These papers like Hal Puthoff's "CIA-Initiated Remote Viewing Program at Stanford Research Institute" in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol 10, No 1, pp 63-76 (1996) are formidable challenges for any objective honest skeptics (e.g., Martin Gardner, Vic Stenger, Murray Gell-Mann, Carl Sagan) who claim there is no good evidence for precognition (i.e., accessing information from the future in violation of the, by now sacred, principle of "Einstein Causality" that causes are before their effects absolutely in all frames of reference). Furthermore, this research of Ed May's was supported by the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Department of Defense under much more stringent monitoring than conventional experimental work in high energy physics or even medical research. It must be taken seriously by professional debunkers of parapsychology if they wish to be taken seriously by the public, most of whom already believe in "psychic phenomena". If May's et-al extraordinary claims survive further testing, it means that a great restructuring of theoretical physics from "modern" to "post-modern" is in the offing. The new "anomalous cognition" data presented at the recent "Tucson II" consciousness conference at the University of Arizona is to 21st Century Post-Modern Physics as radioactivity, black body radiation, and the inability to detect motion relative to the aether was for 20th Century Modern Physics.

The bottom line from this hard-nosed experimental study by empirical "hands-on" raw-data oriented Faraday types who hold "high falutin" quantum theories of mind in disdain is that:

"In fact, DAT leads to the idea that there may be only one underlying mechanism of all anomalous mental phenomena, namely a transfer of information from future to past." p. 198

"Both James (Spottiswoode) and I believe theories that do not quantitatively describe data are not just wrong, they are bad theories."

One can immediately see why the U.S. Defense Intelligence Community is rightly interested in this sort of thing. Aside from the use of psychically sensitive agents to get the edge on the enemy's actions before they themselves are even aware of what they will do, or to use precognition "quantum computing chips" to make money on the swift fluctuations in computer transfers of money in world markets, May et-al write about:

"noisy diodes, radioactive decay, and other random sources... piezoelectric strain gauge(s) ... three-axis accelerometers, calibrated microphones, electromagnetic and nuclear radiation monitors ... air suspension table(s)"

May et-al distinguish four possible mechanisms for their data.

1. "Mean Chance Expectation" (MCE) for data from an "unperturbed parent distribution with unbiased sampling".

2. "Anomalous Perturbation" (AP) expected in "an interaction of a 'force' type ... from a perturbed parent distribution with unbiased sampling".

3. "Decision Agumentation" (DAT) in which "Nature is unchanged, but the measurements are biased; that is, AC (Anomalous Cognition) has 'distorted' the sampling ... we have measurements from an unperturbed parent distribution with biased sampling."

4 "Combination ... biased sampling from a perturbed parent distribution.

They consider a continuous random variable X with a normal probability distribution of given mean and variance. Suppose n unbiased measures and compute the new variable Y as the simple average over the n measures. They claim that the new random variable Y also has a normal probability distribution with the same mean as X but with a smaller variance than X by a factor 1/n. The quantity z is then defined as

This z is supposed to satisfy a normal probability distribution with zero mean and variance = 1. The normalized equation for this is

So that expectation values of any function f(z) are the integrals from - to + infinity of f(z)p(z)dz.

They do a similar analysis for a discrete Bernoulli probability distribution with a given probability po to "observe a one". A discrete z score after n samples is then defined in analogy to the continuous normal case above etc. The mathematics looks fine to me, but I am no expert. I doubt that the professional psi debunkers will be able to punch holes in their mathematics at this stage.

The DAT model of "precognition" for z requires both a biased shift in the mean away from zero and a biased distortion in the variance away from 1. Similarly, the AP "force" model of "psychokinesis" for z only requires a shift in the mean i.e., "an AP effect size". There is no distortion in the variance in the case of force-like psychokinesis.

Let's discuss this before we go further with their analysis. The AP scenario is active in that some kind of mental force literally reaches out from the observer and perturbs the external objective physical process which could be the decay of a single radio active nucleus, the arrival of a single photon at a particular point on a photographic plate, the tunnelling of an electron through an energy barrier etc. In contrast, the DAT scenario, on the surface, is much more conservative and plausible because it is passive. There is no psychokinetic force on the objective external physical process, rather, there is precognition of information transmitted from that external process. This information need not come in the form of electromagnetic signals. No claim of that kind is made by DAT or AP. They are both top-down "black-box" purely empirical or phenomenological orderings of statistical data with no necessary connection to any bottom-up fundamental physics theory. This is both their strength and their weakness.

