Morphic Resonance

[GGoolsbe]

So, I was recently looking through my old Bluff Magazines and I picked up on an article by good old crazy Phil Laak titled "Morphic Resonance"
Basically, if you aren't familiar with the concept of "Morphic Resonance" it is a theory brought basically by this revolution of poker on television. It is the concept that as more people see your cards before play actually occurs it almost changes the odds(more in a sense of telepathy) It compares to similar thoughts as:
1. "Your dog knows when you are coming home
2. "You can tell when you are being stared at"

Well, the idea seems very interesting. It feeds off the fact that you know your being watched. Your mind may not, but your body feels it. That may seem strange but according to Laak and researchers, your magnetic field around your body changes with people watching you.
I find these concepts to be very interesting and I have never played a televised event but always wondered.
Has anyone indulged in this before? I am interested in finding out more and at this moment have no time to really investigate. I will though. Check back for more updates on this..

[OrangeKing]

Three things occur to me as I read this:

1) I now know never to subscribe to Bluff Magazine.

2) That's among the silliest things I've ever heard. I'd love to know who these "researchers" are, to begin with. Beyond that, I'd love to know how even a million people knowing what your cards are would actually physically change the cards that are in the deck. This isn't like people effecting an RNG (there is some really bad research with some horribly designed studies that preport to show how people can effect RNGs, or how RNGs predict world events, or other idiotic things), where there's no physical card - the cards are set, and they'd have to be physically moving in the deck to change probability.

3) Now, let's say I ignore all that, and beyond all the reason in me, I accept that this phenomena actually exists. How does Phil get by the problem that, as he's actually playing, nobody can see his cards?

See, we don't actually see the cards until months later. Does this effect magically transport back in time a few months after we finally see the cards in the edited, made for TV version of the tournament?

This, of course, is not an attack on the OP, just a critical look at what you posted. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Edit: Looking quickly at Wikipedia, I see that the "being stared at" stuff seems to possibly maybe perhaps have some merit, or at least is worthy of more study. On the other hand, the page was clearly written by someone who believes this stuff. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] Even if (huge if!) I accepted the not-so-well documented research, though, it would be a large stretch to think it could possibly effect cards that are dealt before the large numbers of people are looking at them (or at all - I don't see how anything other than being stared at seems accurate at all).

[OrangeKing]

Reading some of the responses to Sheldrake's work on staring, it seems like his trials weren't sufficiently randomized - it was much more likely than not that the next trial would be the opposite of the last as not. In other words, if the last time you weren't stared at, the next time you would be 60% of the time. Amazingly, this is almost exactly the rate at which people guessed they were being stared at. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Other research done after that seems to suggest that people do only as well as chance when they don't receive feedback on how they're doing. But with feedback and non-random trials, the percentage of hits goes way up. So I'm still skeptical about this, at best.

[chicagoY]

I think it just means your more self-conscious about what you do--magnetics be darned.

[Gazzbut]

I would just say to you Orange King that it is extremely likely that reality is far stranger than how we currently perceive it.... [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Maksymilian]

sounds like Laak has been spending too much time with Hollywood celebrities

[Apocalypso]

WHAT

[bobbyi]

[ QUOTE ]
the cards are set, and they'd have to be physically moving in the deck to change probability.

[/ QUOTE ]
The cards in the deck aren't set because no one has seen them yet or knows what they are. At this point, the contents of the deck could be anything in any order. Think of the many worlds interpretation.

[jesusson]

Read this book, it may change how you think about the collective mind. Although a good point is made in that events are pre-recorded... So I am not sure if this applies but is worth some attention.

Science of Mind

[OrangeKing]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
the cards are set, and they'd have to be physically moving in the deck to change probability.

[/ QUOTE ]
The cards in the deck aren't set because no one has seen them yet or knows what they are. At this point, the contents of the deck could be anything in any order. Think of the many worlds interpretation.

[/ QUOTE ]

I don't believe this can apply in the case of physical cards in a deck that has already been shuffled. The top card is always the top card, even though we can't see the side of it that tells us which card it is. We can see the back of it, and it is whatever card it is.

Once the deck is shuffled, we can see what physical card is sitting on the top of the deck. Can we see what value is on the front of the card? No. But we do know that, unless the card is moved, that it is one specific card, and can't be "any" card.

Or to put it yet another way: if we marked only the ace of spades, and saw that the top card was the marked card, we'd know it was the ace of spades. The same would be true if we shuffled the cards face up, and saw that it was the ace of spades. Shuffling the cards face down doesn't change this - the top card is, without a doubt, a single physical card. The only difference between this example and the first two is that we don't know which one it is.

I just realized that this is extraordinarily badly worded, and I hope it's somewhat possible to follow. Basically, what I'm saying is that no many how many splits in the "history tree" (using the terminology of the wikipedia article) there are, if the deck has already been shuffled, the order of the cards is set unless the deck is tampered with, because the cards are 52 seperate physical objects, even if we can't tell them apart from looking at their backs. Each phyiscal card only has one state; I think some people make the error of thinking the top card on the deck has 52 possible states (one of each card value), but this isn't the case.

Edit: Now before the deck is shuffled is a different story. In that case, the many-worlds interpretation would suggest that 52! decks exist at once, because that's how many possible states the deck has. Once the deck is shuffled though, each individual card has only one state.