Dean Radin's Take on Things

[technoextreme]

The notion of electromagnetic waves was not so long ago ridiculed by the scientific establishment; now it forms the basis of quite a proportion of our society.

Ummmm.... Since when??? Most of the physics that dictate how our computers and everything else works were figured out over one hundred years ago. Next time when you pick a field a science don't pick one that actually invokes the word telegraph in a college course on the subject because the scientific establishment sure as hell got over what every problems they were having with it really quickly. I'll chalk that up to ignorance.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

One of the great engines behind progress in knowledge is the investigation of anomalies. We learn by looking at what doesn't fit into our current mode of understanding.
The notion of electromagnetic waves was not so long ago ridiculed by the scientific establishment; now it forms the basis of quite a proportion of our society.
Sorry, but your attitude seems to be one of putting your head in the sand when faced with anomalous data. That's just retrogressive, and a bit clingy.

You don't have to have a theory about how something arises in order to know, and honestly acknowledge, that it does arise.

Cite?

 

[CFLarsen]

Radin's pronouncements on the results obtained by the PEAR people are comprehensively debunked here:

http://www.skepdic.com/pear.html

And here, too:

Shapes In The Clouds
A commentary on "Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research", Dunne and Jahn, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR).

For someone who claims to have qualifications in psychology, he seems to be extremely gullible about the paranormal. It's usually physicists who take such stuff on board uncritically.

Dean is the typical "I want to believe" type of fellow.

More information here:

An Evening With Dean Radin
I spent one of the last evenings of September 2002 attending a lecture by Dean Radin, author of "The Conscious Universe", on the Upper East Side, Manhattan, where he told about the Global Consciousness Project.

Book Review: The Conscious Universe, Dean Radin
The subject of the book is psi research, that is research concerning telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition. Radin claims that these phenomena are real and in the book he presents the evidence, which he thinks proves this.

I feel dirty for saying it, but plumjam has a point. As people have been pointing out to Claus in the distance healing thread, you don't need to understand the mechanism to recognise wether something is having a measurable effect or not.

I'm aware of that, and I'm not saying otherwise.

 

[leon_heller]

Sorry, but your attitude seems to be one of putting your head in the sand when faced with anomalous data. That's just retrogressive, and a bit clingy.

You don't have to have a theory about how something arises in order to know, and honestly acknowledge, that it does arise.

But science advances by proposing theories that can be tested. Simply running experiments that are claimed to produce anomalous results without a theory as to how they arise is a waste of time.

Leon

 

[leon_heller]

Something that makes me very suspicious about the PEAR investigations of the effect of intention on random number generation that Radin discusses at length is some correspondence I had with Prof. Jahn and the founder of Psyleron, John Valentino, who make the RNGs used in the current experiments into "global consciousness". As they appear to be ascribing their results to some sort of quantum effect, I asked them why they didn't use a quantum-based RNG like the Quantis unit made by idQuantique in their experiments. They rejected the suggestion out of hand, saying that

"As a result of these findings, we have come to believe that the phenomenon we are studying is not dependent on the noise source in any way that would lead to enhanced effect or merit a more thorough study of each and every individual type of device."

It appears that they they only want to use equipment they have designed themselves.

Leon

 

[Ersby]

Talk about people not seeing things which are clearly there, I doubt if Radin has ever wondered if he himself has the same blind spot when it comes to evidence against the paranormal.

 

[Pixel42]

I feel dirty for saying it, but plumjam has a point. As people have been pointing out to Claus in the distance healing thread, you don't need to understand the mechanism to recognise wether something is having a measurable effect or not.

It always annoys me when people dismiss something because "there's no known way in which it could work". If it works, it works, and if we don't know why then we'd have to find out. If that meant throwing away everything we currently understand about science and starting again from scratch then that's what we would have to do. But we won't do that until whatever it is has been shown to still work after all the ways in which we know we can inadvertantly fool ourselves have been carefully and methodically eliminated. No supposedly paranormal phenomenon has so far survived that process.

 

[cgallaga]

Kind of cheeky of Radin to use the same vision test that Shermer used to demonstrate the faulty and selective perception inherent in paredolia.

 

[Civilized Worm]

What is wrong with naturalism? It's done a very good job of explaining things so far. Has anyone come up with anything better?

Leon

Plumjam believes that scientists are conspiring to maintain the naturalistic paradigm by suppressing evidence of psi and intelligent design.

Good luck getting him to back up his position though.