My quantum pilot wave theory of anomalous cognition (AC) is consistent with DAT and not with AP. There is a shift in the mean and a distortion in the variance of the quantum probability sampling distribution of the brain substrate of mind away from the orthodox Born MCE distribution by back-action which enables the "precognition" as shown, for example, by Valentini. But this biased sampling shift and distortion is inside the observer and has nothing to do with the external "parent distribution".

I am not claiming that AP is not ever possible. There may be exceptional circumstances in which a thermally protected mental quantum pilot wave of a material brain substrate can become Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen "entangled" with a quantum state of some external physical process in which the effective back action deviation from orthodox quantum mechanics is large. In such a case AP is possible. Therefore, the US Defense-Intelligence Community would make a grave error in not continuing their support of these fringe areas of "the New Physics". All I am saying is that I am satisfied that AP was not happening in the large amounts of data analyzed by May, Spottiswoode et-al. Their results IMHO, though not their manners, are impeccable. But, then again, who am I to complain like "Pot calling Kettle black!" :)

The original papers should be consulted for a large database of details that should be sifted through with a fine tooth comb by the professional psi debunkers. I accept these papers as factual. These papers are qualitatively backed up in independent studies of AC by Professor D. J. Bem , a former psi skeptic and stage magician at the Cornell University Department of Psychology presented as paper 432 at Tucson II, "The ganzfeld: a procedure for obtaining replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer".

Thus, to summarize where we are so far: Skeptics like Cal Tech's Nobel Physics Laureate, Murray Gell-Mann call all claims of AP or DAT "pseudoscience" and any attempt to use quantum mechanics as a theory is "The Story Distorted" (e.g., Ch. 12, The Quark and the Jaguar). Opposing Gell-Mann is another Nobel Physics Laureate, Brian Josephson,of England's venerable Cambridge University, who says that paraphysical phenomena are statistically well-established scientific facts. The small paraphysics community is now split between DAT and AP, as well as whether quantum mechanics is essential or irrelevant to the "anomalous cognition" phenomena. That's the way it is this day of May 24, 1996.

Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 19:29:23 +0100 (BST)

From: Fotini Pallikari-Viras

Reply-To: owner-jcs-online@lists.zynet.co.uk

To: jcs-online@psyche.zynet.co.uk

In relation to the letter by Jean Burns with regard to the Decision Augmantation Theory, I have these comments to make:

It is my opinion that the DAT analysis cannot reject the influence model of psi, as it claims to do. Its interpretation of the mathematical analysis result is not correct! This is because the type of dependence of effect size on the number of events generated, is dangerously disregarded.

I base my opinion on (a) experimental evidence, part of which comes from my own tests, and (b) a mathematical analysis that I'm currently doing on my RNG data to determine whether (or not) the data are influenced and the extend and type of influence.

I intend to present this work and offer it for discussion at the European SSE conference this October, to which I've already sent an abstract.

In relation to my argument above I put the following questions to you ALL:

Q1. If the z^2 vs n graph of the DAT analysis is a horizontal line for the intention data, what will the same graph be for the no intention data? Horizontal or slanted?

Q2. If it is slanted, wouldn't that suggest the presence of influence in the whole of intention-no intention data (parent distribution)?

Q3. If it is horizontal, wouldn't that imply, according to the DAT interpretation, the lack of influence and the presence of selection, precognition and good timing with regard to the data under *no intention* ?

Q4. More specifically: If the no intention (control) data restore the intention data distribution to the calibration Gaussian, according to the reported evidence, by what action of precognition/selection has this taken place in the total absence of intention???

My position is, according to the Balancing Effect Theory (BET), that the parent distribution only 'looks' unperturbed. The psi property of consciousness *influences* the probability space of random events by some (yet unknown) mechanism, while a natural-physical phenomenon of self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing (if you like) counter mechanism relaxes probability tensions (when they reach a certain threshold) and brings the isolated system back to its unperturbed state, before it gets deformed again by psi. The two mechanisms could be isolated and studied separately under certain testing conditions. Otherwise, they will mix and yield not only low effect sizes, but also such as to appear independent of the number of events generated, n.

By the way, if you have RNG data available (intention and no intention) I'd like to run a test on them to determine the presence or not of influence as I have done on my data, and I'll let you know the result. You can send the random numbers by email (I guess).

