No, sound is a wave and only a wave, transmitted by air. If you were talking about radio, I might give your idea consideration.
On the other hand, feng shui made a great episode of Sealab 2021
And the whole foundation of the scientific method is that an experiment is repeatable. Meaning someone independent from the original experimenter can follow the same steps and get the same results. And that’s what’s never true about these new agey things like Feng Shui. Advocates say “See, it works. I followed the steps and I felt more cleared (or whatever)”. So maybe something happened but we can never get the same result becasue the next person doesn’t have the right “aura” or some such thing. The experiment is not repeatable and can’t be verified. That is why Feng Shui is not a science. There are no physical laws or energies that can be indentified because the outcome is supposedly dependent on the practioner and vaguely defined energies, not physical laws which remain constant for all users.
** tremorviolet ** wrote… (or quoted anyway)…
Really, there is a whole bunch more to it then that, and judging by the quality of your lesson to me, you probably already know that. If you look over my posts over the years here, you will see that I don’t qualify as a true “skeptic”, but that does not keep me from pointing my finger and saying “BULLSHIT” from time to time. One must be charitable in the way one would call “bullshit”, because you could go stepping on the toes of another’s deeply held beliefs. Also, I always like to be open for a change of mind, as I had changed my mind with regard acupuncture (see page 1 of this thread). The way ** devislknew ** was presenting his Ideas, I felt as though it was a discussion we might have over a friendly tab or two of LSD, not exactly something I was ready to change my life over. He was being just a bit condescending (and trust me, in a scientific debate with ** unclebeer** you ain’t gonna get far with that kind of thing). So rather then posting all that is involved with the scientific method, I simply said ** “Duuuude! Yer askin’ me ta believe in the milk ferry – BULLSHIT!” ** he came back to me with a humorous little comment about putting my cat in the microwave. But he did not further support his views, only started pointing out his opinions of the semantics involved.
So, here in is the best explanation of the subject, which I will (as a one trick pony) quote from the source I have been quoting throughout this thread.
A Field Guide to Critical Thinking
You can not falsify Feng Shui/Che, because you can’t prove that it even exists. You have no measurable standard go by, thus you have no way to intentionally screw up a measurement of it’s effects. If we know that A+B=C then it stands to reason that A+Bc (should)=D. Measuring Feng Shui/Che, C and D are equally reasonable outcomes, because it is NOT science.
To me, this is where the “Milk Ferry Principal ™” comes into play. (and wouldn’t that make a great sig)
I moved my furniture, yet I still haven’t won the Lotto, neither did my mom or my boss. My friend did meet a new girl friend after moving his furniture though – gloss over the fact that his house was a pig sty, so (according to its supports) Feng Shui/Chi IS valid. Right.
My friend swears he met this righteous new babe because he moved his furniture. He will not consider the Idea that It might just be that when you clean up your house, stop being an addict and pay attention to what’s going on, you may present yourself as being more attractive then the latter. That is, unless she is actually the milk ferry in disguise.
This is what you said, so I wont add my 2 pence. BTW, you win the Lotto lately?
I see this violated ALL THE TIME HERE. “This thing about changing your living space so that it conforms to the cosmic fluctuations of the oceans of energy really works. I say so. Therefore show me why not.” I say, “Duuuude, that’s not my problem, its YOUR problem to show that it DOES”.
They say “I think it’s true, therefore it IS true.” I say “OK, I have a bridge you can buy, it’s mine – REALLY.” Nuff said.
And that’s pretty much it. NONE of the above criteria have been met with regard to this new wave of old thinking. I LOVE a Chinese garden, so peaceful so sweet. Meandering paths and things to look at. Will it make me feel good. I think so. Will it change my life? Coincidentally perhaps. But I will never believe (unless the above criteria are met) that there exists a physical way to manipulate (as yet unproven) physical forces in the universe for the personal enhancement of my existence.
Fooooweee! **Douglas Adams ** wrote…
Janx.
Just for the moment, let’s assume all the stuff you posted above this statement is true. Then, it is still left to you to explain just what this is this “energy” that feng shui so dramatically affects. And how does altering that “energy” affect my love life? Or my luck?
Regarding a single specific example from your list - the last one about my job, my cow-orkers and the negative and positive “energy” absorbed from being in their presence, I have an observation to make.
Your use of the word “energy” is not in accordance with the accepted definition. “Energy” is simply a measure of the capacity to do “work.” What you describe are emotions (including your “senses” of love and security and fear), or the psychological predisposition of a person. They are not a measure of a capacity to do work. (I’d also question that your example is even something that’s part of feng shui as practiced by its adherents - you also must demonstrate this if you wish it to be a vaild example of the workings of this phenomenon.) If you wish to prove the validity of a phenomenon with terms of physics, you must use the accepted definitions; the language of science applies very specific meanings to the words employed and they cannot be altered to suit your purposes. Science is a very well established framework constructed upon a very solid foundation. In order to make the case that some phenomenon is part of science, you must work within that framework and upon that foundation. You may not alter them without sufficient cause - cause you have not shown because feng shui does not display the hallmarks of science: a) it’s not testable, b) it’s not repeatable, c) it has no predictive power, and d) it’s not quantifiable. Your first example is indeed part of accepted science - it can be tested, repeated, quantified and it has predictive power; your last is not.
If you didn’t know that feng shui makes all kinds of claims, other than arranging the things in your environment to be more useful and comfortable, then you haven’t been paying attention. Adherents of feng shui have all kinds of rules about how to arrange things in relation to the cardinal points of the compass - among a whole bunch of other silly stuff . These are passed off as universal precepts. They can hardly be universal given the diversity of local environments.
