GoogleTechTalks: "Science and the taboo of psi" with Dean Radin / RNG & PEAR

[Ufostrahlen]

Because of this thread: Woo

ABSTRACT

Do telepathy, clairvoyance and other "psi" abilities exist? The majority of the general population believes that they do, and yet fewer than one percent of mainstream academic institutions have any faculty known for their interest in these frequently reported experiences. Why is a topic of enduring and widespread interest met with such resounding silence in academia? The answer is not due to a lack of scientific evidence, or even to a lack of scientific interest, but rather involves a taboo. I will discuss the nature of this taboo, some of the empirical evidence and critical responses, and speculate on the implications.

[YOUTUBE]

Dean Radin is a parapsychologist and pseudoscience promoter.

He is a member of the Institute for Noetic Sciences and former president of the Parapsychological Association. In addition to his books, he has become popularly associated with the Global Consciousness Project.

Dean Radin

Dean Radin is a parapsychologist and pseudoscience promoter.

rationalwiki.org

 

[hixidom]

I haven't had time to watch the video and I don't know where I will find it, but this is my view on psi abilities:

If I had an electromagnetic multipole generator with as many degrees of freedom as the human brain, I could produce almost any imaginable EM field configuration. The fields produced by the brain are very weak, but it would not surprise me if they could be used to consciously affect a specially designed and particularly sensitive "psi" detector through some sort of biofeedback process. However, I don't think that such abilities can be extended to practical usage without implementing EEG technology (which is starting to get very cool, by the way).

I think that the human obsession with psi abilities may stem from our general confusion with how we interact with the world on a daily basis. I can control my physical body with my mind by thinking something and thereby causing my body to do it, and with my body as an interface I can manipulate other matter as well. Much of how this works wasn't discovered until a hundred-or-so years ago, and most of it has yet to be discovered. How we exist in the world and how we come to have power over it must be hard to comprehend for animals that burst onto the scene of consciousness only a couple hundred thousand years ago.

Anyways, perhaps real "psi" abilities do exist but, based on my current knowledge of mainstream physics, I cannot imagine a mechanism by which it might occur (without resorting to solipsism). That may say more about my imagination than my physics knowledge.

 

[universecannon]

Have only listened to a few minutes, but that story in the beginning is freakishly similar to an account of Carl Jungs, who was very experienced with synchronicity, apparently precognitive visions, and so on. It's been years since I read it in his memoir but from what I recall he was on the way home after being away from his family for several weeks. On the train ride shortly before arriving, he was overwhelmed by the sensation that he was drowning-despite having visions before he had never experienced anything like that. It was very intense. When he got home, he found his family had been pretty shaken up. Shortly before his arrival, his young son had almost drowned in the water near their home.

I can think of countless similar accounts of others and myself.

Anyways, perhaps real "psi" abilities do exist but, based on my current knowledge of mainstream physics, I cannot imagine a mechanism by which it might occur (without resorting to solipsism). That may say more about my imagination than my physics knowledge.

My knowledge of quantum physics is limited, but perhaps something involving non-locality may provide an answer at some point. We really don't know much at all about consciousness at this point. Just because we don't have a complete model for something, or because it may contradict some of our current ones in some ways (mostly just how we think about them..), isn't evidence against it.

Anyways, there has actually been quite a bit of study on "psi" phenomenon. Most people seem to just assume the work hasn't been done (or that what has is all flawed), but really it's just been comprehensively ignored because of the prevalence of materialism in the western world. It's taboo. Usually personal experience seems to be the key ingredient in people even entertaining the possibility, regardless of external evidence.

Behind closed doors though many scientists admit that they are very interested in these things, but to go public would often be a kind of career suicide. Luckily though more are speaking openly about it. I talked about some of the studies towards the end of this post in the james randi thread.

 

[Ufostrahlen]

Anyways, perhaps real "psi" abilities do exist but, based on my current knowledge of mainstream physics, I cannot imagine a mechanism by which it might occur (without resorting to solipsism). That may say more about my imagination than my physics knowledge.

The researchers don't claim to understand the effect, they're just saying that they can measure a certain effect under certain circumstances (good/bad study design? I can't comment). DR presents these countless studies and talks about the taboo researching "psi" thoroughly. Btw the first hour is the talk and the last 30min are Q/A.

 

[hixidom]

There are some points in the talk that I don't quite agree with, but it was very compelling otherwise. I was especially impressed by the consistency of the 32% result in the many independent Ganzfield studies. Personally, I would love to reproduce something like PEAR's random number influence experiments.

