On Fri, Oct 16, 2026, 1:35 PM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 16, 2026, 11:37 AM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> I don't have paranormal perception. >> > > Whether you know you have it or not is irrelevant. There are some tests > that Ed May has come up with that will fool you into exhibiting paranormal > perception against your will. I haven't run across a case where they didn't > work. > I'm reading the CIA report on the SAIC experiments. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5.pdf The fact that many of the methodologal flaws in the first set of experiments were fixed in the second set does not give me confidence that they fixed all of them. You can see some examples of where experimental conditions were changed in response to not finding an effect the first time. Most of the experiments were also done on the same set of 5 expert viewers. Usually the viewers got immediate feedback, which is not necessary. This is not good when both the viewers and the researchers are motivated to find an effect. In one experiment of the type that you mention, they wanted to see if a person knew they were being watched by measuring galvanic skin response. (Electrical resistance decreases when you sweat). The subject sat in front of a camera while a person watched on a monitor from another room for 16 intervals of 30 seconds each where the display was randomly turned on or off. They report a statistically significant effect. Except it is not, because the 16 trials are not independent because galvanic response changes slowly and because 16 bits is not enough to claim randomness. All 16 bit sequences are algorithmically random for any reasonable choice of programming language. Anyway, it is not clear to me why you would define consciousness this way. What purpose does it serve? ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T2784bbfe524b0b93-Mfc1190e83ea4a85366af0891 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
