Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Officially, I don't believe in PSI. By that I mean that while I can't say with 100% confidence that it's false, I'd give it a low enough probability of being true that I generally ignore it.
But I'm also something of a Fortean, I guess. I don't think that human beings are even close to knowing the final ultimate truth about reality. (I doubt that we ever will achieve that consummation.) That suggests that the unknown will probably always be out there, and if that's so, then it will probably always have the capacity to surprise us by coughing up something anomalous.
'Believe' is the wrong word. This is more like speculation of a science-fictionish sort.
I'm inclined to see belief in PSI as kind of a religious phenomenon. And one of the motivating factors, I believe, is that these phenomena hold out the possibility that more idealistic philosophies might be true, that human beings might actually be spiritual beings more than they are physical ones, and the physical world that physics places so much emphasis on might be little more than illusion.
I'm not particularly attracted to that kind of view, but it's basically what was driving a lot of the old 19'th century-style spiritualism and theosophy.
I guess that the contemporary versions of this philosophical idealist tradition often appeal to quantum mechanics. Especially to the quantum-idealist interpetations that place great emphasis on the physical role of "observers" (idealism's "minds", in other words) in collapsing wave functions and crystalizing discrete being.
My own feeling is that the quantum idealist interpretations might in part be the result of early quantum physicists trying to understand their counterintuitive expermental results by turning to philosphy for help, at a time when the predominent philosphy in Germany was idealistic Kantian philsophy.
It's not impossible, by any means. But nevertheless, my own reaction is 'garbage in-garbage out'. You get bad interpretations of quantum mechanics when you base them on doubtful philosophical speculations. But that's probably not the point. The point is to finally vanquish scientific physicalism and to return to a more spiritualistic conception of the universe. That's why I referred to it as fundamentally a religious phenomenon.
That doesn't sound very believable to me.
Despite the skepticism I expressed up above, that would be where I'd look first for an explanation, assuming that I became more convinced that PSI was real.
Physics, and reality along with it, would really be thrown for a loop (perhaps literally) if causality was temporally symmetrical and could propagate from future to past as easily as from past to future. The time travel paradoxes would show up big-time. And that, in turn, might endow macroscopic existence with some of the stranger characteristics that seems to populate microscopic reality, like superimposed probability states. It sounds outlandish, but the laws of physics do seem to be time-reveral invariant.
I've long toyed with the sci-fi speculation that the time-travel paradoxes and the associated alternate realities stuff are in fact the exact same phenomenon on the macro-scale as the probability superpositions of quantum weirdness are on the micro-scale. Perhaps in our local region around the big bang causality propagates preferentially in one temporal direction (except for residual retrocausation for microscopic intervals), from the past towards the future away from the blast. That might in turn create time assymmetry, allow a fixed past to crystalize in the pastward direction, and neatly account for the elusiveness of the "now" instant that we all are surfing (it's the big-bang's macroscopic wave-function collapse shockwave) and for the seemingly open possibilities presumably still coexisting out there in the futureward direction.
I wonder if Tart is another one of the idealists. He would be if his new non-physical laws are mental laws instead. But yeah, if PSI exists, it might well answer to laws of a sort that we've never imagined. We can't rule that out.
I like my quantum-time speculation.
That doesn't mean that I believe that it's true though. It probably isn't.
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