Talk:Russell Targ

SRI

I'm wondering if the recent changes in nomenclature re SRI in the article are valid. The question is, when did the name of the Institute first get abbreviated to SRI? If it was after 1972, then it would be incorrect to say 'In 1972 Targ joined the Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory at SRI'. Is there any reliable information about this? I can always ask Targ himself of course, as he would presumably know what the lab was called when he joined it. My own recollection, which may not be very reliable, was that the name by which it was known was changed from Stanford Research Institute to SRI International at the time it became separate from the university, which would make 1977 the year of the first usage of the term 'SRI'. --Brian Josephson (talk) 20:54, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

The use of SRI in the article is only meant to be a convenient abbreviation...appropriate in a loose sense to the institution throughout its separation from Stanford U (in 70 I believe) and later renaming as SRI International ('77 ?). Is this not splitting hairs? Juan Riley (talk) 21:10, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

And no, divestiture of SRI was much earlier than the renaming...during the Viet Nam war ahem.Juan Riley (talk) 21:15, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Targ has confirmed what I thought to be the case, writing 'My lab was Stanford Research Institute when I joined it in 1972, and stayed that way until 1977, when it became SRI International.'. I don't agree with your position, in that I don't think it appropriate for an encyclopedia to invent its own abbreviations, i.e. to describe something at a given time in a way that is different from how it was known at the time. Would you have abbreviated the name if the lab had never been known as SRI International? I think not. The usual way of dealing with this kind of issue is to give the full name the first time, and then shorten it with devices such as 'the Institute' later on where appropriate. --Brian Josephson (talk) 22:05, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

[An aside: SRI (by whatever name you wish to call it) was no longer associated with Stanford U when Targ joined it. And I did not make that an issue. You did.] Just a few questions: is MIT the official name of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? Caltech that of California Instituye of Technology? Perhaps they have been officially adopted over the years. Whether or not they have, is there any ambiguity in introducing the acronyms to make an article more succinct? Juan Riley (talk) 22:17, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Look at the article on SRI International. It frequently uses the acronym SRI anachronistically in discussing the history of the institute before '77. Once again you are splitting hairs here. Juan Riley (talk) 22:29, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

I have just one last note on this issue relating to a quote from a 1996 article by Targ "Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s:A Memoir" (tis referenced in the Targ article): "Hundreds of remote viewing experiments were carried out at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) from 1972 to 1986." The acronym in the WP article has been used in the same sense as Targ uses it in his own writing. Juan Riley (talk) 23:28, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

@Brian I see you have made you changes without further discussion. Can I ask if you saw that in the lead the full name and acronym had already been given, i.e., "He joined Stanford Research Institute (SRI, now SRI International)..." ? Juan Riley (talk) 22:59, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

It would be nice to have feedback from others on this (perhaps minor) issue. It is no surprise that virtually every publication by Targ and Puthoff that I have looked at use on first occurrence in the text Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and thereafter use only the acronym SRI. This is quite standard practice in at least technical publications. This article did the same with the acronym given in the lead. Not sure if BrianJosephson saw the place in the lead where the acronym is given. If he did not...well then it may just be an oversight. After his edits, what is used to refer to SRI in what section is rather capricious. However I do not just wish to run roughshod over his edits. Juan Riley (talk) 00:26, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

I see SRI used as a convenience acronym that helps readers easily identify the place without having to read a long phrase. To me, "the Institute" doesn't accomplish the same goal because it isn't immediately recognisable as referring to SRI. I've edited the early career section to keep the first full wikilinked mention of SRI, added SRI as a convenience acronym there, and changed "the Institute" to SRI. --Ca2james (talk) 03:32, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

I guess no form of wording can be totally free from objections, and I'm happy to leave the wording in its present form. --Brian Josephson (talk) 08:09, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

But I'm not at all convinced that these latest changes (re how SRI is described) are good ones. What do people (e.g. Ca2james) think? --Brian Josephson (talk) 21:49, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

