Hello Paul
Just like Schlitz's argument, which is entirely unsubstantiated.
....apart from by the results of the experiment.
Where is the model/theory behind her claim that the experimenter effect is itself psi?
That claim has been part of the "canon" of PSI claims for a long time. The view that the attitudes and beliefs of a person can affect what happens to them via a form of cause and effect unknown to physical science is a central feature of much of the serious writing that has taken place about this - from Jung to Robert Anton Wilson.
And anyway - quite often when an unexpected result occurs in a scientific experiment there
isn't any firmly decided-upon theory to explain it - this doesn't come until later in the process, long after the effect has been recognised and acknowledged. So from a scientific point of view, further experiments are required and I believe they are due to take place this year. But from the point of view of parapsychology this theory has been around for a long time. If you want to investigate it further then I can recomend Wilson as a thought-provoking source of information. The trouble with this is it opens up questions about whether science can actually
do anything with this result. It may just leave an unresolvable question from the POV of science.
Wilson wrote a book (several, actually) about what happens to people who experiment with their own belief systems and their own experiences of reality - and he encourages people to do the same themselves.
NB: He tells nobody what to believe but insists they must seek the truth for themselves. But that isn't really science because each of us only has access to one subjective reality and nobody else can witness what occurs in it. Which brings us right back round to the difference between us which causes the argument to be unresolvable in the first place - people like Ian and myself are willing to take into account the evidence of our own direct experience of reality, whereas the materialistic skeptics are left denying that we can even be sure such a thing exists - unless they simply define it to be physical, resulting in 1st-person evidence being worthless.
Not only do I know I have a mind, I also know what is happening in it.
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You asked me what my favourite result was, and I supplied the answer. You then demonstrated exactly why it is my favourite result: skeptics can't actually explain what is wrong with it, apart from to claim that is is "silly" i.e. it happens to fall outside the box they think inside, a box which is ultimately defined by what is and is not "silly" from the POV of materialism. Why should I accept your "argument from silliness" instead of accepting the actual result of the experiment?
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You don't know what the "actual result" of the experiment is! You have begged the entire question of the theory behind psi by claiming it is some sort of metamind.
I have got no idea what you mean by "begged the entire question". You started by claiming there was no difference between materialism and idealism, Paul. I responded by explaining that the difference is that materialism seems to rule out these phenomena and
all the other ontologies, including idealism, do not. I did not say which other one of them was true. I did not even say that
any of them was completely true at the expense of all the others. What I
did say was that only physicalism rules out the sort of PSI phenomena we are talking about now. But instead of acknowledging that this really does make a difference, you are complaining that I can't give you a precise theoretical exposition of what the alternative theory is, which is something I never claimed I could supply/prove and something which
doesn't matter with regards to original point I was defending. Perhaps we could get back to that original point??? Do you now accept that there are
various ways in which the other ontologies could allow for PSI,
regardless of the fact we can't objectively test/prove which one is "correct"?
Then you say that can explain the experiment effect. You can do no such thing, except as an extension of the original question begging.
Why? There has been no "question begging", Paul. There has instead been an attempt to direct attention and debate away from the original point. You are trying to make capital out of the fact that may be no objective means of resolving this, when the real issue is whether or not ditching materialism makes PSI phenomena less impossible to believe. i.e. your "question begging" complaint is a straw man.
I accept the experimental results. I can't think of anything wrong with the procedure or statistical analysis. Yet I do not feel obliged to make the leap of faith to paranormal explanations.
EXACTLY. That is exactly the situation.
For YOU, accepting Schlitz's explanations requires a leap of faith - a leap
out of faith in materialism or the sort of neo-materialism which you seem to hold to which seems to involve thinking/believing like a materialist without actually saying you are are a materialist.
For ME, who rejected materialism quite a few years ago on the grounds that something I had previously had faith in didn't stand up to logical scrutiny, and who believes, rightly or wrongly, that he has witnessed similar phenomena himself, no leap of faith is required.
Whether or not you require a leap of faith depends on your (implied) metaphysical position. That is why it makes a difference whether you are a materialist or not a materialist, and that is the point I was originally defending. I am not expecting you to nake that leap of faith. But I
am hoping you will recognise why you need a leap of faith and I don't, and why this supports my claim that ditching ones faith in materialism does indeed make a difference.
