Describe this “statistical evidence,” please.
I’d like you to describe these “occurrences” as well.
Is there any deliberate irony in there at all? You have a pretty close-minded view about who is open-minded, lol.
I think that proper methodology removes the “belief” factor to a large degree. That is, after all, the whole point of scientific methodolgy: to try and create a foundation of empiricism over rationalism so that it doesn’t matter what either of us believe in, the results should speak for themselves.
Whether or not that is even possible is another debate.
Certainly, jab: In numerous publications over the years, you will find reports of such things as results of Rhine card test runs, with the statistical probability of the number of “hits” and “misses” compared to chance. Not having a major interest in pursuing this subject beyond general intellectual curiosity, I don’t have specific examples to cite here, but I trust that you would grant that any university-based study would be adequately controlled and documented to suit your expectations. Perhaps someone with an interest in the subject will have some specifics.
As for “true precognition,” I am quite guilty of misnomer. How about “statements of events made prior to their occurrence” and “statements claiming precognitive knowledge of events”?
Question: A scientist who “believes in” telepathy will focus on the positives, but a scientist who “disbelieves in” telepathy will be more objective? Your own tone in previous comments here would leave your objectivity suspect in the hands of any skeptic. I neither believe nor disbelieve; I know events that have occurred to me and to others whose word I trust, and seek rational, not necessarily materialist, explanations for them.
No, a scientist who has no opinion one way or the other will most likely be objective.
No, I’m sorry, but saying that certain “events” have happened to you show that you DO believe something really happened, when it may be nothing more than the result of your own imperfect perceptions and/or memory.
When I say I do not believe that telepathy exists, it’s because I am 44 years old and have never had anything happen to me (or anyone I know and trust) that could be attributed to telepathy. Whenever I have asked someone why they think they had a telepathic (or precognitive) event, they all turned out to be the usual, “I was thinking about someone and they called me on the phone/knocked on my door/saw him (or her) at the store,” kind of thing that is easily attributed to coincidence and people remembering the “hits” and forgetting the “misses”.
Mothers imagining that they sensed the death of a child miles away can be attributed to coincidence (they just happened to have been thinking of their child when they died) and random chance (many, many more other children have died without their mothers suspecting a thing).
You want me to believe that telepathy and precognition really exist, you have to demonstrate to me that those are the ONLY possible answers, that random chance and coincidence have been ruled out.
Hmmm…A friend of mine wrote his PhD thesis on unicorns, making him one of the (probably) rare unicorn’s world specialists. He knows a lot big deal of things about unicorns, and pretty fun stuff at that, including their habbits.
Of course he never stated that unicorns actually exist.
Before someone asks, I don’t think he found any evidences of the existence of invisible pink unicorns. Or if he found them, he didn’t mention them. He was probably affraid that the scientific community wouldn’t take his research seriously if he mentionned the IPU. Everybody knows how these mainstream scientists are prejudiced. They would have refused to take seriously this sort of stuff in a thesis about unicorns.
Jab: A well reasoned answer. Let me suggest that the idea of “belief” is one that should be eradicated as completely as possible from any scientific inquiry.
As for what I stated, I am identifying particular event sequences, not attributing reasons for them. My earlier example of telepathy is a good case in point. I was quite clearly aware, at several times during the summer of 1991, of what was going on in the thoughts of my foster son Chris, with whom I had had a lot of extensive, deep, and intense conversations during the previous few months. I do not attribute that to ESP; I simply knew what his reactions to a given situation were, from having been steeped in what and how he thought and felt. I was sufficiently empathic with him as to be able to feel his feelings and, starting from what I know, think his thoughts along with him. I am certain that body language – facial expressions, posture, etc. – played an important part in my doing this as well, though I don’t recall noting them. It was, in fact, telepathy as that term is commonly used – but it was not “proof of psychic powers” – just proof that human caring can work small miracles of its own.
To give you another example, I emphatically do not “believe in ghosts.” (In fact, I have declined to open that thread.) But shortly after we got the boys as foster kids, two of them and a friend spending the night reported one morning that during the night they had seen a figure in through a closed window, across the room, and through the wall opposite. One son and the guest were sharing a room; the other boy who had seen this (substitute wall for window in his account) was in a room where he could not have easily communicated with the two. The description given matched the build, facial shape, and clothing of my eight-years-dead father. The third boy, who had not seen this apparent apparition, was the only one of the three who had known him during his life, and was present when they described having seen it, and independently identified the description as fitting my father. What happened here? I don’t know. Conspiracy among kids to put one over on me? Confabulation of a ghost-story account to match Dad? An actual ghost sighting? A poltergeist event (which has its own objections)? I am not inclined to give an answer. I merely am reporting the facts. I guarantee that the sentence beginning “The description given…” above includes some confabulation, because I’m basing it on what I recall hearing and on my visualization of my father at the time based on the description, which means that I am not an unbiased reporter in stating it. To the extent that I can be objective on this account, I am being so. And I am trying to take my own preconceptions and possible errors into account.
