User talk:AvantiShri

October 2021

Thank you for your contributions. Please mark your edits, such as your recent edits to Timnit Gebru, as "minor" only if they are minor edits. In accordance with Help:Minor edit, a minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute. Minor edits consist of things such as typographical corrections, formatting changes or rearrangement of text without modification of content. Additionally, the reversion of clear-cut vandalism and test edits may be labeled "minor". Thank you. WesGeek (talk) 22:05, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Now 22

Your recent editing history shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war; read about how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in you being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you do not violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly.Slatersteven (talk) 12:24, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, AvantiShri, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, your edit to Pam Reynolds case does not conform to Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy (NPOV). Wikipedia articles should refer only to facts and interpretations that have been stated in print or on reputable websites or other forms of media.

There's a page about the NPOV policy that has tips on how to effectively write about disparate points of view without compromising the NPOV status of the article as a whole. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the Questions page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, to ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Below are a few other good links for newcomers:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Questions or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!  jps (talk) 16:01, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

What is your basis for asserting that the Journal of Near Death studies does not count as "print"? Even if you claim that their peer review is flawed, the statement I objected to the removal of was that that this was the perspective of researchers of near-death phenomena. Wikipedia's own policy regarding peer review states that even when you have doubts about a journal's peer review, the journal is reliable for showing "the views of the groups represented by those journals". AvantiShri (talk) 05:14, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

JNDS is a so-called "pocket journal". You are correct that it promotes the perspective of credulous researchers of near-death phenomena (that is, they do not accommodate skeptics, for example, as the organization that runs the journal does not admit that the skeptical approach is valid). The only way we can include the opinions of such is if they have been noticed by third-party sources who are independent of the community of believers. This is because there is no other way for us to decide what is a prominent or notable claim that the near-death believers make and what is one that is so out-of-the-way that it is has been essentially ignored. To do otherwise would be a different approach: a "credulipedia" that would "accept all comers". It's just not what the consensus rules for this website are. jps (talk) 11:10, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

I have brought this up in other places, but to repeat it here for anyone else reading this: Wikipedia's policy states that "views held by a tiny minority should not be represented except in articles devoted to those views (such as the flat Earth)". Even if one believes that flat earth claims are in the same category as the idea that the formation of awareness (a long-standing open problem in physics) is linked to a phenomenon that involves distortions in spacetime (literally all that you'd need to postulate to allow for an explanation of these events; no need to involve the "paranormal", physics at very large and very small scales is weird enough to make room for this), wikipedia's own policy states that you should make room for those views in articles devoted to those claims. AvantiShri (talk) 07:29, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

It's pretty clear that you have a soft spot for poorly considered research that makes a variety of paranormal claims. That's fine, Wikipedia covers that, but only to the extent that third parties have considered such research. You have yet to demonstrate that anyone who is an expert in, say, physics, takes your claims about a physical model for awareness seriously and using this as a motivation for editing Wikipedia is a classic issue we encounter here when WP:PROFRINGE editing happens. This is what I think you are running afoul of here. jps (talk) 11:23, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm actually quite surprised you are making the claim that experts in physics don't take these claims seriously. Many of those at the forefront of parapsychology research are in fact physicists (off the top of my head: Helmut Schmidt, Peter Bancel, Alex Gomez-Marin and Edwin May).

I had stepped away from Wikipedia for the sake of my temper, but over the past year and a half I have had more time to delve into this research, and have only become more convinced of the strength of the evidence (and also convinced that Wikipedia has played a major role in holding back awareness of this evidence; case in point: I suspect you will look up the Wikipedia pages of Schmidt and May and conclude that they are not trustworthy, but if you actually dug into the controversy without a pseudoskeptical bias you would likely conclude, as I did, that their Wikipedia pages do not fairly represent their research and many other parapsychology findings...know that scientists like me often reference Wikipedia for an overview of a new field, so if Wikipedia distorts the evidence, this will prevent scientists from looking further). Are you aware that it is literally an open problem in quantum mechanics whether that which is modeled as "random" truly is random, or is in fact determined by "hidden variables" that are yet to be discovered?

Some references:

1. Published in 2018 in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association: "The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review". Non paywalled version here: https://github.com/AvantiShri/paperstorage/blob/main/APA_Cardena_2018.pdf (click the download symbol to download) - it concludes that "The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms". The only refutation I am aware of was one written by other psychologists and literally did not consider the data; it simply argued that it was impossible based on what Alex Gomez-Marin described to me as "pop theoretical physics". Case in point, the refutation did not even consider the mechanism by which these phenomena work via hidden variables, i.e. by creating deviations from what we have assumed in physics is "random". I'm honestly sickened by the state of the scientific institution that that refutation was considered publication worthy.

2. Published in 2023 in Biosystems: "Quantum aspects of the brain-mind relationship: A hypothesis with supporting evidence". Non paywalled version here: https://github.com/AvantiShri/paperstorage/blob/main/Kauffman_and_Radin_Biosystems_2023.pdf - basically argues that the evidence strongly indicates these phenomena most likely work by creating deviations from what we have modeled as "random".

