Is being psychic a matter of quantum entanglemen?

maccored

I've been watching the latest 'Weird or What' - fantastic series - and not only does it have an indepth piece of mind over matter and US Military paranormal research, but it also poses the idea of Quantum Entanglement

The idea is that due to the whole quantum entanglement thing, two people can form a link at a subatomic level. it didnt really go much further than that, but if thats true, then couldnt that explain how psychics (and by that I mean the very rare one or two if such people even exist) might be able to read people? By using that quantum connection? Ive no idea how, but there it is if anyone wants to pontificate over it.

The property of entanglement was recognized as a consequence of quantum theory during the formation of the theory. Quantum entanglement is at the heart of the EPR paradox that was developed by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen in 1935, and was experimentally verified for the first time in 1980 by the French physicist Alain Aspect.

Entanglement is one of the properties of quantum mechanics that caused many physicists, including Albert Einstein, to dislike this formulation of quantum mechanical theory. In 1935, responding to Niels Bohr's advocacy that quantum mechanics as a theory was complete, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen formulated the EPR paradox. The quantum mechanical thought experiment concluded that either nonlocal interaction exists or quantum mechanics is incomplete as a theory. Einstein famously derided entanglement as "spukhafte Fernwirkung"[2] or "spooky action at a distance".

It was his belief that future mathematicians would discover that quantum entanglement entailed nothing more or less than an error in their calculations. As he once wrote: "I find the idea quite intolerable that an electron exposed to radiation should choose of its own free will, not only its moment to jump off, but also its direction. In that case, I would rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist".

Dave!

As a general rule of thumb, if someone attempts to explain paranormal sh*t in terms of quantum mechanics, they are almost certainly dickheads who are trying to confuse you with scientific sounding words.

For more information, see: Deepak Chopra

maccored

Im not going to argue with you on that. what if though, quantum mechanics ends up having some credibilty? Really, if you arent interested in even considering the possibilty then why bother joining the conversation? At least contribute something thought provoking.

No offense, but why the fcuk would I be interested in Deepak Chopra? I just goggled him/her and I really don't see it's connection with the original post. Unless it's because he uses the word 'quantum'. Really - read the last line of the paragraph above.

I suppose really what you're saying is don't bother trying to figure out if theres anything to psychics. Beats having to think I suppose.

Dave!

Perhaps you should focus your efforts on demonstrating that there actually is something to psychics (like, say, find one that can do their thang under controlled conditions) before you start investigating the mechanism by which they might hypothetically do it?

what if though, quantum mechanics ends up having some credibilty?

Can't say I'm much of a physicist, but as I understand it quantum mechanics has considerable credibility within the scientific community? It's just that it doesn't apply to the macro world, of which neurons are a part.

Oryx

Dave! wrote: »

Perhaps you should focus your efforts on demonstrating that there actually is something to psychics (like, say, find one that can do their thang under controlled conditions) before you start investigating the mechanism by which they might hypothetically do it?

He can discuss whatever the heck he likes, in whatever way he likes, its an interesting idea. Except I know about this >.< much about physics and much less about quantum physics. I realise that scientists get a bit testy when alternative or 'woo woo' practitioners jump on their research and try to bend it to fit whatever out there theory they are peddling. But its still worth talking about.

Zombrex

maccored wrote: »

I've been watching the latest 'Weird or What' - fantastic series - and not only does it have an indepth piece of mind over matter and US Military paranormal research, but it also poses the idea of Quantum Entanglement

The idea is that due to the whole quantum entanglement thing, two people can form a link at a subatomic level. it didnt really go much further than that, but if thats true, then couldnt that explain how psychics (and by that I mean the very rare one or two if such people even exist) might be able to read people? By using that quantum connection? Ive no idea how, but there it is if anyone wants to pontificate over it.

The problem with this idea is it is trying to find a way an explanation can work (telepathy) when really there is little to know evidence the explanation is sound in the first place.

Humans could be communicating over distance using an as yet undetectable method but why suppose they are. There are far more plausible explanations for the phenomena of peopling thinking they hear other in their mind that don't require that they actually are.

Humans communicate perfectly well using a perfectly detectable system of causing air molecules to vibrate to pass sound waves to each other.

We have noticeable, detectable, organs in our body for this (vocal cords), where as no one has found any organ or part of the body that could be responsible for telepathy.

Just like we don't randomly cause air to vibrate (you won't hear words if is just wave my hands around), to understand telepathic communication we wouldn't be just randomly causing say electrons to spin, we would need some system to encode language in the communication and no such capacity has ever been found in the brain.