Did you read my discussion that SRI the acronym is handled in this WP article the exact same way it is handled in publications by Targ and Putoff? Juan Riley (talk) 21:53, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

What do you mean by "how SRI is described?" --Ca2james (talk) 21:55, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

General comment

I'm not following the general discussion at this point, but looking at the article it looks like this has come together very nicely. Nice work. Formerly 98 (talk) 01:05, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it has improved greatly. I doubt Targ likes it any better, though, other than that the word "pseudoscience" no longer appears in the thumbnail on Google Guy (Help!) 16:36, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

IP edits

The following was added/changed in this diff. a bit of the content below was already in the article but it is hard to sort so i just copied the changed sections here.

Contains a bunch of WP:OR and unacceptable refs.

in the lead

Targ originally became known for his early work on lasers and laser applications. Targ joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1972 where he and Harold Puthoff coined the term "remote viewing" for the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using parapsychological means. Targ's work on remote viewing has been characterized by some as pseudoscience and has also been criticized as fringe researchers often come under fire in debates over the burden of proof. However, many of Targ's critiques, tend to conveniently omit the fact that his collaboration with the CIA through the SRI, has underscored strict restrictions on public disclosure and on the dissemination of the scientific methods and results of numerous tests and experiments on the basis of National Security protocols. Despite this, his work and that of his collaborators has been published in Nature, The Proceedings of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), and the Proceedings of the American Association the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as well as featured prominently in the Journal of Scientific Exploration , a peer-reviewed scientific journal, thereby contributing to a growing body of research on metaphysical phenomena in the field of parapsychology and perceptual research. Russell Targ is considered one of the pioneers of remote viewing research, along with Harold Puthoff and Ingo Douglas Swann, notably as co-founders and contributors of the Stargate Project as an initiative of the SRI.

Remove viewing section

Remote viewing (or RV) is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using subjective means, in particular, extra-sensory perception (ESP) or "sensing with mind". Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance. "Remote viewing is a mental ability whereby a person (a remote viewer) can describe impressions of, sketch, and model a target that is 'remote' from them and not available through their normal senses. Remote viewing is an intuitive ability related to being psychic, ESP or PSI. Remote Viewing is a psychic skill originally developed and utilized as an operational intelligence gathering tool for the United States Military and Intelligence services from 1972 – 1995. A January 1979 SECRET progress report from SRI to the D.I.A describes Remote Viewing as: "Remote Viewing (RV) is the acquisition and description, by mental means, of information blocked from ordinary perception by distance or shielding, and generally believed to be secure against such access." SRI quarterly progress report for the DIA – Jan 10, 1979 – H.E. Puthoff, I. Swann, G. Langford." The term was coined in the 1970s by Targ and Puthoff, while working as researchers at SRI, to differentiate it from clairvoyance.

A declassified CIA document substantiates the methodological rigor and seriousness of this type of research, despite being experimental in nature, and the challenges posed in developing valid protocoles to understand the phenomena of ESP and Remote Viewing. This document emphasized that "it is possible to vary the experimental paradigm to discriminate between various models for the operation of the phenomenon, such as ESP occurs sporadically but gives perfect information; ESP always occurs and multiplies chances of success by a constant factor; ESP tells the subject the subject one the the things the target is not; ESP, when it occurs answers a question of the form- is the target an X?. In addition to psi-models, it will also be necessary to introduce models which provide more sensitive estimates of ESP. For example, target material will be introduced whereby guesses instead of being of the 'all or nothing' type can be more or less right. Again, a number of different p values will be introduced and intermixed to imitate real life situations" In their 23 year program for the government at SRI, Targ and his team had to carry out “demonstration of ability” tasks for the Director of the CIA, NASA, and the Commanding General of the Army Intelligence Command. For the CIA, Targ and his team were able to accurately describe and draw a giant gantry crane rolling on eight wheels over a large building, and draw the 60 foot gores, “slices” of a sphere, under construction in northern Russia. The sphere was entirely accurate, although its existence was unknown at the time. The description was so accurate that it became the subject of a Congressional hearing of the House Committee on Intelligence. The intelligence agencies involved were afraid of a security leak. No leak was found, and we were told to “press on.” (Online Testimony by Russell Targ)

