Psipog

[heliocentric]

A. That seems to be the case.
B. Yep.

And of course C. The controls are not adequate so B. cannot be trusted.

But if A. is true (psi experiments are the most rigerously controlled form of experimentation).
And C. is also true (the controls are still however not adequate for you to recognise the data)

This means that i would imagine the vast majority of scientific data (90% upwards) simply doesnt meet your standards of empiricsm and doesnt count as evidence.
Now that in itself, while maybe being alittle extreme, is fair enough - i cant criticise someone for being skeptical.
But i have to wonder if in fact your skepticsm begins and ends with psi experimentation, and if thats the case whether that position can be reasonably justified.

Those other experiments are not dealing with life forms that go to great lengths to cheat... so the compairson itself is inadequate.

All experiments deal with human life forms - you cant take the observer out of the loop - one of the oldest problems in science dating back to Newton.
Humans wont necessarily overtly cheat though, more often than not its a subconscious mechanicism whereby you bend the experiment to tally up your preconceptions.

Remember the 'sprites'. Some scientists retrieved pictures and video of them. That means their existence is 100% self-evident. Science brings visibility to what's self-evident. Microsopes bring visibility to bacteria. Radio telescopes bring visibility to non-visible light galaxies. Airplanes and cameras bring visibility to 'sprites'. These are all 'what' phonemonena.

I think youre possibly using the wrong phrase here, although yes i know what you mean - youre talking about phenomena that's very solid and 'grabbable'

We are dealing here with something prehaps alittle more abstract and less 'reach out and touchable' its true - however its erroneous to believe that that makes the phenomenon any less real.
I cant measure or record your subjective experience in any way - but im pretty sure that you have subjective experience, and i can infer that you do from the way your consciousness interacts and manipulates the matter/energy around you.
By the same token something like gravity is completely ethereal - you mearly infer it exists from its interaction with medium to large planetary bodies.

Why do you take issue with ki balls?

The reports are from one social group and age group it seems - teenagers who are into dragon ball z.
If it was a reported phenomenon from people from all walks of life, spanning age, occupation, and beliefs. Then i think there'd be better odds of there being some validity to it all.

Reality has so many facets that are anything but intuitive. Did you know that photons only travel through space and not through time? Regardless, it is what it is. Reality does not lie.

Im pretty sure that's not correct, even allowing for quantum weirdness.
To travel you need time as well as space to travel through, so traveling through space without time is impossible.
In any case, if youve got a link for what you just mentioned id be interested to see it - maybe ive misunderstood what youre saying or youve possibly phrased it wrong.
Although comming back to the general point of alot of physics being counter-intutive or anti 'common sense' youre absolutely right.
Which is why i found it odd that youre aware of that conceptual pit-fall but you still willingly fall into it when dealing with psi or any speculations apon it.

Show me the evidence then.

I think ive posted enough for now, i might post some more in this thread latter tomorrow if i come across any.

You don't have to know all the methods of cheating to be able to know something is a fraud.

Well you kind of do, otherwise youre simply going by some vauge notion of how you think fraud 'might' manifest itself.
What youre doing is akin to sitting at a card table and calling one of the players out on cheating without having seen anything untoward and without knowing any of the sophisticated ways in which card cheats opperate.
Again youre alluding to some sort of 'knowingness' that cheating has taken place without being able to actually define it.

Knowing what humans can, cannot, and behaviorally do are far more important.

Which we've already established you dont.

That psychic lady for example. I know humans cannot do that

Again - youre alluding to some innate intuitive sense of 'knowingness' (even though this is exactly what you were arguing against a few paragraphs back)
You 'know humans cant do that' unyet you cant illustrate why or how they cant do that, or why it should be impossible.
There's no rationalisation to your opinions.

Put her in a controlled environment and the magic will disappear. I would put money on it.

You must be pretty certain shes a fraud then, in which case im happy to talk about where you think she was pulling a fast one.
Or if you want to point to some specific instances which raised your suspicions im happy to talk about that also (since we've both seen the same program).
Otherwise as i said before youre falling back on this fallacy of psi being impossible to your sensibilities without being able to rationalise why it should be out of the realms of possiblity.

It still doesn't explain why thoughts are not physical. What supportive evidence exists that they are not?

Thoughts in themselves arnt physical - theyre the subjective property of matter.
I.e. you could point to physical matter say - a neuron, but that isnt a thought, and neither are the bio-electrial firings between neurons.
Theyre simply the matter that manifests or create the thoughts.

This is pretty much the 'hard problem of consciousness' that philosophers and scientists wrestle with.

I don't think the particle 'knows' anything. It's using information from the same repository as the other.

Again youre falling back on linguistic abstractions - in this case 'repoistory' which cant be correlated to anything physical or mental.
All we can say is at the point one particle changes it's spin the other particle knows or is aware on some base level that the other particle has altered its spin. If it wasnt there would be no basis or causal motivation for the other particle to change its spin.
By invoking ethereal 'repositories' i really think youre making things overly complicated and simply invoking another level of inexplicablity.

If the information changes, both particles change accordingly. I don't think that supports the existence of 'psi' in the least.

The point is - one systems behaviour changes in reaction to the change in another system, despite those two systems having no apparent communication channel between them.
Now think about psi, and why it rubs people up the wrong way so much - it's because people erroneously believe there can be no inter-relationship between systems (in this case people) which are both A. physically seperated and B. have no apparent physical communication channel between them. From a physics stand-point this is complete rubbish, we know this is not true.
That's how it correlates.

The judgement is based on existing knowledge and results. What I see you trying to set up is something theists often do. You cannot know 'God' does not exist without understanding *fill in the blank here*. It is a distract and maneuver tactic that sidesteps the knowns.

No it really isnt, im not trying to be intellectually dishonest here, i really believe that you should actually know how fraudsters opperate if youre going to finger various people as being fraudsters.
The whole reason i learnt about cold reading, body language cues, and nlp was so i could better understand human interaction and what is claimed to be psi.
Believe it or not im a huge skeptic, and in exercising my skepticsm its important to me to have all the tools to hand to exercise my best shot at critical thinking.
What ive found in learning about these processes is that alot of psi relies on a process outside of these psychological processes.
And in further reading ive found many psychologists who have stumbled onto the exact same conclusion.

* People *want* psi to exist.
* People go out of their way to deceive people into thinking psi exists.
* People are deceived into thinking psi exists.
* The best experiments to date have inadequate controls and the results cannot be trusted.
*The best results from these flawed experiments is a ~35% hit rate (10% over chance... which is an 87% failure rate after removing the chance percentage).
* All receivers in such experiments never know if their 'shot' is a hit or miss.

Science is a great process for asking reality questions. Reality is a great validator for what is true. Pit these results against reality and the outcome is quite clear.

Well youre starting to be alittle more critical here which is good, again as i said my goal isnt to get you to believe in psi.
Ive spoken to many people who only go by emprical experimenation and for alot of them the data still isnt good enough - its inconclusive.
I have no problem with conclusions like those whatsover, all i ask is that there be rationality and a critical process at work, rather than a string of assumptions.

 

[Crunchy Cat]

Memory is a perfect example.

How so?

