Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site decwrl.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-pbsvax!cooper From: cooper@pbsvax.DEC (Topher Cooper) Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: Re: Dreams: A Far-Out Suggestion Message-ID: <894@decwrl.UUCP> Date: Thu, 31-May-84 18:31:58 EDT Article-I.D.: decwrl.894 Posted: Thu May 31 18:31:58 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 2-Jun-84 12:11:14 EDT Organization: DEC Engineering Network Lines: 108 LENGTH: 108 Lines RETURN-ADDRESS: ...decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-pbsvax!cooper Ken Laws 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