In 1972 Puthoff and Targ tested remote viewer Ingo Swann at SRI, and the experiment led to a visit from two employees of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. The result was a $50,000 CIA-sponsored project known as the Stargate Project. The SRI team published papers in Nature and Proceedings of the IEEE. In order to publish their findings in the 1976 Proceedings of the IEEE, Targ and his collaborators had to meet with Robert W. Lucky, managing editor, and his board. The editor proposed to Targ and his team to show him how to conduct a remote viewing experiment. If it was successful, he would publish the paper. The editor was also head of electro-optics at Bell Telephone Laboratory. We gave a talk at his lab. He then chose some engineers to be the “psychics” for each of five days. Each day he hid himself at a randomly chosen location in the nearby town. After the agreed-upon five trials, the editor read the five transcripts and successfully matched each of the five correctly to his hiding places. This was significant at 0.008 (one in 5!, 5-factorial). As a result, he published our paper on “Information Transmission Over Kilometer Distances”. (Online Testimony by Russell Targ) Targ and his team also presented their work in a symposium on consciousness at a national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. While a number of scientific reviews of the SRI (and later) experiments on remote viewing reject such experimental findings as conclusive, denouncing it as pseudoscience, this has not deterred a growing number of scientists from conducting advanced research in this field, notably to show and confirm that ESP-related phenomena exist and that there is arguably "enough evidence" to support the original claims of 'remote-viewing' researchers. According to Russel Targ's personal testimony "Remote viewing is easily replicated and has been demonstrated all over the world. It has been the subject of several Ph.D. dissertations in the US and abroad. Princeton University had a 25 year program investigating remote viewing with more than 450 trials. Prof. Robert Jahn also published a lengthy and highly significant (p = 10-10 or 1 in ten billion) experimental investigation of remote viewing in the 1982 Proc. IEEE." (Online Testimony by Russell Targ) Targ continues: "The kind of tasks that kept us in business for twenty-three years include: SRI psychics found a downed Russian bomber in Africa; reported on the health of American hostages in Iran; described Soviet weapons factories in Siberia; located a kidnapped US general in Italy; and accurately forecasted the failure of a Chinese atomic-bomb test three days before it occurred, etc. When San Francisco heiress Patricia Hearst was abducted from her home in Berkeley, a psychic with the SRI team was the first to identify the kidnapper by name and then accurately describe and locate the kidnap car. I was at the Berkeley police station and witnessed this event." (Online Testimony by Russell Targ)

Reception

Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s upon the declassification of certain documents related to the Stargate Project, a US$20 million research program that had started in 1975 and was sponsored by the U.S. government, in an attempt to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995 after it failed to produce any useful intelligence information. David Goslin, of the American Institutes for Research said: "There's no documented evidence it had any value to the intelligence community." This however, is not to say that remote viewing does not exist. The problem, therefore persisted since evidence supported the notion that something "unusual is happening" but as an anomalous form of perception, and without a clear and testable explanation. "Again, we do not know under which circumstances such processes work, and the classified work of U.S. intelligence has shown that it works but is not precise enough for espionage (Targ 1996, Puthoff 1996, Utts 1996)." Targ reports that "Jessica Utts is a statistics Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and is president of the American Statistical Association. In writing for her part of a 1995 evaluation of our work for the CIA, she wrote: “Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted.… Remote viewing has been conceptually replicated across a number of laboratories, by various experimenters, and in different cultures. This is a robust effect that, were it not such an unusual domain, would no longer be questioned by science as a real phenomenon. It is unlikely that methodological flaws could account for its remarkable consistency.” " (Testimony by Russell Targ and cited in ).