3. Published in April of this year in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience: "Brain functional connectivity correlates of anomalous interaction between sensorily isolated monozygotic twins" - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2024.1388049/full

Finally, consider this statement from the 2016 President of the American Statistical Association (source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01621459.2016.1250592 )

"""

Parapsychology is concerned with the scientific investigation of potential skills that are commonly known as psychic abilities, such as precognition, telepathy, and so on. For many years I have worked with researchers doing very careful work in this area, including a year I spent working on a classified project for the United States government, to see if we could use these abilities for intelligence gathering during the Cold War. This 20-year project is described in the recent book ESP Wars East and West by physicist Edwin May, the lead scientist on the project, with input from his Soviet counterparts.

At the end of that project I wrote a report for Congress, stating what I still think is true. The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically, and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at data! And on the other extreme, there are true believers who base their belief solely on anecdotes and personal experience. I have asked the debunkers if there is any amount of data that could convince them, and they generally have responded by saying, “probably not.” I ask them what original research they have read, and they mostly admit that they haven't read any! Now there is a definition of pseudo-science—basing conclusions on belief, rather than data!

"""

Mechanistically, the evidence points to the following: the state of consciousness affects what has been historically modeled as "random", and the brain is not the only thing capable of creating signals in our conscious experience (it is unclear why we assumed otherwise in the first place, since we know we are conscious before we know about brains; in fact, the argument that brains are the only object capable of creating signals in our conscious experience is easily the most poorly considered argument of all, because it is based on the finding that when we alter regions of the brain, we observe alterations in consciousness assocated with those regions - however, if you damage a virtual reality headset that someone is glued to, they will report alterations in those signals originating from the headset, but this does not mean signals in their conscious experience can ONLY originate from the headset).

I have summarised the evidence in more detail in this article: https://avshrikumar.medium.com/the-global-princeton-experiment-that-found-trillion-to-1-odds-that-a-collective-consciousness-e94c911f79f8 - I found it deeply cringeworthy that (last I checked) the wikipedia page for the Global Consciousness Project does not even report the odds ratio achieved across all the events, and presents a post-hoc reanalaysis of one of the GCP experiements as though it consistutes a refutation of the overall finding. AvantiShri (talk) 01:20, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස disappointing that you did not respond to evidence published in established journals, given that you have played a key role in keeping such evidence off of Wikipedia, thus reinforcing the perception that such evidence does not exist. I'll also remind you, again, that subjects who have out of body near-death experiences were found to describe their resuscitations more accurately than those who do not have out-of-body experiences (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6172100/ ). The brain is deprived of oxygen during cardiac arrest and requires oxygen to power itself. Attempting to explain this as being due to a tiny part of the brain that is working during near-death experiences is like claiming that a virtual reality headset can generate a detailed and accurate depiction of the external environment even when its power source is severed. The evidence, considered without bias, points very strongly to the finding that consciousness can have structure that is not tied to physical matter. Given that there is no physical theory of consciousness, it is absurd that people like you make this unjustified assumption to begin with and then predent it is a sensible scientific default in the face of consistent evidence to the contrary, even coming up with circular conspiracies about why the evidence to the contrary must be fraudulent because you deem it impossible based on your unjustified assumptions.

You have very likely caused real-world harm by erasing awareness of this research. The primary differentiator between people who do not suffer in spite of hearing voices daily (the voices can be controlled and provide helpful information) and people who suffer from diagnosed schizophrenia (voices are scary, not under their control, and tell them to do harmful things, etc) is that the people who have their voices under control give them a positive metaphysical interpretation: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28053132/ . Consider this account from a Yale study that found that psychics who hear voices were similar to people with diagnosed schizophrenia in that they formed associations more easily ( https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/article/when-researchers-listen-to-people-who-hear-voices/ ):

If discarnate entities exist, it makes sense that they would find it easier to communicate with people who formed the types of associations measured in the study more easily, as there would be more routes available to "get a message across". By suppressing awareness of legitimate scientific information according to your unsubstantiated assumption that consciousness cannot have structure that isn't tied to physical matter, you may have literally driven people closer towards diagnosable schizophrenia. AvantiShri (talk) 22:28, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

I strongly encourage you to consider WP:MAINSTREAM and WP:CBALL. I hope you have colleagues who are honest with you who can explain to you how these claims all are on the WP:FRINGEs of plausibility. That's as far as it goes with Wikipedia. I remain unimpressed with the citations you are including here. Dramatic claims of this sort are surely worth publication in higher caliber contexts than the ones you cited here. No, not even the Cardena article is taken seriously. You seem to think that Wikiepdia is doing harm to your cause by adopting the status quo. Well, WP:RGW and WP:CBALL are all I can say. You need to go convince Science or Nature to take your claims seriously. Until then, this website isn't going to follow your approach. jps (talk) 23:36, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස I have talked this over with all of my colleagues and none of them could find an error in the argument. You seem to be in denial of how high profile publications work. Have you ever reviewed papers or witnessed the insides of how these publications work? I was at Stanford, and I did see it. Big Professors called up journal editors and strong armed them into accepting their publications by threatening to never submit to their journals again. Peer review is profoundly broken. Are you aware that Alzheimer's research was held back for decades because of how broken the scientific enterprise currently is (https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/25/alzheimers-cabal-thwarted-progress-toward-cure/ )? "In more than two dozen interviews, scientists who fell outside the dogma recounted how, for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences".

