But in the situation mentionned by ** Cervaise **, there’s no difference. Both people are offering the same thing : an ineffectual “cure” for her ailment (respectively magic words and distilled water), sincerely believing it’s going to help her.
When you say “this” place had been previously mentioned, do you mean that the place itself had been specifically named or that it matched a description of something described by a psychic.
Also what kind of place was it? Was it a house or a park or the shore of a lake? A psychic could randomly guess “Yellowstone Park” and get lucky, or the ever popular “near water” or guess “it’s in another state…Wisconsin…under a tree,” and get lucky. It’s not unusual for them to name specific parks, forests or bodies of water because that’s where people dump bodies. They might even say something like, “I see a red building near a body of water.” That allows them to claim a hit if a body is found either inside or near a red building and everything is near a body of water.
If a body ever gets found, then, voila, the psychic knew right where it was. Of course the information is never specific enough to actually locate the body. If what the psychic said wasn’t accurate enough to allow anyone to actually lead anyone to the body then it couldn’t have been that precise.
Simply and succinctly stated, and exactly correct.
So what? We can point to plenty of body features that exist “for no benefit.” Claiming that every single physical feature exists for some reason is more along the lines of what ID proponents would say. We presume that aspects of physical make-up that do not negatively affect our ability to reproduce are evolutionarily neutral. And in any event, there’s no particular change postulated on this end of things. Right now, thoughts exist as the result of some level of energy. I agree that postulating someone who could read the thoughts of Joe Blow in Los Angeles while sitting in New York is impossible, by virtue of the aforementioned inverse-square law, but stength of impulses doesn’t seem to be in insurmountable theoretical issue if we imagine the thinker and the receiver touching skulls in physical contact, right?
We can already sense chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our skin is sensitive to stuff in the 10[sup]-5[/sup] wavelength range; we have eyes that are highly attuned to things roughly in the 10[sup]-6[/sup]. I grant that a single mutation that changed or added a range that corresponded to thought is unlikely in the extreme, but it’s not impossible as a matter of physical science.
And your last point is horrendously misplaced – understanding the received signals as thought would not be evolved, of course – it would be a learned skill, with the receiver gradually learning to associate sensation X with foreign thought Y.
Please understand I’m not suggesting this has ever happened, or is likely to ever happen; the weight of all existing evidence is to the contrary. My point is simply: it’s not impossible, in the sense that it would violate our basic understanding of the physical laws which govern the universe.
So you’re saying the skeptics were right to laugh at people who believed in meteorites until such time as everyone became convinced?
Your last sentence is correct - maybe, one of those mails is from a real Nigerian oil minister. Now, since the vast bulk of them are not, the appropriate course of action for you is to assume, until the evidence shows you otherwise, that any given e-mail is a scam.
But if I were to introduce you to a guy who actually did get money from helping a Nigerian move millions out of his country, surely you’d understand if HIS reaction was, “Hey, there are frauds out there, but my particular experience was real.”
If you introduced me to such a person, my first reaction would be to assume that this person is in on the scam, then ask for hard evidence that such an event happened. I would trust him just about as much as I would the “total stranger” that wins at 3-card monty just to show me that the game is legit.
Of course. He acknowledges it’s almost unbelievable. But, he says, it happened. But IF he were able to adduce sufficient credible evidence to satisfy you beyond a reasonable doubt, you’d then understand how HE believes it, right? Such an event is falsifiable – he can show you bank records, wire transfer reports, sworn statements from neutral parties like local bank officials. Even if you still felt that perhaps there was chicanery of some kind somewhere, you could understand how a man that said, “Well, I now have $2.5 million in my account; I’ve been spending it for the last year,” would believe that it had happened - right?
Now we picture a man that makes a claim that is not falsifiable… He acknowledges it’s almost unbelievable. But, he says, it happened. Obviously he cannot adduce evidence for it. You’re certainly entitled to not believe it; indeed, it’s absurd for you TO believe it. But you can also understand how HE believes it.
I would say, yes, they were right (though I would recast the second half of the sentence as “until such time as enough evidence had accumulated to provide cause for reasonable people to re-evaluate their assumptions”).
In general, as a philosophical foundation, I find it preferable that we, collectively, should be wrong about a few things, and right about many things, if the basis for decision-making is consistent and leaves the door open to correction. For example, expanding beyond meteorites, consider continental drift. Establishment Science wrongly dismissed the hypothesis when it was proposed, and continued to wrongly dismiss it for decades thereafter: and they were right to do so. In the absence of concrete evidence, the idea that our land masses wander the globe is pretty outrageous. But once you’ve got volumes of geological data from the coastlines, information on magnetic striping of the seafloor, and a testable mechanism that would allow the continents to move, then you’ve got something. And that, finally, is when the Establishment reversed itself. Correctly.
I’m sure there are a few things in modern understanding that we’re wrong about, the same way, and that there are a handful of ahead-of-their-time thinkers who are being improperly included among the fringe wackos and who will be redeemed in the coming years and decades. But here’s the thing: until the evidence is there to support their hypotheses, we are right to be wrong.
As I said, I don’t remember. The body was discovered in a forest, and the psychic had specifically named the place though I don’t know with what degree of precision (I don’t even remember if it was mentionned at the time). I just can assume that, if the police thought it warranted further investigation about the psychic and his possible involvment in the crime, it was probably more precise and/or unexpected than what they are accustomed to from psychics.
There’s no way I’m goig to find (or even search for) more informtions about this case. I won’t find it with the few elements I remember (child murder, I believe somewhere in southern France, probably during the 80’s, body found in a forest). The only place on the internet where I would have a chance of finding it mentionned would probably be a french site listing the successes of psychics, and I’m not interested in spending hours searching for and reading such sites, especially since I probably wouldn’t be able to figure out which one it is amongst the proclaimed successes.
