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Ed A call for new open-minded research on psychic phenomena

Warp12 said:
If CS Lewis shows up on my doorstep tomorrow, I am pretty sure a skeptic would consider it simple chance. And for the record, I would not be surprised if psychic powers are utterly fictional. But, you would need to read the thread to get that context.
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CS Lewis is a long time dead. Were he to show up on your doorstep, every skeptic would sit bolt upright in rapt attention with good reason.

Why did you pick that particular corpse? The intentional selection itself raises questions.
 
abaddon said:
CS Lewis is a long time dead. Were he to show up on your doorstep, every skeptic would sit bolt upright in rapt attention with good reason.

Why did you pick that particular corpse? The intentional selection itself raises questions.
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You might have to go back as many as 5 or 6 posts in order to solve that mystery. Don't do anything beyond your norm, however.
 
abaddon said:
Why did you pick that particular corpse? The intentional selection itself raises questions.
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It's just another call back to my analogy that when the data shows nothing, and practical investigation shows nothing, a random anecdote doesn't overide that however much some people might like it to.

P.J. Denyer said:
Reading this thread I can't help but feel it's like arguing that when a map shows that a road is a dead end, and driving down the road shows it to be a dead end you should keep checking different maps in case it's actually a shortcut to Narnia.
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MarkCorrigan said:
I note that despite my rebuttal to this post which is entirely in error, you have neither apologised for your misunderstanding and blatant attempt to mischaracterise me as being closed minded based on a fundamental misreading of what I actually wrote, nor have you acknowledged that you were in error.

I would not want it to come across as being an attempt to build a strawman that failed, so please, acknowledge your error and respond to the point I made rather than your misreading of it.
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Well? Having read more of the thread I note you are still building strawmen and whining when someone calls you on it.

Take the Eva Mendes debacle, in which someone mentioned the law of large numbers and you took something that was absolutely not an example of what was being referred to and continued to insist it was, even claiming that people were agreeing with you when they were not.

I have been dinged for my larger post and won't repeat more of it here, as I was right to be dinged, but I think the central conceit stands. You seem to be unwilling to actually listen to what people are telling you. Why is that, I wonder?
 
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Warp12 said:
But, I figure, the next time we are looking for camels, we might as well look in the deep sea, again.
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Let's think, instead of camels, of unicorns, because we know where to find camels.

We've looked for unicorns on the land, in the sea, in the sky, under the ground. We've looked for them in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australasia, Antarctica, and all the islands of the Earth. We've looked for them on the Moon, on Mars, on all the planetary surfaces we can see. We've never found any.

OK, you say, but there might still be unicorns. You just haven't looked in the right place. You should give up looking in the places you've already looked, and try somewhere else.

So, we ask, where should we look? We've looked everywhere we know; there simply isn't anywhere else we can think of to look. Where do you want us to look?

Why should I have to say, you ask?

The answer is: You don't, but if you don't then you're never going to get what you claim to want. At this point it seems that your aim, therefore, is not to get it, but to be able to continue to complain about not getting it. What use is that to anyone?

Dave
 
Myriad said:
Now, what do I think is really going on here? Are the aura-see-ers lying? I've suggested one possible motivation, after all: fitting in with the aforementioned community. There probably is some pretending going on, but in most cases, I don't doubt that they actually do perceive auras.
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You are too kind. They are all lying.
 
I tried biotherapy. It is some kind of no touch healing. It didn't help for my neuralgia, but people behaved strangely. When biotherapist stood behind them, he worked with his hands as if to pull them and they kinda leaned back.
Back then I really wanted it to work because I was in a terrible pain.
 
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I didn’t read through all 6 pages, but did anyone mention Randi’s simple test of having folks who claimed to see auras try to detect the auras of people sitting behind screens?

The aura folks cheerfully described auras where there was no one sitting behind the screens.
 
Warp12 said:
Let me ask you this...

If we were to conclusively discover evidence of any single notable paranormal phenomenon, is there any level of investment in time and money that would make you say, "it wasn't worth it"?
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If someone passed a test like the ones I spoke of, then yes, it would be worth investing time and money investigating what’s going on.
 
Warp12 said:
If CS Lewis shows up on my doorstep tomorrow, I am pretty sure a skeptic would consider it simple chance.
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No.