Fotini Pallikari-Viras

Physics Department

Athens University

In a message dated 96-04-25 10:24:57 EDT, may@lfr.org (Edwin C. May) writes:

Utts, Spottiswoode, and I have just published a classical theory that we have been working on for over 15 years. Called decision augmentation theory, it holds that by psi information channels, people are able to systematically bias decisions toward favorable outcomes.

When you put math behind this simple idea, you find that the popularly assumed mechanisms for Random Number Generator data are simply wrong. That is mind does NOT reach into the devices and "force" bits to be different from what they would otherwise be.

While the theory is "merely" phenomenological, like Ohm's Law, etc

I do not intend to downgrade top-down phenomenology which is a necessary step in the sequence. My point is not to forget, which I sense Ed May may have forgotten, that it is not sufficient. Like those magnificent engineers from France and England building the great tunnel under the Channel, we are coming from two different levels to meet in the "middle" opening up that "underground stream" that our Alchemical ancestors sought.

The post-modern quantum physicists are simply trying to get a qualitative bottom-up understanding of how qualia fit into the fundamental scheme of things. Occam's razor, and just the weird intuitions or "hunches" of some of us (itself a form of precognition), suggests that the buck stops when brain matter, together with its electromagnetic fields, imprints its change in configuration (due to external sensory input) on its attached mental quantum pilot wave. The pilot wave, not to be confused with an electromagnetic wave, is intrinsically sentient (a postulate) in the sense described by David Chalmers. The Bohm pilot wave corresponds to the term "elemental mind" coined by Nick Herbert, and to "mind-stuff" coined by the late great Sir James Jeans. Note, the pilot wave need not be pure, in fact, as shown by Nanopoulos it is "mixed" described by a "density matrix" that I rename as "destiny matrix". My model is compatible with, though not identical to, the Eccles theory. The imprinting process is really new physics, in Penrose's sense, beyond orthodox quantum mechanics. Stapp would agree that the sort of anomalous stuff reported by you guys does require this extra "back-action" of matter-particle (also electromagnetic field) on its mental-quantum pilot wave, but that ordinary consciousness does not require it. I think Stapp is wrong there. Stapp's theory, based on Bohr's, has no natural distinction between inert rocks and living cells. Zero vs non-zero back-action provides the distinction. All forms of matter with non-zero back-action are capable of qualia in my theory. This includes artificially engineered nanodevices that we will manufacture in the near future. The back-action shows how both ordinary qualia and anomalous remote-viewing, PK etc are unified into one mechanism, and it also shows why "rocks" don't have qualia etc. The back-action in rocks is zero. My theory predicts that non-zero back-action is required for all life. It is necessary, but not sufficient, for any sort of mind and qualia to emerge in open complex self-organizing adaptive systems held far from thermal equilibrium.

Spottiswoode continued:

it has two minor advantages over many other efforts in this area: it is testable and has been successfully tested.

David Chalmers has said that the back-action model is testable. The back-action term is implemented quantitatively in Nanopoulos's quantum friction from the superstring states via the quantum gravity foam. This is one way to test it. It also has the virtue that it has the same form as the top-down "self-organizing" term in Prigogine's phenomenology - so a very pretty picture is now emerging by synthesizing ideas from several different theories - which happens to be my great talent. :-)

Spottiswoode:

Aside from these trivia, it has many other problems, from your point of view: it has nothing to do with QM and it eliminates, that is reduces, a whole class of psi phenomena.

Spottiswoode explains:

What we have shown, in essence, is that the results of the hundreds of experiments which have shown that operators can apparently influence the output of random devices, such as random number generators (RNG's) cannot be explained on any influence model which describes the effect of the operator as a biasing of the bit probability. The data just do not fit this at all, since a biasing of the bit probability leads to Z-scores statistics which cummulate as the square root of the number of bits sampled. In the experiments, on the other hand, it is found that the Z score is independent of the number of bits sampled. We show an 8 sigma disagreement with all bit biasing models (except for one degenerate case). What emerges is a clear argument that these experiments can be explained by opportunistic sampling on the part of the operators which is probably mediated by a form of precognition, for which we have ample independent laboratory evidence.

