You agree about the importance of evidence and claim that you love science, yet nothing you've said seems to demonstrate that fact -- something you have in common with tutz. I think you want to see yourself this way but you are not. I mean, the first guy I looked up from your panel of scientific experts is someone who studies parapsychology, which is a pseudo-science. And then we have Rupert Sheldrake and other people who are associated with Deepak Chopra and a whole host of pseudoscientific fields of study. One thing they have in common: they all have something to sell, literally. Interesting how quick they are to bring up QM in that paper yet I could not find a single one of them having a background in physics.
Why do you dismiss these people as pseudo scientists? What is the root of this dismissal? I'm asking all of you to really examine why the mainstream has written these scientists off.
This is where the materialist bias I mentioned earlier comes into play. Tarnishing these scientists with the label of "pseudoscience" stems from the materialist belief system which pretty much every person is taught when they're inducted into the scientific community. Sheldrake's done great work, and plenty of other people like him have been dismissed just because the topics they research seem so ridiculous to the materialist perspective
Regarding having something to sell, you don't think the mainstream scientists that y'all consider to be legit don't have something to sell too? That they don't have personal benefit which comes from preventing this paradigm shift? Remember, scientists are humans with all the flaws humans have. That's the main reason science is not actually practiced objectively like it's supposed to, because we have a bunch of scientists who have not done the personal work to get their ego in check and dismantle their implicit biases. Yes, the scientists I'm promoting are biased too. We gotta be honest about everyone's bias and limitations, and factor it in when examining the research. That applies to the mainstream accepted scientists and the marginalized ones.
Your answer to the Randi challenge is that people who have developed these abilities don't seek him out, because they don't care about money and fame -- yet you admit that if you were in their shoes you would do it, and we can assume many people feel the way you do, because they'd want to put that money to good use and help people break out of the "materialistic trap". So, it seems your explanation here is not congruent with the rest of your belief system. I mean really, that response is utterly laughable, and I mean no disrespect to you, but think about the number of people who claim to have these powers in India and elsewhere, who have sick relatives whom they could help, and turn their lives around with a cool million... and yet... somehow it just never happened once. If you say "well, they're culturally obliged to avoid revealing their powers to westerners" it still doesn't change the fact that there is also a large number of westerners who make those claims or who could embark on a journey to develop these powers and come back for the challenge.
This is definitely one of the hardest parts to explain, cause it's like people from two different worlds trying to understand each others behavior. Also you have to add in the skeptics effect on demonstrations.
While I know about the randi challenge, I doubt it's well known in India and other parts of the world, and getting to the USA to prove it isn't an easy task even if someone did hear about it. It's funny how we westerners just assume that since a magician put out a million dollar challenge, every person on the planet who could win the challenge must know about it and be motivated to prove him wrong and get some money. That's the ethnocentrism I'm talking about.
Then like I said, generally people who have developed these skills aren't interested in showing them off. The girl from India and her guru are an exception, not the norm.
The people who are generally more eager to show off and win a challenge, usually also are less adept. That's where the skeptic effect comes into play, cause the consciousness of people observing effects the results, and you need to be adept in order to overcome them. So if the people who do actually have powers and show up for the challenge are likely to be weak at doing it, there's a good chance they won't be able to perform in that scenario. I'm assuming that the majority of people who have tried to meet Randi's challenge are just charlatans thinking their gimmick could be good enough. If any did show up with a real power, it's also likely that they would have trouble performing in that environment of a hostile skeptic.
It's a tricky scenario, where the people who can perform reliably aren't interested, and the ones who are interested aren't reliable.
But if you look outside of his challenge, you do see people coming forward to show what they can do. They're all over the world, and some of them are famous, like John of God in Brazil. Others are just locally famous, like the healer I met in Brazil. Most are not famous at all, just doing their practice and healing work on the down low.
Now, while I said I'd love to get in the lab and show these abilities, that is what the version of me who can't do it wants. It's likely that if I did develop the ability, my perspectives would also have changed in a way where I may not be so interested in going to a lab anymore. I'm hopeful that I'd still do it, but it would be a risk to do so. I explained in my reply to your other post more thoroughly about my view about these powers and how they relate to my personal path.
Well, you could start by giving us some of that anecdotal evidence, which is better than nothing, and certainly better than saying you're more qualified than us to know whether or not the stuff shown in some YouTube videos is real or trickery.
My first hand experiences are personal stories which I haven't written out yet, and I have a desire to write it properly if I'm going to share them. So I've avoided going into detail in these posts. Agreed, it's better for me to share that than claim superiority in analyzing youtube videos, so I'll see about writing it down to share with y'all sooner rather than later.
"why accomplished practitioners don't show up in labs or for million dollar challenges."
But you've that capitalism is the reason why this guru charges 10k for the third eye awakening. Why can't "because this is capitalism" apply to the million dollar challenge too?
I think charging for training & courses to fund your ashram because we're in capitalism and need money to make things happen is different than heading to America to win some challenge. But I do see your point, and considering that this guru is all about showing off, I think he should be the one to go meet with Randi. Or shit, they could just send the girl from the video, he doesn't have to be the one. I don't know if they're aware of the challenge or not, but I do like the idea of encouraging them to take it on.
I already posted a few videos of him here. Take a look at them. There is no way this is cold reading, the informations are too specific.
This guys is for real. So rare to find someone like him.
Also, if you think he doesnt deserve credit because he is making a profit out of it my answer is that there is no problem making money out of your spiritual knowledge/skills as long as you are doing something good to the world. In his case, he is bringing messages from the other side to people here in our world, which brings comfort and is likely to make those people receiving these messages to change the way they live their lifes, towards awakening.
