Latent Psychic Ability in the Religious, and Athiest

[Blurry]

to his own mind, he is NEVER wrong.

Deal with it.

I don't have to deal with it. You do.

Why don't you keep editing your post, see how many more "brilliant' things you can think of that you imagine will sufficiently tell me off.

[Gobbo]

I'll make you a deal, if you stop derailing this thread with off-topic nattering, I'll post another thread where I say something original.

[Gobbo]

As for me being wrong, when was I proven wrong in this thread?

I posted the progression of studies which, after the first round, were criticized. The people doing the study did it again, according the specifications suggested by the critics, got the correlation again, and then did it again with a completely different group.

So why should I act like I was wrong here when clearly I wasn't. XCZ didn't read the article. Woobly didn't either, and then maybe did, but still failed to see the relevant points, and just kept harping on the issues which were resolved after the first study.

Nothing has happened with regards to this issue except Wobbly and James talking about science for a while. So we're moving on. I just can't find the next study. If the Canucks weren't playing in game 7 today I would be looking to find it.

[Blurry]

I'll make you a deal, if you stop derailing this thread with off-topic nattering, I'll post another thread where I say something original.

What the hell kind of deal is that? Like I give a fuck if you actually attempt to say anything original. How about this -- if you will acknowledge my on-topic posts seriously rather than feel that it is necessary to make some kind of asinine, asshole-ish comment to try to assert your assumed superiority over me, I will refrain from continuing the off-topic trend that you, yourself, set.

[Wobbly]

So why should I act like I was wrong here when clearly I wasn't. XCZ didn't read the article. Woobly didn't either, and then maybe did, but still failed to see the relevant points, and just kept harping on the issues which were resolved after the first study.

Tell me Gobbo, what are the relevant issues?



Here little guy, my problems with the study laid out as overtly as you seemingly need:

1. Neither the Jaytee nor the Kane experiments were properly controlled. The dogs were left to be influenced by the environment. In fact, had you read the study, you would know that Sheldrake mentions environmental influence on the dogs behaviors throughout the studies, but inexplicably never controls for them. This invalidates the data.

2. In every Jaytee study the humans around Jaytee were uncontrolled for. The equipment was run by the participants(smart and her parents) in an overwhelming majority of Jaytee experiments. This instantly invalidates the conclusion about Jaytee, as the majority of the data is untrustworthy.

3. The conditions of success were arbitrarily defined, and were adopted after the failure of the first experiments. This is data dredging...data dredging creates a bias in analysis by influencing the conditions of success. This invalidates the studies.

4. The Kane study was only 10 experiments, this is not a large enough sample to make any conclusions whatsoever. The fact that Sheldrake does make a conclusion based off of such a small sample size calls into question his competency as an experimenter. The conclusion of the Kane study must be rejected because of the inherent limits of such a small sample size.

Sidenote 1:

Sheldrake misrepresented the Wiseman study in his response, and uses the Wiseman study as part of his body of data. The wiseman study, even as Sheldrake pointed out, was methodological suicide. They changed goal posts, varied the environment arbitrarily, and imposed no controls on Jaytee's interactions with the humans involved in the experiment. Sheldrake knows the data must be thrown out for these reasons, he mentions it in his response, but he still integrates it into his data during the subsequent study. This seriously calls into question the integrity of Sheldrake's data and techniques. No reasonable person can any longer "trust" that he did what he said he did, and his conclusions must be abandoned.

[Gobbo]

Tell me Gobbo, what are the relevant issues?

You're proposing experimental conditions that are ridiculous. I don't see a problem with this particular study not being double blind. If you bring in a stranger to watch the dog it's going to act differently. You want to put them into a metal room with no windows. My issue is you're not taking bunch of seemingly relevant things into consideration.

Anyways, I started with the weakest study. Let's move on to a couple studies that are a bit harder to discredit, shall we?

[Gobbo]

So basically this study is testing whether, in a sense-deprivation setting, one person can receive the thoughts/images from another individual.

