Psience Quest

Full Version: Scientists send thoughts from brain to brain
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It's not sci-fi, it's not mind control, but a real-world attempt at telepathy.

"There is no psi - but we'll invent it!"

(More seriously - I don't really know what to make of this, but some tech-savvy acquaintances seem hot on it.)
My comments remain the same as last time:


(2019-03-28, 11:40 AM)Typoz Wrote: [ -> ]Overblown headline, but those are not unusual. Unfortunately it incorrectly and misleadingly describes the scenario.


I suppose attaching apparatus to the heads of each participant and linking said apparatus via the internet counts as 'nothing' according to the headline writer.
See previous post:
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-w...1#pid27061
Especially misleading. Basically, all they were able to do was transmit a visual perception of a shape rotating as opposed to not rotating. Then the writer enthuses, "Imagine a world where ideas and experiences could be shared directly with other people, allowing them to quite literally walk in your shoes or help you navigate unfamiliar and dangerous territory." A movement of an inch imaginatively stretched into a leap of a light year.

This technology is fundamentally incapable of actually transferring thoughts in mind, ideas whether concrete or abstract. Nobody has even the slightest idea how to stimulate the brain to force it to form specific thoughts. This ignorance starts with never having been able to localize any structures whatsoever responsible for abstract thought. Wilder Penfield's clinical research established that a long time ago. It's a category error.
(2020-08-10, 06:36 PM)Will Wrote: [ -> ]It's not sci-fi, it's not mind control, but a real-world attempt at telepathy.

"There is no psi - but we'll invent it!"

(More seriously - I don't really know what to make of this, but some tech-savvy acquaintances seem hot on it.)
From the article:
Quote: What makes this study particularly interesting is the incorporation of a situation where the Senders do not agree - that is, where one Sender wants to rotate the shape and the other does not. To test this, the researchers intentionally made one Sender less reliable than the other to see if the Receiver could figure out whether one Sender was more likely to be correct than the other. They quantified this by creating a “Mutual Information” score that measured how reliably information was conveyed from one of the Senders to the Receiver, and saw that the Receiver was statistically more likely to act on information from the more reliable Sender than from the less reliable one.

How can this be not good for Psi?   The receiver seems to be getting a "feel" for the best probability with an information loaded signal.