[ExI] Psi in a major science journal, J. Personality and Social Psychology

[Richard Loosemore]

Keith Henson wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 8:03 AM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com> wrote:
> 
> snip
> 
>> Actually, this is just factually incorrect.  Me, personally, I have read
>> dozens of papers that try to analyze how it works.  They may not be good
>> explanations, but they are attempts, at least.
> 
> I can't imagine reading one, much less dozens.
> 
> Did any of them make sense?

Well, define "make sense". :-)   I have read papers on computational 
cognitive psychology and artificial general intelligence that were 
pointless drivel from one end to the other, far worse than these 
theoretical psi papers, so it's kind of a fuzzy category.....

Anyhow, the examples of theoretical psi papers that I remember made 
sense in that they tried hard to grapple with the way that psi might 
arise from quantum mechanics, or they tried to deal with the "observer 
problem".  I happen to think that even at their best they did not 
succeed, but they were damn good for what they were:  one cannot condemn 
such works just because they do not find a viable theory.

The best of the theoretical ideas would be things like the "conformance 
behavior" model, but that was a long way from an explanation.  More like 
a reframing of the data.  But if you look at the history of Newton's 
struggle with the concepts of motion, you will find that 99% of the job 
that he claimed to have done, was exactly that struggle pin down the 
exact way to think about the issue...

FWIW I stopped doing anything in the field because I felt that (a) 
nobody was making any theoretical progress and I didn't want to be the 
only person doing it, and (b) I couldn't stand the idea of being hated 
by a bunch of scientific bigots for the rest of my career (and it became 
clear that there were plenty of those).



Richard Loosemore