Several times you’ve had dreams that seemed to have come true? Could you perhaps give us a rough estimate of how many dreams you’ve had so far over your lifetime, so that we get an estimate of what percentage of your dreams(only several? Seems pretty low, even for coincidence) are coming true.
This assumes, of course, that you are remembering the dreams accurately, and not form-fitting the dream to fit the incident after the fact.
So, since the incidence is low it’s not worth documenting?
I’m not sure, now that you mention it that the “ability” is still present. Hadn’t thought about it in a very long while, but I haven’t had a future dream (that I remember) since before the war.
The dreams were not “form fitted”, the dreams were approximately 6 months prior to the awake event. At this time, many many years after the fact, I remember 7 incidents that were completely in line with dreams. That is not to say there weren’t others, but as I said, I am not/was not developing this “talent” nor was I keeping a journal. (Always thought that having stuff in writing was a bad idea when you have nosey little sisters. 
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Why? Are you doing a study?
If they had been around things of importance to someone else then I would think that my dreams might be worth adding to the mix. The thing is the events were only important in my life. Example: recieved rejection letter to a bording school but none the less dreamt about sitting in a room full of girls I had never met having cocoa. Wake up, think, " that couldn’t possibly happen, I’m not going" and without having seen the dorms or the girls remember them and the event from the dream to the colors of the coffee mugs. So, if I had believed in precognition that dream could have put my mind at rest about getting into the school but I can’t see that it would matter to anyone else.
I don’t know if there is anything to the para buisiness one way or the other but I’m not going to dismiss someone elses experiences out of hand, just because “that couldn’t possibly happen”.
All of this to say, that if there are studies being done they shouldn’t be deemed illegitimate because of our own lack of personal para normal experience. I’ve never seen a cold virus but we know that such things exist due to someone having the courage to study something that “people” just can’t possibly believe in.
For someone relatively new here, I sure am posting prolificly.
Welcome to the boards, Rae of Dawn. Now prepare to pull out your evidence!
It is worth documenting, but is probably insignificant in the long run.
I kept a journal of my dreams for years, and a few of my dreams, including some quite specific stuff, have come true. Does this suggest to me that I can in any way predict the undetermined future in my dreams? Of course not.
As pointed out, a few dreams that come true (or are perceived to come true) are of no significance, because 1) we dream a lot, 2) we do a lot in waking life, 3) we tend to modify dreams from the moment we dream them to long after we are awake. Now, you say that it took six months for a dream of yours to come true (and you didn’t keep a journal, so how do you know you are not changing your memory of the dream? It is very likely that you are, even if you think you have perfect recall of the dream). An awful lot can happen in six months, and every day there is a possibility your dream will come true (through sheer chance). I may dream of breaking my left leg, and then several months down the road I actually do. During a skiing trip, when my chances of breaking a leg are higher. And because I am a reckless skiier. And with two legs, the chances of breaking the left one are roughly 50%, so that’s no big prediction.
At any rate, anecdotal evidence is not evidence, it’s gossip! Anecdotal evidence is inadmissible in a scientific study or debate, because it is so thoroughly unreliable.
Let’s be very clear on this. In 150 years or so of rigorous formal inquiry into the various topics of parapsychology, not one piece of reliable positive evidence has surfaced. Not one.
And don’t forget that science sometimes works on the basis provisional agreement as well as open-minded investigation. After all the effort that has gone into parapsychology, and especially considering how poor the arguments of its proponents are, it is fairly safe to provide provisional agreement that parapsychology is crock until reliable evidence to the contrary is presented. The problem is that no, zero, zilch, none whatsoever of this reliable evidence has surfaced in one and a half centuries of formal investigation.
This doesn’t mean that no evidence will ever surface, or that we should dismiss out of hand every properly constructed claim for parapsychology; it simply means that after 150 years of study, it will take more evidence than some one saying “I speak with dead people” or “I can read other people’s thoughts”.
Studies are deemed legitimate or illegitimate based on their methodology, experimenter bias, quality of data, statistical procedures, etc., certainly not because of a lack of personal experience with the subject matter.
This is a variation of the tired, old, argument that I call “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (with no disrespect to Shakespeare). We have always had available evidence for the cold virus; what we lacked was a hypothesis and solid application of the scientific method and technology to reach the conclusions we regard as obvious today.
On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing in favour of parapsychology other than a lot of anecdotal accounts. Pseudoscience it is, pseudoscience it remains until we have any reason to think otherwise.