Further work on parapsychology

A variety of scientific studies of remote viewing have been conducted. Some earlier, less sophisticated experiments produced positive results, but they had invalidating flaws. None of the more recent experiments have shown positive results when conducted under properly controlled conditions. The perceived lack of successful experiments has led the mainstream scientific community to reject remote viewing, based upon the absence of an evidence base, the lack of a theory which would explain remote viewing, and the lack of experimental techniques which can provide reliably positive results. Science writers including Gary Bennett, Martin Gardner, Michael Shermer, and professor of neurology Terence Hines describe the topic of remote viewing as pseudoscience.

Note, however that most of the critiques against the work of Targ, were expressed before 1995, which is when "the CIA released a report with the unassuming title, “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.” The 183-page white paper was more like a white flag—it was the CIA’s public admission, after years of speculation, that U.S. government agencies had been using a type of ESP called “remote viewing” for more than two decades to help collect military and intelligence secrets. [...] But the report, conducted for the CIA by the independent American Institutes for Research, did much more than confirm the existence of the highly classified program. It declared that the psychic-spy operation, code-named Star Gate, had been a bust. Yes, the CIA researchers had validated some Star Gate trials, finding that “hits occur more often than chance” and that “something beyond odd statistical hiccups is taking place.” But the report declared that ESP was next to worthless for military use because the tips provided are too “vague and ambiguous” to produce actionable intelligence. [...] According to the now-declassified “secret” briefing, available online, the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command had conducted “100 collection projects” using ESP since 1979 for a slew of government agencies including the CIA, NSA, FBI and Secret Service. Several of the projects involved the use of Army psychics to help locate Americans taken hostage by Iran in 1979. “Over 85% of our operational missions have produced accurate target information,” states the briefing. “Even more significant, approximately 50% of the 760 missions produced usable intelligence.” "

Since then, Targ's work and that of researchers interested in metaphysical and psychic phenomena has continued to elicit strong support despite the criticisms. In "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: the case of non-local perception, a classical and Bayesian review of evidences," Patrizio E. Tressoldi argues that according to both a frequentist and a Bayesian meta-analysis, experimental results from seven databases, related to six different protocols confirm that human visual perception may have non-local properties, meaning that it may operate beyond the space and time constraints of sensory organs. As such, the reality and the functioning of non-local perception were analyzed using a frequentist and a Bayesian meta-analysis. According to the former, "the null hypothesis can be rejected for all six protocols even if the effect sizes range from 0.007 to 0.28. [... While the] Bayesian meta-analysis, [...] provides strong evidence to support the alternative hypothesis (H1) over the null hypothesis (H0), but only for three out of the six protocols." This re-evaluation has been followed up by Jeffrey N. Rouder, University of Missouri, Richard D. Morey, University of Groningen and Jordan M. Province, University of Missouri, who argue that "Psi phenomena, such as mental telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, have garnered much recent attention. We reassess the evidence for psi effects from Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio’s (2010) meta-analysis. Our analysis differs from Storm et al.’s in that we rely on Bayes factors, a Bayesian approach for stating the evidence from data for competing theoretical positions. In contrast to more conventional analyses, inference by Bayes factors allows the analyst to state evidence for the no-psi-effect null as well as for a psi-effect alternative. We find that the evidence from Storm et al.’s presented data set favors the existence of psi by a factor of about 6 billion to 1, which is noteworthy even for a skeptical reader."

