It's About Time: The Scientific Evidence for Psi Experiences

reply to post by cycondra


I agree with some of the things you said but there's real data to support the Psi exist. I also agree that fields of biology and physics need to look into this as well. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake is already working in these areas. He's testing animals for some of the same effects because he thinks the effect is connected to evolution and it's something that evolved.

The fact is skeptics will say that there has been significant results in these areas but there not significant enough because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Again, this is subjective nonsense.

The only one making the extraordinary claim is the skeptic. People like Professor Bem, Dean Radin and others are not claiming that Psi has "supernatural" origins. The skeptic is always the one that talks about supernatural powers. It's because they can't debate the evidence so they have to diminish the subject.

Most people that do studies and experiments in these areas ask if these effects are connected to biology or are they quantum mechanical in nature. It's the skeptic making an extraordinary claim.

You have Professors supporting everything from Parallel universes to String Theory. These things haven't been confirmed but you never hear Dr. Kaku or Stephen Hawking tagged with the claim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Why isn't Hawking Radiation an extraordinary claim? Why isn't extra dimensions or M-Theory an extraordinary claim?

These things haven't been confirmed but Psi effects have year after year after year.

Again, the only way you can say this is an extraordinary claim is if someone is claiming that Psi effects are supernatural. Nobody is making this claim outside of the skeptics.

Originally posted by rhinoceros
If it was real all casinos of the world would have been bankrupted a long time ago.

There are plenty of people without high psi ability gladly giving their money away to casinos. And while it's true that a casino will ban you or have your legs broken if you win too much, someone with decent psi potential (or basic common sense) would be able to know then the casino was getting suspicious, and purposely lose just enough to throw them off. People have lucky streaks. And people are smart enough most of the time not to be so obvious about having a winning advantage.

reply to post by Blue Shift


Exactly and the effect size in th study tells you why Casino's are not wiped out by Psi effects. The effect size in the Retroactive Priming experiment was .25. This is small but significant. The p value was .006. Anything under .05 is considered significant.

This means the .25 will be spread out amongst the population and some people will exhibit stronger Psi effects and in others it will be much weaker.

An effect size of .5 or greater is medium up to .8 and up is large. So if Psi effects had an effect size of .8 then you can ask why isn't Casino's and the Lottery being wiped out because of Psi effects.

For comparison, the effect size of asprin in relation to preventing heart attacks was .03. This is very small compared to Dr. Bem's test yet this result was significant enough for the FDA to say places like Bayer can use it in commercials and Doctors put patients who have had heart attacks on asperin to prevent a second heart attack.

So Psi effects are real and confirmed and now we need to look for the origin. Is it biological or quantum mechanical in nature?

reply to post by Matrix Rising


Do you have some sources for evidence of Psi that are not simply statistics?

If so I would be very interested in reading it!

reply to post by cycondra


First your question implies we need something more than statistics. Statistics show that Psi effects exist. You can call it ESP, PSP, The X Effect or whatever you want to call it.

We use statistics in all walks of life. The drugs people take are based on statistics some with a smaller effect size than many experiments in Psi research.

The next step is for biologist and physicist to start looking for a mechanism for Psi.

The problem is pseudo skeptics and their silly logic. They're opinion is given to much weight The research in these areas needs to be more extensive.

Psi researchers are not debating just the pseudo skeptics, it's actually a 3-way debate.

The Pseudo skeptics are debating religion while Psi researches are debating science. The pseudo skeptics are always talking about the supernatural or some source that's beyond science. That's silly. Psi researchers talk about things like biology and quantum mechanics as possible mechanisms.

So the pseudo skeptic makes the claim "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" when they are the only ones making an extraordinary claim not the Psi Researchers.

reply to post by Matrix Rising


Ya I know, I just got the impression from your other post that you might know of some other studies that actually focused on the biology / Quantum aspect of Psi.

I realise that many people have ideas about the mechanics of Psi and how exactly it works. I was hoping for any specific studies on that.

reply to post by cycondra


Rupert Sheldrake is trying to connect the study to Biology. He thinks Psi is something that evolved and animals share this same trait.

www.sheldrake.org...

I actually agree with him on some points. I think consciousness is a force. It's a force that's in all living things. Look at the definition of force.

