urban@trwspp.UUCP (01/23/84)
The remote viewing stuff wasn't very convincing. I
object to this "re-enactment" business; it smacks of "In
Search Of" instead of what I expect to see on Nova. The
only thing we're told about the experimental protocols is
that the selection of places is "locked in a safe". How
was the psychic prevented from getting a peek? IF he knew
the entire list of places, could he deduce the location of
the experimenter on the basis of how long it took him to
get there? Nobody seems to bother to ask these questions on
the show and that bothers me. Considering Puthoff & Targ's
track record in letting Uri Geller get away with all sorts
of amusing tricks, these questions demand answers.
The lady can tell you what an island in the Indian Ocean
looks like by just being given its coordinates in binary.
Well, even if we buy this, why is this "remote viewing" and
not "telepathy", since the experimenter presumably knows
what's at that location already? And again, we're told
NOTHING about the possibility of fraud here. In fact, a
lot of the clairvoyance stuff they presented is badly
controlled against the possibility of telepathy. Consider
the experiment where the woman wrote out the 25 symbols in
advance and locked them in a cabinet, then sat in a room
with the subjects who tried to guess the symbols. I don't
necessarily buy telepathy either, but these "experiments"
seem to be of particularly poor design if you're out to
seriously investigate the possibilities of psychic
phenomena.
The only reasonably interesting experiment they showed was
with the control of the random number generator. It's not
clear whether they found "genuine psi" or just found the
end of a normal curve (they seem to have discarded the many
subjects for whom there were no significant results.
Hmmm.) but there may be something significant going on
here. But must we conclude, with the experimenter, that
"physics is incomplete" or do we start thinking about what
might affect the random number generator and then consider
whether neurophysiology is incomplete? The problem here
seems to be that the psi experimenters are beginning with
their conclusions.
Mike