Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA (05/21/84)
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
The May issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal contained an article on "Sixth
Generation Computers" by Richard Grigonis (of the Children's Television
Workshop). I can't tell how serious Mr. Grigonis is about faster-than-
light communication and computation in negative time; he documents the
physics of these possibilities as though he were both dead serious and
well informed. He also discusses the possibility of communicating with
computers via brain waves, and it this material that has spurred the
following bit of speculation.
There seems to be growing evidence that telepathy works, at least for
some people some of the time. The mechanism is not understood, but then
neither are the mechanisms for memory, unconscious thought, dreams, and
other cognitive phenomena. Mr. Grigonis suggests that low-frequency
electromagnetic waves may be at work, and provides the following support:
Low frequencies are attenuated very slowly, although their energy does
spread out in space (or space/time); the attenuation of a 5 Hz signal
at 10,000 kilometers is only 5%. A 5 Hz signal of 10^-6 watt per square
centimeter at your cranium would generate a field of 10^-24 watt per
square centimeter at the far side of the earth; this is well within
the detection capabilities of current radio telescopes. Further, alpha
waves of 7.8 and 14.1 cycles per second and beta waves of 20.3 cycles
per second are capable of constructive interference to establish
standing waves throughout the earth.
Now suppose that the human brain, or a network of such brains distributed
in space (and time), contained sufficient antenna circuitry to pick up
"influences" from the global "thought field" in a manner similar to the
decoding of synthetic aperture radar signals. Might this not explain
ESP, dreams, "racial memory", unconscious insight, and other phenomena?
We broadcast to the world the nature of our current concerns, others
try to translate this into terms meaningful to their lives, resonances
are established, and occasionally we are able to pick up answers to our
original concerns. The human species as a single conscious organism!
Alas, I don't believe a word of it.
-- Ken Lawsrobert@erix.UUCP (Robert Virding) (05/29/84)
Alas, I don't believe a word of it either. Where is the transmitter supposed to be situtated? What is "racial memory"? Robert Virding
cooper@pbsvax.DEC (Topher Cooper) (06/01/84)
LENGTH: 108 Lines
RETURN-ADDRESS: ...decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-pbsvax!cooper
Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> summarizes an article in the May Dr. Dobb's
Journal called "Sixth Generation Computers" by Richard Grigonis. Among
other things it proposes that standing waves of very low frequency
electromagnetic radiation (5 to 20 Hz apparently) be used to explain
telepathy.
As the only person of I know of with significant involvement in both the fields
of AI and parapsychology I felt I should respond.
1) Though there is "growing evidence" that ESP works, there is none that
telepathy does. We can order the major classes of ESP phenomena by their a
priori believability; from most believable to least: telepathy (mind-to-mind
communication), clairvoyance (remote perception) and precognition (perception
of events which have not yet taken place). "Some-kind-of mental radio" doesn't
seem too strange. "Some-kind-of mental radar" is stretching it. While
precognition seems to be something akin (literally) to black magic. There is
thus a tendency, even among parapsychologists, to think of ESP in terms of
telepathy.
Unfortunately it is fairly easy to design an experiment in which telepathy
cannot be an element but precognition or clairvoyance is. Experiments which
exclude telepathy as an explanation have roughly the same success rate
(approximately 1 experiment out of 3 show statistical significance above the
p=.01 level) as experiments whose results could be explained by telepathy.
Furthermore, in any well controlled telepathy experiment a record must be made
of the targets (i.e. what was thought). Since an external record is kept,
clairvoyance and/or precognition cannot be excluded as an explanation for the
results in a telepathy experiment. For this reason experiments designed to
allow telepathy as a mechanism are known in parapsychology as "general ESP"
(GESP) experiments.
Telepathy still might be proven as a separate phenomenon if a positive
differential effect could be shown (i.e. if having someone else looking at the
target improves the score). Several researchers have claimed just such an
effect. None have, however, to the best of my knowledge, eliminated from their
experiments two alternate explanations for the differential: 1) The subjects
are more comfortable with telepathy than with other ESP and thus score higher
(subject expectation is strongly correlated with success in ESP). 2) Two
subjects working together for a result would get higher scores whether or not
one of them knows the targets. Its rather difficult to eliminate both of these
alternatives from an experiment simultaneously.
The proposed mechanism MIGHT be used to explain rather gross clairvoyance (e.g.
dowsing) but would be hard pressed to distinguish, for example, ink in the
shape of a circle from that of a square on a playing card. It is obviously no
help at all in explaining precognition results.
2) Experiments have frequently been conducted from within a Faraday cage (this
is a necessity if a sensitive EKG is used of course) and even completely sealed
metal containers. It was just this discovery which led the Soviets to decide
in the late 20s (early 30s?) that ESP violated dialectic materialism, and was
thus an obvious capitalist plot. Officially sanctioned research in
parapsychology did not get started again in the Soviet Union until the early
70s when some major US news source (the NY Times? Time magazine?) apparently
reported a rumor (apparently inaccurate) that the US DoD was conducting
experiments in the use of ESP to communicate with submarines.
3) Low frequency means low bandwidth. ESP seems to operate over a high
bandwidth channel with lots of noise (since very high information messages seem
to come through it sometimes).
4) Natural interference (low frequency electromagnetic waves are for example
generated by geological processes) would tend to make the position of the nodes
in the standing waves virtually unpredictable.
5) Low frequency (long wavelength) requires a big antenna both for effective
broadcast and reception. The unmoving human brain is rather small for this
since the wavelength of an electromagnetic wave with a frequency of 5 Hz is
about 37200 miles. Synthetic aperture radar compensates for a small antenna
by comparing the signal before and after movement (actually the movement in
continuous). I'm not sure of the typical size of the antennas used in SAP, but
the SAP aboard LandSAT operated at a frequency of 1.275 GHz which corresponds
to a wavelength of about 9.25 inches. The antenna is probably about one
wavelength long. To use that technique the antenna (in this case brain) would
have to move a distance comparable to a wavelength (37200 miles) at the least,
and the signal would have to be static over the time needed to move the
distance. This doesn't seem to fit the bill.
I'm out of my depth in signal detection theory, but it might be practical to
measure the potential of the wave at a single location relative to some static
reference and integrate over time. The static reference would require
something like a Faraday cage in ones head. Does anyone know if this is
practical? We'd still have a serious bandwidth problem.
The last possibility would be the techniques used in Long Baseline Radio
Interferometry (large array radio telescopes). This consists of using several
antennas distributed in space to "synthesize" a large antenna. Unfortunately
the antenna have to communicate over another channel, and that channel would
(if the antennas are brains) be equivalent to a second telepathy channel and
we have explained nothing except the completely undemonstrated ability of
human beings to decode very low frequency electromagnetic radiation.
In summary: Even if you accept the evidence for ESP (as I do) the proposed
mechanism does not seem to explain it.
I'll be glad to receive replies to the above via mail, but unless it's
relevant to AI (e.g. a discussion of the implications of ESP for mechanistic
models of brain function) we should move this discussion elsewhere.
Topher Cooper
(The above opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my
employer, my friends or the parapsychological research community).
USENET: ...decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-pbsvax!cooper
ARPA: COOPER.DIGITAL@CSNET-RELAY