 

[hixidom]

I tried and failed to reproduce PEAR's RNG experiment. I was not able to produce a significant result. I am fairly confident about my RNG and Chi^2 calculations. Perhaps PEAR claims that only certain RNGs can be influenced by the mind. I know that they claim that thought caused a significant shift of only 3 out of 10,000 random events, so maybe I am simply not taking enough samples. In any case, I am not convinced about their result.

 

[Ufostrahlen]

I tried and failed to reproduce PEAR's RNG experiment. I was not able to produce a significant result. I am fairly confident about my RNG and Chi^2 calculations. Perhaps PEAR claims that only certain RNGs can be influenced by the mind. I know that they claim that thought caused a significant shift of only 3 out of 10,000 random events, so maybe I am simply not taking enough samples. In any case, I am not convinced about their result.

That's the spirit! I wish I could join, but my math knowledge is very limited.

Are you using /dev/random as your RNG source?

Edit:

Some ideas:

Ask different persons to contribute to your RNG experiments. It is said, that not everybody has the same "psi" abilities, maybe yours aren't that developed.

I could image that a remote effect is also possible. Ask someone distant via phone to influence your RNG.

You could use Nexus members for your experiment. Tell us a precise time when you run your collection of data and what to think. But I'm not sure what to think in that case... "I am now influencing hixidom's RNG to produce spikes in his graph?"

Edit2:

Ah, okay.

In 1986, Jahn, Brenda Dunne, and Roger Nelson reported on millions of trials with 33 subjects over seven years trying to use their minds to override random number generators (RNG). Think of the RNG as producing zeros and ones. Over the long haul, the laws of probability predict that in a truly random sequence, there should be 50% of each produced. The subjects in the PEAR experiments tried to use their minds to produce more zeros (or ones, depending on the assignment). In short, the PEAR people did what many drivers do when they try to use their thoughts to make a red light turn green.

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com

www.skepdic.com

So you need a true RNG.

 

[hixidom]

I know it at least can't be deterministic (or at least it would be weird if that worked). In the PEAR experiment, the RNG is based on the small electrical fluctuations of a zener diode.

I made a RNG that produces random numbers based on fluctuations of my CPU's processing speed. The CPU speed is determined by things like temperature, so I assume the CPU speed should fluctuate randomly. I perform an arbitrary calculation and store the required time to do that calculation as "t1", then I do the same for "t2". I do this N times, then I sum all of the t1 value and sum all of the t2 values. If t1>t2, the RNG returns 0; if t1<t2, it returns 1.

If N is large enough, the average output of the RNG is 0.5. I can then produce 100000 or so random bits and calculate what the probability is that the result was chance (p-value). I would expect that, if I am influencing the RNG toward 0 or 1, I will see results with very small p-value (0.01 would be sufficiently small), but I don't. I get false positive results if N is too small because the RNG is not random enough, but otherwise, the RNG seems to be sufficiently truly random.

But I'm not sure what to think in that case... "I am now influencing hixidom's RNG to produce spikes in his graph?"

This aspect of the experiment really bothers me. I think "up" or "down" when doing the experiment, but there's no reason that should be any better than "left" or "right". I could think "0" or "1", but then why not think "t1<t2" or "t1>t2" instead, or why not "high CPU temperature" or "low CPU temperature". It seems rather arbitrary to me but, if this is a physical effect, I would expect my influence of the RNG to be largely dependent upon what exactly I am thinking.

 

[Ufostrahlen]

I made a RNG that produces random numbers based on fluctuations of my CPU's processing speed. The CPU speed is determined by things like temperature, so I assume the CPU speed should fluctuate randomly. I perform an arbitrary calculation and store the required time to do that calculation as "t1", then I do the same for "t2". I do this N times, then I sum all of the t1 value and sum all of the t2 values. If t1>t2, the RNG returns 0; if t1<t2, it returns 1.

Mhh interesting, but is that really random? I think the CPU speed is fixed and will only be adjusted once in a while. If you are referring to speedstepping ( SpeedStep - Wikipedia ) then the fluctuation isn't very high. Modern motherboards have in-built voltage meters for 12V, 5V & 3,3V, you could use these fluctuating values as "seeds", too.

 

[hixidom]

I don't think it is related to SpeedStep.

If I measure the amount of time (in seconds) that it takes to perform some operation, e.g. log(23), I would expect it to take exactly the same amount of time every time because the processor performs exactly the same steps every time. However, the time it takes is slightly different every time. I don't know what causes this, so I chock it up to fluctuations in CPU temperature and workload. The workload fluctuations can cause correlations between t1 and t2, but this effect is cancelled out by increasing N.

 

[Ufostrahlen]

I don't think it is related to SpeedStep.

