W:

Interesting -- I hadn't thought the two posts were contrary, but I think I can see why you indicate they are; my sense of the Swann experiments was that they were different in certain ways from Rhine's work with card prediction. But I may be misremembering.

If you try to exercise awareness just by exercising it, even in a somewhat controlled environment, as I understand the Swann series was done, just comparing the results to the pure chance numbers of a material system, I guess you're not imposing any standards on the performance of awareness, are you? All the filtering, really, is left in the hands of the test subject. If you limit him to guessing about cards, I would expect that the sheer boredom and unreality of the subject matter would be enough to distort the results, assuming (and I do) that interest is an attribute of awareness in action.

I make the point about germane variables because I think there is a range of attributes which are peculiar to awareness itself, which can be messed with in a test environment that is trying to control the wrong things, or at least an insufficient number of things. For example, if Ingo Swann (or any other such subject) were tested by a person who was perceptibly hostile to the question of awareness being extra-material, would that "resonate" in some way as to distort results? Does hostility dampen ability? It certainly makes a difference in human performance in other circumstances, such as auditions in musical groups, etc. depending on the indiivudal. But it NEVER makes a difference (as far as I have heard) in purely material experiments relying on the replicative aspects of physical setups.   Expectation has an effect on some events in the boundary region between living and mechanical systems, as demonstrated int he placebo effect. If an observer expects you to fail, does it disrupt your focus in some degree? All this is unquantified as far as I know.

I have to run off and be productive for a while. Thanks for the interesting conversation so far.

A