He wasn’t the only one. I was just as ignorant, hence this thread.
The universality/absolutism wasn’t even practiced in China, originally. It is much more subtle and complex than that, in the original form. If the basic ‘rules’ were truly universal, no tomb or temple would face any direction but south. And yet they face all sorts of directions.
The vast majority of books on the subject are hooey - and some don’t even appear to be based on the original concepts! Many of them are so Western-philosophy-ized that they appear to just be prettied up with Asian mystique to sell better. Some have just a few layers of the info in the original content, others have outright wrong information - from tables with numbers out of order, to calculations of natal numbers that skip half the equation. If you’re gonna use the esoteric method, at least use the whole thing. Ugh. I’ve even seen books that include maps upside down from the original orientation - that is, they are using Chinese maps (with north at the bottom) in Western orientation (N at top, but without flipping the map over). Only after you read about a dozen do you start to see overlaps, patterns, and eventually you start to see schools and approaches that are not explicitly stated… anyone who reads just a few books on the subject is going to have a very odd picture of what it is supposed to do, and how to do it.
There are people out there who beleive that ONLY the old original (highly trained and having to pass exams by multiple masters) form is valid science. I’m not sure I buy the ‘it is science’ thing on that side, either. Okay, I’m sure I do NOT buy it. But at least they’re working from the original basis, so I grant them the title of ‘real Feng Shui’ masters. It is at least based on highly detailed observational analysis. Just like biology, though, we can predict some behaviors from observation of previous behaviors, but we don’t know why, and we don’t know whether different situations will bring about different results.
In all of this one thing that doesn’t translate well is Chinese culture. Gone is the subtlety of the language, the underlying Confucian understanding that saying one believes something, and practicing it as if it is true, is not the same as knowing it is in fact objective truth (or caring if it is, for that matter). We get no sense of the poetry or interplay of meanings in the concepts, or depth or complexity of the process. When most westerners read about the concepts, they don’t have the basis for ‘getting’ them anyway, so they apply them with their own biases and understanding. They also tend to want to provide reasons for them - certainly I did that in my own minor essay earlier… but the reasons can get really far from reality, really quickly, depending on who is doing the analysis. Even the Pyramid School has gone nuts on the ‘I’m telling you why it works’ thing, and is now out in the ether of energy-workers … sigh.
Qi exists, IMHO, as a proxy for the things that were observed to be true. It works in application because it reflects quality observation, not because that observation was seeing some energy at work. When you can’t prove something, but it is observationally true, it becomes simpler to call it by a name and define it. It still doesn’t make it true. Just like we know that some things work in medicine, but we’re still just figuring out why some of them work the way they do, and sometimes our assumptions about why (from earlier science) were way wrong - but the result is the same, it still works. Requiring the REASON to be the fact is beside the point, and Chinese philosophy recognizes that. The result is the important part. If it is placebo, who cares, as long as the disease is gone. A lot of ‘western’ thinkers freak out over that concept, but it is part of the underlying culture for a lot of the world.
Feng Shui terms work just like Chinese language, which uses evocative phrasing, uses puns and double-meanings, drops portions of longer word constructions for simplicity with an assumption that you will ‘get’ the rest from context. Trying to force the terms into the English/American language/usage is like picking up a feather to use as a hammer. It isn’t going to work the way we think it should. If you get enough people running around trying to hammer nails with feathers and claiming they can build you a better house with their method, you’re gonna start calling the use of feathers idiotic… but that doesn’t mean that using feathers as part of a fan is stupid, too.
Not sure if this is helping or not.
It sure does. Another good post, hedra. Thanks for contributing to this thread.
Of course, if you want to get a quick laugh from your friends the next time you’re in a bookstore, pick up the Feng Shui books and move them to a different shelf while saying “These would work better over here.”
It turns out that feng shui has crept into the corridors of power in Great Britain, where the government hired a feng shui expert and Tony and Cherie Blair are apparently devotees.
When the Blairs moved into Downing Street, a feng shui expert rearranged the furniture at Number 10. Cherie wears a ‘magic pendant’ known as the BioElectric Shield, which is filled with ‘a matrix of specially cut quartz crystals’ that surround the wearer with ‘a cocoon of energy’ and ward off evil forces."
The linked article makes interesting reading, including the part about how the Blairs got into primal scream therapy even before Howard Dean.
Bumped due to this story. A resolution from a California State Assemblyman proposes the State Building Standards Commission adopt elements of Feng Shui, from the article:
“[The resolution]…is meant to encourage planning agencies, building departments and design review boards to provide for the use of feng shui principles, which often touch on the placement of doors and staircases, the position of buildings and the alignment of objects in rooms. It aims to help people live in harmony with nature by promoting the flow of chi, or positive energy, and neutralizing or avoiding negative energy.”
An odious aspect is the suggestion of this as a recognition of Asian cluture in California. Nice, promote the old stereotype of “oriental mysticism” as if it is a progressive multicultural effort. Maybe the pols in Sacramento should consult the Ouija board for advice on the upcoming bond issue.
I’m sure this resolution will fail, still I find it ridiculous that this nonsense reaches the table at a time of budget crisis.
He must have been kidding. That’s absolutely ridiculous.
No shit. How are they going to afford fifty-thousand dollar gold toilets in all the government bathrooms?
I guess they just freaking love harmony.