Alex Tsakiris and the Skeptiko Podcast - CRITICAL LOOK AND OVERVIEW.

[Arouet]

Cool. Which arguments?

Oh my, I disagree with so many of Alex's arguments! You should come over to the Skeptiko forum and get into them with me! (some of the the Skeptiko proponents hate when I invite JREFrs over so this is just for them! - you know you're reading this thread! )

 

[Daylightstar]

Yeah, it's subtle. I don't really classify rhetorical devices under dishonesty. But really my point isn't much deeper here than I think Alex is sincere in his beliefs and presentation of them. Do I know for certain? No ,but having listened to most of his podcasts and argued with him quite a lot over on Skeptiko I have no reason to doubt him.

Some rhetorical devices can easily be classified as dishonest.
However I am not stating he is dishonest, although, as I stated, I would not claim that he is clearly honest in his approach - which' statement I made in the context of Alex's approach to his guests, not his beliefs or presentation of them.
Alex leaves no doubt about him believing ...... the stuff he believes

...
Unfair ...

Yes, that sounds quite reasonable.

... sorry, back on the fraud again! ...

What do you mean?

 

[Daylightstar]

Cool. Which arguments?

Oh my, I disagree with so many of Alex's arguments! You should come over to the Skeptiko forum and get into them with me! (some of the the Skeptiko proponents hate when I invite JREFrs over so this is just for them! - you know you're reading this thread! )

Perhaps I misinterpreted both statements with respect to concentrating on- and attacking Alex's arguments as his arguments with respect to the Dean Radin focused attention test.
Perhaps you meant to acknowledge implicitly that Alex has no arguments there and you wanted to move on to any other of Alex's arguments.

Am I correctly representing your position?

 

[Arouet]

Some rhetorical devices can easily be classified as dishonest.
However I am not stating he is dishonest, although, as I stated, I would not claim that he is clearly honest in his approach - which' statement I made in the context of Alex's approach to his guests, not his beliefs or presentation of them.
Alex leaves no doubt about him believing ...... the stuff he believes

Sure, I should have left out clearly and rather just said, based on being a longtime member of Skeptiko Alex has given me no reason to doubt that he sincerely believes what he is setting out. I agree it won't be as clear to someone with less experience dealing with Alex! So I think that brings us both to the same page here! (I hope)

What do you mean?

I just meant that I had been responding to the fraud allegation again.

Perhaps I misinterpreted both statements with respect to concentrating on- and attacking Alex's arguments as his arguments with respect to the Dean Radin focused attention test.

Sorry, I was referring to Alex' arguments in general. On his take on the quantum mechanics I don't get the sense that Alex has a good handle on it. Then again, most of us don't. I think some of us are better at recognizing that than others.

I would like to see some commentary on radin's experiment though.

perhaps you meant to acknowledge implicitly that Alex has no arguments there and you wanted to move on to any other of Alex's arguments.

No I was just talking in general.

Am I correctly representing your position?

Hopefully the above clarified. I think I could have been more clear the first time out! Sorry!

 

[Daylightstar]

...
Hopefully the above clarified. I think I could have been more clear the first time out! Sorry!

Sure, thanks a lot.

With respect to the mentioning of fraud by the other poster, I wouldn't want to call inventing stuff a correct typification of that poster's remark.
It's partly due to Alex's own way of dealing with his guests and beliefs, he has a tendency to provoke such thoughts.

But anyways, I'd welcome Alex's own thoughts about Radin's experiment as well.
Perhaps Alex could indicate whether he would see a possibility to improve Radin's experiment.
Perhaps his thoughts on how to isolate* consciousness better than Radin did.
It's a challenge for sure.*

 

[Piero]

The posts on this thread are getting increasingly surreal. I'll explain my take on the matter as succintly as I can, which unfortunately won't me very succintly at all.

Does consciousness determine the results of an experiment? Obviously not, fot the following reasons:

1. Are we referring to consciousness as self-awareness or merely as being conscious of (i.e. perceiving) the experiment being carried out? Let's say a dog watches a double slit experiment: will the experiment be altered by the dog watching it?

