PK parties

[T'ai Chi]

So... why do people have to touch the metal objects at all?

Why do they tend to use both hands?

Any videotape of a spoon bending by these people?

 

[Darat]

Anyone read this? http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=14014&item=2252536732&rd=1&ssPageName=WD2V

If so is it worth it?

 

[CFLarsen]

Claus,

In you opinion, is there anything I should be especially wary of when contacting Dr Targ ?

Why should you be wary of anything? If you have a question, ask the man. He will answer - or not.

I don't have any opinions about either of them; my stance is neutral.

Really? I'm confused.

If you are able to take a neutral stance, why did you insist that people either believed that mediumship was real, or that mediumship was fraud, when you tried to get people to help you with going through cold reading transcripts?

You denied me the possibility to help you out, specifically because I took the third option: That I was undecided. You insisted that I had to choose between the two.

It seems that you can be neutral, but others have to take sides.

And do you mistrust Radin? Do you have any reason to? Can you provide examples of where he's cheated or lied?

I can provide examples of where Radin has selected his data to prove his point.

Trust is irrelevant.

And a magician is not an expert in physics. However, if you get both together, you get - Hey Presto - Russell Targ. Now, enough with the bar raising and straw conjourers.

The best person to answer those questions, of course, is Russell Targ. I suggest you also ask him about his experiences as a performing stage magician and any issues you may have about his ability to spot trickery.

Tell us what you know about Targ's magical career. Why has his magical skills convinced you?

If you want to try to debunk, try to do it honestly.

You should talk, you lying cheat...

In case you "forgot": I have no idea what you are talking about re. "the glamourisation of rape". I would like a clarification.

 

[T'ai Chi]

If you are able to take a neutral stance, why did you insist that people either believed that mediumship was real, or that mediumship was fraud, when you tried to get people to help you with going through cold reading transcripts?

I was asked what I thought about people: "Do you think Targ is lying / deluded? How about Houck, do you have reason to believe he is just scamming people?", not what I thought about a subject like bending spoons, etc.

Please don't try to derail this thread agan.

 

[CFLarsen]

I was asked what I thought about people: "Do you think Targ is lying / deluded? How about Houck, do you have reason to believe he is just scamming people?", not what I thought about a subject like bending spoons, etc.

No, you answered to whether Houck was scamming people or not. That deals with his abilities, his claims. You were neutral about that.

If you are saying that you are neutral about someone claiming to be able to bend spoons by paranormal powers, then you are able to take a neutral stance about a paranormal phenomenon.

Please explain why you are able to do that, while demanding that people are either believers in a paranormal phenomenon, or say that the phenomenon is not possible.

Please don't try to derail this thread agan.

Hypocrite. You who has tried in many, many threads to get people to talk about you and your personal feuds?

 

[T'ai Chi]

Whatever.

Please don't derail this thread.

 

[CFLarsen]

Whatever.

No, really. Please explain it: Why are you able to take a neutral stance on a paranormal phenomenon, while you demand that people are either believers in a paranormal phenomenon, or say that the phenomenon is not possible.

Please don't derail this thread.

Hypocrite.

 

[LTC8K6]

I don't know if this has been posted before but I would have run out of the place laughing.

Finally, Houck picks up the milk crate and dumps about 1,000 perfectly good stainless-steel spoons and forks all over the floor. Guests are instructed to grab a handful of silverware in order to ascertain which ones will be suitable for manipulation.

To do this, each person picks up a "dowser," a pendulum-type device that looks like just a colored bead on a piece of white string. The next step is to ask the pendulum which direction it will swing when answering "yes" or "no" to the holder's questions.

"Show me yes," people ask the piece of string with a colored bead. Once that's determined, they hold the pendulum over individual spoons and forks and ask out loud, "Will you bend for me?"

Now, visualize the scene here: an entire room filled with people dangling pendulums over their spoons and asking, "Will you bend for me?" It feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone. I keep waiting for Rod Serling to chime in with the epilogue, but he never does.