On December 06 2018 00:42 Loco wrote:
Your friend doesn't have to have reasons to lie to you, he only needs reasons for why he would deceive himself, or be deceived by someone else. And there are plenty of reasons for that, here's just one which I often bring up: the need for us to escape a grim world and our awareness of our finite existence through the imagination.
You're right, generally with anecdotal evidence this is the standard flaw. Even if the person telling you what happened is telling the truth, they could have been deceived. This point, as well as being a magician who sent many a person off claiming to have seen magical powers (and they would have passed a lie detector), was a big reason I was such a staunch skeptic for so long. It felt like no one could ever provide enough evidence to convince me. It wasn't until I opened my heart, which opened my mind, that opportunities to have first hand experiences entered my life.
Saying that we have to be open to supernatural claims is bogus. We only have to be open to the fact that they believe these things for real and open to giving them the opportunity to show evidence for them, in the right setting. That setting isn't an internet forum, or some low budget TV show.
Agreed, there should be openness to viewing the evidence in the right setting, and for a skeptic, my posts on a message board are not that setting. I hope to see that manifest, like bringing that girl into a lab
@Loco, I pretty much agree with everything you've said. Hinted to you to not google her, all the shit written on the internet are made with the intent of money grab, nothing written there has been said by her. And indeed people that have those types of thoughts as central to their belief system are limiting themselves much more, but that's not what I'm talking about. Obviously I'd take your way of thought over anyone believing in the supernatural any day of the week, it's the rational thing to do.
I'd just put such cases "out there" in my mind, I don't trust them due to lack of scientific explanation, yet I don't dismiss them due to no evidence which would mean they don't exist. As k2o4 has said, I too believe that science will eventually explain everything (well unless we cease to exist as species beforehand), the question is, will the paradigm shift, and to what direction.
Let's change the topic for a while from the supernatural to physics, or whatever other scientific schools you'd like. New discoveries that impact everyone are almost always made by people that find something that makes absolutely no sense and can give zero evidence to back it up. Imagine the cavemen explaining fire or lightning or even wind. Our lack of comprehension doesn't verify the lack of existence of something.
@k2o4 the issue of anecdotal evidence is quite big. Any sane person would make the same claim you have - anecdotal evidence shouldn't be used due to obvious reasons. Yet it has been proven that our minds learn much easier with anecdotes. Just have to be very skeptical and stray away from Plato type of anecdotes.
So I took the time to do a bit more research today, and realized that we've been arguing over the less convincing video Turns out the guy who filmed the indian girl has also now filmed other kids doing the same thing in the UK. He did a much better job of addressing skeptical concerns, especially thanks to having a skeptical camerawoman who pushed them to address doubts about the blindfold, but they didn't do a perfect job and there's still some room for doubt. The type of footage and editing needed to meet a skeptics standard seems not to occur to most people who go to film this stuff.
Of course you can continue to dismiss this by saying "everyone is in on it and they're all acting", which is why these types of videos will never be enough for a rigidly skeptical mind. But if you're willing to be open, this video does a much better job of eliminating the possibilities of deception. It's also not tainted by the guru charging 10k to get the power and so on.
On December 06 2018 07:16 Stroggoz wrote:
Reading through these comments on science, it should be pointed out that many things that once seemed like magic are now part of modern science. Even Newton regarded his theories as some sort of magic that was difficult to completely explain.
Yes indeed. That just keeps happening, "magic" becomes science. I think the next big leap we take on that path is a shedding of materialist dogma, allowing us to analyze all of the data and create theories which explain everything we're observing, rather than throwing away data which doesn't fit our materialist model, as we do now.
secondly, yes i agree that science suffers from certain distortions from elite interets. some parts of neuroscience has a history of lying to justify the drug war, and inventing pseudo-science to justify the slave trade. crimonologists have lied on fox news, ect. all fields in STEM suffer from serious distortion, physcisists especially are focused onto certain research topics, due to their expensive research facilities that they want, the military wants something back from them. I'd say pure mathematics is just about as independent from power as a field can get though. Social sciences are full of ideology, from just war theory, to 'security', and 'terrorism studies', to post modernism. Political science does a lot of polling simply because propagandists want to know how to manipulate the population. Economics doesn't teach economic history in undergraduate anymore because it's too helpful for understand why there is such massive wealth inequality.
Thanks for the list of examples, this highlights some of what I've been referencing
Im suspicious of the manifesto because i don't think it understands or represents the positions properly.
1) reductionism is a fine activity for science, if you can link two areas of science togethor, that's obviously helpful. But often it goes the other direction. Chemistry was explained through discoveries in quantum physics, not the other way around.
Yes, the manifesto agrees that reductionism is a fine activity for science, it's just saying that it was assumed to be the only way to go about things. You have to see the way all the parts fit together, and how the system interacts, not just what each individual part is doing. Reductionism has led science to be laid out in all these little subcategories. Think about the medical system. You go to one doctor for your lungs, a different for your brain, another for your feet, etc. They each specialize in their body part or organ or cell type, whatever. Then they do a bunch of research just focused on their little lense, and lose sight about how their part fits in and interacts with the rest of the parts. Reductionism isn't bad, but you have to balance it with a wider perspective.
So in 2) they define scientific materialists as "The belief system implies that the mind is nothing but the physical activity of the brain, and that our thoughts cannot have any effect upon our brains and bodies, our actions, and the physical world."
