Broad Speculations

I would like to call attention to a new paper Origin of probabilities and their application to the multiverse by Andreas Albrecht and Daniel Phillips.

There is an excellent layman’s explanation of the paper on the UNconstant blog with some comments and exchanges between the author of that blog and me.

The core of the paper is that classical probability, such as the 50-50 in coin flipping, is fundamentally rooted in the randomness of quantum mechanics.

Frankly I have always felt there is something not quite right with probability, particularly in regard to parapsychology and perhaps other sciences. Keep in mind  that probability itself is not real, it is a mathematical concept. Probability seems to describe the behavior of various sorts of events in the real world just other types of mathematics seem to describe other events.

Koestler in the Roots of Coincidence quotes Sir Alister Hardy:

“… It remained for M. G. Spencer Brown of Trinity College, Cambridge, to suggest the alternative and simpler hypothesis that all of this experimental work in so-called telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psycho-kinesis, which depends depends upon obtaining results above chance, may be readily a demonstration of some single and very different principle. He believes that it may be something no less fundamental or interesting – not telepathy or these other curious things – something implicit in the very nature and meaning of randomness itself…”

I wonder if this paper could provide some understanding into what this might be.