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Very. Very. Cool.
Ignaz Semmelweis.
Sometimes practice outstrips theory. Don’t demonize practice when that happens. If it’s stupid but it works, it is not stupid.
Childhood’s End.
It never goes away.
I met Targ at a laser conference years ago, probably CLEO, while he was still at Lockheed. A few of us had dinner together one evening. He seemed normal, except for his wacky ideas about remote viewing.
Targ reminds me a little of another physicist, John Taylor (not to be confused with several other physicists of the same name). This Taylor was duped by Uri Geller into believing that Geller had paranormal powers. If you want to investigate paranormal powers, hire a magician. Those guys know how tricks are done.
Much less cool were those “experiments’ where the government (CIA) administered LSD to unsuspecting subjects, to see what the effects might be. Some never recovered.
The MKUltra program, which explored psychedelics and other substances toward the end of finding a “truth serum” or “mind control agent” was part and parcel of the focus on the human mind which occupied the CIA after World War II. Andrija Puharich, who later brought Uri Geller to the U.S., was involved in the immediate postwar years in the search for the “magic mushroom” in Mexico and tests, some conducted without the consent or knowledge of subjects, as to whether ingestion could improve psychic functioning. This is discussed in the book, although it is not the main focus of the text.
Her previous book about DARPA had three pages dealing with GPS. She managed to get almost everything wrong about it. I am skeptical about her scholarship.
I hold the same view on this as I do about UFOs, global warming, Bigfoot, ancient astronauts, miracles, etc.: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
I’m open-minded and amenable to persuasion, but I’ll have to see some robust and reproducible evidence.
I haven’t yet.
Non-techies writing tech is fraught with peril.
Indeed. One important take-away from this book is that the U.S. government expended taxpayer funds on this work for almost half a century, including 23 years in which an operational program provided “intelligence” to government clients. Almost all of this work was classified and funded by “black program” budgets opaque to scrutiny by Congress and those who paid for them.
Makes you wonder about the merit of other “science” funded by the government, doesn’t it? And also the extent one should rely on the coercive state resorting to “science” to justify its policies, almost all of which seem to curiously have the same result of increasing its own power at expense of its subjects.
And wouldn’t you like to audit what the current “black program” budget is funding?
If that’s a passing swipe at climate science, I’m all over that. Yes.
I imagine “pure” science has always had to deal with the conflicting incentives of partisan patrons — in the same sense that movie directors have always had to put up with the investor’s mistress getting some modest part in the production.
When almost all of the work in a field is funded by the government — as in climate science and this paranormal nonsense (did I say that out loud?) — then I think the results tend to be predictable.
What about the program from The Men Who Stare at Goats? Was that part of one of the ones mentioned, or was it a parallel Army program?
In this regard, I like to quote Eisenhower’s farewell address. Everybody remembers the part about the “military-industrial complex”, but few recall the next few paragraphs.
Before becoming president, Eisenhower was (briefly) a university president. He saw first-hand the effects of federal funding distorting the priorities of academic research and vice versa.
It was part of the same program which supported the remote viewing project. The funding agencies changed over the years, but the structure of the program remained largely intact. The book is a straight nonfiction account (albeit ironic and funny) of this “research”, while the movie embroiders upon the facts in the interest (successful) of entertainment.
One good thing that came out of the Ahnenerbe programs was the whole Hellboy universe. Nazis and black magic as entertainment? Who knew?
The other good thing was that the resources they expended rubbing runes weren’t available to get the Me 262 into full-scale production.
I have had many paranormal events and remote viewings all of which have been associated with and accompanied by large amounts of alcohol.
I listened to as much of Targ’s pseudo-TED talk as I could tolerate. His claim about the connections of paranormal phenomena with quantum mechanics are specious. He’s trying to associate the EPR/Bell’s Theorem experiments of the 1970s and 80s with Buddhism: total rubbish.
Also, Targ’s understanding of scientific epistemology is wrong. You don’t “prove” things in physical science by accumulating statistical data. That’s more the social “science” epistemological model. And we all know how successful that’s been.
You know how you see a book in a bookstore, it looks interesting but you don’t buy it and then later wish you had but never see it again? This is about one of those. It was a nicely done coffee table size book on dowsing. It had photos of U.S. Marines in Viet Nam dowsing for VC tunnels and mines – both from maps and on the ground, and another one of a man in a coat and tie under a starched white lab coat with a group of men similarly dressed or in expensive suits. This was a dowser and a group of top brass at what was then the Sandoz pharmaceutical company. He was locating a suitable water source for a new manufacturing plant.