Once we divine five utensils that produced a positive response from the pendulum, we move our chairs into a circle, two rows deep, and sit down.

"If you don't sit in the circle itself, you won't be able to bend the metal," Houck explains. He also explains that saying to ourselves, "I can't bend the spoon," would create a mental block. So we are forbidden from saying the word "can't."

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.27.03/spoonbending-0348.html

Is the bead a magnet, perhaps?

 

[Psiload]

CFLarsen:

Tell us what you know about Targ's magical career. Why has his magical skills convinced you?

No, it's true. Russell Targ really does possess impressive skills of prestidigitation.

One time, he walked into a laboratory with Uri Geller and turned himself into an ass!



I slay myself.

 

[Ed]

CFLarsen:

Tell us what you know about Targ's magical career. Why has his magical skills convinced you?

No, it's true. Russell Targ really does possess impressive skills of prestidigitation.

One time, he walked into a laboratory with Uri Geller and turned himself into an ass!



I slay myself.

(Rim shot)

Thank you ladies and germs, Mr. Load will be here all week.

 

[flyboy217]

I don't know if this has been posted before but I would have run out of the place laughing.

What better way to learn anything?

Is the bead a magnet, perhaps?

Yep, it's a magickal magnet that causes the bowl of the spoon to bend at some much later time.

 

[CFLarsen]

CFLarsen:

Tell us what you know about Targ's magical career. Why has his magical skills convinced you?

No, it's true. Russell Targ really does possess impressive skills of prestidigitation.

One time, he walked into a laboratory with Uri Geller and turned himself into an ass!



I slay myself.

Hehehehe......

 

[LettristLoon]

O McFly, you weren't present, you don't know that the spoons weren't ever tampered with, that the stories from the parties aren't spun by psychic spin doctors. All that was suggested is that maybe, maybe, something was done in order to surreptitiously select the spoons.

Which is, of course, more likely than the laws of physics being violated.

Not to say that the spoons weren't bent by psychic means, or whatever, but there you go.

Hey! Have we stopped to consider the mechanics of this thing?

Okay, first off: You got some spoons and forks and whatnot. They're made of metal. Then you've got some men and women and children and whatnot. They're made of all kinds of goo and bone. Right? Right.

Now, goo and bone, whether alive or dead, can move things around by coming into contact with those things and exerting some sort of force upon them. Right? Righteo!

Okay! Now, we're assuming that corpses cannot perform PK. No one has said that--I'm just assuming it. If anyone disagrees, feel free to, you know, disagree.

Right! Well! The difference between a corpse and a living person is something like this: Living people have a pulse, and all sorts of cool electrical/chemical activity going on inside of their bodies. The most interesting thing done by all of this electrical/chemical activity is called "consciousness." It happens in the brain.

Now, presumably, it is the "mind"--a function of the brain--which is performing all of this PK. So!

Basically, what you have, is a bunch of chemicals and a little bit of electricity moving in these erratic patterns inside of a large, mushy organ. PK is the subtle art of getting that stuff--those chemicals and that electricity--to somehow move matter that is not, in fact, touching it.

Somehow, the brain is supposedly the only popular combination of chemicals and electricity on earth capable of doing this sort of thing. Which is odd! Because it's also the only popular combination of chemicals and electricity on earth capable of conceiving of such a thing as PK! Coincidence? Nosir! It's also the only popular combination of chemicals and electricity on earth capable of thinking about how strange it is to be a self-aware combination of chemicals and electricity, which then, nevertheless, goes on to ignore the logical extensions of this idea--namely, that chemicals and electricity, just because they're "aware," don't violate the laws of physics any more than any chemicals or electricity anywhere else.

So, let's assume that PK ain't violating the laws of physics. If that's the case, then it goes something like this: The brain thinks about bending some silverware. Luckily, this particular kind of thinking causes some surge of energy to leap out of the brain from the brain's Super Secret Hidden Raygun--something near the frontal lobe which, mysteriously, disappears whenever it gets within slicing distance of an autopsy table. Dig it?