They say that the assumptions of materialism and reductionism lead to the belief system that the mind is nothing but the physical activity of the brain. They define materialism as: "the idea that matter is the only reality". What they don't say is that matter is also assumed to be unconscious. So the materialist paradigm believes that only matter is real, and that from unconscious matter there magically sprang up the quality of consciousness. That's the logic which follows from the materialist belief, that unconscious matter became conscious. Generally the explanation is that upon enough complexity consciousness emerges, and then the debate goes into what level of complexity qualifies as consciousness. They say humans qualify, but what about dogs? What about fish? What about cells? What about plants? What about rocks? Materialism generally only accepts humans and a few animals as conscious. Some go so far as to say that not even humans are conscious, because consciousness could not emerge from something which is unconscious. Basically, the materialist belief system is much easier to prove if we're all just unconscious "zombies".
secondly, anyone who beleives that our thoughts cannot have any effect on our actions', is obviously wrong, since that goes against our immediate experience. We choose to walk or drive with our thoughts. other actions are based on pre-conscious cognition, like language, but more complex actions are a result of our thought. This all seems pretty obvious to me. I typically wonder that people are being strawmanned in scientific or philosophical journals unless they are being directly quoted. I'd like to see someone calling themselves a scientific materialist and that they dont beleive thoughts affect action, and have them quoted, than have someone tell me there are bunch of people like that-without any quotations.
If you get into the realm of "what is consciousness" you'll find that the materialist belief system logically leads to an interesting conclusion - since your mind is just the result of activity of the brain, and activity of the brain is just stimulus response with the environment, we aren't actually having thoughts. Our brain is creating thoughts based on stimulus response and we experience them. And it goes a step further, cause are we really experiencing them? Or are we just zombies, who appear to be alive and conscious, but we're not actually experiencing anything and we have no free will, we're completely determined and run by the result of biology, physics, etc. So while a stimulus may come, which triggers a thought, and then that thought leads to an action, we didn't have any choice in the matter, we're just the result of actions and reactions. Once the brain stops, there's no thought, no experience, nothing. These are the conclusions I've seen from the materialist belief system. It's a chain of logic which starts from the idea that the only reality is matter, and that matter is unconscious.
I think why we get lost in thinking this belief system is accurate is because there is truth to some of that. You see similar ideas arise in yogic and buddhist thought about how our brain is just processing data and creating thoughts that form stories for us to experience. Then you realize you are not those thoughts, they are separate from your real consciousness. In the west we tend to conflate consciousness and thinking, but thinking is a very superficial level of consciousness. The root of consciousness exists beyond the physical, and is not limited to the activity of the brain.
Brain is not a creator of consciousnesses, it's more a transceiver. It's more like a smartphone, and just like your smartphone allows you to tap into the internet reality (a reality that surrounds you at all times as waves of energy, but you can't perceive it without the proper device), your brain allows you to tap into physical reality. It's a device that exists within the physical reality in order to process data and give you an experience of the physical, which is really just a vivid hallucination (good TED talk on that here). Once the smartphone dies, you don't die, you just can't perceive the internet anymore. You could log back onto the net with a new phone, or a computer, or a tablet (a new body basically, reincarnation). When the brain dies, we continue to exist in a realm where we can no longer perceive the physical, cause we lost our connecting tool, and we have the option to reincarnate and put on a new body to regain access to the physical experience.
To me one of the coolest realizations of this post-materialist paradigm that I'm describing, where the brain doesn't create consciousness but is rather a transceiver of consciousness, is that it means all of our brains are connected to an extra-dimensional internet where we can go to access information or message each other. And we do it all the time without realizing it. Through training, we can learn to do it under our own control. Right now we're so caught up with the surface distractions, all the stimuli coming in via the 5 senses, that we put all the internal stuff on autopilot. If we learn to retake manual control of the deepest parts of our consciousness, we can access the extra-dimensional internet and do all sorts of cool stuff. And just like the physical world's internet looks and sounds like magic to someone 1,000 years ago, this extra-dimensional internet that we're all connected to sounds like psychic magic, but will soon just be the expected result from our understanding of the reality. A understanding which the current limitations of the materialist paradigm prevent us from recognizing.
3) They claim without evidence that the materialistic dogma has become very strong in science. Im suspicious of this claim and think it requires evidence.
Really? It's pretty self evident. Everything in science is geared towards the materialistic dogma.... and anyone who goes against that dogma gets berated, like how Baal has responded to me.
Here I'll let Rupert Sheldrake explain, he does it better than me:
I think you may have misunderstood what the definition of materialism was, and the rest of your confusion sprang from there. Hopefully that talk and my comments will clarify things. If I misinterpreted you and this was unhelpful, please lemme know and I'll try to hear ya better
That little fraudulent shit and her 3rd eye could claim James Randy million and feed her village for years.... she could easily raise billions and feed all the poor in all of fucking India, then become the most influencial and beneficial human being in all of history, but NO... she doesn't because she is culturarly against the west or some stupid shit, and none of the hundreds of charlatans step up either.
An ex-magician that thinks simple tricks with batteries is real magic is like a chemist believing he can turn led into gold, it is the epitome of ironic stupidity.
and anyone who goes against that dogma gets berated, like how Baal has responded to me.
Because you haven't provided the slightest form of evidence about extraordinary claims, you posted a stupid manifesto wich again isn't evidence of anything besides perhaps your intellectual dishonesty.
If I claim I shit bricks of gold and i dont offer any proof of it, non-believers aren't dogmatic, believers are, just like you.
