Blood from a Stone

This post is a follow-up to two peaks and the telepathy tapes.

(1) p-values killed the cat

The advent of science—particularly statistical methods, p-values, and falsifiability—created the framework by which “Magic” could be dismissed. There is a reason science is compared to a sharp razor, or a flaming laser sword¹. It slices through and murders one half of the universe.

Magic is the mystery prior to measurement. It’s Schrödinger’s Cat before you open the box. What’s more magical than a cat in the superposition of life and death? How can you ensure that you never kill the cat? You never open the box. Don’t falsify my magical cat. Do not read out that p-value.

You may criticize my feigned ignorance. You may tell me that I am coping; that I am turning away from science because I know it will not validate my beliefs. But I respond: you cannot use measurement to find what is immeasurable!

We all know that reality as we see it is a terribly lossy projection. Our senses reduce a rich universe into a handful of coordinates—sight, sound, smell, touch—but even much of this is ignored. Our minds spin narratives. No vantage point is high enough to see the entire valley. Have you ever fallen in love? Do you know what it feels like to have all of your thoughts orbit another? To trust anything is to have faith in a million truths unverifiable.

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(2) squeezing blood from a stone

At the heart of the good materialist’s soul is hope that in God’s eye there is no epistemic uncertainty—the deterministic pathways of the universe can be forwarded, rewinded like a VHS tape. With enough precision at $t=0$ I will tell you the world at $t=1$.

In the 20th century, exegesis of quantum phenomena spoiled this conviction. No amount of information at $t=0$ will tell us $t=1$, time at collapse. Please allow me to state some history here (you can skip this paragraph if you resist math): hidden variable theories suppose that there are certain, perhaps indeterminable, factors responsible for probabilistic collapse of the wave function. That is, an accurate prediction of quantum collapse would be possible if we had access to some additional data. In 1932, von Neumann sketched a proof that there were no such hidden variables. John Stewart Bell, while working at CERN, found von Neumann’s proof to be hand-wavey: “The proof of von Neumann is not merely false but foolish! Bell wanted a testable—falsifiable!—hypothesis with minimal a priori assumptions. It took some years for his famous inequalities² to appear. The Bell Tests are my favorite scientific experiments. They are so slight. In one initial formulation, based on the CHSH inequality³, a pair of entangled photons are shot into separate controllers and collapsed by orthogonally polarized detectors. The outcome of each collapse ($+1$ or $-1$) is jotted down. You run this experiment millions of times and take the mean, and if that mean exceeds the magic number—2!—there are no hidden variables! In 1972, after several hundred hours of lab time, this experiment had its first positive result: $2.30\pm 0.16$. In the ensuing decades, scientists took much care to ensure that there were no experimental lapses, possible objections. One possible gap was the communicate loophole, which suggested that the two photon detecors could be leaking information to each other at the speed of light. How was this resolved? Put the stations far enough apart (e.g. opposite sides of the planet) so that light can’t travel fast enough in time. Another gap, called the freedom-of-choice loophole, was solved via “Cosmic-Bell tests”: the experiment involved separate photon streams emitted from distant stars in order to rule out “common past variables”.

Isn’t that story fun? After some terrible ingenuity, concentrated effort from several world-historic geniuses, careful bookkeeping, and some exhausting labwork, we can wrestle out a profound strangeness of reality—no local hidden variables.⁴ Truth falls out like blood from a stone.

In contrast, psi tests are furiously imprecise. In the Telepathy Tapes, mothers make symbols with their fingers, visibly push limbs, and murmur suspicious subvocalizations. There is so much room for interference, rigor that hasn’t been considered. Human minds are much harder to measure than quantum particles, and so there is much greater room for interference and loophole in minds than in quantum physics.