People like you are the ones interpreting Wikipedia's policies, and I am pretty sure Wikipedia does not have a policy that only research that gets published in Science and Nature is valid (never mind that the earliest study on correlated brain activity between identical twins *was* published in Science: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5890891/ ). Can you come up with a valid reason for why the Cardena article should not be taken seriously? "People's egos are threatened by it" is not a valid reason, but you seem to be in denial of how commonly this is the underlying reason, even among scientists. Scientists are extremely afraid of contempt from their peers. How long did it take for scientists to finally come around to the idea that homosexuality is not a mental illness? The evidence to indicate as much was always there, but the willingness to acknowledge it was not. If Wikipedia had existed then, and editors had suppressed the evidence that it was not a mental illness, saying "until you publish in Science and Nature we will not take you seriously", then they would have been doing harm under the guise of "just enforcing the status quo".

You can continue to hide behind the status quo to avoid the ethical responsibility to change it. You would have been one in a million if you actually given this evidence a fair hearing, and you don't seem to be that person. I am quite used to the status quo, but having witnessed the harm it has caused, I will continue to do what I can to encourage people to consider this topic with clarity. I strongly suggest you read this article on what constitutes a good thinking algorithm; long story short is that if you are rejecting an idea based on a feeling of contempt, then you are rejecting the idea because you are afraid of it, not because you can pinpioint that it actually lacks merit: https://avshrikumar.medium.com/the-secret-to-a-good-thinking-algorithm-6225b2bd4811 AvantiShri (talk) 02:25, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

I have talked this over with all of my colleagues and none of them could find an error in the argument. You are mistaking my explanation of site policies with a desire to have an argument with you. I'm not engaging with any argument you are making. You rightly identify that I am talking about the status quo understanding of the subject. The lack of the high-quality sources and this site's preference to emphasize the mainstream understanding of the subject at hand is simply how Wikipedia works. If you think Wikipedia has an ethical responsibility to buck this status quo, you will need to endeavor to change the policies and guidelines of the site. This will require getting a new consensus of the community for how to approach these subjects. Perhaps starting somewhere at the village pump to see if there is anyone who agrees with you. I suspect not, but we are an open community and so you are welcome to try to see if you can make the case. jps (talk) 03:05, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස thank you for the detailed pointers on where to start. Given the wording of the policy on high quality sources, my efforts would probably be better spent trying to get journal editors to publish research on the topic. However, I hope you can see how, even in this discussion, your goalpost shifted from "Wikipedia covers that, but only to the extent that third parties have considered such research. You have yet to demonstrate that anyone who is an expert in, say, physics, takes your claims about a physical model for awareness seriously" to "must be published in Science and Nature". That is the ambiguity in interpreting editorial policies that I am talking about. Discussion of the evidence for these topics is suppressed even on Wikipedia pages devoted to those topics, where (according to other editorial policies, namely the ones that allow the arguments of flat earthers to be presented on pages devoted to flat earth claims) it should be permitted. The status quo you can challenge is the status quo of selectively enforcing these policies. AvantiShri (talk) 03:51, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry if this discussion strikes you as problematically ambiguous. Please understand that there are a wide range of contributors who come to this site and not all of them respond to communication in the same way. It seems clear to me that it would have been better if I was more categorical about the rules and less chatty about the content. To be clear, I am happy to discuss my understanding of the sources that we include on this subject here at Wikipedia, but ultimately the best use of our time on this site and is probably a focus on what ends up in the search-engine-facing articles rather than a discussion about whether the evidence is strong or weak for paranormal claims. jps (talk) 04:06, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස sounds good. Maybe I'll be back in a few years, after throwing myself into neuroscience research (I switched fields for this, confusing everybody who expected me to reap the success I had in my old field; most scientists are in it for the ego validation, and so was I until the problems with the system were shoved in my face too many times to ignore). Having switched, I have learned that we don't understand the basics of how the brain works. Regions of the brain show synchronized activity even when that synchrony does not correspond to the neuronal structure of the brain; they causally acknowledge this in textbooks on functional MRI. If it's true that brainwaves can be synchronized between identical twins, as the evidence claims, then whatever is mediating that connection could be mediating connectivity within the same brain. You'd think I would be excited that there is such an obvious place to make a scientific breakthrough in this field, but I am just tired.

In the meantime, if you can articulate a reason for why you think these phenomena are implausible, I would be happy to hear it. AvantiShri (talk) 06:24, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