In physics, a force is any influence that causes a free body to undergo a change in speed, a change in direction, or a change in shape. Force can also be described by intuitive concepts such as a push or pull that can cause an object with mass to change its velocity

This describes Consciousness. It can cause a body to change direction or change velocity.

I think Psi comes from the Field associated with consciousness. So the field extends outside of the body. Humans have a highly evolved consciousness and this is why we're self conscious.

The Mind (field,self conscious) and the brain (Consciousness).

This is why people having near death experiences are outside of their bodies. The Field (mind) is looking at the body (consciousness).

So Psi could be connected to this Field that extends outside of the Body. I wish there was more money for research in these areas.

reply to post by Matrix Rising


Definitely an interesting theory he has.

I'm willing to bet that it would take a discovery in a similar but unrelated study to kickstart any sort of mainstream research of Psi from a biological standpoint.

If Psi does exist we are sure to find it at some point as we learn more about the human mind.

reply to post by cycondra


Like I said, I do think Psi has a biological connection.

I think consciousness is a property of what we call matter. So consciousness is a force in all living things and it evolves from simple consciousness to more complex.

This force creates a field and this is the field of consciousness that extends outside of the body.

I think the field(mind) and the brain(consciousness) give us the human experience of self consciousness.

I think we measure consciousness with brain waves. Brain waves are from 1 - 30 Hz so Consciousness would create and electromagnetic field in the ELF range on the electromagnetic spectrum.

I was just reading a study about the experimenter effect in some Psi experiments. A skeptic tried to replicate a test done by a proponent of Psi. The skeptic got a less than a significant result while the proponent got a significant result.

They decided to do the test together in the same building and in the same way but they still got two different results.

Psi could be the first evidence of this field of consciousness.

Maybe our intentions create virtual particles that affect consciousness. So our intentions create reality. The reason why our intention don't always occur is because we are entangled with other intensions in the field of consciousness. We also are entangled with unintended consequences.

So it could be my intension to go to the store and get a bag of Doritos and my Consciousness will direct me to the store but when I get there they're out of Doritos.

This is just a simple example of how our conscious intentions are entangled with probability.

Psi could be a major breakthrough in understanding Consciousness if we just had more research.

I was reading over Bem's study again and this is truly a breakthrough. The study clearly supports ESP and Precognition. These are simple things though that should be self evident. People sense danger, when someone is looking at them and more.

The retroactive priming study really gets me every time I read it. It's truly a simple yet powerful test. This satisfies the null hypothesis and predicted effect occurs. The study results were a p value of .006 and an effect size of .25. This is clearly evidence that supports precognition and I look forward to seeing this particular experiment replicated.

Just a thought here.
Imagine living, say 200 years ago, and then hearing about the Internet. There'd be no way to begin explaining a lot of it, and people who could just get information they shouldn't know by physical experience would probably be thought of as witches or something, at least when they could verify it and not just be taken for a nut.
You see where this is going. In the future, we may use psi like we use the Internet today. The explanation will probably turn out to be some kind of complicated insight into the nature of reality that we don't have yet, and which I'm surprised more people aren't pondering now (what if, for example, precog is not magic but a clue into a different way of looking at time/space and how events connect etc).
Of course, we might not all know the physics even then (like the way a lot of people don't really know how the Net works, they just know how to access it), but at the same time it could become fairly mundane.

originally posted by: Matrix Rising
I was reading over Bem's study again and this is truly a breakthrough. The study clearly supports ESP and Precognition.

You didn't read carefully enough. Bem's own analysis of his own work says that without replication it's not considered valid and to my knowledge replications have not lived up to Bem's expectations.

a reply to: greyproject
You don't have to know how a car works under the hood to be able to drive it.

Likewise, you don't have to know how the internet works to be able to use it.

Psi might take some skill to use, but the most "highly skilled psi experts" can't demonstrate any significant ability, so there is understandable mainstream skepticism when they've tested for it and the results are so statistically insignificant as to be unconvincing.

The arguments tend to be over whether getting 1.2 right out of 4 is statistically significant, when random chance would only allow for getting 1 in 4 right, on average. If you go to a casino the odds of a red on a roulette spin are just under half. Yet casinos have seen 22 reds in a row, seemingly defying the odds, but the statistics predict that things like this can, do and should happen, albeit rarely. But getting 1.2 right out of 4 would not be such a rare statistical result, despite some psi proponents attempting to argue to the contrary.

