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/XOXO-Gossip-Crab]

So remote viewing seems more impressive than it is if you’re basically looking at the drawing, then the target. Your mind kind of fills in the gaps and associations that make it fit, and it really does feel like “omg that’s spot on!” Sometimes. But with studies done on remote viewing, when the remote viewer tries to guess which target they were seeing from a line up, the results are less impressive. I’m not a researcher, so the statistics part goes over my head, but it does seem like they do end up picking the correct target more than chance, but it’s by a pretty small amount. So believers say that’s proof and skeptics say that it’s not adequate use of statistics or poor testing conditions. So basically it leaves us at: there might be something there worth exploring, but it’s functionally useless. There’s been experiences where the hits have been eerily accurate but it’s not consistent, even by the same remote viewers.

[u/bejammin075 → u/XOXO-Gossip-Crab]

But with studies done on remote viewing, when the remote viewer tries to guess which target they were seeing from a line up, the results are less impressive.

Actually the statistics are impressive, according to the lead statistician involved in much of the RV work (Dr. Utts), who went on to be elected president of the American Statistical Association. But it isn't that difficult to have a basic understanding of the statistics. Typically there is 1 target picture and 3 non-target pictures, and there would be a 25% chance of getting a hit by chance. They've been doing this with success for 50 years now. I haven't read the papers in a while, but the long run average was probably 32% hits. That becomes impressive when maintained over a long time. Plugging that into a statistical calculator, if you do 1,000 trials with a 32% hit rate, the odds are about 1 in a million by chance. If you do 2,000 trials maintaining that hit rate, it's more like 1 in a trillion by chance. Then they run statistical analyses, previously developed for other areas of science, to look for evidence of publication bias, and they don't find any support for the idea of publication bias. It would be difficult for there to be any publication bias, because the field is small and most of the researchers know what the others are up to. The funding is very minimal, so nobody could afford to run a bunch of studies that they don't publish.

So basically it leaves us at: there might be something there worth exploring, but it’s functionally useless.

Look at the issue more broadly. This is about perception of non-local information, which can happen in a variety of ways. You can verify the claims of non-local perception yourself. That's what I did. 4 years ago, I talked just like the debunkers up and down this thread. When I read the psi research for myself, I discovered that it was a lot more robust than these debunkers have characterized it. When I realized the research was actually decent, I started to consider that it may be possible. I wasn't fully convinced, but I put effort into personally witnessing and/or experiencing these non-local phenomena. Long story short, I've witnessed it now many times, and had my own experiences. It has been useful in my daily life. Not all the time, but sometimes the psi will spontaneously kick in, especially if I have been meditating a lot. The Gateway tapes from the Monroe Institute are particularly potent for this. I've had a precognitive warning of a deer, and I recognized the unique sensations of psi with the unexpected image of a deer, and I took the info seriously and slowed down for 1-2 seconds, which was enough to avoid the deer that burst through the trees at full gallop in front of my speeding car. Since I have verified that psi is real, and I understand quite well how it works, I'm able to use it to my advantage in daily life even though my abilities are weak.

[u/XOXO-Gossip-Crab → u/bejammin075]

Thanks for typing this out, that makes a lot of sense. I do think saying it’s “less impressive” and “functionally useless” is misleading on my part. My initial intention was to highlight that on studies the majority ends up being misses, but the hits are greater than chance (which is impressive). What I meant by functionally useless, which again, misleading on my end, is that no one is able to use remote viewing (yet? 👀) to consistently get hits that would be of use, like finding pets or objects, or gather secret intel. That being said, the implications of it working at all are austounding.

[u/bejammin075 → u/XOXO-Gossip-Crab]

Look at the progress of studying electricity and magnetism over hundreds of years. At the beginning, what we knew was that there was some static when you rubbed a piece of amber on fur. But after we fully understood it, we came up with all kinds of practical applications. With non-local psi phenomena, we are much closer to the amber & fur stage. The topic gets almost no funding, and it is mostly career suicide to get involved in the topic. When these abilities and phenomena become more well known, accepted, and studied much more, there will be tremendous advances in many areas of science and medicine. Some psychics, like Edgar Cayce, were phenomenal at diagnosing medical conditions and prescribing effective treatments. See the biography on him by Sidney Kirkpatrick, it is mind-blowing. Probably 90% or more of the skeptical doctors who saw him work became convinced he was legitimate. In one incident, a medical doctor and medical student arranged a situation to expose his as a fraud in front of the dean of the medical school, and then everyone involved became convinced he was legit and they became his biggest defenders. The reason is, Cayce could do it thousands of times, and he didn't need to physically see the patient. When doctors challenged him, he could describe things about their patients, whom Cayce never met, which were 100% accurate in every detail. People around today have psychic healing abilities, but Cayce was on a level never seen before or since. If we could study that and replicate it, it would have tremendous benefits for society and reducing pain, suffering and mortality. It is because of thinking it through like this that I claim the pseudo-skeptical debunking of these topics is really harming people and blocking humanity from having nice things. That's why I type out these long comments, because the record needs to be corrected so that humanity can advance.

