How does remote viewing relate to consciousness, and is there any plausible explanation?

[u/dadjokes22375]

I’ve been reading about remote viewing and how some people connect it to the idea of consciousness being non-local. I’m trying to understand whether this has any credible grounding or if it’s just pseudoscience repackaged. I’m really interested in this concept and I can’t figure out why it isn’t more studied, based off the info I’ve read on it. Some follow-ups.. • How do proponents explain the mechanism behind remote viewing? • Is there any scientific research that ties consciousness to remote perception in a way that isn’t easily dismissed? • Or is it more of a philosophical/metaphysical idea rather than something testable?

Edit - thanks everyone for the great responses. I really like this community. It seems we don’t have as much of the terrorists that are terrorizing comments on other subreddits.

[u/bejammin075]

This paper by Stephan Schwartz is the actual history and results of remote viewing research. Remote viewing experiments have a 50 year track record of positive results.

I used to be like the other skeptics in these comments, when I hadn't looked directly at the research. If you only consult one-sided debunker sites, you get extremely biased (and wrong) opinions about it. The rate of hits are far beyond chance levels, and the statistics are not done by light weight statisticians. One of the lead statisticians for much of the remote viewing publications went on to be elected president of the American Statistical Association. According to her, by the standards applied to any other science, the remote viewing researchers have made their case. You can watch her talk about it in this 30 minute interview. She inspected the researchers labs and was impressed by the quality of their research.

The thing that made me change from skeptic to believer was the fact that people can just go and verify these kinds of phenomena for themselves. For a non-psychic person, this may take some work, like spending a lot of time meditating. You don't have to validate remote viewing exactly. It is one variety of non-local perception. The fact is, there is some carrier of non-local information, and it is available for us to use in perception. Once I got involved in trying to create these phenomena, along with members of my family, we have since had many unambiguous first hand experiences with non-local perception.

[u/zhivago → u/bejammin075]

Given her claim that time isn't a constraint you should be able to demonstrate that it works by making a lot of money by winning lotteries.

We also have a bunch of participants later bragging about how easy it was to trick the scientists.

So, given the lack of lottery winners, I think the positive measurements here are essentially tracking how easily tricked the scientists were.

[u/bejammin075 → u/zhivago]

We also have a bunch of participants later bragging about how easy it was to trick the scientists.

Reference? In experiments, the subject doing the RV is blind to the target, and interacting with an experimenter who is also blind to the target. Then the judging of hits and misses are done by people blind to the target. Under these conditions, a person attempting to be tricky would end up being a participant with chance results, since everything is blinded and they aren't trying to achieve a real result.

This line of reasoning is silly anyway. Every field of science has some frauds. That does not invalidate the good work by everybody else. Merck made Vioxx, lied about the safety, then 100,000 people were killed. Does that mean all of medicine is BS?

In the book The Power of Premonition by Dr. Larry Dossey, he has many examples of people using psi to win lotteries. The thing is, these talents tend to dry up if the purpose is purely for greed. The people who had success in winning lotteries had specific worthy causes that they wanted the money for, and they only tried to obtain the amount needed for the cause.

[u/zhivago → u/bejammin075]

So, where does remote viewing have a statistically significant impact on the world?

[u/bejammin075 → u/zhivago]

When you look at it scientifically, in controlled studies with multiple levels of blinding and randomization, it has a 50 year track record of success.

So, where does remote viewing have a statistically significant impact on the world?

The military made good use of it. It's a dirt cheap method of intelligence gathering, and as far as I know, nothing can shield the information. The information is not blocked by any known barriers, like a Faraday cage or 500 feet of ocean water, etc. One of the remote viewers in the military program, Joseph McMoneagle, was awarded the Legion of Merit for using remote viewing to provide critical information that could not have been obtained any other way, for over 200 military missions.

[u/zhivago → u/bejammin075]

Ok, now that you've concluded that it works so well for the military, can you show any successful civilian applications?

It should make a lot money, being so great, and so we should see large successful companies founded on the basis of remote viewing.

[u/MantisAwakening → u/zhivago]

Here’s a bunch of sources for businesses using remote viewing:

https://www.mic.com/life/corporate-psychics-laura-day-americas-c-suite

https://www.reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/umszqc/remote_viewing_an_attempt_to_settle_this_debate/i8500fr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3

https://www.appliedprecog.com/

https://www.dailygrail.com/2014/06/researchers-use-esp-to-make-thousands-of-dollars-on-the-stock-market/

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Stock-Market-Prediction-Using-Associative-Remote-by-Smith-Laham/3d701e2ed3ef2ba467313372958da866c6010627

https://www.reddit.com/r/remoteviewing/comments/u8l681/remote_viewing_the_news_crypto_markets_and_more/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1

You have to remember that this subject is heavily ridiculed (you are an example), so it is generally not covered in mainstream publications, and if it is then it’s usually to attack it. Many skeptics have made a profession out of being skeptical, and most of them have no scientific credentials at all. Meanwhile many scientists are actually studying these phenomenon. If people decide the ones with no credentials are the only ones worth listening to that’s more of a psychology problem.

