This.
Really?
Sorry. Just saw a link with no text to a site with no clear relevance. It was only after that I saw you were a longer term poster that I realised your post was obscure not malicious.
Regardless of why it’s here, that’s an awesome video!
Yes, Really! I almost reported it myself.
If you have a point to make, USE YOUR WORDS! :rolleyes:
Or at least do a descriptive waggle dance.
But what about Tarot cards? ESP? UFOs? Sasquatch, for god’s sake! I personally saw a bigfoot flying a saucer while reading my mind. You can’t possibly call that fake!
Reading your own mind is hardly an impressive feat.
…and if you’re faking that, you’ve got some real problems.
No? I can think of a few posters who haven’t yet mastered that task.
I was thinking something similar when various mentions were made of accessing the subconscious; the best way to access the subconscious is through the conscious.
Watch the video and think about it. It shouldn’t have to be explained.
I watched it. I thought about it. Please explain the relevance.
That’s a crock of shit. I watched 30 seconds of the video, realized it had nothing to do with the thread and closed it.
Why should anyone be expected to intuit your meaning? It was obviously unrelated, but you expect that I should watch it because you can’t be bothered to express yourself in the same fashion as everyone else?
Assuming your point is: “…you can’t believe things you see in videos on the internet” do you also agree with the: “it’s a commentary about how fake dowsing rods are,” part?
Can you possibly answer that question without posting some asinine video showing cats riding Roombas, and please, use some words?
It was not my intention to infer that it was MY theory...I have done a little reading around the subject, over several years off and on, and have formed the opinion that IF dowsing has a scientific basis, it is likely to be found by exploring that avenue.
It might also go some way to explaining the perplexing problem of lack of experimental success..because if a human was to be in a state of mind where he was open to such influence from subconcious/unconcious areas of the brain stem ( for instance..perhaps the instinctive brain has evolved survival instincts that notice sounds, smells, vibrations, electromagnetic fields, etc when they change) then the practitioner may need be be in state akin to meditation.
This would also allow for multiple cues to affect a dowser..perhaps totally unknown to him. I wouldnt put smell` out tof the equation, for some water..particularly in dry areas. Bacteria growing in wet conditions produce a smell that can be picked up from miles away by desert animals, elephants, etc…it may have had some value when humans hunted on the wide dry plains of Africa.
Just sharing ideas here, btw. 
Your ideas and theories might have merit if the phenomena has been proven to exist. Since it hasn’t, and the best tests suggest it doesn’t work at all, it’s just spinning your dreaming wheels in fantasy land to postulate a mechanism.
You realize you are proposing to explain how something works that is *known to **not *work?
Please explain – first – what Leprechauns wear on their feet, what Santa Claus feeds his reindeer, and how unicorns keep their horns so sharp, shiny and screwy.
The lack of experimental success only becomes a perplexing problem if one ignores the possibility that dowsing doesn’t actually do what it advertises to do and that the explanations for why people believe it does is explainable by well known cognitive biases.
The fact that lots of dowsers believe they have abilities that are easily tested, such as finding water in pipes, and fail when tested, cast their judgement of other abilities into doubt. Actually knowing something about magnetic and electric fields, geology and biology moves us further into the realm of “dowsing is an absurd idea and should have more evidence to be worth pursuing”.
:dubious:
Then you might want to avoid prefacing theories that are not your own with
which strongly implies that the subsequently presented theory is one you claim to be true.
Moreover, your description of the lack of experimental success as “perplexing” reveals that you do in fact believe that dowsing really does work. So stop pretending you don’t.
Somebody with a lot of fun money could easily test for this. Instead of a completely synthetic test arrangement (a la JREF), pick a large undeveloped field out in the real world. Drill a shitload of wells at 10-foot intervals on a grid, and record how many of them hit water (for this to be a truly useful test, the percentage should be low). cap them all, then bring in a dowser and ask him to identify a well that has water in it. Repeat with as many dowsers as you can find. If 80% of the wells have water, and the dowsers achieve an 80% success rate, then they’re useless. If 10% of the wells have water and the dowsers achieve an 80% success rate, then maybe there’s something worth investigating further. Afterall, this was a real field with real groundwater, and all the expected environmental cues.
If there’s concern about the drilling of the grid of wells somehow disturbing the site, then just mark the drilling spots with wooden stakes, and then have all the dowsers come and do their thing before the grid of wells is drilled.
If there’s concern about the presence of wooden stakes (and the awareness of this being an experiment) screwing up the dowser’s mental state, then don’t tell them what’s going on. Just invite them out to the unmolested field, one at a time, and ask them for their dowsing-based recommendation on where and how deep to drill. Record all their answers, then lay out the grid, and drill, baby, drill.
Unless/until this test is done, I’ll stick with the results of earlier controlled experiments which have shown that dowsing does not have a success rate that is better than chance.
I would welcome such a test. I think many scientists would.
But the chances of a rewarding outcome are slim. New concepts in science are usually preceded by experiments that suggest further work is needed, or the premise needs to be revised (Michelson-Morley and continental drift come to mind).
If we had nothing more than a hint that water could be detected in concealed jugs; that flowing water caused a detectable, quantifiable electric current in human beings or a galvanometer, or someone could define a possible mechanism that could explain why wood is attracted or repelled by water, moving or otherwise; it might be rewarding to pursue a test and refine what is being detected.
We have nothing like this. Instead, we only observe phenomena that strongly suggests wishful thinking, personal deception, ignorance of how levers and swinging devices work, and psychological failures.
I.e., superstition. Didn’t we leave that behind in the Middle Ages along with witches?
Actually I find myself saying “What the hell was I thinking?” quite a lot. But then, I probably have some real problems.