Is there a Scientific Basis for Believing in Remote Viewing?

[Polycrates]

I get that part. What if they just don't understand the mechanism? There's still lots of things physics has not figured out yet. What about the results of the double blind tests for accuracy? How do you explain it?

Double blind tests for accuracy? You mean the test where a bunch of "researchers" - who want a positive result so they can get published - subjectively score the results while the psychic is still right there with them? That's the least double-blind methodology I've ever seen and it's disgracefully poor "science".

I wish I could show you the figure they cherrypicked as the most accurate of all his results (between 6 and 7 on their scale), it's hilarious. It was a silhouetted picture of a twister over flat ground. His "highly accurate" drawing was three horizontal lines, and three vertical lines and a squiggle. He wrote "deep feelings,"(?) "dark but airy", "gloomy", "building", "stars or points of", "clandestine romance"(??), "feelings of seeds"(???), "struts", "electricity", "feeling of awesome"(????), and the letters "TKP"(?????). Presumably they gave him a highly accurate rating because "struts" and "electricity" could refer to the power poles visible in the picture. But given that all the pictures were of landscapes, and that he knew this, guessing that power poles would be visible is probably a pretty safe bet. Maybe the twister gave him "feelings of awesome". He could certainly tell them that was what he meant when they were grading it in his presence (I still can't get over that). They appear not to have marked him down for the absence of feelings of seeds. And this was the most accurate result that he gave in the whole session.

You remember the start of Ghostbusters? Where Bill Murray is testing for remote viewing with those cards with the symbols on them? That's a significantly better methodology than this, because you can objectively score whether they were correct or incorrect with their choices, rather than trying to figure out what "feelings of seeds" is supposed to mean. Does "correct" correlate with the brainwave spikes? You can double-blind it easily enough, and there's the bonus that you get to electroshock some "psychic" idiot for wasting your time. If a movie about marshmallow ghosts can design a better experiment than you can, you're doing science wrong.

EDIT: Here's the figure
EDIT2: looking closer at his scrawls, it seems like he also wrote "boat" and "waterline" next to the horizontal lines. I could be reading it wrong, but I can't see anything in their list in the text proper that looks anything like those words. That's....wow.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

What about the results of the double blind tests for accuracy? How do you explain it?

Why do you ask whether we can explain it? What is the relevance of that?

Do you have any links about that? It sounds fascinating.

I know that bees know where the sun is at all times. No idea how, also something to do with magnetic fields perhaps, but it seems they that even at night they are aware of it's position.

edit: Just saw the picture. Not very convincing at all I'm afraid. Really Murky, go find Messiah on youtube if you like that sort of thing. You'll be totally flabbergasted.

 

[Murky]

Good work guys.

I just find the subject interesting. Even if you only look at it form a psychological point of view it's still fascinating. How could high ranking military officers and researchers be fooled for over a decade? Was there something to this or was it just a huge game of deception?

I'm not really interested or have time for the Messiah stuff for now. Too much on my plate at work.

edit:

Just located another interesting piece of the puzzle:
U.S. military psychic spy manual
link to PDF

Spoiler :

Category: Pseudoscience
Posted on: December 15, 2007 6:47 PM, by Mo

Remote viewing is a form of "psychoenergetic perception" (i.e. clairvoyance) developed as part of a long-term $20 million research program initiated by U.S. intelligence agencies in the early 1970s. Now known by the codename Stargate, the program was initiated largely in response to the belief that the Soviets were spending large amounts of money on psychic research.

Research into remote viewing began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute, "an independent non-profit research institute that conducts contract research and development for government agencies" (actually, a think tank that has nothing to do with Stanford university).

Led by Harold Puthoff, who had worked for the National Security Agency and was at the time a Scientologist, the research involved training people who were believed to be gifted psychics to use their alleged abilities for psychic warfare. Among these individuals were the New York artist Ingo Swann, who claimed to have remotely viewed the planet Mercury, and Uri Geller, the psychic spoon-bending fraudster.

