[extropy-chat] Psi Phenomenon

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:35 PM 12/19/2004 -0800, Kurt Schoedel wrote:

>the Amazing Randi has a standing offer of a $1 million
>prize for anyone who can reproduce such phenomenon under controlled
>conditions. Go to www.randi.org for the details, rules, and entry form.
>Consider Randi's offer an X-prize for the development of psi
>phenomenon. Perhaps Jessica Utts should apply for the prize.

Randi is a stage magician and self-publicist who sets the rules in the 
contest. He is not a scientist, and he is certainly very far from 
disinterested. Suppose the Vatican were running a prize at 
www.jesusfake.org offering a million dollars to anyone who could prove that 
Jesus was not the son of god, or had never performed miracles. What are the 
chances that anyone would win? Would leading atheists rush to try their 
luck? (In fact, there *is* just such a prize, run by some born-again 
lawyer. Give it a shot, report back.)

>The second reason why I think psi phenomenon does not exist is because
>if it did, someone would have figured out who to use pre-cognition to
>make money in the financial markets.

So one might suppose. But wait, it's worse. If psi is a faculty evolved by 
natural selection to take advantage of a natural affordance, prey should 
develop it to avoid detection and predators should use it to capture prey. 
Many iterations later, one might expect a standoff, except at the margins. 
Or perhaps it functions best at certain times (rather like our eyes, which 
are far more effective--despite the jeering of sight-skeptics--during the 
day when the sun is shining). And so on. Or perhaps precognition monitors a 
sheaf of the multiverse springing from this moment and fanning away from 
the most probable future to the least; financial futures are notably 
chaotic and perhaps for this reason there are many equally likely versions 
of the future. By contrast, perhaps some events are extremely likely (the 
sort that scientific predictions cope with quite well, given a good grasp 
of theory and boundary conditions). It might be that precognitions of an 
eclipse (which is almost inevitable) might have been fairly reliable via 
psi in the days before the mathematics of planetary dynamics provided a 
principled understanding.

These kinds of objections (`If you're so psychic, why ain't you rich?') 
certainly must be considered, the more the merrier, but in the end 
controlled lab data, dry and awkward as it is, has to be the best basis for 
evaluation.

Damien Broderick