Oh! That's right. I forgot you told me this at breakfast in Tucson. OK! OK! now I see what's happening. I sure hope your data is correct because it actually does fit my back-action ideas much better than a direct PK would. You see an elemental form of "precognitive remote viewing" is at the core of my theory. Now you got me really excited. Look! here is the point. When you have back-action you violate the Born probability rule of orthodox quantum theory. I am not sure if Nanopoulos has this part- he seems to want to keep the "unitary" Born rule which would be wrong. His quantum friction extra term in the evolution equation for the destiny matrix means a violation of probability conservation for open systems which gets larger as the number of particles N in the system increases. Closed systems are not able to display the creative novelty which is the prime property of mind. As emphasized by Brian Josephson who cites Valentini (see my z.html for excerpts from Valentini), violation of the Born rule means a non-thermal distribution of the nonlocal hidden variables (e.g., the Nanopoulos "W2 string states"). This then implies that nonlocal quantum EPR correlations can be used as a precognitive remote viewing communication channel. We have leap-frogged over Eberhard's "no FTL signal" theorem which requires the Born probability rule.

That is, one can now use the Bohr-Wheeler "delayed choice" to actually send a locally decodable message back in time without having to wait to correlate local data from both future sender and past receiver. You cannot do this in orthodox quantum mechanics because the random noise from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle hides the coherent precognitive message with no possibility of filtering. This is easily explained, in Bohm's pilot wave theory, as the lack of a feed-back control loop between the atoms and EM fields of the living brain and their attached "mental" pilot wave. The pilot wave is the fundamentally sentient field that has "qualia" the same way that electrons have "charge", "mass" and "spin" to use Chalmer's way of thinking. The situation here is that of Newton's "hypothesis non fingo". Like gravity, no scientific theory can ever tell what qualia is, only how it relates to other phenomena.

Returning to the aforementioned idea of sending messages back in time via a "filter" for Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. Such a filter would be a successful Maxwell Demon which would violate the classical limit of the second law of thermodynamics as shown by Asher Peres. However, the second law of thermodynamics in the quantum domain leads to classically counter-intuitive results like a Carnot engine with greater than 100% efficiency when operating between a "hot" negative quantum temperature and a "cold" positive temperature. That is, the efficiency (1 - Tcold/Thot) is greater than 1 because Tcold/Thot is negative. This means that the pumped population inversion, which corresponds to the negative Thot, is a quantum trigger that forces the positive temperature thermal fluctuations to cohere making it able to perform useful work. This is what probably happens in the pumped Frohlich electric dipole modes in microtubules. It may explain why macro-quantum coherence is possible in the brain. The prediction here is that the thermal perturbations are damped out, i.e. cohered, in nanoscale regions of the "ordered water". This may explain why there is "ordered water"!

"Dangerous Dan" Dennett is all wrong about the logical necessity of infinite regress and "no second transduction" - the buck stops as soon as sensory data is imprinted on the pilot wave by back-action or quantum friction etc which means there is a two-way feedback control loop between brain and mind. Qualia are simply the changes in the pilot wave in Hilbert space imprinted by isomorphic changes in the brain-configuration embedded in the spacetime geometry. This is all in the math of fiber bundles. Libet's data can be understood this way as can precognitive remote viewing (PRV) data. So, if you are reducing RNG psychokinesis to PRV precognition, well that's fine and dandy from my point of view.

In any case Ed May should not claim to have a "classical" theory because you need an extension of quantum theory to explain any kind of PRV which is in strong violation of the retarded causality axiom of physics today.

Spottiswoode continues:

Thus it appears that all the models which implicate consciousness in the biasing of outcomes via a role in state vector collapse are incompatible with the observed deviations from chance in the RNG experiments.

Spottiswoode (my Eddington :-)) concludes:

Instead these experiments provide further evidence for a small information flow about future events acting as part of the decision making process in the subjects. To return to my initial point, this theory is certainly driven by the data available but it does accomplish a major simplification: there may be only one thing to explain, namely precognition.

Ed May remarked:

I have always thought that the QM "theories" do not answer the basic question how a squishy 1 Kg bag of mostly water (brain) at 300 degrees K has any measurable QM-wave properties. The extensive literature on the QM/classical interface show that QM coherence dissipates for even a few (10^5) atoms at approximately 50 millidegrees K except for special situations such as superconduction.

This demonstrates that Ed has not bothered to read the papers presented at this conference on the above point. Stu Hameroff should say something on this.

And Ed May replied:

Of course I have read the papers and listened to the statements that large protein molecules are in quantum superposed states. Saying it is true is vastly different from showing it to be true.