Telepathy sounds cool but supposing its existence makes little sense in a biological and more importantly evolutionary context. There is nothing physically in humans to suggest we have this ability and nothing in evolution to suggest we would develop this ability without there being something to detect.

Telepathy seems simply a by product of the evolution of the inner monologue, the little voice we hear in our head and identify as ourselves but also some what separate. We deduce that if we can "hear" it then perhaps other people can. But of course we don't hear this voice in the same sense that we hear the voices of others.

As for quantum entanglement specifically it doesn't really help telepathy even if we imagined the human brain had a dedicated telepathy organism and an inner monologue that is understandable by others.

For a start you have to make the two entangled particles as far as I know, and then move one away from the other. So if I wanted to communicate using quantum entanglement I would have to give you one of the entangled particles and have you go away. I can't simply start manipulating a particle since I've no idea which other particle, if any, is entangled with it.

Also no one has figured out how to actually send messages with entanglement. There is still a random element to entanglement that can only be reconciled when you have access to both particles, which defeats the purpose of sending messages. If you just have one particle it is hard if not impossible to work out what the other person has done to their particle without looking at it as well.

maccored

i'm just proposing a suggestion. maybe 'psychic' people can manipulate the things you mention naturally. that would tie science in with the mumbo jumbo of psychic land and weirdly, neither side would be wrong.

The sooner someone works out that damn theory of everything the better.

maccored

Dave! wrote: »

Perhaps you should focus your efforts on demonstrating that there actually is something to psychics (like, say, find one that can do their thang under controlled conditions) before you start investigating the mechanism by which they might hypothetically do it?


Can't say I'm much of a physicist, but as I understand it quantum mechanics has considerable credibility within the scientific community? It's just that it doesn't apply to the macro world, of which neurons are a part.

Im not actually a big fan of psychics. there are millions of fakes, but statistically that has to mean theres at least one real one. thats all you need. If we were all to follow your suggestion, science would grind to a halt . 'Dont research the Big Bang Theory - show us it working first ...'

Quantum mechanics doesnt have the same credibility as quantum physics and i certianly understand neither of them.

Genghiz Cohen

maccored wrote: »

Im not actually a big fan of psychics. there are millions of fakes, but statistically that has to mean theres at least one real one. thats all you need. If we were all to follow your suggestion, science would grind to a halt . 'Dont research the Big Bang Theory - show us it working first ...'

Quantum mechanics doesnt have the same credibility as quantum physics and i certianly understand neither of them.

No it doesn't.

maccored

why not? surely thats what statistics are all about? Plus, you'd need to have some way of proving that being psychic is impossible (dont use the old 'cant prove a negative' as a handy way out) in order to be so sure.

Fremen

maccored wrote: »

Im not actually a big fan of psychics. there are millions of fakes, but statistically that has to mean theres at least one real one.

That's not how statistics works. The fact that there are millions of fakes means that it's less likely for there to be a real one.

Suppose I'm considering the proposition that all swans are white (read: all psychics are fakes). If I look at a population of one million swans, and every one of them is white, this observation should reinforce my belief that all swans are indeed white. I can never prove that all swans are white, but the longer I go without seeing a black swan, the more confident I should be in my hypothesis.

maccored

I can never prove that all swans are white, but the longer I go without seeing a black swan, the more confident I should be in my hypothesis.

aye, but if there were tons of people running around telling you of the black swans they've been talking to you'd have to reconsider. People claim psychics exist. of course you can call them all stupid but .....

maccored

anyway - any chance anyone wants to bother discussing the OP rather than psychics? I know yous are very fond of the only debate people have over this side of the forum ...... in that psychics arent real (which Im sure you can all scientifically prove).

Fremen

maccored wrote: »

aye, but if there were tons of people running around telling you of the black swans they've been talking to you'd have to reconsider. People claim psychics exist. of course you can call them all stupid but .....

And there are plenty of people who say they don't exist. I'd be inclined to let the evidence speak for itself. People are unreliable, tests less so.

maccored

Fremen wrote: »

And there are plenty of people who say they don't exist. I'd be inclined to let the evidence speak for itself. People are unreliable, tests less so.

fair enough. Ive no idea how that pans out in relation to your story about swans, but sure how and ever.

Fremen

maccored wrote: »

fair enough. Ive no idea how that pans out in relation to your story about swans, but sure how and ever.

At the risk of running the metaphor ragged, I'd go out and look for some swans myself, rather than listening to what other people told me about them.

At the very least, I'd find some people who have proven themselves reliable, get them to look at the swans, then have their work checked by some other reliable people.

maccored

so the basis of your argument is you;d beleive it if you saw it. Or you'd believe it if someone you trusted had a definitive experience with a psychic? Therefore, just because you havent, then its not true?