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Last edit: 07/12/2018 23:38
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Stroggoz New Zealand. Dec 07 2018 06:03. Posts 5296
Ok so if they defined scientific materialism as 'matter as the only reality, and that matter excludes consciousness', you say that scientists don't actually say that matter excludes consciousness, so in fact it is not self evident that scentists beleive this at all. And yes, the view that consciousness springs up from organized matter is a very reasonable one, they just don't understand it, and no one uses the word 'magically springs up', rather they say it is an emergent property of the organism, and that we simply don't really understand how it works but can guess as to the evolutionary causes for these adaptations or mutations-at best.
I'm aware there has been some dogma in science about the limitations of what animal minds are capable of. There was a school in psychology called behaviorism who viewed the mind as a black blox and that animals were simply response stimilu machines (behavourism being on a big decline since the mid-20th century though), I havn't met anyone that's described themselves as this type of materialist and made claims saying that humans are not conscious. Because of this, it is not self evident to me that there is a widespread 'materialist dogma' in the sciences, it would also not be self evident to people who are not working in the sciences, which is 99% of the population.
Going back to the claim that 'matter is the only reality', this just suffers the same problem as words like physicalism. Since our definition of matter is constantly changing due to new discoveries, It's like saying 'everything is reality'. It's just a pointless tuatology that offers zero insight. if we discover that the brain has electrical activity, it becomes part of matter. if we discover the world is made of 1 dimensional strings, it becomes part of matter, or the physical.
you say the materialists imply this view: "- since your mind is just the result of activity of the brain, and activity of the brain is just stimulus response with the environment, we aren't actually having thoughts."
The first concept 'mind', is a general concept, not particularly useful for specialized scientific research but when people use it, the word means a lot of things, uncounscious and conscious activity, basically anything to do with thought, and of anything that is psychological in nature. It is about as reasonable of an assumption that the mind is a result of activity in the brain, just as flexing arm muscles is a result of proteins in the arm, the nervous system, ect, or that the digestive system is the result of acids in the stomach, ect, and all sorts of things located in the human body. We don't observe consciousness in plants and rocks so there is no reason to beleive those objects have it-it defies basic observation.
The second view that 'activity of the brain is stimulus response with the environment' has simply shown to be false in cognitive science about a million times, if it is even a coherent theory.
I agree that the second view imply's we have no thoughts, in fact i think it would probably imply that just about everything in biology is false.
I think that consciousness and free will exist in human beings because we observe them to be there, and our immediate observations are the highest form of evidence, far outweighing scientific theories that go through constant modification.
I don't think i agree with your analogy about consciousness and transceivers-the view that the brain secrets thought seems pretty obvious to me, like i think we should view the brain as any other organ. I feel people are very irrational about this, it's just like claiming legs are the basis of walking, or arms are the basis of throwing. brains are the basis of thought.
edit: well actually, i remember a few philosophers that argued consciousness didn't exist in humans now, daniel dennet being one. Yeah, i think the view is crazy, since it denies our immediate experience.
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I dont think you are helping at all Stroggoz in fact the opposite, you are debating the most reasonable part of his claims, discussing the details of the manifesto instead of adressing all the daft things he is saying.
Using the creationist example again, its like discussing the inacurancies of carbon dating as a dating method with a man who believes that the noah ark literally happened, you are not helping him but validating his position as rational, that if only you could convince him about the carbon dating issue he is going to be like "oh you are right, the bible is a lie".
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Stroggoz New Zealand. Dec 07 2018 06:45. Posts 5296
Ok, i don't want to go through all of the sheldrake video.
The first dogma that nature is mechanical or machinelike, i may agree with this to some extent that it is a dogma. It has certainly been true since the enlightenment-up until now, that philosophers have often claimed that animals and humans are just complex automata. Cartesian physics stated that animal's were just complex automata, and that humans were different because we had the soul as well as the body. And now we have computer scientists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists claiming that we are just complex machines, making the same mistake that descarte made, imo.
The fact is science has made many of the most impressive leaps forward by creating abstract theoretical, and simplistic principles of an underlying structure of reality. simplifying phenomena until they are deterministic or probabilistic has revealed to us many of the principles of nature. And those principles have such extraordinary explanatory power because they are easy, simply to understand, and can be used to deduce further principles. Mathematics does this better than anything. The STEM fields all make serious use of this, but it has it's limitations. These acheivements in no way imply that we are all complex machines of course, they should be understood as limited explanations of reality, and there are many things that we don't understand and never will.
2) already adressed
3) how is it a dogma that the laws of nature are fixed since the big bang? Im not a physcist but it seems like It's a very reasonable assumption.
4) Not sure what he means by 'evolution has no purpose', evolution does have a purpose, to propagate the species. That's the purpose.
5) while genetics is being constantly updated and new discoveries are coming out all the time, at the time it seems very reasonable to claim that everything that you inherit is in your genes. why would this be a dogma?
6) already adressed
7) adressed
8) lol ok. This guy is a charlatan until proven otherwise if he is claiming telepathy exists, in the supernatural sense of the word. I mean ofc we can read people's expressions and have mirror neurons to picture other people's mental states, but that is not what people mean by telepathy.
He seems like a charlatan to me, but i partly agree with his first 'dogma'. They get progressively crazier from there.
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Stroggoz New Zealand. Dec 07 2018 06:51. Posts 5296
well i made that post having read up to number 7 of the manifesto. Coming back to it, it gets progressively crazier from there. Yes, point 11 claims that people talk to the dead. That is obviously pseudo-science, but yeah i don't get any enjoyment out of debating things that are just crazy as it is not interesting. Berating people for beleiving things you think are ridiculous is not helpful either. Did this manifesto really get 300 doctorates to sign it?
