Latent Psychic Ability in the Religious, and Athiest

But that has nothing to do with determining psychic ability (which is the subject here).

The point is that you cannot do negative testing on ESP issues.

In Science, a VERY fundamental concern is that if you observe something, you might very well affect it. With inanimate subjects, such risk is minimal until you get down to extremely small entities. Heisenberg proved through mathematics, that one cannot measure the state of an electron and also measure its position because any attempt to measure either would affect the other. That came to be known as the “Uncertainty Principle”.

But that thought invaded every level of Science because at Copenhagen, they had decided that if something cannot be observed, then it does not exist at all. Of course that led to huge effects throughout the world concerning the existence of God and very many things, like the back side of the moon if no one is watching it. The paradoxes that it created led to Relativity and the notion that Truth itself doesn’t exist (hence no God).

The uncertainty Principle was finally undermined when someone realized that they could use an “Entangled” pair of electrons and thus measure one without affecting the other. Entanglement is a form of parallel behavior.

But it is very difficult and actually impossible to use entanglement methods concerning people. You have to find two people who are exactly identical (they try with identical twins), but both people must then be in the exact same situation. But on top of that, they have to NOT have any ESP ability else either will detect that they are being treated differently than the other. But it is such ESP that is being tested for.

Thus if ESP occurs, it can only be analyzed in retrospect and within the “natural” environment in which it occurred. The only way to conclude any data concerning its non-existence is to examine all history and declare that there has never been significant data to reflect a positive occurrence.

ESP can only be positive tested, negative tests cannot be arranged.

If one can see it occurring while being tested, then it can be concluded as valid. But if one does not see it occurring, nothing can be concluded.

I agree with everything here, except I thought entanglement meant that observing one did affect the other. Otherwise we would be able to determine position and spin. Although I quit following this shit some time ago because I was no longer able to recognize it as science.

And I am undecided on the implication of observation changing reality. My intuition that it is a Newtonian point of view to say the fact that if you “observe something, you might very well affect it” is a problem or risk , but in a world where observation does alter physical reality observation cannot have a privileged position and must be organically integrated into our worldview. As in it is okay experimentally to change things through observation because it is natural to the thing being observed. It would not be an experiment if our observation did not change things. I don’t know, there is just something fishy about the way people deal with the implications of the observer according to QM.

Well that is good, because it really stopped being what we think of as Science. Science, after Copenhagen became a promotion of magic, the very thing that it proposes to dispel. But the same happened with all of the religions. They were originally proposed to dispel beliefs in gods with the declaration that there can only be one actual god, hence “God”. And that God was declared, “What is” (not “I AM”). In other words, Reality itself, or Truth itself. But such quickly became an issue of magical invisible monsters.

It doesn’t change it except by the normal means, but sometimes those means cannot be easily detected. ESP is actually a provable occurrence, but as with everything, if you do not clearly define exactly what you are talking about, you can’t really prove anything, But even if you do, whatever you do will quickly get corrupted with presumptions concerning magic again. The double slit experiment is a perfect example.

QM is the Quantum Magi using psychology to usurp power from “Truth bearers”, including scientists. It works. Science has been converted into a religion for mystics, just as all of the religions prior. The Jewish Cabala explains exactly how to accomplish it using words, semantics. It is a very old art involving “spells” and is why we refer to the assembly of words as “spelling”.

What we can validly conclude from experiments is only that “while being measured, these things behave in this way”. And that has been very useful for verifying many hypotheses. But it has a limit and cannot be used so as to proclaim Truth even though that is the new agenda for Science (as per Copenhagen).

Don’t mind Gobbo, you guys. If you read through some of his old posts you’ll see that, to his own mind, he is NEVER wrong.

Yeah, he’s one of those.

And you know what’s shitty about it? He doesn’t realize that once people realize this about him they are turned off of what he is going to say before he even says it. What’s the point in even listening to someone who thinks he’s never wrong? There is no discussion to be had, just a lecture, and lectures are boring.

The persona reminds me of Impenitent.

Deal with it.

What is “original”, Gobbo? You? :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

Oh shit, that’s good stuff. Check out the first quote in my signature :wink: Unlike yourself, I recognize that it’s not possible to be “original” anymore. At least I can embrace that, yeah? Instead of pretending like I have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. There you go with trying convince yourself of what a special little snowflake you are…again.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Statisticians cannot preform scientific inquiry…

Now I know I have you on the ropes.

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 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.”