“Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Scotland’s Edinburgh University also have chairs in parapsychology.”
Do you think this a leap forward for science, or a giant step back to the past?
How could it be less-scientific to study unexplainable phenomena? Ignorance, bias and close-mindedness seem to less scientific to me. Simply because something isn’t understood, and is thus associated a paranormal cause, does not exclude a valid scientific explanation. We might as well just keep assuming the world is flat and the center of the solar system - as that was ‘fact’ at some time, and the nay-sayers were pretty ‘silly’.
What exactly isn’t understood? There’s no phenomena to study, since they all disappear as you look closely. If someone can come up with something to test then the study would make some sense.
Since there is some serious study being devoted to this area, I’d have to think that the correctness of your statement that ‘there’s no phenomena to study’ is not as decided as you’d like to think.
There’s been serious study for decades with no reproducible results. Those few reputable studies which have purported to show statistically significant results have never been duplicated, leading to the conclusion that either those studies were flawed somehow or there was outright fraud being perpetuated.
Not to mention that no mechanism for “psychic” ability that explains all of it’s supposed properties has ever been put forth that fits within the parameters of known physics. it’s not electromagnetic, or we would have detected it by now. There’s only three other forces and the only other one that acts at a distance is gravitation, and that’s sure not it, weak as it is. Show me a study whose resluts can be duplicated consistently, and I’ll listen.
I think that the phenomena should be studied. If there’s something to it then it should be studied vigorously.
If there’s nothing to be found then that should be studied as well. What makes up the various paranromal psychic phenomena? Even if it’s only a bunch of hysteria and conscams, it still deseres study.
Results from a survey published in Seed Trade News December 1999 (Ball
Publishing, Batavia, Illinois.). The survey source was Thomas J Hoban,
1999.
The question was “ordinary tomatoes do not contain genes while genetically
modified ones do” The survey was done is several countries with the
following results (n percent of responses):
false don't know true
Austria 34 22 44
Canada 52 33 15
Finland 44 27 29
France 32 39 29
Germany 36 20 44
Ireland 20 51 29
Italy 35 44 21
Netherlands 51 27 22
Spain 28 46 26
Sweden 46 24 30
UK 40 38 22
USA 45 45 10
Why ? At least in the case of the Edinburgh Unit the core funding is the Koestler bequest, which can’t be used for other purposes. The decision by the university in the 1980s to accept the bequest was controversial, but the argument that won out was that it was pure win-win from a research income point of view. Money they wouldn’t otherwise get their hands on. Nothing to do with the likelihood of the unit generating any useful positive results.
How exactly are they going to study something which doesn’t exist? Is this a magicians’ class or something? This is like a class on vampires or elves. What are they going to use for study subjects?
You could just study them as phenomena w/o trying to study them for validity.
I’d love to see a double-blind study where subjects were surveyed a little about themselves and about their ideas on paranormal psychic phenomena before and after seeing a live show by either a self-identified real psychic or a stage magician. and then survey them about what they witnessed.
An assessment of what constitutes a “hit” in the minds of people who believe, disbelieve and don’t believe in paranormal psychic phenomena.
Quite a number of aspects of these things to be studied.