Autcsrgv.291 net.misc utzoo!utcsrgv!donald Fri Apr 16 21:38:44 1982 Yet Another PSI article Do the parapsychologists *really* postulate a quantum exchange particle to mediate the "psi" interaction!? This seems like overkill, and also a bit silly: it would imply that brains, which work at the molecular level, can generate and detect an elementary particle with weird properties, via chemical reactions! Enough to throw a quantum electro- dynamicist (is that a word?) into fits! I agree with duke!bcw that of all the "psi" phenomena, telepathy is the least unlikely. Clairvoyance, if you think about it, usually involves a ridiculously large amount of selective information transfer between an event and the mind clairvoying (is that a word?) it. PK is perhaps the least reputable since Uri Geller got through with it and we return to the "action-at-a-distance" problem, which seems less tractable than the "information-at-a-distance" problem. As for O.B.E.'s-- no comment! Now I'll remove my skeptics' hood and plunge into a morass of amateur speculation ("a bon chat, bon rat", as they say) Given that telepathy exists (for the sake of argument), there is nothing wrong with it being instantaneous and all-penetrating. All we are given is that the states of two minds have through some mechanism become "correlated". Now if this correlation arose because of a signal being transmitted, one does not have to investigate far to realize that the traditional interactions are ruled out, so the parapsychologists propose the hypothetical "psi" mediator. But how about using the "correlated space-like separated events" that quantum mechanics (via Bell's Theorem) seems to predict? This allows superluminal connections between space-like events which may possibly turn out to allow the instantaneous transmission of information between the two events (and hence to correlate the events). We do know that humans are capable of detecting events which occur at the level where quantum effects are significant: a dark-adapted eye is capable of detecting less than six single photons. Anyway, Gary Zukav describes all this stuff (quantum mechanics, not telepathy) in his book "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters". Now all we have to do is take a big leap of faith... Speaking of which, you'd be surprised at how many Christian apologists attempt to argue that their faith is really based on facts and hard scientific evidence! Obviously they haven't figured out that God was an astronaut and Venus was a comet emitted by Jupiter. Sigh... ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.