Still a strawman. You are still arguing for a level that doesn't exist. I'm very impresees that you can come up with examples where people can know at a certain level of certainty but by know strecth of the imagination is that the case with all phenomenon. If it was there would be no need for science.
Furthermore, moo is very subjective and open to interpretation. In japan dogs say moo (that's a fact).

You knew it was a cow... that level of certainty seems to exist.

The argument does not dimiss that. What the argument says is that there are above statistical hits in consistently in experiments.

The argument says that it supports the existence of psi too... when the evidence is not trustworthy of such a conclusion.

There are many instances in the history of science when the status quo proved itself to be too rigid in its thinking and flat out wrong. Plate techtonics is a good example. Second, you don't understand science. Finding possible flaws and criticsims of tests are standard procedure in science. What usually happens in science is that the person that finds the psssible flaw redoes the experiment this time elimintating the possibility of that flaw. For some reason in psi criticism the sceptics think it is enoguh merley to speculate and think that speculation itself is proof.

In general I agree and due to the known nature of people, a skeptic only needs to know that enough potential exists for data to not be trusted when dealing with fantastic human claim.

Stop repeating this. I am really starting to question your sanity when you keep repeating this over and over again even though the people that wrote that paper clearly state otherwise. Again, in their words: As such, it should be clearly noted that this paper has outlined the potential for the sender-to-experimenter leakage; it has not established that such an artifact actually occurred. Do not repeat again that communication happened.

I think you need to look at the experiment protocol and find the places where people talk and other people hear. Once you see that what you have is evidence that communication HAPPENED in the experiment. As a result there are opportunities for leakage (potential).

Just proves that the Fundametalist will persist in their belief no mater what evidence is presented.

You mean like the experiment protocol saying people spoke, people heard, and yet denying communication happened?

Then stop saying their is no evidence.

There is evidence for all sorts of things... just not psi.

This proves nothing but that you refuse to accept evidence that doesn't fit into your worldview. You are no different in this regard to a Christian fundamentalist that says they know "whats really going on" with the evidence for evolution - "deception."

A fundamentalist typically wont accept supportive evidence. I can be easily convinced with supportive evidence; however, I wont ignore existing knowledge that makes the evidence collection process untrustworthy.

No, the work is not solely on the shoulders of the psi-advocates. The work is also on sceptics that find what they believe to be possible methodological errors. They are actually the ones making the claim. The claim is: The statistical difference is due to methodological error X. What is supposed to happen is the test is redone removing methodological error X. If the statistical difference remains then it is known that the difference isn't due to error X. Don't forget the autoganzfeld are a refined methodological retest of the original ganzfelds and the statisitical difference remained.

I am sure someone will refine it more. I am curious as to what you are going to do "if" (and I use that word sarcastically) all statistical significance disappears in the next round of refinement?

The fact that the sceptics have been unable to falsify these experiments says everyhting.

Specifically, why waste the time with all the knowns?

 

[Crunchy Cat]

Crunchy there is no evidence that the double-blind controls were compromised. Again, in their words: As such, it should be clearly noted that this paper has outlined the potential for the sender-to-experimenter leakage; it has not established that such an artifact actually occurred. Do not repeat again that communication happened.
The next step in science is for these critics to redo the test. If they falsify the experiment then the results get dismissed. Funny how you accept speculation as proof from sceptics but dimiss scientific evidence from "advocates."
In their words: we believe that the autoganzfeld studies (and the resulting database) represent an impressive achievement. The studies achieved a very high level of methodological sophistication. Stop saying their is no evidence - it's just plain and fucking simply not true. I will tell that to crazy-ass Christian Fundamentalists that refuse to accept the evidence for evolution and I will say it to crazy-ass "sceptics" like you that refuse to accept evidence of psi.

Take these two sentences from the experiment protocol and paraphrase them:

"At that point, the sender moved to the receiver's chamber and revealed the identity of the target to both the receiver and the experimenter."

"There was two-way intercom communication between the experimenter and the receiver but only one-way communication into the sender's room"

 

[Crunchy Cat]

But if A. is true (psi experiments are the most rigerously controlled form of experimentation).
And C. is also true (the controls are still however not adequate for you to recognise the data)

This means that i would imagine the vast majority of scientific data (90% upwards) simply doesnt meet your standards of empiricsm and doesnt count as evidence.
Now that in itself, while maybe being alittle extreme, is fair enough - i cant criticise someone for being skeptical.
But i have to wonder if in fact your skepticsm begins and ends with psi experimentation, and if thats the case whether that position can be reasonably justified.

I think you probably understood before even asking the question. The psi claim mixes human desires and a long history of intentional deception with an objective claim. Because of this, people cannot be trusted at all and the protocol has to therefore be extreme.

In other areas of science, the playing field is quite different as we can trust chemical reactions, physical reactions, etc. to not have desire and intention.

All experiments deal with human life forms - you cant take the observer out of the loop - one of the oldest problems in science dating back to Newton.
Humans wont necessarily overtly cheat though, more often than not its a subconscious mechanicism whereby you bend the experiment to tally up your preconceptions.

Agreed.

I think youre possibly using the wrong phrase here, although yes i know what you mean - youre talking about phenomena that's very solid and 'grabbable'

We are dealing here with something prehaps alittle more abstract and less 'reach out and touchable' its true - however its erroneous to believe that that makes the phenomenon any less real.
I cant measure or record your subjective experience in any way - but im pretty sure that you have subjective experience, and i can infer that you do from the way your consciousness interacts and manipulates the matter/energy around you.
By the same token something like gravity is completely ethereal - you mearly infer it exists from its interaction with medium to large planetary bodies.

Whether it's a cause of effect, something ultimately bubbles up to a level of visibility that's grabbable. Psi really has yet to do that. Even what cosmologists call 'dark matter' has a grabbable effect.

The reports are from one social group and age group it seems - teenagers who are into dragon ball z.
If it was a reported phenomenon from people from all walks of life, spanning age, occupation, and beliefs. Then i think there'd be better odds of there being some validity to it all.

What? You mean this is all delusion?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2yaj-QmooM

Im pretty sure that's not correct, even allowing for quantum weirdness.
To travel you need time as well as space to travel through, so traveling through space without time is impossible.
In any case, if youve got a link for what you just mentioned id be interested to see it - maybe ive misunderstood what youre saying or youve possibly phrased it wrong.
Although comming back to the general point of alot of physics being counter-intutive or anti 'common sense' youre absolutely right.
Which is why i found it odd that youre aware of that conceptual pit-fall but you still willingly fall into it when dealing with psi or any speculations apon it.

Regarding photons, this is one of the harder concepts to understand. If you put a clock on a photon, let it move to another solar system, and checked the clock, no time would have passed for the photon. Yet it moved through space. This effectively means a photon is ageless and doesn't move through time but does move through space and we can detect it's positional changes relative to our time frame even though it has no direct relationship with it.
latter tomorrow if i come across any.

Well you kind of do, otherwise youre simply going by some vauge notion of how you think fraud 'might' manifest itself.
What youre doing is akin to sitting at a card table and calling one of the players out on cheating without having seen anything untoward and without knowing any of the sophisticated ways in which card cheats opperate.
Again youre alluding to some sort of 'knowingness' that cheating has taken place without being able to actually define it.

