(Quantum) Pseudoscience

[Carborundum]

Continuation of off-topic discussion from Eywa...

Then define for me your definition of nonlocality.  I do not see it here.

I don't have my own definition of quantum nonlocality. There is however a generally accepted definition. Wikipedia has it as the following

"Quantum nonlocality is the phenomenon by which measurements made at a microscopic level necessarily refute one or more notions (often referred to as local realism) that are regarded as intuitively true in classical mechanics. Rigorously, quantum nonlocality refers to quantum mechanical predictions of many-system measurement correlations that cannot be simulated by any local hidden variable theory. Many entangled quantum states produce such correlations when measured, as demonstrated by Bell's theorem."

I'll readily admit to not having the slightest idea of what that means.

In the first place, you are wrong about my claim.  I have never claimed to have had telepathic communication with any person.  I have experienced the foreknowledge of events of which I should have had no knowledge.  That is NOT telepathy, although you insist that it is.

Then I apologize for misinterpreting you. You wrote:

Everyone is familiar with stories of parents or spouses suddenly 'knowing' that their loved one is in danger or dead.  I have had similar experiences, so I know this is real.

Which sounds like telepathy to me. However, clearly that is not what you meant and again, I am sorry for jumping to conclusions. Now I will instead walk carefully to the same conclusion, because precognition is as much a pseudoscience as telepathy.

[A moderate quantity of pseudoscientific nonsense]

Look, I don't mean to be insulting here, but your text contains several hallmarks of pseudoscience, and not one shred of substance that I can find. Since pseudoscience is nonsense trying to pretend it's science, it uses a lot of science-sounding terminology ("Zero Point Field", "brain microwaves", "wave interference patterns", "a different level of reality", etc.), none of which are defined or explained. It also likes to throw around names of well-known and respected scientists and thinkers (Karl Pribram, Walter Schempp, Peter Marcer, Sir John Eccles, Denis Gabor, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, etc.), who supposedly did and said things that would lend credibility to the subject at hand. Of course, no references for anything are provided, even though doing so shouldn't be very difficult; as you said yourself:

There is so much more research and experimentation along these lines that time doesn't permit me to present it here.

I certainly wouldn't expect you to dig up citations for all of the above, that would clearly be far too exhausting. A single peer-reviewed paper would suffice, or perhaps two for redundancy purposes. Let me show you how it's done:

There is the well-known phenomenon of entrainment of biological function - e.g. women who share a lot of time with each other will begin to harmonize their menstrual cycles.  How else can this exchange of information and subsequent reordering happen except through quantum processes?

The existence of menstrual synchrony is disputed [1]. If it does exist, there are possible explanations other than quantum interaction (which I doubt anyone who knew what they are talking about has ever suggested. Feel free to prove me wrong on that by citing a scientific paper), such as pheromones [2].

I would be willing to cite this information for days, if you feel interested and so inclined.  But again, if you are standing on fundamentalist dogma, then it's more a waste of bandwidth and I'd rather not spend the time.

As I said, I'm more than willing to listen, as soon as you start backing up your claims with peer-reviewed literature. Heck, let me make it easy for you: any literature at all would be an improvement over the current situation.

Again you are mistaken.  Science cannot refute anything.  In other words, it cannot conclusively, definitively and with ultimate authority prove a negative. That goes against its own definition.  Of course, to say otherwise is to be as authoritarian, dogmatic and fundamentalist as any religious practitioner.  All science can do is prove that something appears to be correct or incorrect for the time being. To remain true science, it has to be open-ended.

I will concede that "refuted" was a poor choice of word. Allow me to try again:
RV has been thoroughly examined by other people on multiple occasions, and has always yielded negative results (as has telepathy, precognition and a plethora of other paranormal abilities).

I make no pretense of being a scientist, ma Carborundum.  I am a curious layperson at best who sets a great deal of stock by empiricism.  And for me, it works.

I am also not a scientist. As a non-scientist, the honest thing to do in the face of things we do not understand is to either tentatively accept the consensus position (paranormal abilities do not exist), or refrain from taking any stance whatsoever. You have instead chosen to reject the scientific consensus based on you personal experiences. This is understandable, but you in turn need to understand two things:
1. Your sensory system is not infallible. The human brain is amazingly simply to fool; it even routinely does it to itself as a defense-mechanism. You need to accept the possibility that not everything you perceive is an accurate representation of reality.
2. Science is not concerned with personal experiences, so do not try to pass your beliefs off as legitimate science.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

People always talk about quantum effects like they can make anything happen. Yeah they can, but the probability is SO DAMN LOW when things are as big as human beings. For example, if you were the size of a particle of dust, probably you can do telepathy if your are like close enough together. Maybe the currents in your brain would induce Brownian motions that will jiggle the head of the other and you would probably be able to do Morse Code telepathy. However, you are a human. At human-level sizes, Newton's Laws are equivalent to quantum physics. Quantums are really really small - think of Planck's constant.