Thats not very scientific. I regret starting this thread. Its turned into yet another Skeptic Forum Focus On Psychics. I was trying to see if scientifically it might be possible to explain what psychics do, but its a waste of time as so far there doesnt seem to be any properly sceptical people (ie those with a mind thats open to both possibilities) around these days.

I still think this should be renamed the Cynics Forum as thats nearer the truth.

Fremen

It's absolutely scientific. What I described in my last three or four posts is in effect the scientific method as outlined by Karl Popper. The part about getting other people to look for you was an allusion to repeatable experiments and the process of peer review.

The default position should be not to believe anything until there's a decent body of evidence for it.

You wanted a discussion about the possibility of telepathy via quantum entanglement, but without a verified telepath to study, the question is meaningless. We might as well speculate about whether they communicate using radio waves.

Oryx

Paranormalists are often told off for not being scientific enough, but unfortunately all discussion here ends up in the same loop, without either side learning much about the other.

Id like to ask something hypothetically, cos this whole area intruiges me, but Im also totally confuzzled by it, and I want to get past the impasse in some way.

If you were to assume for a moment that you have person A and person B here. And by some method, person A can apparrently read person B's mind, no matter how far apart they are or in what circumstances.

Two questions. Could this quantum entanglement be used to posit a possible theory on how A & B are communicating? What other methods could be theorised as allowing this to happen? (real methods, not simply deception).

How would you go about confirming the ability of A, what tests and controls would you apply??

Im asking the scientists how to apply this science.

maccored

Fremen wrote: »

You wanted a discussion about the possibility of telepathy via quantum entanglement, but without a verified telepath to study, the question is meaningless. We might as well speculate about whether they communicate using radio waves.

completely disagree. Most things in swcience, particularly when it comes to anything quantum, cant be verified ... so why start looking for verification now? the big bang theory cant be verified. Neither can the whole expansion theory etc etc. Why would you particularly want telepathy to be completely verified first? Imagination is needed first. then eventually if someone can convince someone with promosing psychic skills to put themselves forward to be completely ridiculed, then maybe you could use the thoughts initially 'imagined' and put them to use. To stop the conversation by demanding someone verifies that a medium is real first is just copping out if you ask me. Observation is obviously important, but you get to that when you get to it - and certainly in this thread, we arent that far along yet.

Fremen

Great, much better question.

The first thing I would measure is how fast signals travel between the pair when they are communicating. This in itself is a difficult thing to measure since human reaction times are so slow. If the signal travelled at the speed of light, you would need to put one of the pair on the moon in order to get an accurate estimate of the signal velocity.

If the signal is transmitted instantly, then we're in trouble because modern physics says information cannot travel faster than light. It's back to the drawing board for physics in this case.

The speed of the signal would give me a clue as to its nature (massive/massless particles?). Once that was known, I would try to devise a method for blocking the signal. Once you can block it or detect it in some way, you're a step closer to figuring out how it works.

maccored

Glad to see the whole thing was simplified for you.

There's an interesting report from Commander L.R. Brenseth, US Navy (2001) about US Military Paranormal Research. One of the conclusive suggestions is more research should be done in regard remote viewing / psychic abilities. here's a link to the PDF

Fremen

maccored wrote: »

completely disagree. Most things in swcience, particularly when it comes to anything quantum, cant be verified ... so why start looking for verification now?

Mate, you need to do some reading. Quantum electrodynamics is the best theory we have. It predicts the value of a physical quantity known as the electromagnetic fine structure constant more accurately than any other theory by a wide margin. Quantum mechancis predicted the existence of antimatter.

Psychics can't reliably predict what I'm going to have for dinner tonight.

Fremen

maccored wrote: »

Glad to see the whole thing was simplified for you.

Thanks for your sneering. I think I'll take the high road.

maccored

yeah 'mate' indeed. Quantum electrodynamics is just one part of quantum physics. Is it cold up there on that high horse :rolleyes:

maccored

Fremen wrote: »

Thanks for your sneering. I think I'll take the high road.

Is that because its a link to research on the stuff you're claiming hasnt been researched?

Oryx

Fremen wrote: »

Great, much better question.

The first thing I would measure is how fast signals travel between the pair when they are communicating. This in itself is a difficult thing to measure since human reaction times are so slow. If the signal travelled at the speed of light, you would need to put one of the pair on the moon in order to get an accurate estimate of the signal velocity.

If the signal is transmitted instantly, then we're in trouble because modern physics says information cannot travel faster than light. It's back to the drawing board for physics in this case.

The speed of the signal would give me a clue as to its nature (massive/massless particles?). Once that was known, I would try to devise a method for blocking the signal. Once you can block it or detect it in some way, you're a step closer to figuring out how it works.