The lack of scientific evidence for psi phenomena is not yet reason to suspect it does not exist. I want to persuade you that it, by its very nature, is hard to replicate. If consciousness is much more than science currently claims, then it is also exotic in a many more ways that we expect. As such, when we attempt to study it we can expect pitfalls everywhere. Despite this, there have been several strong attempts in the literature:

• The Sheep/Goat effect as documented by Gertrude Schmeidler: believers in ESP consistently perform significantly better on ESP tests than chance; disbelievers perform significantly worse—this effect is also called “Missing Psi”.⁵
• Rupert Sheldrake has positively repeated experiments on scopaesthesia—the extrasensory abiliity to detect when being stared at—several times.⁶ This study has been replicated by various parapsychology proponents, and has failed to replicate many other times by skeptics. Such a dichotomy, amusingly, is an example of the sheep/goat effect.
• The Telepathy Tapes must be studied with rigor. They deserve such an honor, but I believe the effort involved would be immense:
  • The telepathy discussed in these episodes is exhibited by non-speaking autistic children who necessarily require some help by assistants.
  • Double-blind studies are, by definition, incompatible with the nature of telepathy. If you assume that it is possible to have a double-blind study, you assume there can be no telepathic communication. This point is pedantic, but demonstrates limitations of the standard paradigms for measuring psi.
  • Studies that introduce deception (e.g. via double-blindedness) and a clinical setting would interfere with psi abiliity. Paraphrasing what I wrote previously: “psychic abilities are governed by the physics of love; love is sincere, and abhors concealment. Such a physics, which is based on the validity of the psyche—emotions, feelings, experience—is not easily measurable in a materialist setting. A double-blind study simply may not be possible.”

The immeasurable resists measurement. After all, what is magic if not esoteric? But if you tread very carefully, and you plan very steadily, you may find it in your hands. Nietzsche believed science had the power to rescue such an esotericism; that it could be justified in a more noble way than blind faith. Dr. Laurence Lampert elegantly writes:⁷

Nature loves to hide. We dwell within the natural incomprehensibility of things and we dwell inquiringly. At best, Nietzsche suggests, our inquiry will afford us glimpses into the heart of things. And at best, reports on those glimpses will appear enigmatic; they will be like the report Zarathustra issued after creeping into the well-guarded fortress of Life herself where, with her complicity and with her permission, he stole her secret.

[…]

For Nietzsche, ‘Nature loves to hide’ is not a lament. That Nature loves to hide is the ultimate gift of nature to nature’s favourites, inquirers into nature: we dwell within a boundless whole that will never sate us or bore us or make us disappointed. On the contrary, the enigmatic object of the inquirer’s hunt transforms the inquirer into a lover and the object of the hunt into the beloved.

[…]

Esotericism survives in Nietzsche at the heart of his thought, the impassioned, erotic heart of a way of thinking that is the way of the lover who loves the highest beloved, the enigmatic whole of things.

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Footnotes

1. Occam’s Razor and Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword ^

2. Bell’s Inequalities, inspired by work by Bohm on the EPR Paradox. ^

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHSH_inequality ^

4. It is still possible for the universe to be deterministic if we assume there are global hidden variables. That is, two particles on opposite sides of the universe could be governed by the same deterministic equation. In such formulations, the equation itself is typically what is real; the particle itself is a sort of residue in material space. Such theories, namely Bohmian Mechanics and Wolfram’s Ruliad are global superdeterministic theories. These conceptions imagine simple guiding equations or rules govern the precise motion of every single underlying beat of the universe; matter itself only arises as an emergent property of some mathematical system. I love both of these theories so much. They also frighten me to my core. I find both to be scratching at some deep metaphysical truth much deeper than simulation theory, which is shallowly similar. I also feel as if Pythagoras would be at home with them; but not Plato. ^

5. Tao Lin has written about this in detail. This effect also implies that skeptical scientists studying Psi phenomena are somehow incapable of producing a positive result. Another instance where studying the thing itself requires much greater attention to detail than has been given. In the linked blog post, Lin also compiles some dozen or so other compelling evidence for psi phenomena. ^

6. There is a collection of scopaesthesia studies on Sheldrake’s website. As an aside, Sheldrake is a personal hero of mine. His theory of Morphic Resonance is terribly deep and seemingly fundamental; I believe its laws are still a hundred years ahead of our grasp. He has dedicated much effort to validating many psi phenomena. Some highlights include the Hill Effect, dogs knowing when you’re coming home, joint attention. ^

7. From Nietzsche and Esotericism, which I have accessed here. ^