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I've just found this article, which links to this study, Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments, which says,

By contrast, factors associated with consciousness, such as meditation experience, electrocortical markers of focused attention, and psychological factors including openness and absorption, significantly correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double-slit interference pattern. The results appear to be consistent with a consciousness-related interpretation of the quantum measurement problem.

Is this peer reviewed evidence that human consciousness can modify quantum states at distance?

Oddthinking
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Saturnix
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    I am not an expert in these matters... but I have to admit that the discussion of the paper is quite something: *Cumulatively, these experiments suggest that mind–matter interactions occur in a broad range of physical target systems. Observed effects tend to be small in absolute magnitude and are **not trivially easy to repeat on demand**, but **high variance** and concomitant **difficulties in replication** are to be expected because all of these studies necessarily involved focused human attention or intention.* – nico May 11 '15 at 11:19
  • 3 years and still not an answer... sometimes I still think about this... hope it'll be figured out! – Saturnix Nov 06 '18 at 04:00
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    @Saturnix: You could try a bounty, but no guarantees. I turned off when I saw [Dean Radin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Radin)'s name. His reputation as a scientist isn't a strong one. – Oddthinking Nov 13 '18 at 03:55
  • These might be interesting: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01891/full https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0211511 – Saturnix Feb 06 '20 at 15:43
  • The link to the study is currently down (http://media.noetic.org/uploads/files/PhysicsEssays-Radin-DoubleSlit-2012.pdf = This site can’t be reached media.noetic.org took too long to respond). – Dave Feb 06 '20 at 16:02
  • new link seems to be here: http://deanradin.com/evidence/Radin2012doubleslit.pdf – Wolpertinger Feb 06 '20 at 23:16

1 Answers1

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Short Answer: No, the evidence being provided is largely worthless.

I will start by heading off at a tangent.

The primary author of this study is parapsychologist Dean Radin. That Wikipedia page explains:

Radin's ideas and work have been criticized by scientists and philosophers skeptical of paranormal claims.

It goes on to quote more specific attacks on his work.

I wouldn't be as generous. He is a pseudoscientific crackpot who pushes Quantum Mysticism.

The fact that this preposterous claim comes from Radin is probably why it hasn't garnered much attention here.

But don't fall for an ad hominem fallacy. Just because Radin is a crackpot with a history of many ridiculously wrong ideas doesn't mean that he is wrong this time.

For that we need evidence - e.g. someone attempting to reproduce the experiment.

Just a few months ago, someone published a study that did exactly that:

To address this question, a conceptual replication study involving 10,000 test trials was commissioned to be performed blindly by the same investigator who had reported the original results. The commissioned study performed confirmatory and strictly predictive tests with the advanced meta-experimental protocol (AMP), including with systematic negative controls and the concept of the sham-experiment, i.e., counterfactual meta-experimentation. Whereas the replication study was unable to confirm the original results, the AMP was able to identify an unacceptably low true-negative detection rate with the sham-experiment in the absence of test subjects. The false-positive detection rate reached 50%, whereby the false-positive effect, which would be indistinguishable from the predicted true-positive effect, was significant at p = 0.021 (σ = −2.02; N = 1,250 test trials). The false-positive effect size was about 0.01%, which is within an-order-of-magnitude of the claimed consciousness effect (0.001%; Radin et al., 2016). The false-positive effect, which indicates the presence of significant SME in the Radin DS-experiment, suggests that skepticism should replace optimism concerning the radical claim that an anomalous quantum consciousness effect has been observed in a controlled laboratory setting.

That is, not only did they fail to reproduce the results, they explain that the experiment is so flawed that positive results are likely to be false positives, so successful reproductions would need to be treated with skepticism.

We can, once again, dismiss the claims of Radin.

Oddthinking
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