It's not quite the same. In a card game, cheaters are not common. In psi, well, everyone's a cheater .

Which we've already established you dont.

I know they can and do fake psi and I know they cannot perform psi for real. Seems to be more than enough.

Again - youre alluding to some innate intuitive sense of 'knowingness' (even though this is exactly what you were arguing against a few paragraphs back)
You 'know humans cant do that' unyet you cant illustrate why or how they cant do that, or why it should be impossible.
There's no rationalisation to your opinions.

It's self-evident that they can't. I know it's different for you as you have had people 'pluck' the thoughts out of your mind... yet the best anyone has ever done in a science setting is a 10% over chance hit rate with untrustworthy protocols. Doesn't that seem odd to you?

You must be pretty certain shes a fraud then, in which case im happy to talk about where you think she was pulling a fast one.
Or if you want to point to some specific instances which raised your suspicions im happy to talk about that also (since we've both seen the same program).
Otherwise as i said before youre falling back on this fallacy of psi being impossible to your sensibilities without being able to rationalise why it should be out of the realms of possiblity.

I would place my bets on her being a hotreader (having priori knowledge). Remember most of the variables are in her control. Stick her in a session with the "amazing randi" or a real double-blind experiment... well someone like that is not likely going to agree to something whose results would cut her career short.

Thoughts in themselves arnt physical - theyre the subjective property of matter.
I.e. you could point to physical matter say - a neuron, but that isnt a thought, and neither are the bio-electrial firings between neurons.
Theyre simply the matter that manifests or create the thoughts.

This is pretty much the 'hard problem of consciousness' that philosophers and scientists wrestle with.

Why can't the bio-electrical firings of a neural network be a literal thought? Why can't any moment of a subjective experience be a configuration of bio-electrical firings in a neural network?

Again youre falling back on linguistic abstractions - in this case 'repoistory' which cant be correlated to anything physical or mental.
All we can say is at the point one particle changes it's spin the other particle knows or is aware on some base level that the other particle has altered its spin. If it wasnt there would be no basis or causal motivation for the other particle to change its spin.
By invoking ethereal 'repositories' i really think youre making things overly complicated and simply invoking another level of inexplicablity.

Why can't the repository be correlated to anything physical? Why can't the repository be a real tangible part of both particles simultaneously? Why would the either particle have to have knowledge of the other?

This might not be the best anology but lets say you had two remote controlled cars and 1 remote controller that worked on both of them at the same time. If you steer left both cars go left. If you steer right both cars go right. Yet neither car has any knowledge about the other's position. They share a single repository (the controller).

The point is - one systems behaviour changes in reaction to the change in another system, despite those two systems having no apparent communication channel between them.

That they do.

Now think about psi, and why it rubs people up the wrong way so much - it's because people erroneously believe there can be no inter-relationship between systems (in this case people) which are both A. physically seperated and B. have no apparent physical communication channel between them. From a physics stand-point this is complete rubbish, we know this is not true.
That's how it correlates.

I don't think that's what bugs most people about psi; allthough, you might be right that it bugs some of them. I think more often its just a claim without supportive evidence that bugs most folks.

No it really isnt, im not trying to be intellectually dishonest here, i really believe that you should actually know how fraudsters opperate if youre going to finger various people as being fraudsters.
The whole reason i learnt about cold reading, body language cues, and nlp was so i could better understand human interaction and what is claimed to be psi.

I think it's great that you have and I personally think it's overkill to expect everyone whose skeptical to do so. To me and many others it is quite self-evident that psi isn't real and we don't all have to be experts on fraud.

Believe it or not im a huge skeptic, and in exercising my skepticsm its important to me to have all the tools to hand to exercise my best shot at critical thinking.
What ive found in learning about these processes is that alot of psi relies on a process outside of these psychological processes.
And in further reading ive found many psychologists who have stumbled onto the exact same conclusion.

I've noticed that people whom really shoot for openness and objectiveness tend to sacrafice weight and importance of information. I am not entirely sure why it happens; however, it is clear to me that too much bias or too little bias can put truth in a blind spot.

Well youre starting to be alittle more critical here which is good, again as i said my goal isnt to get you to believe in psi.
Ive spoken to many people who only go by emprical experimenation and for alot of them the data still isnt good enough - its inconclusive.
I have no problem with conclusions like those whatsover, all i ask is that there be rationality and a critical process at work, rather than a string of assumptions.

There always has been and sometimes it helps to see them listed out in bullets.

 

[grover]

How so?

Memory is a perfect example because is not 100% accurate and a person doesn't know if their memory is true or false.

You knew it was a cow... that level of certainty seems to exist.

No one said that there aren't somethings that a person can be reasonably certain of. The problem is that you are trying to make it sound like there always has to be 100% in life. It's totally unrealistic.

The argument says that it supports the existence of psi too... when the evidence is not trustworthy of such a conclusion.

The article you posted does not say its not trustworthy it says: we believe that the autoganzfeld studies (and the resulting database) represent an impressive achievement. The studies achieved a very high level of methodological sophistication

In general I agree and due to the known nature of people, a skeptic only needs to know that enough potential exists for data to not be trusted when dealing with fantastic human claim.

we believe that the autoganzfeld studies (and the resulting database) represent an impressive achievement. The studies achieved a very high level of methodological sophistication

I think you need to look at the experiment protocol and find the places where people talk and other people hear. Once you see that what you have is evidence that communication HAPPENED in the experiment. As a result there are opportunities for leakage (potential).

Communication happens in all double-blind experiments. In a pharmaceutical study double-blind means that the experimenter does not know who gets the real pills and who gets the placebos. The entire point of that article is speculating if the blinds could have been compromised.

You mean like the experiment protocol saying people spoke, people heard, and yet denying communication happened?

You obviously don't know what double-blind means. He has to do with not knowing information, not that no one is allowed to speak.

There is evidence for all sorts of things... just not psi.

In your opinion. Just like in the opinion of Christian Fundamentalists there is no evidence for evolution.

A fundamentalist typically wont accept supportive evidence. I can be easily convinced with supportive evidence; however, I wont ignore existing knowledge that makes the evidence collection process untrustworthy.

No, you're just holding the evidence for psi to a different standard than you hold other evidence.

I am sure someone will refine it more. I am curious as to what you are going to do "if" (and I use that word sarcastically) all statistical significance disappears in the next round of refinement?

If it disappears I will say that the Ganzfelds experiments are not evidence. However, the autoganzfelds are a refined version of the ganzfelds and the statistical difference didn't disappear as all sceptics thought it would.

Specifically, why waste the time with all the knowns?

That's like saying "Why waste time with the scientific method?"

 

[heliocentric]

In other areas of science, the playing field is quite different as we can trust chemical reactions, physical reactions, etc. to not have desire and intention.

Yeah but the point is even objectivity has to pass through or come via humans who have a vested interest in a certain outcome, with QM it gets even stickier as the subjective/objective relationship has a direct casual effect on the experientation.

What? You mean this is all delusion?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2yaj-QmooM

The gamma on my monitors abit fux0red atm, i'll have to come back to that or look at it on a laptop sometime - cant see what's going on.