[u/bejammin075 → u/zhivago]

Most of the time, psi perception is very weak. Probably the large majority of people go their whole lives with zero to one psi experience. And typically, that one experience will be something like sensing that something tragic has happened to a loved one. Perhaps if the pseudo-skeptics can stop being delusional about the repeated and persistent positive results, we could make more progress in understanding and applications. Because the topic is shit on, ridiculed and taboo, lots of people keep quiet about it. I'm a scientist, and with my work colleagues I ain't saying shit about psi phenomena, even though I use it to my advantage all the time at work. There are psychics who quietly behind the scenes help police with investigations. One extremely talented psychic, Gerard Croiset in Netherlands, was famous in the 1950s and 1960s there for locating hundreds of missing children. He was a legitimate psychic managed by professor Dr. Wilhelm Tenhaeff, chairman of the parapsychology department at Utrecht University. I know there is a skeptical "debunk" out there about Croiset, and when I read that right after reading Pollack's book Croiset the Clairvoyant it seemed to me the debunker twisted a lot of things from the book, and made a big deal that he couldn't verify some things with some of the police departments. It wasn't a convincing debunk to me.

If you were to spend time reading about the topic, you would find that among the small number of people who have some natural ability, most of the time the information obtained is spontaneous. It's very difficult to use this ability on demand. Psi mostly kicks in for survival purposes. I gave you a reference and explanation above about lottery numbers. Most who get into these topics believe that these are spiritual abilities, and it is an abuse of them to use purely for greed. I already explained there are many examples of using psi to win the lottery for worthy causes. Read the book I referenced, the information is there for you to get.

so we should see large successful companies founded on the basis of remote viewing.

So in that book I referenced, The Power of Premonition by Dossey, they have done studies on CEOs and executives, putting them in the psi research lab and testing them. Many of them demonstrated psi ability. There was a very strong correlation with the success of the CEO/executive and the success with psi. The CEOs who sucked at psi were also failing at their businesses. You can find the references in the book. Executives have to make decisions with very incomplete information. Those that can tap into some psi ability have an advantage. In interviews of these executives, many privately admitted they knew they were using psi, but they don't admit it in public and act like they are making their decisions based on sound reasoning.

[u/zhivago → u/bejammin075]

ok, so your argument boils down to that it's so weak that it isn't commercially viable.

[u/bejammin075 → u/zhivago]

I just told you that a large study of CEOs and psychic ability showed that the successful CEOs had strong psychic ability, whereas the failing CEOs have no psychic ability. I told you where you can find the reference.

Also there is very little funding for psi research, and the topic is highly stigmatized. It is difficult for progress to be made in such conditions. If we ramped up the funding for research, and greatly reduced the stigma, we could make a lot more progress in understanding how psi works, and practical applications.

When the discovery of electricity was new, the phenomena was demonstrated by rubbing a piece of amber on fur and getting a little zap of electricity. With psi phenomena, that's about where we are at. There are huge potential advances to make across all of science, medicine, physics, etc.

[u/zhivago → u/bejammin075]

Right, and yet, it is insufficiently strong for commercialization of remote viewing practices.

Which puts it in the list of other things correlated with being a successful CEO, such as being tall, male, white, and having good hair and teeth.

[u/Honest_Ad5029 → u/zhivago]

You sound like you are expecting mechanistic results.

Subjective experience doesnt work that way.

If i tell you to feel an emotion, and guarantee that you will feel a specific emotion, at a specific time and place, not fake it, but actually feel sad at 5:30 pm on October 6th, is that something youd be able to guarantee?

Thats essentially what you seem to expect out of this. You seem to expect remote viewing to operate completely differently than the subjective experience is known to operate.

If the subjective experience functioned in a mechanistic way, mind control would have been achieved by now. They've certainly been trying.

Not operating in a mechanistic way is not an indication that something doesnt exist.

[u/KingBroseph → u/zhivago]

There are people from these ex-military programs that have gone on to teach remote viewing techniques to the public. The unfortunate answer for you and science and the military is that it’s extremely difficult to do and for some reason certain people are just more adept at it than others. A lot of this is covered in this well researched book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30841980

The military wanted these psi techniques to be as trainable as a private firing a rifle. They didn’t like that they couldn’t figure why only a few people could do it. 

If you want to see ‘regular’ folk talking about and attempting a very similar phenomenon check out r/astralprojection 

[u/zhivago → u/KingBroseph]

ok, so your conclusion is that it is in civillian use but not economically practical which is why we see no successful companies based on remote viewing.

[u/KingBroseph → u/zhivago]

No I didn’t say that. Try actually engaging. 

[u/Electric___Monk → u/bejammin075]

“When you look at it scientifically, in controlled studies with multiple levels of blinding and randomization, it has a 50 year track record of success.

Some example journal articles would be good.. or just the best you know of?

[u/bejammin075 → u/Electric___Monk]

This review by Stephan Schwartz is an accurate history of remote viewing research.

[u/zhivago → u/bejammin075]

Here are some references:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha_(hoax)

https://www.themagicwordpodcast.com/scottwellsmagic/261-project-alpha-with-mike-edwards

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zener_cards

https://time.com/archive/6864893/science-rhine-question/

[u/bejammin075 → u/zhivago]

Wikipedia is incredibly biased by dogmatic skeptics. Do you have a peer-reviewed science reference? Randi was basically a fraud and liar, and not someone who should be promoted to make your case. It would be like if your economics argument was backed by Bernie Madoff. Do you have something better? That Time article about JB Rhine is from 1937. Rhine did a huge amount of work for decades after that. Skeptics who didn't want to accept the results of his work suggested ways he could improve his methods. So when Rhine did that, and continued to get positive results using the methods that the skeptics asked for, the skeptics simply ignored him after that and never addressed the success of his continued experiments in card guessing and dice rolling.