Feeling the Future: Interesting Article

[bassplayer142]

Just thought some people here would be interested in this article...

http://www.smellybean.com/link.jsp?UniqNumber=3891

 

[honestrosewater]

Haha, while I was reading the story, I thought of Minority Report for some reason, I saw some images of it in my head, and a couple minutes later, it was mentioned in the story. I don't think it was a short enough time for the words to have been on the page already, but I wasn't paying enough attention. Anyway, that leads nicely to my first reaction...

Who says that a mechanism for people to predict the future doesn't already exist? People predict the future all the time, e.g., when they step out of the way of a falling object (by predicting its future path). Could these things, or at least some of them, be people simply deriving the future, or a possible future, from past experiences rather than somehow receiving information from the future? It seems to me that our brains can do an awful lot of computing without us, and perhaps these vague feelings are just subconscious theoretical predictions. No?

 

[bassplayer142]

I agree. I am just really excited that they had found some proof. Maybe more testing and more experimenting and you will maybe someone will begin to understand the future and not just react to it subconsciously .

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I agree. I am just really excited that they had found some proof.

Such amazing studies - if verified -

Not proof until duplicated many times by other scientists and peer reviewed.

...not to mention the fact that a little more skepticism might be in order when the source is called "smellybean" and offers a "fart button" on the page.

 

[hypnagogue]

It's impossible to evaluate these claims without taking a direct look at the research involved. I would certainly not trust claims made in a news article like this-- I don't trust claims put forth in news articles even when they're talking about tapioca science. It seems like each of the phenomena mentioned in the article that are supposed to evidence information coming from the future are open to viable alternative explanations that do not posit information flowing backwards in time, though the skeletal claims made in the article are really not substantive enough on their own to support substantive discussion.

 

[russ_watters]

Much of the article is about conspiracy theory and at least one line is "plagarized" from conspiracy theory sites (in quotes because most share the exact same text without citations - that's the nature of the business). I'm not inclined to accept much of the article as having any merit, but if the test and results are as straightforward as they say, there should be no reason why they couldn't publish them for real instead of submitting them to a newspaper. That also makes me skeptical.

And apro pos...I'm getting a feeling of deja vu about this article...

 

[russ_watters]

Who says that a mechanism for people to predict the future doesn't already exist? People predict the future all the time, e.g., when they step out of the way of a falling object (by predicting its future path). Could these things, or at least some of them, be people simply deriving the future, or a possible future, from past experiences rather than somehow receiving information from the future? It seems to me that our brains can do an awful lot of computing without us, and perhaps these vague feelings are just subconscious theoretical predictions. No?

Two completely different things. The idea of predicting the future based on the past is completely different from predicting the future without any past data for building the predictive model.

 

[PIT2]

Red orbit/nova (the site is loaded in smellybeans html frame)had almost the same story about 2 years ago, but the focus then was on the black box of the global consciousness project:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=66591

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It's impossible to evaluate these claims without taking a direct look at the research involved.

In order to do that you have to press the fart button.

 

[honestrosewater]

Two completely different things.

Right. I wasn't agreeing with their interpretation. I was offering an alternative that I found much more plausible: "simply deriving the future, or a possible future, from past experiences".

 

[Q_Goest]

Being skeptical of a sensationalized article is the right reaction, but it's easy enough to google for the references. I haven't read these two through, but they seem legit.
http://cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3/BiermanRadin.html
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/pdfs/presentiment.pdf

Other references are given in those papers, including this one (probably one of the references the SmellyBean article would have picked up on):
Bierman, D. J. & Radin, D. I. (1997). http://www.parapsy.nl/uploads/w1/anticip_pms97.pdf" Perceptual and Motor Skills, 84, 689-690
Don't know if that's the right link, but you can try Google scholar and find other links here:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q...se+on+randomized+future+conditions"&hl=en&lr=

There seems to be a handful of articles that have been published on the phenomena of "anticipatory responce". Personally, I'm not too interested in debating them on either side, but I'd be interested in seeing what others might think.

 

[Evo]

Oh geeze, if Dean Radin is involved, the results are more than likely skewed.

 

[Q_Goest]

I've never heard of Dean Radin, but apparently he's got quite a reputation, as does the university he works at.