In 1974, Puthoff and his colleague Russel Targ published the results of the experiments they had performed with Geller, in Nature, the most prestigious of scientific journals.The paper was accompanied by an editorial disclaimer, but nevertheless provided impetus for further research and funding (and gave Geller an air of authenticity that undoubtedly helped propel him to international stardom).

By 1985, the Stargate program was in full swing, and there were up to 7 full-time remote viewers, as well as support personnel, in the employ of the CIA. In that year, Puthoff and Swann published the remote viewing manual which was used to train the psychics to produced detailed information about enemy sites at specified geographical co-ordinates.

Hundreds of intelligence gathering "missions" have been conducted within the Stargate Program, including determining the whereabouts of Muammar Gaddafi, marines kidnapped in Lebanon, and North Korean plutonium. The U.S. military continues to employ psychics: it is reported that psychics were employed to help find Saddam hussein, and that the Department of Homeland Security hopes to adopt Russian "mind-reading" technology to identify terrorists.

Similarly, a classified report released recently under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the British Ministry of Defence contracted commercial researchers to investigate psychic ability, perhaps so that they could use remote viewing to find Osama bin Laden and locate Iraqi weapons caches.

Reference:

Targ, R. & Puthoff, H. (1974). Information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding. Nature 251: 602-607.

 

[Leoreth]

Spending over 12 years on a something that doesn't work doesn't make a whole lot of sense does it?

This fact is a better argument for libertarianism than it is for remote viewing.

 

[El_Machinae]

and here's a list of people known to possess esp:

rothbard rockwell block ron paul mises


????

 

[Murky]

And here's a list of successful libertarian economies:

 

[Traitorfish]

It's ironic that your sig includes the words "Native Americans", but that would be sort of accurate in many cases.

 

[tokala]

It's ironic that your sig includes the words "Native Americans", but that would be sort of accurate in many cases.

WHAT???
You equalize society structures mostly based on kinship and gift economy, with a society structure based on contracts between individuals and capitalism?

 

[Traitorfish]

WHAT???
You equalize society structures mostly based on kinship and gift economy, with a society structure based on contracts between individuals and capitalism?

"Libertarian" doesn't mean "von Mises or GTFO". A stateless economy founded on goodwill and mutual trust is in the broadest sense what the more authentically libertarian of right-libertarian thinkers advocate, even if the practice of "indigenous anarchies" tends to refute some of their anthropological assumptions.

 

[tokala]

"Libertarian" doesn't mean "Von Hayek or GTFO".

Then what would your definition of libertarianism be, such that it would be a fitting description for some/most historical native american societies?

 

[Traitorfish]

Then what would your definition of libertarianism be, such that it would be a fitting description for some/most historical native american societies?

Depends what sense you mean it. In one sense, what you might call the "subjective sense", it would imply the primacy of liberty as a social value, which wasn't present in these societies, or at least not as we would understand it; their ideological framework simply didn't work that way. In another sense, an "objective sense", it would mean a society with a strictly limited amount of coercion, which describes certain indigenous societies in at least certain significant respects. The dimension in this case would be that they demonstrate that human beings have the capacity to reproduce themselves materially without the supervision or intervention of a state, so to the extent that this was true of any given indigenous American society it can be at least broadly described as a "successful libertarian economies".

 

[Murky]

Native Americans are not libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. They were tribal/communal in nature. They cared for their sick/injured regardless of their wealth or status. Everyone was fed regardless of how much they contributed to that actual hunting and gathering. Most of them happily contributed to the success of the tribe as a whole but they did have a sort of merit system where the bravest warriors would have songs/stories in their honor.

 

[Traitorfish]

Native Americans are not libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. They were tribal/communal in nature. They cared for their sick/injured regardless of their wealth or status. Everyone was fed regardless of how much they contributed to that actual hunting and gathering. Most of them happily contributed to the success of the tribe as a whole but they did have a sort of merit system where the bravest warriors would have songs/stories in their honor.

