Online Retrokinesis

[flyboy217]

Well, that was just Claus, and if there is a "they" I'm probably one of "them".

Eh? I meant nobody's still arguing the "change a zero to a one" any more, at least not recently.

It's poorly named because it implies that you need an observer.

David

But this hasn't been settled, has it? Whatever we want to call it, there is some action which (apparently) completely collapses the state vector. We have no idea (explicitly) what physical process would do such a thing, rather than going into a superposition with the system... and yet we perform this operation all the time.

 

[Lucianarchy]

What's the average 'swing' of those still doing the Formilab online RPK experiment.

I find that most of the session the deviations go to the intended direction, but towards the end, it often comes back nearer to the middle. After about 50 runs, I'm still getting the intended result.
Also, a weird one: When I concentrate 'hard' on the influence, I get small movements to the intention. But when I 'relax' and breath out ready for the next 'push', I often get a dramatic 'surge' towards intention. Does this happen to anyone else?

 

[CFLarsen]

Eh? I meant nobody's still arguing the "change a zero to a one" any more, at least not recently.

I am.

 

[flyboy217]

I am.

Please tell me you are kidding. Did you not understand the analogy?

Let me try with a coin example. The RPKP experiment would go something like this: I am going to flip a coin 1000 times. While I am flipping it, please try to make it come up heads more often than tails. At the end, we will count how many excessive heads there were, and calculate the probability of that happening due to chance.

Your suggested experiment might go something like this: I am going to flip a two-headed coin 1000 times. Please make it come up tails JUST ONCE.

Or maybe this: I am going to make a fair coin come up tails EVERY time (miraculously!). Please make it come up heads JUST ONCE (what?).

Suppose I made the claim that, by blowing on the coin mid-flight, I could cause heads to come up more often than should happen with no external influence (in the first experiment). Would you design experiments 2 and 3 to test this hypothesis?

Do you see why these experiments are fundamentally different?

Such a claim can ONLY be tested probabilistically. After the probability of it happening by chance has exceeded some constant (1 in a million? Billion? Trillion?), it would start to become foolhardy to claim that nothing is going on. How do your proposed experiments reveal anything at all?


EDIT: I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume it is the quantum mechanics portion that isn't clear to you. The stream of qubits being generated by the RNG can be seen as a stream of coins flipping in the air. Not until a measurement is made on a qubit does it "land." There is nothing being "changed," so no 0s can be "changed" to 1s. The qubits merely haven't "landed" yet.

(caveat: Whether or not the coherency of the qubit can be maintained in a classical stream is a quite separate discussion.)

 

[Lucianarchy]

Claus, using your 'coin down the bog' analogy, and your claim that 'If some scientists are crooks, it doesn't mean the rest are', why do you not accept Bierman's database over the archeologist who finds the roman coin? In archeology, we have the 'Piltdown Man' and other examples of fabrication. The field of parapsychology, otoh, is actually completely free of such grand fabrications, and the evidence we are discussing is completely devoid of any evidence of bad science, in comparison. Yet you scoop the coin from the bog and invest it in your own belief system. This is why I am sceptical of your skepticism, Claus.

Using your own evidence against you, you are a clearly biased hypocrite.

 

[CFLarsen]

Claus, using your 'coin down the bog' analogy, and your claim that 'If some scientists are crooks, it doesn't mean the rest are', why do you not accept Bierman's database over the archeologist who finds the roman coin?

Because you have not address my questions. Please do so, before we move on.

In archeology, we have the 'Piltdown Man' and other examples of fabrication. The field of parapsychology, otoh, is actually completely free of such grand fabrications, and the evidence we are discussing is completely devoid of any evidence of bad science, in comparison. Yet you scoop the coin from the bog and invest it in your own belief system. This is why I am sceptical of your skepticism, Claus.

You are utterly insane, if you can claim that the field of parapsychology is "completely free of such grand fabrications". You really are.

Using your own evidence against you, you are a clearly biased hypocrite.

Not at all. You, OTOH, have dodged questions again.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

We can debate this all day long, but if we don't know what causes a wave function collapse, we're not going to get anywhere.

We agree that I collapse it when I run the clock experiment and observe the results. Right?

What about an experiment with a dog? Would that do it? How about a cockroach? How about a computer program?

What about copying the bit stream before we ever use it? Does a copy collapse it?

What if we run a program that analyzes the bit stream to see if it's statistically random? Does that do it?

This is all easily testable.

~~ Paul

 

[Kopji]

This was an interesting site and worth a visit. I thought from the visual feedback that I was having an effect, but the numeric report said I was not really. Got a "1".

The only evidence seems to be that my perception of my psychic ability is different than reality. I am perfectly willing to admit being wrong about something that seems so sure, even if I saw it with my own eyes.

This does not prove or disprove anything, except maybe that we see what we expect to see.