May again:

That is, why the walls of the tubules are thought to be candidates for macro-quantum systems, given that they are at 300 K. In addition, it seem to me that proposing QM gravity at this stage without any experimental evidence for or against the concept seems premature to offer it as anything to do with consciousness. They have NOT shown experimentally or as far as I have seen even proposed theoretically where or how the thermal shielding could prevent the distruction of the QM coherence.

Hameroff says something about "ordered water" shielding the coherent state from thermal perturbations. I agree he does not give enough details for a proper evaluation. Vitiello should work on this part of the problem. Claims are also made that there is an energy gap in the Frohlich mode that is 100 times larger than kT = 1/40 ev. This would be an effective shield.

Remember, in my theory, the mind is the Bohm quantum pilot wave attached to the spacetime pattern of the, for example, collective Frohlich electric dipole mode in the microtubules. Vitiello has the detailed math on this in which the Frohlich mode is the Goldstone mode from spontaneous breakdown of the rotational symmetry of the dimers. The normally gapless Goldstone mode acquires a gap from the waveguide cutoff finite boundaries and possibly from a Higgs mechanism from the self-focussed electromagnetic "vortex" filaments inside the microtubules. The vector massless photons with two polarization state presumably mix with the scalar massless Frohlich dipole modes with one polarization state to make massive self-trapped photons with three polarization states.

However, I have also come up with a new thermal shield idea above which I repeat here for emphasis since it appears to be crucial to Hameroff's thesis and it is a totally new idea. The second law in the quantum domain leads to classically counter-intuitive results like a Carnot engine with greater than 100% efficiency when operating between a "hot" negative quantum temperature and a "cold" positive temperature. That is, the efficiency (1 - Tcold/Thot) is greater than 1 because Tcold/Thot is negative. This means that the pumped population inversion, which corresponds to the negative Thot, is a quantum trigger that forces the positive temperature thermal fluctuations to cohere making it able to perform useful work. This is what probably happens in the pumped Frohlich electric dipole modes in microtubules. It may explain why macro-quantum coherence is possible in the brain. The prediction here is that the thermal perturbations are damped out, i.e. cohered, in nanoscale regions of the "ordered water". This may explain why there is "ordered water"!

Ed May continues:

From my discussions with Hameroff and others, there seems to be an additional confusion between optical coherence and quantum coherence. While they both describe a property of waves, they are fundamentally different. One atom in a very long laser can de-excite and send a photon off which collides with a second atom and stimulates it to decay in optical phase. The QM wave functions of these two atoms are not coherent.

Furthermore, quantum states of different particles (or systems) A and B can never be "coherent" but they can be "entangled". "Coherence" is only possible for different states of the same isolated quantum system. That is,

Assuming, for simplicity, 2-D Hilbert spaces for each system. One possible "entangled" or EPR "correlated" pair state is

I am happy to have it turn out that QM is happening,

Both Stapp and I agree that any form of precognition violates orthodox quantum theory. My back-action theory extends quantum theory and is "really new physics" that may be the correct way to reformulate Penrose's "orchestrated objective reduction". The "orchestration" is from the feed-back control loop between the thermally protected mental quantum pilot wave in Hilbert space beyond spacetime, and its specfically attached matter-EM field collective modes inside of spacetime. My way of thinking here is much more visualizable than Stapp's or Penrose's ways. I have the "Feynman diagram" of the post-modern physics of the mind-matter interaction.

Ed May continues:

but Penrose, for example, stopped his talk just where he should have started it.

Subj: Re: 21C Questions

Date: 96-04-26 08:50:37 EDT

From: may@lfr.org (Edwin C. May)

Reply-to: may@lfr.org

To: dreamscape@peg.apc.org

CC: JSARFATTI@aol.com, james@jsasoc.com, Puthoff@aol.com, srh@ccit.arizona.edu

Writer, Alex Burns, dreamscape@peg.apc.org wrote:

Whoa! This has got way out of hand! This is a case of a badly worded question that I wrote late at night, needing a fix of caffeine. I made a mistake - I confused _SAI_ with the experiments undertaken at Stanford, that as I understand it, yielded few *actual results*. That was the 'problem' I was thinking of, as well as generally this field of research's links to socio-political factors/funding etc. I am unaware of any 'problems' with Mr. Ed May's important research, and I agree with Sarfatti that such research is vital, although the actual use of such non lethal technologies is of concern.