Okay. A word about this surge of energy:

It is powerful. More powerful than the force you can exert by your hands, apparently.

Interestingly enough, even though it's SO POWERFUL that it can bend the bowls of spoons, and zinc-plated steel rods, it doesn't damage the forehead of the person emitting this energy, nor disturb the air between the person doing the PKing and the object he or she is attempting to bend. That's because this is "time release energy." It's smart, see--it knows when it's approaching its target. When it gets there, it bends some damned metal, but it leaves all objects in the way utterly unblemished.

Clearly, this is VERY smart energy. How'd it figure all this out? How's it know the difference between "forehead," "air," and "spoon?" Where's this energy keep its brain? Amazing, non? Wonders never cease.

Paradoxically, New Agers most interested in using all of these energy-work techniques don't seem to burn any calories in doing so. They get this energy from nowhere, it seems (pay a bunch of them $100 an hour to spin a turbine at your local power plant, says I--damned near free energy!), because New Agers, as a whole, are mordantly obese. (ever been to a pagan festival? Dear GOD, they're enormous [though this is a generalization, it is pretty true. Go visit a Wiccan church sometime, or spend a few hours in a New Age bookstore. Avoid getting eaten long enough, and you'll wind up as spooked as me.])

ON THE OTHER HAND, there is a way for PK to exist and none of this Misty Mountain Raygun ◊◊◊◊◊ would hold. That would involve something like:

You are NOT just a mass of bone and goo. There is a SPIRITUAL component to your mind, as well, which is not constrained by the laws of physics--and, in fact, is only constrained by the limitations of "the spirit world."

That seems to be the way most New Agers feel about this sort of thing, and to that, I say this: Show a single point of interaction between the "brain" and the "spirit," and I'll say, "Shizznit, you're right!" However, as near as we can tell, the brain seems to account for the whole of the mind, going in its merry, thinking, conscious way without any interference from some spooky, immaterial, astral whatevah. Ask my grandma. She has Alzheimer's--and unless Alzheimer's has a "spiritual component," like the organ it attacks, then the case seems pretty closed. Gram's disappearing, bit by bit, just 'cause kooky little tarry clogs are shutting down her neural pathways, a thousand at a time.

If the brain's physical actions--like thought and feeling--were being dictated by the spirit, wouldn't that spirit also have control over the other physical processes taking place in the brain? Like, you know, dementia?

So, both of these ideas seem pretty unlikely. But I'll accept either, or any other, theory regarding how these things might work, once again, if someone could just show up in my town with a decent demo. (but, beloved believers, 'till you have irrefutable evidence, ain't that a whole lot to swallow? C'mon, mang) 'Zat's all.

Yours in Christ,
- B

 

[Pragmatist]

I don't know if this has been posted before but I would have run out of the place laughing.

"To do this, each person picks up a "dowser," a pendulum-type device that looks like just a colored bead on a piece of white string. The next step is to ask the pendulum which direction it will swing when answering "yes" or "no" to the holder's questions."

Is the bead a magnet, perhaps?

http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.27.03/spoonbending-0348.html

I've read two separate accounts like that about the pendulum. I also read an account by a journalist who was convinced that Houck was trying to hypnotize the "audience". He said that Houck talked for a long time in a low, monotonic, droning voice.

Think about a "magic" trick. They nearly always rely on misdirection. The first rule of misdirection is the actual "direction". You need to engage the audience's attention elsewhere or at least engage them into the premise of the trick in such a way that they temporarily suspend critical thinking. How do you do this? Three ways:

1. Hypnotize them (or at least bore them to the point where the attention starts to flag).
2. Do the opposite, ramp them up to hysterical excitement and/or anxiety.
3. Get them to believe that some unlikely aspect of the trick is true, once they accept one part, again critical thinking tends to shut down and belief takes over.
4. And finally, the clincher, get them to focus on something OTHER than the key object at the critical moment.

