You may vaguely recall that Deepak Chopra claimed the results from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) labs supported his religious ideas. In a very timely bit of news, Jeffrey Shallit reports that PEAR is closing after 27 years of embarrassing futility. About time.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Unrelated in a sense, but did you discuss with Dawkins that exceedingly stupid anthem “God Save the Queen”, asking a superstition to preserve an anachronism? Has Dawkins publicly asked that the song be abolished?
A Guru in Disgrace, a poem
.
GOD IS HIS EQUAL
.
the guru preaches
his distorted
views of the world,
including God,
to everyone.
the ones with
lesser intelligence
buy whatever he
sells.
but the ones even with
some commonsense
don’t tolerate his
nonsense.
they ask him questions.
he answers to no one
but keeps on preaching
further his nonsense.
He only talks with God —
his equal — 3 hours a
day in deep meditation.
and always shows his
bitterness exposing further his
foolishness to people like
Myers and Dawkins.
~white wings
http://whitewings.sulekha.com/blog/post/2006/11/god-is-his-equal.htm
What struck me in the Princeton obituary:
“Jahn’s general conclusions are that anomalous phenomena are real, can be studied scientifically in large data sets, and could be used in applications. He admitted that some of his faculty colleagues view the research with skepticism, and others have been completely dismissive. But he does not think that the engineering anomalies work affected his reputation as a distinguished researcher in electric and plasma propulsion. Princeton’s Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory, which Jahn started in 1961, remains at the vanguard of the field under the direction of one of Jahn’s former students, Edgar Choueiri *91, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.”
So thirty-odd years of researching something that actually exists brings results, whereas …
from Shallit’s article from the link above:
Jahn claims “it has been the most personally stimulating and rewarding intellectual activity I’ve ever been involved in”.
Strenuous mental acrobatics and successful self deception could be described that way.
I wonder what sort of formal scientific studies have been done on the causes and effects of wishful thinking in adult humans. Maybe it is so obvious to anyone that there would be no point.
Believers will soon be saying this is evidence that they are right. The powers that be couldn’t allow something so revolutionary to be revealed as it would threaten the status quo. They were on the verge of knowing too much. Or something like that.
I totally predicted this would happen!
Most embarrasingly, there is also a chair of parapschology at the University of Edinburgh founded by a grant from Keostler’s widow …..
I know a graduate of this school – don’t ask ….
Unfortunately this won’t bring Deepak to reconsider his position.
He’s such a joke!
Actually, one of the bright sides of something like PEAR, is that believers in paranormal phenomenon can’t honestly claim that no one has seriously looked into their claims. That being said, 30 years of serving that purpose is long enough.
Lies As Proofs of Life After Death, a poem by WW
LIFE AFTER DEATH, PROOF # 2
“Besides the various experiments in telepathy and ‘remote viewing,’ which are much more credible than skeptics will admit, there is a replicated study from the engineering department at Princeton in which ordinary people could will a computer to generate a certain pattern of numbers. They did this through thought alone, having no contact with the machine itself.”
~Deepak Chopra gives proof of life after death scientifically
http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2006/11/what_happens_af.html
***
It is concluded that the quoted significance values are meaningless because of defects in the experimental and statistical procedures.
~George P. Hansen, Jessica Utts, Betty Markwick
http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/PEARCritique.htm
Originally published in the Journal
of Parapsychology, Vol. 56, No. 2,
June 1992, pp. 97-113.
***
to cite unproven proofs
of psychokinesis
as proofs of afterlife —
misleading and telling lies —
is chicanery in itself
and is punishable for
charlatanism in this life,
and for rotting in hell when
Yama presents the guru’s
soul to the maker of life.
~whitewings
V
The national anthem shares with several other features of British life (eg the Royal family) the fortunate position of causing many/most Britons mild embarrassment (in this instance more for its dirge-like qualities than anything else), so hardly anybody takes it seriously, so people don’t get worked up enough about it to abolish it. Survival by apathy – it’s the British way.
Indeed. I’m not proud to have such a load of hogwash as a national anthem. But I _am_ proud to have a national anthem to which no-one can ever remember the words.
Deep-pockets Chopra
Since I promote ignorance
To make more money
Buy my books and tapes
For just a nominal fee
Stay foolish for me
You must buy my book.
I promise there won’t be math.
Go get your wallet.
Bah. How can anyone not love an anthem that says we must confound the politics of the French (and frustrate their knavish tricks), and crush the rebellious Scots?
And even PZ would surely agree with the sentiment of verse 8:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Save_the_Queen#Lyrics
The only problem is that no-one ever gets past the first verse.
God Delusion? Part3 by Deepak Chopra
http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2006/11/the_god_delusio_2.html
Also at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/the-god-delusion-part-3_b_34497.html
This cements it for me. Chopra’s an idiot.
Knowing a little about how computers actually work, I have to call bullshit on this. Even if it were possible for a person to manipulate the state of computer hardware through thought alone (it isn’t, sorry guys), they’d have to know how to manipulate that state in the right way to produce the desired result; they’d have to be intimately familiar with the design of the computer hardware and software to know which bits to flip, in the right order, to do what was claimed.
Now, if they were claiming that people could crash a system through thought alone, I’d be a little less skeptical; I have anecdotal evidence that some people can bring down a system just by looking at it. This may not be a random sample, however; I’ve only seen it happen to senior management.
I understand the Chopra’s not a computer scientist or electrical engineer, but even so, that level of credulity is disturbing in someone who calls himself “Dr.”