Dean Radin is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. He is Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, in Petaluma, California, USA, on the Adjunct Faculty at Sonoma State University, on the Distinguished Consulting Faculty at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, and four-time former President of the Parapsychological Association.[1][2]

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Radin

Research supported by the Institute of Noetic Sciences has been criticized as lacking in strict "peer-reviewed empiricism". In an article that critiqued the New Age movement's detachment from the mainstream scientific community, Thomas W. Clark, founder of the Center for Naturalism, referenced work supported by the Institute as suffering from "what humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz calls the 'transcendental temptation' [that] drives the flight from standard, peer-reviewed empiricism into the arms of a dualism that privileges the mental over the physical, the teleological over the non-purposive."[9]

The skeptical organization Quackwatch includes the Institute of Noetic Sciences on its list of questionable organizations. The list outlines nine criteria they feel are useful in determining the reliability of groups offering health-related information.[10]

The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have also criticized distance healing research supported by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, citing a ten-week study in their critique of parapsychologist Elisabeth Targ where "healers directed their psi energy to the [AIDS] patients by using prayer or meditation."[11]

Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences

And this article certainly throws some mud on his name:
http://skepdic.com/essays/radin.html

 

[Evo]

And this article certainly throws some mud on his name:
http://skepdic.com/essays/radin.html

I hadn't seen the article before. That's hysterical.

 

[setAI]

Oh geeze, if Dean Radin is involved, the results are more than likely skewed.

you often see these sort of empty attacks against Radin- yet the man's work has been published and reviewed in the likes of Nature/ Science/ Phys Review

http://www.deanradin.com/NewWeb/EMbiblio.html

it just goes to show you that regardless of peer reviewed experiments and a mountain of evidence published in the most respected scientific journals on earth- this sort of research is still ignored and disrespected simply because the subject makes some uncomfortable- mostly because 'psi' challenges some trivial concepts in classical Newtonian/ Cartesian notions of the universe- but we DO NOT LIVE in a classical universe [and even if we did- there is no working classical physical theory which works at the quantum-scale domain of electrochemical reactions in neurons anyway!]- we live in a quantum mechanical universe in which parallel quantum states interfere and histories/futures exist in probabilistic superpositions where observers affect what is observed- processes like 'psi' then are not only unproblematic- but such phenomena can actually be predicted when observers are rightly treated as part of a quantum system-

 

[Evo]

you often see these sort of empty attacks against Radin- yet the man's work has been published and reviewed in the likes of Nature/ Science/ Phys Review

Yeah, he got raked over the coals in a review of one of his nonsense books, the criticism of his book is what appeared in Nature.

http://members.cruzio.com/~quanta/review.html

 

[Huckleberry]

PROFESSOR Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room. The gentle whirring of machinery can be heard faintly in the background. He smiles and presses a grubby-looking red button. In the next room, a patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner. If it wasn't for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker across the woman's face, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just a normal health check.

I'm assuming, ofcourse, that they are speaking of the red fart button.

The military has long been fascinated by such phenomena. For many years the U.S. military (and latterly the CIA) funded a secretive programme known as Stargate, which set out to investigate premonitions and the ability of mediums to predict the future.

Dr Dean Radin worked on the Stargate programme and became fascinated by the ability of 'lucky' soldiers to forecast the future.

These are the ones who survived battles against seemingly impossible odds.

And he has concluded somehow that experience has nothing to do with this survival?

The whole experiment with measuring electrical current on the skin to predict an image one has not yet seen sounds a bit strange to me. Has nobody tried something similar before now? It doesn't sound very complex.

 

[setAI]

Yeah, he got raked over the coals in a review of one of his nonsense books, the criticism of his book is what appeared in Nature.

http://members.cruzio.com/~quanta/review.html

I referred to the many papers of experimental data published in peer reviewed journals- not an editorial book review or other ephemera located in one of the magazines- [which was mostly ranting against a straw-man of radin's personal interpretations of that data- not the data itself- which includes well-established results such as Bell's Inequalities and the DCQE]

 

[Evo]

I referred to the many papers of experimental data published in peer reviewed journals- not an editorial book review or other ephemera located in one of the magazines- [which was mostly ranting against a straw-man of radin's personal interpretations of that data- not the data itself- which includes well-established results such as Bell's Inequalities and the DCQE]

Please post links to those Radin "peer reviewed" papers, I'd love to see them.