Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory
Sean at
In the aftermath of the dispiriting comments following last week’s post on the Parapsychological Association, it seems worth spelling out in detail the claim that parapsychological phenomena are inconsistent with the known laws of physics. The main point here is that, while there are certainly many things that modern science does not understand, there are also many things that it does understand, and those things simply do not allow for telekinesis, telepathy, etc. Which is not to say that we can prove those things aren’t real. We can’t, but that is a completely worthless statement, as science never proves anything; that’s simply not how science works. Rather, it accumulates empirical evidence for or against various hypotheses. If we can show that psychic phenomena are incompatible with the laws of physics we currently understand, then our task is to balance the relative plausibility of “some folks have fallen prey to sloppy research, unreliable testimony, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking” against “the laws of physics that have been tested by an enormous number of rigorous and high-precision experiments over the course of many years are plain wrong in some tangible macroscopic way, and nobody ever noticed.”
The crucial concept here is that, in the modern framework of fundamental physics, not only do we know certain things, but we have a very precise understanding of the limits of our reliable knowledge. We understand, in other words, that while surprises will undoubtedly arise (as scientists, that’s what we all hope for), there are certain classes of experiments that are guaranteed not to give exciting results — essentially because the same or equivalent experiments have already been performed.
A simple example is provided by
This knowledge has consequences. If we discover a new asteroid headed toward Earth, we can reliably use Newtonian gravity to predict its future orbit. From a rigorous point of view, someone could say “But how do you know that Newtonian gravity works in this particular case? It hasn’t been tested for that specific asteroid!” And that is true, because science never proves anything. But it’s not worth worrying about, and anyone making that suggestion would not be taken seriously.
As with asteroids, so with human beings. We are creatures of the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as everything else. As everyone knows, there are many things we don’t understand about biology and neuroscience, not to mention the ultimate laws of physics. But there are many things that we do understand, and only the most basic features of quantum field theory suffice to definitively rule out the idea that we can influence objects from a distance through the workings of pure thought.
The simplest example is telekinesis, the ability to remotely move an object using only psychic powers. For definitiveness, let’s consider the power of spoon-bending, claimed not only by Uri Geller but by author and climate skeptic Michael Crichton.
What do the laws of physics have to say about spoon-bending? Below the fold, we go through the logic.
- Spoons are made of ordinary matter.
This sounds uncontroversial, but is worth explaining. Spoons are made of atoms, and we know what atoms are made of — electrons bound by photons to an atomic nucleus, which in turn consists of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made of quarks held together by gluons. Five species of particles total: up and down quarks, gluons, photons, electrons. That’s it.
There is no room for extra kinds of mysterious particles clinging, aura-like, to the matter in a spoon. That’s because we know how particles behave. If there were some other kind of particle in the spoon, it would have to interact with the ordinary matter we know is there — otherwise it wouldn’t stick, it would just zip right through, as neutrinos zip right through the Earth nearly undisturbed. And if there were a kind of particle that interacted with the ordinary particles in the spoon strongly enough to stick to the spoon, we could easily make it in experiments. The rules of quantum field theory directly relate the interaction rates of particles to the ease with which we can create them in the lab, given enough energy. And we know exactly how much energy is available in a spoon; we know the masses of the atoms, and the kinetic energy of thermal motions within the metal. Taken together, we can say without any fear of making a mistake that any new particles that might exist within a spoon would have been detected in experiments long ago.
Again: imagine you have invented a new kind of particle relevant to the dynamics of spoons. Tell me its mass, and its interactions with ordinary matter. If it’s too heavy or interacts too weakly, it can’t be created or captured. If it is sufficiently light and strongly interacting, it will have been created and captured many times over in experiments we have already done. There is no middle ground. We completely understand the regime of spoons, notwithstanding what you heard in The Matrix.
- Matter interacts through forces.
We’ve known for a long time that the way to move matter is to exert a force on it —
This is where the previous point comes in. Spoons are just a certain arrangement of five kinds of elementary particles — up and down quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons. So if there is going to be a force that moves around a spoon, it’s going to have to couple to those particles. Once you tell me how many electrons etc. there are in the spoon, and the arrangement of their positions and spins, we can say with confidence how any particular kind of force will influence the spoon; no further information is required.
- There are only two long-range forces strong enough to influence macroscopic objects — electromagnetism and gravity.
Of course, we have worked hard to discover different forces in nature, and so far we have identified four: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. But the nuclear forces are very short-range, smaller than the diameter of an atom. Gravitation and electromagnetism are the only detectable forces that propagate over longer distances.
Could either gravitation or electromagnetism be responsible for bending spoons? No. In the case of electromagnetism, it would be laughably easy to detect the kind of fields necessary to exert enough force to influence a spoon. Not to mention that the human brain is not constructed to generate or focus such fields. But the real point is that, if it were electromagnetic fields doing the spoon-bending, it would be very very noticeable. (And the focus would be on influencing magnets and circuits, not on bending spoons.)
In the case of gravitation, the fields are just too weak. Gravity accumulates in proportion to the mass of the source, so the arrangement of particles inside your brain will have a much smaller gravitational effect than just the location of your head — and that’s far too feeble to move spoons around. A bowling ball would be more efficient, and most people would agree that moving a bowling ball past a spoon has a negligible effect.
Could there be a new force, as yet undetected by modern science? Of course! I’ve proposed them myself. Physicists are by no means closed-minded about such possibilities; they are very excited by them. But they also take seriously the experimental limits. And those limits show unambiguously that any such new force must either be very short-range (less than a millimeter), or much weaker than gravity, which is an awfully weak force.
The point is that such forces are characterized by three things: their range, their strength, and their source (what they couple to). As discussed above, we know what the possible sources are that are relevant to spoons: quarks, gluons, photons, electrons. So all we have to do is a set of experiments that look for forces between different combinations of those particles. And these experiments have been done! The answer is: any new forces that might be lurking out there are either (far) too short-range to effect everyday objects, or (far) too weak to have readily observable effects.
Here is a plot of the current limits on such forces, from the Eot-Wash group at Julianne’s home institution. This particular plot is for forces that couple to the total number of protons plus neutrons; similar plots exist for other possible sources. The horizontal axis is the range of the force; it ranges from about a millimeter to ten billion kilometers. The vertical axis is the strength of the force, and the region above the colored lines has been excluded by one or more experiments. On meter-sized scales, relevant to bending a spoon with your mind, the strongest possible allowed new force would be about one billionth the strength of gravity. And remember, gravity is far too weak to bend a spoon.
That’s it. We are done. The deep lesson is that, although science doesn’t know everything, it’s not “anything goes,” either. There are well-defined regimes of physical phenomena where we do know how things work, full stop. The place to look for new and surprising phenomena is outside those regimes. You don’t need to set up elaborate double-blind protocols to pass judgment on the abilities of purported psychics. Our knowledge of the laws of physics rules them out. Speculations to the contrary are not the provenance of bold visionaries, they are the dreams of crackpots.
A similar line of reasoning would apply to telepathy or other parapsychological phenomena. It’s a little bit less cut and dried, because in the case of telepathy the influence is supposedly traveling between two human brains, rather than between a brain and a spoon. The argument is exactly the same, but there are those who like to pretend that we don’t understand how the laws of physics work inside a human brain. It’s certainly true that there is much we don’t know about thought and consciousness and neuroscience, but the fact remains that we understand the laws of physics in the brain regime perfectly well. To believe otherwise, you would have to imagine that individual electrons obey different laws of physics because they are located in a human brain, rather than in a block of granite. But if you don’t care about violating the laws of physics in regimes where they have been extensively tested, then anything does in fact go.
