From: ChuckKuecker (ckuecker@mcs.net)
Date: Thu May 07 1998 - 06:00:31 MDT
At 23:29 5/6/98 -0700, you wrote:
>
>I certainly don't think more experiments are needed in precognition because
>every week a huge experiment on it is conducted under the most rigorous
>controls imaginable. Every week in the USA millions of people buy lottery
>tickets and have been doing so for many years. On every Saturday 6 numbers
>are picked at random, each number can be 1 to 50, if you guess all 6 numbers
>you win millions of dollars, if you guess 3 you win about $10. If there were
>anything to ESP the number of winners should be larger that what you would
>expect from chance, but it is not, and if the effect is too small for even a
>huge experiment like the lottery to detect then The Princeton Engineering
>Anomalies Research sure as hell won't find it.
>
Is this the same thing as 'ESP' between two human subjects? I have always
wondered at the reasoning that you can test precognition by letting a person
read the outcome of a chaotic future event (lottery balls), or controlling
the outcome of some sort of digital device. Such experiments seem to be pure
magic.
For instance - suppose there IS such a thing as telekenesis. If one person
so gifted is present in a room with a lottery machine, he or she might be
able to influence the outcome.
Now suppose a few million of these gifted people, all wanting to see THEIR
particular numbered balls roll out of the machine. My thought is that the
conflicting forces would give a result indistinguishable from chaos. Similar
reasoning should hold for telepathy or precognition - after all, the
hallmark of a chaotic system is that you don't know where it will settle
until it does. Forgive me if I mangle some definitions here. Perhaps I am
meaning to say 'random'.
The ideas of telekenesis or telepathy seem more probable when you consider
two similar beings having some remote effect on each other. This kind of
research, done in a proper setting with a properly designed experiment,
should be able to show some results if a sufficiently large pool of test
subjects is used.
Of course, we will always have 'believers' even if several well-designed
experiments show no support at all for these phenomnena..
Chuck Kuecker
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