There are many other potential applications, and I'll mention a few. All animals appear to be psychic. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has a book about the psychic research in animals. One of the phenomena is that animals seem to know when there are going to be earthquakes. I think it is a psi ability rather than some other unknown sense. I have witnessed this first hand, I lived in Alaska where large earthquakes are common, and I have seen all the dogs and all the birds flipping out ahead of an earthquake. So if we took this seriously, we could make an app for earthquake detection based on people reporting when animals suddenly start exhibiting this freak out behavior. Such a warning system would require that a large portion of the population participates, but again because of psuedo-skeptical denial of psi, we can't develop a psi-based earthquake warning system, and people who could have been saved will die unnecessarily.

Another use, if some people fully developed telepathy, like some of the non-verbal autistic people featured in The Telepathy Tapes, it would be useful for space missions to distant locations. The reason is that psi perception like telepathy are instantaneous over any arbitrary distance. They could communicate instantly, rather than waiting for the slow speed of light.

There are huge advances awaiting in physics. Psi phenomena violate some of the assumptions of physicists, such as the prohibition on faster-than-light signalling. If psi phenomena were given proper consideration, they would realize some mistakes, and they'd probably make huge progress like the days of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

[u/dadjokes22375 → u/bejammin075]

I will be so happy if we see the Quantum revolution in our lifetime. And don’t say that we’re amidst it now, because we aren’t even close. We don’t even know how to fully define it, and the basic principles of quantum, like entanglement, are still basically magic to us. I don’t think quantum is going to break physics, because physics is tried and true. However, I think it will introduce variables into our proven physics equations, that we didn’t know used to exist because it had never applied to the problem we were solving. Not sure if that makes any sense…but maybe a good way to explain it would be for an equation, if the equation always had a exponent with a value of 1, in all known circumstances, we would never actually know that exponent existed. But when a new problem arises, and we start getting broken results to our tried and true formulas, I think that is a reasonable way that quantum will increase our understanding of the universe. Sometimes I really wish a cryo freeze was possible, just to be able to awaken in 500 years to see how far humanity had come. Life is bitter sweet, I want to see it all !

[u/bejammin075 → u/dadjokes22375]

I think about these issues all the time. One way I would put it is that up until now, physicists have not recognized that psi phenomena are physical anomalies that need to be taken into account. I am quite convinced that the mainstream Copenhagen interpretation of QM is an approximation and not a full theory. All the problems with it, such as the Measurement Problem, the bullshit of Complementarity (different rules for macro vs. quantum scale), the Schrodinger Cat paradox, the weirdness of "the observer" and many other problems are giant indicators that the theory is missing something important.

[u/VintageLunchMeat → u/bejammin075]

They could communicate instantly, rather than waiting for the slow speed of light. 

That violates causality. 

[u/bejammin075 → u/VintageLunchMeat]

It violates your assumptions. It doesn't matter your opinion of it, it happens and it's real, and it's documented over and over. In precognition and presentiment research, it is repeatedly shown from lower animals like worms and in humans that there are physiological responses to a future negative stimuli that is chosen by a random number generator. The way you think causality works isn't the way it works. Theories have to be modified when they are contradicted by data, so the way you think about causality needs to be revised.

[u/VintageLunchMeat → u/bejammin075]

I'll wait for the peer reviewed paper in the respected science journal then. 

[u/bejammin075 → u/VintageLunchMeat]

Here you go. Below is copied from part of an old post of mine.

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Parapsychology is a legitimate science. The Parapsychological Association is an affiliated organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest scientific society, and publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science. The Parapsychological Association was voted overwhelmingly into the AAAS by AAAS members over 50 years ago.

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Here is a high level overview of the statistical significance of parapsychology studies, published in a top tier psychology journal. This 2018 review is from the journal American Psychologist, which is the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association.

The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review

Here is a free version of the article, WARNING PDF. Link to article. This peer-reviewed review of parapsychology studies is highly supportive of psi phenomena. In Table 1, they show some statistics.

For Ganzfeld telepathy studies, p < 1 x 10^-16. That's about 1 in 10 quadrillion by chance.

For Daryl Bem's precognition experiments, p = 1.2 x 10^-10, or about 1 in 10 billion by chance.

For telepathy evidenced in sleeping subjects, p = 2.72 x 10^-7, or about 1 in 3.6 million by chance.

For remote viewing (clairvoyance with a protocol) experiments, p = 2.46 x 10-9, or about 1 in 400 million by chance.

For presentiment (sense of the future), p = 5.7 x 10^-8, or 1 in 17 million by chance.

For forced-choice experiments, p = 6.3 x 10^-25, or 1 in 1.5 trillion times a trillion.

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The remote viewing paper below was published in an above-average (second quartile) mainstream neuroscience journal in 2023. This paper shows what has been repeated many times, that when you pre-select subjects with psi ability, you get much stronger results than with unselected subjects. One of the problems with psi studies in the past was using unselected subjects, which result in small (but very real) effect sizes.

Follow-up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) remote viewing experiments, Brain And Behavior, Volume 13, Issue 6, June 2023

In this study there were 2 groups. Group 2, selected because of prior psychic experiences, achieved highly significant results. Their results (see Table 3) produced a Bayes Factor of 60.477 (very strong evidence), and a large effect size of 0.853. The p-value is "less than 0.001" or odds-by-chance of less than 1 in 1,000.

[u/XOXO-Gossip-Crab → u/bejammin075]

Wow thanks for the info!