Regarding photons, this is one of the harder concepts to understand. If you put a clock on a photon, let it move to another solar system, and checked the clock, no time would have passed for the photon. Yet it moved through space. This effectively means a photon is ageless and doesn't move through time but does move through space and we can detect it's positional changes relative to our time frame even though it has no direct relationship with it.
latter tomorrow if i come across any.

Ahh ok im with you, we're talking about relativity, well yes time for the particle would be 'seem' to be a near standstill or as you say 'timeless'.
Of course from our vantage point we can plot it's movement through time as well as space.

It's not quite the same. In a card game, cheaters are not common. In psi, well, everyone's a cheater .

Its just you cant explain the process by which everyones cheating, and nor are you interested in being able to.
You have innate extra-rational knowledge that this is all definitely taking place, and that works just as well.
Unfortunately as well as this process might work inside your own head - it isnt science.
To be scientific you have to have a rational argument and demonstrate some critical process, this is infact equally as true in philosophy these days as well where all your arguments have to be pretty air-tight to be taken seriously.
You just absolutely would not get away with your non-arguments within any proffesional arena. Which should speak volumes to you about the current state of your methodology.

I know they can and do fake psi and I know they cannot perform psi for real. Seems to be more than enough.

But i 'know' they can perform psi for real!
Unfortunately both those claims (mine and yours) lie outside of any rational process so are essentially useless.
We might as well stick our fingers in our ears and shout 'la la la' over each other if that's the basis on which you want to hinge this discussion.

It's self-evident that they can't. I know it's different for you as you have had people 'pluck' the thoughts out of your mind... yet the best anyone has ever done in a science setting is a 10% over chance hit rate with untrustworthy protocols. Doesn't that seem odd to you?

Youre still mis-using the term self-evident - there's nothing axiomatic about psi 'not existing' even hardcore skeptics dont involve themselves with non-arguments like that.
At best you can say the evidence is inconclusive, if you want to make absolute claims instead fine - although you have to accept that those claims lie outside of science.

I would place my bets on her being a hotreader (having priori knowledge). Remember most of the variables are in her control.

No most of the controls (if not all) are defined by the production company - you could put a case forward that everyone in the production house is feeding her information and its all abig setup. But youd have to actually set about proving that, which i know from experience you wouldnt be prepared to do.

Stick her in a session with the "amazing randi" or a real double-blind experiment... well someone like that is not likely going to agree to something whose results would cut her career short.

Anything to back that up, or are you just making sweeping assumptions again?

Why can't the bio-electrical firings of a neural network be a literal thought? Why can't any moment of a subjective experience be a configuration of bio-electrical firings in a neural network?

I think youre missing the point alittle here.
The whole point is no matter what objective process you point to you cant measure the subjective experience itself, the subjective experience is non-physical.
Again this is just standard consciousness theory that everyone in science and philosophy accepts - arch-materialists and realists alike.
It just seems like you argue against science whenever it falls outside of your assumptions of what you assume science says about something.

Why can't the repository be correlated to anything physical? Why can't the repository be a real tangible part of both particles simultaneously? Why would the either particle have to have knowledge of the other?

Because no scientist has ever deteched a physical 'information repository', no point invoking something that doesnt exist.

This might not be the best anology but lets say you had two remote controlled cars and 1 remote controller that worked on both of them at the same time. If you steer left both cars go left. If you steer right both cars go right. Yet neither car has any knowledge about the other's position. They share a single repository (the controller).

Youre arguing against your own position.
your position is 'there is no communication channel' (or at least it was a couple of posts ago)

you have 1 wavefunction for both particles and that nixes information transmission. That's important to know and while it doesn't explain the 'hows' it reduces the possibilities of the 'hows'

... but youre using an analogy of a communication channel to make your case - in this case a radio transmitter - bizzare.

I think you need to sort out what you actually think about action at a distance, at the moment it seems like youre not really sure about your own position atall.

I don't think that's what bugs most people about psi; allthough, you might be right that it bugs some of them. I think more often its just a claim without supportive evidence that bugs most folks.

Which is fine - it's when people base their opinions on psi on some 'oh but that would go against the laws of physics' style rhetoric that they expose themselves as entirely ignorant.

I think it's great that you have and I personally think it's overkill to expect everyone whose skeptical to do so. To me and many others it is quite self-evident that psi isn't real and we don't all have to be experts on fraud.

Which is fine, but you have to be comfortable in expressing what you know is true (but cant explain or defend) as something which lies outside of rationality.
Otherwise you end up wasting everyones time invoking a critical process that doesnt actually exist.

I've noticed that people whom really shoot for openness and objectiveness tend to sacrafice weight and importance of information. I am not entirely sure why it happens; however, it is clear to me that too much bias or too little bias can put truth in a blind spot.

It seems alot of things are clear to you - youre just unable to rationalise them. Untill that time i can only assume that it all makes sense inside your head (somehow).

 

[grover]

I think it's great that you have and I personally think it's overkill to expect everyone whose skeptical to do so. To me and many others it is quite self-evident that psi isn't real and we don't all have to be experts on fraud.

Helio, is it even possible to have a self-evident negative? To say it's self-evident that something doesn't exist? I can understand someone saying it is self-evident something does exist, but something self-evidently not existing is a very bizarre claim.
--------------------
Personally, I think its very interesting how Crunchy is really just a garden variety fundamentalist. He just Knows. Personally I think fundamentalism has more to with extreme discomfort with uncertainty as opposed to the actual content of the fundamentalism itself.
-------------------------------------------

 

[heliocentric]

Helio, is it even possible to have a self-evident negative? To say it's self-evident that something doesn't exist? I can understand someone saying it is self-evident something does exist, but something self-evidently not existing is a very bizarre claim.

Its a good question really, i was going to say a negative self-evident truth could be something like 'computers dont have consciousness' however we dont know that to be true - and youd certainly get alot of people disagreeing with that.
I think any self-evident truth or 'accepted axiom' in this instance, are generally pretty thin on the ground - i guess 'humans are either male, female, or a mixture of the two' would be along the lines of a solid axiom.
But its when you start to get into specifics that it all starts to fall apart - as you said earlier even something as simple as 'cows always say ''moo'' is shrowded in disagreement.
Due to the fact that many cultures hear very different sounds to us as they phonetically interpret animal vocalisations in line with their own language.

So for me personally id rather leave the invoking of self-evident truths alone. Its just a cheap way of circumnavigating reasoned argument imo.
You hear people imploying the same tactics in consciousness threads
'its self evident consciousness is emergent!' 'no, its self evident consciousness is innate!'
It doesnt get you anywhere..

Personally, I think its very interesting how Crunchy is really just a garden variety fundamentalist. He just Knows. Personally I think fundamentalism has more to with extreme discomfort with uncertainty as opposed to the actual content of the fundamentalism itself.

I think there's a definite pathological need in some people for everything to be prosaic just as there's a natural need in some people for everything to have mystery.
The thing with debunkers is, i always find them arguing as if science is a complete frame-work or even worse - arguing from a position of near-total ignorance of the scientific method.
The latter for me is indicitive of a creeping culture of scientism in the west - people who opperate from within their assumptions of what science says about 'xyandz' rather than what science actually says.
It kind of pisses me off really, because its just so ignorant - even though im non-religious i honestly have more respect for religious people who at least know their scripture (system of understanding reality) inside and out.
Its really alot more than can be said for people opperating within a frame work of scientism.