Summaries of the studies of linking minds through telepathy using the ganzfeld technique

Source: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE EVIDENCE FOR PSYCHIC FUNCTIONING Professor Jessica Utts, Division of Statistics, University of California, Davis. (http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/air2.html)

Show Credentials

The ganzfeld technique is used to measure whether a receiver can know what a sender in a separate room is viewing. The technique uses sensory deprivation to test for telepathy. Ping-pong balls are put over the receiver's eyes and headphones over the ears. White noise is played through the headset and a bright red light in the room creates a featureless wall before the receivers eyes when seen through the ping pong balls. The receiver's eyes lose focus and have a cloudy view after a while. At the same time, the sender in another room is shown a visual stimulus such as a short video clip. The sender tries to transmit telepathically what he or she is seeing to the subject in the ganzfeld room.

The video clips or other visual stimuli are selected randomly from a large set of items. While the sender concentrates on the target, the receiver provides a continuous verbal report of what he or she seems to see in the cloudy, unfocused wall created by the halved ping-pong balls. Images the viewers describe are compared with the images seen by the subjects. Finally, at the completion of the ganzfeld period, the receiver is presented with several video clips, pictures, or objects, one of which was what the sender was actually seeing, and, without knowing which was the target, is asked to rate the degree to which each matches the image experienced during the ganzfeld period. If the receiver assigns the highest rating to the target stimulus, it is scored as a "hit." Thus, if the experiment uses judging sets containing four stimuli (the target and three decoys or control stimuli), the hit rate expected by chance is .25.

Typically, the ganzfeld experiments show a hit rate of around .35, indicating that the sender and receiver's minds were linked even when separated in different rooms.



Dr. Utts reviewed the studies using the ganzfeld technique at the request of the U.S. government to determine whether they were valid. This is the result of her research.

Abstract:

5.1. Conceptual Similarity: Ganzfeld Experiments

While remote viewing has been the primary activity at SRI and SAIC, other researchers have used a similar technique to test for anomalous cognition, called the ganzfeld. As noted in the SAIC Final Report of 29 Sept. 1994, the ganzfeld experiments differ from remote viewing in three fundamental ways. First, a "mild altered state is used," second, senders are [usually] used, so that telepathy is the primary mode, and third, the receivers (viewers) do their own judging just after the session, rather than having an independent judge.

The ganzfeld experiments conducted at Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL) were already mentioned in Section 3.4. Since the time those results were reported, other laboratories have also been conducting ganzfeld experiments. At the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Parapsychological Association, three replications were reported, all published in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the conference.

The ganzfeld experiments differ in the preferred method of analysis as well. Rather than using the sum of the ranks across sessions, a simple count is made of how many first places matches resulted from a series. Four rather than five choices are given, so by chance there should be about 25% of the sessions resulting in first place matches.

5.2 Ganzfeld Results from Four Laboratories

In publishing the ganzfeld results from PRL, Bem and Honorton (1994) excluded one of the studies from the general analysis for methodological reasons, and found that the remaining studies showed 106 hits out of 329 sessions, for a hit rate of 32.2 percent when 25 percent was expected by chance. The corresponding p-value was .002. As mentioned earlier, the hallmark of science is replication. This result has now been replicated by three additional laboratories.

Bierman (1995) reported four series of experiments conducted at the University of Amsterdam. Overall, there were 124 sessions and 46 hits, for a hit rate of 37 percent. The hit rates for the four individual experiments were 34.3 percent, 37.5 percent, 40 percent and 36.1 percent, so the results are consistent across his four experiments.

Morris, Dalton, Delanoy and Watt (1995) reported results of 97 sessions conducted at the University of Edinburgh in which there were 32 successes, for a hit rate of 33 percent. They conducted approximately equal numbers of sessions under each of three conditions. In one condition there was a known sender, and in the other two conditions it was randomly determined at the last minute (and unknown to the receiver) that there would either be a sender or not. Hit rates were 34 percent when there was a known sender and when there was no sender, and 28 percent when there was a sender but the receiver did not know whether or not there would be. They did discover post hoc that one experimenter was more successful than the other two at achieving successful sessions, but the result was not beyond what would be expected by chance as a post hoc observation.

