Is Precognition Real? Cornell University Lab Releases Powerful New Evidence that the Human Mind can Perceive the Future

[quote]According to today’s conventional scientific wisdom, time flows strictly forward — from the past to the future through the present. We can remember the past, and we can predict the future based on the past (albeit imperfectly) — but we can’t perceive the future.

But if the recent data from the lab of Prof. Daryl Bem at Cornell University is correct, conventional scientific wisdom may need some corrections on this particular point.

In a research paper titled Feeling the Future, recently accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Bem presents some rather compelling empirical evidence
that in some cases — and with weak but híghly statistically significant accuracy – many human beings can directly perceive the future. Not just predict it based on the past.

A pre-publication copy of Bem’s paper is available on his website, and it should appear on the
journal’s website shortly. The article is already attracting considerable attention, including a
piece in Psychology Today. Also, Bem reports that he has already received hundreds of requests
for “replication packages” — documentation and software allowing others to repeat the experiments he did. If you want to try to replicate the work yourself, replication packages for some of the
experiments are already available at http://dbem.ws/psistuff .

If Bem’s results are indeed replicated, this wíll shock some scientists, but many others wíll say “I told you so.” A 2002 survéy by the US Natíonal Science Foundation shows that 60% of adult Americans agree that some individuals possess psychic powérs. The percentage of scientists holding such opinions is much lower — but there is a small community of scientists, such as Dr. Bem, working to reconcile popular intuitions about paranormal phenomena with the scientific method and world-view.

Read more @ http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/11/04/pre ... -mind-can/

Bem in Quantum Spacé

[quote]A new article in Discover Magazine (March, 2012, . . . it came to us from the future) gives a nice biographical sketch of Daryl Bem and his distinguished career in social psychology. You cĂłme to see Bem's involvement with parapsychology and his 2010 splash paper in the conservative Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in a new light. Perhaps his rebellious youth foreshadowed the rebelliousness of his twilight years (Discover's words, not mine). Or could it be the other way round, with time being so bi-directional and all?

The statistical point of the JPSP experiments was to show that the future can causally alter the present with p < .05. The conceptual, epistemic, metaphysĂ­cal point was much larger. That's what I tried to convey in my first Bem post. If you accept the existence of retrocausation as proven fact, many of your beliefs about the universe (universes?) wĂ­ll topple like dominoes. Worse yet, there is no known number of domino pieces that can topple. You'd end up in the anything goes zone with Paul Feyerabend and Philip Dick. Once there, you question the veracity of the significant statistical result that gave rise to this crescendo in the first place-an epistemic nightmare. Bem is on board with that. When considering the possibility of precognition for the first time, "I thought, my god, that is fascinating because it means that our classical view of the physĂ­cal world is wrong." Thank you, Daryl, at least we agree on one thing. I think the domino point is important. I find it annoying when proponents of psi claim that positive evidence would just establish another interesting phenomenon, in addition to all that other good stuff we already know from science. Not so. And by the way, I am convinced that no true parapsychologists believe they are just pursuing phenomena that have been difficult to document because they are weak or evanescent. No, they believe that if they can demonstrate what they want to demonstrate, they have wĂ­ll have a scientific and cultural revolution on their hands.

Read more @ http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one ... ntum-space