SPR Study Day - The Psychology of the Sceptic

[tyr_13]

It has yet to be shown that there are not any such 'psychic realities'.

It has not been shown that there isn't an ethereal gnome watching me every time I right-click.

 

[maatorc]

It has not been shown that there isn't an ethereal gnome watching me every time I right-click.

I take it you are saying there are such beasties? - !

 

[Jeff Corey]

"In the editorial of the March/April 2003 issue of Infinite Energy, the late Gene Mallove reports on breakthrough research in acupuncture which showed that stimulating a specific acupuncture point in the foot leads to instantaneous activation of the visual cortex of the brain. Measurement of the speed of transmission was only limited by the instrumentation's time resolution and shown to be "at least 1,000 times any known nerve transmission speed". This important result was

"submitted to Science, and then Nature, which both rejected without review according to Dr. Joie Jones. Subsequently, five sympathetic Nobel laureates in the biological sciences, who were impressed with the paper, urged Nature to reconsider its decision. It did not. Therefore, the paper had to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which does not censor the work of its participants."[/url]

I'd like to see a link to that. It smells.

 

[tyr_13]

I take it you are saying there are such beasties? - !

No, I'm saying that at this point they are just as evidenced as your psychic realities.

 

[Jeff Corey]

What Gorilla?: Why Some Can't See Psychic Phenomena

[...]

"Because of these blind spots, some common aspects of human experience literally cannot be seen by those who've spent decades embedded within the Western scientific worldview. That worldview, like any set of cultural beliefs inculcated from childhood, acts like the blinders they put on skittish horses to keep them calm. Between the blinders we see with exceptional clarity, but seeing beyond the blinders is not only exceedingly difficult, after a while it's easy to forget that your vision is restricted.

An important class of human experience that these blinders exclude is psychic phenomena, those commonly reported spooky experiences, such as telepathy and clairvoyance, that suggest we are deeply interconnected in ways that transcend the ordinary senses and our everyday notions of space and time.

Exclusion of these phenomena creates a Catch 22: Human experiences credibly reported throughout history, across all cultures, and at all educational levels, repeatedly tell us that psychic phenomena exist. But Big Science -- especially as portrayed in prominent newspapers and popular magazines like Scientific American -- says it doesn't.

Well then, is this gorilla in the basketball game, or not? One way to find out is to study the question using the highly effective tools of science while leaving the worldview assumptions behind. That way we can study the question without prejudice, like watching a basketball game without preferring either the white or black team. Neutral observers are much more likely to spot a gorilla, if one is indeed present."

[...]

This is not only wrong, but willfully stupid. This dork uses the gorilla demonstration to show that clear minded individuals have blinders? That people not fooled by illusions, delusions and hallucinations have blinders? He has his head so far up his blinders that he is functionally blind.
Don't bother to respond to this, I know you are buzy.

 

[maatorc]

No, I'm saying that at this point they are just as evidenced as your psychic realities.

'Ethereal Gnomes' are a strictly 'pseudo-skeptic' verbal delusional invention devised as a derisive diversion in lieu of any genuinely skeptical knowledge and experience of all subjects beyond the capacity of pseudo-skeptics to evaluate, comprehend, judge, or measure.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Wowsa, you remind me of Gnome Chomsky!

 

[tyr_13]

'Ethereal Gnomes' are a strictly 'pseudo-skeptic' verbal delusional invention devised as a derisive diversion in lieu of any genuinely skeptical knowledge and experience of all subjects beyond the capacity of pseudo-skeptics to evaluate, comprehend, judge, or measure.

Labeling people 'pseudo-skeptic' is an often self-gratifying tactic of people who have had their faulty logic pointed out to them in a curt manner in lieu of any actual explanation on why their reasoning is sound or why they get to use such long run-on sentence structures. It is beyond the capacity of these logic-impaired persons to evaluate, comprehend, judge, or measure their mistake. Thus, they gain comfort through labeling.

So instead of calling me a 'pseudo-skeptic' for pointing out why your stance on 'psychic realities' is not evidence based (i.e. it isn't), why don't you try to explain why postulating 'psychic-realities' is important on this thread.

'Psychic realities' are a strictly wooish verbal spin to make psi advocates sound as if they were being scientific in lieu of any real evidence.

 

[fls]

I'd like to see a link to that. It smells.

I posted a link to the paper in my response to Limbo.

http://www.pnas.org/content/95/5/2670.full

I realize that Limbo wasn't able to appreciate it, but I think that you will. Enjoy.

If you are referring to the story of suppression, the stories all seem to suffer from the same problem demonstrated in the OP. They fail to show that the research wasn't rejected for the usual reasons. In some ways, it's one long argument that the research was rejected because of poor quality, when studies like this are supposed to serve as 'evidence'.

