Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research

Abstract 

This article has four purposes: 1) to present for the first time in archival form all results of some 25 years of remote perception research at this laboratory; 2) to describe all of the analytical scoring methods developed over the course of this program to quantify the amount of anomalous information acquired in the experiments; 3) to display a remarkable anti-correlation between the objective specificity of those methods and the anomalous yield of the experiments; and 4) to discuss the phenomenological and pragmatic implications of this complementarity. The formal database comprises 653 experimental trials performed over several phases of investigation. The scoring methods involve various arrays of descriptor queries that can be addressed to both the physical targets and the percipients’ description thereof, the responses to which provide the basis for numerical evaluation and statistical assessment of the degree of anomalous information acquired. Twenty-four such recipes have been employed, with queries posed in binary, ternary, quaternary, and ten-level distributive formats. Thus treated, the database yields a composite z-score against chance of 5.418 (p = 3 × 10⁻⁸, one-tailed).

Numerous subsidiary analyses agree that these overall results are not significantly affected by any of the secondary protocol parameters tested, or by variations in descriptor effectiveness, possible participant response biases, target distance from the percipient, or time interval between perception effort and agent target visitation. However, over the course of the program there has been a striking diminution of the anomalous yield that appears to be associated with the participants’ growing attention to, and dependence upon, the progressively more detailed descriptor formats and with the corresponding reduction in the content of the accompanying free-response transcripts. The possibility that increased emphasis on objective quantification of the phenomenon somehow may have inhibited its inherently subjective expression is explored in several contexts, ranging from contemporary signal processing technologies to ancient divination traditions. An intrinsic complementarity is suggested between the analytical and intuitive aspects of the remote perception process that, like its more familiar counterpart in quantum science, brings with it an inescapable uncertainty that limits the extent to which such anomalous effects can be simultaneously produced and evaluated.