Some will argue that parapsychology can be just as legitimately “scientific” as paleontology or cosmology, so long as it follows the methodology of scientific inquiry. But that’s a slightly too know-nothing attitude to quite hold up. If parapsychologists followed the methodology of scientific inquiry, they would look what we know about the laws of physics, realize that their purported subject of study had already been ruled out, and within thirty seconds would declare themselves finished. Anything else is pseudoscience, just as surely as contemporary investigation into astrology, phrenology, or Ptolemaic cosmology. Science is defined by its methods, but it also gets results; and to ignore those results is to violate those methods.
Admittedly, however, it is true that anything is possible, since science never proves anything. It’s certainly possible that the next asteroid that comes along will obey an inverse-cube law of gravity rather than an inverse-square one; we never know for sure, we can only speak in probabilities and likelihoods. Given the above, I would put the probability that some sort of parapsychological phenomenon will turn out to be real at something (substantially) less than a billion to one. We can compare this to the well-established success of particle physics and quantum field theory. The total budget for high-energy physics worldwide is probably a few billion dollars per year. So I would be very happy to support research into parapsychology at the level of a few dollars per year. Heck, I’d even be willing to go as high as twenty dollars per year, just to be safe.
Never let it be said that I am anything other than open-minded.
143 Comments on “Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory” rss feed
This kind of post is the reason I read your blog… you have the ability to bring down the complex stuff to support ordinary knowledege. I admit I didn’t fully understand the graph, but I think I can believe you anyway.
But just as your arguments are powerful, so can other arguments have the same power given a good writer and an ill-informed listener, and that happens a lot.
Do you think blogging/teaching is the only way to help the ill-informed be more suspicious of what they believe?
Do you think there’s a certain point in which persons are not going to understand more arguments? Is it bad to give up?
It’s ok to give up on certain people, such as charlatans and preachers- to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, those whose paychecks are dependent on their lack of understanding.
The people who have been fooled by those charlatans and preachers can and must be won over by science, unless you want to just give them up to superstition and let them come back to fight you later (most of the fighting right now is around issues of public health and education. but that bad science education mandated by creationists affects physics education too).
Sean, I’ve been working on an essay called The Atheist’s Guide to Tragedy, and about my frustration trying to explain to a friend/neighbor that the hundreds of dollars she’s spent on Astral Projection classes is a complete waste since it’s not possible.
Since I’m not a scientist, it’s often hard for me to put into words why it’s crap, but this post has helped a lot in how I’ll explain in the future.
And also, it gives me great happiness that I’m not so alone in not believing in magic.
Awesome article. I’m definitely saving a link to it to refer people towards when they point out that science doesn’t know “everything” next time. The probability/cost estimate at the end is just brilliant, though I can’t help thinking that studying parapsychology to a limited extent could be useful, for the purpose of understanding why so many people believe pseudoscience (but perhaps it’s just psychology in that case?).
I’ve been working on some ideas to try to explain to some friends why Astrology is almost certainly bunk. Going through the fallacious arguments and lack of evidence is useful, but this sort of approach is much more concrete and I’d bet it will make more sense to some of them. Thanks for the ideas.
Sean, posts like this are the reason I love this blog. Like others here in the comments, I am continually frustrated by those who do not understand the limits imposed by well-understood physics. However, while I personally would put the odds at telepathy working at less than a billion to one, I’m inclined to question some of your comments near the end of the article. Obviously telekinesis, astral projection, and some other forms of paranormal activity would require the existence of forces that we know don’t exist, as you say; however, it is known that brain activity created EM-waves. From what I understand, these waves are fairly weak, and difficult to detect even with our sophisticated technology, but nature has beaten us in technological advancement before. Isn’t it possible that some very special people have equally special sensors that allow them to detect and translate these electromagnetic waves into thoughts? Perhaps they would need to be in direct contact to detect them, and I think it is 100% safe to assume that they couldn’t detect them over any appreciable distance, but in this theory of telepathy, no mystical new forces of nature are needed - just the detection of weak electromagnetic waves. Again, I’m NOT saying I believe those who claim they can do this, just asking if it isn’t outside the realm of known physics? Am I wrong? I would love it if I am.
Chris, you’re right, and that’s why the telepathy case is less straightforward. Brains are made of charged particles, and in principle they could create and detect electromagnetic signals — radios and walkie-talkies do it all the time!
But that’s just the point — they are really easy to detect. Setting up a radio receiver would be a much better way to test the phenomenon than looking at abstract symbols on cards behind a screen. And when we get into the details, the brain isn’t really set up to transmit very strong waves; its functioning is more chemical than electromagnetic. There are many other sources all around us that are creating much stronger electromagnetic waves, at all sorts of frequencies.
Still, at the level of the brain itself, there is much we don’t understand, and I would certainly support research into the role of electromagnetic fields in the brain. It would fall under “neuroscience,” of course, not “parapsychology.”
Fantastically well written. Coincidentally, your post here is somewhat related to one at Bad Astronomy today.
- Pingback on Feb 18th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
[...] then Sean nails telekinesis, and the rest of parapsychology, in a piece called “Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory”. This is long, but well worth your time. He considers claims about spoon-bending, and points out: [...]
Howdy CV,
There is another approach to the question of whether or not such phenomena exist. While I appreciate (and enjoy) Sean’s argument, there is a more basic, perhaps easier to appreciate, starting point for many people. While I am very happy to start from very basic principles, it’s often easier to convince people with much simpler and more direct arguments/evidence.
Suppose the possibility of an outside, here-to-fore unseen, unknown interaction mechanism that is responsible for telekinesis. Many people without a firm knowledge of what we already understand about nature will find this a familiar starting point. Without seeking to construct a possible method or mechanism, it is fairly simple to test for its presence in a direct fashion. This does not require the budget of the LHC or the APS or even much of any budget. Some modest money, time and effort is all that is necessary to perform such a test. And in fact, many people have done just such experiments in the past.
The simple fact is that, in all reliable, controlled tests, no telekinesis has been observed. In the cases where there was a “positive” the outcome was not repeatable at different times (anyone remember Carson’s excellent show where Uri Geller attempted to perform?). As such, with no repeatability, with no independent verifiable evidence, those reports of positive tests must be miscounted. It is entirely possible, even for career scientists, to either make a mistake (often through a preconception of the outcome and improper control) or to be fooled (human subjects are not entirely known to be completely honest, Uri Geller for instance). Give Martin Gardner, James Randi or Carl Sagan a good read as a starting point for such information.
Anyhow, people have gone to look for such phenomena directly and never found any consistent, reliable, reproducible positive outcome. In a total absence of observable evidence and a long list of negatives, we are left with the conclusion that it just doesn’t exist. Further testing of the same phenomena, under the same conditions (I predict!), will produce the same results (and hence not tell us anything new, nor be worth serious effort). If there was any real evidence of “paranormal” phenomena, then of course it could be included within the rubric of science. But as it stands now (and has for some time), it just doesn’t hold water and therefore isn’t science. Even without a well phrased argument of how it doesn’t fit with our current understanding of nature, the simple repeated experimental failure should be enough to remove it from science (and hence the AAAS).
If such tests had not been previously performed, it would be very good to consider your argument before attempting to pursue such a course of research. Especially when considering the question of spending money and effort on something completely off the envelope of current understanding. Anyhow, the simple, “people have looked for it in the past and not reliably seen it” statement, while a bit dry, may find readier acceptance by some people.
best wishes
Michael
(apologies if my statement is a bit scattered. I’m polishing/cleaning samples with only scattered 5 minute spots of time between cycles to write this)
I used to think that Scientists should have an open mind about testing paranormal phenomena, until I read the following passage from Steven Weinberg, and suddenly I understood why they should not:
“When the Spanish settlers in Mexico began in the sixteenth century to push northward into the country known as Texas, they were led on by rumors of cities of gold, the seven cities of Cibola. At the time that was not so unreasonable. Few Europeans had been to Texas, and for all anyone knew it might contain any number of wonders. But suppose that someone today reported evidence that there are seven golden cities somewhere in modern Texas. Would you open-mindedly recommend mounting an expedition to search every corner of the state between the Red River and the Rio Grande to look for these cities? I think you would make the judgment that we already know so much about Texas, so much of it has been explored and settled, that it is simply not worthwhile to look for the mysterious golden cities. In the same way, our discovery of the connected and convergent pattern of scientific explanations has done the very great service of teaching us that there is no room in nature for astrology or telekinesis or creationism or other superstitions.”
