Analog Science Fiction And Fact - June 2014 (23 page)

"Is this under warranty?"

"For Schrödinger failure? Sorry, nope. You see, technically there's a possibility that your computer is completely functional whenever not being observed. I hope you backed up regularly."

I groaned.

"Let me transfer you over to Sales."

Sales must have been training new staff. The data entry specialist, Ms. Heisenberg, claimed she couldn't enter my credit card expiration date during the same call as my credit card number.

Fortunately, she could manage PayPal, and there were sales on two models guaranteed immune to crashes, freezes, or other interesting ways of not working.

The cheaper one, unfortunately, was a model I'd already had trouble with: tablets and styli and I just don't mix. That left something which didn't have nearly as wide a range of apps. However, it was still cheap enough that I could splurge for overnight shipping.

"You'll need to be there tomorrow to accept delivery. Before we end this call, would you like extended warranty protection for your new abacus?"

Science Fact

In 1995, two academic researchers were tasked with assessing twenty years of U.S. government and government-funded studies of "anomalous mental phenomena." (You have seen the movie
The Men Who Stare at Goats,
right?) That awkward expression, "anomalous mental phenomena," stands in for abilities more commonly labeled as—take your pick— "psi," "paranormal," and "extrasensory."

One of the researchers—Jessica Utts, a statistician then at University of California Davis—reported:

Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude to those found in government-sponsored research... have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud.
¹

Reviewing the same information, her co-evaluator—Ray Hyman, then a University of Oregon psychologist—replied:

The occurrence of statistical effects does not warrant the conclusion that psychic functioning has been demonstrated. Significant departures from the null hypothesis
²
can occur for several reasons. Without a positive theory of anomalous cognition, we cannot say that these effects are due to a single cause, let alone claim they reflect anomalous cognition.
³
Confused about the state of evidence for paranormal abilities? Join the crowd.

In this article, we'll review some of the support—and objections to same—for the paranormal. We'll survey some science fiction reliant on the paranormal, consider this magazine's history with the paranormal, and take a look at the physics that might underpin paranormal abilities (if such exist).

Is parapsychology a science? Or is the paranormal in science fiction purely a trope, a bit of authorial legerdemain like a time machine? Read on. (Unless you're a precog, in which case you already know the answer.)

Merely the popular term
paranormal
is problematical. The expression
anomalous mental phenomenon
eliminates any implication of the supernatural, without def ining some presumed scientifically accessible baseline (the "normal") against which an anomaly is measured.

For the duration of this article, the phenomenon under discussion is: a mentally mediated transfer—whether of force, matter, or information—without technological assistance, under circumstances commonly understood to preclude such transfer.

Quite the mouthful.
Paranormal
has brevity going for it, and I'll use that term. (I'll retain the synonym
psi
when it appears in quoted text and in my discussion of such quotations.)

What might be examples of such transfers? Telepathy: the direct projection of thoughts to, or the reading of thoughts from, another's mind. Remote viewing: the perception of distant places.
⁴
Precognition: the perception of events before they occur. Psychokinesis (aka telekinesis): altering the physical state of a system from a distance. Mental healing: altering the health of an organism from a distance. Teleportation: relocating an object, including oneself, without recourse to muscles or artificial mechanisms. In this article, alas, space limits (of the most mundane sort: our page budget) preclude looking at equal depth at all forms of the paranormal.

Why consider such abilities? For one reason: because (per a 2005 poll) 41% of Americans report a belief in extrasensory perception and 32% in telepathy.
⁵

Founded in London in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was "the first society to conduct organized scholarly research into human experiences that challenge contemporary scientific models."
⁶
The SPR counted among its early members:

• William Crookes—chemist and physicist better known for his pioneering work with vacuum tubes.

• John William Strutt, Third Baron Rayleigh—physicist better known for discovering "Raleigh scattering," the explanation for why the sky appears blue (and holder of a Nobel Prize for codiscovering argon).

• Alfred Russel Wallace—biologist and naturalist better known for developing, independently of Charles Darwin, the theory of evolution through natural selection.

• Carl Jung—psychiatrist and the founding father of analytical psychology.

In two words: serious thinkers.

And yet, as we saw in the opening, more than a century later the case for—and against—the paranormal remains contentious. A closer look at typical studies will show why.

In 1927, J. B. Rhine, a botanist by training, established a lab at Duke University for the study of the paranormal. To make that research quantifiable and repeatable, Rhine pioneered the use of Zener cards: card decks of five easily distinguished shapes, designed by perceptual psychologist Karl Zener. Subjects were asked to identify—without looking—the shape on each of a long random series of the cards, sometimes after an experimenter had seen the card (i.e., by telepathy) and sometimes before (i.e., by clairvoyance). In trials that continued for more than a decade, Rhine reported subjects who indicated the correct card more often than sheer guesswork would explain.