I think there are better spokespeople than I for the physicist's complaint about the conceit. You can start with Sean Carroll, for example. Appealing to quantum mechanics is the classic comeback, but the physicists who actually do quantum mechanics don't find that argument convincing at all and the neuroscientists studying consciousness like Anil Seth basically see no cause to invoke quantum mechanics for any of the known "consciousness" phenomena. In that sense, you are right to appeal to those extraordinary claims of the parapsychologists to have hope for the what I'll call hopefully without causing offense "a phenomenology of magic". And all these claims over the years have been characterized by a lack of rigorous, independent replication. There just is not strong empirical of evidence for things like EVP, ESP, remote viewing, or reincarnation. I never get past the null hypothesis. Your interest in PEAR work, for example, meets my own skepticism of their claimed results which suffer from, in my estimation, a poor outcome when hit with Bayesian approaches especially as the lack of double blinding in their Global Consciousness Project looks pretty glaring to me (you know, Look-elsewhere effects, and all that). What I see are people who want to believe getting the results they want to get. This happens over and over and over again and, to be clear, it's not just a problem in this area -- it's a problem across science. The issue is that these paranormal claims are fundamentally at odds with huge swathes of our understanding of material reality to the extent that what is demanded is a paradigm shift. Scientists just don't go for those unless the reasons are super compelling. That's the fundamental skepticism that lies at the heart of it all, and inasmuch as the ideas you are pursuing are marginalized (rightly or wrongly!), they remain fairly unconvincing to me. jps (talk) 11:23, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස so regarding that null hypothesis: you have set the null hypothesis at "all signals in our conscious experience can only originate from brain activity". As I recall, this assumption was at the basis of Sean Carroll's argument against telepathy/psychokinesis: "brains are made of matter", "matter interacts through forces", and if there were a force capable of these phenomena, they would have shown up in particle physics experiments by now. The entire argument hinges on the assumption that these effects originate from the brain, as opposed to originating in consciousness itself. This is the analogy that comes to mind: two individuals are wearing VR headsets and playing a multiplayer game in the same room. The VR game has its own in-game physics and communication system. The individuals bypass this in-game communication system by muting their mikes and speaking to each other. Other players in the game then deem this type of communication to be impossible because "the physics of the game is completely understood"; they completely ignore the possibility that the communication did not occur using the in-game physics.

I also find it really weird that Carroll asserts the physics of the everyday is completely understood, because the physics of consciousness is very poorly understood. In particular, the question of "what defines the limits of our conscious experience" (the so-called boundary problem of consciousness) is famously unsolved. To me, it makes sense that we are struggling to solve this problem because it would be like trying to use the in-game physics to understand what makes the avatars so special; the heads of the avatars obey exactly the same in game physics as everything else, but they are made unique by the fact that players tune in to their perspective; unless we acknowledge that the players are not created by the in-game physics, we will continue to struggle to solve the boundary problem.

Given that we only know about brains because we are conscious, and we do not have a physics that can explain the limits of our conscious experience, can you articulate why (without relying on argument from authority) we should set the null hypothesis to "signals in our conscious experience can only originate from brain activity"?

Regarding the statement that "Appealing to quantum mechanics is the classic comeback, but the physicists who actually do quantum mechanics don't find that argument convincing at all" - precision is important here. The argument I made is that a plausible mechanism by which consciousness could influence physical reality is by creating deviations from what quantum mechanics models as randomness. It is an undisputed open problem in quantum mechanics that there could be hidden variables which, if known, would remove the indeterminacy from quantum mechanics. I did a search in the article you linked for "random" and "hidden variables" and found no mention of either, so it is not clear how that article addresses the plausibility of the mechanism I put forth (note that the "randomness" assumption likely holds just fine as an approximation for the state of hidden variables in particle physics experiments, because those are not psi experiments). The article seems to be complaining about how you don't need consciousness to come up with an interpretation of quantum mechanics. I am not saying you need it to come up with an interpretation of quantum mechanics; I am saying you need it to explain the deviations reported by parapsychologists, and this mechanism does not violate any established laws.

"neuroscientists studying consciousness like Anil Seth basically see no cause to invoke quantum mechanics for any of the known "consciousness" phenomena" - again, precision is important. I am saying no laws are broken if we posit that the state of consciousness can influence hidden variables. Unless the consciousness phenomena Anil Seth discussed include parapsychology experiments, he would not have addressed this argument.

By the way, if you rely on the Wikipedia pages for a summary of the state of parapsychology research, you're not likely to get an accurate summary, as there are organized groups of pseudoskeptics (they call themselves Guerilla skeptics) who are very open about rewriting the Wikipedia pages on parapsychology research to suit their cause (and it is a cause, as their null hypothesis is on shaky footing): https://mitch-horowitz-nyc.medium.com/the-man-who-destroyed-skepticism-be35a6e5c5e4

Case in point regarding your understanding of the Global Consciousness Project: the experimental parameters were fixed and the time periods to be analyzed were chosen *before* the metrics were computed for them, so it wouldn't be vulnerable to overfitting (what you call look-elsewhere effects; I say overfitting as my background is in machine learning) *except* in the psi selection sense (in that the experimenters got extra lucky with their parameter choices due to relying on their intuition to guide them). Also, the GCP signal has been found to correlate with stock market activity and internet search trend data, though I haven't had bandwidth yet to replicate that analysis (but the guy who did it is a trained economist and says he did out of sample validation, which should address the possibility of overfitting): https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=l3Hb18MAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate

"What I see are people who want to believe getting the results they want to get." - have you considered that there may be more to this than just bias? These parapsychology experiments are experiments on whether beliefs affect reality. The beliefs of the experimenter would be included in this effect. Indeed, can even controlled for, as this experiment that was a collaboration between a believer and a disbeliever found; identical experimental conditions, the believer found an effect and the disbeliever did not: http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/staring1.pdf ("Experimenter Effects And The Remote Detection Of Staring")

I also think that if you drilled down into the weight of the evidence on near-death experiences and the like, you would find that it is not very easy to explain it away. You mention Bayesian inference; people do not lie without motive, and every time you have to appeal to a plot to fabricate data in order to explain away the evidence in a way that preserves your null hypothesis, you should *reduce* the weight placed on null rather than raise your prior on how often data is fabricated.

