Latent Psychic Ability in the Religious, and Athiest

Geeezz…

Tit-tat
Tit-tat
Is there a rat?
Where is the cat?

I could choose, but I want you to. I don’t know which study to choose based on any criterion. You posted the overview, so hopefully you may know which study is the most famous, which study is considered the most legitimate, ect. If you don’t, just say, and i’ll choose one randomly. Just don’t complain that I chose the worst one when I do.

LOL, you wrote the meta-review or posted a single link?

My choice is for you to study them all individually, and then as a whole with regards to the conclusions from the meta-view.

If you don’t want to do that, then look at them all quickly and choose the weakest one carried out by a researcher from a discipline you find to be the least scientific.

I also kind of need you to align yourself with one the studies, otherwise it will be like last time. Where you just go from study to study quoting it’s conclusion, and I’m the only one that reads them all and tries to understand them. It was far too one-sided. You get one study this time.

James, do you know anything about these? Are some baby-land frolics and others legit?

Have you not figured this out yet, Wobbly? If you disagree with him it’s because you either haven’t read what he posted, haven’t read it carefully enough, or you’re just an idiot. Duh.

Yeah, that’s just smoke an mirrors though, a behavior he has acquired recently. Let us hope for his sake that I don’t decide it’s not worth the effort to pry some authenticity out of him.

Yes, many are “legit”. Although I stopped looking into them many years ago after being so thoroughly disappointed in Man’s ability to rationally deduce what he is looking at.

They are legit in the sense that they can display that the mind is more perceptive to minuscule tidbits of data than people realize. The question as to whether the mind is performing unknowable feats of magical perception is a false and senseless question.

How about if I choose one;

So now… where is the trick?

kk, I’ll read it and then bounce my problems with it back to you(if I find any).

After this, I have a few experiences that might be of interest along these same lines involving that mystical “ethereal plane”.

Can’t find the actual study, or whatever the hell the CIA released.

Yeah, I thought about that after I quoted it.

How about this one instead since we have already read the summary;

Exactly. So why do you keep asking it? I don’t feel, or see the need to ever say ‘magic’ unless it’s like…in a game, or something. Magic is just a slang word for physics playing out. You see all this inquiry as pointless because you’re looking at it the wrong way. Of course wondering about magic is pointless. I’m wondering about the syntax of existence.

People think I’m here trying to be annoying, but I’m here doing my own experiments, and there is a slight difference there. I’m truly trying to learn about people because I seem to look at things very differently.

People say to me, 'there isn’t any scientific evidence for [fringe thing] that’s just some conspiracy theory. Bring me some ‘scientific’ evidence and then I’ll consider it. Then you bring them the evidence and suddenly they go into a hyper-charged intellectual agility that usually seeks to obfuscate truth rather than seek it out. Every ‘fringe’ discussion, more often than not, ends with the skeptic demanding the person doing the assertion admit that he doesn’t know for sure, even in the face of significant correlation because, well, no one does know for sure. They don’t take that conclusion that nothing is 100% knowable with them to the real world and apply it to their beliefs there. They don’t do that because it’s fucking insane.

Yeah, there are obviously flaws in these experiments, as there are with any experiment, but if you (not the scientists) applied the same level of skepticism to everything as you do with any topic labelled ‘fringe,’ you wouldn’t have beliefs. How many sciences outside of (para)psychology even use double blind studies in practice? How many even still teach it still? If you want to assert what you are, you must go against, somewhat at least, the belief that ‘nature is blind’ - a belief many academics hold, and ask them to change their practices. Well maybe not that, but you would be dismissing their findings.

To me, the most fascinating thing is when you give people the evidence they asked for, and then they make up excuses as to why they are not going to look at it. I’m not saying it in a condescending manner. It really is the nexus of where much of psychology comes together.

When you think about it anything in the ‘fringe’ is something which the public has decided it just doesn’t like. It’s de-facto at odds with the public emotionally; if it was not it wouldn’t be fringe, it would be an area of grey research, or on-going research, or something. There are things which the public does not consider fringe supported by less scientific data than things which are (and the other way around obviously.) There is no line, intellectually; there is a line emotionally. There is no constant or correlative - education, culture, race, religion, sex - that unites those who purport different so-called ‘pseudo-sciences.’ The assumption it’s all rednecks and religious people is completely false.

As kind of an aside: the term conspiracy theorist is such an effective psychological trigger, and I applaud whoever introduced it, but at the same time it has a very telling effect. The moment someone uses that term (or others like it) to describe what you’re saying, as opposed to simply saying ‘that argument’ or ‘that’ or whatever someone would say for anything else, you catch a glimpse of their thought process. Similar to someone saying ‘gay wedding’ instead of ‘man wedding’ or ‘2 men getting married’ or something, it shows you how the person conceptualizes it. In my experience you can hear the disdain in their voice, then they go on to tell you they’re open and unbiased because they watch South Park, or something.

