Gravitational Waves Detected?

As David notes googling "retrocausation quantum mechanics" or quantum time backward suggests this may not be as certain as he thinks? Also Wheeler's claim that the past isn't set until observed would also seem to put the quoted statement into question?

IIRC there other ways to explain precognition besides violating this arrow...and without any model of causation last I checked it's odd to try and assert the arrow is even definitive. Beyond Physicalism even includes a chapter by the physicist Henry Stapp wherein he offers some possibilities within largely standard physics for precognition (just accept the consciousness causes collapse interpretation).

Appealing to quantum effects can't really explain what Bem claims to be measuring on the macro level.

We have no familiar everyday phenomena in which information travels backwards in time. This makes it difficult even to imagine possible mechanisms for precognition and retroactive influence.
 
Heh. Bem is the lead author on the meta-analysis so support for Bem is not unexpected. Moreover, a meta-analysis is likely to come out supportive if negative studies struggle to get published,

In fact there is evidence that Bem has personally acted to block publications of negative replications:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/mar/15/precognition-studies-curse-failed-replications

Given the history of questionable tactics from self-described "skeptics", if I were Bem I'd question the claims of supposed failed replication by some of their ilk as well.

So perhaps he had good reason to reject their debunking attempt. Perhaps not.

Probably worth checking with him for a response.

Appealing to quantum effects can't really explain what Bem claims to be measuring on the macro level.

We have no familiar everyday phenomena in which information travels backwards in time. This makes it difficult even to imagine possible mechanisms for precognition and retroactive influence.

Yet Novella was appealing to a definitive arrow of causation as coming from our accumulation of scientific knowledge.

So he's wrong.
 
We have no familiar everyday phenomena in which information travels backwards in time. This makes it difficult even to imagine possible mechanisms for precognition and retroactive influence.
I don't know the names of the logical fallacies, but this has to be one.
 
Appealing to quantum effects can't really explain what Bem claims to be measuring on the macro level.

We have no familiar everyday phenomena in which information travels backwards in time. This makes it difficult even to imagine possible mechanisms for precognition and retroactive influence.

Even from a conservative viewpoint, We've got problems explaining some highly accelerated adaption/mutation of organisms to changes in their environment. Quantum effects do give us a potential way to get out of that problem, and it's not been too difficult for ideas to be put forward. Even more generally, getting to a replicator to get life going is a problem, QM effects can offer potential help there too. We are also starting to pick up what look like QM signatures in warm and wet bodies, and seeing behavioural effects on organisms using hyper-weak magnetic fields, which have no particularly viable electro-chemical explanation, because they are just too weak. We've got tunneling effects proposed for smell, and now summat to do with loss of consiousness under anesthesia.

Again, from a conservative viewpoint, we don't have to entertain the idea that information has to travel backwards in time, just that the base building blocks of life might sum the energy of matching patterns outside of space-time, leading to the total of summed patterns (energy) influencing the organism. It could be a dumb process, and might stretch out no further in time, than say quantum tunnelling in space. But it might be enough to select for a more favourable pattern. After that more complex patterns could begin to emerge... It is the sort of idea that isn't that far away from those evolved hardware experiments.

You've got a triangle of forces, fields and particles to play with, and we understand them as being transformed in the everyday world. I think there is enough wiggle room for space-like separations to have a related time-like effect, considering that it's not ever possible to completely tie down exactly where things are in space-time. A bit like leading a bull (the organism) around by the ring in its nose... just in front of it...

I certainly think QM stuff is at work... But irrespective of that, Bems experiments and the replications suggest there is summat to explain, particularly the really interesting data from the high stimulus seeking sub-group.

I also think the more you run these types of experiments, the more likely the results just go to average, because you've got masses of different non-significant future patterns, coherently interfering with one another... eventually you get a smeared out blur of summed energy patterns that produce no specific route forward for the organism... and you're back to average.
 
Given the history of questionable tactics from self-described "skeptics", if I were Bem I'd question the claims of supposed failed replication by some of their ilk as well.

So perhaps he had good reason to reject their debunking attempt. Perhaps not.

Probably worth checking with him for a response.



Yet Novella was appealing to a definitive arrow of causation as coming from our accumulation of scientific knowledge.

So he's wrong.

Well, to quote you on page 1 of this thread: "My point is a bit of suspicion isn't unwarranted?"
 
On arrows of causation:

Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time

Bizarre quantum bonds connect distinct moments in time, suggesting that quantum links — not space-time — constitute the fundamental structure of the universe.

Normally physicists think of these correlations as spanning space, linking far-flung locations in a phenomenon that Albert Einstein famously described as “spooky action at a distance.” But a growing body of research is investigating how these correlations can span time as well. What happens now can be correlated with what happens later, in ways that elude a simple mechanistic explanation. In effect, you can have spooky action at a delay.

These correlations seriously mess with our intuitions about time and space. Not only can two events be correlated, linking the earlier one to the later one, but two events can become correlated such that it becomes impossible to say which is earlier and which is later. Each of these events is the cause of the other, as if each were the first to occur. (Even a single observer can encounter this causal ambiguity, so it’s distinct from the temporal reversals that can happen when two observers move at different velocities, as described in Einstein’s special theory of relativity.)
 
Appealing to quantum effects can't really explain what Bem claims to be measuring on the macro level.

We have no familiar everyday phenomena in which information travels backwards in time. This makes it difficult even to imagine possible mechanisms for precognition and retroactive influence.
I am not so sure. Today we sweep the skies looking for near-earth objects that can intersect with earth. When a unknown object is found, such as an asteroid, its information is detected and measured as to its probability for intersecting the same space as our home rock.