We covered that.

"Libertarian" doesn't mean "von Mises or GTFO".

 

[Murky]

So why bring this up in this thread? What does libertarianism have to do with remote viewing?

 

[Traitorfish]

Why are you asking me, when you brought it up in the first place?

 

[Murky]

Why are you asking me, when you brought it up in the first place?

Nope, someone else did.

 

[tokala]

In another sense, an "objective sense", it would mean a society with a strictly limited amount of coercion, which describes certain indigenous societies in at least certain significant respects.

Just because there were no jails and only rarely some specific group or individual would be formally charged with upholding "the law", it doesn't mean there were no coercion. Group pressure can be just as effective or even more so than formal punishment methods. People were kept in line by gossip, teasing, public humiliation, and if all else failed, expulsion. In a society where by definition everone is related to everyone else, and average degree of seperation would be around 2, you just cannot escape from that.

The dimension in this case would be that they demonstrate that human beings have the capacity to reproduce themselves materially without the supervision or intervention of a state,

Pretty self evident considerung that something like 99% of human history society functioned just fine without something even closely resembling "the state"

so to the extent that this was true of any given indigenous American society it can be at least broadly described as a "successful libertarian economies".

Don't you think its fairly nonsensical to shoehorn tribal, kinship based societies into modern society concepts that revolve around the interaction of individuals?
How can a society by "libertarian" if it's most important unit is the (extended) family, some 10 to 100 people that stuck together, no matter what?
Where important decisions were made by finding a concensus, which can only work if anyone is willing to sacrifice his individual preferences for maintaining cohesion and harmony within the tribal group, and were it is drilled into him from childhood that the wellbeing of the group has precedence before anything else?

Native Americans are not libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. They were tribal/communal in nature. They cared for their sick/injured regardless of their wealth or status. Everyone was fed regardless of how much they contributed to that actual hunting and gathering.

As mentioned above, this would only be the case as long as the individual in question would not actively undermine the tribal cohesion.

Most of them happily contributed to the success of the tribe as a whole but they did have a sort of merit system where the bravest warriors would have songs/stories in their honor.

I would be careful with generalizing from just the famous, flamboyant plains tribes.
An average, social prestige would be at least as dependent on how well an individual would represent the ideals of the specific society as a whole, and contributed to the smooth function of the tribal unit he belonged to, with individual martial provess only one facet of that.

 

[Traitorfish]

Nope, someone else did.

Then ask him?

Just because there were no jails and only rarely some specific group or individual would be formally charged with upholding "the law", it doesn't mean there were no coercion. Group pressure can be just as effective or even more so than formal punishment methods. People were kept in line by gossip, teasing, public humiliation, and if all else failed, expulsion. In a society where by definition everone is related to everyone else, and average degree of seperation would be around 2, you just cannot escape from that.

That's not what the word "coercion"means.

Pretty self evident considerung that something like 99% of human history society functioned just fine without something even closely resembling "the state"

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But a lot of people need it pointed out to them.

Don't you think its fairly nonsensical to shoehorn tribal, kinship based societies into modern society concepts that revolve around the interaction of individuals?

Yeah. Did I give the impression that I thought otherwise?

How can a society by "libertarian" if it's most important unit is the (extended) family, some 10 to 100 people that stuck together, no matter what?
Where important decisions were made by finding a concensus, which can only work if anyone is willing to sacrifice his individual preferences for maintaining cohesion and harmony within the tribal group, and were it is drilled into him from childhood that the wellbeing of the group has precedence before anything else?

I'm afraid that honestly don't understand the question. Are any of these characteristic incompatible with what I previously described as an "objectively libertarian" society? "Subjectively libertarian", sure, but I already made it clear that I wasn't talking about that. (It would not have been compatible with Murky's use of the term, at least I understood it.)

 

[Murky]

Here's another video (long) on the science of remote viewing.

Link to video.

 

[Quackers]

This thread was won on post number six