Linda

 

[blutoski]

My previous post was a bit facetious. This is the real meat of Robert McLuhan's reply:

(quoting Robert McLuhan): '...proper evidence will establish, for me, any claim.' What is 'proper evidence'? What James Randi says it is?

And this is where the disagreement lies! There is a disagreement about what constitutes proper evidence! Hello!

The original essay makes best sense if interpreting the background assumptions McLuhan accepts mean he is incapable of accepting that there is

a) that the skeptics' requirements differ from those of psi advocates in being more closely aligned with the requirements of the natural sciences

b) that the skeptics' requirements might possibly have merit

c) that the skeptics' requirements have not been met

If he doesn't accept the above, then I guess it makes sense that the only conclusion he can draw is that skeptics are flailing.

However, I hold the above three premises to be true, and assert that the skeptics who matter are rejecting the conclusion of psi-proven because they find the evidence too weak.

(quoting Robert McLuhan): Why not the tests and investigations devised by scientists who believe it to be a genuine entity? Or for that matter other magicians, like Robert-Houdin, who believed the clairvoyant Alex Didier to be genuine, or J.N. Maskelyne, who debunked seance mediums, but then privately experimented with table turning and, far from being convinced by Michael Faraday's explanation - which skeptics take to be the last word - thought a genuinely psychokinetic effect was at work.

This is a compound question, but the answer is pretty simple: because the tests were badly designed, even though they were done by scientists and magicians.

Also: Faraday provided more than an 'explanation' - he demonstrated with apparatus that the tables were being turned by the fingers of the participants, which we now call ideomotor. This is not a 'last word', but it is acceptable to disprove the reasoning of Maskelyne's claim that because it was impossible for table-turning to be caused by the participants' fingers, that therefore there was no other explanation than psychokenesis. All Faraday did was report that in all demonstrations of table-turning using his apparatus, the participants' fingers had applied pressure in the direction of rotation. We are left to decide if that's meaningful to the thesis. Is McLuhan unaware of the facts? Uninterested? Ignoring? I can't say.

 

[maatorc]

......why don't you try to explain why postulating 'psychic-realities' is important on this thread.......

Are you saying 'pseudo-skeptics' can determine questions of 'psychic realities'?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Chris: You have to remember that the argument is not really about the evidence. The argument is about their assumptions and their preconceptions. Their preconceptions are, with these sort of phenomena, that they don’t make any sense and challenge their world view. So, they’re going to do anything they possibly can to dismiss evidence that challenges their preconceptions....

We all do this to some degree. The key is to do it based on extensive preexisting knowledge, not on preexisting unsupportable dogmatic beliefs. And, to have evidence which supports your conclusions. If those preconceptions were arrived at through valid evidence, then it only makes sense to be skeptical of things such as the psychic already exposed cheating, or, of yet another claim a perpetual motion machine has been built (one that creates more energy than it uses, not the one which runs on changes in air pressure). Skeptics would have no trouble accepting a Bigfoot if one were found. In a case such as Bigfoot, however, the exhaustiveness of the search must also be taken into account. Such a skeptical position is based on evidence, not on nay saying anything which doesn't fit a preexisting conclusion.

By the same token, one needs to recognize preexisting beliefs which are based on weak evidence and be more open to new information when that is the case. Skepticism of yet another unverifiable eyewitness is justifiable in the case of Bigfoot, while natives claiming to have seen an animal with gills that lives in the forest which had not been searched for by thousands of people was valid to consider possible rather than be viewed with excessive skepticism.

In the long run, valid evidence is what it is, regardless of the people dismissing that valid evidence. That is what determines the difference between an evidence based skeptical belief and one of accepting the 'supernatural' for which the quality of the evidence is poor. You can have a skeptic with poor critical thinking skills, but I think it is less common than poor critical thinking skills in a believer in all things supernatural and paranormal. The latter by their nature cannot be using good critical thinking skills because after extensive and exhaustive searching for evidence for the usual paranormal/supernatural things, valid evidence cannot be found.


(Edited to add, once again I think a thread is new and find it has gone pages and pages past the post I've replied to. I really should look at the date of these threads more often.)

 

[cj.23]

What definition of 'psychic' are you using? And what exactly did you point out on Bad Psychics? (And what is Bad Psychics?)

Bad Psychics was a UK anti-woo forum, which has reappeared several times, but in its earliest form at least was very good. The community sort of split in two over a row or something, and fragmented into several other sceptical websites. No idea what the score is now -- most of the UK sceptic websites I used to frequent no longer exist.