That’s from the end of the second chapter of “Dreams of a Final Theory”
Man, that’s a lot of words.
All I’d say is “Because it’s all a bunch of crap! Because I said so!”
Hi Sean,
Nice post, very clearly written.
I understand what you are saying with ’science never proves anything’ with which you seem to refer to ‘real world objects’ (with all the clutter that comes with the word ‘reality’), but you have thereby declared you don’t consider mathematics to be a science. Which I find admittedly somewhat inappropriate. ‘Scientia’ (Lat) means simply ‘knowledge’ and is not necessarily bound to knowledge about meteorites or spoons. I would think mathematics qualifies as a science, even if you call this kind of knowledge ‘tautologies’.
Also, I think the matrix spoon isn’t concerned with interactions at all, it rather refers to our fragile notion of reality. The human imagination can make up many scenarios that violate the laws of nature, and reality is never objective, it is just what your brain believes it to be.
Best,
B.
Pay no attention to andy.s
Moving spoons with your mind is (in principle) trivial.
The distance between my mind and the spoon is three feet, but as is well known, the space-time interval between my mind (now) and that same spoon three nanoseconds in the future is 0.
So in a sense, the future spoon and everything in the universe on the forward light-cone is a distance of 0 from my mind. So my mind should (in principle) be be able to wield any force imaginable on the spoon, no matter how short range such a force may be.
Pay no attention to my alter ego.
He gets this way when I forget to take my meds.
Just a matter of time with new tech before we see sht move with the mind. If you could would you let anyone know. Being a lab rat would really suck. We’ve all had it happen to us and laughed it off as being strange. Now think of generations of people thinking and practicing with the mind. Research the spells of the Vatican. The History channel said they have real SHT and real spells said to work, to call on angels. Micheal…
Need moor brain power see what science says to do on Livingwithoutcancer.org!
‘Scientia’ (Lat) means simply ‘knowledge’ and is not necessarily bound to knowledge about meteorites or spoons. I would think mathematics qualifies as a science, even if you call this kind of knowledge ‘tautologies’.
The etymological origin of the word “science” has nothing to do with the current meaning of the English word science; if “science” merely means “knowledge,” then every field of study imaginable is a “science.” Memorizing the capitals of the 50 US states will give you knowledge, but I don’t think anyone would call it a science.
Anyway, I would indeed assert that mathematics is not a science. Science follows the scientific method; mathematics does not.
Chris (#6) - re telepathy:
Thoughts are not some Platonic form floating in space. My thoughts consist of patterns within my brain. Those patterns exist in a unique neural net that grew in accord with DNA instructions and in response to unique personal circumstances (eg, nutrition, training, trauma, infections, etc). So there is no one-to-one mapping of my brain onto yours. The pattern in my brain for ‘rice pudding’ may be very different from your pattern for that concept. So why do some people think that we can ‘read’ the thoughts of others? Even if we knew the appropriate patterns to look for, we would need extremely fine resolution to discern events on a cellular scale. So our existing scientific knowledge seems to indicate that mind-reading is an unlikely event.
But more to the point, no one has yet repeatably demonstrated any ‘psychic’ phenomenon. So for all the billions of words written about such abilities, they appear to be wishful thinking.
Hey, what if the spoon just bent itself coincidentally at the time the performer says so? I mean by some weird extraordinarily unlikely case when the air molecules are all just pushing in the same direction to bend the spoon? Just a thought.
Thank you! (Both literally, and in the current way that people ackowledge support of their own opinions.) And yet, Freeman Dyson, whom I otherwise respect, says this in “The Scientist As Rebel” (hope I am not violating any Fair Use laws):
From a review of “Debunked: ESP, Telekinesis, and other Psuedoscience”, by Charpak and Broch:
… There are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not [always] the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often. A simple way to state the paradox is Littlewood’s law of miracles. Littlewood … a professional mathematician … defined a miracle as an event which has a special significance when it occurs, [and which] occurs with a probability of one in a million.
Littlewood’s law of miracles states that in the course of a normal person’s life, miracles occur at the rate of roughly one a month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake … we hear and see things happening at the rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about … one million per month.
[Discussion of attempts to detect paranormal “abilities” by the Rhine methods and others, “a sorry story”.]
… Charpak and Broch and I agree that attempts to study ESP … have failed. Charpak and Broch say that since ESP and telepathy cannot be studied scientifically, they do not exist. Their conclusion is clear and logical but I do not accept it because I am not a reductionist. I claim that paranormal phenomena may really exist but may not be accessible to scientific investigation. This is a hypothesis. I am not saying that it is true, only that it is tenable, and to my mind plausible.
… One fact that emerges clearly from the stories is that paranormal events occur, if they occur at all, only when people are under stress and experiencing strong emotion.
… I should here declare my personal interest in the matter. One of my grandmothers was a notorious and successful faith healer.
… Whether paranormal phenomena exist or not, the evidence for their existence is corrupted by a vast amount of nonsense and outright fraud.
… A deluge of eloquent letters came in response to this review. Orthodox scientists were outraged because I considered the existence of telepathy to be possible. True believers in telepathy were outraged because I considered its existence to be unproven.
It isn’t just physics that rules out parapsychology. You can also get a lot of mileage out of mere physiology. Consider telepathy. The relative size of the parts of animal brains that process the various sensory modalities are proportionate to the extent to which the organism relies on that sense. Animals that track their prey by smell, for example, have large olfactory lobes. Visual animals such as eagles and hawks have large sections of their brains dedicated to processing information from their eyes. Electric fish, which navigate muddy water by interpreting electric fields, have special sections of the their brains to deal with electrical data. Thing is, there is just no section of the human brain that is a plausible candidate for the organ of telepathy.
20. JimV: quoting Freeman Dyson: “and to my mind plausible.”
So much the worse for Freeman Dyson’s mind.
“Thing is, there is just no section of the human brain that is a plausible candidate for the organ of telepathy.”
One can also argue from an evolution theoretical standpoint. Would it be possible to communicate by telepathy at all, then this would have an obvious positive effect on survival, and it would have been developed by many species. That only a few people would be able to do this, and this barely, just does not make any sense.
I think it’s useful to reserve the word “science” for the particular type of contingent, empirical knowledge about this actual world that we obtain through hypothesis testing, observation, and experiment. The type of logical truths revealed by mathematics (and amenable to proof) seem very different. There are obviously similarities, but the distinction is worth emphasizing — especially because too many people suffer under the misimpression that physics and biology actually do “prove” that certain things are true or false.
One can also argue from an evolution theoretical standpoint.
No, we all would have killed each other if we knew what we were all thinking of each other.
Plus, no poker.
One of the most stunning revelations of quantum physics is the role of consciousness, weakening forever the notion of an objective world. Consider the possibility that the very belief system many of those involved in this discussion are reinforcing actively selects the world you perceive and experience out of an infinity of potential worlds.
I am a physicist, yet I have had indisputable premonitions. Completely unanticipated events seen in advance down to minute, arbitrary and irrelevant details. Of course, my experiences are anecdotal, and are non-repeatable. Therefore, they cannot fit within the standard scientific paradigm. Yet they are real to me, and real to many others I know who have had similar experiences.
