IBM And Mind Input Devices

An anonymous reader writes: "The basic idea is that an electronic device that produces random static noise may be affected by an observer if that static noise is based on the state of subatomic particles. This interaction of the user with the device can be measured and used as a form of input. An interesting aspect of quantum physics is that when a subatomic particle is observed its state changes (its wave function collapses), and the new state that it assumes cannot be predicted. Various theories exist as to why a particle assumes whatever state it does when its wave function collapses. One theory is that the observer is somehow interacting with the particle, causing it to assume its new state. Researchers at Princeton's Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab have amassed statistically significant data that says that an observer affects the new state of the observed particles. In some way, our mind interacts with these particles, and this interaction can be measured. IBM wants to use this measurement to create a new type of input device that basically reads your mind, no wires attached. IBMs Patent, PEARs Website. Incidentally, the inventors of this patent are a who's-who of the members of PEAR. Particularly Jahn and Dunne."

FTL communication exists in labs.

I see a ton of posts from people who know a little bit about physics saying things like, "You can't use quantum means to send information faster than light". Some of them are even bringing relativity into the discussion. Let me clarify a few things.

It is an unjustified extrapolation of relativity to assume that the equations describing the limitations of mass increases and time contraction due to conventional particles that are accelerated to a velocity different than an observer particle carry over to all forms of communication.

First, it is not established that all forms of communications require particle transmission. For a simplified and incorrect analogy that is understandable, let me refer to electrons in a wire. Electrons move very slowly through a wire, it is only the signal which moves at near the speed of light, caused by the forces between the electrons. (Yes I know these forces are propagated by photons, and photons are particles travelling at the speed of light.)

There are some currently unmeasured things fundamental to quantum mechanical theory that travel faster than the speeed of light. By derivation of Shroedinger's equation, it can be shown that the particles we measure are simply envelope waves wrapped around other waves. It is derived that the envelope waves must always travel slower than the speed of light, but interestingly enough, it is also derived that the waves wrapped inside must ALWAYS travel faster than the speed of light. This is handwaved away by saying that we can never measure or interact with these waves.

But that isn't entirely true. While we cannot interact with those waves, we CAN reshape them and make them interact with each other. In a spectacular experiment, researchers were able to fire particles at a thin solid barrier, called a potential barrier. The barrier is composed of such solid material that it is physically impossible for the particle to go through the barrier. Instead, by a consequence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, as the particle strikes the wall, it's position becomes uncertain, and there is a real and measureable probability that the particle will show up on the other side of the wall.

The result? When researchers measure the time it takes for the particle to stop existing on one side of the wall and start existing on the other side of the wall, they find that it covers the distance significantly faster than the speed of light. The best recorded time I've heard of was 30c, or 30 times the speed of light.

So far this has only been done over tiny, but definitely measureable, distances. It isn't directly useful for communication, but it does show that it can no longer be argued that communication cannot occur faster than light, because it does.

Re:But what does that really mean?

Hofstadter's book Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid has a discussion of this issue. (If you haven't read it yet, do so.)

He discusses this in terms of envelopes and inner messages. If I hand you a vinyl record, what is the message? You could use the record as a plate for eating from, but that's clearly not the message I was trying to give. If your understanding is a little better, you'll know that the record is a sound recording, and you'll be able to play it back. But you might not know how fast to rotate the disc, so your hearing may be at a lower or higher speed/pitch than the recording was made. Once you actually hear the sounds, there's another layer of meaning. Let's assume the record contains only human speech. It might be in a language you recognize, or it might not. You'd have to decode the langauge first, to translate the sounds into symbols (words). Then, finally you get to the innermost meaning -- the significance of the words. If the words are a poem or similarly complex communication, then simply understanding the individual words may not be enough to give you a full understanding of the communication. You'd have to be able to put the words together in the appropriate context; in other words, you'd have to be able to share some insight with the person who wrote the poem.

Imagine a poem from a hypothetical alien creature who lives on a gas giant. Perhaps the poet is eloquently singing the praises of a particularly rich methane stream. Even if you understood the individual words, would you necessarily be able to understand what the poet is talking about? We can't see or smell methane gas, after all -- so what reference points would we have in interpreting the words of a creature who can?

However, even if we fail to decode all the layers of meaning of any given communication, we still gain some understanding even from the physical envelope itself. In the case of a record, we know that there is someone out there who is capable of communcation; that this person can produce sound; that this person can engrave an analog version of these sounds into vinyl; that this person can then deliver a vinyl record over long distances; etc.

This is a bit incoherent (sorry), but I hope you get the point. And that you read the book -- it's much better than my poor little /. post would indicate. :-)

Please, enlighten us!

Why do you say nothing will come of it? You don't know, already, do you? Because if you do, and you can prove it or show it or demonstrate it, please do, and save taxpayers and the rest of humanity untold millions of dollars in waste and embarrassment.

The whole point of basic research is that *everything* you look at is within the minority fringe until something has been shown, validated, modeled, predicted, and reviewed. Think Relativity; 100 years ago it would have been viewed as rubbish. Think QM. Think QED. Think gravity 500 years ago! So now it is fringe and faddish and strange. But what about 100 years from now, when IBM or Intel or someone discovers the way to interact with brainwaves(we do emit radiation, you know... and I suppose if you built the appropriate devices, you could read them or respond to them)?

