Reber and Alcock respond to Cardeña's paper in the American Psychologist

Interesting. What alternative concept(s) would you suggest?

Generally speaking, whenever I've gotten veridical predictions from spirits they always emphasize how what they're doing is reading the energy of things and that it's not "the future" its more "a future" and the one that's most likely for me if things continue the way they are now.

On top of that, the article clings to this notion that "oh you can't use some of these theories to support psi because the theories don't explicitly support what you're saying" Which isn't really an argument. Specifically in this case the idea that the future has no ontological reality to it so you can't get energy from it, thus breaking thermodynamics. Ultimately these are all gross assumptions on his part. Technically my work on poltergeisting suggests that it does, as unofficial as it may be. When they've worked I'm outright there in "the future" acting on objects that are really right in front of me at the time. It's just that my body isn't in the same timespace as my projection. But once it catches up, the things that I did happen exactly as I did them. The energy transferred directly between two supposedly non-contiguous points of time. How did they do that unless the future wasn't already there? Either I created it through a sort of wave function collapse thing, in which case the same thing could be happening in precognition cases, or it was already solid. In either case it would be able to transfer energy without breaking thermodynamics.

It's also an assumption that time can only be one dimensional. Again, I've favoured a multiaxial version of time, partly because that's what the physics from my memories says and also because I've gathered at least some evidence for it here. There's no reason time can't flow "forward, to the left and up" for example. Some of this comes from the elderberry case, where the guys trepidation of me and Teal being out of synch in time could cause her to not have the dream he was trying to give her if I did something that changed it. It doesn't mean the dream wouldn't've occured, just not for "her", that version of her.

I had something like this happen for one poltergeist that I thought for sure was not only real but that I'd found video evidence for. It later turned out that the video wasn't genuine and that still blows my mind because it's so close to what I remember doing. One explanation for this is that of the dimensional adjacency principle from my memories. Which is that if you look at two different timesapces they will be similar or different to a degree that is related to how far apart, or adjacent they are. I know I'm probably not using those terms right but whatever. In the same way that "one second from now" is going to be INCREDIBLY similar to now because both points are so close together, or have "high adjacency", the same is true if you go laterally in time. Which could easily account for why the video was pretty much identical to what I remember, yet the cause of it was different. Something that was a very normal, consistent effect to observe under that principle. And this was allegedly because every individual person, or more specifically the soul, was effectively their own individuated existence that was interacting with other existences and thus each one technically had it's own path it'd flow through all this contiguous.... stuff... information maybe. This applied to particles and stuff too if I remember correctly. Even though it was kinda like how everyone might take up their own little part of a river. They might cross over sometimes or go faster or slower than others sometimes but everything's still flowing in the same general direction(s). But since space and time were just results of all this and didn't technically really exist in the way that we'd think of them, you could have things have high adjacency to each other and yet low adjacency to other things, Like two entangled particles that seemed to share information despite impossibly long distances between them, or two seemingly distant points in time. I think at this point I'm just rambling, but maybe I made some sense for some of this.

The a priori arguments seem remarkably similar to the ones advanced by Reber 36 years ago. They say their comments about physics were vetted by two experts in quantum mechanics and declared correct, but I actually find it hard to believe that an expert in quantum mechanics would endorse stuff like this:
"If the future affected the present, it would violate the thermodynamic principle that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. The act of choosing a card from a fixed array, a common procedure used in psi research, involves neurological processes that use measurable biomechanical energy. The choice is presumed to be caused by a future that, having no existential reality, lacks energy."

This one seems to make no more sense in the American Psychologist than in the Skeptical Inquirer:
"Energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. When an individual makes a choice, cortical processes utilize knowable and measurable biomechanical energy. Within the world of psi, that choice is due to (i.e., caused by) a future that, lacking ontological status and having no existential reality, is bereft of energy and lacking in substance. Hence, the hypothesized effects can be operating only by creating energy in a closed system."

Can anyone make any sense of it at all?

When someone takes part in a precognition experiment, isn't it obvious that the biomechanical energy needed to make choices just comes from what they had for breakfast, whether their guesses are right or wrong?

I really appreciate the description, "it's not "the future" its more "a future" and the one that's most likely for me if things continue the way they are now". It reflects pretty much how things are for me.

Sometimes I've been in places in my life where there have been plentiful precognitive dreams, as well as dreams giving guidance. The way I'd describe things at that time is one of building bridges and occasionally burning bridges. There are times where I made a choice, of my own free will, which drastically altered the path I was on. The guidance I received in my dreams was accepting, and telling me that the future which had lain ahead of me no longer existed, but that a fresh one would be constructed. I liken it, again using building metaphors, to starting to construct something and then discovering that the foundations were undermined and so the current building materials would be re-assembled in a new variation of the old plan. This, like all large construction projects, involved contributions from many people. This picture is one of a lot of cooperation, even among people who have never met and are unaware of one another's existence, all working together to enable an outcome.

My feeling is that sometimes people may be given a little nudge, perhaps by unseen guides of their own, to allow the pieces to fall into place, while still honouring each person's own free will.

Apologies:  I don't wish to distract from the thrust of contributions from Chris.

Apologies:  I don't wish to distract from the thrust of contributions from Chris.

Not at all. That's probably a sign I'm posting too much.

I haven't listened to it yet, but it sounds as though Cardeña himself comments on the paper by Reber and Alcock in this New Thinking Allowed interview:

I finally found the time to listen to that, and I thought it was quite interesting.

It is indeed strange that the journal would publish a paper that leans so heavily on physics, written by two psychologists without any qualifications or expertise in that subject.

Courtesy of the SPR Facebook page - Gordon Bonnet on his Skeptophilia blog isn't happy with Reber's and Alcock's argument that psi is a priori impossible, and would rather remain agnostic about its possibility, "As befits a good skeptic":
http://www.skeptophilia.com/2019/08/the-...sible.html

But given his previous open-minded articles and Ganzfeld experiments and precognition, some hardline sceptics may already have been wanting to rename the blog "Woophilia."

It is indeed strange that the journal would publish a paper that leans so heavily on physics, written by two psychologists without any qualifications or expertise in that subject.

To be fair, you could say the same about appeals to quantum mechanics in psi-friendly papers written by non-physicists.

The rules of QM are used to probabilistically predict future observations (objective facts - shared classical stuff). But those QM rules also depend on virtual particles, which really do affect the probabilistic predictions of future observations. These virtual particles do violate the conservation laws of both energy and momentum. The shorter their virtual existence, the more they can violate the conservation laws of energy and momentum. And although they are emitted and quickly reabsorbed, they really do affect the probabilistic predictions of future observations (classical facts). There is not really any way of getting around that. So I’d say the authors claim is sort of meaningless... these virtual particles might be considered real or not real depending on ones perspective, but they do violate conservation laws, and informationally they have a very real effect upon QM probabilistic predictions of future observations.

The Wikipedial article on virtual particles says that virtual particles "always conserve energy and momentum."