There are serious researchers in the field of parapsychology. of course, the majority of people in the field tend to be merely proponents, and there is also a lot of confusion! Susan Blackmoore is a researcher that springs to mind: she started off as a “believer” and then gradually accepted the harsh truth that there is no evidence in favour of parapsychology, at least according to the last I read of her.
The basic question is what sort of evidence would be, well, evidentiary.
It is entirely plausible that a particular item placed on the table as example of parapsychological ability, or other “supernatural” phenomenon for that matter, might be explained away by the proper assumptions – regardless of whether it was in fact an appropriate manifestation of the phenomenon under study. The dream example above is a precise example of that: the odds that a phenomenon might happen in a dream and the same phenomenon later happen in real life, given the proclivities of the dreamer/sufferer of the phenomenon, may be quite high. And any post hoc reportage of the dream is very likely to be influenced by the tendency of human brains to “fill in the gaps” – so that, having seen and identified, say, Spiritus Mundi, I will “know” whether he was wearing matching sweatsocks and had a bald spot on the back of his head, despite my actual perception being of him facing me and standing behind a hedge which cuts my sight of him off at the thigh. I will unconsciously “fill in the gaps” in my perception based on previous knowledge of the person/place/thing seen. In the same manner, having actually suffered the fall in skiing, the dream will be amplified by the bush in left foreground and the two slender trees off to the right that were actually not perceived in the dream but were in the later real-life experience.
Nonetheless, the fact that anything can be explained away by natural means, results in absolutely nothing being clear-cut convincing evidence for [eerie voice]strange occurrences[/eerie voice] being real. If I were to predict that later today slythe will see a truck carrying a rhinoceros pass him on the street, and that event actually comes to pass today, there is a small but real chance that, pulling a highly improbable occurrence out of my sphincter ani, I hit at random on an event that in point of fact was going to occur, and that the odds of slythe seeing a truck carrying a rhinoceros on a given day, while small, are not totally negligible. Besides, I didn’t specify what kind of rhinoceros.
Ha! That is classic, Poly. 
Sheesh…did anyone check out that ScienceDaily link I supplied concerning the university experiment on the effects of prayer on in vitro fertilization?
Seems to me that “reliable” evidence is there. Sure, I understand that the experiement needs to be duplicated, but how can anyone say that there is “zero” or “zilch” for evidence?
The Rhine Research Center is still located in Durham, North Carolina, but is no longer affiliated with Duke University.
I think the university is vaguely embarrassed (or maybe more than vaguely embarrassed) to have been mentioned as an authority for the existence of ESP in nearly every cheesy science fiction movie made between 1949 and 1960.
Einmal ist keinmal.
What we have here is a study that makes a claim. The claim has not been verified yet–and it is not a new claim either. A few years ago I looked into the prayer business (praying for bacteria was hot back then) and I found it to be a most confusing set of claims, with even the experimenters not completely sure what they were claiming. I no longer have the information, but not a single one of those studies had results that were kosher; in one case (the most reputable I believe) the results were obtained through statistical massage, the critics ruled.
This claim you quote remains a claim and is not evidence. When it is duplicated by and to the satisfaction of other experimenters, it may be considered evidence if no “common” explanation is found to explain away the claimed effect (which is certainly a point I would focus on).
I wouldn’t waste my time getting excited just yet though; such claims are being made all the time, and they typically come to nothing once the public has made its appreciative noises and the scientists buckle down. Still zero evidence for the paranormal.
As a very real medical effect and nothing paranormal. And if it is perception affecting reality, then the effect is confined to the person’s body only.
Abe
All you’ve done is to sidestep my refutation of your strong statements eariler in this thread. Your method is to mold the definition of the words evidence and claim to meet your need.
A claim is an assertation. “Assert” implies stating confidently without need for proof or regard for evidence. The example I provided was not a claim. The example was a scientific study…a study that produced evidence.
So…when you write things like…
…I have to call you on it and produce data that helps you (or others that might agree with you) to understand that your statement is incorrect.
I’ll pass on your offer to stop wasting my time getting excited too. I think this study is very interesting indeed. I’m hoping for more studies of this type. If positive results keep occuring in subsequent controlled double-blind scientific studies, then we get to try to determine if it occurs due to divine intervention, human conciousness, some combination of the two, or none of the above.
To address the OP title, “Parapsychology - Legitimate Science or Psuedoscience?”, I weigh in that it can be legitimate science. The link I supplied supports this.
I have not sidestepped your complaint at all. It merely happens to be an invalid complaint.