I assume that you are thinking about the 24-year government-funded psi program. If so, then some of the confusion can be cleared up if you look at the current issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 1. In there you will find discussions from the major players in this program. From 1972 to 1985 it resided at SRI International under the direction of Puthoff. From 1986 to date, I have program responsibility. In 1991, the program moved from SRI to SAIC. Ray Hyman believes that there were few "actual results" from the SRI program. He bases that belief, in part, because he believes he had a chance to examine all the SRI data. As I point out in my JSE article, he saw almost none of the data. During the SRI era, there were substantial positive results. Utts has evaluated the whole database and discussed it in depth in her JSE article. Check it out.

Edwin C. May, Ph.D.

The Laboratories for Fundamental Research

415.327.2007 Voice

415.322.7960 Fax

http://www.jsasoc.com/~csl/index.html

may@lfr.org

Interview with Dr. Edwin C. May of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory

May 12th, 1996

Dr. Edwin C. May is an active psi researcher and is currently the director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, based in Palo Alto, California.

RPKP Home

Date: 96-04-25 10:24:57 EDT

From: may@lfr.org (Edwin C. May) Reply-to: may@lfr.org

To: JSARFATTI@aol.com

CC: dreamscape@peg.apc.org, srh@ccit.arizona.edu, james@jsasoc.com (James Spottiswoode)

In a message dated 96-04-24 04:16:54 EDT, you write:

Was interested in your comments regarding non-lethal warfare and the neuro/cognitive science papers presented at the Conference. Is it your impression that Washington's interest in the use of such technologies has been increasing in recent years, despite the problems with SAI research into precognitive remote viewing? What effects is this having on the physics-consciousness research community (e.g. the 'Hemlock of financial grants' you refer to)? (21C)

I have my money mit at the ready! :-) (Ed May)

May responds:

First, please let me set the record straight. Jack has a bit of imagnination going with regard to the colorful description of my lack of interest in theory. Utts, Spottiswoode, and I have just published a classical theory that we have been working on for over 15 years. Called decision augmentation theory, it holds that by psi information channels, people are able to systematically bias decisions toward favorable outcomes.

When you put math behind this simple idea, you find that the popularly assumed mechanisms for RNG data is simply wrong. That is mind does NOT reach into the devices and "force" bits to be different from what they would otherwise be.

To my understanding, DAT is the only model that have been so successfully tested with data.

What Jack sees as "redneck disdain for basic theories" is a redneck zest for testable models, for data and a redneck disdain for hand waving. I have always thought that the QM "theories" do not answer the basic question how a skwishy 1 Kg bag of mostly water (brain) at 300 degrees K has any measureable QM-wave properties. The extensive literature on the QM/classical interface show that QM coherence disipates for even a few (10^5) atoms at approximately 50 millidegrees K except for special situations such as superconduction.

QM may be necessary to understand the brain, but the ball is in the court of the claiments to show how thermal effects do not destroy QM coherence and thus macroscopic state selection.

Thus endeth my comments on theory.

Ed May's Comments with regard to precognition:

The company that conducted anomalous cognition research for DIA was Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) no-longer SAI.

Since I was the director of the contractor effort in the government's activity in psi research since 1985, I have some understanding of what they did. At SAIC we did not conduct a single precognition experiment. In fact, except for two studies, one of which Puthoff and Targ published in their IEEE article, we have not been studying precognition since 1972.

What we have shown, in essence, is that the results of the hundreds of experiments which have shown that operators can apparently influence the output of random devices, such as random number generators (RNG's) cannot be explained on any influence model which describes the effect of the operator as a biasing of the bit probability. The data just do not fit this at all, since a biasing of the bit probability leads to Z-scores statistics which cummulate as the square root of the number of bits sampled. In the experiments, on the other hand, it is found that the Z score is independent of the number of bits sampled. We show an 8 sigma disagreement with all bit biasing models (except for one degenerate case). What emerges is a clear argument that these experiments can be explained by opportunistic sampling on the part of the operators which is probably mediated by a form of precognition, for which we have ample independent laboratory evidence.

Ed May responded:

I assume that you are thinking about the 24-year government-funded psi program. If so, then some of the confusion can be cleared up if you look at the current issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 10, No. 1. In there you will find discussions from the major players in this program.

From 1972 to 1985 it resided at SRI International under the direction of Puthoff. From 1986 to date, I have program responsibility. In 1991, the program moved from SRI to SAIC.