I used to work as a programmer, and very often in conversations with my collegues, I would answer a question of theirs before they asked it. When this happened, I was in something approaching a trance-like state, almost as if I was listening to someone else speaking. No deliberate effort was involved. My collegues at first were amazed, then began to be frightened, so I restrained myself.
I suspect that if I had made a point of reinforcing in myself the limited scientific paradigm rather than spending years developing my consciousness through meditation, I would not have had the experiences I have. I believe that our conscious and unconscious belief systems have an enormous impact, not only our perceptions of an objective Newtonion-like world, but actually on the quasi-creation of a subjective world. Did you every wonder about how free will fits into physics?
Science is more exciting when one continually asks the question, “What if….?” rather than if everyone agrees that the world is ordinary.
For those of you who still have an open mind about parapsychology, I recommend that you read Broughton’s book.
Yes, but the current laws of Physics could be just, due to the fact that we are close to uniting them. The Laws are dynamic as far as I know; they know when your looking and will know already if we are going to unite them. This mean Quantum physics could simply due to our knowlege in the future.
We also could have created these laws, to prevent us from knowing too much too soon. The laws of physics can be altered within Teddy Bears, e.g we can take a Teddy Bear and surround a section of space-time with a Teddy Bear. The bear can contain different laws within its self, while on the outside reality remains the same. There are probably natural bears, that allow for laws to be circumnavigated and prevent life from distorying the universe. Once you can live without your Teddy Bears, you can start to find out what life is really about
People can create there own teddy bears, were the laws of physics break down, while the rest of the universe remains sane. But the universe could reverse this if there is a possiblity that it can be contained within somebodys Teddy Bear. I may not ever be able to see the future, but I can move an entire universe without breaking any laws.
Qubit
Yes parapsychology would fall outside the realm of known physics, but that cannot disprove it. That which is outside the realm of known physics, the unknown, is the very province of science. Assuming one knows almost everything and then rejecting something as inconsistent with that knowledge demonstrates only the limits of that knowledge. As you say, science never proves anything. There may be no evidence of it, there may be no worth pursuing it, but this can only be established by experiment. Even when experiment fails, we can only say that the experiment was unsuccessful. Now parapsychology as it exists, is sterile and not worth pursuing without some keener insight or evidence, but that doesn’t disprove it or falsify it. Someday, it may be resurrected, as continental drift was resurrected in plate tectonics, and we may find some truth which we have failed to elucidate to this point. Science is best reserved for the imaginative, and needs to as skeptical of itself as everything else in order to progress.
Many people would consider an ability some people have that is the subject of this article to be paranormal if they are not told that nothing paranormal is involved.
Since science doesn’t have an explanation for my sense of free will, I don’t see why I should expect science to have an explanation for telekinesis (sp?). As far as science is concerned, my ability to hit the “submit” button is just as much a mystery as spoon bending.
The really bizarre belief is that physicists would conclude, from a few tricks with very simple experiments covering only the simplest possible interactions, that they know enough about the world to know it all.
So I’m a total non-believer in parapsychology and all that crap, but I don’t find this argument convincing at all.
I mean, we know that our model of the universe is not quite accurate, right? So how is it that even though we can’t get general relativity and quantum physics to fit together, we can still say with absolute certainty that once they do fit together, it will be in a way that doesn’t allow for the existence of any other types of particles or long-range forces that we haven’t predicted yet? You say things like “we know that only two kinds of fields exist”, etc. But scientists 100 years ago knew a lot of things too, and they were wrong. And we know that we’re wrong too, we just don’t know exactly how we’re wrong.
I mean, yes, you’d have to be completely obtuse to try to argue that “telekinesons” exist, and are plentiful on Earth, but have precisely the correct set of properties so as to not be discovered by physicists. But well, we’re talking about completely obtuse people here. Can you actually say that it is literally impossible that any future discovery in the field of physics would allow for a new type of long-range force, or are you just saying it’s incredibly implausible? Because if it’s the latter, I think the Texas and evolutionary arguments above do a much better job of pointing out the implausibility.
even though we can’t get general relativity and quantum physics to fit together
They fit together just fine, unless you try to ask questions about physics at the Planck scale (many orders of magnitude shorter in distance scales than anything we can experimentally test) or subtle questions about correlations among vast numbers of particles (as in the black hole information paradox). The “contradiction” between gravity and quantum mechanics is vastly exaggerated in the popular literature. The fact that we don’t know the right description of quantum gravity near the Planck scale is presumably less important in day-to-day life than the fact that we don’t know the right description of electroweak symmetry breaking at the TeV scale. And all of those unknown things are happening on scales where they cannot possibly influence macroscopic objects like the brain in any meaningful way.
(yawn)
How did I know this was coming? (Oh, right - behavioral analysis.)
Here’s the simple point you miss, Sean. Parapsychology doesn’t exist as a scientific discipline because somebody dreamed up the ideas of telepathy and telekinesis. Nor does it exist because one person persuasively argued that such a thing would be cool so let’s see if we can create it.
Parapsychology exists because many people have have experiences that defy conventional explanation. The first step in parapsychology was phenomenological - classify and describe them. The next step was to try to get them to appear under controlled conditions. (This step is where we have had some trouble, unfortunately. And this is what allows people like you to squawk.) Parapsychology is scientific precisely because it started from data. I’m sorry you have never seen that data as it was being collected or had a ‘psychic’ experience yourself, but then I have never seen a sub-atomic particle and I’m willing to believe the many scientists who tell me they exist. (It’s amazing how open-minded I am.)
The fact that you spent so much time explaining why psi ‘cannot’ exist makes me wonder what you hope to accomplish by that. People who have had these experiences will not be persuaded by your arguments and will keep looking for explanations. Bravo to you if you can convince people who have not had these experiences that they can’t exist; those people probably weren’t ‘aiding the cause’ anyway.
You argue that gravity and EM are forces of insufficient strength to affect macroscopic objects. Okay. I argue that psi experiences are still real and therefore a theory that can explain them probably will not rely on those forces. Gravity and EM may describe observed behaviors of macroscopic objects, but when other observations exist that contradict them, they are incomplete.
That’s what it all boils down to - observations. I’m not arguing for an ‘everything is the mind’ model of anything, but I am also not content with accepting that what works most of the time must be true all of the time. That’s inference, not science. Anything that ignores data is not science. Parapsychologists don’t ignore the laws of physics; they are simply curious about observed exceptions to those laws. That is, apparently, data that you choose to ignore.
I’m scared to even broach the subject of the observer problem with you. Or consciousness. Or the idea that it’s perfectly valid to wonder why we can’t observe matter in its smeared state.
Sean: “We are creatures of the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as everything else.” Heaven help me, I’m going to say it - that means that at some point we break down and start behaving according to quantum rules. Where is that point? And what does it mean that conscious experience allows us to observe only one of the possible states of a particle?
You can’t answer that question with your ‘known laws of physics’. I can’t answer it either. But I can think about it. And I can think about what psychic experiences and parapsychological data might tell us about what the answer might be. And I can wonder about what it might be like to live in Smearland… 
You can’t answer that question with your ‘known laws of physics’.
We can and do. Sean did. You’re wrong.
“The main point here is that, while there are certainly many things that modern science does not understand, there are also many things that it does understand, and those things simply do not allow for telekinesis, telepathy, etc.”
Sorry, wrong call on the second example. There are no hard laws of physics preventing correlative phenomena involving some parallel process happening in one brain due to activities in another one. It doesn’t have to be a case of, or even work like, classic quantum entanglement. QE is an example of correlations but I don’t see what requires it to be the only one.
I do think telekinesis is a really long shot , but not necessarily impossible. If there’s something about complex arrangements and processes of matter that cause effects not so-far predicted from simpler phenomena (i.e., emergent in some extreme sense) that it could perhaps have a chance. A small chance, but I don’t think we should rule out the idea of complicated things having more effects and quirks than expected from their building blocks.