 

[Interesting Ian]

This was an interesting site and worth a visit. I thought from the visual feedback that I was having an effect, but the numeric report said I was not really. Got a "1".

The only evidence seems to be that my perception of my psychic ability is different than reality. I am perfectly willing to admit being wrong about something that seems so sure, even if I saw it with my own eyes.

This does not prove or disprove anything, except maybe that we see what we expect to see.

This is clearly false. We do not just see anything we expect. Our expectations, at the most, mould and shape our perceptions. I might expect my blind date to be gorgeous, that don't make her so!

 

[The Don]

I might expect my blind date to be gorgeous, that don't make her so!

That's what the beer goggles are for.

 

[CFLarsen]

I might expect my blind date to be gorgeous, that don't make her so!

Don't forget to bring something for her seeing eye dog.

 

[Blondin]

This is clearly false. We do not just see anything we expect. Our expectations, at the most, mould and shape our perceptions. I might expect my blind date to be gorgeous, that don't make her so!

I don't think Mr K meant "see" literally. I interpreted his comment to be related to human tendancy to "count the hits and forget the misses" or subjective interpretation of results.

 

[Ed]

This is clearly false. We do not just see anything we expect. Our expectations, at the most, mould and shape our perceptions. I might expect my blind date to be gorgeous, that don't make her so!

Once again, complete ignorance shows through.

 

[flyboy217]

We can debate this all day long, but if we don't know what causes a wave function collapse, we're not going to get anywhere.

And indeed we don't. Here's some very interesting reading on the matter though:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-collapse/

Among the more interesting portions:

Let us state immediately that the (alleged) problem arises entirely from keeping the standard interpretation of the wave function unchanged, in particular assuming that its modulus squared gives the probability density of the position variable. However, as we have discussed in the previous section, there are much more serious reasons of principle which require to abandon the probabilistic interpretation and replace it either with one of those proposed by Bell, or, more appropriately in our opinion, with the mass density interpretation have outlined above.

That is to say, there's nothing inherent in QM that requires the probability distribution to correspond to the square of the amplitudes of the eigenvalues. Specifically, although standard QM predicts a 50/50 distribution, there are competing theories that do not.

Anyway, back to the original question of what collapses the RPKP stream... I (and probably you, and most) feel it is untenable to suggest that the data stream is uncollapsed by the time it reaches the subject. As far as what else might collapse a general system, who knows.

(edited for rambling)

 

[Interesting Ian]

Anyway, back to the original question of what collapses the RPKP stream... I (and probably you, and most) feel it is untenable to suggest that the data stream is uncollapsed by the time it reaches the subject.

Untenable? Why?

 

[flyboy217]

Untenable? Why?

In light of virtually all current theories of collapse. That is to say, I cannot find a reasonable theory of QM that allows for such preposterously large macroscopic coherence. Doesn't mean we won't find one tomorrow.

 

[Interesting Ian]

In light of virtually all current theories of collapse. That is to say, I cannot find a reasonable theory of QM that allows for such preposterously large macroscopic coherence. Doesn't mean we won't find one tomorrow.

What makes you such an authority? And what precisely is "macroscopic coherence"?

 

[flyboy217]

What makes you such an authority? And what precisely is "macroscopic coherence"?

I am no authority. I am only speaking from what I've learned of QM (for example, as part of the Quantum Circuits Group at the University of Michigan.) In addition, I enjoy reading about such things, and keeping somewhat up-to-date on advances.

Now, for your question: what is "macroscopic coherence?"

"What is quantum coherence? This refers to circumstances when large numbers of particles can collectively cooperate in a single quantum state..." -- Roger Penrose

Now, what is macroscopic? The division between microscopic and macroscopic is somewhat arbitrary. The link I provided above:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-collapse/

Suggests a boundary at ~10^-5 cm. That is to say, systems larger than this are subject to rapid (on the order of 10^-7 sec) decoherence if unprotected from their (noisy) environment:

It follows that a microscopic system undergoes a localization, on average, every hundred million years, while a macroscopic one undergoes a localization every 10^-7 seconds. With reference to the challenging version of the macro-objectification problem presented by Schrödinger with the famous example of his cat, J.S. Bell comments [Bell, 1987, p.44]: [within QMSL] the cat is not both dead and alive for more than a split second.

To assume that superposition is maintained across the trillions of atoms between the RNG and the observer is (far) overstepping the bounds of coherence observed in laboratory testing. And remember, QM has been tested quite thoroughly.

So to assert that the observer is collapsing the data stream as it gets to his computer seems to be untenable. However, if you propose that the subject is somehow able to collapse the stream closer to the source, before it decoheres... who knows, maybe there's something there. You'd have to show how the subject's mind could "connect" to that distant particle (I understand that RPKP is objective-based, but if you're wanting to explain it by QM...). And then you'd have to identify a theory that allows deviation from the standard stochastic interpretation (which predicts a 50/50 distribution). Such theories do exist, but I wouldn't really know how to go about applying them to this.