[ExI] heaves a long broken psi

[Damien Broderick]

On 1/23/2010 6:06 PM, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> I am quite persuaded that if you try and guess a
> billion time a playing card you guess slightly more often than would
> be statistically warranted

Experience indicates that this isn't true, actually, because boredom 
crushes whatever is invoked by psi experiments, as it does with 
imagination, sex, and many other human responses. You do better getting 
a million people to make 1000 guesses each, or 10 million to make100.

> I am much less sure that whatever the
> reason of that may be, it has anything  to do with quantum mechanics.
> This kind of "explanation" seems to me a far-fetched attempt to
> explain something of which we do not know much with something else
> which understand rather poorly.

This is often said dismissively, but I disagree. People turn to QT 
because it is the best theory available for how the real world works, 
and it sometimes turns out that interpretations of QT appear to be 
consilient with at least some psi anomalies, far more so than with the 
predictions of classic physics models. For example, entanglement does 
act in ways that utterly defy traditional notions of separability. It is 
not all clear that this can be used to account for precognition or 
telepathy, given the fairly well-established result that messages can't 
be sent via entanglement because a particle can't be forced into a 
desired state without destroying the entanglement--but there could be 
some aspect science has so far overlooked. Or perhaps, like the 
rolled-up dimensions and dark matter, it's something that hardly anyone 
ever thought about until quite recently--perhaps (perish the thought!) 
some deep insight that yet remains to be discovered. Meanwhile, the 
empirical results of, say, double-blinded precognitive remote viewing 
(by professional researchers, not bogus idiots and scammers blathering 
on Coast to Coast) remain to tease the theorists, if they can bothered 
looking at these results.

Damien Broderick