Broughton and Alexander (1995) reported results from 100 sessions at the Institute for Parapsychology in North Carolina. They too found a similar hit rate, with 33 hits out of 100 sessions, or 33 percent hits.

Results from the original ganzfeld work and these three replications are summarized in Table 3, along with the SRI and SAIC remote viewing results. The effect sizes for the ganzfeld replications are based on Cohen's h, which is similar in type to the effect size used for the remote viewing data. Both effect sizes measure the number of standard deviations the results fall above chance, using the standard deviation for a single session.

http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/air2.html

5.3 Conclusions about External Replication

The results shown in Table 3 show that remote viewing has been conceptually replicated across a number of laboratories, by various experimenters and in different cultures. This is a robust effect that, were it not in such an unusual domain, would no longer be questioned by science as a real phenomenon.



Round 2.

[Wobbly]

You're proposing experimental conditions that are ridiculous. I don't see a problem with this particular study not being double blind. If you bring in a stranger to watch the dog it's going to act differently. You want to put them into a metal room with no windows. My issue is you're not taking bunch of seemingly relevant things into consideration.

Anyways, I started with the weakest study. Let's move on to a couple studies that are a bit harder to discredit, shall we?

So you're done defending that trash? And what relevant things are you talking about. What you are criticizing me for was an "on the fly" 1 sentence description that I explained and refined in my next posts. Do you object to what I actually hand in mind, or do you just want to trade zings by making up stuff like "metal room"? What would you do different.

http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/air2.html

A cursory glance at the new link showed that it is a synopsis of of the literature written by a statistician. It is unsatisfactory in this thread. We need the actual studies with clear descriptions of the methodology and manor of experimenting. Choose one from the meta-article to focus on.

[James S Saint]

I recognize that it's not possible to be "original" anymore.

It's possible to be original.

That's funny you think it isn't.

Prove it. Say something original, right now. Something that has never been thought or spoken of before. Ready...GO.

"We should close the Patent office because clearly all things have been invented."
"There is no longer need to question, fore all answers have been given."
"There is no need for philosophy, because Science/Religion has the means to all knowledge."

"Existence is determined by Affect."
Just try to find that one from anyone else anywhere.

[Gobbo]

A cursory glance at the new link showed that it is a synopsis of of the literature written by a statistician. It is unsatisfactory in this thread.

Statisticians cannot preform scientific inquiry...

Now I know I have you on the ropes.

[James S Saint]

You are going to run into one inherent problem in all such studies;
"If I eliminate all possible means to know of something, then that something cannot be known.
If you know of it, it can only be because I hadn't yet removed all possible means."

Scientists in general don't seem to understand the higher concepts in what they do. They think in terms of psychic ability as something which is totally independent of anything else. Is chemistry independent of physics? Is a mind independent of the brain?

One cannot remove all possible means of knowing something and expect to ever have it known. In effect, by such measure, the conclusion is being tailored by the premise so as to ensure it. What would be the point?

Psychic processes function by typically mysterious, but knowable means. If they were not knowable, then no science effort would be able to do anything with them anyway because they would not be reliable enough to utilize. If anything is not consistent, it is random. If it is random, it is not usable except to randomize. If it is consistent, then its consistency is what forms it principles and the very make of knowledge.

A cursory glance at the new link showed that it is a synopsis of of the literature written by a statistician. It is unsatisfactory in this thread.

Statisticians cannot preform scientific inquiry...

Now I know I have you on the ropes.

A report of the statistics is not sufficient to study the experiment. I think that was his point, to which I agree.
The details of the actual experiment need to be seen in detail (the devil is always in the detail).

But again, all that can be ever proven is that "we haven't yet eliminated all of the means by which a mind can sense reality. But when we DO, we will then prove that no mind can do anything unless it has something with which to do."

[Gobbo]

They explain the details. They go through the methodology. You just have to read the entire study.

I'm starting to think your guys' form of argumentation here is 'Well I didn't read that part.'

[Gobbo]

But again, all that can be ever proven is that "we haven't yet eliminated all of the means by which a mind can sense reality. But when we DO, we will then prove that no mind can do anything unless it has something with which to do."