A second phenomenon emerged in Rhine's studies: the longer the experiments continued, the less the observed improvement over random guessing. Does use of the paranormal diminish aptitude? Does boredom dull paranormal aptitude? (How long would
you
maintain your concentration on which of five shapes is up?) Does the Law of Large Numbers come into play, driving results toward the mean?

As for the validity of Rhine's results, not everyone is convinced.
⁷

The U.S. government's exploration of the paranormal during the '70s and '80s was mostly performed by or on behalf of the CIA. These are the underlying studies alluded to in the opening, and this research focused on remote viewing. (If you ran a spy agency, wouldn't you appreciate a way to inspect places of interest—say, suspected missile silos and nuclear-test sites—from the comfort and safety of your office?)

Many of these experiments involved a test subject and an interviewer isolated inside a windowless and shielded room (i.e., an enclosure designed to preclude signaling via electromagnetic radiation). The test subject was tasked to describe what a third party was seeing—or in the case of precognition experiments, what the third party would see. The interviewer would ask questions to clarify what the subject saw. Subject/interviewer dialogues were recorded; sometimes the subject would sketch or build clay models of the distant scene. The perceived scene (as captured in the recordings and any sketches and models) and the actual scene were then compared and the degree of match graded. In one test series, the locations were chosen from among sixty points of interest randomly visited across greater San Francisco; scoring depended on an evaluator identifying from the test subject's remote-viewing report the place the third party visited.

The lead experimenters for the CIA studies were Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, both laser physicists. Some of their early results with remote viewing appeared in two prestigious journals:
Proceedings of the IEEE
⁸
and
Nature,
⁹
and Targ continues to cite these papers in substantiation of his claims.

On the other hand,
Nature
accompanied Targ's article with an editorial that stated:

There was agreement that the paper was weak in design and presentation, to the extent that details given as to the precise way in which the experiment was carried out were disconcertingly vague.... All the referees felt that the details given of various safeguards and precautions introduced against the possibility of conscious or unconscious fraud on the part of one or other of the subjects were "uncomfortably vague."

A few years later,
Nature
published an additional disclaimer: an article by psychologists unable to replicate Targ and Puthoff's results.
¹⁰

While the remote-viewing experiments reduced or eliminated the "decline effect' sometimes attributed to subject boredom, in the process they sacrificed objective scoring. Consider the complexity of scoring these experiments. In how many features, and in what details of particular features, can the remotely viewed scene and the actual scene differ and still be counted as a match? Suppose the subject sketches a scene with several points of similarity to the visited location—but adds other details that correspond, if at all, only with structures that
were
present decades earlier. Does that circumstance count as a mismatch or as an instance of viewing remote in space
and
time?

In short, the determination of a match in each remote-viewing experiment was subjective, putting into question claims of statistical significance when aggregating results across several experiments.

The CIA's motivation, of course, was not scientific curiosity, and the Agency insisted upon more practical demonstrations. Test subjects were given geographical coordinates and asked to describe what they saw. One designated location corresponded to a suspected Soviet research facility that had been observed by spy satellite. The subject sketched a large crane in significant detail, matching a structure in the satellite image—and also several buildings that did not exist. Proponents of remote viewing claim credit for the crane. Skeptics focus on the discrepancies—and indeed, the subject
might have
drawn bunches of structures in the hopes of getting one right.

In another test, a CIA agent gave the coordinates of his private cabin in the woods. The test subject came back with a description with similarities to a nearby NSA facility. Was this experiment a success (the subject was drawn to a facility of claimed psychic significance to the CIA) or a failure (the viewed scene was not at the specified coordinates)? In the same experiment, the subject reported reading words and phrases out of file cabinets. Some of the vocabulary matched out-of-date NSA code words. Was this a success (real code words detected from a distance)? Or did those words popping up somehow reflect that those code words had been in effect when Targ, the interviewer in the room with the subject, had worked for the NSA?

In short, proponents and skeptics alike claim support for their positions from these studies. Such divergence can reflect honest differences of opinion. For a particular event of claimed paranormal significance, it's no small task to ascertain a probable cause. Was an anomalous phenomenon at work or something more mundane? How does one preclude every alternate explanation of:

• Fraud (whether by test subject or experimenter).

• Unintentional cuing (the test subject responding, even subconsciously, to the observer's reactions).

• Experimental design flaws.

• Wishful interpretation of ambiguous results.

• Statistical outliers (toss a coin often enough and you
will
see ten heads in a row).

Some skeptics discount any asserted demonstration of the paranormal until fraud can be ruled out—no proof of actual fraud required. Are paranormal researchers guilty until proven innocent? Isn't that an unjust standard? As we've seen, researchers in the field often have significant scientific credentials.

The counterargument: scientists are unprepared for experiments that might lie to them. Per Carl Sagan, "Scientists are used to struggling with Nature, who may surrender her secrets reluctantly but who fights fair... Magicians, on the other hand, are in the deception business."
¹¹
James P. Hogan, in his novel
Code of the Life Maker,
used a magician cum mind reader to drive home the same point.