This is a threshold that qualifies other experiments in physics as showing valid results. The “Linux bots” – machine “observers” that sometimes took the place of actual humans - showed results that would be expected by pure random chance (i.e., no QM “observer effect”) whereas humans showed measurable QM “observer effect” results with (so the experimenters claim) 5-sigma statistical significance. This turns out to be a task that can be automated by a “bot” with a small bit of clever web programming. The experimenters used an ingenious setup involving the internet as a distance separator and had a Linux “software bot” sometimes take the place of actual humans in performing the experiment, which involves interacting with a web page displaying some sort of feedback graph. The results seem to show, among other things, that “meditators” (people who practice meditative thinking) can achieve more statistically significant effects on influencing the double slit result than others but humans, when “observing” the experiment have on the whole a statistically significant influence on the double slit result in contrast with simple machines. They were also thorough in their use of meta-analysis techniques to inspect their raw data for evidence of bias (p-hacking and selective reporting, for example.) There are also efforts underway to duplicate their results which appear to show confirmation. In any case, the researchers behind this particular experiment seem to have been meticulous in removing all possible extraneous mechanisms that might interfere with their experimental results, and they conducted these experiments with fairly ingenious controls and delay protocols that make their conclusions very difficult to refute. Mills work is a better fit in most cases (although this double slit result is hard to reconcile.) To be clearer: I acknowledge the validity of (at least some or most of) the phenomena that are described as consequences of quantum physics, even though I disagree that our current abstraction of how to represent these phenomena mathematically via QM is the “best fit”. There are many well-known “quirks”, gaps, and flaws involving the QM framework that are dissatisfying and reveal it to be arguably incomplete. I have objections to the idea that the current form of Quantum Mechanics (QM) -that is, the physics theory, from a mathematical/framework point of view-is the correct mapping of theory to the real-world physical phenomena of “quantum physics”. Randell Mills, and I never really believed in things like telekinesis or parapsychology) I have no choice but to accept that these guys are evidently onto something with this experiment the results are compelling. While I have trouble acknowledging this (I’m a Quantum Mechanics heretic, thanks to my physicist friend Dr. Their thoughts can change the behavior of a distant experimental apparatus. The experimental subjects in this study can-apparently-imagine themselves influencing a certain condition in the double-slit apparatus, causing something to be “observed” (thereby “collapsing the wave function”) such that this conscious effort apparently has a quantitatively measurable effect on the outcome of the experiment. This video covers a fascinating bit of research that purports to prove, in a fairly robust way, that human conscious thought can-statistically speaking, anyway-influence the outcome of a famous quantum mechanics experiment known as the “double slit” experiment (for details, watch the video.) Here is the original article I wrote, which introduces a surprising and unique idea involving a new way to perform a Turing Test using a consequence of Quantum Physics it is an idea that has troubling implications. If they cannot tell, then the machine is judged to be “sentient” in some sense. The goal is for the investigator to try to determine, using only the responses they hear to the questions they ask and the conversations they hold, which room has the computer in it, and which has the human being. You put a phone in each one, and an investigator is given the task of calling the phone in each room from the outside and asking any series of questions they like as they converse with the person or machine. This is sometimes described using the following analogy: you put a computer, and a person, into separate rooms. To try to tell the machine apart from the human being, he devised what we now call a “Turing Test.” While thinking about “computers” in general, Turing realized a time would come when a “machine” might possess a level of “intelligence” that could be indistinguishable from a human being. His life story is captured in the movie “ The Imitation Game ” and also in the book “ Cryptonomicon ” by Neal Stephenson.
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