They had a standing challenge to anyone who could demonstrate a psychic power (for cash, a fiver I think!) so I demonstrated mental arithmetic...

psy·chic adj.1. Of, relating to, affecting, or influenced by the human mind or psyche; mental.
2. Capable of extraordinary mental processes, such as extrasensory perception and mental telepathy.
3. Of or relating to such mental processes.

Definition 1 & 3, the original and indeed current in psychology & medicine usage of the term. It's why I tend to use psychical for the "spooky" stuff, following the SPR lead.Of course as no one else does, well hardly anyone outside parapsych and medicine, it may well be a lost cause.

Nik who ran it took it all in good humour, saw my point and changed the wording of his challenge with good grace, and I never got rich. I did however as all agreed demonstrate psychic powers. In this i did better than most people who tried.



cj x

 

[fls]

Are you saying 'pseudo-skeptics' can determine questions of 'psychic realities'?

"Pseudoskepticism" is irrelevant to this discussion. Per your definition, we are talking about skeptics - people with expertise in a particular area. The question really is, what expertise is relevant - an experience of the phenomenon or knowledge and experience with the psychology of the psychic?

Linda

 

[Jeff Corey]

I posted a link to the paper in my response to Limbo.

http://www.pnas.org/content/95/5/2670.full

I realize that Limbo wasn't able to appreciate it, but I think that you will. Enjoy.

If you are referring to the story of suppression, the stories all seem to suffer from the same problem demonstrated in the OP. They fail to show that the research wasn't rejected for the usual reasons. In some ways, it's one long argument that the research was rejected because of poor quality, when studies like this are supposed to serve as 'evidence'.

Linda

That article was retracted.
Correction for Cho et al., New findings of the correlation between acupoints and corresponding brain cortices using functional MRI
physiology. For the article “New findings of the correlation between acupoints and corresponding brain cortices using functional MRI,” by Z. H. Cho, S. C. Chung, J. P. Jones, J. B. Park, H. J. Park, H. J. Lee, E. K. Wong, and B. I. Min, which appeared in issue 5, March 3, 1998, of Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (95, 2670–2673), the authors reported a specific cortical correlation with a given acupoint and suggested that there could be correlation between acupoint stimulation and cortical activation, for example via increased blood flow in the visual cortex. Accumulating evidence suggests that the central nervous system is essential for processing these effects, via its modulation of the autonomic nervous system, neuro-immune system, and hormonal regulation. We, therefore, carried out a series of studies questioning whether there really is point specificity in acupuncture, especially vis-à-vis pain and acupuncture analgesic effects as we originally reported in our PNAS article, that had not yet been confirmed by other studies. We have reported some of these results as preliminary observations (1, 2). Having concluded that there is no point specificity, at least for pain and analgesic effects, and that we no longer agree with the results in our PNAS article, the undersigned authors are retracting the article. J. P. Jones, J. B. Park, and H. J. Park have not approved this retraction.

Z. H. Cho

S. C. Chung

H. J. Lee

E. K. Wong

B. I. Min

 

[fls]

Are you saying 'pseudo-skeptics' can determine questions of 'psychic realities'?

I think that what is being asked is why you are suggesting that individuals can determine the veridical nature of their experiences when we already know that people are unreliable in this regard? Homeopaths and their patients have spent untold resources on developing a detailed system of treatment depending upon just that - individual determinations of veridicity - and subjecting that system to the evaluation of skeptics has shown that it's entirely an illusion. Scientists have already learned the hard lessons that blinding and controls have taught us. Why trust anyone who remains ignorant of that lesson?

Linda

 

[fls]

That article was retracted.

Linda

 

[tyr_13]

Are you saying 'pseudo-skeptics' can determine questions of 'psychic realities'?

Wait...did you just call yourself a 'pseudo-skeptic'? At any rate, I wasn't saying that. That doesn't mean there is any more reason to believe in psychic realities than there was.

 

[maatorc]

Originally Posted by maatorc View Post
Are you saying 'pseudo-skeptics' can determine questions of 'psychic realities'?

"Pseudoskepticism" is irrelevant to this discussion. Per your definition, we are talking about skeptics - people with expertise in a particular area. The question really is, what expertise is relevant - an experience of the phenomenon or knowledge and experience with the psychology of the psychic? Linda

Definitely peer or higher level knowledge and experience of the reality: Hence the impossibility of resolution of testing for 'paranormal/psychic/supernatural/occult' events and/or powers by phenomenally and therefore contextually necessarily pseudo-skeptically driven procedures.

 

[maatorc]

Wait...did you just call yourself a 'pseudo-skeptic'? At any rate, I wasn't saying that. That doesn't mean there is any more reason to believe in psychic realities than there was.

I am saying that as pseudo-skepticism is driving tests for psychic reality that such tests are necessarily undecidable.