Also, I has little chance of happening, but just “for the logical record” of accuracy: as I explained before, intervention in causality does not have to involve violation of laws of physics (the basic ones at least). For example (and I haven’t thought of any more non-probabilistic examples yet),
(1.) There can be a delay in particle interactions, e.g. for colliding particles to be held up for a tiny interval before taking the same paths they would normally take - ergo same energy and momentum.
(2.) In the center-of-momentum frame, the paths particles take exiting a collision can be rotated together without any violation: e.g., rotate the vector pair by say 30 degrees etc. The energy and linear and angular momentum stay the same in that frame (and therefore will in all frames.)
Neil B. said: “I do think telekinesis is a really long shot , but not necessarily impossible.”
See comment 11 for an illustration of why we still shouldn’t bother researching paranormal phenomena, even if what you say is correct.
BTW, how many went to http://www.parapsych.org/ to see if they linked to reports of ESP etc. in experiments, to find articles and see if the claims were credible, instead of just repeating tropes (?) that there isn’t any evidence etc? I don’t know if there is and make no general claims, but as a framing-buster I again ask: How does a person find out that there aren’t any such successful results, in principle and in practice? Aside from burdens of proof, if you say *that there aren’t any* (not to be confused with just challenging others to provide if it is), you are making an actual claim about the state of affairs of experimentation and data, not just challenging. You are implying that you know what surveying the claims shows you (maybe not personally having checked every single report, but at least collected through “sifters and funnels” that are credible and not axe-grinders with their own credibility problems.)
I have looked at reports of studies showing better than average clairvoyant “hits” in ganzfeld studies, etc. I was in such an experiment as a student at UVA in the 70s. I described some rough outlines of the imagery in the actual target revealed later. The guy doing the tests told me later, he got better hits than chance. Maybe, maybe not (I see no reason not to believe his data claim, whatever the explanation), but what makes it appropriate for someone to claim “no evidence” instead of “that didn’t impress me much because….” ?
anonymous: I don’t think the cities of gold in Texas is a good enough analogy: people would have run into the cities and they would be reachable, on maps etc. They are “gross” entities that stick out like a sore thumb once we have a lead to go on. But if PK really happens but is evanescent and not easily repeatable (and what logically entails that phenomena have to be accessible, to exist?) then we could expect just what goes on: some people say it has been observed, most experimenters can’t replicate it, etc. BTW, did you know that new large animals, like types of deer, have been found in recent decades, such as in remote parts of Vietnam (!)?
Neil, these so called “ganzfeld” tests are not so reliable because you have a person who is interpreting the picture the “receiver” is describing and he also knows what the “sender” is trying to send.
I’m sure that if these tests are done in a completely double blind way there will be no correlations.
Neil B. asks: “what logically entails that phenomena have to be accessible, to exist?”
Nothing entails that existence requires accessibility. But inaccessibility entails that phenomena are outside the purview of science. If PK are not accessible, then they should be in the same category as God etc.
onymous:
And all of those unknown things are happening on scales where they cannot possibly influence macroscopic objects like the brain in any meaningful way.
But that’s the logical leap I don’t get. Sure, the only known holes in our current theories occur at ridiculous scales. But how can we get from that to saying that there are no unknown holes in the system at human scale? How can we know the limits of what we don’t know?
Newton thought his system was pretty good, but it turns out it’s just an approximation that works in certain cases. How do we know that our entire system of physics isn’t just an approximation too? One that works in more cases than Newton’s, but still breaks down when you get too close to Uri Geller? 
Well Iblis you have a point, but some such experiments did involve how many you got right. The one I was in had specified points (pick five different features) and so wasn’t just a sloppy estimate. The trouble is, you say you are sure it wouldn’t but that isn’t the same as knowing what results are out there, as I said.
PS: Would you maybe start posting to your blog again? I dig the sort of ideas you played with, like the posing of what modal realists say (one of my pet kicks):
The Universe doesn’t ”really” exist
Our universe only exists as an abstract mathematical entity.
I don’t agree with that, but it is amazingly hard to refute! There is no clear, logically rigorous way to prove it wrong, incredibly, AFAIK. I have posed the refutation that true randomness (as in QM of decay) cannot be represented by a “mathematical structure”, since math is a rigorous logical system and therefore must be deterministic in principle (even if chaos, pseudorandomness etc. appear in practice.)
Sean:
You probably should have discussed quantum mechanics! There is a lot of quantum quackery out there. But before that your write here is a good job.
As I say, there are two relationship systems for particles. One involves geometry, the other involves quanta. The geometry one involves first space, time and spacetime, and a system of symmetries on that spacetime. There is a theorem by Coleman and Mandula on this, which gets a bit of an upgrade to supersymmetry, which spells this out very nicely. Here the geometry is a measure system, a set of kinematics so to speak, which permits us to determine a relationship system between particles by forces and the transfer or communication of energy, information and the rest. The other relationship system is quantum. This is not a metric geometric system — two quantum states can be entangled across the whole universe as “strongly” as on an optic bench — well in principle. Quantum gravity is about merging these two relationship systems into one.
There are many people who think that quantum mechanics is involved with nonlocally influencing things. There are a lot of theorems for why this can’t be the case. But a simple way of thinking about this is that if quantum entanglements don’t involve distance or metric geometry then the simplest and most basic equation in physics
F = ma
is something which does not operate according to quantum entanglements. We have that acceleration “a” and that involves space, or d^2x/dt^2 (space changes with time etc). Quantum relationships, or nonlocality and entanglements, don’t involve metric distances in geometry, and so one can’t impart a change of states remotely by quantum entanglements. Any imparted force or communication of information or energy necessitates a metric geometric description. There are no faster than light communications, no remote viewings, and of course no Uri Geller spoon bending by quantum nonlocal effects — or quantum mind nonsense ideas.
Lawrence B. Crowell
anonymous: I should have said, “easily accessible” instead of implying maybe not accessible at all. If the former, then phenomena could exist but easily not have been found or be “around” or readily observable despite efforts to look for or cause them. One actual (by now, agreed on AFAIK) example is ball lightning.
Awesome that Boulder (my locale showed up in the graph.
It seems to me that people are willing to believe in the paranormal and parapsychology because they want to believe in it. Evidence and good arguments do not factor into it because it gives meaning to their lives to think that there are profound things that are yet to be discovered and (hopefully) explained. This is something that arguments based on physics are going to have a hard time dealing with. It’s no bother to them that it would require new, undiscovered forces of nature so long as the force of subjective experience goes unexplained by physical theories. Neuroscience is a long ways from making progress in explaining phenomenal consciousness (whether it can be explained is a deeply troubling philosophical question) and I strongly doubt that Quantum Field Theory is going to help. It is most applicable in that other most important question of our time, that regarding the Big Bang, which is the reason I read this blog. In the meantime, I’m OK with parapsychologists and religion. Even though they are mistaken, it’s not all that bad in the grand scheme of things.
IMHO, grain of salt and all that. The kind of thing I’d say over a beer, if they served them here.
Lawrence, quantum correlations have to do with “hits” of photon states and make no interference with laws of conservation of energy and momentum etc. Those laws are are conserved just as much when photon polarizations are correlated as when they are not, f = ma is not an issue and your neoclassical framing of issues is not current theory. That leaves the door open for ESP based on correlated brain states, quantum issues in choice and free will, etc., however long a shot you think it is.
You know, I have been mangling with dimensional regularization lately, and that totally feels like pseudoscience.
(I keed, I keed!)
Neil, yes, I have some new things to write on my blog. Check my blog again early next week
See comment 11 for an illustration of why we still shouldn’t bother researching paranormal phenomena, even if what you say is correct.
I don’t know about that. If hundreds of people report seeing a ghost in the same place, I believe people are probably seeing something. Not a ghost, but I’d still like to know what it is.