 

[grover]

So for me personally id rather leave the invoking of self-evident truths alone. Its just a cheap way of circumnavigating reasoned argument imo.
You hear people imploying the same tactics in consciousness threads
'its self evident consciousness is emergent!' 'no, its self evident consciousness is innate!'
It doesnt get you anywhere..

But the thing with consciousness/subjective experience all we can know if it is through direct experience. In a sense it is the ultimate in self-evident.

(Obviously I'm one of the people this line of argument. But, I hope I can get you to see why its in my opinion legitimate in discussions of consciousness).

 

[heliocentric]

I actually accept where youre comming from - you can only subjectively understand or 'come into contact with' your own subjectivity. In fact you could argue from a certain vantage point that that's the only real self-evidence that can exist for a human.

However im not talking about self-evidency as a sort of 'inner proof', im talking about the self-evidency thats often used as short hand for 'it is apparently obvious to me'.
- A self-evidency which points to a axiomatic truth that doesnt require proving; thats the kind of self-evidency i have a problem with.
And i believe if thats sort of 'self-evidence' that crunchy is refering to.

As i said you can use this type of reasoning; or non-reasoning, to erroneously defend absolutely anything (consciousness was just an example).

However as ive said before in relation to consciousness, you can definitely infer it's existance in other things by objective behaviours - no you can never get inside anothers interiority and say they have consciousness with absolute certainty. Although there isnt really anything else you can say absolutely exists either, if you want to go down that road.
I think that's why alot of philosophers to save themselves going mad assume that the exterior world has its own external reality and the people around them arnt some sort of self creation or zombies - and simply work from there.

 

[grover]

I actually accept where youre comming from - you can only subjectively understand or 'come into contact with' your own subjectivity. In fact you could argue from a certain vantage point that that's the only real self-evidence that can exist for a human.

I'd take it a step further and say that consciousness is the only thing that can be directly known. Everything else is second-hand. Which is very interesting in my opinion since, if this is true, science rejects that which can actually be directly known. Make sense?

 

[grover]

However as ive said before in relation to consciousness, you can definitely infer it's existance in other things by objective behaviours - no you can never get inside anothers interiority and say they have consciousness with absolute certainty. Although there isnt really anything else you can say absolutely exists either, if you want to go down that road.
I think that's why alot of philosophers to save themselves going mad assume that the exterior world has its own external reality and the people around them arnt some sort of self creation or zombies - and simply work from there.

No, I agree. A certain amount of common sense is required. When I'm trying to back people into a corner with the consciousness thing I'm trying to get them to see that somethings we actually only know through direct experience. Even we extrapolate that something else has consciousness we are doing so based on our own subjective experiences. It just seems weird to me that alot of people seem to think that its ok to jsut leave subjective experience out of the whole equation of truth and life because I would say subjective experience is the most important aspect of it.

Discussions of consciousness actually tie back into religion because many people seem to think that religion is only ever based on blind faith without realising that all religions also have a contemplatie component in which people claim to discover certain truths about self and universe through directly observing consciousness. Most atheists think that heaven is in the sky - but CHrist actually said the Kingdon of Heaven is in you. So from my perspective its possible that the Kingdom of Heaven is a directly observable phenomenon of consciousness. (Note: I'm much more Buddhist than Christian, I'm just using an example).

 

[Vladimir]

If these special powers do exist, Psipog can settle it once and for with a convincing demonstration.

Of course there is always the concern that the government will seize that person.

 

[Crunchy Cat]

Yeah but the point is even objectivity has to pass through or come via humans who have a vested interest in a certain outcome, with QM it gets even stickier as the subjective/objective relationship has a direct casual effect on the experientation.

Correct and it's in the best interest of scientists not to fudge the results as it will invariably come back to bite them in the ass if they do. Also, I am not quite sure what you meant by the subjective having an effect on the objective in QM. Could you explain?

The gamma on my monitors abit fux0red atm, i'll have to come back to that or look at it on a laptop sometime - cant see what's going on.

Np, I thought it was cute.

Ahh ok im with you, we're talking about relativity, well yes time for the particle would be 'seem' to be a near standstill or as you say 'timeless'.
Of course from our vantage point we can plot it's movement through time as well as space.

Correct on the last part but not on the first part. It's not at a near standstill... its zero movement in time.

Its just you cant explain the process by which everyones cheating, and nor are you interested in being able to.
You have innate extra-rational knowledge that this is all definitely taking place, and that works just as well.
Unfortunately as well as this process might work inside your own head - it isnt science.
To be scientific you have to have a rational argument and demonstrate some critical process, this is infact equally as true in philosophy these days as well where all your arguments have to be pretty air-tight to be taken seriously.
You just absolutely would not get away with your non-arguments within any proffesional arena. Which should speak volumes to you about the current state of your methodology.

The point is being missed. psi has not been demonstrated in a controlled environment and I've explained the knowns (ex. people want psi to be true and go to great lengths to fake it... that video I posted being a good example). It puts psi in the 'God' category... millenia of claim... no supportive evidence (ex. psipog)... and mounting contradictory evidence (ex. oobe testing results in hospitals, comprehension of hypnopompic / hypnogogic hallucination, mechanics of schizoprenia, etc.).

But i 'know' they can perform psi for real!
Unfortunately both those claims (mine and yours) lie outside of any rational process so are essentially useless.
We might as well stick our fingers in our ears and shout 'la la la' over each other if that's the basis on which you want to hinge this discussion.

Well no. Absence of evidence over great amounts of time becomes evidence of absence. Also, you're lying because I know your position is not "psi is real".

Youre still mis-using the term self-evident - there's nothing axiomatic about psi 'not existing' even hardcore skeptics dont involve themselves with non-arguments like that.
At best you can say the evidence is inconclusive, if you want to make absolute claims instead fine - although you have to accept that those claims lie outside of science.

There is. People go to great lengths to lie about psi, people want psi to be true, etc... Then add to the pile that a millenia of claim exists and no supportive evidence exists. Autoganzfeld (which seems to be a wobbly crutch for believers on this subforum) isn't inconclusive evidence. It's untrustworthy data. Due to the nature of people, psi has to be handled with some fairly extreme protocol. Double blind and zero (I mean zero) communication or potential for communication between all involved.

No most of the controls (if not all) are defined by the production company - you could put a case forward that everyone in the production house is feeding her information and its all abig setup. But youd have to actually set about proving that, which i know from experience you wouldnt be prepared to do.

Quite correct. Her production company would no doubt be helping her... after all it's not in their best interest for her to not make money. And you are correct, I would not waste my time finding out how she is a fraud. It speaks volumes that she is not the greatest discovery of all time.

Anything to back that up, or are you just making sweeping assumptions again?

I can show you any number of examples of popular psi folks agreeing to the Randi challenge and then going dark. Would you like some evidence? Ask and ye' shall receive you know?

I think youre missing the point alittle here.
The whole point is no matter what objective process you point to you cant measure the subjective experience itself, the subjective experience is non-physical.

I've never seen any evidence that it is anything but physical. I will agree that it cannot be measured at present.

