> The study of how information is transmitted by electromagnetic radiation and how the human body perceives sensations is incompatible with supposed abilities like ESP, and completely incompatible with seeing into the future in the manner described by Bem
You're not stating this strongly enough. It's not just the "study", i.e., the theory of how information is transmitted, and it's not just EM. Physicists have experimented for decades looking for any kind of interaction other than the four known forces (strong, EM, weak, gravity) at every distance and energy scale. They have found none. So the statement that ESP, precognition, etc. are incompatible with the known laws of physics is not just a statement about our theories; it's a statement about the experimental facts. If there were any real interactions that could mediate these kinds of abilities, we would already have found them. Sean Carroll explains it here:
And yet entanglement causes changes to occur instantaneously over unlimited distances. What's worse, there are many readings of it where one's own consciousness impacts that change.
These things occur, that is a given. How or why is left to interpretations like the Many Worlds interpretation, the Transactional interpretation, the Bohm interpretation, Quantum Information, etc. The point is these interpretations are more of the philosophical ramblings of scientists saying "It's the way I think it is because X and Y and Z."
Psi is an interesting topic. I think the likelihood of it existing is small, but if you'd asked anybody in 1900 what the likelihood of quantum physics existing was in the form it has ultimately been found, you would have been laughed out of the room without an answer (even though even Newton had at least some reservations about whether light was a particle or a wave).
> And yet entanglement causes changes to occur instantaneously over unlimited distances
That is an interpretation; specifically, it's the Copenhagen Interpretation. The other interpretations you mention all say different things about what is "really happening" with entanglement. The only other one I'm aware of that would describe it similarly to "changes occurring instantaneously over unlimited distances" is the Bohm interpretation, but AFAIK that interpretation only works for non-relativistic QM; there is no relativistic version of it, which means it can't be right as it stands.
In any case, one thing all the interpretations agree on is that entangment cannot be used to transmit information instantaneously over unlimited distances. So entanglement can't produce the sorts of phenomena that are claimed to occur in psi. So the experimental facts are still just as I described them.
> if you'd asked anybody in 1900 what the likelihood of quantum physics existing was in the form it has ultimately been found, you would have been laughed out of the room without an answer
That's because nobody had actually done the experiments we've done now. We have quantum physics because experiments forced us to it, not because theorists thought it was a cool idea--i.e., because experiments ruled out the "classical" view of the world that everybody had before quantum physics. So it seems perfectly reasonable to me to rule out psi based on experimental data that rule out the existence of any interactions that could cause it.
For the record, my comment was not meant to imply that entanglement is the source of psi; it is rather clear that it is not (regardless of how many pseudo-scientific books on Amazon say otherwise). My point is that the world became much more weird than we would have given credit for a century ago or so ago, to the point that we still don't fully understand it (even if we can use it to make predictions to a remarkable level of accuracy), after all, to cover it today, we have to manufacture new universes every time a person makes a decision to make the data fit (obviously, I'm reaching into hyperbole to make a point, but only because I put the person in the middle).
Could psi be an exhibition of some other weirdness, something in the realm of the indecipherable thing we call consciousness or some other effect we have yet to find? I think the odds are very long against it, but they are probably greater than zero. We live in a universe that may be a 3D hologram above a 2D reality; that leaves lots of room for things we don't understand. I'm not ready to concede that we know everything (but while a handful of current psi researchers are interesting, I'm fully on the skeptical side).
> Could psi be an exhibition of some other weirdness, something in the realm of the indecipherable thing we call consciousness or some other effect we have yet to find?
No, because, once again, if there were any such weirdness that could transmit information through non-sensory channels, or allow people to influence matter with their minds, etc., etc., we would already have seen it in the experiments we have run. Saying magic words like "consciousness" does not change that.
Yes, we don't know everything, so we can't rule out everything that isn't covered by our current knowledge; but in the areas of physics we do know, we have a very good understanding of the boundaries of our knowledge, which means we have a very good understanding of what is ruled out by what we already know. The Carroll article I linked to goes into all this.
You're not stating this strongly enough. It's not just the "study", i.e., the theory of how information is transmitted, and it's not just EM. Physicists have experimented for decades looking for any kind of interaction other than the four known forces (strong, EM, weak, gravity) at every distance and energy scale. They have found none. So the statement that ESP, precognition, etc. are incompatible with the known laws of physics is not just a statement about our theories; it's a statement about the experimental facts. If there were any real interactions that could mediate these kinds of abilities, we would already have found them. Sean Carroll explains it here:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/02/18/...