Sounds like you loved him very much and had a very good rapport with him. And it’s certainly not impossible that one could unconsciously pick up clues from body language, vocal inflections and facial expressions. People with attention disorders miss many of these things and thus tend to be socially inept and unpopular, never completely connecting with anyone.
That is NOT what it says in the dictionary under “telepathy”:
That’s what I mean when I use the word. Looks like we weren’t communicating.
Nice “ghost story.”
I personally have a very low interest in parapsychology, but I happen to know of one experiment that demonstrates a statistically significant result. The design is simple: 30 slides are shown for a groups of people, some of the pictures are strongly negatively loaded (dead person with head wound), others are positively loaded (smiling wedding-couple). In another room, another group has the task of guessing whether the first group views a positive or negative picture. Every picture is shown 20 secs, and a lamp is lit up in the assessment’s group when the viewing group sees a picture. After this, the two groups change places, so the “receivers” get to view pictures, and the “senders” are assessing them. Of course the order in which the pictures are shown, is randomised.
The study was performed on a few hundred subjects, and the result was that the receiviers were a little bit better than would be expected by chance, especially for the first picture shown and for the positive pictures. There was a significant negative correlation between believing in telepathy and correct hits. There was also a negative correlation between negative pictures and hits.
Read the published article here:
http://www.psychology.su.se/units/cogn/parapsyk/paraartiklar.html
The findings have not been replicated. I can think of several possible explanations why, but since I’m very sceptic, my opinions might be biased against this study even if I’m a trained scientist in another area. So I keep my mouth shut for now, and let you read the article and judge for yourselves 
Oh, I forgot to mention that my link will take to a page with two articles, and it’s the lower of them you should read - the one called “Five experiments…”. (The upper one is in Swedish)
Anybody know if DUKE UNIVERSITY still sponsors the institute for parapsychology?
But the contrapositive is true as well; if you go in believing it doesn’t exist, you may ignore positives, writing them off to coincidence or small sample statistics.
What you said originally is not correct. Science is not a belief system, it’s a method. In an ideal world, a scientist would go into the investigation with no “belief” either way, and would be swayed by the evidence gathered. That’s what skepticism is all about: not making a decision until the data are in, and even then making sure that questions are asked about methodology, instrumentation, possible emotional involvement, etc.
Having said that, I agree with what Trisk said originally: anything is open to scientific investigation, including astrology, creationism, UFOs, the face on Mars and what-have-you. For all of these pseudoscientific topics about which I have read, the usual concensus after investigation is they don’t hold water. That’s why I am confident in labeling them pseudoscience; people still adhere to them using bad scientific method, even after proper scientific method shows them to be false.
Look, it is not neccesary for scientist to be unbiased when investigating a phenomenon. In actual practice, every scientist has some sort of idea of what the results of his experiments should be. And this is good. Without a hypothesis as a guide how would you know which experiments would be interesting to do?
It is true that having a pre-existing belief can cause a scientist to fool themselves, or to ask the wrong questions, or to ignore results that don’t fit with their beliefs. That is why replicability is so important. It doesn’t matter that Dr. Smith has believed in fairies for decades before he finally found proof of their existance. All he has to do is publish his results and let other people try to reproduce his results. If anyone can follow his procedures and reproduce his results then the investigators beliefs are not important.
Now, beliefs can interfere with good interpretation of the data. If Dr. Smith’s experiment is to leave out a plate of cookies and in the morning the cookies have been nibbled, proving that fairies nibbled the cookies and thus fairies exist, then other scientists can point out flaws in the design of the experiment and suggest improvements like video cameras or powder that might reveal the footprints of small rodents that might have nibbled the cookies.
But if Dr. Smith refuses to listen to the suggestions then chances are that his experimental proof of the existance of fairies is not going to be generally accepted. His belief or non-belief in fairies has nothing to do with it. His willingness to improve his experiment and generate reproducable results does.