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On December 07 2018 04:37 Baalim wrote:
That little fraudulent shit and her 3rd eye could claim James Randy million and feed her village for years.... she could easily raise billions and feed all the poor in all of fucking India, then become the most influencial and beneficial human being in all of history, but NO... she doesn't because she is culturarly against the west or some stupid shit, and none of the hundreds of charlatans step up either.
An ex-magician that simple tricks with batteries is real magic is like a chemist believing he can turn led into gold, it is the epitome of ironic stupidity.
and anyone who goes against that dogma gets berated, like how Baal has responded to me.
Because you haven't provided the slightest form of evidence about extraordinary claims, you posted a stupid manifesto wich again isn't evidence of anything besides perhaps your intellectual dishonesty.
If I claim I shit bricks of gold and i dont offer any proof of it, non-believers aren't dogmatic, believers are, just like you.
Lol this post is so standard baal. I can feel the contempt
On December 07 2018 05:51 Stroggoz wrote:
well i made that post having read up to number 7 of the manifesto. Coming back to it, it gets progressively crazier from there. Yes, point 11 claims that people talk to the dead. That is obviously pseudo-science, but yeah i don't get any enjoyment out of debating things that are just crazy as it is not interesting. Berating people for beleiving things you think are ridiculous is not helpful either. Did this manifesto really get 300 doctorates to sign it?
Thanks for your posts Stroggoz, I've appreciated hearing your perspective.
Yes, they did get those signatures and I predict the list will continue to grow as time goes by and evidence accumulates. There's a scientific case being built despite a very hostile environment, so it's a little slow moving, but when the paradigm finally shifts we'll get a much deeper understanding of reality. I understand why the theory sounds crazy to you and appreciate your candor.
You agree about the importance of evidence and claim that you love science, yet nothing you've said seems to demonstrate that fact -- something you have in common with tutz. I think you want to see yourself this way but you are not. I mean, the first guy I looked up from your panel of scientific experts is someone who studies parapsychology, which is a pseudo-science. And then we have Rupert Sheldrake and other people who are associated with Deepak Chopra and a whole host of pseudoscientific fields of study. One thing they have in common: they all have something to sell, literally. Interesting how quick they are to bring up QM in that paper yet I could not find a single one of them having a background in physics.
Why do you dismiss these people as pseudo scientists? What is the root of this dismissal?
Because parapsychology is not a science and you presented these people as well respected scientists who are leading a paradigm shift that we should embrace. Your basic argument is that these people are ahead of their time, and all of this stuff you're promoting will be well-accepted science soon. Except a field like parapsychology has been coming up empty-ended for over 100 years. You think this is the next heliocentrism and contemporary scientists are the Church, but we live in the information age, not the 16th century. The truth has every chance to come out and it eventually does. Your view is basically a well-disguised conspiracy theory at this point. Serious scientists are not concerned with this work because it's of poor quality. That's the simple explanation. Sorry that it's not attractive to you.
You want to know what my root problem is? It's that I actually study this stuff seriously, and I also think the paradigm we exist in must change if our species wants to survive, but I know that you've made a few too many wrong assumptions and what you're saying is easy to dismiss because it's amateurish, riddled with mistakes and misunderstandings. You bandy terms around that you know little about, and you don't understand that you're the one dismissing entire fields of study in order to promote your particular brand of anti-materalism.
You've created this boogeyman, which only has a kernel of truth to it, and that's of course always how false ideas persist: it's because they're not entirely false that they succeed in convincing others and gain momentum. My problem is that, while you are studying parapsychology and teaching yoga, I have been working to educate people on antireductionism for close to two years now, and it is people like you and these excuse for scientists that are making my job much harder. I'm aware of how harsh that sounds, but it's true. You (and the people you look up to) keep propagating the notion that there are only two options, either we are reductionist materialists or we have to embrace a dualistic supernatural worldview.
This is not a serious debate in academia, it hasn't been since the 60s. And it's not because "academia is biased in favor of materalism", it's because it's over. The work that's been done in physics by Gibbs, Boltzmann, Maxwell and Prigogine and the work of second-order cyberneticians has made both of these worldviews impossible to subscribe to. There is overwhelming evidence against the both of them. Somehow I don't think you would have been able to cherry-pick your way into your current belief system if you had grown up around the Macy conferences instead of the M&L stuff. It's a real shame, in my view.
This is where the materialist bias I mentioned earlier comes into play. Tarnishing these scientists with the label of "pseudoscience" stems from the materialist belief system which pretty much every person is taught when they're inducted into the scientific community. Sheldrake's done great work, and plenty of other people like him have been dismissed just because the topics they research seem so ridiculous to the materialist perspective
Plain old circular reasoning here, using your presupposition to validate your conclusion. Also, how do you know this extremely controversial figure has done great work? You've said it yourself, you are not an expert (an understatement). So you'll trust your own experiences above everything else when it comes to the paranormal, but when it comes to science, suddenly you trust other people's opinions -- the marginalized scientists -- over your own experience, and the experience of people working in those fields. Somehow I don't think you follow the same model when it comes to climate sciences. Interesting how those mainstream scientists aren't "bad"/dogmatic.
Regarding having something to sell, you don't think the mainstream scientists that y'all consider to be legit don't have something to sell too? That they don't have personal benefit which comes from preventing this paradigm shift? Remember, scientists are humans with all the flaws humans have. That's the main reason science is not actually practiced objectively like it's supposed to, because we have a bunch of scientists who have not done the personal work to get their ego in check and dismantle their implicit biases. Yes, the scientists I'm promoting are biased too. We gotta be honest about everyone's bias and limitations, and factor it in when examining the research. That applies to the mainstream accepted scientists and the marginalized ones.
Most scientists aren't selling shit, actually. Or if they are, they make very little money off of their contributions. Now let's contrast that to Deepak Chopra shall we?
