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Parapsychology Needs a Theoretical Program
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Abstract and Figures
(This short essay argues that more effort should go into theoretical work on Psi phenomena).
As a scientific discipline, Parapsychology remains on the margins of mainstream science. This state of affairs impedes the development of the field and prevents Parapsychology from flourishing. A way to address the problem is to identify the elements necessary for any marginal or nascent field to gain acceptance by mainstream science and then examine the status of these elements within Parapsychology. A reasonable set of criteria for a field to transition to the mainstream is that the field's experimental and theoretical programs appear viable from the outside, and that the field has established a minimum of social features to nurture research and attract new scientists. The paper examines these three legs of Parapsychology-theory, experiment and social features-to conclude that theory is the weakest leg and proposes that strengthening research in psi theory will be necessary for the field to gain mainstream acceptance. The way in which theoretical advances can impact such a transition is illustrated with two cases of sub-fields in physics that overcame marginal status. The paper concludes with a brief look at how the field of Quantum Foundations offers a rich and diverse collection of results that may be relevant to psi and can provide valuable input to a theoretical program of psi phenomena.
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... Recent examples of such complaints were published by critics of parapsychology Arthur James Alcock (2019, 2020), but also parapsychologists have maintained that a lack of a theory hampers the scientific progress and acceptance of parapsychological research (e.g. Bancel, 2018). However, parapsychologists and associated colleagues have already developed numerous theories and models in order to understand and explain psi phenomena and their underpinnings. ...
... I have not yet come across an explicit attempt to develop a joint synthesis focusing on the communalities of different approaches. The present article aims at renewing recent appeals to advancing the theory of psi (Bancel, 2018;Bancel et al., 2019) in order to provide the most accurate understanding of psi and its implications for understanding the world. It includes a critical eye on mainstream sciences and focuses on creating synergies that draw from ideas about psi functioning that already exist. ...
Scientific facts are constituted as consensus about observable phenomena against the background of an accepted, or at least plausible, theory. Empirical data without a theoretical framework are at best curiosities and anomalies, at worst they are neglected. The problem of parapsychological research since its inception with the foundation of the Society of Psychical Research in 1882 was that no sound theoretical basis existed. On the contrary, the proponents of the SPR often indulged in a theoretical model that ran contrary to the perceived materialism of mainstream science, and many tried to use the data of parapsychological research to bolster the case of "mind over matter," yet without producing a good model of how such effects could be conceptualized. In general, parapsychological (PSI) research has been rather devoid of theorizing and, if anything, assumed a tacit signal theoretical, local-causal model of some sort of subtle energy that would be vindicated, once enough empirical data were amassed. History, and data, proved this stance wrong. We will present a theoretical approach that challenges this local-causal, signal-theoretical approach by proposing that parapsychological phenomena are instances of a larger class of phenomena that are examples of nonlocal correlations. These are predicted by Generalized Quantum Theory (GQT) and can be expected to occur, whenever global descriptions of a system are complementary to or incompatible with local descriptions of elements of such a system. We will analyze the standard paradigms of PSI-research along those lines and describe how they can be reconceptualized as instances of such generalized nonlocal correlations. A direct consequence of this conceptual framework is that misrepresentations of these phenomena as local causes, as is done in direct experimentation, is bound to fail long-term. Strategies to escape this problem are discussed.
At a fundamental level, the classical picture of the world is dead, and has
been dead now for almost a century. Pinning down exactly which quantum
phenomena are responsible for this has proved to be a tricky and controversial
question, but a lot of progress has been made in the past few decades. We now
have a range of precise statements showing that whatever the ultimate laws of
Nature are, they cannot be classical. In this article, we review results on the
fundamental phenomena of quantum theory that cannot be understood in classical
terms. We proceed by first granting quite a broad notion of classicality,
describe a range of quantum phenomena (such as randomness, discreteness, the
indistinguishability of states, measurement-uncertainty,
measurement-disturbance, complementarity, noncommutativity, interference, the
no-cloning theorem, and the collapse of the wave-packet) that do fall under its
liberal scope, and then finally describe some aspects of quantum physics that
can never admit a classical understanding -- the intrinsically quantum
mechanical aspects of Nature. The most famous of these is Bell's theorem, but
we also review two more recent results in this area. Firstly, Hardy's theorem
shows that even a finite dimensional quantum system must contain an infinite
amount of information, and secondly, the Pusey--Barrett--Rudolph theorem shows
that the wave-function must be an objective property of an individual quantum
system. Besides being of foundational interest, results of this sort now find
surprising practical applications in areas such as quantum information science
and the simulation of quantum systems.