Again this is just standard consciousness theory that everyone in science and philosophy accepts - arch-materialists and realists alike.
It just seems like you argue against science whenever it falls outside of your assumptions of what you assume science says about something.

Huh? I can see philosophers putting the subjective into some intangible zaboombafoo dimension, but I have not see neuroscience do so. Can you show me where scientific knowledge explicitly says the subjective is non-physical?

Because no scientist has ever deteched a physical 'information repository', no point invoking something that doesnt exist.

That sounds more like a visibility problem than a reason. It is a known that particles can be entangled, it is a known that entangled particles have a single wave function, and it a known that a single wave function means no data transmission. Therefore what we are left with is a particle relationship. A shared repository. The observable what is there. The how... well thats what's beyond our visibility at present.

Youre arguing against your own position.
your position is 'there is no communication channel' (or at least it was a couple of posts ago)

... but youre using an analogy of a communication channel to make your case - in this case a radio transmitter - bizzare.

I think you need to sort out what you actually think about action at a distance, at the moment it seems like youre not really sure about your own position atall.

I think I also stated that the anology probably wasn't good and I was quite correct. What I intended for you to understand was that the two vehicles could respond "simultaneously" without having knowledge of each other.

Which is fine - it's when people base their opinions on psi on some 'oh but that would go against the laws of physics' style rhetoric that they expose themselves as entirely ignorant.

Ooook...

Which is fine, but you have to be comfortable in expressing what you know is true (but cant explain or defend) as something which lies outside of rationality.
Otherwise you end up wasting everyones time invoking a critical process that doesnt actually exist.

It seems alot of things are clear to you - youre just unable to rationalise them. Untill that time i can only assume that it all makes sense inside your head (somehow).

That's an interesting response. It's as if every time the knowns aren't explicitly listed out in every sentence then they are simply forgotten, invalidated, and put aside.

Remember these?

* People *want* psi to exist.
* People go out of their way to deceive people into thinking psi exists.
* People are deceived into thinking psi exists.
* The best experiments to date have inadequate controls and the results cannot be trusted.
*The best results from these flawed experiments is a ~35% hit rate (10% over chance... which is an 87% failure rate after removing the chance percentage).
* All receivers in such experiments never know if their 'shot' is a hit or miss.

There are more of course and it seems like you are willing to sweep them all aside as if they don't exist and use the resulting void as a means to protect the idea of psi from the very fact that it is absent of supportive evidence. The onus is on the believer and the believer has failed to yield proof since the idea of psi has existed.

 

[Crunchy Cat]

Memory is a perfect example because is not 100% accurate and a person doesn't know if their memory is true or false.

YOU ARE GAY. Did you remember that after you read it? Are you 100% sure? While you might not remember what I said a month from now or a year from now, I have absolute certainty that you remember it at this very moment.

Now go to a basketball court and take a shot... just one shot. Right after, do you remember taking the shot? Do you remember if it went in? Was that a real basketball?

It seems as if when someone pays attention to their last experience, they can remember it with astonishing accuracy. You are right that memory is subject to corruption / entropy just like any other data storage system, but the implication that entropy is so bad as to render all memory untrustworthy is just silly.

No one said that there aren't somethings that a person can be reasonably certain of. The problem is that you are trying to make it sound like there always has to be 100% in life. It's totally unrealistic.

I agree. What I don't think you realize is just how much certainty surrounds you.

The article you posted does not say its not trustworthy it says: we believe that the autoganzfeld studies (and the resulting database) represent an impressive achievement. The studies achieved a very high level of methodological sophistication

we believe that the autoganzfeld studies (and the resulting database) represent an impressive achievement. The studies achieved a very high level of methodological sophistication

Good god Grover. I never stated that I agreed with the conclusions of that article's authors.

Communication happens in all double-blind experiments. In a pharmaceutical study double-blind means that the experimenter does not know who gets the real pills and who gets the placebos. The entire point of that article is speculating if the blinds could have been compromised.

Now we're getting somewhere. In the case of psi, all human sensory communication (minus that supposed 6th sense) has to be cut of due to the nature of the claim. Failure to do so introduces the risk of information leakage.

You obviously don't know what double-blind means. He has to do with not knowing information, not that no one is allowed to speak.

Double-blind methods are there to prevent research outcomes from being influenced by either the placebo effect or the observer bias. Observer bias in 'parapsychology' refers to the situation of an experiment creating the experiment's results (leaked infomation / expectations).

In your opinion. Just like in the opinion of Christian Fundamentalists there is no evidence for evolution.

My 'opinion' has reproducibly absent results. The same is not true of the Xian opinion. It's a comparison of Apples to Thor.

No, you're just holding the evidence for psi to a different standard than you hold other evidence.

That I am and I hope you understand that it needs to be.

If it disappears I will say that the Ganzfelds experiments are not evidence. However, the autoganzfelds are a refined version of the ganzfelds and the statistical difference didn't disappear as all sceptics thought it would.

If it disappeared would you still assert it exists somehow?

That's like saying "Why waste time with the scientific method?"

It's more like saying, look there's a ditch... lets avoid it.

 

[heliocentric]

Correct and it's in the best interest of scientists not to fudge the results as it will invariably come back to bite them in the ass if they do. Also, I am not quite sure what you meant by the subjective having an effect on the objective in QM. Could you explain?

Yes the subjective observation, whether directly or by means of a machine collapses the wavefunction. The observer doesnt just alter the experiment he/she/it shapes the entire outcome.

The point is being missed. psi has not been demonstrated in a controlled environment and I've explained the knowns (ex. people want psi to be true and go to great lengths to fake it... that video I posted being a good example). It puts psi in the 'God' category... millenia of claim... no supportive evidence (ex. psipog)

Well there is plenty of supportive evidence, both objective and inter-personal.

... and mounting contradictory evidence (ex. oobe testing results in hospitals, comprehension of hypnopompic / hypnogogic hallucination, mechanics of schizoprenia, etc.).

Telepathy/psi is nothing to do with hallucinating, maybe youre thinking of ghosts.

Well no. Absence of evidence over great amounts of time becomes evidence of absence.

How long has psi actually been experimentated with rigorous double-blind controls though? since around the late 70s id say, hardly equates to millenia of 'evidence of absense' as youd have it.
Empricism in the current form we understand it has only really been knocking around for the past 200 years at best.
Anything before that was integrated/personal proofs, actually i think the oldest report of someone setting out to prove the existance of psi was a chap in ancient greece - from what i remember he went round to all the mystics and asked them what he would be doing tonight, 1 out of 3 answered correctly 'roasting a pig' i believe was the answer.
Doesnt really settle the issue from a modern stand-point of course, but the point is the claim that people have been looking for evidence of psi for millenia and comming up short isnt really true atall.

Also, you're lying because I know your position is not "psi is real".

Correct, i was just proving a point though

Quite correct. Her production company would no doubt be helping her

With 'no doubt'? so there's no doubt whatsoever that the production company was helping her?
Although im guessing from past experience you cant map out an argument or point out anything suspicious to add any weight to this conclusion, you 'just know', right?

It speaks volumes that she is not the greatest discovery of all time.

I wouldnt bother using the media as a gauge for how revolutionary or paradigm-shifting something might be, wont get you anywhere imo.

