Tag: confirmation bias

Coincidence is Logical – Except When it Isn’t

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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There is a certain type of person who prefers to ascribe coincidence, or random happenstance to events rather than accept any unproven {hypothetical} causal links. It would take a multiplicity of “coincidental” occurrence before they would deem significant corelation of happenstance sufficient to justify either causal linkage or even causality itself.

If the statistics to the contrary started to build up, they would resist dropping the logical conclusion of coincidence for quite a while.

Because of this they would never believe in karma. Even were it to slap them around the chops with a large wet pollack.

Say for discursive example you were covertly reading this blog and perhaps making some cunning plans which in some way pertained to me. You then noted that I posted “We’re only making plans for Nigel” here. The first port of call would be that this was entirely coincidental. You might start a tad, nevertheless. It is logically impossible for someone in another country to know that you were discussing or chatting about them. The occult ability of “seeing” belongs only to fictional characters like “Wednesday Addams”. At a stretch you might go so far as to think I had made some lucky intuitional guess which by fluke of timing matched circumstance. No way would you, as a rational scientist, accept that seeing is possible and that I am capable thereof.

People therefore write off many things because their confirmation bias says that they cannot or should not be possible. Anecdotal evidence of not boarding a plane because of  bad vibe and it subsequently crashing and burning, remains anecdotal and conversational perhaps to be found on “The Daily Mail”. The life of those prone to ascribing things near always to coincidence is a bit boring and chances are that they miss a great deal. They should steer well clear of roulette, statistics says so.

There are however many things for which coincidence and random happenstance are poor explanations. But logic is very limited and as it is currently formulated fails to encompass many things without far-fetched hypotheses like dark energy and dark matter.

“Show me a can of dark matter!!”

There is a part of society which believes in karma and synchronicity. Were you forever looking for these things then chances are you will find them. You could argue that belief in synchronicity is a self-fulfilling prophecy because of confirmation bias. Similarly if you were fond of the notion of seeing, ANY thing, any event, no matter how small could provide you with proof of efficacy. You could comb the opus of Nostradamus or the Revelation of Saint John and find clear {and incontrovertible} evidence of fulfilment of prophecy. It might not occur to you that you are kidding yourself.

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So where is reality?

Is it that coincidence is logical except when it isn’t?

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The Book of Revelation, also known as the Book of the Apocalypse or the Apocalypse of John, is the final book of the New Testament, and therefore the final book of the Christian Bible. Written in Greek, its title is derived from the first word of the text, apocalypse (Koine Greek: ἀποκάλυψις, romanized: apokálypsis), which means “revelation” or “unveiling”. The Book of Revelation is the only apocalyptic book in the New Testament canon and occupies a central place in Christian eschatology.

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Information and Context

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Because people are lazy, they tend to treat information in a monopolar way, without actually acknowledging that. We have monopolar information. They are very confirmation bias oriented. The red caps might hear gospel from the don, the green caps from The Guardian and the anti-brown-Islam-o-phobes might want to hear Uncle Nigel pontificate. People perceive according to how they want to perceive, they believe what they want to hear. Perception is monopolar and not balanced or heteropolar. Bias is pandemic.

Taking a monopolar information source out of a wider context is rarely wise. Newspapers are sold to their biased audience and articles are targeted at that bias. Tell me what I want to hear and I will buy your newspaper, or clickety-click it on line so that you can get advertisement revenue.

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I could say that I have a fair general knowledge. Out of context that is a lie. I would be shit at normal pub quiz general knowledge, because a) I don’t like soccer, b) I have no idea about current soap operas and c) I know nothing about package holiday destinations nor who is hot on social media. I would be a middling team member on a University Challenge quiz team.

I can say with a fair degree of confidence that I understand how academic science is enacted and reported. I may be rusty on nuance, but I have a good gist. I can read a Nature article and know to what extent I understand and if there are gaps in understanding which I might need to follow up on. If I watch a video on YouTube, I know that it is almost always surface and that people have a click generating agenda. Pass the Saxa salt, please.

I have read widely in the esoteric – occult – new age bookshelves of the library, the one with actual books in not on-line. I have intellectual access to that context something your common or garden scientist will not have. Many so-called scientists are disproportionately fearful of being labelled “whacko”. The gossip around “cold-fusion” is exemplar. Yet I have discussed over a cigarette on the steps of the Chemistry Department at Imperial College with a practising homeopath and staff member. We talked and speculated on quantum effects in water memory. Homeopathy is derided by many a sceptic yet demonstrably erudite scientist.

People are scared of the occult. It actually means “difficult to see” as in “an occult fracture of the T3 vertebra”. It does not mean that I am going to bite the head off a bat, spit blood to anoint the bone of goat and point that at you whilst chanting incantations for your demise.

People can and do get the wrong end of the stick.

