Slashdot Mirror
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.
Something tells me this isn't going to work.
You're thinking that nobody will ever win that $1 million. I think I might be on to something...
Now let's invest some more tax money on finding UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster and inventing the perpetuum mobile!
If you were told that the only way you could have an ability such as telapthy would be to eliminate your attachments and improve your moral quality (given a moral standard of course), would you set out in achieving it?
Of course! Attachments are evil and lead to viruses on your computers.
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.)
I'd rather not have a paranormal outcome. It is likely that if telepathy is possible, it is not paranormal; rather, certain theories and hypotheses previously thought true would need a little tweaking. If telepathy were possible, and explainable in scientific terms, that would be cool.
Even if this experiment doesn't pan out, there are other viable challengers to The Amazing Randi. Behold, the Power of the Vagina !
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Can someone tell me why this isn't as outragious as spending tax money to research "intelligent design"? I mean, there is no real scientific theory that describes how telepathy would work, and virtually all scientific evidence says that telepathy doesn't exist. Telepathy is pretty much to fortune telling what Intelligent Design is to creationism - turning superstition into pseudo-science to make it palatable to the modern audience. I realize that England doesn't have the same strict legal seperation between religion and state as other countries, but even if research into the mystical and supernatural isn't strictly illegal it is certainly a questionable use of taxpayer money, no?
Why are people outraged over Intelligent Design but not this kind of stuff?
Research into this stuff isn't just for cooks and crazies -- even Princeton has a small lab the goal of which is to experimentally gather a "better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality". It's called the "Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research" (PEAR) lab, and its web page can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/ -- Martin
Well, there's also the slight difference that he has facts on his side. None of these so-called "people who can" have ever been able to demonstrate their alleged abilities under controlled conditions. Until they can do that, they're nothing more than "people who lie to others", or at best, "people who lie to themselves".
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.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Are you for real?
About 4 years ago, I went to a local music venue for the weekly talk show hosted by musicians and some pathetic psychic was there claiming "quantum physics proves crystals can heal you". Every other claim she made was punctuated with a bunch of keywords about quantum mechanics (esp. strange action at a distance and observability).
I finally got the mic and asked her opinion of Schrodinger's dissent and if she could respond to one of the founder's main gripes, and she had never even heard of Schrodinger. I asked how she could possibly quote QM every other sentence and never had heard of it's primary founder. She brushed it off with some analogy about knowing how to hit a baseball without understanding all that complicated math.
Don't fall for people who pick a hole in scientific understanding and try to defend pseudoscientific babble while hiding behind things they don't understand.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
How can it exist but be unprovable? If you and your family have a super-natural connection, or at least one that is not currently explained by science, it can be tested.
Too many times to be coincidence has things like this happened. But trying to force it never has produced any results...
That statement implies that you've done the statistics. Let's see them. How many times have you guys not thought the same thing at the same time vs. how many times have you thought about the same thing? Keep in mind that because you are in the same family, some of the things you think about will inevitably be related. I mean if you're thinking about your mother, it's pretty reasonable to think your daughter might also think about her grandmother at some point during the day.
There is a wealth of literature on what is likely going on. You are only noting the times it happens, rarely or never the times it doesn't. So when you "think back on it" the hits greatly outnumber the misses in your memory when in reality the hits are just coincidences amidst a sea of misses.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
If all of the people who are found to be "telepathic" are hot girls, I'm gonna have to call bullshit on this one.
Wait, gaming? Okay, what I said above probably won't be an issue.
Are they planning to strip-search the participants for hidden transmitters and receivers?
To test and debug the system, have they hired a couple of good magicians skilled at "mentalist" acts, with a promise to pay them well for their time if they can successfully cheat?
Or, like most scientists, are they just protecting against unconscious cheating by honest, good-faith participants?
I find it disappointing that TFA doesn't really discuss the possibility of conscious, clever cheating... or implies that it's impossible because, well, gee, the system is so high-tech.
People have smuggled transmitters and receivers into casinos, where the management is probably far more savvy, cynical, and experienced at detecting cheating... and financially motivated to do so... than these scientists.
I predict that this will have the same outcome as all other parapsychology experiments: a very slightly better-than-chance statistical outcome, and endless ambiguity and debate about whether the statistics were done in a valid way.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There is no such thing as "ESP". It is simply the Force. All around you, the Force is. Many things that we as humans cannot explain are quite simple really. Many of us are capable of touching the Force, some moreso than others.
I've never been slapped walking down the street, sitting in a meeting, etc., etc.
Invariably if I'm in a public place, there will be someone I find attractive and I will think "hey now". I've never had someone come up and slap me for thinking rude thoughts, so at the very least, women I find attractive, as a rule, do not have telepathy.
Prehistoric humans with even a little telepathy would have enormous survival advantage. You'd be able to tell whether a predator was hiding behind the next rock, or whether it's an animal you're hunting for food. Or nothing, in which case you go off and hunt somewhere else.
In that case, natural selection would at the same time pressure animals, both predators and prey, to evolve to a form where they could block the effect so that their adversary (human or other) would have no idea where they were hiding.
Even if we can't tell where animals are hiding, even a little telepathy between humans could be used in group hunting and teaching offspring, or summoning help in a dire emergency. Even a brief feeling which influences your actions based on information from another human would confer enormous advantage.
Some people have reported that they have gotten "feelings" that some loved one is in trouble, but frankly there is an overwhemingly enormous number of dire incidents throughout human history, each one of which would select for having the telepathic trait. Something as simple as children having the ability to alert their parents that they are in trouble would still confer enormous survival advantage.
From an evolutionary perspective, telepathy is a strong survival trait. Since we don't see it in the gene pool, it's unlikely that it's even possible.
Circumstantial I know, but it's hard to prove that something doesn't exist...
Here's my prediction of what will happen.
This experiment is very poorly controlled (who's to say that two people aren't also on the phone to one another, for example), and some startlingly accurate correlations will occur. These will be debunked as the players come under scrutiny and the communication channels between players are detected.
However, after these have been removed, some correlations between players will still remain, below the level of staistical significance. Rather than being dismissed as insignificant, the woo-woo crowd will seize on these random correlations as "proof of need of more research".
This prediction is not the result of clairvoyance, rather it is an educated guess based on previous observations of this kind of setup.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.