As for nonlocality, since I am somewhat of a physics enthusiast, I can explain it in layman's terms. Basically, nothing occurs at a precise POINT in space. Every event and every object is spread across a probability field. For example, an electron cannot just BE nicely in one place - it is SIMULTANEOUSLY in ALL OF THE PLACES about the radius of an atom across. Actually it is also a bit in other places, but you can think of a a cloud that gets thinner very quickly as you get away. Which means that basically the human brain would only be able to do telepathy based on nonlocality if the two brains are less that the radius of an atom apart. Which means that you would probably need to do surgery to connect the two brains together with a wire. Which means that tsaheylu would be much more convenient. 

BTW @Carborundum could you change the title? This thread is not about pseudoscience in general but "quantum" pseudoscience.

[Seze Mune]

See my response here.  It doesn't belong under 'Pseudoscience'.

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

One of my pet peeves is taking things like Heisinberg's uncertaintity principle and trying to create a new belief system out of it. The uncertantity principle is what it is. So is Darwinian evolution, another theory commonly looked to as a harbinger of a new world order.

Quantum physics is great science...and lousy politics!

BTW, one day a policeman pulls Heisenberg over for speeding. The policeman walks up to Heienberg's car and asks him: "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg responds, "No, but I can tell you exactly where I am".  

[Carborundum]

While you have made the point of noting the absence of citations in my previous post, will you really make it worth my while by actually looking these up?  I could make a prediction here, but I won't claim precognition.     I don't think you will.

You are wrong. It would however make my life easier if you would clearly mark which reference is supposed to back up which statement. Barring that, piecing it together myself is likely going to take a while.

In the mean time:

Further, the consensus opinion on the ground and in the trenches is not the same one held by the priests of Newtonian sciences.  That does not make it automatically wrong. It may make it cause for further study.

I don't know what you mean by "priests of Newtonian sciences", but there is never more than one consensus position in science. The model that best explains experimental data is the one that will be used. There may be controversies regarding the correct interpretation of certain data, which then motivate additional research.

(there is supposed to be a line over this 'h'.  I have no idea what it means and no means to produce it on this computer. Sorry.)

That is the reduced Planck constant.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

H = Σih*Ωi(ni + ½)

So you say that the ½ is so important. Basic math tells you that this term simply multiplies the entire expression after the equal sign by (½ni). Renormalizing the ½ or not does NOT affect Planck's constant or anythign important.

NOBODY is arguing that nonlocality doesn't exist. I am only arguing that nonlocality has nothing to do and cannot explain paranormal phenomena.

By the way, could you please stop talking like a postmodernist philosopher, i.e. say "for me" over and over? Postmodernism is THE enemy of thinking rationally or having meaningful discussions. You could as well say "One plus one equals THREE because that's the way it works FOR ME." We are talking about an EMPIRICAL conclusion, not a conclusion drawn about you. Nobody is supposing that YOU don't have paranormal experiences or that you are lying. We are only trying to say that nonlocality and quantum physics do not allow precognition &c any more than classical physics does.

How to quantify the amount of time into the future precognition can predict - SCIENTIFICALLY

As for which equation really shows whether or not quantum physics plays a role in precognition/telepathy, let me throw out the famous Heisenberg uncertainty equation:



Since we are talking about precognition, the only possible way quantum physics can have anything to do with precognition is as follows - if the time arrow can be reversed, if quantum physics hold in the time dimension, and if transversing the time dimension in the opposite direction with in the same universe is possible (three extremely big ifs), then the Heisenburg uncertainty principle says that the spacetime location of an event has a certain fuzziness that extends to the time domain. This means that events in the future and in the present are all "partially" extant in the present. This of course, means that precognition would be possible.

However, as the equation says, delta x times delta p is h-bar over two. Delta-x is the uncertainty in position, which we also extend to uncertainty in time as per Einstein. H-bar over two is an extremely small number, around (5.27 10^-35). Our objective is to make delta-x as big as possible, so that it extends more into the past. This would mean that delta-p needs to be REALLY small. You'll need to know the EXACT weight and EXACT moving speed of the person you're predicting to something like 35 digits after the decimal point. Which would defeat the whole purpose of prediction anyway, since you're not supposed to know this beforehand.

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

THis also shows how little uncertantity there is in the uncertantity principle-- small enough that, except for the most sensitive of experiments, it can be neglected. That said, the uncertantity priinciple ultimately dictates how random, things like random noise, is.