2. If that was the case, photons or electrons or whatever would have behaved differently before conscious entitities existed, and that makes no sense at all, because particles of matter or energy cannot possibly be affected by an emergent, immaterial property of a brain's functioning.

3. Consciousness is not an on-off switch. We can surely recognize consciousness in chimps, gorillas, orang-utans and bonobos. They sure know who they are. To a lesser extent, it is quite obvious thas dogs, cats, dolphins and other mammals exhibit some consciousness. So, before human existed, was the double-slit experiment affected somehow, but not that much really? That's an absurd proposition.

4. As far as we know, the Earth is the only planet that supports life, and hence consciousness. Does that mean that in galaxies far far away electrons do whatever they want in the double-slit experiment, because we are not observing them?

5. If consciousness affects the double slit experiment, why does it not affect the path of my car? Why doesn't a car driven by an unconscious person (say, someone who just had a brain haemorrage) follow a different path from a car driven by a conscious but paralyzed driver?

6. By what mechanism could consciousness alter the result of an experiment? I understand why shining a light on an electron alters its orbit and energy level; after all, the electron is being bombarded by photons. But what does consciousness bombard the electron with? Ideas? Concepts? Desires to eat chocolate cake? Come on, let's be serious.

 

[Daylightstar]

...
6. By what mechanism could consciousness alter the result of an experiment?...

The key to understanding this, is realizing that consciousness really does alter the result of a (double slit) experiment.

After the experiment.

 

[Piero]

The key to understanding this, is realizing that consciousness really does alter the result of a (double slit) experiment.

After the experiment.

How? Suppose we set up a double-slit experiment in Mars, together with a detecting device (a robot) and a cat. The experiment runs automatically, so that no conscious beings are watching it. The robot is programmed to kill the cat if the thickness of the interference lines is greater than some threshold, and to self-destroy if it is smaller. Two centuries later, a space mission goes to Mars and finds a rusty robot and the fossilized skeleton of a cat. Where was the cat during those two centuries? Did it die and decompose instantaneously as soon as a conscious being perceived it? Or was he dead from the moment the robot killed it?

Is the migration of photons from the centre of a star to its edge dependent upon observation by a conscious entity? Does that mean that the universe is there only when some conscious entity observes it? Was the universe in an ambiguous state of existence until conscious being arose? Can we say that the universe is about 14 billion years old when conscious, semi-conscious or barely-conscious beings are no more than 3 billion years old?

We are pretty confident that human beings are more conscious than amoebas. Would an advanced alien race consider us to be conscious or would they regard us as we regard amoebas? What level of consciousness is required to modify the outcome of an experiment?

The whole consciousness business is totally incoherent, and so far the only benefit derived from it has been to fill Deepak Chopra's already deep pckets.

 

[Daylightstar]

How? ...

Like this:

He will most likely create false correlations from whatever 'data' he will gather.

There's no valid reason to think that consciousness can and will change the results of a double slit experiment directly or immediately.
Only afterwards.

... What level of consciousness is required to modify the outcome of an experiment? ...

We'd first need to establish that consciousness could have any direct or immediate influence on the (double slit) experiment at all.
This has not yet been established.

...
The whole consciousness business is totally incoherent, ...

It's pure magical thinking.

 

[Piero]

Daylightstar:
"It's pure magical thinking."

I couldn't agree more. For some unknown reason, some people have chosen to believe that a human observer is different from a non-human observer in a fundamental way. I cannot see the logic of that, unless we dismiss gorillas, chimps and bonobos as figments of our imagination (or should I say ,"figments of our consciousness"?).

 

[Kuko 4000]

Still no progress on this whole consciousness and the DSE thing:

http://forum.mind-energy.net/skeptiko-podcast/3295-question-jref-forum-member-5.html

Alex, what's going on? What's your evidence that human consciousness alters the DSE process? You were being pretty strong about your views on this when discussing it with Jerry Coyne:

Dr. Jerry Coyne: And I cannot read every paper on quantum mechanics. You surely haven’t yourself to ask me enough questions about whether this has any effect on evolution or not.

