Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> and Prof Dick Bierman, of the University of Amsterdam , replied:
>
> The raw data are public. Aynbody can make a running log. I have asked
> Roger to supply the running log of one year's of data. Of course
> that is a lot of calcualtions but I have heard that Dean Radin has
> gone back a number of months now and sep11 is still the only peak of
> that magnitude.
This result - this whole experiment - is simply too strange to be
believed. I mean that literally. If Damien personally went over the
blinded raw data and used the simplest test he could think of and found
911 jumping out at him immediately, then my guess would be that the raw
data was faked. Much worse has happened in the history of past psionic
investigations.
I would admittedly, at that point, probably be willing to donate at least
ten bucks if Damien wanted to get his own EGG and try recording his own
raw data and looking for the next terrorist incident, because that is the
Process of Science for dealing with data you think might have been faked,
and if Damien then said that *he* spotted it, I would have to get my own
EGG and try it.
But this whole experiment is simply too strange to be believed. There is
no non-nitwit many-worlds explanation for it, or indeed any physical
explanation at all, except one; that a desire in the present day - the
desire of the experimenters to find weird correlations in their data -
affected the past recorded data. That implies not only a solipsist kind
of universe, but a timeless, causality-violating solipsist Universe,
perhaps with no fixed past. It gets us into terrority that not even Greg
Egan has explored. Saying that the Universe is a computer simulation
doesn't cut it. I would regard this as *disconfirming* the hypothesis
that the Universe is a computer simulation; simulations wouldn't be that
weird on the inside but this normal-looking on the surface; only physics
does that. And easiest of all is for me to believe that they tortured the
data or that one prankster corrupted the data for 9/11.
It is, literally, too strange to be believed. I don't explain away the
crossing of the Red Sea as freak winds exposing the sea bottom; I assume
that the data was corrupted and that the report is memetic rather than
historical. I am forced to assume the same for this experiment, and will
continue to do so unless and until the entire scientific community
confirms it, or they come up with an experimental method that I can
personally implement and verify. If a DIY method is easy I'd do it just
for fun and for the glory of the Scientific Process; if it's hard, I
probably won't invest the effort unless someone like Damien says *he* did
it and it worked.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:55 MDT