If (the ghost of) C.S. Lewis provably showed up on your doorstep, the typical skeptic would be delighted because it would mean we finally have data for testing something people have previously only claimed.

But if you simply announced that such a thing had happened to you, and could provide no other evidence for it, then you'd simply be in the same boat as all the other unprovable anecdotes and all other other self-proclaimed necromancers. Your claim would have little if any evidentiary merit. No, skeptics would not write it off as "chance." They'd rightly say that it's a naked claim on a topic known to be practiced by tricksters and ne'er-do-wells. Their dismissal on those grounds would be perfectly reasonable.

"No greater than chance" rebuttals arise when there is the possibility to construct a dataset suitable for statistical hypothesis checking. That applies to various forms of claimed mentalism like telepathy or clairvoyance. Happenstance occurrences can be tested that way only if it is possible to confidently elicit the alleged phenomena again. Not all claims of the paranormal can be tested statistically, but there are other forms of tests that are equally if not more probative in relatively happenstance cases. But at the heart of such claims is the responsibility of the claimant to supply the evidence that would drive the science. It is not the burden of the skeptic to disprove claims of paranormal occurrences that are provided with no detail or corroborating evidence. It is not the burden of skeptics to seek out and provide such evidence.

You're tossing out straw man after straw man, which is in itself evidence of an unprepared argument. But more importantly, the nature of the straw men points to your continued desire to lump a vast number of clearly dissimilar anecdotal claims together as if they were all indistinguishable. Your critics are noting important differences between the kinds of claims you seem to want to include under the tent. That you seem disinterested in these important distinctions casts doubt on whether you really have an interest in the science, or instead just a rhetorical axe to grind.

And for the record, I would not be surprised if psychic powers are utterly fictional. But, you would need to read the thread to get that context.
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I've read the entire thread and everything you posted in Scorpion's thread about scientific claims of the paranormal. My judgment at this point is that you're clearly biased in favor of the existence of paranormal effects, that you have no appreciable understanding of how science actually studies those effects, and that you don't think very highly of skeptics.
 
Coincidences as evidence of the paranormal? I'm with Pixel on this one: If someone predicted an extremely unlikely coincidence, that would be evidence of something paranormal. Coincidences themselves are delightful, intriguing and fun to talk about; but, they aren't evidence of anything in and of themselves. I'll give you a personal coincidence to illustrate the concept.

I've had a crush on a certain actress for most of my life. My wife understands that she is on my "list." We spent a night discussing these "lists" with my son and his best friend. My son's best friend is a local cameraman who does freelance work for local tv stations, news orgs and other local stuff that needs to be filmed like weddings. He knows all the local production companies and does work with them. He often recruits my son to help him with editing, music and sound design.

A few weeks after this "list" conversation, my son and his friend tell me I should really go help them with a job -they need extra hands for a scene they are helping a local crew with and they think I would have fun seeing what they do. They tell me that I just have to be cool, try to stay out of the way and help out with lugging equipment around. Lo and behold, the scene is at a local home and I actually know the couple who own it very well. But the big coincidence is that the scene they are filming is for a Netflix production starring my actress crush. There she is a few feet away from me for a good chunk of the day!

Filming wraps for the day, I chat with my friends while helping clean up. They invite me and the kids to have a few beers. OMG, she is still here and is going to join us! I say hi; she says hi and smiles. We end up sitting next to each other and we have a few beers, subtly flirting with each other. OK OK, the last three sentences of this paragraph didn't happen, lol. She was out the door as soon as the filming was done and was kind of standoffish between takes.

But it's a pretty amazing coincidence, no? What are the odds that I would mention her in a conversation with my son and his friend and then they just happen to be helping out on a crew filming her Netflix movie? In my relatively unknown city in South Texas? At the home of a friend of mine? The odds have to be pretty damn astronomical, I think. As amazing as it was, I don't consider that to be evidence that there's a God or that there's anything paranormal about what happened. It's just one of those delightful things that sometimes happens; nothing more, nothing less.
 
The premise of this thread seems to be "Why don't we start again and try to test for psychic phenomena nobody's even claimed might exist?".
 