Personally, I don't think this post deserves the moderation... but, if it prompts conversation, it's probably worth keeping it here


-AS

Good God

Excuse my tone, but I think this is the most irresponsible /. article I've seen in a long time.

First, what does this have to do with IBM? The only connection seems to be that it appears in their patent database. Are we suppose to give IBM credit for every patent [ibm.com] in their database?

Suggesting that this project is associating with IBM only lends credibility to this ridiculous idea. (If I were IBM, I'd be vehemently demanding a retraction right now.)

As far as the project itself, I'm afraid I'm too tired right now to effectively debunk it, but hopefully some of our local physicists will pick up the ball. All I can say is that if there was any reality to their claims whatsoever, it would completely shatter everything that we know about how the universe works, particularly from the perspective of cognitive science.

(Just in case TPTB retroactively correct this story, as they have in the past, you should know that when I saw the article, it was titled "IBM And Mind Input Devices", and had an IBM logo next to it.)

Between this and Elian (troll), I haven't been this disgusted in a long time.

Re:Long distance communication

Read the article "On the Detectivity of Advanced Galactic Civilizations", by C. Sagan
Reference: 1973, Icarus, Vol 19, pp 350-352

The paper is an attempt to quantify, in a general way, the number and distribution of ETI's, and to show that many or most of them are ancient civilizations well advanced beyond our own. The paper concludes that very advanced civilizations use technologies that we cannot detect or communicate with.

The author uses two analogies: radio versus New Guinea drummers, and humans versus micro-organisms. The analogies are quite good, but they bring up an interesting point. What is communication? Humans can have an effect on micro-organisms by an exchange of chemicals, in which case the organism will react. A sort of communication is seen here. The same applies with the New Guinea drummers. The technological humans use radio waves, but we still have not discarded older forms of communication, such as speech. In other words, the radio-user can communicate with the New Guinea drummer. If civilizations do indeed discard older technologies entirely, then Sagan has a stronger case. Perhaps one day we will lose the ability to play back old phonographic records, in which case this example would be a stronger analogy.

Carl Sagan refers to "communications horizon", a civilization can communicate with others within its communications horizon.

Here are the types of civilization described by the author:
Type I - ability to manipulate the resources of a planet.
Type II - the ability to manipulate the resources of a star. This idea has been explored under the name of a "Dyson sphere". Dyson spheres are detectable via the infrared radiation left over from industrial activity.
Type III - the ability to manipulate the resources of a galaxy.

Carl explains that in principle we can communicate only with civilizations that use radio waves for communication over relatively short distances, i.e., within a single solar system. The author states that we can communicate with Type II, and I would gamble on the detectability of a fully developed Type I civilization. Beyond our reach are the Type III civilizations.

So SETI knew all along that their observations could be completely useless from this stand point but they argue that if we don't search at all, for sure we will not find anything. If we at least try to search, we have a better chance.

Cheers

Re:Crap. All crap.

It get much wierder; I'm optimistic (in a kind of "good luck, better you than me" way) about IBM doing this kind of research, because AFAIK we know almost nothing about the rules for what an "observer" is in quantum-mechanical terms, and this might shed some light if the research was done right.

Example: According to something I've read somewhere and believe (I think it was in a Dilbert book, but hey, I trust Scott Adams), you still get the interference pattern if you turn the detector on but instruct it to throw away its data instead of sending it anywhere -- this is what discredits the hypothesis that the detector beam interacts somehow with the electrons.

What's always bothered me about this (and Schroedinger's Cat, which was made up to illustrate exactly this point, I guess) is the messiness that goes with it. What if the scientists just don't look at the detector? What if the detector, instead of throwing the data away, XORs it with an unknown bit and outputs the encrypted data? Does the pattern change depending on who in the room knows what the unknown bit is? What if the detector has audio output, but the scientist is deaf?

If you build a QM burglar alarm that rings when it's observed, and the burglar who glances at it is unobserved by you, does he count as an observer from your viewpoint, or does he become part of the wave-equation, like Schroedinger's cat? Does the alarm ever ring when you're not around?

Sorry... nice try, though.

Learn the physics first, please. You don't exactly understand what they're talking about.

Imagine an electron is in a mixed state, that is, it is not in a measurement eigenstate (i.e. it is not 'definite' what the result of the measurement will be). Now, *observe* the electron. I don't care how. Just make it so that macroscopically, the state of the apparatus is linked one-to-one with the state of the electron. Now, the question is, when you observe the apparatus, you don't see a superposition of eigenstates - you see one eigenstate. This is what is typically referred to as "the collapse of the wave function."

Your explanation would be "well, you scattered an electron or something off of it, and that changed the state and 'somehow' that pushed it into an eigenstate." Good explanation. Two points for trying.

