Rex Kerr
2 min readSep 27, 2023

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Not every one, but many. I don't think anyone's bothered to review it because it's not a hypothesis that most people think is worth seriously considering. People also don't correct for astrology, spirits, prayer, which song is playing on the radio, etc..

I couldn't find a good open-access example in the few minutes I was willing to spend looking, but many experiments involve an intentional correlation, and the study design involves finding out what the individual needs to start discerning the correlation (e.g. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049539508258763). But because the correlations are intentional, they presumably exist in "collective consciousness" (certainly, the experimenters are consciously aware), and thus if the collectivity were that important, the controls wouldn't work--people would behave better than chance before learning, and without cues they need to (individually, independently) detect the phenomenon.

Now, you can always rescue something like this by limiting the strength of the effect. Generally people study things for which there's a pretty strong effect in whatever they're studying so they don't need too huge of a sample size--and this does limit how tightly one can constrain any sort of surprising baseline performance. But that rapidly becomes a God of the Gaps argument. We take for granted that the material explanation is almost right instead of taking all the times where it works properly as evidence for that hypothesis and against others that don't make such specific predictions.

Indeed, while I haven't read Irreducible Mind, I have read accounts of many of the phenomena that the summary says it describes, and they almost universally are of the form, "Wow, we don't have a good way to understand this. Therefore, it's not material."

But the reasoning is completely bogus. There are all sorts of material things we don't understand at all. Look at how much disagreement there is among even domain experts about various aspects of LLMs!

And, furthermore, the vastly more numerous cases where the material explanation seems fine and the alternative (collective consciousness or whatever) seems irrelevant despite there being no real reason why it shouldn't appear, isn't counted equally strongly against the alternative hypothesis.

Thus, pseudoscience. At least, everything I've seen is.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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