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Actually, there is an important point that needs re-iterating here. Nobody is claiming that physical LAWS are altered. I said "behaviour" was altered, but not to the point where LAWS are altered. There is scope within current laws for PSI phenomena, provided they do not actually break existing laws. The sort of phenomena I am talking about are not levitating objects in defiance of the laws of gravity, but results which are stastical in nature and indicate something has happened which appears to defy probability. In other words, something has happened which seems incredibly unlikely, but isn't actually impossible according to established physical law. This is because it is based upon events which look acausal to us actually having a cause which is hidden from us. But no laws are broken (or altered), because from the POV of physics the events are still strictly acausal - even thought they look as if they are being co-ordinated/caused.
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So there is a source of the psi effect, causal in nature, that physics cannot investigate? Or is it just that it hasn't found it yet?
It may be that physics reaches a boundary it cannot cross, and it may be that this boundary involves trying to link cause to effect when "cause" is something like "free will" and "effect" manifests itself via acausal quantum events. I can't see how physics can go there, no.
Individual people might be able to, but not
physics.
If the former, I have no idea what that means.
Why? What's so hard to understand?
If the latter, then I agree that we haven't yet found the cause of the experimenter effect. I presume psi investigators are all over it, trying to replicate it and understand it.
There is interest, yes. There is also interest from scientists involved with drug trials because what is being proposed has features in common with the placebo effect. The placebo effect is both well-known and poorly understood. It is an anomaly itself. If Schlitz's claim is true then the placebo effect is no longer unexpected.
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All of which emphasises the point that it is not science and physical law which makes PSI look silly, but the materialistic metaphysics which sometimes hitches a free ride on the back of those things which makes PSI look silly. And while you have evidence for the existence of the physical laws, you don't have any evidence for believing materialism is true.
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According to every definition presented, I don't think materialism is true. As an ontology, I think it's incoherent.
So you think it is incoherent, and you also think it is equivalent to idealism? In that case it follows that both of them are incoherent, which is my own position. So what is wrong with neutral monism? Is
that also incoherent? If so, why?
"When there has been a failure to replicate, it is not appropriate to engage in the circularity of assigning to this failure a label (psi-experimenter effect), and then implicitly suggesting the label as its explanation.
But this is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts!
There has been no "failure to replicate". That one was nailed the second and third times the experiment was run and Schlitz REPEATED her result and Wiseman REPEATED his failure to replicate her results. The whole reason the experiment was repeated three times, the last time going to herculean efforts to eliminate
any unknown source of discrepancy, was so that the skeptics could no longer claim there had been no repetition of results. What has been REPEATED,
three times, is that when Schlitz carries out the experiment she gets a positive result and Wiseman carries out the same experiment he gets a negative result.
Where is the circularity?
If the "experimenter effect" is real, then how many times does Schlitz have to get a result and Wiseman get a non-result before the skeptics accept that this is a valid repeat demonstration of that effect?
Or are you trying to argue that the experimenter effect is not a valid example of PSI?
Since there is no other way of defining or identifying the psi-experimenter effect, it has no explanatory value.
Eh? You are beginning to sound like Stimpson. J. Cat. I think what you
mean is that you
don't like the explanation.
Using it as a possible explanation only leads to a tautology: By substituting the definition of the psi-experimenter effect, one gets: 'The failure to replicate may be a manifestation of "one researcher failing to replicate a finding that another researcher had made".
REPEAT: This is NOT a "failure to replicate". It would be a failure to replicate only if Schlitz did not always get a positive result or Wiseman did not always get a negative result.
This may well prove to be a barrier that science can't cross: indeed, that was the entire point of the New Scientist issue that contained all these stories. The headline on the the cover was "Why the paranormal will not surrender to science." But acknowledging that we may have a barrier that science (as we know it) cannot cross, is
NOT the same as claiming it is meaningless.
Far from it. What is
means is that all the people who want to go around claiming that science has proven that PSI phenomena don't exist are making unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable claims. So it is hardly surprising that accepting this result is resisted at every turn and in every way possible.
' This circular reasoning excludes from the debate a possibly fruitful aspect of research, in terms of coming to understand the reasons, other than psi, that might account for the fact that different experimenters have obtained different results."
---James Alcock
In other words "we can't accept it's PSI, and we want to accuse you of not exploring other explanations properly". Pure bunkum. Every possible effort has been made to explore those other explanations. The skeptics ran out of ideas.
Geoff