Too bad you're wrong. Quantum mechanics knows how particles interact - they interact via the Schrodinger equation. You can do the basic QM for the apparatus/electron interaction. You do *not* get that the electron emerges in an eigenstate. (You couldn't. That would indicate a hidden variable theory, and Bell's inequality says that QM and a hidden variable theory don't work.) You get that the entire system is in a superposition of eigenstates.

This again leads you back to the previous problem. Somewhere, the wave function collapses. Guess what? We don't know where yet. We have no idea where yet. "We're working on it."

So, is there a mystery to it? Yes. Is there a *problem* here? No one's been able to find one - i.e., no one has been able to find anything other than philosophical problems with QM to my knowledge.

In conclusion, to sum up, in this case, yes, you're a total heathen. Sorry. :)

If you want a good reference to the philosophical issues regarding measurement and quantum mechanics, read J.S. Bell's Physics World, August 1990 article "Against 'measurement'" and the subsequent follow up articles in October, January 1991 and May 1991.

Re:PEAR is a con

PEAR is hardly a con and seeing an article on the discovery channel does not qualify you to decide on experimenter bias as reporting is intrinsically biased and set to get attention, not provide facts.

Read some of the research that PEAR has done and some of the better meta-analysis (which is a well documented, demonstrated, and researched technique) that has been published on this subject (see my other post for a book referance http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/04/23/09462 36&threshold=-1&commentsort=3&mode=threa d&pid=43#98)

Further, I do not know the exact number which should have a type I error (rejecting the null hypothesis when you should fail to reject it), but we are definantly talking about more than 1 out of every 20 experiments having a p-value (probability of having a type-I error) of less than 5% (alpha = .05 is the commonly accepted value in statistics when dealing with scientific phenomena).

-Hartwell

"It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste." - John Tyndall

Re:Crap. All crap.

It's more than that.

Take double-slit diffraction experiment. The slits are of comperable width to the wavelength of a photon. Fire a beam of photons through the two holes. They produce an interference pattern.

Place a sensitive detector where the target screen is. Now you can detect individual photons, and you can detect where they hit.

Now take a source of photons which though somewhat random would be just as likely to spew a photon through one slit or the other. It's not that hard to produce, nor is it terribly critical for the experiment. The key point is that rate of photons coming out can be controlled.

Slow down the source and watch the pattern. lots of interference... turn it down more... still lots of interference.

What happens when only single photons are going through? One would expect a simple non-interfering diffraction pattern right? After all, singular photons are going through the slit, how could they possibly interfere with one another?

The pattern is that of interference. Peculiar isn't it? Which hole did the photon go through?

As soon as you attempt to observe the hole which the photon goes through... you have a non-interfering diffraction pattern. It has nothing to do with the fact that photons are bouncing off eachother or that the mechanism of detection is affecting the experiment. The pattern on your detection screen is for the particles which you did not interfere with.

This has been scrutinized very carefully by many very meticulous people. If you doubt the results, pick up a book by a reputable author or publisher and read about it. There are practial applications of these results, and the same properties were found for electrons. There is more evidence that the results are not propreties specific to photons or electrons, though I have not read it personally and cannot comment on it.

Long distance communication

On a similar note, it is implied by quantum physics, that quantum particles appear to be aware of eachother, and that this action at a distance has no time delay, such as the limit of the speed of light. I wonder if SETI is listining to the wrong thing. Imagine this technology coupled with the action at a distance principle, so that you could choose coupled quantum particles to communicate over vast distances with no time delay. Couple these technologies with virtual reality, and it could be possible for communities, seperated by vast distances of space, to communicate and interact in real time. Wouldn't it be surprising to find a universal (literally) quantum network that was in use, and that we have been looking in the wrong place all this time. I would imagine that any species entry in to the universal forum would be predicated by their discovery of the technologies, and their ability to apply them to interact with this universal network. Instead of physically traveling in a space ship to distant worlds, we instead project our consciousness over vast distances with the help of virtual reality and quantum communication. Perhaps ET isn't going to show up in a galactic cruiser, but instead is patiently waiting for us to pick up the damn quantum telephone. We just haven't heard it ring yet.

The problem with direct mind input

Well, first of all there's [hey, look at the bird out the window!] the fact that [I wonder if Janie will go out with me] it's hard to [I should upgrade my computer] differentiate between [how come this mind interface keeps making all my programs barf and die?] deliberate thought [hmm... what will I have for breakfast today?] and those annoying [I'm a little teapot, short and stout...] little background thoughts. [I'm hungry. Why isn't this page loading faster? What's the meaning of life? Why do we have ten fingers instead of sixteen? Where did I put my keys? What was that sudden popping noise in the back of my head?]

[Brain overload. Core dumped.]

PEAR is a con

I saw a dicovery channel magazine segment on these guys, and wasn't impressed.

I believe their results are biased.

Its based on a pretty basic statistical phenomenon that unfortunately is not documented very much in research.

If you generate 20 hypotheses (hypothesising structure) on random phenomenon, odds are 1 of them will falsely show structure within the common 19/20 (95%) confidence intervals.

when you combine this with the selective labelling of people as talented and untalented (in ESP), and throwing out of data when the subjects feel tired, or are otherwise displeased with the results, you get the self fullfilling results used to obtain increased funding from the stupid.