If I measure the amount of time (in seconds) that it takes to perform some operation, e.g. log(23), I would expect it to take exactly the same amount of time every time because the processor performs exactly the same steps every time. However, the time it takes is slightly different every time. I don't know what causes this, so I chock it up to fluctuations in CPU temperature and workload. The workload fluctuations can cause correlations between t1 and t2, but this effect is cancelled out by increasing N.

Interesting effect. Sounds random to me, but as I said before my math knowledge is very limited. You might want to have a look at HAVEGE (it's available as static and dynamic libraries for Linux and Windows: HAVEGE: Hardware Volatile Entropy Gathering and Expansion * HAVEGE: Hardware Volatile Entropy Gathering and Expansion ) and try to influence it.

I guess I'll have a more detailed look into RNGs the next days/weeks when my Linux system is back on the track. If I can influence /dev/random with my mind, I'll let you know.

 

[hixidom]

Based on what I read about it, I think that /dev/random is an equally (if not better) true random source. I'll take a look at HAVEGE. Thanks for the advice.

I am interested to hear about your results when you have some. For now, my most clear-cut results are as follows:
N0=120,000 (total number of bits generated while willing "0" )
N1=120,000 (total number of bits generated while willing "1" )
x0=60963 (total number of ones generated while willing "0" )
x1=61167 (total number of ones generated while willing "1" )

I assume that the offset of the mean of x0 and x1 from 60,000 is caused by a bias in my RNG. I think that bias in the RNG can cause a shift of both x values from 60,000, but it should not cause a shift between x0 and x1. To cancel out the alleged RNG bias, I shift my x values so that they are centered around 60,000:
x0_corrected=59898
x1_corrected=60102

So the assumption I am making is that thinking "0" shifted x down by 102, and thinking "1" shifted x up by 102. I can then calculate the probability of getting this result by chance, which is p=0.277. A significant result would be below 0.05 by most standards, so my results is not significant.

I did the experiment again and got:
N0=160,000
N1=160,000
x0=97843
x1=97838
After performing the same offset correction on x0 and x1, I get p=0.59

There are some experiments where x1 is smaller than x0, which goes against our hypothesis that thinking "1" or "0" produces more 1s or 0s. There are other experiments where the amount of separation between x0 and x1 fluctuate between significant and insigficant as I perform more trials, which makes it hard to trust the usefulness of the significance calculation.

 

[Ufostrahlen]

This forum clearly lacks the sweat smiley :d *sweat*. I'm not able to give a qualified comment on your results because statistics isn't my cup of tea. But thanks for reproducing the experiment. Multiple sources of knowledge are always better.

Here's an article from the Skeptical Inquirer Magazine: The PEAR Proposition: Fact or Fallacy? According to the article, the PEAR random device wasn't so random at all. So a TRNG is a must.

Since we are on the Nexus, another idea for influencing TRNG is doing it on a low dose of psychedelics. Maybe this has an influence on statistics?

 

[hixidom]

But thanks for reproducing the experiment.

I think my reproduction is far inferior to the original experiment, but it's the best I can do for now.

Assuming a TRNG will work better is making an assumption about the mechanism for this [possible] psi effect. Since we don't know why it happens (if it does), how can we say that a TRNG should work better than a pseudoRNG?

 

[Ufostrahlen]

Assuming a TRNG will work better is making an assumption about the mechanism for this [possible] psi effect. Since we don't know why it happens (if it does), how can we say that a TRNG should work better than a pseudoRNG?

Oops, I'm clearly leaving my field of knowledge. With the NSA undermining RNGs, I read some stuff about it and tried to test and understand /dev/random better, but that doesn't make me an expert on RNGs. So yeah, saying one needs a TRNG makes an assumption about the mechanism for a [possible] psi effect. Logical fallacy on my side.

 

[hixidom]

I wasn't saying that you are wrong. I just think that since the mechanism for this psi effect is currently unknown, whose to say that a TRNG will work better or worse. Suppose I made a TRNG based on the decay of some radioactive substance, only to find out that the electrical nature of the zener-diode-based RNG is what made the PEAR experiment work. From what I have read, the zener diode setup would not be too hard to reconstruct, so maybe I'll give that a try. The zener diode is not quantum-sized, but it is definitely smaller than my CPU, and thus its fluctuations depend on a smaller number of environmental factors. Maybe this is why it works. Plus with a hardware based RNG, rather than a software based one, we would be able to produce random bits much quicker (I would think). I don't actually have time to do this, however.

Maybe it would work with a deterministic pseudoRNG, in which case it would seem that the RNG influences the person rather than the other way around.

 

[Ufostrahlen]

The Global Consciousness Project currently uses these RNG: GCP: REG Design

Simple Arduino TNRG: RNG Version 2

Maybe I build the latter with my programming friend, but I can imagine more exciting projects at the moment.