It's not clear how you can dismiss the work of the Division of Perceptual Studies without saying they fabricate data, which naturally raises the question of why no one has blown the whistle given that they take in new researchers constantly. Groups at UVA have tried and failed to shut down the department multiple times; the fact that they have failed to shut it down despite the enormous bias against this type of research is hard to explain if what DOPS was doing actually was fraudulent. Here is a summary of their reincarnation research, written by a (true) skeptic writing for Scientific American who took the time to drill in to the evidence - it was extremely brave of him to admit that he could not explain it away, even though he wanted to: https://web.archive.org/web/20240623230852/https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/bering-in-mind/ian-stevensone28099s-case-for-the-afterlife-are-we-e28098skepticse28099-really-just-cynics/

Anyway, I don't expect you to change your mind on this. Just wanted to make you aware of your assumptions, and request that you be more precise when trying to use argument from authority to shut down an idea. I learned the hard way that assuming an authority figure is smarter than you is a guaranteed way to never spot glaring holes in what they are saying. "This person in smarter than me" essentially injects anxiety into your thinking algorithm and does nothing but make you dumber. Doesn't matter how "smart" someone is, every smart person tends to go into denial when their ego is threatened. AvantiShri (talk) 12:23, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

A few points (let's keep it brief)

entire argument hinges on the assumption that these effects originate from the brain Not at all! You can have consciousness outside of the brain if you want. It just has to be in the physical world.

the physics of consciousness is very poorly understood Maybe you should read his follow-up?

"signals in our conscious experience can only originate from brain activity" this is the astonishing hypothesis. If you take the neuroscientists seriously (e.g. Anil Seth), this is the natural consequence of parsimony, as far as I'm concerned.

if you rely on the Wikipedia pages for a summary of the state of parapsychology research, you're not likely to get an accurate summary I think you should take a step back to consider whether or not I may be aware of a lot of what you are saying already. I give links to Wikipedia primarily because that is what we are. I do not pretend that these are rigorous considerations of the topic. This is only scratching the surface of the discussion, of course.

Guerilla skeptics I think you'll find that this is pretty much a Craig Weiller boogeyman. Look into whether his claims actually match the activities or not. Read through the talkpages here if you think that this is a coordinated group that is truly responsible for the coverage (hint: it is not).

the experimental parameters were fixed and the time periods to be analyzed were chosen *before* the metrics were computed for them, A laudable first step but, crucially, not enough. I linked to the statistical fallacies I linked to for a reason.

I also think that if you drilled down into the weight of the evidence on near-death experiences and the like, you would find that it is not very easy to explain it away. I have and I see no evidence that anything has been shown beyond what we know is possible in anoxic states, etc.

more to this than just bias this is exactly the confirmation effect. It will lead you into explaining away all disconfirming evidence if you take that tack.

dismiss the work of the Division of Perceptual Studies without saying they fabricate data They fabricate a lot, but they are independently funded and so there is no incentive for UVa to investigate them. Ignored byways of academia are not worth investing time into and Jim Tucker is basically ignored by everybody.

(true) skeptic writing for Scientific American Jesse Bering is not a "true skeptic" and I say this as his Facebook friend and one who interacts more than casually with his arguments and quesitons because of that very blogpost. Bering gives Stephenson the benefit of the doubt in ways that I have told him I find completely problematic, and we have more-or-less agreed to disagree on the subject. He is not convinced that this is good enough evidence for reincarnation anyway, so you can ask him why.

Just wanted to make you aware of your assumptions you may wish to take some of your own medicine.

jps (talk) 19:46, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස Sorry for underestimating how familiar you already are with the issue I raised about fair coverage of parapsychology research. I did find double standards in the talk pages, such as the policy I mentioned under which the arguments of flat earthers can be presented freely on pages devoted to flat earth claims, but the arguments of parapsychologists are suppressed on pages about parapsychology topics, as with the Pam Reynolds page that prompted this discussion.

Here's a quick response:

"Not at all! You can have consciousness outside of the brain if you want. It just has to be in the physical world." - yes, but it doesn't have to be in the physical world through what physics defines as a force. The difference being that forces alter the wave function; the evidence from psi experiments suggests that these phenomena work at the point of wave function collapse. Right now, the outcome of wave function collapse is predicted by the postulate of the Born rule, but the Born rule can't be derived without relying on circular justifications, as discussed in https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/10/29/lsd-and-quantum-measurements-can-you-see-schrodingers-cat-both-dead-and-alive-on-acid/

"Maybe you should read his follow-up" - I did, and he states without evidence that the physicalist explanations for consciousness are by far in the lead. This is a subjective assertion, and I don't think it holds up to scrutiny. For example, according to this review on the neural binding problems: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/

"Different visual features (color, size, shape, motion, etc.) are computed by largely distinct neural circuits, but we experience an integrated whole...There is now overwhelming biological and behavioral evidence that the brain contains no stable, high-resolution, full field representation of a visual scene, even though that is what we subjectively experience...The structure of the primate visual system has been mapped in detail (Kaas and Collins 2003) and there is no area that could encode this detailed information. The subjective experience is thus inconsistent with the neural circuitry".