In this way the information of this offending rock is brought from the future into the present. Why is this not information traveling (imported) from the future to the present. Probabilities in the real-world can change due to the current mutual information between the bodies, enabling intention to change future events. ( if we are capable of knocking it off-course.)

Maybe the issue is --- we still think of information as not real and for it to be real it has to be "matter-like" and "travel physically".
 
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Appealing to quantum effects can't really explain what Bem claims to be measuring on the macro level.

We have no familiar everyday phenomena in which information travels backwards in time. This makes it difficult even to imagine possible mechanisms for precognition and retroactive influence.
I'd half accept that if it were not for the fact that precognition experiments were not dreamed up out of the blue, they were done because people in moments of intense emotion sometimes have precognitive experiences.

Here is a very famous one

http://rogerjnorton.com/Lincoln46.html

It is the job of science to explore phenomena like that that break the laws of physics as they are thought to be, because they obviously scream that those laws are somehow wrong.

David
 
Heh, you know out of all the Psi possibilities I hope precognition is false - at least to the extent it suggests the future is fixed.

But Bem's stuff doesn't seem so bad as it suggests we evolved precognition in order to change the future.
 
Heh, you know out of all the Psi possibilities I hope precognition is false - at least to the extent it suggests the future is fixed.

I think there are different types of event covered under precognition. I tend to look at it like this. If there is a ball positioned at the top of a slope and it starts to roll down the slope, we can predict that it will continue to roll downwards, and foresee an outcome before it occurs. But lots of things could change that outcome, it isn't over till it's over. In that sense, there's nothing mystical about predicting or foreseeing the future.

However, such things as precognitive dreams or visions often attach to significant personal or emotional events. One example I remember - at least vaguely, a woman dreamed that an infant in a pram or buggy was rolling towards some disastrous outcome, and when in waking reality, she saw the beginning of that scenario start to unfold, she was able to quickly intervene and prevent the foreseen outcome.

But I don't think everything can be viewed as simply as that. Life, from a human perspective can often have its own dramas which may seem to unfold as inevitably as a Shakespearian play. At least from personal experience I would say so, inasmuch as the action proceeds inevitably until the scene is set. Then there is a scene, all the actors are there, fully prepared, their parts well rehearsed, and I would find myself pushed onto the stage from the wings, with no lines prepared and no clear idea of what I should do. So it's my opinion that there is huge scope for a wide range of outcomes, nothing is fixed after all. Perhaps that seems contradictory. Oddly though, it has been one of the ways in which I began to find stability and make some sense of the world.
 
Was Einstein Wrong?

Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described "evangelist of science."

Last week's announcement of the direct detection of gravitational waves proved, once again, the enduring power of Albert Einstein's scientific vision. Once again, Einstein was right in that this theory accurately predicted the behavior of the world.

But with last week's triumph, a deep and fascinating question arises: Could Einstein be right about his science and still be wrong about the broader context into which we humans put that science?

In Bergson's philosophy, there was something greater to time than just measurements. Time was so central to human experience that fully unpacking it meant going beyond mere accounts of clocks or of even "psychological" perceptions. Instead, time was intimately connected to the bedrock of what it means to experience the world. It was, in some sense, the essence of human being and hence of being itself. For Bergson, that meant purely scientific accounts could not exhaust time's meaning or importance.

So, on that day in Paris, Bergson was not criticizing Einstein's theory. He was attacking a philosophy that had grown up around the theory — and that was being passed off as part of the science. It was the theory's hidden metaphysics that Bergson challenged. Bergson told Einstein that the only proper way to unpack the full meaning of time, in all its lived richness, was through explicit philosophical investigations.

Now, what are we to make of Bergson's claims?

I don't know enough about Bergson's explicit philosophy of time to take a stand one way or another, but I do think his separation between valid scientific theories and the metaphysics that grows around them is worth considering.

The physicist David Mermin once pointed out that we physicists have a way of turning our mathematical equations into "things" existing in the world. We take their success at describing aspects of the world (like the behavior of read-outs in an experiment) to mean the equations are fully interchangeable for real things (often unseen) existing out there independently in the real world.

But for Mermin, the equations are always abstractions. They are immensely powerful and immensely useful stories we tell about the world that capture some essential truthbut not all truth.

And in spite of what one may think of Bergson's specific ideas about time as an "elan vital" driving life and evolution forward, there are other philosophical perspectives that take experience to be irreducible.

Being human, being at the center of our own worlds, is an immense and beautiful mystery. The explanations of science are one route to plumb that mystery — but not the only route.

If this is true, then what step do we take next?

See also neuroscientist-philosopher Tallis on the limits of physics in describing time, and physicist Lee Smolin on the reality of the Present.
 
Looks like another detection at LIGO, if you believe in that sort of thing ;-)

http://news.mit.edu/2016/second-time-ligo-detects-gravitational-waves-0615

While LIGO’s first detection, reported on Feb. 11, produced a clear peak, or “chirp,” in the data, this second signal was far subtler, generating a shallower waveform — essentially a faint squeak — that was almost buried in the data. Using advanced data analysis techniques, the team determined that indeed, the waveform signaled a gravitational wave.

The researchers calculated that the gravitational wave arose from the collision of two black holes, 14.2 and 7.5 times the mass of the sun. The signal picked up by LIGO’s detectors encompasses the final moments before the black holes merged: For roughly the final second, while the signal was detectable, the black holes spun around each other 55 times, approaching half the speed of light, before merging in a collision that released a huge amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves, equivalent to the mass of the sun. This cataclysm, occurring 1.4 billion years ago, produced a more massive spinning black hole that is 20.8 times the mass of the sun.

This second detection of gravitational waves, which once again confirms Einstein’s theory of general relativity, successfully tested LIGO’s ability to detect incredibly subtle gravitational signals.
 
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