Ohhh stop your whining.

:mrgreen:

Haha… I just thought I’d demonstrate the next step they go to just to make it worse. :laughing:

In Old England, they just had people declared insane. In the US after the socialist take over, they just labeled you as paranoid. But since that involves a degree of science now, they just have the magog in society throw random insults and implications at you until whatever you said that isn’t supposed to be believed gets buried - playing on the herd mentality syndrome.

Conspiracy theorist is a silly term.
Who isn’t a conspiracy theorist?
Is there anyone who thinks that 9/11 was not a conspiracy? They would then have to think it was caused by pilot error.

The fact that this term is used by people who when using it are contrasting themselves with people they think are irrational is funny and ironic. But there isö unacknowledged secondary gain in using it. And when will this get noticed by the very people who tend to say their opponents are being unduly influenced by their emotions?

In a world of 800,000 sworn to be secret employees of Homeland Security spread across the country, how can anyone even use the term “conspiracy theory”. :laughing:

At what point does a theory finally get to drop its doubt and become fact?

It is remarkably difficult to track down the studies on Ganzfeld, and the one’s I did track down were mostly meta. It seems that the early Ganzfeld experiments have been abandoned by the literature itself in favor of an “autoganzfeld”. Conditions are basically the same except that a computer randomly generates the image, the experimenter is not in the room, and the stream of consciousness of the receiver is both recorded electronically and transcribed by the experimenter. (It controls for problem variables which include when an experimenter knows the image/interacts with the participants/images are physical(finger prints and warmth tip off to the receiver which was in the hands of the sender) ect.) Further, the experimenter does not know the image being shown to the Sender. Interestingly the initial Ganzfeld with the methodological problems generated a significantly higher correlation that autoganfeld.

There is a sort of end all be all study for AutoGanzfeld methodology that all the studies I found referenced as the basis for their experiment. It is Honorton 1983 or 1990, but I cannot determine which study it is, nor can I find the name of either. It may be this, as per Honorton’s pax vitae: Psi communication in the ganzfeld: Experiments with an automated testing system and a comparison with a meta-analysis of earlier studies, but it is not available online.

I am at a dead end. All that I can conclude at this point, without seeing the agreed upon conditions, and keeping in mind that there is a serious documented problem where negative results are not published, is that the evidence demands further experiments. They need to test the repeatability of autganzfeld and generate the requisite amount of data. Further, the literature itself is undecided as to proof and proper controls.

As for me, besides the above, I have two serious problems with Ganzfeld based on my current knowledge of the methodology, or one problem that is two pronged. The problem is with the stream of consciousness that occurs while the receiver is in a relaxed state. The experiment lasts 30 minutes which gives the receiver enough time to pretty much say every damn thing that pops into their head, which can and does cover a whole lot of material. In studies that use a judge, would they not have a tendency to key in on the bits of the 30 minutes that correlate to the proper image? It seems to me that they obviously would.

The judge takes notes of everything the person says, then finds out the image the receiver saw, then tries to connect the notes to the image. This is quite flawed. The problem is, there are not enough studies available for me to determine how often this technique is used in the literature.

Also, why only 4 images? To me that seems like they are asking for statistical anomalies in the 200 or so experiment. Humans are cued based on sequence images are shown, and with so few images and so few tests it cannot be ruled out that this occured. I also cannot figure out why the hell the put ping-pong goggles and white noise on with a red light background. How the hell would they know if blanking out your senses would help psi when they are conducting a study trying to figure out if it even exists.

Recommendations: The conditions are replicated as per the literature, only receivers are offered far more images to choose from. Instead of 3 false and one true, do 9 false and 1 true. Also, test it under different conditions and see how the results vary. Never tell the experimenter on site or the receiver what the image was, rather leave that to someone offsite. Why risk this sort of taint when it’s so easy to get rid of it.

I don’t know how prolific these other two problems are, but they struck me as serious.

  1. One study gave a description of the images and and three were normal everyday things and one was exotic. A cup, a coin, a sofa, and then a fire breather. LOL, the right image was the fire breather and the receiver picked it…Of course it’s going to be picked, it’s the “not like the others” image.

  2. A different study used both people who claimed to be psi and those who did not. The people who claimed to be psi scored 15% correct, while those who didn’t scored 32%(which is the result of most studies I saw). The immediate problem with this is that it may suggest that an unknown cue is present. Whereas the “psi people” were focusing on there own abilities and missed it, the “lay people” were not and picked up on the cue.