Physicalist theories currently posit that the information is integrated in the EM fields, but it is not clear how the information is kept distinct and coherent (they have to favor the EM fields because there is nowhere else to look under physicalism). On the other hand, the integration of distinct neural circuits is natural to make sense of if we introduce a mechanism by which units of consciousness can tune into these distinct circuits.

"this is the natural consequence of parsimony" - to be favored by the principle of parsimony, you'd need to first have a complete explanation that makes fewer assumptions and favor it over one that makes more assumptions. But what we have are observations that are a mystery under some set of assumptions and which we can at least start to form a coherent explanation for by relaxing those assumptions.

"I linked to the statistical fallacies I linked to for a reason." - I am confused by this statement; you linked to a page problems that arise from multiple testing. Preregistering is how you address the problem of multiple testing.

"I see no evidence that anything has been shown beyond what we know is possible in anoxic states" - hallucinations are possible in anoxic states, but detailed, lucid and accurate perception of the world requires the brain to be powered. Important to distinguish between evidence and proof. There is plenty of evidence, but you are choosing to explain it away as being due to other causes (like fraud), thus it doesn't amount to proof.

"It will lead you into explaining away all disconfirming evidence if you take that tack" - not necessarily, because the experimenter effect can be controlled for, as it was in the paper I linked to.

Thank you for sharing your perspective; it is helpful for me to understand how you view DOPS and Jesse Bering. It is still not clear to me why new researchers would not have blown the whistle if evidence were truly being fabricated. People react very negatively to being deceived about topics like this, so I find it implausible that none of the new researchers would have spoken up if something was corrupt. AvantiShri (talk) 01:58, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

As far as "flat earthers" vs. "parapsychologists", I have to say that I think Wikipedia's coverage of flat earthers is problematic. It shouldn't be exhaustive. Most of their ideas should be completely ignored. We probably do a better job at getting WP:PAG alignment with parapsychology. Wikipedia is not perfect.

it doesn't have to be in the physical world through what physics defines as a force You lose physicists when you say this. The rest of this is just complaints that you want there to be action -- physical action -- without one of the four fundamental interactions. Where in parameter space are you going to put it? I suspect the answer is you are blowing up parameter space entirely. I'm really not going to go along with you on that ride.

You want to hang your hat, as it were, on interpretations of quantum mechanics. I will grant, as does Carroll, that we don't know the correct one. But consciousness causes collapse is maligned for good reasons. Not the least of which is that many of its proponents fundamentally misunderstand things like decoherence and what is meant when the term "observation" is used in quantum mechanics.

it is not clear how the information is kept distinct and coherent who said that information of the sort you are arguing about had to be distinct and coherent?

to be favored by the principle of parsimony, you'd need to first have a complete explanation No. You don't need a complete explanation. You just need one that follows more simply than extravagant alternatives.

you linked to a page problems that arise from multiple testing Oh, problems that arise from multiple testing are not the only problem at all. Look elsewhere effects occur post hoc in single observations all the time.... especially in particle physics, for example.

There is plenty of evidence, but you are choosing to explain it away as being due to other causes (like fraud), thus it doesn't amount to proof. If you won't take the possibility of fraud or delusion seriously, you're going to waste lots of time. The possibility becomes greater when you are dealing with these subjects. Even devotees admit this.

the experimenter effect can be controlled for C'mon! The experimenter effect is controlled for by only allowing believers to conduct experiments! You don't see a problem?

why new researchers would not have blown the whistle if evidence were truly being fabricated because there are a lot of various things at work that prevent this sort of thing. I think, just interacting with you, that you have a far higher sense of morality and doing the right thing than a lot of people out there in the world. People have complained about Tucker's division. The answer typically comes back from the University that (1) they do not endorse nor dispute any of his stuff, (2) he has academic freedom, and (3) unless there is evidence of material fraud (misappropriation of funds, willful manipulation of data, or rank incompetence), then there is no cause for dispute. But these kinds of complaints do eventually wear down academic institutions. This is why similar sorts of institutes were closed at Duke, Edinburgh, University of Arizona (still nominally running, but basically in name only as The Veritas Institute). I do not think the division of perceptual studies will survive Tucker's eventual retirement.

jps (talk) 02:33, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස quick reply since i need to work:

"you want there to be action -- physical action -- without one of the four fundamental interactions. Where in parameter space are you going to put it?" - *hidden variables*, ie the things that are hypothesized to remove the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics! It is a very glaring place where such parameters could be present and provide predictive power, without contradicting the existing parameter space. That is why I say this proposal does not break *any* current models, it simply challenges the postulate of the Born rule, and *only* under conditions where the randomness approximation does not seem to hold if we trust the available information.

"If you won't take the possibility of fraud or delusion seriously, you're going to waste lots of time." - I certainly take it seriously, but I also hold it up against a model of what secondary signs are typically present when people are being fraudulent or deluded. Usually, someone close to them is keen to call them out.

"C'mon! The experimenter effect is controlled for by only allowing believers to conduct experiments! You don't see a problem?" - In the experiment I linked to, there was a collaboration between someone who did believe and someone who did not believe, conducting the identical experiment. "Adversarial collaborations" such as those are how one would control properly for the experimenter effect.