Thank you for proving my point. Two parapsychologists with no contributions to the field of physics, except for one guy's work with lasers. Studying physics for a few years and going rogue supernaturalist is hardly the type of guys you need in order to sell these guys as experts/renown scientists to a bunch of skeptics. This is what wikipedia says about taggart's only contribution to parapsychology, remote viewing: "A number of scientific reviews of the SRI (and later) experiments on remote viewing found no credible evidence that remote viewing works, and the topic of remote viewing is regarded as pseudoscience."
This is definitely one of the hardest parts to explain, cause it's like people from two different worlds trying to understand each others behavior. Also you have to add in the skeptics effect on demonstrations.
It really isn't. The world now speaks the same language, it's called money (and power), and what has led to its ability to cause different cultures to constantly interact with one another is called globalism. They are not being kept in a cold dark cell with no access to the internet or the ability to gain financially from other countries. These videos are published on YouTube for christ's sake. You can bet they are attracting Westerners too. And these videos you're sharing are also always including skeptics... and now you're saying the skeptics can mess up their psychic powers and that might be why they don't do it. Isn't that a little disingenuous and contradictory?
While I know about the randi challenge, I doubt it's well known in India and other parts of the world, and getting to the USA to prove it isn't an easy task even if someone did hear about it. It's funny how we westerners just assume that since a magician put out a million dollar challenge, every person on the planet who could win the challenge must know about it and be motivated to prove him wrong and get some money. That's the ethnocentrism I'm talking about.
What's funny is how blatant your dodging this point is and how inconsistent your responses have been. Regardless of what you believe they think over there in India, I got you backed into a corner when you admitted you would do the challenge, which means there are many more people like you out there who know about it and would do it too, and yet it has never happened. And it's not that people are not aware of the challenge. There have been plenty of people who have tried to do the challenge and they all fail. People much like you. It's all been recorded, over and over again, and they always come up with neat justifications as to why "it has always worked, or it works most of the time, but for some reason it doesn't work here."
Then like I said, generally people who have developed these skills aren't interested in showing them off. The girl from India and her guru are an exception, not the norm.
Anyone who has traveled to India knows that this isn't true. The place is swarming with swindlers who pretend to have superpowers. Westerners who travel on spiritual journeys often get scammed by people who prey on them, knowing exactly what it is they are searching for.
The people who are generally more eager to show off and win a challenge, usually also are less adept. That's where the skeptic effect comes into play, cause the consciousness of people observing effects the results, and you need to be adept in order to overcome them. So if the people who do actually have powers and show up for the challenge are likely to be weak at doing it, there's a good chance they won't be able to perform in that scenario. I'm assuming that the majority of people who have tried to meet Randi's challenge are just charlatans thinking their gimmick could be good enough. If any did show up with a real power, it's also likely that they would have trouble performing in that environment of a hostile skeptic.
Sigh. So you go from claiming that the scientists who are investigating paranormal abilities are ahead of their time, and soon it will all be accepted mainstream science, to arguing that the gaze of an "hostile" skeptic (how value judgment-laden is that!) is enough to prevent it from working. So much for you being a "science lover". Anyway, I've wasted enough time on this. Good luck to you on your journey.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
Oh and Stroggoz, you should read more on this topic, you have some important misunderstandings of your own as well. Dennett is certainly not making the claim that "consciousness doesn't exist in humans" or "denying our immediate experience". It's kind of silly to think one of the world's most respected philosophers would fall for something that you've identified as obviously foolish, isn't it? Dennett's views have changed since he's read Terrence Deacon's "Incomplete Nature", but he never held this view in the first place. In fact, he went to war on Sam Harris' ass because it was his shoddy work that was promoting the "we're just robots without agency"-view. On a similar note, I saw on Harris' website that he recommends Gazzaniga's books, and yet, there is no sign in his own work on free will that he has read or comprehended it.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
Last edit: 07/12/2018 09:11
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Stroggoz New Zealand. Dec 07 2018 11:46. Posts 5296
ah, that was laziness on my part. I'm not familiar with dennets work. haha eminent philosophers beleive all sorts of crazy and completely idiotic things imo, so it wouldn't suprise me in the least.
One of 3 non decent human beings on a site of 5 people with between 2-3 decent human beings
On December 07 2018 07:47 Loco wrote:
Because parapsychology is not a science and you presented these people as well respected scientists who are leading a paradigm shift that we should embrace. Your basic argument is that these people are ahead of their time, and all of this stuff you're promoting will be well-accepted science soon. Except a field like parapsychology has been coming up empty-ended for over 100 years. You think this is the next heliocentrism and contemporary scientists are the Church, but we live in the information age, not the 16th century. The truth has every chance to come out and it eventually does. Your view is basically a well-disguised conspiracy theory at this point. Serious scientists are not concerned with this work because it's of poor quality. That's the simple explanation. Sorry that it's not attractive to you.
We're clearly not seeing the same thing when examining this situation so I think it's best we both stop spending time trying to impress our view upon the other.
You want to know what my root problem is? It's that I actually study this stuff seriously
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You study this seriously eh? I don't know much about you and maybe you'd be so kind as to tell me what you mean by this? Are you a research scientist who spends his time in labs? Or a grad student who studies this stuff daily? Or just an enthusiastic student who keeps up with it all via the internet?
I know that you've made a few too many wrong assumptions and what you're saying is easy to dismiss because it's amateurish, riddled with mistakes and misunderstandings. You bandy terms around that you know little about, and you don't understand that you're the one dismissing entire fields of study in order to promote your particular brand of anti-materalism.
