[extropy-chat] Precognition on TV

[Damien Broderick]

At 04:12 PM 3/15/2007 -0700, Jef Allbright responded to my comment:

> > (There is no lack of peer-reviewed papers
> > available on the web, in the midst of a deluge of
> > insane "psychic" and "astrological" crap.

with, inter alia,

>UFO fad, ghost-hunting, and the like. I even visited a "holistics
>fair" recently and observed many true believers, even some selling
>"tachyon water." (I suspect their employer, however was not such a
>true believer, but rather a somewhat unethical business person.)
>
>As I said to Sondre, I seems to me that the evidence for these effects
>is little or none, and I weigh that relative to the perceived weight
>of evidence for alternate explanations.

But there's no point citing "holistics fairs" and "tachyon water" 
when I've already denounced "psychic" crap as irrelevant. Tell me 
what's crucially and killingly fallacious in the McMoneagle RV 
experiments, for example. Or the growing number of controlled 
"presponse" measurements, which physiological sensors register 
significant responses not only in advance of a stimulus having been 
generated but in advance of its being chosen at random from a 
possible set of stimuli. I would not be surprised if this latter 
protocol is what will finally establish the reality of some kinds of 
reverse causality in perception, and will be published in the 
heavy-duty scientific literature. It's sufficiently simple and 
elegant that it edges toward resembling classic probes of visual or 
acoustic acuity.

Damien Broderick