a distance, then that tells me that telepathy is possible."

This argument doesn't hold water, as quantum entanglemet can not be used for communication at a distance. This, of course, isn't even counting the fact that you'd need millions (if not billions) of quantum entangled electrons to fire off a single neuron in your brain. Your brain does not work on the scale of electron spins.

"So then I looked for evidence."

I feel the "intelligent design" reasoning approaching.

"We have a ton of anecdotes in which a mother knows when a child is in danger. However, we have zero anecdotes in which a father knows."

Irrelevant. There are tons of anecdotes of the greek gods coming down and copulating with human females to produce super offspring. I wouldn't use it as eveidence.

Those anecdotes are more a "sign of the times". For example, who's primary responsibility was it to raise children up until the last half of the last century?

"This follows; the child spends 9 months in physical proximity to the mother, exchanging fluids; it's likely that entanglement is happening during that fluid exchange."

The rest of your post follows along the same vein. I'm sorry, but these are really just ludicrous statements that have absolutely no scientific basis to them. You can find a wealth of information on the "twin effect" on the web, along with explanations for the "mother's instict" and various other related issues.

Please do some research into the subject before posting. And who modded this insightful?

~X~

Re:Odd feeling

[mattjb0010]

but it gives room for some interesting possibilities

No, it doesn't. Even if there are interesting quantum effects going on within the brain, they cannot be over the large distances between two brains, because of quantum decoherence.

Re:Tax payer money at work

[radtea]

The first said that the human brain works not only on chemical, electrical, and biological principles, but that it also takes advantage of quantum effects.

This is false. Long-range (ie. more than molecular-scale) quantum effects are important only in systems with very low dissipation. The brain is not such an environment on scales larger than a single molecule or so. There is no evidence that any non-trivial quantum effects are important in the brain, and a great deal of evidence that they are not. The speculation that they are is primarily due to Roger Penrose, who is a brilliant mathematician and wrote a book called The Emperor's New Mind on the subject.

The second article said we had isolated one quantum effect in the lab, that being entanglement. Through a process, two electrons become "entangled", and when separated experimentally up to 10 km, when the spin on one is changed, the spin on the other is changed immediately--with no speed-of-light delay.

This is false. Neither electron can be said to have a spin that might be changed prior to measurement. But when the spins are measured along the same axis they have the same value (and the joint probability distribution follows the equivalent law for the case when the spins are measured along different axes.) It is simply a mistake to subscribe to the classical notion that both electrons "really have" a spin-value "before" measurement (before in what frame of reference?) and that one of the spin values changes "when" (in what frame of reference?) the other one changes.

Remember: the order of measurement is arbitrary. No one can say which member of an entangled pair was measured "first", and asking the question (in the absense of some operational procedure that provides an unambigous answer) is like asking "How high is up?"

The quantum world is not capable of supporting the weight of classical ontologies, and if you try to view the quantum world through a classical lense you'll wind up far astray. I strongly recommend Heisenberg's "The Physical Principles of Quantum Mechanics" as a reasonably accessible explication of the fundamental problems--of all the founders of modern QM Heisenberg had the most useful combination of deep insight and clear exposition regarding the meaning of the new physics. Bohr may have seen more deeply, but he wrote so opaquely that no one can tell, and Einstein wrote clearly but didn't see so deeply. Heisenberg understood how weird it all was, and was very good at drawing the boundaries that it is a mistake to try to cross, because nothing definable within a classical ontology lies beyond them.

Except PEAR is a laughing stock

[aepervius]

Bad hypothese, bias, bad statistical analysis etc... etc...
skepdic on pear
sceptic report
And tons of other link...