[ExI] Psi (but read it before you don't read it)

[Will Steinberg]

I saw that Damien was talking about psi.  I don't know what most of you
think about it.  It is good to have a crowd that at least has an opinion on
it one way or the other though.

When you try to boil down what people consider psionics, it is easy to draw
a line between the completely ridiculous and the somewhat ridiculous.  It is
hard to back up a group of people that often espouses things like
pyrokinesis, so I will say here that I would only give merit to a few of the
ideas; namely, telepathy, empathy, remote viewing, and precognition.

What distinguishes these from the rest is that they can be completely
described in terms of knowing rather than doing.  Telekinesis and the like
rely on the user acting, while our "soft" psi is an act of observation.
Acting across space to move an object might be absurd, but given causality
and maybe entanglement, knowledge is only limited by computational power.
It's not incredibly difficult to imagine a causality analysis system based
on observations around us.  Think about it like an implicit, extended
anthropic principle: If *now* is like it is, the universe must be like it
is.  This would allow us to communicate telepathically not by *sending* a
message, but instead by *knowing*, given the surroundings, what message you
will receive.  Empathy, remote viewing, and precognition work the same way,
using accessible data to predict inaccessible data.

The biggest problems are obviously the difficulty of synthesizing this
information into coherent ideas and the "causal distance," or relative
triviality, of observed events with regards to the topic at hand.  Why
should the spin of molecules in the air, the position of the stars at night,
the precise feel of gravity, give us any indication as to a completely
unrelated circumstance?  It would follow from this that events that are
causally close to you (that are linked to you by fewer steps backwards and
forwards in time, generally having closer x, y, z, t) are more easily
predictable than events that are causally distant.  It's easy to see that
this hold true for extreme circumstances--it is easy to know when I will
pick up my fork to eat my next bite of dinner, not so easy when trying to
guess the weather on Venus.  The middle ground is harder to justify.  It
seems that predicting earthly events can be as hard, if not harder, than
predicting otherworldly events.

But these all rely on observation.  The reason it is as impossible to guess
the weather in Tulsa as on Venus (or anywhere) is that the system is very
independent of any actions we make.  Since any informational i/o will be
ridiculously garbled by a chaotic system, this will be difficult anywhere.
Most things are chaotic and unrelated to us.  It follows that psi cannot
operate on whim or on a desired object (ask many who believe they experience
these things and they will tell you it happens to them rather than their
causing it); it, should it exist, is carefully limited and allotted based on
what is closest and with the least amount of informational decay.

Perhaps some events and ideas manage to escape being broken apart and are
instead retained as material information.  Or, rather, perhaps some material
sets of information diverge into paths sometime in the past, happening to
exist in more than one locus later in time and thus be accessible by
multiple, separated people.  This happens today.  We can understand the
possible composition of unobservable parts of the universe based on mutated
information from backwards in time like CMBR or spectral analysis.  These
are all based on causal distance.  If we receive a wave that contains a lot
of information and thus is helpful for understanding, it must have
interacted with less than more garbled waves, which means it *does* less
before we observe it.  A wave that takes its sweet causal time to get to us
might not even be a wave anymore; it could be the heat I feel coming from my
laptop.  When something is garbled, we have to work harder to understand how
it is related.  The picture of the heat of the universe is expressed very
directly, but if you try to deduce the fact based on element levels in a
rock sample, we have to make many, many more syllogisms, through the
anthropic principle, geology, physics and chemistry, before we get to the
end result.  So--human intuition and experimentation is a means of
reversing, through math, the transformations that time and being have
effected on objects we want to understand.  By taking the slow route, we end
up learning more about the laws of the universe, because those laws are
manifested in the physical interactions that we have to follow back in
time.  The "psionic" approach is quicker but would seem to skip a lot of the
good stuff, which also leads to a lot of problems with proof and acceptance.

We all know that the brain is mathematically capable of more than one is
consciously allowed, to an incredible extent.  It is in the best mind to
humor the idea, if only for as long enough as a sensible discussion allows.
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