I can show you any number of examples of popular psi folks agreeing to the Randi challenge and then going dark. Would you like some evidence? Ask and ye' shall receive you know?

So - let me get this straight - anything but the last word in double-blinded experimenation isnt even really science and cant even be referenced in the same breath as the term 'evidence'
But james randi is completely immune from all this rigour, you'll happily accept a stage-magician performing to an audience in a half our show as 'evidence' in place of anything better.
Whats the point in pretending to be scientific if you cant even pretend to be consistant?
I think its incredibly transparent that scientific rigour is only ever a concern when it might actually rub up against your biases.

Huh? I can see philosophers putting the subjective into some intangible zaboombafoo dimension, but I have not see neuroscience do so. Can you show me where scientific knowledge explicitly says the subjective is non-physical?

I really dont think you get this, again youre reacting badly to it because you think im saying consciousness is like some wispy ethereal cloud floaing around in some higher dimension.
That's not what anyone is saying atall, it just means that no
matter what material you point to or measure you cant 'find' a thought, the experience is in itself cannot be known via any form of objective measurement - simply because thats the nature of subjectivity.

That sounds more like a visibility problem than a reason. It is a known that particles can be entangled, it is a known that entangled particles have a single wave function, and it a known that a single wave function means no data transmission. Therefore what we are left with is a particle relationship. A shared repository. The observable what is there. The how... well thats what's beyond our visibility at present.

Yeah but by invoking this 'shared repository' you are trying to invoke the how
Its the QM equivilent of invoking god - Just invoke something intangible, the existance of which cant even be measured or infered, when all else fails.
I mean yes ok - there could be some spacial 'shared repository' but it could also be god whispering to each particle telling them which way to turn.
Youre just adding another layer of mystery and explicablity where there's already enough imo, but theres nothing ultimately wrong with speculation and theres always a chance you might be right - so live and let live i guess.

I think I also stated that the anology probably wasn't good and I was quite correct. What I intended for you to understand was that the two vehicles could respond "simultaneously" without having knowledge of each other.

But the point remains, in classical physics there needs to be a communtion channel or medium for something to causally respond to something else.
If there isnt then, we're either dealing some sort of innate knowledge or telepathy or we're dealing with a communication channel that does exist, but which is simply way way beyond what we can measure.
In either case - the point remains, theres no real problem as far as reality is concerned with two seperated systems communicating with each other without any known communication channel.

There are more of course and it seems like you are willing to sweep them all aside as if they don't exist and use the resulting void as a means to protect the idea of psi from the very fact that it is absent of supportive evidence. The onus is on the believer and the believer has failed to yield proof since the idea of psi has existed.

Im not trying to sweep your reasons under the carpet, im simply pointing out that you can never illustrate why or how your reasons might apply when asked to do so.
If i push you to show me why or how youve arrived at one of your conclusions all i get is 'you just know'.
As ive said i dont mind, people using extra-rational means to arrive at certain conclusions, i just do wish theyd admit that thats what theyre doing.

 

[grover]

YOU ARE GAY. Did you remember that after you read it? Are you 100% sure? While you might not remember what I said a month from now or a year from now, I have absolute certainty that you remember it at this very moment.

Am I arguing with an adolescent or a very immature adult? Memory is still a perfect example.

It seems as if when someone pays attention to their last experience, they can remember it with astonishing accuracy. You are right that memory is subject to corruption / entropy just like any other data storage system, but the implication that entropy is so bad as to render all memory untrustworthy is just silly.

Memory is still a perfect example. All memory is untrustworthy.

I agree. What I don't think you realize is just how much certainty surrounds you.

Nonsense.

Good god Grover. I never stated that I agreed with the conclusions of that article's authors.

Typical fundamnetalist. Pick and choose what you want.

Now we're getting somewhere. In the case of psi, all human sensory communication (minus that supposed 6th sense) has to be cut of due to the nature of the claim. Failure to do so introduces the risk of information leakage.

So you've gone from wanting a double-blind study to a study where what? Everyone is blind?

Double-blind methods are there to prevent research outcomes from being influenced by either the placebo effect or the observer bias. Observer bias in 'parapsychology' refers to the situation of an experiment creating the experiment's results (leaked infomation / expectations).

The experimenter is blind. They have no information to leak.

My 'opinion' has reproducibly absent results. The same is not true of the Xian opinion. It's a comparison of Apples to Thor.

No, it's a perfect comparison. Christians say there is no evidence for evolution just like you are saying there is no evidence for psi.

That I am and I hope you understand that it needs to be.

Psi does have better control than other studies.

If it disappeared would you still assert it exists somehow?

No.

It's more like saying, look there's a ditch... lets avoid it.

No, it's like saying the scientific method is a waste of time.

 

[Crunchy Cat]

Am I arguing with an adolescent or a very immature adult? Memory is still a perfect example.

Memory is still a perfect example. All memory is untrustworthy.

You just contradicted yourself. Your first response shows that you remembered what I said quite well and your second response says that what you remembered is untrustworthy. Considering you provided supportive evidence of memory working immediately after an event, your latter statement would appear to not be true.

Nonsense.

Lets do a certainty bet. I am certain that you will fart tomorrow. Care to place a wager?

Typical fundamnetalist. Pick and choose what you want.

Separation of data from other people's opinion is only fundamentalism in your head.

So you've gone from wanting a double-blind study to a study where what? Everyone is blind?

I don't know why that hasn't been clear since the beginning of this thread. When testing for form of human information transfer that does not use existing senses then all of those existing sense must be removed.

The experimenter is blind. They have no information to leak.

As long as there is any communication in any direction or the potential of communication with sound, sight, touch, smell, or taste, the ganzfeld/autoganzfeld data wont be trusted.

No, it's a perfect comparison. Christians say there is no evidence for evolution just like you are saying there is no evidence for psi.

A Xian can be shown drug resistent bacteria and the fossil record. Self evident data. Whether or not a Xian accepts the data doesn't matter at that point. The best psi has to offer is an untrustworthy data collection process, questionable analysis, and statistically significant / reality insignificant results after if the untrustworthy data collection process and questionable analysis is taken at face value.

Psi does have better control than other studies.

Yes and psi does not have adequate controls for its subject matter.

No.

Would it make you a liar to be claiming that 'psi' exists now and then drop the claim later if the results disappeared? How would you feel about putting so much effort into something which turned up as delusion?

No, it's like saying the scientific method is a waste of time.

You're separating knowledge from desire and discarding the former.

 

[grover]

You just contradicted yourself. Your first response shows that you remembered what I said quite well and your second response says that what you remembered is untrustworthy. Considering you provided supportive evidence of memory working immediately after an event, your latter statement would appear to not be true.

You wanted an example of something where someone can't tell if they are correcto r not. I provided one. Of course you can create a false analogy between activities where certainty can be achieved like "moving your arm."
WHat you are doing is no different than a christian fundamentalist asking to actually see evolution. Its ridiculous.

Lets do a certainty bet. I am certain that you will fart tomorrow. Care to place a wager?

I never said there aren't things of which people can't be certain. Its absolutely ridiculous for you to pretend like all things are certain. It is also one of the hallmark traits of fundamentalists that they are can't tolerate uncertainty.