Thousands and thousands of people report out-of-body experiences, for example. To just say it’s all rubbish and not try to find out why people feel that sensation is sort of sad.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/aug/24/2
So now there’s a theory, and not an irrational one, which is nice.
Sean’s lovely wife once had a post about “ghosts” and weird sensations caused by magnets, which was fantastic. Not everyone reporting “paranormal” phenomena is a crackpot, they just don’t know where or how to find the cause of what they’ve experienced.
“Psychic” phenomena can likely be traced to a keen observation of body language, which is incredibly useful in negotiating the social world, and having a sharp sense of it would be an incredibly useful trait passed down through our evolution. It isn’t mind-reading, but you can sort of see how it could be confused for that. It isn’t magic, but it’s a skill employed by tarot card readers and palm readers…as well as salespeople, card players, and counselors.
It really is worth studying these things instead of dismissing outright, interesting things about human behavior/evolution/how our brains work can be found.
Give me a break. I’m not an advocate of parapsychology, but it’s not clear how valid current QFT is. Yes, it may agree with extraordinarily well with experimental data but so did epicycles. At least Dirac and Feynman were willing to admit that we might have to change our views drastically:
“[Renormalization is] just a stop-gap procedure. There must be some fundamental change in our ideas, probably a change just as fundamental as the passage from Bohr’s orbit theory to quantum mechanics. When you get a number turning out to be infinite which ought to be finite, you should admit that there is something wrong with your equations, and not hope that you can get a good theory just by doctoring up that number.”
- Paul Dirac, Nobel laureate 1933
“The shell game that we play … is technically called ‘renormalization’. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It’s surprising that the theory still hasn’t been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate.”
- Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate 1965
Sorry, my source is Chris Oakley’s website:
http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/
You know, we’ve learned a bit about QFT since 1965.
“You know, we’ve learned a bit about QFT since 1965.”
I agree, but my point is that none of us are omniscient.
Eric, what is your point? You say “it’s not clear how valid current QFT is. Yes, it may agree with extraordinarily well with experimental data”
And… that’s really the point, isn’t it? It’s pretty much the most well-tested theory we have in all of science. So, sure, we’re not omniscient, but you really think QFT is somehow macroscopically wrong and it hasn’t shown up in any experiment but it has in psychic phenomena?
- Pingback on Feb 18th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
[...] a recent post, he carefully explains why it is unreasonable, in light of our best physical theories, to believe [...]
“The argument is exactly the same, but there are those who like to pretend that we don’t understand how the laws of physics work inside a human brain.”
There’s the crux of the problem right there. There are a lot of people, even serious intellectuals, who have a lot invested into the whole idea that there is a duality between mind and body, essentially insisting on the old canard of spirit versus flesh in different words.
Where does this come from? Well, I’m of a mind to agree with something that I’m pretty sure I read in Sagan’s Demon Haunted World. The basic idea is something like this: our minds possess a fantastically accurate model of an incredibly complex reality that they must deal with constantly. That model is the one that ascribes intents, motives, personas, and etc to the events around you and the reality it works so well on is the social environment and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the animal environment. We even use the model on ourselves. The flaw in the model is that it doesn’t permit for something more fundamental working underneath it, and it is incredibly deeply ingrained in each of our psyches. Thus there is a cognitive disconnect between the complicated and successful social model and the simpler but more difficult to apply mechanistic model.
There are two types of scientists.
One scientist says ‘I know that cause precedes effect. It is that way because the world would be inconsistent if it were not’.
the other says
‘I know that cause precedes effect, b/c in every experiment ever performed this has always been the empirical finding. The probability that we detect the converse is on the order of the inverse of the total amount of experiments ever done’
#17,24
Well, arguing about the usage of words is a moot point, and not something I consider worth arguing about. In my sphere of thought, mathematics is and remains a science. Memorizing capitals isn’t knowledge, it’s data storage.
Best,
B.
Eric #50, since the early 1970s we have a different perspective on renormalization mainly through the application of Field Theory in Statistical Physics. In statistical physics we do computations exactly the other way around compared to high energy physics. You start with with some well defined microscopic theory, say the Ising model, and look at the long distance behaviour of that model. That model is then well described by some renormalizable field theory.
You can then compute critical exponents etc. of the Ising model by pretending that the field theory is valid at arbitrary small length scales. But then you have to deal with the infinities of divergent integrals in exactly the same way as is done in particle physics. This means that any microscopic model which gives rise to the same macroscopic field theory will make the same prediction of critical exponents. So, you have an explanation why different models can have the same critical behavior.
In the case of high energy physics, one can say that the Standard Model is the low energy effective field theory which you would get if you knew the Theory of everything and “integrated out” the high energy degrees of freedom. So, it doesn’t make sense to argue that because we don’t know the Theory of everything (and thus the correct way to regularize the divergent integrals), Uri Geller could really be bending spoons using paranormal abilities.
Is it just me or are the die-hard scientists (obviously including the author of the post) here forgetting that science is comparable to religion in that it is extremely based in tradition. This makes me more than a little nervous about being a scientist (even though I still am) because tradition has always been a means of “teaching” the “truth” to the non-believers. Science is no exception. Despite all the “empirical” evidence there happens to be for describing the physical world, science is simply an interpretation of that world in an attempt to find reproducible results through pattern recognition. Of course, you have to add a slight bit of creativity for the development of a few silly names (quarks, photons, neutrinos, etc.) and a lot of effort to tie loose ends together. Nonetheless, science is but one, albeit a complex one, interpretation of what we have decided to call reality. I find it very hard not to laugh AT the post itself because the writer has tried so hard (perhaps without realizing it) to drag out all the scientific “explanations/proofs/ideas” for their occasional pony show, while neglecting that just because we have developed a given way of looking at or studying reality, this does not mean that there are not other, more efficient and perhaps accurate, ways of doing so. I’m not saying parapsychology is one of them, but I do think that a little caution needs to be had when acting as though science has all this evidence, because as Nietzsche put it, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Not to mention, I think you clearly missed the point of the spoon-bending bit in The Matrix, but I guess that message was clearly not for a particular audience. I find it interesting though that their are scientifically documented cases where individuals are able to focus enough (consciously or subconsciously) in order to change things such as personal biochemistry. For instance, cases of multiple personality disorder are known to have personalities with completely different biochemistry than the next personality, all for the same body. Also, certain sects of monks have been known to endure hours of meditation in severely cold weather without personal injury, only possible by their ability to increase their body temperature. So, the phrase “I am that” has a whole new meaning if one actually begins to focus on that which you choose to be.
But, I guess all the scientists will continue being happy chasing their dreams of obtaining more and more “information” and “evidence” while basking in the glory of status provided to them by our current societal hierarchy, and perhaps even in this case, gloating about the fact that they get, what was it, ah yes, billions of dollars to study things that should always be true by their standards, and thus neglecting all the current problems that would actually be better served with that funding like poverty, political corruption, cultural meltdown, etc. Keep on making those particle accelerators boys!
I doubly think Sean missed the point on the spoon-bending. But that idea wasn’t meant to be interpreted by a quantum physicist in his/her own physical terms. It is much broader than this.
I see this all coming back to interpretation, whether you consider “bending a spoon” as a physical event requiring a force (which scientists will continue to assume would come from “brain waves” or some force over distance) or one can see it as a metaphor, that “it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” Bending spoons at a distance is impossible, physically impossible. Those who actually believe they can do this discredit the very argument.
