[ExI] superluminal signalling

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:59 PM 12/17/2007 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:

>Whoa! I don't think I've missed any paper on superluminal signalling,
>but apparently I have. Any references?

It is generally accepted that non-inferential veridical foreknowledge 
(deviating from sheer guesswork significantly far from mean chance 
expectation) would require something like superluminal signalling: 
that is, access to states beyond the light cone. This has been 
demonstrated (it seems) in the lab, as well as by fairly rigorous 
non-lab means, and discussed in

> >OUTSIDE THE GATES OF SCIENCE
>
>For those of us who don't have your book on the bookshelf, can
>you provide a relevant snip?

Well, here's an extract; the doubtful will need to go to the primary sources:

<[Dr. Dean] Radin used one of the simplest possible methods, 
measuring shifts in skin conductivity in fingers or palms when the 
wired subjects were affronted by computer images of violent or erotic 
scenes, and those reactions in turn were compared with the physical 
response elicited by soothing images and no images at all. When the 
data from many subjects were added together and averaged, in order to 
remove idiosyncratic responses and the intrusion of random noise, it 
turned out that the average response (presponse) to neutral or 
pleasant images followed pretty much the curve one would expect. The 
image flashes on the screen for three seconds, and while subjects 
watch the blank screen that follows, their skin conductivity rises 
slightly, drops away again, flutters along in its normal quietly 
wandering path.

After emotionally charged topics, though, skin conductance soars to a 
quick peak moments after the image has flashed up, then again ebbs 
away as the subject recovers from the brief startle or shock. All 
this is only to be expected by any physiologist. Radin's and 
Bierman's remarkable claim, though, is that the emotional images 
appear to cause a smaller anticipatory surge *before* they are 
displayed--in some cases even before the computer has *chosen* them 
from a random pool. It's precognition on a small scale, registered by 
tiny currents participants can't even feel.

This paradigm was eventually extended from simple lie detection 
devices that look for modulations in galvanic skin response to the 
more complex brain scanning devices used by medical physiologists, 
brain surgeons, and cognitive scientists [...]. The great thing about 
this approach is that a huge trove of data already exists, precisely 
the research materials of scientists looking for almost anything 
except psi. When Radin and his colleagues accessed this material, 
their findings had been replicated in advance, mostly. Rather 
suitably, Dick Bierman re-examined old studies on phobias and 
gambling behaviors, and found small but significant pre-stimulus 
rises in the ways people reacted to, for example, calm images versus 
pictures of animals or erotic scenes (even among the phobic, the 
naughty pictures cause more of a leap than the scary animal shots, 
probably something Darwin would have predicted). An excellent 
description of such presentiment research can be found in Dean 
Radin's book Entangled Minds (2006), where he quotes Nobel 
prizewinner Kary Mullis who visited his lab in 1999: "It's spooky. 
You sit there and watch this little trace, and about three seconds, 
on average, before the picture comes on, you have a little response 
in your skin conductivity which is in the same direction that a large 
response occurs after you see the picture... That, with me, is on the 
edge of physics itself, with time."

After a dry run on his own brain, Dick Bierman went more high-tech, 
using a non-invasive instrument called Blood Oxygenation Level 
Dependent fMRI. This provides pretty color-coded pictures of blood 
oxygen levels in the brain as a subject responds to certain stimuli, 
or performs a simple task. Bierman chose the by-now-standard tripolar 
workhorse of three kinds of visual stimulus--calming, violent, 
erotic--drawn from an equally standard image inventory. He was 
flashed a sequence of images for 4.2 seconds each, from a selection 
of 18 violent, 18 erotic and 48 calming images. Oddly enough, there 
was no presentiment elevation before either the calm or the violent 
pictures, but the lift created by the erotic pictures was improbable 
by chance at the level of some 1 in 320, certainly significant.

Encouraged, he applied the test to six male and four female 
volunteers, segregating their results according to sex. The average 
male reaction resembled his own. Again, no special arousal prior to 
violent images, but a barely significant response to the erotic 
pictures. The females did react to the erotic stimuli, but even more 
strongly to the violent ones. What this tells us about our cultural 
conditioning and our inherited propensities might be worth musing 
upon. Given the very small number of subjects, it is remarkable that 
Bierman got any kind of significance at all from his results, but in 
fact the combined erotic target results were improbable at the level 
of 1 in 250. >

More recent unpublished work (which I've read, but can't yet discuss) 
by Dr. Edwin May--former scientific director of the US Star Gate 
Program--and his colleagues, confirms these experiments.

Now, of course none of this is *proof* of time reversed information 
flows, but these phenomena certainly suggest that it's real. Or, of 
course, we're all in a leaky sim...

Damien Broderick