Separation of data from other people's opinion is only fundamentalism in your head.

There is no data in their article. Their is speculation. Why do you accept their speculation as valid but not their overall conclusion? Its because you are picking and choosing. Why are you picking and choosing? Because you're an intellectually dishonest fundamentalist.

I don't know why that hasn't been clear since the beginning of this thread. When testing for form of human information transfer that does not use existing senses then all of those existing sense must be removed.

No, what you've been demanding is double-blind. Now, because you are intellectually dishonest you are changing your tune to something beyond double-blind. Exactly what this thing beyond double-blind is supposed to be is anyones guess...a third experimenter that doesn't know who the real experimenters are?

As long as there is any communication in any direction or the potential of communication with sound, sight, touch, smell, or taste, the ganzfeld/autoganzfeld data wont be trusted.

The experimenter does not have any information to give away. He is blind. The reason you dont trust it is becasue you are a fundamentalist and will never trust anything presented.

A Xian can be shown drug resistent bacteria and the fossil record. Self evident data. Whether or not a Xian accepts the data doesn't matter at that point. The best psi has to offer is an untrustworthy data collection process, questionable analysis, and statistically significant / reality insignificant results after if the untrustworthy data collection process and questionable analysis is taken at face value.

No, all fundamentalists are presented with evidence that they find ways to dismiss. In reality their is nothing wrong with the data but the fundamentalist finds ways to lie to themself so that the data can be dismissed.

Yes and psi does not have adequate controls for its subject matter.

f course it does. You saying this just proves you will never accept any data.

Would it make you a liar to be claiming that 'psi' exists now and then drop the claim later if the results disappeared? How would you feel about putting so much effort into something which turned up as delusion?

No, it wouldnt' make me a liar. It would mean that I was intellectually honest.

You're separating knowledge from desire and discarding the former.

No, I'm saying the scientific method is reliable and should be used.

 

[Crunchy Cat]

Yes the subjective observation, whether directly or by means of a machine collapses the wavefunction. The observer doesnt just alter the experiment he/she/it shapes the entire outcome.

Man-made machines at present have no means to make subjective observations and the wave function collapses long before a human takes a look at the machine that caused the collapse. Different materials and sizes of materials result in collapse when they have relationships with superpositioned particles. That is why on one hand some particle-sensitive materials don't cause the collapse and can pick up the interference pattern from superposition particles hitting it.

Well there is plenty of supportive evidence, both objective and inter-personal.

If there was, then an instance of psi would be reproducible and it's mere existence would be evident.

Telepathy/psi is nothing to do with hallucinating, maybe youre thinking of ghosts.

Talk with Existabrent. He hears voices and is convinced its telepathy.

How long has psi actually been experimentated with rigorous double-blind controls though? since around the late 70s id say, hardly equates to millenia of 'evidence of absense' as youd have it.

The claim has been around since humans imagined it.

Empricism in the current form we understand it has only really been knocking around for the past 200 years at best.
Anything before that was integrated/personal proofs, actually i think the oldest report of someone setting out to prove the existance of psi was a chap in ancient greece - from what i remember he went round to all the mystics and asked them what he would be doing tonight, 1 out of 3 answered correctly 'roasting a pig' i believe was the answer.

Doesnt really settle the issue from a modern stand-point of course, but the point is the claim that people have been looking for evidence of psi for millenia and comming up short isnt really true atall.

66% failure rate and 33% hit rate in the absence of controls. I'd say that is pretty short.

With 'no doubt'? so there's no doubt whatsoever that the production company was helping her?
Although im guessing from past experience you cant map out an argument or point out anything suspicious to add any weight to this conclusion, you 'just know', right?

Not at all. I know human psi is fantasy / delusion and I know that it's too much work for one person to do a good hot reading.

I wouldnt bother using the media as a gauge for how revolutionary or paradigm-shifting something might be, wont get you anywhere imo.

I think the media would be all over a definitive proof of psi.

So - let me get this straight - anything but the last word in double-blinded experimenation isnt even really science and cant even be referenced in the same breath as the term 'evidence'
But james randi is completely immune from all this rigour, you'll happily accept a stage-magician performing to an audience in a half our show as 'evidence' in place of anything better.
Whats the point in pretending to be scientific if you cant even pretend to be consistant?
I think its incredibly transparent that scientific rigour is only ever a concern when it might actually rub up against your biases.

Fantastic claims require fantastic evidence. Psi is about as fantastic as it gets.

I really dont think you get this, again youre reacting badly to it because you think im saying consciousness is like some wispy ethereal cloud floaing around in some higher dimension.
That's not what anyone is saying atall, it just means that no
matter what material you point to or measure you cant 'find' a thought, the experience is in itself cannot be known via any form of objective measurement - simply because thats the nature of subjectivity.

That's very different than saying the subjective is not physical. What this says is that it's not presently measurable... which is quite true. That isn't necessarily always going to be the case.

Yeah but by invoking this 'shared repository' you are trying to invoke the how
Its the QM equivilent of invoking god - Just invoke something intangible, the existance of which cant even be measured or infered, when all else fails.
I mean yes ok - there could be some spacial 'shared repository' but it could also be god whispering to each particle telling them which way to turn.
Youre just adding another layer of mystery and explicablity where there's already enough imo, but theres nothing ultimately wrong with speculation and theres always a chance you might be right - so live and let live i guess.

It's really a process of deduction. 1 wave function for both particles means no information transmission. By process of elimination that means they share a relationship. That's the what. How that works... the mechanics behind it... well that's just an utter mystery. Maybe we have a fundamental difference in understanding reality and we don't interpret the information the same way. It really doesn't matter because in time people will unlock that little mystery.

But the point remains, in classical physics there needs to be a communtion channel or medium for something to causally respond to something else.
If there isnt then, we're either dealing some sort of innate knowledge or telepathy or we're dealing with a communication channel that does exist, but which is simply way way beyond what we can measure.
In either case - the point remains, theres no real problem as far as reality is concerned with two seperated systems communicating with each other without any known communication channel.

Matter having knowledge, telepathy, or some mega ultra hidden communication channel seem like vast complications (one or more of which require sentience) when the simplest interpretation isn't any of that.

Im not trying to sweep your reasons under the carpet, im simply pointing out that you can never illustrate why or how your reasons might apply when asked to do so.
If i push you to show me why or how youve arrived at one of your conclusions all i get is 'you just know'.
As ive said i dont mind, people using extra-rational means to arrive at certain conclusions, i just do wish theyd admit that thats what theyre doing.

I could go through the list again, expand it, put flowers on it, etc. but it wont have any affect on your interpretation. What it comes down to is there is a human claim of psi and the evidence is stacked against it. The world of science considers it a waste of time and those poor souls whom haven't learned end up wasting their time trying to do things like reproducing the auto-ganzfeld experiments and guess what? They come up empty:

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-20749206.html

Which of course falsifies what little 'evidence' psi is trying to hang on to. Let's face it. Psi is human fantasy. It is a delusion. It is in the same bucket as 'God', 'Ghosts', 'Weresolves', 'Vampires', etc.

The valuable knowledge of psi comes into play when we start asking the real questions. Why do people want psi to be true? Why do they go to such great lengths to fake it? What psychological needs does the delusion fulfill?