What would be impressive and convincing is getting say at least 2 out of 4 right, or better yet 3 out of 4 right, but no scientifically valid test results have ever seen such levels of accuracy.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

Psi might take some skill to use, but the most "highly skilled psi experts" can't demonstrate any significant ability, so there is understandable mainstream skepticism when they've tested for it and the results are so statistically insignificant as to be unconvincing.

That's total BS. Dr Persinger has provided overwhelming evidence for psi with the help of Sean Harribance, who is an extremely powerful psychic.

Humanity simply isn't ready for it though, and so people turn a blind eye, based on nothing but a weak-minded ideology, while pretending the blind eye is based on objective, detached, informed, open-minded empiricism. Well, whatever helps 'skeptics' sleep at night, I guess.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

That's actually wrong. Bem successful replications have occurred:

Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events

Abstract:

In 2011, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a report of nine experiments purporting to demonstrate that an individual’s cognitive and affective responses can be influenced by randomly selected stimulus events that do not occur until after his or her responses have already been made and recorded, a generalized variant of the phenomenon traditionally denoted by the term precognition (Bem, 2011). To encourage replications, all materials needed to conduct them were made available on request. We here report a meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries which yielded an overall effect greater than 6 sigma, z = 6.40, p = 1.2 × 10-10 with an effect size (Hedges’ g) of 0.09. A Bayesian analysis yielded a Bayes Factor of 1.4 × 10^9, greatly exceeding the criterion value of 100 for “decisive evidence” in support of the experimental hypothesis (Jeffries, 1961). The number of potentially unretrieved experiments required to reduce the overall effect size to a trivial value is 547. Several tests demonstrate that the database is not significantly compromised by publication bias, selection bias, or by “p-hacking,” the selective suppression of findings or statistical analyses that failed to yield statistical significance. An analysis of p–curve, the distribution of significant p values (Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014a; 2014b) estimates the true effect size of the database to be 0.20, virtually identical to the effect size of Bem’s original studies (0.22). We discuss the controversial status of precognition and other anomalous effects collectively known as psi.

papers.ssrn.com...

originally posted by: neoholographic
a reply to: Arbitrageur

That's actually wrong. Bem successful replications have occurred

I didn't say no successful replications have occurred. I said "Replications have not lived up to Bem's expectations." Here is an example of what I mean:

daniellakens.blogspot.co.uk...

...we admit that unsuccessful study 2 had an a priori power of 95% and yet did not reveal any significant effect. This is surprising and constitutes from a frequentist point of view a clear empirical failure of finding evidence for retro-causation.

So for my statement to not be true, the study they reference with an a priori power of 95% should have shown a significant effect. The "This is surprising" statement is an example of why I say it didn't meet their expectations. If it met their expectations, they wouldn't have been surprised and such a high power study should have shown an effect. It did not.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Of course replications have lived up to Bem's expectations. You don't understand how a meta analysis works. You can't extrapolate them talking about one study in a meta analysis of 90 experiments. What you're doing is just wrong.

In a meta analysis, you will have some studies that may agree with the underlying hypothesis and some studies may not fully agree with the underlying hypothesis. So you do a meta analysis to see if the studies agree with the effect size of the original hypothesis whether it's Psi or it's a study on whether aspirin helps prevent a second heart attack. This is why the absrtact says this:

We here report a meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries which yielded an overall effect greater than 6 sigma, z = 6.40, p = 1.2 × 10-10 with an effect size (Hedges’ g) of 0.09. A Bayesian analysis yielded a Bayes Factor of 1.4 × 10^9, greatly exceeding the criterion value of 100 for “decisive evidence” in support of the experimental hypothesis (Jeffries, 1961).

So, you can't blindly pull out a study in the meta analysis and say LOOK, LOOK, LOOK, Bem was unsatisfied. That's just nonsense. It ends with this:

An analysis of p–curve, the distribution of significant p values (Simonsohn, Nelson, & Simmons, 2014a; 2014b) estimates the true effect size of the database to be 0.20, virtually identical to the effect size of Bem’s original studies (0.22).

This was very successful and the meta analysis of 90 experiments yielded an effect size that matched the underlying hypothesis about Psi.