Ray Hyman believes that there were few "acutal results" from the SRI program. He basis that belief, in part, because he believes he had a chance to examine all the SRI data. As I point out in my JSE article, he saw almost none of the data. During the SRI era, there were substantial positive results. Utts has evaluated the whole database and discussed it in depth in her JSE article.

Check it out.

Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 09:49:50 -0700

From: Jack Sarfatti

To: james@jsaoc.com, may@lfr.org, rdnelson@princeton.edu, psischmidt@aol.com, Puthoff@aol.com

CC: dradin@nevada.edu, rhett@teleport.com, mschlitz@well.com, physics@intuition.org, vjs@uhheph.phys.hawaii.edu, bdj10@cam.ac.uk, M.R.Watkins@ukc.ac.uk, mgm@santafe.edu, STAPP@theorm.lbl.gov, quantum@cruzio.com

How do you conclude precognition and not pk from your observation that we sense spatial gradient of Shannon entropy in a "locally deviant subsequence of binary bits"? I mean what is your theoretical argument here? Please spell this out in detail so I can argue this point with Vic Stenger, a professor of physics at University of Hawaii and with Murray Gell-Mann both of whom are totally skeptical of such claims. They would both, of course, say that neither pk or precognition are possible within known laws of physics.

Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 12:07:51 -0800

From: "Edwin C. May"

Reply-To: may@lfr.org

Organization: Laboratories for Fundamental Research

To: Jack Sarfatti

CC: James Spottiswoode

Subject: Re: Key Issue of DAT

The grad(S) is what it is, a simple bit-wise calculation. We noticed a strong (rho=~0.45) linear correlation between this and the quality of the anomalous cognition. Rho=.45 is not a good physics correlation but it is fantastic for a psi experiment. The correlation vanishes for S, and we take this as suggestive of a sensory system. This is from the AC side of the research.

The argument goes like this: If grad(S) is what humans "sense" with anomalous cognition, than because grad(S) is independent of sequence length of a locally deviant subsequence we would expect that the RNG statistic would be independent of the sequence length. It is.

You might check our current DAT articles in the current issue of the Jounal of Parapsychology.

Ed

Yes, but neither you or Jim show clearly how independence from sequence length connects to "precognition" while dependence connects to "pk" in which the mind reaches in so to speak. That is the core of what I am trying to understand. Do you explain this key idea in your above cited articles?

Ed May responded May 20, 1996

Jack, PLEASE read the original article. Of course we do. If mind is pushing on each bit, then Z ~ sqrt(sequence length). The data show this is not true! I'll state the case again: RV ~ grad(S). grad(S) for excess hits in RNG sequences is independent of the sequence length. Thus if RV is responsible for the RNG data then one would predict an independence of the sequence length of Z. That is exactly what the data show since 1969!

Any clearer?

Ed

1. You have made the empirical correlation that successful precognitive remote viewing (PRV) data is independent of sequence length.

2. You see the same kind of independence in so-called psycho-kinetic (PK) data.

3. Therefore, you conclude that both PRV and PK phenomena are the same process.

So far, so good. I can accept that analysis. What is still not so clear is why the traditional notion of PK in which in your own words

"That is mind does NOT reach into the devices and "force" bits to be different from what they would otherwise be."

"...since a biasing of the bit probability leads to Z-scores statistics which cummulate as the square root of the number of bits sampled."

Now this logical analysis is independent of any particular like the gradient of the spatial entropy. I am not sure how you operationally determine that. It is some sort of rule from comparing adjacent bits in the sequence. But that is a relatively minor matter that I am sure I can get from your paper.

Here is something exciting. Someone in Tucson claimed a similar independence of bit sequence length in ordinary cognition. My Bohm-type quantum mind theory demands that ordinary cognition, memory and PRV all be the same physical mechanism. Stapp's Bohr-type quantum mind theory seems to say just the opposite. In any case, in order to have PRV the quantum mind must be locally decoding messages from a future state of itself. This is not to be confused with the bit sequences on the tapes or piece of paper or however you irreversibly make records of your objective bit sequences. I am talking about subjective local decoding or halting of the quantum computation in the field of qualia of the quantum pilot-wave attached to the Frohlich modes. Such local decoding violates Eberhard's theorem of orthodox quantum mechanics with zero back-action. So we have here a new law of physics.