Anyway, IMO there would be no point in debunking this particular case, assuming it could be done. As I wrote previously, given the number of informations provided by psychics in criminal cases, it’s unavoidable that some will guess right, and sometimes even very precisely so. Your original statement that it never happened was quite bold, in my opinion, and more importantly isn’t a good argument against psychics : if tomorrow you hear about a crime where a psychic did guess right, are you going to change your mind about them? I doubt it.
I’ve read a good bit if literature in this subject, been to a lecture by Honorton, and read Rhine, and I don’t recall telepathy requiring the touching of skulls. Like DerTrihs I’m not saying that telepathy is inherently impossible - in fact I said that I could probably figure out an evolutionary mechanism for it - just that no one is going to be born with a mutation allowing it. Nothing of what you said addresses this point.
Why is it unlikely to have just evolved? Because anything requiring energy in the body requires an increased intake of food, and unless there is an advantage members of a species requiring more food are more likely to die before reproducing. What would the advantage of telepathy be at short distances, when less energy intensive and higher bandwidth communications mechanisms are available? Picking up the brainwaves of a predator would be useful, but the predator would soon stop transmitting. That something is theoretically possible doesn’t mean that it is evolutionarily attainable, at least not from where we are already. We climb Mt. Improbable, but we don’t descend to visit another mountain in the distance.
Things we don’t use are usually on the way out. ID, at least the Behe version, is correct in saying that you can’t pass through useless stages to get to a useful one. Evolution doesn’t work that way. Where he’s wrong is in not seeing that there is a path to existing structures through useful one. If a structure could be found where this is not the case, ID would have a leg to stand on. (This is the original ID, not the ID which is obtained by doing a s/Creationism/ID/g in creationist textbooks.
Neither is that all the atoms in my desk calendar suddenly move 10 feet to the right. The odds are about the same, though.
But understanding language is not a solely learned skill. People pretty much agree with Chomsky that it is built-in to us, and the discovery of a gene for language pretty much proves it. We can read brain waves quite well - but I’m not aware of anyone being able to interpret them. I’m not aware that there is even a way of reading emotions or some such at a primitive level (let alone thoughts or pictures) and that would clearly evolve first. Maybe it is possible for some other brain design, but not for ours.
See above. Not all things physically possible are evolutionarily possible given our current evolutionary history. If someone wants to write about an alien race doing this, fine, but for us to do it is as close to impossible as makes no never mind.
Laughing is a matter of politeness. Laughing inside, yes. But they needed to keep an open mind, which they did.
If someone told me that he did, I’d want to see the evidence. It is just like the case for meteorites. I’d need a fairly high burden of proof. There is the possibility that he got taken and managed to borrow money to make it seem like he didn’t. I’d consider that more likely, actually.
I suspect you were educated in law school to stay with a case until the end, and to find ways of dealing with evidence to the contrary. I was educated to be skeptical but to be ready to dump my beliefs if strong evidence to the contrary comes in. Those who don’t do that, like Fred Hoyle, are considered bad examples. If in the middle of a case, hearing particularly strong evidence, if a lawyer for the defense said “oops. I’m convinced. He’s guilty” that would be a no-no, putting it mildly, right? That is exactly what a scientist is supposed to do.
I’ve read several investigations of so-called psychic hits. It turns out that the psychic makes very general comments like “it is near running water” or “I see trees.” We then selectively remember the hits and forget the misses. It is exactly the way cold reading works.
Often the psychic says that the police took their evidence. But the police say that they are obligated to look at all tips, no matter how far out, and it does not mean that they didn’t shitcan it immediately.
It is possible that someday one of them will get something right. But out of thousands of attempts, that’s expected from probability - it means nothing. Some kids countdown to when a light turns from red to green in a car. Sometimes they hit it exactly, but it doesn’t mean anything since most of the time they don’t.
How do you know it would be either ? Speech is both high energy and low bandwidth; there’s lots of room for electromagnetic telepathy to improve on it. As for other advantages; the difficulty or impossibility of detection comes to mind, depending on how many other species have evolved similar abilities, or how far they’ve developed it. Like crickets chirping; a sound they can localize to find each other, but vertebrate insectivores generally can’t - unusual modes of communication can give you an edge.
True, which I suspect is the real reason why telepathy isn’t all over the animal kingdom. I recall Larry Niven way back pointing out that one piece of evidence against telepathy was that it wasn’t all over, like vision.
There are methods for crude “mind reading”, at least of some aspects. Such as being able to see the general shape of an imagined object, or detect certain mental processes like “jumping to conclusions”. However, they tend to require complete access/observation the brain area in question, which tends to restrict long term experiments to things like monkeys with surgically implanted glass skulls. And even that only gets you access to surface brain functions, like the visual cortex ( thus being able to detect visualized shapes ). Nature wouldn’t have that sort of access problem.
And as someone pointed out in the past, we know for a fact it’s possible to read minds; we read our own, all the time.
You seem to have created a false dilemna here, in that your response suggests there are only two modes: abject ridcule, complete with derisive laughter, or accepance.
What I am suggesting, especially when non-falsifiable claims are made, is politeness, even while disagreeing. I absolutely concur that, absent evidence, you’re RIGHT to dismiss a claim as unfounded. What I don’t agree with is being so certain that ridicule of the opposite view is considered appropriate.
Contrast: “Ha! Ha! What an idiot! Only a drolling moron would believe that!” with “I’m sorry, but there’s just no evidence for your position, and for this reason I don’t accept it; bring me some solid evidence and we’ll talk.”