Gonna have to agree to disagree here. I made it through my schooling by understanding these terms and making the arguments for the case you're trying to make. I do understand how hard it is to come from your perspective to the place I'm advocating, so it's not surprising to see your resistance. I'm not trying to say that all mainstream scientists have made the case for my view, I'm saying that scientists, including some mainstream ones, are putting together a theory and studies to back it, that there's a scientific way to understand these supernatural things which isn't based on dismissing it all as fake. I understand that for a skeptical mind, not enough evidence has been gathered to prove the theory, so my goal is mostly to make sure everyone is aware the theory exists in a hope that the more open minded can get involved in gathering the evidence. Also, for those wiling to take a bit of a leap based on the theory, it's possible to have personal experiences which prove the theory's validity. While a personal experience won't qualify as scientific enough to convince skeptics, it can be enough for a person to see the truth in this theory before the hard scientific data proves it.
Basically we're in a paradigm which says consciousness sprang up from unconscious matter. I think that's backwards. I think consciousness came first, and all matter sprang up from it, and all matter is endowed with at least some level of consciousness. Basically, panpsychism, which you can see explained by Christof Koch at a MLI event here. I think that if we just make that fundamental shift in our understanding, then suddenly all the paranormal becomes normal and can be explained within the scientific framework. When we stick to the old belief that matter is unconscious and somehow consciousness sprang up from it, then we label psychic activity as paranormal and anyone willing to study it as pseudo-scientists.
Loco, I'm grateful to you for taking the time to make so many replies and give me a refresher on the mindset of a skeptic. Also thanks to everyone else who commented, from Stroggoz to Baal to Spitfire and more. Your willingness to participate in the conversation has given me the opportunity to learn more, and I hope you all benefited as well
I'll leave with Rupert's google talk, where he does a good job of talking about the different theories of consciousness and some research supporting the one I'm advocating for. And an explanation of scientific materialism from Mario Beauregard in the spoiler. If you want to learn more about other explanations for consciousness, these are good place to start the exploration
Few scientists are aware that what has been called the “modern scientific worldview” is predicated on a number of metaphysical assumptions—i.e. hypotheses about the nature of reality—that were first proposed by some of the pre-Socratic philosophers (Burtt, 1949). These assumptions, which several centuries later became associated with classical physics, include materialism—the notion that matter is all that truly exists, i.e. everything in the universe is composed of collections of material/physical particles and fields (*the terms ‘materialism’ and ‘physicalism’ are used interchangeably in this article)—and reductionism, the idea that complex things can be understood by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things such as tiny material particles. Other assumptions include determinism, the notion that future states of physical or biological systems can be predicted from current states, and mechanism, the idea that the world works like a machine.
During the 19th century, these assumptions hardened, turned into dogmas, and coalesced into a belief system that came to be known as “scientific materialism” (Burtt, 1949; Sheldrake, 2012). This belief system implies that mind and consciousness—and all that we subjectively experience (e.g. our memories, emotions, goals, and spiritual epiphanies)—are identical with or can be reduced to electrical and chemical processes in the brain, and these brain processes are ultimately reducible to the interaction between basic physical elements. Another implication of this belief system is that our thoughts and intentions cannot have any effect upon our brains and bodies, our actions, and the physical world, since the mind cannot directly affect at a distance physical and biological systems. In other words, we human beings are nothing but complex biophysical machines. As a result, our consciousness and personality automatically vanish when we die.
The ideology of scientific materialism became dominant in academia during the 20th century—so dominant that a majority of scientists started to believe that it represented the only rational view of the world. This dominance has seriously constricted the sciences and hampered the development of the study of mind, consciousness, and spirituality. Furthermore, faith in this belief system as an exclusive explanatory framework for reality has compelled many scientists to neglect certain aspects of the subjective dimension of human experience. This has led to a severely distorted and impoverished understanding of ourselves and our place in nature (Beauregard and O’Leary, 2007; Nagel, 2012; Wallace, 2012).
Over a century ago, physicists discovered phenomena, at the atomic level, that could not be accounted for by classical physics. This led to the development of a revolutionary new branch of physics called quantum mechanics (QM). This “new physics” has convincingly refuted the metaphysical assumptions underlying scientific materialism. For example, QM has called into question the material foundations of the world by showing that atoms and subatomic particles are not really objects—they do not exist with certainty at definite spatial locations and definite times. Rather, they show “tendencies to exist,” forming a world of potentialities within the quantum domain (Heisenberg, 1976). Moreover, physicists have discovered that particles being observed and the observer—the physicist and the method used for observation—are somehow linked, and the results of the observation seem to be influenced by the physicist’s conscious intent. This phenomenon led towering figures of QM (such as Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, John von Neumann, and Eugene Wigner) to propose that the consciousness of the physicist is vital to the existence of the physical events being observed, and that mental events, such as intention, can affect the physical world. This interpretation of QM is supported by well-known living physicists (such as Freeman Dyson, Henry Stapp, Paul Davies, and Andrei Linde).
Although QM has invalidated the metaphysical assumptions associated with scientific materialism, several contemporary scientists and philosophers still hold to this belief system and, therefore, adopt a very narrow view of what humans are and can be. They firmly believe that science is synonymous with methodological and philosophical materialism; further, they are convinced that the view that mind and consciousness are simply by-products of brain activity is an incontrovertible fact that has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt (Dossey, 2015).
Undoubtedly, scientific methods based upon materialistic philosophy have been highly successful, not only in increasing our understanding of nature but also in creating numerous benefits for the world, such as greater control and freedom through advances in technology. Nevertheless, science is, first and foremost, a non-dogmatic, open-minded method of acquiring knowledge about nature through the observation, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. Science is not synonymous with materialism and should not be committed to any particular beliefs, dogmas, or ideologies.