I mentioned before that there do appear to be a few scientists involved in the “paranormal” (including parapychology) who are conducting honest work (Susan Blackmoore is the one I remember most clearly, and she has obtained zero positive results in a lifetime’s work). Parapsychology, however, isn’t a science any more than phrenology is. Parapsychology is nothing more than a varied collection of claims harvested from wishful thinking using thousands of poorly conceived and executed experiments as a base. Like phrenologists, parapsychologists have set up a number of methods for their “science”, bodies of work, societies, and so forth. That is not enough to be called science. Are phrenologists really able to determine character traits and other details from the shape of one’s skull? Of course not. Similarly, the “body of knowledge” built by parapsychology consists of claptrap that doesn’t hold up under scientific scrutiny.
The only time any sort of paranormal study will ever hold up is when the results of such a study can be verified by those other than the claimants. It works the same way with all science. I repeat: einmal ist keinmal. One time is no time at all. Until the data, methods, and conclusions are verified independently no study is acceptable.
Talk about sidestepping. Since you want to play the word game, I’ll help you out, and I’ll start by pointing out that there is no such word as “assertation”. Claim: a contention or an assertion. Assert: declare; state clearly. The example you provided makes certain claims concerning the power of prayer, citing X results as evidence. I hate to repeat it one more time, but that evidence is barely of academic interest until it is verified by an independent and impartial party. Confirmation is needed–as the media and the public ought to have learned from the 1989 cold fusion fiasco of Pons and Fleischmann, when the two U. of Utah scientists made a claim to the effect that they had discovered a method to achieve fusion at room temperature using table-top apparatus. Their work was studied and replication was attempted. Nothing. The media ate crow, the public was disenchanted, the pseudoscientists cried foul. Bah.
IF the results can be replicated, it is an area worthy of study. If not, it’s another fiasco in a long line of fiascos. Considering its rather controversial claims, until the study achieves independent confirmation it’s safe not to get too excited over it. If it does earn confirmation, it will be an interesting area of inquiry and will probably lead us to some serious wrangling. If.
Abe,
You say that if the results are reproducible, then it would be suitable for scientific study. That statement is an excellent example of pseudoscience.
If you don’t study it again, how are you going to reproduce the results?
When you decide on the truth, and then do your investigation, that is not science. You look at the phenomena you see, or which are reported, and you study those to find out the truth. The fact that prayer has been shown to correlate with improved chances of conception in one study is not proof of the efficacy of prayer, but it is evidence that there could be a causal relationship.
Just because it isn’t proof doesn’t mean it isn’t scientifically valid experimentation.
“If we are going to stick to this damned quantum-jumping, then I regret that I ever had anything to do with quantum theory.” ~ Erwin Schrodinger ~
Thank you Trisk for backing that although the study is not proof, the study results are evidence.
To quote from the article previously linked:
…so we hope that further studies are forthcoming. Yes, this is legitimate science.
Tris, either I am not making the point clear, or you are offering a rather feeble defence of pseudoscience yourself, while condemning my defence of the scientific process as pseudoscience.
I won’t decide whether this particular experiment is valid science, I will let the peer review decide that. If the study passes the peer review, then the subject matter has merit and deserves to be investigated further to establish causality, set and test hypotheses, etc. It would be the first time ever that prayer has been found to have an effect, although many such experiments have been carried out before. But this could very well turn out to be one more fiasco in a long line of fiascos, so just wait for the peer review.
And, to answer the OP AGAIN, no, parapsychology is not a valid science. Certainly not yet, and, given all the materials investigated so far, I have grave doubts as to whether it will ever be. If you believe that a single unverified study is enough to redeem this “science”, with all its many “iron-clad” claims that have already been refuted, good luck. In actual fact, that study is no more than a glimmer of an indication until it is verified.
A science requires objective principles, systematized knowledge, observation and experiment with phenomena, etc., as well as confirmation. Which brings me to
No ever said it wasn’t. You don’t get to decide whether this is valid scientific experimentation, however. The peer review does. And, until they do, Krispy can go on all he wants about “legitimate” science, but it won’t make a whit of difference to the reality that parapsychology is not a legitimate science, and that an unverified experiment is deemed legitimate not by someone’s repeated assertions, but by peer review.
So the answer is still no, Krispy.
There is good, conclusive evidence and there is poor, inconclusive evidence and there is ambiguous evidence. IMHO, the study you cited is #2. Even the people you quote say that more study is needed, implying that what they have found is not conclusive, that no one should make up their minds just yet, that they may have found nothing at all.
Well, I do, in fact get to decide for myself. I haven’t yet. I don’t have enough evidence to decide.