John Bode wrote:
We know you wrote this with tongue in cheek, but for the reality-challenged amongst us, perhaps it would be best if that is made clear.
BTW, I have personal experience of the exact opposite – I have the amazing ability to make computer problems go away merely by examining them. At least that’s how it appears, when I get called to someone’s office to see a problem they are complaining about. Poof! No problem. ;-)
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out the existence of Britain itself made British people feel embarrassed.
John Bode & others:
Chopra is misreporting and over-interpreting some of the odd but questionable results from PEAR. They had a random number generator (RNG), physically based, not a programmed pseudorandom algorithm. Various people were asked to try to influence the generator by thought alone, under different circumstances. For some attempts, PEAR came up with statistically significant departures from chance. The really bizarre “findings” were some case when the subject was (IIRC) not presented with the RNG output, but with a *recording* of a previous run. The woo-woo interpretation that the subject’s intention was being transmitted to the past has not been widely accepted, although Deepak is doing his part to spread it.
Ginger Yellow wrote:
So, that “hanging on in quiet desperation” thing really was true after all?
Where Does God Come From? a poem
.
CHILHOOD STORIES AND MEMORIES
.
the fundamental problem
with the fundies like
the dingbat followers
of a dingbat guru is:
they have firmly made
up their minds from
childhood stories and
memories that God is.
like enchanting stories
of Savitri, Ramana and Yama,
Lord Krishna and his women,
Lord Shiva and Parvati, his beloved.
like Jesus, Joseph and Mary
and her immaculate conception.
and Jesus, God and the holy ghost
living somewhere in the heaven.
so no matter what Dawkins says,
Hawkins says or Myers says,
their brains are open to none,
or perhaps they’ve no brains.
~white wings
http://whitewings.sulekha.com/blog/post/2006/11/chilhood-stories-and-memories.htm
You know, it’s funny John Bode should bring something like that up, and he’s right of course — the most the vast majority of hypothetical telepaths/telekinetics could possibly do is crash the computer by disrupting electron flow on the motherboard. (In fact, I’ve often wondered if “natural”, unaided telepathy could ever work even if there was a mechanism — how do we know the underlying “machine language” of the human brain is even compatible from one person to the next? As it is, it doesn’t need to be because virtually all human communication is high-level, with no mechanism yet known for direct brain-to-brain interfacing.)
I think it was the White Wolf game “Mage: the Ascension” that pointed out one very important thing about magic: just because you have the power to create something doesn’t mean you have the knowledge to do it. Creating a laptop out of thin air as you pretend to pull it out of a briefcase would require not just impossible magical powers, but an equally impossible in-depth understanding of how computers work. If the paranormal did exist, it would be nothing like the woo-woos imagine it.
Guru’s Universe, a poem
“GHOSTLY VIBRATIONS WINK IN AND WINK OUT”
“Rather, ghostly vibrations wink in and out of the universe thousands of times per second, and what lies beyond the boundary of the five senses holds enormous mysteries.
Enough mysteries, in fact, to be consistent with God.”
~Deepak Chopra
The God Delusion? Part 3
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/the-god-delusion-part-3_b_34497.html
http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2006/11/the_god_delusio_2.html
***
the guru sees the ghostly
vibrations winking in
and winking out of the
universe as he sees souls and
the ghostly god of death, Yama.
air, water, earth, aether, fire
were the five elements God used –
as per guru and his vedas –
to make man and the universe
and he breathed into man a
piece of himself – the soul –
and lo! stood there before him
a naked man and a naked women.
enough mysteries,
in fact so many mysteries
to be consistent with God,
all found in bible and vedas.
but not as many as before when
man’s mind was like the guru’s –
mystery of fire in the god of fire,
mystery of air in the god of air,
mystery of rains in the god of rains,
mystery of water in the god of waters.
now mystery of DNA perplexes the guru
as the mystery of his own irrational brain.
the guru invokes God for everything
he is incapable of to understand,
scientists invoke logic to understand
what some pee-wee brains can’t understand.
~white wings
http://whitewings.sulekha.com/blog/post/2006/11/ghostly-vibrations-wink-in-and-wink-out–3.htm
Okay, that makes a little more sense; my same objection still applies, though, in that I can’t see how you can manipulate a physical system to create a particular outcome unless you understand how that system works in great detail. If the RNG were tied to a radioactive source, for example, you would have to know how many atoms to manipulate, and in the right way, to trigger the right amount of decay to translate into a particular value.
And aside from all that, they should have used a physical source to generate a non-random sequence, and have the subject attempt to influence it. ISTM that such an experiment would be far more convincing, easier to verify, easier to eliminate noise from, and be less subject to woo-woo-ism when interpreting the result.
What the hell is a ghostly vibration?
Where’s Dr. Peter Venkman to explain it all? Anyone seen Spengler?
John: It was a radioactive source. The mechanism was measuring the times of three subsequent decay events. If the interval between the first two was greater, then it was counted as heads. If the interval between the second two of the three was greater, then tails.
A common belief (what they would call a finding) among parapsychology researchers is that peoples’ ability to manipulate the output of random processes is not dependent at all on the complexity or scale of the process. The magnitude of the influence seems to be the same in any case.
If I understand correctly, the RNG experiments at PEAR did, collectively, show a very small (like .02% or something), but still significant effect. (In fact, I believe that, due to the very large number of trials (millions), that there was no question as to the significance, barring bad statistics.)