An active area of research in the fields of machine learning and statistics
is the development of causal discovery algorithms, the purpose of which is to
infer the causal relations that hold among a set of variables from the
correlations that these exhibit. We apply some of these algorithms to the
correlations that arise for entangled quantum systems. We show that they cannot
distinguish correlations that satisfy Bell inequalities from correlations that
violate Bell inequalities, and consequently that they cannot do justice to the
challenges of explaining certain quantum correlations causally. Nonetheless, by
adapting the conceptual tools of causal inference, we can show that any attempt
to provide a causal explanation of nonsignalling correlations that violate a
Bell inequality must contradict a core principle of these algorithms, namely,
that an observed statistical independence between variables should not be
explained by fine-tuning of the causal parameters. We demonstrate the need for
such fine-tuning for most of the causal mechanisms that have been proposed to
underlie Bell correlations, including superluminal causal influences,
superdeterminism (that is, a denial of freedom of choice of settings), and
retrocausal influences which do not introduce causal cycles.
A theoretical framework is proposed that starts from the assumption that information processing by a brain, while it is sustaining consciousness, is restoring the break in time symmetry in physics. No specifics are given with regard to which physical formalism, either quantum or classical, is the basis of the subsequent apparently anomalous consequences: "apparent" because the proposed model doesn't require a radical extension or modification of existing physics. Rather it is argued that time symmetry that is already present in current physics should be taken seriously, and a simple initial mathematical formulation is given that allows for specific quantitative predictions. The elusiveness of psi phenomena, the experimenter effect, and the relationship of psi to other theoretical frameworks like decision augmentation theory (DAT), observational theory, and several others, are discussed. One of the major advantages of CIRTS is that it offers handles to link this theory to psychological theories that might explain individual differences. Specific testable predictions are given.
The concepts of complementarity and entanglement are considered with respect to their significance in and beyond physics. A formally generalized, weak version of quantum theory, more general than ordinary quantum theory of physical systems, is outlined and tentatively applied to two example.
A theorem is presented showing that, in a certain well-defined sense, any ontological embedding of quantum theory must have infinite excess baggage beyond that required simply to make predictions about the outcomes of experiments.
A brief review of the physical significance of the paradox of Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky is given, and it is shown that it involves a kind of correlation of the properties of distant noninteracting systems, which is quite different from previously known kinds of correlation. An illustrative hypothesis is considered, which would avoid the paradox, and which would still be consistent with all experimental results that have been analyzed to date. It is shown, however, that there already is an experiment whose significance with regard to this problem has not yet been explicitly brought out, but which is able to prove that this suggested resolution of the paradox (as well as a very wide class of such resolutions) is not tenable. Thus, this experiment may be regarded as the first clear empirical proof that the aspects of the quantum theory discussed by Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky represent real properties of matter.
We have measured the linear polarization correlation of the photons emitted in a radiative atomic cascade of calcium. A high-efficiency source provided an improved statistical accuracy and an ability to perform new tests. Our results, in excellent agreement with the quantum mechanical predictions, strongly violate the generalized Bell's inequalities, and rule out the whole class of realistic local theories. No significant change in results was observed with source-polarizer separations of up to 6.5 m.
In a complete theory there is an element corresponding to each element of reality. A sufficient condition for the reality of a physical quantity is the possibility of predicting it with certainty, without disturbing the system. In quantum mechanics in the case of two physical quantities described by non-commuting operators, the knowledge of one precludes the knowledge of the other. Then either (1) the description of reality given by the wave function in quantum mechanics is not complete or (2) these two quantities cannot have simultaneous reality. Consideration of the problem of making predictions concerning a system on the basis of measurements made on another system that had previously interacted with it leads to the result that if (1) is false then (2) is also false. One is thus led to conclude that the description of reality as given by a wave function is not complete.