It is not an argument of someone “being able to bend a spoon with brain waves,” if it were, then of course, you win. The discussion arises from a misunderstanding of a statement. The idea is that the world around us does not change it’s laws or forces, we change them. Our interpretations change, and hence, our experience of those laws and forces change. It is our interpretation of these very laws and forces, our interpretations of each other, our interpretations of ourselves, these influence the impact events have on our lives. Science has been reinterpreting its laws since its advent, so has religion, so has humanity. Reinterpretation is what allows us to thrive in a world that changes with us. The more humanity learns (astronomy, physics, astronomy, chemistry, religions, politics, government, music, art, etc.), the more dynamic the world becomes. The more the world changes in our collective eyes. The more we have to work with, the more we have to digest, understand, interpret and then reinterpret.
There was a lack of foresight Sean’s post. Pursuing such a difficult question of mind and body by attempting complex answers that come from only one side of the argument, that only beg more questions and only leave more remainders is a trap any person can succumb to. Occam’s Razor, my friends.
Science cannot study the “mind” that we speak of when we consider mind and body. The scientific method is not meant to study mind. You can’t physically experiment on it. That’s the point. Scientific laws are brilliantly founded and I believe they are very real. But I also know that the “fine tuning” of physical laws is just another way of saying we are reinterpreting those laws based on observation, or by having “more to work with.” We change those laws through our interpretations of observation. The universe doesn’t change them. To the universe, everything works just fine. It is we, as humans, curious as we are, that are here to try and interpret the universe in a way that includes the whole universe in our understanding. Truly, we can’t leave anything out because it will still be here in our awareness. No matter how hard we try, what arises in the human awareness will continue to arise until reconciled with. We can’t sweep thousands of years of belief, from any society or organization, under the rug of consciousness. It hasn’t worked yet, though we’ve tried. I imagine nothing is meant to be swept under the rug. Inclusion rings much finer.
I suppose a comforting thing is to feel that the universe is working regardless of our interpretations. No spacetime rifts or tears in the fabric yet. That is, until we interpret the universe as being capable of such events. Eh?
The very best to all of you,
Wayne
I see that most of the people that proclaim to be open to have other interpretations of reality miss the point of this post. The phenomena that are not explained by the laws of physics — in their regime of their validity — are not an open door to our yearnings of how the world should operate. They are actually mean that the human capabilities are finite and limited when it come to understand systems of a vast complexity like the human brain. The easy way to go when confronted by these formidably hard problems is to advocate for something ‘unknown’ that explain our experiences. It is part of the human condition to try our best to make sense of the world. Furthermore any additional knowledge we gain about the world around us will not overwrite what we already know. General Relativity does not invalidate Newton’s theory and Quantum Mechanics does not invalidate Classical Mechanics. They actually expand our knowledge explaining things — in their regime of their validity —.
#60, please cite sources. Even the existence of Multiple Personality Disorder is highly disputed among those knowledgeable in the area. I have heard liars and charlatans like Anthony Robbins talk about people with different biochemistries in their different “personalities,” but have not found any record of these cases. Can you elaborate?
If matter came before mind then this view is correct. If mind came before matter then there is something outside the system that makes psi possible.
Neil B. on Feb 18th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Lawrence, quantum correlations have to do with “hits” of photon states and make no interference with laws of conservation of energy and momentum etc. Those laws are are conserved just as much when photon polarizations are correlated as when they are not, f = ma is not an issue and your neoclassical framing of issues is not current theory. That leaves the door open for ESP based on correlated brain states, quantum issues in choice and free will, etc., however long a shot you think it is.
————-
A quantized system will of course have all the metric geometry stuff, such as if you quantize Maxwell’s equation, or the quantum mechanical motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field etc. In what I was talking about I was referring to the nonlocal aspects of the quanta, or the parts which violate Bell’s equalities.
Conservation of energy? Sure as a local law, but cosmologically — you might want to think again. The cosmological spacetimes have time dependencies, which means that a Killing vector
which defines an isometry for the “t” part of the four momentum does not exist. So in cosmology there is no global meaning to conservation of energy.
Anyway, my point was that nonlocal effects can’t be used as a way to communicate information or to impart energy or a force from “here” to “there.”
This latest blog-thread appears to be sinking into the same morass that the AAAPara-P thread did. As Sagan put it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to back them up. In the case of Mind-Over-Matter claims such as telekinesis this is required before the idea can be seriously entertained.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Jim, Moveon,
“Thing is, there is just no section of the human brain that is a plausible candidate for the organ of telepathy.”
One can also argue from an evolution theoretical standpoint. Would it be possible to communicate by telepathy at all, then this would have an obvious positive effect on survival, and it would have been developed by many species. That only a few people would be able to do this, and this barely, just does not make any sense.
I remember watching a flock of geese, riding a wind current and wondering which would start to flap their wings first. With that, they all did it as one. What is an evident evolutionary advantage for people is our intellectual autonomy. The problem with telepathy is that we don’t want everyone else reading our minds, we function best asindividual operators. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some deeper level where we are all one larger beast, like individual bees function as a hive, but that it is elemental and emotional, not intellectual. It would be the raw foundation out of which we have risen, not complex awareness. The evolutionary function of the brain is navigation and survival of mobile organisms. Being able to conceal your intentions is a prized trait in a Darwinian environment. This may seem too woo woo for some here, but much or reality consists of open space between particles, of a much greater proportional distance then that between people, yet such agglomerations of energy manage to behave as one state.
- Pingback on Feb 19th, 2008 at 11:57 am
[...] link [...]
Sean makes a logical argument for why we cannot bend spoons with our minds, minus the medium of hands, but can anyone offer a clear reason why timetravel is scientifically implausible, if not impossible?
Given that Relativity treats it as a fundamental dimension similar to space, we are treated to any number of wormholes, branes, alternate universes, etc. explaining how it might be possible and that is all well and good, because scientific inquiry requires a consideration of all possibilities.
I have on a number of occasion in various posts on CV offered a description of time as a emergent description of motion, similar to temperature;
If two atoms collide, it creates an event in time. While the atoms proceed through this event and on to others, the event goes the other way. First it is in the future, then in the past. Which is the real direction? If time is a fundamental dimension, then physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones. If time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and the events created go from being in the future to being in the past.
Consider a thermal medium, say a pot of hot water, with lots of water molecules moving about. To construct a time keeping device out of this we would measure the motion of one of these points of reference against the medium it is moving through. The point is the hand and the medium is the face of the clock. Obviously all the other points are hands of their own clocks, but are medium/face for all other clocks. The motion of any point/hand is balanced by the reaction of the medium/face of the clock. At any one moment, the positions of all these points constitute an event, so while they all go from past events to future ones, the medium against which any point is being judged is the overall context, which once created, is displaced by the next, so the events go from future potential to past circumstance. There are innumerable points of reference describing their own narrative and all this activity exists in an equilibrium, so every potential clock constitutes its own measure of time. The only absolute time would be like absolute temperature; the complete absence of motion.
Suffice to say, it’s drawn little response and less positive response, but it does effectively explain why time travel is not a physical option. Unfortunately it doesn’t fit the “equations,” so it doesn’t seem to be scientifically valid.
In our day and age, where political and religious fanatics seem intent on leading us to Armageddon and financial charlatans are sucking the system of economic exchange dry, the Einsteins of the day are mostly intent on kicking metaphorical stray mutts and other straw men, as they savor their own registered creations. I realize this may seem shocking, but you will never find what’s outside the box, if you never come out of the box.
(A box is a closed set and subject to entropy.)
Well, I think the laws of physics are all an illusion created by the computers that use our bodies for energy. If you learn to see through the illusion and ‘believe’ then you can control the matrix and it’s virtual reality.
Well, I think the laws of physics are all an illusion created by the computers that use our bodies for energy. If you learn to see through the illusion and ‘believe’ then you can control the matrix and it’s virtual reality.
I know Kung Fu!