So I had heard of map dowsing when I heard the following story from a friend, gone now. She had kept and trained horses on a small property in the East Bay. She decided that she needed a new well. She had been working for a while with a man who did both map and onsite dowsing. In this case, he worked from a map of the property. He and his map were in Oregon, the property was in California.
He told her to drill in a certain spot, and that she would hit water at a specified depth but that it wouldn’t be enough for her needs. She was to drill something like another 75 feet or so past the first water the drill hit, and that would get her what she needed. Both predictions panned out. I saw the well. It delivered the amount of water the dowser had said it would, coming from the depth he said the water would be.
Charles Stross stirred the Ahnenerbe SS together with the Cthulhu mythos and a few other things in the Laundry Files series.
Heh, my father once challenged the universe in that way. He got an answer to his challenge, too.
And yet one of the “hardest” of the hard sciences—particle physics—is largely based upon statistical arguments. If you read the discovery paper for the top quark or the book-length treatment of the discovery, it’s evident that what’s going on is nothing like identifying the positron as an oddly curved track in a cloud chamber you could point at say, “there it is”.
Instead, the discovery process involves modeling the background from a multitude of decay processes, taking into account the behaviour of the detectors, by running Monte Carlo simulations of known events. Then you search for an excess of events over the expected background, producing a “bump” in the energy spectrum of decay products. If the bump reaches a statistical significance of five standard deviations and its energy and properties of the event are consistent with those expected, this is considered grounds for claiming a discovery. (I have, of course, vastly over-simplified the process, ignoring the complex process of tagging events as candidates; read the paper.)
You can’t even point to a given event and say, “That’s a top quark (or Higgs boson).” All you can say is that among an ensemble of events, some fraction of them must have been produced by the new particle, while others were due to background processes not involving it. Two- and three- sigma results appear all the time and routinely disappear as more data are collected, proving to be random fluctuations: in 2015 there was a buzz when the LHC appeared to have produced a bump between three and four standard deviations around 750 GeV but it went away when more data were taken in 2016.
I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with statistical methods per se. You just have to use them carefully and be aware that knowledge of one domain, for example particle physics, does not mean you’re an expert in statistics, which can be very subtle.
For a discussion of the use of statistics in parapsychology research, I recommend Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds, the latter the subject of Saturday Night Science for 2013-09-07.
In 1986, the London Financial Times (“A cost-effective Account of the Spoons”, January 18, 1986) reported that Uri Geller was charging £1 million for map dowsing, and that he had performed at least eleven known dowsing projects for petroleum and mining company clients including Petróleros Mexicanos (Pemex), Rio Tinto-Zinc of the UK, and Zanex Ltd. in Australia.
For £1 million they had better have panned out.
No, it doesn’t. But neither does our belief in free will, moral agency, love, altruism, the innocence of children, prayer, intuition, human equality and soul. When certain things go away — or are culturally and politically disappeared — others follow.
My PQM not only explains this kind of “paranormal phenomena,” but also ordinary consciousness in terms of mainstream theoretical physics.
http://ricochet.com/archives/saturday-night-science-flying-saucers-explained/
https://vimeo.com/171013596
https://cornell.academia.edu/JackSarfatti
see my endnotes to starting on p. 331 to p. 336
https://www.academia.edu/32054204/Updated_JackSarfatti_Physics_Essays_1991_Faster-Than-Light_Communication_-_complete_version_cited_by_David_Kaiser_in_How_the_Hippies_Saved_Physics from 1990
My point is that there is now a Popper falsifiable theory based on essentially conventional physics that explains what Annie has reported and that will lead to a valuable new post-quantum information technology that can hack present day quantum cryptographic networks mistakenly thought to be secure. In addition, the idea of uploading our actual conscious experiences to The Cloud in a kind of virtual personal immortality is now, in principle, doable.
In almost all of social science, can’t we replace “paranormal” with “conservative”? Especially as regards traditional conservatism rather than market conservatism.
Sure, there’s some push back (though mostly there’s accommodation) when leftist theory threatens economic interests. But on social questions, conservatives have no confirmed theory of the family, sexual modesty, traditional cultural forms, like-group attachment (to use a defanged phrase), emotional restraint and settled habits which have somehow accommodated human anomalies for centuries.
Interesting reaction, not what I was talking about however.
CS Peirce said that if you flip a coin, initially fair, and modify the resulting outcome so that every head or tail becomes (very)slightly more likely on the next flip you will the outcome will be bimodal. That is, you will wind up with coins that will result in either results in heads or tails with a high degree of likelihood.