Jack by the hedge said:
The premise of this thread seems to be "Why don't we start again and try to test for psychic phenomena nobody's even claimed might exist?".
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Possibly it's a variant of that: "why don't we consider, and test for the possibility, that phenomena we think we understand scientifically are actually paranormal?"

Maybe not on the level of "smart phone screens actually work using captive conjured fire spirits instead of electronics," but the same general idea applied to more elusive and complex things like weather, health, consciousness... or coincidences.

In the esoteric community I mentioned in the OP, I once raised the question of how one might go about holding a "fair" lottery. By "fair" I meant that I wanted the outcome to depend only on random chance, and not be affected by the players' respective karmic statuses, or how anyone's stars aligned that day, or what deities or angels they'd prayed to, or what chronic curses or long-term blessings might be attached to them, or what talismans they were carrying or magical rituals they'd performed, or what spiritual entities had designs on the course of their futures. The clear unanimous answer was that what I was describing was totally impossible, nearly unthinkable. About the same reaction as if I'd asked people here how to design a spacecraft to be unaffected by gravity.

A very atypical answer from an admittedly atypical population? I don't think so. Anyone who believes deities answer prayers, or that karma "balances," or that "everything works out for the best," or that a positive attitude will help them win a game of chance, or that certain actions bring good or bad luck, or that the winner's stars must have aligned in some special way, or that they have a destiny or a fate, must at some level of their cognition come to the same basic conclusion even if they never consciously take the reasoning that far. And the union of those sets is pretty close to everyone.

That basic conclusion is, random chance doesn't actually exist. Not for the technical reasons we sometimes discuss here (the trajectory of the dice through the air is theoretically calculable; computers only generate pseudo- random numbers) but because ineffable forces or entities (perhaps only one; perhaps whole swarms and legions and empires of them) constantly have their fingers or their noodly appendages on the numbered ping pong balls of fortune.

Coincidences being explained as an expected consequence of random chance? But there's no such thing. The significance of the results of ESP trials being determined by statistical tests based on the mathematical behavior of sequences of random events? But there's no such thing. Evolution depending in part on random mutations and random recombinations? But there's no such thing. Quantum mechanics? Fughettaboutit.

The gap in world models between that and the rationalist view is wider and stranger than between the starship captains and any of the alien cultures in Star Trek. Darmok and Jalad might have fought the Beast at Tanagra, but they probably agreed with Picard that random chance occurs. In the alien world we actually live in, there's no such thing as fair random lotteries, only ones that "maybe I deserve to win this time."

Is that closer to what you want to see investigated more, Warp12?
 
I would have to ask. do people here think God would create a universe like this one, and a spirit world to which we go to when we die, and not separate the two?
I suggest science will never discover the spirit world because it is beyond the earthy universe and functions on a different level. We are not meant to gain access to it.
Can you imagine the human race getting power over the angels, or invading the spirit world. You can only know the psychic and spiritual by spiritual means not by science.
 
Scorpion said:
I would have to ask. do people here think God would create a universe like this one, and a spirit world to which we go to when we die, and not separate the two?
I suggest science will never discover the spirit world because it is beyond the earthy universe and functions on a different level. We are not meant to gain access to it.
Can you imagine the human race getting power over the angels, or invading the spirit world. You can only know the psychic and spiritual by spiritual means not by science.
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No. I waste no time guessing what a being whose own fan-fiction says surpasses all understanding would do if it existed.

I suggest anything which manifests itself in the physical world in any way can be studied, if not directly then by measuring its effect on the physical.

So far nothin'.
 
Scorpion said:
I would have to ask. do people here think God would create a universe like this one, and a spirit world to which we go to when we die, and not separate the two?
I suggest science will never discover the spirit world because it is beyond the earthy universe and functions on a different level. We are not meant to gain access to it.
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You assume the existence of god, the spirit world where we go to when we die, angels, and that whole belief system in your question. That's called begging the question.

My answer is no, I don't think any of that is true because I don't believe any of those entities exist. I've never seen any convincing evidence of any of it.

Scorpion said:
Can you imagine the human race getting power over the angels, or invading the spirit world. You can only know the psychic and spiritual by spiritual means not by science.
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If those entities did exist I don't know that your premise would be any more likely than than many other arrangements. If there is a god maybe he's just a prick and likes to fool with us.
 
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