I was referring to the book “When Rabbit Howls,” but it is not the first time I’ve hear of the varying biochemistry situation. Also, the words “liar” and “charlatan” suggest, at least to me, that the individuals in question are saying these things with full, or at least partial knowledge, that they are in the “wrong.” Just because somebody makes a claim that you or I do not agree with, though, we really shouldn’t be making statements about whether their intentions were to deceive unless they come out an admit to doing so. To use a point from Nietzsche again, people are rarely, if ever, malicious because they are too concerned with themselves to actually worry about another person so much as to hurt them or whatever. Anyhoo, just throwing that out there because I’ve grown a little tired of random people on this page referring to the non-scientist types (parapsychologists) or those making such types of claims as being ridiculous, liars, charlatans, etc. As a friend and I have discussed about this whole discussion, it seems to be more a matter of pride than anything else.
Hi Sean,
Thanks a lot for such a wonderful article. As an (active) member in a science forum, I’ve encountered may times such charlatans and it has been proved awkard to rule them out as they do not listen to arguments.
Actually the best thing to do is to scatter your post !
Meh, I’d hardly say that an autobiographical account of MPD constitutes evidence that those afflicted have varying biochemistries.
Haelfix at #57: You are wrong due to demonstrable historical examples fundamental to physics. Quantum mechanics and relativity (both kinds) were both absurd in terms of prevailing assumptions. Neither had clear supporting evidence until after the outset (although hints that something was wrong with previous theories was there, just not appreciated for what it was) because we weren’t’ doing experiments in the regime in which those effects would matter. (Not entirely, but there wasn’t clear evidence for GR effects for example.)
To reiterate, the trouble with a simplistic evaluation of the chance that the odd effect being the inverse of the number of experiments is the unfounded assumption that the prior experiments represent a broad cross-section of all the possible tests that can be done. For examples involving future possibilities, the one Sean gave about gravity: the 1/r^2 law may break down at tiny distances (like microns, not even extreme stuff like 10^-33 cm etc.) because we haven’t been testing at those distances. We didn’t because it is damn hard to measure gravity forces between things weighing in the micrograms etc.
Things didn’t work out as we expected when they were very small, going very fast, very massive - OK. Well, we shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t work out as we expect when things are very complicated - get the hint?
Apparently you have not read the book otherwise your evidence and required sources would have slapped you across the face. But hey, it’s always been my experience that the average man is not too keen on looking a few inches beyond his own nose. Not to mention, your use of the word evidence is interesting because it assumes a number of things while also misunderstanding my original statement. I never said that all ALL case of multiple personality disorder have different biochemistries, but there are documented cases in which a few individuals with said disorder have that unique quality. Also, you seem to assume that evidence must be gathered by “proper authorities” because you act as though somebody is not a confirmed scientist that reports on their own experiences (such as having tests done, looking at the results with a trained doctor, coming to a conclusion, and then relaying it to others) is not as credible as the doctor’s report itself. Anyhoo, next time, instead of just peeking your head in at a review of a given book and then making a comment about evidence, perhaps try reading that book, assessing the evidence or lack thereof, and then pull out your jumping chart to help you find a suitable conclusion.
- Pingback on Feb 19th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
[...] they do. Physicists use their doctoral sophistry to hide the fact that they believe in the occult. Here’s how it’s done by Doctor Sean Carroll of Cosmic [...]
Admittedly, I have not read the book, and based on the descriptions that I’ve read online, I have no real intention to - in my belief system, someone who claims to have supernatural powers cannot be trusted on other matters of science. However, one thing important here is your comment:
ou act as though somebody [who] is not a confirmed scientist that reports on their own experiences (such as having tests done, looking at the results with a trained doctor, coming to a conclusion, and then relaying it to others) is not as credible as the doctor’s report itself.
Yes, that’s exactly how I act, because it’s true. The doctor’s report would be far more direct evidence than the relaying of that doctor’s report. The relayed story is not nearly as credible, because there are many more opportunities for mistakes, misinterpretations, omissions, or direct fraud to occur.
True, eh. Again, language is everything. Perhaps a report would be more direct evidence, but only evidence of a particular kind if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it all. I just read that it is suspected that at least 20% of all doctor’s determinations for patients are false or incorrect in regards to what they describe as being true. Now, I’m not saying a person should not trust the opinion of a person who has dedicated a large amount of time to a particular field of study, but I do think that what we, as a society, term “credible” is only based on some sort of ambiguous agreement as to what counts as proof. On top of that, even if I was citing a direct report, I’m sure questions would be flying about the validity of the study and psychological “experiments” in general. Anyhoo, claiming that one can alter there own biochemistry seems to me, as a chemist, not all that too far fetched. But yeah, truth is such an arbitrary term in matters of science that I don’t think it really helps an argument any by claiming that such and such is true.
Just bend the spoon with your damn fingers and tell everybody you’re a psychic. It’s a whole lot simpler than looking for loopholes in physics. Scientists, accustomed to an adversary who is “subtle but not malicious,” all too often fail to appreciate what a canny fellow can do with a child’s book of parlor tricks.
Ironically enough, I had a rather lengthy discussion with someone this morning on the reality of quantum teleportation. He couldn’t fathom how it could be possible (no knowledge of quantum physics) and was fairly certain that the stories of the successful teleportation of a particle were the result of a conspiracy of scientists. (No joke; the irony almost choked me.)
Tomorrow I will have pictures to illustrate the process for him, but I doubt it will make a difference. To much of a gap between what you ‘know’ and what you are being asked to believe leads to cognitive dissonance and the (generally) abrupt refusal to consider the conflicting idea any farther.
Well, I’m jumping in late to the fray here, but as the guy who kicked off the “dispiriting comments” in the previous post, I have to say Sean’s arguments were pretty convincing for me.
But not quite convincing enough for me to rule out my own personal “para” experiences as confirmation bias. So the most attractive option left to me is to turn to the ever-popular reality as a computer simulation framework, discussed here before. To which I think I can add some valuable contributions.
Here’s what I’m toying with:
We’re all Non Player Characters in a massive multiplayer computer game. At least I’m an NPC. Can’t say for sure about the rest of you - there could be some real players mixed in. Speaking for myself, I have some damn good AI, which, presumably, makes the game more fun for the real players.
The reason that QM and GR don’t mesh is because they’re only approximations of “real physics” designed to make the in-game physics engine run more smoothly - in terms of processor cycles, it’s easier to render two separate, simplified approximations than exactly mimic whatever the real thing is.
The player characters are most likely the world leaders, or the secret societies/skull and boneses out there - the ones driving our world to war all the time, because, let’s face it, war games sell. Imagine the ad campaign in the “real world” - “Will you join the War On Terror, will you strap on a suicide vest?Log into the multiverse now for only $20 a month!”
Or perhaps the player characters are really aliens, and most of the action in the game is off earth. We’re like an easter egg or something, hiding as a brief distraction for those who find us - “Go ahead, abduct a few, see what makes them tick!”
Anyway, back to us. I’m occasionally psychic because the code for this universe is all written, a priori - sometimes my server just processes it a little faster than others.
The simplest plan in that case is to find out who the player characters are and extract the truth from them, by threatening to make the game no fun if they don’t comply. Can NPC’s be Griefers? Let’s find out.
The only plausible circumstances that MPD might arise is in a callosotomy (severing the corpus callosum) at a very young age and then specifically training that person to develop redundant sets of skills such as language in each hemisphere. Kind of like siamese twins, just in one brain. There are no documented cases of such a thing - it’s science fiction. The brain just isn’t designed to support multiple personalities. There are crazy cases of dissociative fugue’s etc…, but not multiple personalities. It’s completely unsupported by evidence and flies in the face of all of cognitive science. Almost all cognitive disorders arise from the brain trying to present a single coherent picture. That the brain would suddenly try to present two of them is preposterous IMHO, which is based on the lack of verifiable cases so far.
Source : http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/02/18/telekinesis-and-quantum-field-theory/
No comments:
Post a Comment