psychics
- Thread starter leopold
- Start date
They don't.
The biggest peoblem with using a psychic to solve a crime is that the police almost have to be psychic to know which are real "psychic detectives" and which are fakes. There is also the problem that psychics can not control what and when they will receive and it does not come neatly packaged. Living another person's nightmare is not a pleasurable experience.
I remember reading recently that most police forces are sceptical about the use of psychics and that few, in officers' opinions, have ever contributed significantly to the solving of a crime.
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/police-psychics.html
http://www.valleyskeptic.com/psychic.htm
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/police-psychics.html
http://www.valleyskeptic.com/psychic.htm
candy said:
That, or they can have worked with the psychic and gotten to know that person's track record.
I don't think that it is necessarily true that a psychic can't to control what he receives. The trouble is that it takes a lot more time and energy to train for control than it does to gain a wild talent that you are born with or that somehow develops. It may actually be more difficult for the talented person because he doesn't think that he needs training or that anyone is fit to train him.
Whether you think that it is credible or not, the evidence is all over the place. You certainly should be aware of some kind of evidence, even if that evidence is not credible to you. There are all kinds of adjectives used with the word "evidence", like "good", "bad", "solid", and so on. I do not accept the word "evidence" as meaning any particular kind of evidence unless the writer uses one of those modifiers explicitly. The implicit use of the word "conclusive" as a modifier is always inappropriate and wrong in my book. It also indicates what I believe to be the wrong attitude.
There is certainly no conclusive evidence that psychic powers do not exist. I've seen enough evidence that they do exist in my personal life. That evidence is hard to fit into a paradigm that tries to fit human emotion into some sort of numerical formula and assumes that "inanimate" matter does not feel. I also have difficulty with an immature science that tries to exclude everything that it cannot prove using what little it has.
Instead of dismissing metaphysical writings as not being evidence, it is better to read a variety of them and achieve a good synthesis of what they are saying.
There is certainly no conclusive evidence that psychic powers do not exist. I've seen enough evidence that they do exist in my personal life. That evidence is hard to fit into a paradigm that tries to fit human emotion into some sort of numerical formula and assumes that "inanimate" matter does not feel. I also have difficulty with an immature science that tries to exclude everything that it cannot prove using what little it has.
Instead of dismissing metaphysical writings as not being evidence, it is better to read a variety of them and achieve a good synthesis of what they are saying.
There's no conclusive evidence that pink unicorns do not exist, either. That doesn't mean we have any reason to believe in the existence of pink unicorns.
For example?
A number of open invitations exist for people to demonstrate psychic powers under controlled conditions. But strangely, no psychic ever wants to do this, even if it would earn them $1 million (see www.randi.org for details).
The first step in examining psychic powers is not to determine how they might work, or on what principles they operate. The first step is to determine that they exist, beyond doubt. If such powers were as common as people claim, that should be very easy, wouldn't you say?
Why bother? This would be like reading up on the ecology and mating habits of pink unicorns.
c7ityi_ said:
Oh, enlighten us oh great one. Tell us something that we don't know?
James R said:
That is what I call making an excuse for having a closed mind.
I am not impressed when you talk about pink unicorns. At least there do exist claims of psychic phenomena that correspond with actual observations. You're actually back to simply dismissing a lot of observations.