Does present science prohibit FTL communication except via entanglement?

A leading scientist asked us that, in a discussion group on brain and consciousness. My reply:

Because I have deep respect for what you have been doing, I will try to add a bit more precision to this discussion.

Under the most mainstream, solid versions of QED (which I do not believe in), it is simply impossible to send actual information FTL (let alone backtime, which is more or less equivalent ) WITH OR WITHOUT ENTANGLEMENT. 

X.. previously asked what we can learn about time from the classic work of Scully, Shih and others on quantum delay eraser, published in January 2000 in PRL. Shih himself, who did the experiment, had an intuitive feeling that it should be possible to send bits back through time, based on his work, and we funded him to try: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0084447 .  But it would not work that way. Lots of us reviewed the math in great detail, and agreed that this would not work. More generally, the book by J.S. Bell really is the definitive story here, explaining how what "feels" like a backwards time influence is not. 

But what happens when gravity and QED are accounted for together? Bottom line: no one has any right to say they know. The proper unified theory to unify gravity and QED has been much debated and much studied, but certainly not resolved. Lots of strong opinions, just opinions. 

But what happens when we go for a different theory of quantum measurement than the usual Heisenberg version? This is about what Henry Stapp quotes Von Neumann as calling "Process I." If Process I is a classical Markov process, as in what has been used in all successful predictions of experiments to date by quantum physics (not counting some of the recent quantum optics stuff not yet in journals), then it does not allow FTL, or BTT, or anything like a vehicle through which mind would express itself. (Maybe some upgrading of the lower-level hardware of the brain and such, as important as other key bits of lower level hardware, but no more.).

What motivations would justify anyone to look for alternative models of process I? 

One is the HOPE that mind really does express itself somehow specially through collapse events. But saying that gravity causes collapse does not help, unless it is further assumed that gravity represents mind. Dean Radin has tried to show an effect of mind on collapse, by buying an SPDC kit and doing a PK kind of experiment, but on quick reading, the results seem no different in nature from earlier work on more mundane PK experiments from places like Princeton PEAR long ago and George Weissman. 

My motivation in wanting to change the model of measurement is very different. It started out as "Bohmian," wanting to test the hypothesis that local realistic models are still allowed empirically (as DeBroglie and Bohm and Einstein all argued for), which logically means revisiting the so-called "causality" assumption in the CHSH theorem, the real basis for all the Bell's Theorem arguments against the DeBroglie/Bohm/Einstein view. 

My fundamental paper on this, an open access paper in a leading physics journal,

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf,

has a higher citation count than anything Sarfatti has ever published, none of which was in any of the core journals of basic physics. 

But exactly when I wrote that paper, I realized that the problems with the usual model of Process I go far beyond the concerns of "Bohmians." 

In fact... EITHER the experiments which can test my version of time-symmetric physics do favor my version, OR ELSE Process I CANNOT BE DERIVED as the outcome of Process II (the dynamics). That would imply that there really is a kind of magic in quantum measurement (from Magic Schoolbus to Magic Sunglasses? Really?) which defies the physics which applies to more mundane physical objects (Process 2, Boltzmann, etc.). If it really did come out that way, we really need to know, because it forcibly sends us back to the weirdisms of Deepak Chopra, of Swedenborg (real "What Dreams May Come" by Matheson), or implicitly the movie Inception (which I recommend very highly to anyone interested in taking weirdism seriously, not just as a matter of academic posturing). Would Shiva really choose the sleeping Vishnu over Deutsch and Einstein/Bohm both? 

There are of course lots of precognition data showing FTL sending of signals. The problem with that data is that for reasons I don't understand the folks doing those experiments seem reluctant to involve friendly skeptics like me in helping with the design and implementation of the experiments. 

Radin says they tried that kind of thing, but when the skeptic is convinced, he then becomes "just another believer" to the quasi-gestapo of Randi-ites. 

I was a very strong skeptic myself before 1967. I do wonder how George is doing lately. Seriously. Maybe we both should have paid more attention to his invitations. 

Best regards,