Sure, science is a method, but even the method is open to dispute, and I would maintain that the difference between ‘real’ science and the pseudosciences is not all that great. The notion of ‘experimenters regress’, (where determining if an experimental result is correct or not depending on a set of assumptions already held by the scientist) calls into question the intellectual high-ground that mainstream science perches on. The problem with the ‘whacky’ sciences is that conventional scientific method is unable to measure them in ANY way AT THE PRESENT TIME, but that does not mean that they will remain unmeasurable forever. Maybe we just need to spend less money on defence and more on ‘alternative’ sciences. Just think of the number of previously disparaged theories that have since become part of our scientific knowledge base. Now. I’m not advocating that the Royal Society give Uri Geller unlimited funding to warp the cutlery of the world, but discarding any idea that offends the scientific sensibilities harks back to the dark ages of intellectual persecution. And that just isn’t good enough.
Check out the book “The Holographic Universe”. Amazon has it. It’s a great read. All about the research into the paranormal and the people who think such research is foolish. He goes back through history (from 10 years ago to 1000 years ago) and looks at reports of strange occurences: Miraculous healings (documented by hospitals, not the kind preached by televangilists), people being impaled with no damage, remarkable tolerences, and a bunch of other stuff I’m not really doing justice here.
It takes a while, but eventually he comes up with some pretty interesting theories about the nature of reality to account for all this data, which he says should not be ignored. A succesful theory has to account for ALL of the data, even if some of it seems pretty spooky.
DaLovin’ Dj
On what grounds?
The scientific process is a self-refining set of operations performed both within and without the constructs of the individual scientists. This is not intellectual high ground they are perching on. They are clearly and consicely (mostly) stating what they are willing to accept as evidence for a theory. They are not perching on anything if you don’t offer them what they ask for. They are being consistent.
So? When they can be measured, then, those scientists perching on their intellectual high ground will accept it, even if they accept it with some hostility like time-travel solutions to General Relativity or the metaphysical implications of Quantum Physics. Those are some “wacky” theories, too, you know. They just happen (conveniently ;)) to be able to be tested, as well as their predictions.
Uh… I’m confused… is it the snooty scientists or the greedy defense contractors that are holding science itself back?
People have attempted to test theories of the paranormal. As I understand it the tests were either inconclusive or worse. Promoting empirical testing of ideas which have been shown, empirically, to have no value sounds more reminiscent of an intellectual dark age to me.
dalovindj, yes data has to be “accounted for” by a perfect theory. Good theories are allowed to have little holes in them 
erislover, true. However, no one has been able to come up with a pefect theory of everything yet. I think that should such a perfect theory be found, it will only be by including research into human spirituality and perception and their effect on reality. I could be wrong, but I feel that existence is more than just quantum particles and probabilities.
I have no proof and accept that I may be quite wrong. Such is the deal when you get into the big ones.
DaLovin’ Dj
First of all, you’d have to demonstrate, scientifically, that people HAVE spirits. Second of all, perception does not affect reality; it’s the other way around.
Very good, grasshopper. Admitting that you are imperfect is the beginning of wisdom.
I don’t mean spirituality in the sense of Biblical spirits. I don’t buy that people have spirits in that sense. I’m talking about things like the pursuit of enlightenment and the feeling that we are connected to something greater than the individual parts. Many people experience these feelings, and I’m of the opinion that contained in reality is an awareness that offers us hints and guidance if we open up to it. I feel this way based on my experiences. It could be a trick of the mechanics of the brain, I suppose. But I think it is rooted in something real and as of yet undiscovered by science.
Then how do you explain the placebo effect?
DaLovin’ Dj
Prayer might influence in vitro fertilization:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/10/011002065831.htm
I have on occasion (several) had dreams where the thing that I dreamt happened. If it had been a common to me place, people or situation I would have dismissed it out of hand. These dreams, however, are of people I haven’t yet met, places I haven’t yet been and of situations I wouldn’t normally find myself in.
I can’t explain it. I’m not cultivating it. It’s just something that happens.
If this does have an explaination I would like to hear about it. I would love for someone to study it seriously. I’d like to know if it’s just me or if there are other people out there who have the same thing happen to them.
BUT. As long as people believe that there are things that are purely imagination, “can’t possibly be”, and are “pure bunk” then that process will be stalled out and the possibility of this “talent” being of use to someone in the future will be delayed.
Oh, btw, when I dreamt that I would find the sheet music on the shelf, I did, but just as in my dream it was after the competition. :S