Furthermore, materialist theories have utterly failed to explain how the brain could generate the mind and consciousness. Thus, these theories cannot solve the “hard problem” of consciousness, the problem of explaining how and why we have phenomenal experiences (or qualia; Chalmers, 1995). In addition, these theories are unable to account for a plethora of empirical findings that are considered to be anomalous with regard to the materialist framework. This leads me to Thomas Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions.
On December 07 2018 17:15 k2o4 wrote:
Also thanks to everyone else who commented, from Stroggoz to Baal to Spitfire and more. Your willingness to participate in the conversation has given me the opportunity to learn more, and I hope you all benefited as well
I didnt benefit at all, I probably got aids because of this thread
Here's an article written by a physics prof who does a little bit of science history that does a good job showing that the anti-mainstream/maverick scientist narrative in this openscience paper is sensationalistic and unfounded. Quoting a preview:
There are three categories of scientists (MDs included):
Those who do mainstream science.
Those mainstreamers who bend the mainstream.
Those who leave the mainstream and turn into crackpots.
The overwhelming majority of scientists belong to the first category. Scientists including Galileo, Newton, Dalton, Crick and Watson, Planck, and Einstein belong to the second category. People in the third category may once have been accomplished scientists in the first category; however, for various reasons, they left the mainstream science, and with it, science itself. People like Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, Dr. Oz, Rupert Sheldrake, Fritjof Capra, and the authors of the “manifesto,” by their own admission, are no longer mainstream scientists. And certainly they don’t belong to the second category!
Since Pruett’s main argument for the extolment of the post-materialist “science” is his characterization of the authors of the manifesto as “mavericks” on par with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Einstein, it is crucial to debunk this characterization and to demonstrate that these four scientists, as well as all other giants of science, were in fact mainstreamers.
There is a huge difference between introducing revolutionary ideas within the confines of the mainstream science and irresponsibly throwing in nonsense and calling it “revolutionary” simply because the mainstream scientists don’t accept it. The mainstreamers’ opposition to both types of ideas is a healthy reaction to the subversion of cherished and experimentally tested prevailing theories. The same mainstreamers who oppose a new idea eventually become its supporters once evidence verifies its validity. That is how the mainstream bends! On the contrary, a pseudoscientist’s ad hoc gibberish gets thrown out of the mainstream—along with its proposer, if the latter insists on the unproven, untested, and unsubstantiated idea.
Additionally, I clicked on the Rupert Sheldrake vid above, and again I was stricken by the way that these people frame things based on a half-truth from the very beginning. First sentence of the abstract: "We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head." This is another way of saying that everyone and their dog believes that the brain is the mind, or the mind only depends on the brain. Now what the average uninformed person thinks is irrelevant, but those who have studied a little have thought otherwise based on neuroscience that dates back to the 1920s, that's way before the more recent pioneering work done in embodied cognition that opposes this theory and has a lot of empirical backing. It's been known for a long time for instance that a newborn baby doesn't have a mind, an ego, yet they do have a brain. The nervous system has not been "marked" or imprinted by experience yet, and without memories of previous experiences, without a body schema, there can be no mind. This isn't "forbidden knowledge", it's basic neurobiology.
In order to have a mind, the whole of the organism has to participate, including the brain. Experimentally, if you put a sentient organism in a sensory deprivation tank, in weightlessness in water, despite a healthy brain with acquired memories, the organism will lose consciousness. There can be no consciousness without perfect circulation of information between an autonomous organism and its environment. It's the integration of various functions of the organism that give rise to this body schema, which is to say that it gives rise to consciousness as mere reflexes are replaced with efficacious behavior within an environmental niche -- learned behavior as to what will allow the organism to maintain its structure. There is no hierarchy of value here with the brain being the one responsible for consciousness, there is only a hierarchy of functions, and all functions are dependent on other functions, other systems, in order to exist.
The similar point that consciousness is not localized in one part of the brain is not some great mystery outside of the mainstream either, its mainstream knowledge, yet it is often portrayed as being radical and used to justify belief in pseudoscience.That the mind cannot be reduced to the brain is not the same position as saying that a mind can exist without one.
On December 07 2018 17:15 k2o4 wrote:
Basically we're in a paradigm which says consciousness sprang up from unconscious matter. I think that's backwards. I think consciousness came first, and all matter sprang up from it, and all matter is endowed with at least some level of consciousness. Basically, panpsychism, which you can see explained by Christof Koch at a MLI event here. I think that if we just make that fundamental shift in our understanding, then suddenly all the paranormal becomes normal and can be explained within the scientific framework.
Yes, we're in this paradigm because all of the evidence favors it. The problem is not that paradigm. It's the reductionist sub-paradigm to it. I don't need to have panpsychism explained to me. I've been following Matthew Segal and Peter Sjöstedt-H (two well known panpsychist philosophers on YouTube) for nearly a decade and have engaged them in conversation more than once. I've read some Nietzsche, Bergson and Whitehead... I know enough about it and the philosophical development that has led to it to know that you are definitely not a panpsychist and your boner for supernaturalism will not be reconcilable with the position. Also, panpsychism is a bit of a joke in my view when we have theories like those of Terrence Deacon that have much more explanatory power re. the emergence of consciousness, replacing outdated unscientific teleology with the rich concept of teleonomy (or what he terms teleodynamics). If you ever feel like challenging yourself a bit, watch some of his lectures. I posted this one before, and it pokes fun at panpsychism early on .
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