Bit confused by your reference to a "post-hoc" look elsewhere effect that isn't a variant of multiple hypothesis testing (and also confused how pre-registering the analysis to be done could allow for a post-hoc effect). You mentioned particle physics so I found this article in the references section of the wikipedia page: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v4/s127 - but it still sounds like a variation of multiple hypothesis testing? From the article: "experimentalists must account for the fact that if they look at enough areas of parameter space, they are certain to see statistical fluctuations. To control for this “look-elsewhere effect,” the data must be normalized for the number of places searched in which a fluctuation could be observed."

Re. the idea that "consciousness causes wavefunction collapse stems from a misunderstanding of what an observation is": I know that there is no consensus definition of what constitutes a "measurement" in quantum mechanics, and the most parsimonious definition of a measurement is "something that provides information". Provides information to *what*, though? The hypothesis here is that a measurement could turn out to be something that provides information to a conscious system. I don't see how this stems from a misunderstanding of what an observation is, as it follows directly from the measurement problem?

Ok, i really need to focus on work now and set boundaries with how much time I spend on this. Thank you for providing your perspective. AvantiShri (talk) 05:44, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Unlike many who have arrived here with approaches similar to yours, I do think you have at least a handle on a lot of what the problems that I and others have with the "magic is real" kinds of approaches you are taking. I could go on at greater length to quibble with your points about adversarial collaborations (many end up with contradictory conclusions), trust in secondary signs for fraud detection, look elsewhere post hoc analyses (Frequentist versus Bayesian approaches along with blinding of the data analyses are my biggest concerns, mostly), but I think it's best for us to keep our discussions brief and thank you for adopting that strategy. :)

Briefly on quantum mechanics: while hidden variable theories are fun things to look into, I'm sure you are aware of the standard approaches which do not admit possibilities of quantum mysticism (which, hopefully, you are also no doubt aware have concomitant grift and fraud associated with the endeavor including more than a few who have no understanding of actual quantum theory).

In line with this, the whole measurement/observation conundrum ended up in certain "woolier" ares with wild claims about delayed choice quantum eraser experiments that have been, at least to my satisfaction, thoroughly debunked. If you set up an experiment where a detector can tell which slit the photon is going through, the interference pattern disappears. If you keep the detector active but destroy the which-way information recorded by a detector, the interference pattern does not reappear. Conscious appreciation of the which-way information is not needed.

Such discussions, in any case, are as good as any other to start. There are further rejoinders and discussions we can have trying to refine or isolate the differences in our ideas/approaches, but I suspect you can find all these counters without my help necessarily.

jps (talk) 14:28, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස OK, thanks again for the discussion. Re "If you set up an experiment where a detector can tell which slit the photon is going through, the interference pattern disappears" - am I correct in my understanding that this indicates that interaction with the detector causes decoherence, but does not necessarily establish that it causes wave function collapse? AvantiShri (talk) 15:48, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Maybe this can help answer your question. Briefly, while certain fundamental mysteries of wavefunction collapse remain, decoherence is more-or-less a manifestation of certain wavefunctions collapsing. jps (talk) 17:01, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස Thanks, I believe this aligns with my understanding; decoherence = now the system is one of several classical states, but to be a specific classical state, you need collapse.

Some closing thoughts: I too am concerned with the prevalence of nonsense permitted by quantum mysticism, but I don't think scientists will regain the trust of the public by painting with broad strokes and asserting that we know for certain it's all fraudulent or delusional when some of it (in my estimation) doesn't appear to be. After I became more open about the possible veracity of these experiences, I have found that such experiences were more prevalent in my social groups than I had previously thought; people just weren't telling me about them.

As food for thought: about two years ago a highly intelligent friend of mine (who is also a gifted scientist by training), on learning that I was receptive to the possibility of these phenomena, opened up to me about her childhood memories of a "previous personality", and she said she normally never tells the story because people look at her like she is crazy. She had not heard of DOPS' work, even though her story had all the features of the typical DOPS case: the memories surfaced when she was under 5, were very specific (first and last names of the previous personality, names of spouses, children, mode of death, and a profession), produced strong identification (as a child, she insisted that the name of the previous personality was her real name to the point that her parents gave in and changed her original name), and involved a traumatic death (a fire) that caused recurring nightmares (she says she would wake up in the middle of the night and run out of the house screaming that someone needed to save her children). Later, she says they learned of a family with the same names and profession that had died in a fire in the area that she had "recalled". She says that, as a 4 year old, she would have been too young to have read about the incident. I can try to come up with a story to explain it away (e.g. maybe someone told her about the story when she was young), but it is odd that she would not recall having been told about the story if it produced such strong identification to the point where she asked for her name to be changed and was having recurring nightmares. Besides, she knows the full facts of her story and was coming up short even though she is intelligent enough to have considered these explanations. She also has no shortage of reasons to search for a mundane explanation given that she knows the story is viewed as insane by her peers, and she was not spiritual (I actually expected her to react negatively when I told her I was open to the possibility of such phenomena). I couldn’t get past how well it fit the typical DOPS profile, specifically the age and the traumatic death. These are the kinds of things that emerge when people feel safe enough to share their stories, and they affect my posterior probability estimate that DOPS is faking everything.