I'm aware, at least to someone like Woobly, there is absolutely no way I will convince him through the citing of experiments.

I'm fully aware of that.

What would be the point?

Push the limits. Discussion.

[James S Saint]

They explain the details. They go through the methodology. You just have to read the entire study.

I'm starting to think your guys' form of argumentation here is 'Well I didn't read that part.'

That might be because I have been "arguing" [pointing out] the issues of the very theories involved in any such studies.

The second experiment you have posted is far more interesting. And I am not at all surprised by the conclusions. I have no doubt that I could "mysteriously" cause the conclusions to change in any pre-determined direction. Every mind functions by specific causes in all it does. But that doesn't take away from the intriguing and fascinating way a mind can know things that no one would think possible to know.

[Wobbly]

They explain the details. They go through the methodology. You just have to read the entire study.

I'm starting to think your guys' form of argumentation here is 'Well I didn't read that part.'

Fucking bizarre.

A report of the statistics is not sufficient to study the experiment. I think that was his point, to which I agree.
The details of the actual experiment need to be seen in detail (the devil is always in the detail).

[Gobbo]

Are you saying they don't go over the methodology in study I posted?

That they only mentioned the statistical outcomes?

Is that what you're saying? If so, it's wrong.

[Wobbly]

Dude, it is an overview, do you know what that means....It is a description of various studies, and does not talk about the specifics of data collection.

Put your power-ego-boner away and choose one.

[Gobbo]

So...? They still lay out, in detail, the methodology. If you want all the specifics go look at the individual studies. She includes the summaries from them anyways.

If you want to say, 'She is a statistician, and because I haven't read all the details, it immediately invalidates everything presented' that is a ridiculous statement. As far as I can tell, that is what you're saying.

Put your power-ego-boner away and choose one.

Why? It's better to use the data collected from more than one study, as opposed to just one.

[Wobbly]

Absolutely, I am brushing it off and asking you to choose a study that I can focus on and investigate...

My god you are dense.

[Wobbly]

It's better to use the data collected from more than one study, as opposed to just one.

Uh-huh, but the data must be vetted in it's manner of collection, you learned that in the trash study you originally posted.

[Gobbo]

My god you are dense.

You're asking me to do more work than the work I'm already doing in this thread. I don't need, or want to do that.

If you don't want to look at the evidence I will just assume you don't want to because it's not the type of evidence you want to see.

[Wobbly]

Yeah, choosing a study from an already available list that I would then spend time analyzing is a lot of work on your part.

[James S Saint]

Can we cut out the ad hom and get to the actual details in question?
I really don't care if Gobbo is an egotist or an altruist.
I don't care what credentials anyone has who might be doing the experiment.

I agree that the exact details must be carefully scrutinized to verify the experiment.
I personally don't care much which details were overlooked, if any, but anyone trying to prove anything must eliminate all possible alternatives else nothing has been proven at all.

Obviously a lot of effort was made to ensure sensory deprivation, which is an issue in itself, but as I said before, if you can show positive results that are valid, you have shown something. If they got negative results, nothing has been demonstrated except that by using sensory deprivation, such ESP effects are usually canceled.

Frankly, I would find it awkward to try to sense anything under such annoying and noisy conditions, but if they can show that someone has higher than 5% significance in detecting particular affects at a hidden or distant scene then they have an interesting story to tell.

So the real question is only whether there was some detail overlooked?

But it is a bit like looking at a magic show and trying to deduce how he did it. The ability to do such magic, regardless of how, is still of interest even to Science.

[Wobbly]

Can we cut out the ad hom and get to the actual details in question?
I really don't care if Gobbo is an egotist or an altruist.
I don't care what credentials anyone has who might be doing the experiment.

Just waiting for Gobbo to choose. It just requires a bit of work and hoops to jump through to pry it out of him, for whatever reason.

[James S Saint]

Just waiting for Gobbo to choose. It just requires a bit of work and hoops to jump through to pry it out of him, for whatever reason.

Did you see some detail overlooked?
Did you see the opening for the trick; the card up his sleeve?