One big problem, as I mentioned here, and elsewhere, with ID as a hypothesis is that it is predicated on the idea that mind is “immaterial” (or at least “non-materialistic”) yet can have an effect on matter. That’s the basis of Beauregard and O’Leary’s book “The Spiritual Brain”, as well as of a number of theories of consciousness and/or free will. And, if true, it makes some kind of sense of ID – if by “intelligence” we mean a “mind” (as opposed to, say, an algorithm, and we have many that can produce output from input that is far beyond anything human beings can manage unaided, and can in some sense be said to be “intelligence”), we are also implicitly talking about something that intends an outcome. Which is why I’ve always thought that ID would make more sense if the I stood for “Intentional” rather than “Intelligence”, but for some reason Dembski thinks that “intention”, together with ethics, aesthetics and the identity of the designer, “are not questions of science”.
I would argue that intention is most definitely a “question of science”, but that’s not my primary point here.
What I’d like to do instead is to unpack the hypothesis (and it’s a perfectly legitimate hypothesis) that there is something that we term “mind”, and which is “immaterial” in the sense that it has no mass, and does not exert a detectable force, but which nonetheless exerts an influence on events.
Beauregard and O’Leary cite Henry Stapp, and say:
According to the model created by H. Stapp and J.M.Schwartz, which is based on the Von Neumann interpretation of quantum physics, conscious effort causes a pattern o neural activity that become a template for action. But the process is not mechanical or material. There are no little cogs and wheels in our brains. There is a series of possibilities; a decision causes a quantum collapse, in which one of them becomes a reality. The cause is the mental focus, in the same way that the cause of the quantum Zeno effect is the physicists continued observation. It is a cause, but not a mechanical or material one. One truly profound change that quantum physics has made is to verify the existence of nonmechanical causes. One of these is the activity of the human mind, which, as we will see, is not identical to the functions of the brain.
Well there is certainly some important unpacking to do here before we go any further. Beauregard and O’Leary appear to be saying that quantum effects are neither “mechanical [n]or material”. OK. In that case, I do not know of a single “materialist”! Nobody I know would claim that quantum effects do not exist. In which case, none of us are “materialists” and Beauregard and O’Leary have a straw man. I would also buy the idea that the brain itself is non-deterministic in a quantum sense – that what we do is not merely direct result of matter put into motion at the beginning of existence, but also fundamentally uncertain.
So I think that Beauregard and O’Leary have drawn their desired line in a very odd place. The difference between the people they dismiss as “materialists” and themselves is not that we “materialists” don’t think that quantum effects exist or are perfectly real. It’s between people who don’t think that these quantum effects have anything to do with intentional behaviour, and people who think that it’s where the leeway for “free” intentional behaviour resides. They go on to say (h/t to William for doing the typing):
In the interpretation of quantum physics created by physicist John Von Neumann (1903-1957), a particle only probably exists in one position or another; these probable positions are said to be “superposed” on each other. Measurement causes a “quantum collapse”, meaning that the experimenter has chosen a position for the particle, thus ruling out the other positions. The Stapp and Schwartz model posits that this is analogous to the way in which attending to (measuring) a thought holds it in place, collapsing the probabilities on one position. This targeted attention strategy, which is used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders, provides a model for how free will might work in a quantum system. The model assumes the existence of a mind that chooses the subject of attention, just as the quantum collapse assumes the existence of an experimenter who chooses the point of measurement.
Firstly, I find the idea that because doing something intentionally (focusing attention, for instance) has neural correlates demonstrates that intention, and thus mind, has physical effects extraordinarily naive (and their claim that it was not until the nineties that neuroscientists considered that thought could affect brain structure even odder, given that Hebb, their own countryman, died in 1985, is regarded as the “father of neuroscience” and is most famous for “Hebb’s rule” that “what fires together wires together”, and that “Hebbian learning” is fundamental to the notion of neural plasticity). But more to the point, is there any basis for concluding that something that we call an immaterial, non-mechanical but somehow quantum-real mind can “hold” brain patterns “in place” and thus affect the motor output, i.e. the act that implements the final decision?
One source cited is a paper by Schwartz, Stapp and Beauregard, which goes into some detail. There is an interesting critique by Danko Georgiev of the Stapp model here, and a reply by Stapp here (link is to a Word document with tracked changes still turned on!). So I’d be interested to know what the physicists here make of the physics.
But my problem with the argument is more fundamental, and relates to the concept of intention itself. I’m going to define “intention” in the plain-English sense of meaning “a goal that a person has in mind, and acts to try to bring about”. And I will use “quantum mind” to denote the putative non-material, non-mechanical but capable-of-inducing-effects mind apparently postulated by Beauregard and colleagues.