However, from the point of view of the OP, the matter is not about who decides, but rather how they decide. The peer review (which authority you choose to cite) decides by engaging in further experimentation. It is not the acceptability of the subject that is reviewed, but the reproducibility of the results. My objection to your view of science is that it is authority based, not method based.
The claims of the Pons/Fleischman Cold Fusion experiments were not dismissed because they seemed unlikely, or because the people who read their reports doubted the methodology. They were dismissed after further experiments failed to produce the same results. That is science. Your objection to the prayer study is a matter of opinion.
“There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.” ~ Hippocrates ~
Didn’t imply you couldn’t hold an opinion. I simply mean that you do not have the authority to claim that this study is good evidence until a peer review decides it is. Until then, this study is simply a claim.
Your objection is completely irrelevant to this case, because my view of science is certainly not based on authority. I don’t know how you got that from what I wrote. Further experimentation to verify these results is exactly what I said was necessary in my first post on this subject. Authority has nothing to do with it, and I wonder why you mention it.
Again, I don’t know whose posts you are reading, but they’re probably not mine. That results which are not successfully replicated are inadmissible has been my position since the beginning. In fact, let me quote myself, in case you missed what I said: “Confirmation is needed–as the media and the public ought to have learned from the 1989 cold fusion fiasco of Pons and Fleischmann…”. And let’s be clear on this: when scientists looked at the methodology of Pons and Fleischmann, there were problems (although as you say it is the lack of replicability that put the nail in that coffin).
This prayer experiment means nothing until its validity is ascertained. Exactly the same with cold fusion–the media and public got all excited about the unverified CLAIM (for such is a study that has not been verified) and the scientists waited wisely for results to be replicated before they took cold fusion seriously. The prayer study is NOT good evidence until it is “certified”. I don’t care where the scientists are from or which big name sponsored the study (that would be reliance on authority).
My objection to your point is based on this sentence:
My objection is that you have to study it to find out if you can replicate the results. One report of a phenomenon is, in some cases, the only evidence available before a scientific study is begun. Worthiness for study implies a judgment in advance of study. That is opinion, not science.
Science is mostly practiced by institutions in the real world. Unfortunately institutional thinking is much more likely to agree with your assessment than with mine. Worthiness for study of such things as AIDS, and micronutrition were not decided on the basis of prior experimental evidence; they were decided on the political power of the population demographic which was most affected. That is opinion, not science. Those who wish to see science become a tool true to its own standards should avoid making assessments of the worthiness of study areas on any basis other than the methodology of the study.
That is my objection to your position regarding the study on the efficacy of prayer. You do not point out failures in method, you object to the worthiness of the area of study. The matter being studied is not germane to the argument of whether or not the study has scientific validity, only the design and implementation of the study, and the methods by which the data are collected and assessed. Pleas to the IPU, or endorsements by famous Supermodels could easily have been substituted for prayer in the study noted, and the scientific validity of the study would have been unaffected.
It is impossible to avoid bringing your opinions to your assessment of a point of scientific study. It is still an error. When you find such an error, it is essential to remove it from your examination of the world, even though you will still have errors in your examination which come from your opinions.
“No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris … [because] no known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.” ~ Orville Wright ~
Good grief, Tris, is that really the meat of your objection? You are turning a molehill into a planetary body.
If you scrutinize my posts, I don’t think you’ll find an advance judgement on this study (and my judgement on the field of parapsychology is very well-researched, I assure you). In fact, your repeated objections to the contrary, I have been saying since this argument arose that we should wait for the results of the review before making any conclusions about this study. That includes conclusions as to whether it is evidence or not.
How you read that point the several times I wrote it and then come back to me with “My objection is that you have to study it to find out if you can replicate the results” is beyond me. I specifically advocate evaluating any such “evidence” before making a decision about it. That doesn’t have to translate into a silly catch-22 like this:
That is definitely not where I am going. Last time: when this study is “certified”, only then will it be accepted as evidence. Only then will it be scientific to take such evidence into consideration. To do so before that time will be the pinnacle of pseudoscience, the height of scientific irresponsibility, and is in fact a common resort for many pseudoscientists, who use a vast array of discredited or unreviewed experiments to “prove” that mysterious energy/effect XYZ exists. Hey, with false premises you can use logic to prove absolutely anything.
In spite of the fact that parapsychology is a field thus far supported by wishful thinking and not evidence, there is a chance–however small considering that it’s been tried before–that this prayer study could be legitimate science with legitimate results. I am letting the review decide that. I don’t see how you can accuse me of bringing opinion or prejudice to the discussion when I am specifically encouraging people like yourself and Krispy O to wait for such a confirmation!