Among those who want to take Targ's work further, Harald Walach (Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt, Walter von Lucadou, Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Parapsychologie (WGFP) and Hartmann Römer, University of Freiburg, argue that "Scientific facts are constituted as consensus about observable phenomena against the background of an accepted, or at least plausible, theory. Empirical data without a theoretical framework are at best curiosities and anomalies, at worst they are neglected. The problem of parapsychological research since its inception with the foundation of the Society of Psychical Research in 1882 was that no sound theoretical basis existed. On the contrary, the proponents of the SPR often indulged in a theoretical model that ran contrary to the perceived materialism of mainstream science, and many tried to use the data of parapsychological research to bolster the case of "mind over matter," yet without producing a good model of how such effects could be conceptualized. In general, parapsychological (PSI) research has been rather devoid of theorizing and, if anything, assumed a tacit signal theoretical, local-causal model of some sort of subtle energy that would be vindicated, once enough empirical data were amassed. History, and data, proved this stance wrong." In light of development in quantum phycis, notably in the theorization of quantum entanglement these authors therefore suggest that such phenomena are better understood as predicated by a Generalized Quantum Theory (GQT). They are part of a group of researchers that link psychic phenomena to quantum theories, such as entanglement, as discussed and debated by a growing community of scientists, notably since the Quantum Mind Conference in 1999 and 2003, where a consortium of scientists discussed Quantum Mechanics (QM) and Remote Viewing and their application to entanglement research- particle entanglement in QM and consciousness entanglement in RV.

The link between Remote Viewing and ESP on one hand, and quantum entanglement differs from Targ's proposed theory. Note that for Russell Targ and Elizabeth A. Rauscher, Remote Viewing and ESP could be understood, not as a matter of entanglement per se, but rather as an inter-dimensional phenomena that collapses space and time. One of their proposition, presented in the 2006 AIP Conference Proceedings, and subsequently published in Ingrid Fredriksson (ed.), 'Aspects of Consciousness: Essays on Physics, Death and the Mind', is that the "light cone metric representation may imply superluminal signal propagation between subject and event in the real four-space, but the event-receiver connection will not appear superluminal in some eight space representations. We can consider that our ordinary four dimensional Minkowski space is derived as a 4-D cut through the complex eight space." One of their main conclusion is that "It appears then that there is a human perceptual modality in which distant space-time events can be accessed. The remote perception phenomena may imply, in a certain sense, that space and time are not primary physical constructs. In the words of Albert Einstein, 1941, "time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live." In a similar vain A. S. Eddington, (1923) said, "time is a mental construct of our private consciousness ... physicists construct the concept of a world wide time from a string of subjective instances." " As Fredriksson explains Targ and Elizabeth A. Rauscher "present a geometrical model of space-time known as a "complex Minkowski space" shown to be consistent with our present understanding of the equations of Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Schrödinger. The product of 25 years of research, this model utilizes elements of experimental parapsychology, while remaining consistent with the structure of modern physics." For Ken Renshaw, a veteran electrical engineer working in satellites and communications high technology, and author of the 2009 book "Science, Remote Viewing and ESP: Beyond Einstein's Horizon," the sciences across multiple disciplines seem to strongly support the existence and functions of ESP and Remote Viewing. He offer a compelling analysis of the literature, of the experiments, of the methodological protocols and of the link between such plausible explanation and the laws of, and debates within physics, notably notions on electromagnetism, the holographic universe and the configuration of space-time.

References

-- Jytdog (talk) 00:41, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Targ's marriage

I'd like belatedly to complain about the action of User:Cwobeel in having removed the information about Targ's second marriage (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russell_Targ&type=revision&diff=611250618&oldid=611247057), on the basis of no verifiable references having been given. Marriages are a matter of public record and there can be no reasonable dispute over whether a marriage in recent times took place or not. This is the kind of information that is in principle verifiable by someone willing to do the work, and should not be removed unless there is good cause to believe it to be in error. It is particularly bad to remove information about a current marriage, the revised article giving the misleading impression that Targ is currently unmarried. Do you have to die, so that your obituary can be quoted as a source, before you can be accepted as having been married to someone by wikipedia?

The relevant information is now back, with a source but, knowing what WP fanatics are like, it would not surprise me in the least if someone will now declare the source unreliable. --Brian Josephson (talk) 10:36, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

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