The droning voice is obvious. We also see the manic excitement in some of the accounts. And now we see element #3. Use the ideomotor effect to convince them that the "magic" has already begun even before they get to the spoons. And element 4 is present too. It's the "relaxed inattention", or the sudden shout from across the room where someone is encouraged to jump up wave a spoon in the air and shout, "It's bending, look!" And precisely that is described in at least one of the accounts I read, Houck encourages people to jump up and shout out when they think their spoon is bending.

Four classic precursors of a typical "magic" trick. I don't see how that could explain all the alleged effects of course apart from self-deception, but then I'm not a magician and they manage similar things all the time without me having a clue how they do it. And all the elements are there.

 

[LTC8K6]

Hey flyboy217!

Could a magnet on a string help a person decide which spoon was made of a certain alloy?

I know it could help me. Could it help you?

 

[flyboy217]

O McFly, you weren't present, you don't know that the spoons weren't ever tampered with, that the stories from the parties aren't spun by psychic spin doctors. All that was suggested is that maybe, maybe, something was done in order to surreptitiously select the spoons.

I believe we've been over this. Of course I don't know these things. Ergo, I hold my own party where I do.

Which is, of course, more likely than the laws of physics being violated.

Which laws might those be? Do you have a Grand Unified Theory up your sleeve?

Why don't we stick to what we know. The most we can say is "it is far more believable that some form of deception was used than that the purported activity actually took place." Then we don't have to worry about bending physics or calculating the probabilities of things about which we have no idea.

The very concept of violating physics disturbs me. Physics, after all, is no more than our way of describing observables. In the end, it is merely an empirical science. The most important point I can stress is that one cannot discard empirical evidence based on theories. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that this is not the way science is conducted. (I also trust you meant to say "the known laws of physics." But even then, laws are not proven. They are still theories, and as such, are liable to be knocked off by disagreeing observables.)

So, let's try to see if this purported anomaly is reproducible, shall we? And then we can worry about if we're hurting current physics' feelings.

Not to say that the spoons weren't bent by psychic means, or whatever, but there you go.
...
Hey! Have we stopped to consider the mechanics of this thing?
Somehow, the brain is supposedly the only popular combination of chemicals and electricity on earth capable of doing this sort of thing. Which is odd! Because it's also the only popular combination of chemicals and electricity on earth capable of conceiving of such a thing as PK! Coincidence? Nosir! It's also the only popular combination of chemicals and electricity on earth capable of thinking about how strange it is to be a self-aware combination of chemicals and electricity, which then, nevertheless, goes on to ignore the logical extensions of this idea--namely, that chemicals and electricity, just because they're "aware," don't violate the laws of physics any more than any chemicals or electricity anywhere else.

Aren't we missing something, Bill Nye The Science Guy? How about this: science is mum on the subject of the Schroedinger wavefunction collapse. The evolution of this probabilistic function is not what we observe. Instead, consciousness affects a collapse in a way that we can't even fathom putting into formulae just yet. That is to say, wavefunction collapse DOES in some sense violate known physics. And what causes it? Inanimate matter? No. Only one thing: consciousness.

Feel free to disagree with me there, as none of this is set in stone yet. But really now, there are reasonably mysterious things going on in modern physics that haven't yet been extricated from the goo we call our brains. Now, this isn't to say that quantum mechanics is related to psi in any way, no sir. That would be a foul of the first woo-woo degree.

Interestingly enough, even though it's SO POWERFUL that it can bend the bowls of spoons, and zinc-plated steel rods, it doesn't damage the forehead of the person emitting this energy, nor disturb the air between the person doing the PKing and the object he or she is attempting to bend. That's because this is "time release energy." It's smart, see--it knows when it's approaching its target. When it gets there, it bends some damned metal, but it leaves all objects in the way utterly unblemished.