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It is possibly not illegal to file a patent application on “Quantum Telepathy” using the name Whacko McNutjob at the Intellectual Property Office in Newport, less eye catching perhaps at the European Patent Office unless the examiner was a Brit. One could ascertain if there was prejudice against Nut-jobs. We could define a new term, nutjobphobic.

I am confident that I can write an application of sufficient plausibility. I have three granted patents already.

People can over and misinterpret just about anything which they read on the internet. Rarely do they check understanding nor can they be arsed to read around or do further research. The gospel according to SEO optimized Google search returns is a highly skewed and paid for version. People forget and rely.

The informational fodder is not always the best fully nutritional meal for an avid clicker.

Proof of Telekinesis – Pennies

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Many people do not believe in telekinesis as a real thing, an observable phenomenon. Yet they are able to use their mind to counter the gravitational attractive force between the planet Earth and pennies. Reality exerts a pull on said pennies causing them to ground, to fall to earth. Yet people are able to deny, refuse, fail to accept, act dumb, fail to see, fail to understand, not appreciate or otherwise be unable to perceive something true and sometimes obvious.

The penny does not drop, not because pennies do not obey gravitational law, but because people use their mind to elevate them, slow the acceleration.

On a bed of contrary reasons and justifications the penny is held near stationary in space. Complacency and dogma act as a treacle, a thick gloopy liquid which holds the penny up. Many famous scientists who do not believe in telekinesis are highly skilled in the art. They can stop pennies dropping for a very long time. Yet if you asked them, they would say that telekinesis does not exist.

There are many historical examples of telekinesis.

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Confirmation bias is one of the best techniques for telekinesis. We see only what we want to see, what is convenient. This helps us to keep the penny elevated.

One day that penny can drop and the sudden realisation so-caused can be difficult to assimilate and comprehend. All that effort at telekinesis is not let go of quickly or quietly. People even after the penny has dropped for the first time are able to re-elevate it for a while. Because to accept that the penny has dropped is to acknowledge that one’s omniscient superpower has failed. There are implications.

Complacency is a good telekinetic technique. It can keep pennies from falling for quite a while. Unfortunately, complacency is a bit fragile and not really a good buttress against reality.

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At the moment there are pennies dropping all over Europe about how reliable long held alliances are. There remains a lot of wishful thinking, but that which was once dependable is no longer.

Some people are quicker on the uptake than others and less prone to penny telekinesis. Others are highly skilled in the arcane art of levitation.

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Are you any good at telekinesis?

Can you stop the pennies from dropping?

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Confirmation Bias and Conditional Transactional Interactions

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

The previous post is an I Ching consultation and I will use it to inform any interactions upcoming which I might have in 2025. I am aware that confirmation bias is a widespread phenomenon. One of the lines speaks about someone withdrawn from the world being seen as aloof by others and not caring about what others think or say about him. That fits me, maybe. Now is my confirmation bias wanting to see that fit or is it by way of an accurate description, an oracle which arises out of six shakes of three coins. It could be a fluke. It is suggesting an increase in interaction. If that happens my confirmation bias might say “look the I Ching is right”.

My confirmation bias, if indeed it is that has found numerous good fits between I Ching consultations and “reality” during the near thirty five years I have been consulting it. I could be delusional. But If I am I am detached and delusional.

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For most people interpersonal interaction or “relationship” is of a conditional transactional nature. This time of year, people send Christmas cards and exchange presents. Good behaviour in children is rewarded by a nice present, if finances allow. This is a transaction. “If you are good, you can have a nice bike.”  If we send someone a Christmas card and they don’t return the favour, they may get left off next year’s card list. If don Corleone does you a favour, you owe him one back. If you fund the Trump election campaign you might get the nod for attorney general. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

One could say that this normal socio-political behaviour. We could call it conditional because the conditional if is implied if not explicit. Taken too far this behaviour is corruption. Gifts to politicians to curry favour need to be transparent, but a bribe is still a bribe. Bribery is an expectation and a norm in some countries. The confirmation bias of a norm fails to see illegality. “That is the way we do things around here.”

Nearly always with favour is a returned favour expected. People have a confirmation bias that this is the way of the world. Few acts are genuinely unconditional. There is some kind of price, or reward and maybe temptation or manipulation.

If you look back at the I Ching consultation it suggests that some might offer sexual favours easily to gain power. This theme is throughout human interactional history.

Out of the blue we had visitors yesterday. They asked us if we had plans for tonight New Year’s Eve. We don’t. The lack of drama in the festive period in this house is notable in comparison to much of the world. Are we ruining the illusion of Christmas like the grinch? No, it is calm and drama free. Which for some is difficult to understand.

If you live by the mantra of scratch my back… and someone did something unconditional your confirmation bias would imagine that they wanted something back. Recently I asked someone for their opinion on a course of action I was considering and he said I should use the lens of “what is in it for me?”

That is not at all how I think. Our orientation towards the world differs.