I could go into a working hypothesis for why I think the DOPS findings are not as bizarre as they may seem at first; briefly, we understand very little about how memories are stored, and even though changes in the brain can create false memories, it is genuinely not clear whether the brain stores the memory itself or just influences which memories are accessed. I didn't ask my friend if she had unusual birthmarks/birth defects, but even this finding is not so strange when we consider research that shows organism development is goal-driven (that is, organisms seem to have an encoding of their end-state and can develop towards this end-state even when the initial conditions are messed with, as with Michael Levin's "Picasso Frogs" experiment); in other words, a sufficiently strong conviction that "there is an injury in this region of my body from a previous life" could plausibly lead to birth defects in that region, like a harmful version of the placebo effect? This is obviously just a hypothesis, but a plausible enough one that I am not so quick to conclude that the DOPS research is fabricated, especially after encountering cases like this where someone who was otherwise grounded and had never heard of DOPS opened up to me about a story that sound like the typical DOPS case after she felt safe doing so.

Anyway, thanks again for the discussion and I wish you well. AvantiShri (talk) 02:15, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

It has been enjoyable to continue this exchange. Most of the people advocating for similar understandings to yours who come through here are so thoroughly convinced that they are right we never actually get to discuss material in this fashion. These things stuck out about your discussion:

1) asserting that we know for certain it's all fraudulent or delusional I don't know if "for certain" is correct here. I tend to think of "certainty" in the context of scientific explanation as something that boils down to empirical evidence and the explanatory power of a theory. By necessity, we leave almost any hypothesis open to review, but this is both a benefit and a drawback. How do I decide which hypotheses are worthy of attention? We both agree that the Earth is not flat, but it is locally flat. It is understandable that a person unable to access measurement equipment that can show the Earth is not flat might desire us to float the alternative hypothesis. I think this is a waste of time, but others entertain these advocates even as demonstrations of "Earth = globe" are unconvincing. What could explain this? Wishful thinking, delusion, and grift all seem plausible to me, but tell that to the Flat Earther and you will get a response of resentment. They complain that we aren't taking their hypothesis seriously. I don't mean to say that your hypothesis is more or less plausible than the Flat Earther's but, absent metrics beyond the empirical evidence and explanatory theory, I am left with the skeptic's indictment where we put all these ideas in the same giant group excluding it from scientific plausibility. This tends to offend everyone. The Flat Earthers don't think that ghosts exists. The ghost hunters are offended that people don't believe in evolution. The creationists think UFOs are a figment. And so on.

In your case, you have particular paranormal hypotheses which you think we should investigate more carefully than you think the community has done. I think that there isn't a strong case for that given limited resources and the kinds of no-go principles I was referencing about physics and the plausible (in my mind) alternative hypotheses for the claimed evidence. In this, I liken it to any number of other extraordinary claims that are made.

2) it is odd that she would not recall having been told about the story if it produced such strong identification to the point where she asked for her name to be changed and was having recurring nightmares Is it? I don't find it odd at all. Trauma provokes all sorts of interesting responses and overhearing such a story as a very young child is traumatic. Early childhood memories are unreliable and almost anyone is susceptible to having false memories.

You seem to think that fraud and delusion are damning charges against the DOPS claims. But I think they are actually very prosaic. One way that fraud and delusion happen which every human being runs the risk of engaging is wishful thinking. This can be done from a completely innocent motivation. I do not doubt that Stephenson and Tucker believe in reincarnation. Stephenson, of course, was brought up from childhood believing in reincarnation.

jps (talk) 15:52, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

@ජපස Wishful thinking as an explanation feels like stretch because when you sit down with the "Reincarnation And Biology" textbooks and look at the documentation (https://archive.org/details/reincarnationandbiology01/page/11/mode/2up ), you find that it isn't sloppy. People doing this due to wishful thinking would be predicted to keep sloppy documentation.

"Trauma provokes all sorts of interesting responses" - when dissociative identities are created, they serve the role of protecting the ego state from the traumatic memory. Here, you are suggesting that a dissociative identity was created to *overidentify* with the traumatized ego state (not just that, but replace it with an even more traumatized one where she actually *is* the person getting burned, not just hearing a story about it). This does not align with what we know of how trauma affects memory.

"Early childhood memories are unreliable" - yes, but DOPS cases never rely on the the child's memory, but on the testimony of family members. They only rely on the child when testing the child. (and if you were referring to my friend's case: her parents told her she behaved like this). AvantiShri (talk) 21:18, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

People doing this due to wishful thinking would be predicted to keep sloppy documentation. I don't know why you say this. In my experience, rigor can be found whenever people get obsessive enough, and some of the most passionate rigor I have ever seen comes out of cults. Not saying this is a cult... just saying I do not see the truth in the proposition that sloppiness is a feature of wishful thinking.

I'm not really saying anything specific about these possible psychological explanations for reincarnation claims. What I am saying is that the etiology is so wide and varied in such scenarios that trying to tease out a specific cause for any given claim is necessarily fraught.

I am also not sure why you think I should accept parents as being particularly reliable narrators.

Stories are poor forms of evidence, AFAIC. jps (talk) 14:50, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Notice of Fringe Theories Noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. jps (talk) 15:02, 4 November 2022 (UTC)