Clearly, this is VERY smart energy. How'd it figure all this out? How's it know the difference between "forehead," "air," and "spoon?" Where's this energy keep its brain? Amazing, non? Wonders never cease.

Wondrous indeed. It will sound even more wondrous if indeed the party actually works, and will be entirely moot if it doesn't. In fact, I could regale you with even more frightfully ridiculous stories (Schroedinger's cat, the EPR paradox, quantum teleportation, the dual-slit experiment, etc.), but they serve only to make known physics all the more glamorous. So let's save the glamor of psi for a time we can actually appreciate it, no?

Paradoxically, New Agers most interested in using all of these energy-work techniques don't seem to burn any calories in doing so. They get this energy from nowhere, it seems (pay a bunch of them $100 an hour to spin a turbine at your local power plant, says I--damned near free energy!), because New Agers, as a whole, are mordantly obese. (ever been to a pagan festival? Dear GOD, they're enormous [though this is a generalization, it is pretty true. Go visit a Wiccan church sometime, or spend a few hours in a New Age bookstore. Avoid getting eaten long enough, and you'll wind up as spooked as me.])

Get this energy from nowhere, do they? That would be a neat trick. But since I haven't really read this anywhere else, I'll suppose you're making it up . (On an unrelated note, several observers at parties have noticed the air temperature dropping significantly in the vicinity. Sound crazy? Sure. I'll save my theories 'til later.)

That seems to be the way most New Agers feel about this sort of thing, and to that, I say this: Show a single point of interaction between the "brain" and the "spirit," and I'll say, "Shizznit, you're right!" However, as near as we can tell, the brain seems to account for the whole of the mind, going in its merry, thinking, conscious way without any interference from some spooky, immaterial, astral whatevah. Ask my grandma. She has Alzheimer's--and unless Alzheimer's has a "spiritual component," like the organ it attacks, then the case seems pretty closed. Gram's disappearing, bit by bit, just 'cause kooky little tarry clogs are shutting down her neural pathways, a thousand at a time.

Ah yes, the old consciousness debate. A material reductionist, are you? Luckily, cognitive neuroscience has a long way to go before making any ground on the topic. And let us not forget the mind's effect on quantum indeterminacy. The brain cannot yet account for that yet, can it? But I'm far ahead of myself. I'll leave that up to the cognitive scientists, quantum physicists, et al.

If the brain's physical actions--like thought and feeling--were being dictated by the spirit, wouldn't that spirit also have control over the other physical processes taking place in the brain? Like, you know, dementia?

I'm honored you'd ask me to solve such a puzzling question. I'm sorry to say I have no answer for you at the present time.

So, both of these ideas seem pretty unlikely. But I'll accept either, or any other, theory regarding how these things might work, once again, if someone could just show up in my town with a decent demo. (but, beloved believers, 'till you have irrefutable evidence, ain't that a whole lot to swallow? C'mon, mang) 'Zat's all.

Yours in Christ,
- B

Ah, and finally we get to the heart of the matter. As fun as it is debating gobbledygook with you, I say it's more fun to gather up 25 of my friends and go have a tootin' time at the good ol' spoon bending party! Yee haw!

 

[flyboy217]

Hey flyboy217!

Could a magnet on a string help a person decide which spoon was made of a certain alloy?

I know it could help me. Could it help you?

Tricky tricky. I shall ban magnets, dowsing rods, and related paraphernalia from my party. Not that it will matter if I'm using only stainless steel forks and spoons, mind you.

 

[T'ai Chi]

It reminds me of my grandpa showing me how to take a beer cap and bend it in half just with a light squeeze using your thumb and finger.

 

[Lucianarchy]

As fun as it is debating gobbledygook with you, I say it's more fun to gather up 25 of my friends and go have a tootin' time at the good ol' spoon bending party! Yee haw!

You go, Boy!

I love guerrilla science. Much more fun than monkey science!

 

[flyboy217]

It reminds me of my grandpa showing me how to take a beer cap and bend it in half just with a light squeeze using your thumb and finger.

Touching story.