Alex Tsakiris: Not at all because it’s so basic and fundamental I don’t have to go there.

Dr. Jerry Coyne: Okay, then you tell me how it’s so basic and fundamental for evolution if you think that this finding of quantum…

Alex Tsakiris: It’s the observer effect, Jerry. It’s the double-slit experiment. It’s our…

Dr. Jerry Coyne: Yeah, okay, what does that have to do with…

Alex Tsakiris: Are photons waves or particles, right? So it’s like…

Dr. Jerry Coyne: What does that have to do with evolution?

Alex Tsakiris: It has to do with evolution because what we find is that it’s consciousness. If we put our consciousness one way or another it measures this way or that way. We no longer have laws of physics the way that you talk about them in this high school science way in your USA Today articles.

Why the silence now when you're asked to back your claims and views on this "basic and fundamental" issue?

 

[Kuko 4000]

Arouet do you know if Alex has clarified his position on the double-slit experiment and his comments to Jerry about it? I have only looked at the thread he opened for it, but nothing else.

 

[Arouet]

Arouet do you know if Alex has clarified his position on the double-slit experiment and his comments to Jerry about it? I have only looked at the thread he opened for it, but nothing else.

Not that I recall.

 

[Kuko 4000]

From the latest podcast:

...Another guest we’ve had on that I really appreciated is Dr. Larry Dossey, who was a physician for a long time in Dallas and got into prayer research. There’s really some unbelievably impressive data that gets drowned out by a lot of Atheist skeptic types that shows that prayer is efficacious, prayer works, and at the same time the rub for Christians is the best evidence suggests that Christian prayer is no more efficacious than Buddhist prayer or Muslim prayer or anything like that.

Alex Tsakiris, would you mind citing this "unbelievably impressive data" which shows "that prayer is efficacious and that it works"?

 

[Kuko 4000]

Additionally, they are again promoting the strange idea that atheists are somehow threatened by scientific evidence that would show that there is something real to the religious / believers position.

Speaking of myself, I am not at all philosophically threatened by any evidence whatsoever, I just accept the best scientific explanations as being the best knowledge about nature that we currently have. There's nothing threatning about it for me, things change all the time, which means that we have more accurate knowledge, and I want to know about it.

 

[steenkh]

It is a pity that no special kind of prayer works better than others. If, say, only Methodist prayer had worked, I would simply start believing in the Methodist god, no problem. I would not feel threatened at all.

But as it stands, it is more likely that they have made a protocol error, so I will stick to my atheism, a while yet, because this is what the evidence is pointing to. I am still not feeling threatened.

 

[Kuko 4000]

Just a little heads up, Daryl Bem responds to critics on the latest episode of Skeptiko, I haven't listened to it yet, but should be...interesting.

 

[GnaGnaMan]

Just a little heads up, Daryl Bem responds to critics on the latest episode of Skeptiko, I haven't listened to it yet, but should be...interesting.

I've listened to it. It's just unbelievable. Bem must have gone completely bonkers. The less said, the better.

 

[zooterkin]

57% versus 53% is significant?

Doesn't Alex like spreading unfounded insinuations? The Edinburgh Secret Society is not a secret atheist alliance, or whatever he was trying to suggest. Nor do I think Randi's work is negated by the immigration status of his partner.

 

[Steve001]

57% versus 53% is significant?

Doesn't Alex like spreading unfounded insinuations? The Edinburgh Secret Society is not a secret atheist alliance, or whatever he was trying to suggest. Nor do I think Randi's work is negated by the immigration status of his partner.

I've listened to it. It's just unbelievable. Bem must have gone completely bonkers. The less said, the better.

It does some good to critique here, but it might be even better too critique there. We all know Alex's views are skewed. Why not engage in pointing that over at Skeptiko ?