Presentations from the 62nd Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association

The Parapsychological Association has uploaded Dean Radin's presidential address, entitled "Making Sense of Psi":

This is the paper Radin refers to at 28 minutes:
https://www.scientificexploration.org/do...adin_2.pdf

The Parapsychological Association has uploaded Dean Radin's presidential address, entitled "Making Sense of Psi":

I can't help but notice Radin's physical resemblance to Max Planck in that video.
https://www.sciencesource.com/archive/Ma...87499.html    

This is the paper Radin refers to at 28 minutes:
https://www.scientificexploration.org/do...adin_2.pdf

I think that's quite interesting. The experiment (published in 2006) involved a system generating random bits (i.e. 1s and 0s), and the participant's goal was to produce more 1s than 0s. In the study shown, the participant (Radin) succeeded in producing about 56% of 1s out of 600 bits. The generation of the 1s and 0s was done in three stages, with an initial 1 or 0 being generated, then being flipped to the opposite state with a probability of 20% in two more stages. When he looked at the hit rates after the first two stages, he found initially it was about 50% (that is, at chance expectation) and after the second stage about 54%. He argued that this was consistent with only the final output being directly affected, and the intermediate stages being what would be expected in order to be consistent with that final result. (He calls this retrocausality, which I don't really think is appropriate.)

If the system producing the random bits is to act like a "black box," with the internal mechanism being irrelevant - as Helmut Schmidt suggested should be the case - it's difficult to see how it could be otherwise. But I don't think I've seen an experiment that has tried to verify it before.

The unfortunate thing, which Radin didn't mention in the talk, was that this was just a pilot study of 600 trials, and that the larger replication study of 2118 trials with the same system failed to produce any significant results.

I have been posting videos from this Convention in various other threads, forgetting I had started a thread specifically for it here. Eight have been uploaded so far, in this YouTube playlist on the Parapsychological Association's channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUw9kT19...ucfrCBTLcg

These two have been added in the last few days:

Callum E. Cooper | The Phenomenology and Impact of Perceived Spontaneous After-Death Communications


Christine Simmonds-Moore | A Grounded Theory of Ghost Experiences