I am coming around to an opinion / hypothesis that the majority of people do not understand unconditional behaviour or acts. Most people are on the make, most of the time. They are after something; they want some thing or other. Which means they can be leveraged, by favour, money, kudos, apparent friendship or a New Year’s Honour.

My confirmation bias is that I am unlikely to be on the New Year’s honours list and sure enough we have not yet received anything from The Cabinet Office.

I told you so.

spukhafte Fernwirkung Telepathy and Teleportation

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

“Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon of a group of particles being generated, interacting, or sharing spatial proximity in such a way that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance. The topic of quantum entanglement is at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics: entanglement is a primary feature of quantum mechanics not present in classical mechanics.

Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, and polarization performed on entangled particles can, in some cases, be found to be perfectly correlated. For example, if a pair of entangled particles is generated such that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle is found to have clockwise spin on a first axis, then the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis, is found to be anticlockwise. However, this behavior gives rise to seemingly paradoxical effects: any measurement of a particle’s properties results in an apparent and irreversible wave function collapse of that particle and changes the original quantum state. With entangled particles, such measurements affect the entangled system as a whole.”

Excerpted from Wikipedia

We could say that the karma of two photons in an entangled photon pair is also entangled. Measurement of one photon collapses the wave function and establishes its karma, its fate which determines also the karma, the fate of the other photon. One of the pair photo-excites an electron in some material or other, when detected, the properties of the other photon such as polarisation are then fixed by the measurement. The entangled wave functions can be very nonlocal. The photons can have widely differing energies yet remain entangled at birth. They can be different colours. At annihilation or death of one photon the characteristics are created in the pair photon. The wave function collapse of the entangled state produces a phoenix like wave function no longer entangled in the surviving photon, an eigen function.

In principle something entangled here could have one half sent to a planet in the solar system of Sirius and remain entangled on the journey with its earthly twin. However, no one has managed to maintain a qubit coherence of 8.6 years the time needed to get there.

One can teleport the state of a part of an entangled pair, one can herald the arrival. There is all sorts of funky stuff. But people still like to invoke hidden variables to explain. There could be teleportation even heralding between here and the putative Sirian planet.

I don’t think I am overegging what physics suggests here. That is some quite far-fetched stuff.

If teleportation is possible then why not telepathy?

The generated thought form in one being read at a distance by another being. Experiments in this field are seen as pseudoscience.  People can look down their noses and go, “bah humbug”. The establishment is snooty and self-congratulatory. It is a club which has “rules” and peer pressure.

Psychiatry

The notion of telepathy is not dissimilar to three clinical concepts: delusions of thought insertion/removal and thought broadcasting. This similarity might explain how an individual might come to the conclusion that he or she were experiencing telepathy. Thought insertion/removal is a symptom of psychosis, particularly of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or substance-induced psychosis. Psychiatric patients who experience this symptom falsely believe that some of their thoughts are not their own and that others (e.g., other people, aliens, demons or fallen angels, or conspiring intelligence agencies, or artificial intelligences) are putting thoughts into their minds (thought insertion). Some patients feel as if thoughts are being taken out of their minds or deleted (thought removal). Schizophrenic patients suffering from the form of alleged telepathy known as thought broadcasting believe that their private thoughts are being broadcast to other people against their informed consent. Along with other symptoms of psychosis, delusions of thought insertion may be reduced by antipsychotic medication. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists believe and empirical findings support the idea that people with schizotypy and schizotypal personality disorder are particularly likely to believe in telepathy.

Excerpted from Wikipedia

Question: read the tone of this, is there any bias? What do you reckon? Pole up the bum?

Scepticism is largely self-fulfilling. If you believe something is not possible before experimenting you already have confirmation bias. Just as some people are overly wishful and want to believe, others are as biased in not wanting to believe. One could argue that neither is objective.

Unless you have meditated extensively it is likely that the background noise in your perceptual instrument “mind” is high. Synapses will be firing and your internal dialogue chuntering away. The signal to noise ratio of your mind will be poor. Tiny signals will get lost in the noise. If you cool your mind to 77K or below the dark current will dramatically reduce and you will be able to detect tinier signals.

Even were I still employed at a university I will speculate that the chances of getting a research grant funded to look into telepathy would be vanishingly small. I would have better luck, perhaps with the CIA or FSB. Think for a moment.

Were one to discover and enable telepathy it would be an utter game changer. The impact would be more far reaching than smartphones in time. The mobile phone manufacturers would want it suppressed ASAP.

It is my opinion that research in telepathy might be aimed at advanced meditators.

It is suggested that the many of the blue books opus is the result of telepathic interplay. Nobody can verify post hoc. Even if you don’t believe them one has to accept that it is an opus a big internally self-consistent body of work.

Telepathic rapport is mooted as being a faculty of the evolving humanity in the incoming new age. People might have to get used to spukhafte Fernwirkung or spooky long distance effects.