You can't put one on the moon, so how do you get around that, and how do you factor in the reaction times?

And you find yourself unable to block it. What next?

Fremen

Put them on other sides of the earth and take an average of reaction times over hundreds of experiments, then do the same thing when they're in adjacent rooms. If the signal travels at light speed, there will be a difference on the order of forty milliseconds. Attempt to control for tiredness, climate conditions, nervousness, coffee consumption, etc...

If it's impossible to block and impossible to detect, we're kind of screwed. We need to find a way to "break" the signal. I would suggest lobotomising one or both the people being studied, but that's hardly ethical.

Zombrex

maccored wrote: »

i'm just proposing a suggestion. maybe 'psychic' people can manipulate the things you mention naturally.

Possibly but consider the mechainary required to do this in a lab it is hard to see how they could do it without any obvious or detectable organs or dedicated areas of the human body for this purpose.

This was my point about the vocal cords. How we speak is not a mystery, we have dedicated organs for this. Even if we think telepathy might be happening it seems some what ridiculous that we can't find the part of the body that is doing it. Evolution tends not to make such mysterious things, particular when what is taking place is complex.

Zombrex

maccored wrote: »

Im not actually a big fan of psychics. there are millions of fakes, but statistically that has to mean theres at least one real one.

What do you mean by "real one"

I'm pretty confident we know what "psychics" are, it is a combination of things like cold reading, all of which I find fascinating by the way, well worth of research into.

So in a sense they are all real. There is a real phenomena here worthy of explanation and study.

What isn't supported is the various paranormal claims traditionally made to explain these phenomena.

That doesn't mean nothing is happening, it simply means some sets of explanations of what are happening are inaccurate or wrong. That is hardly shocking, most explanations end up being wrong. We know longer think that the liver pumps blood or that light travels in an aether.

There is no real need to keep revisiting the same explanations over and over simply because people keep putting them forward. No one would care if some witch doctor, out of ignorance, says the liver pumps blood around the body because we know it doesn't, the heart does.

Nor would someone entertain the idea that all witch doctors cannot be wrong.

Abandoning the out of date paranormal explanation is not the same thing as abandoning the study of the phenomena it was used to explain. A lot of these phenomena remain fascinating. You don't stop studying blood flow because you find out the heart pumps blood instead of the liver, but neither do you keep that out dated idea around either.

Zombrex

Oryx wrote: »

Could this quantum entanglement be used to posit a possible theory on how A & B are communicating?

Unlikely. Again you cannot simply entangle two particles at distance. You must make them together at the same time. Person A would have to put one of the entangled particles in person B's brain, send person B off and then start manipulating their entangled particle.

Also no one has figured out how to send information through entangled particles, and some theories suggest this is in fact impossible. In order to understand what has happened during an entanglement you have to look at both of them. Then you can see that doing something to one changes the other. But if you just have one particle it is impossible to work out what has happened to the other particle. As such it doesn't seem likely that you could send information through particle entanglement, at least at the moment.

Oryx wrote: »

What other methods could be theorised as allowing this to happen? (real methods, not simply deception).

Far easier methods would be radio waves or ultra-sonic messaging. But of course these are detectable so we know humans don't use them for communication.

The appeal, I suspect, of quantum entanglement to proponents of paranormal explanations is that it is so cutting edge they believe (wrongly as it turns out) that it is not yet possible to disprove it.

What proponents of telepathy are looking for is an explanation that justifies the paranormal claim while also fitting in with the reality that no one has detected any method of telepathy communication between humans.

Oryx wrote: »

How would you go about confirming the ability of A, what tests and controls would you apply??

Im asking the scientists how to apply this science.

You would propose a falsifiable theory. So you might say in my model (theory) human A produces a high frequency radio wave that person B can pick up on. This is a falsifiable theory because it makes the prediction that person A should have radio waves coming out of his head, and if he doesn't then the theory is wrong.

You test this and see if the prediction matches observation. If it doesn't you change the theory.

The problem with telepathy is that no one has ever detected any previously undetected non-verbal or visual communication between subjects.

This is lead to testing in other areas that have lead to far greater success in terms of building an accurate model of what is happening, for example cold reading.

And important point to remember is that science is not about disproving the paranormal. It is about finding an accurate model of what is happening. An accurate model is as good as any other accurate model. Cold reading is a pretty accurate model, any ideological objections to this fact from people who subscribe to paranormal explanations (not directing that at you btw) are irrelevant to science.

It seems some what puzzling to me that some (again not you directed at you ) seem deeply unsatisfied by this and continue to think that there must be a paranormal explanation some where.