If a person has such a mind, then her intention, according to my definition, resides within it it. Which is fine. And her capacity to act to bring about the intended goal has something to do with the muscles she possesses, and the relationship between her mind and those muscles, which presumably goes via the brain. And let’s suppose that this quantum mind brings about changes in brain state that can “hold in place” a particular neural pattern of firing, possibly until it reaches execution threshold, and outflow to the muscles begins.
This is actually quite a good model of decision-making, and something that my own research deals with specifically – how do we inhibit a response to a stimulus that requires one until we are sure that our response is going to be the appropriate one?
The problem it seems to me is when we try to address the question: how is that goal selected? For example, in many circumstances, the proximal goal (find a pencil) subserves a more distal goal (write down your phone number) which in turn serves an even more distal goal (so that I can call you back when I’ve found the answer to your question) and so on (so that I can help you solve your problem; so that I can feel good about myself; so that I can check “problem solved” on my worksheet; so that you feel good about yourself; so that your children will be able to get home from school; etc). And all these goals require information. Depending on the information, the goals may be different, and in the light of new information, goals may change. In other words, to form an intention, the quantum mind needs a goal, and to form a goal, it needs information.
Where does it get that information? One possibility is the sensory system. In fact it’s hard to know where the information can come from otherwise. In order to solve your problem I have to know what it is, and in order to prioritise my goals I have to know more about your problem. That means I have to listen to what you are saying, and my brain has to react to the vibrations that arrive at my eardrum.
And that information has to get to the quantum mind. What the quantum mind decides must therefore be, in part, an output from the input of my body and brain.
So my very simple question to Beauregard, Stapp, Schwartz, O’Leary et al, is: in what sense is your postulated quantum mind anything more than part of the process by which as a person (an organism) I respond to incoming information with goal-appropriate actions? If the quantum mind is adding something extra to the process, on what basis is it doing so? If on the basis of incoming information, why is it not a result of that input? If on the basis on no information, in what sense are the decisions it makes anything more than a coin toss?
And, to IDers generally: if a divine mind can alter the configuration of a DNA molecule by means of somehow selecting from quantum probabilities those most likely to bring about some goal formed on the basis of information to which we are not privy, how could we tell that the resulting DNA molecule is the result of anything other than probabilities that are perfectly calculable using quantum physics? And if those molecules violate those probabilities – DNA molecules suddenly start to form themselves consistently into configurations highly improbable under the laws of quantum mechanics – on what basis would we invoke quantum mechanics, or even a quantum mind, to “explain” it?
I don’t think you can use “quantum” as an alibi for “anything improbable that we can’t explain”. If Divine intention is smuggled in under the guise of quantum indeterminacy, then how could we detect it? And if your inference is that Cambrian animals must have been intended because they are otherwise unlikely, how do you explain that in terms of quantum mechanics? And if quantum mechanics won’t do the job, we are back to square one:
How does mind move matter?
I suspect you are simply saying this because you consciously refused to look at the history of testing that has been done in this area. It is an extensive history and you have absolutely no excuse that you cannot find in on your own. A few minutes of Googling on the Internet will get you plenty of history.
I will give you this challenge even though I already know you have no clue.
The energies that move molecules within the nervous system are easily measured. They are in the range of about 0.001 to about 0.005 electron volts. The forces with which “walking” molecules can pull are in the range of tens of piconewtons.
Action potentials swing from about +40 mV to about -75 mV. EEG and EKG technology can pick up voltages a thousand times smaller than these. NMR and other technology are sensitive to even smaller changes in voltages.
We are immersed in a sea of electromagnetic radiation that pushes electrons around in just about anything that conducts.
So, given that we already know the energy levels at which the molecular systems of the brain and nervous systems of living organisms operate; and given the fact that we can measure energy levels far lower than are required to move electrons, atoms, and molecules around; given all that, what experiment do you propose that will detect “psi energy?”
I don’t think so in this case, William. I am sure that some mediums and psychics think that what they are doing is real, and aren’t intentionally fraudulent. Same with dowsers. But time after time, when asked to produce their claimed effects under protocols designed by professional magicians (i.e. people trained to simulate such effects) they cannot reproduce their skill.
I’m not even ruling it out a priori. My brother-in-law does a lot of dowsing, and it’s fascinating to talk to him. He doesn’t even think of it as “paranormal” – he thinks it’s a real effect. He might be right. But I’ve yet to see a rigorous protocol that demonstrated that dowsing works. Randi did one in Australia once, and it was really rather sad. The dowsers were absolutely confident they’d be able to pick the pipe with the running water. They performed absolutely no better than chance. They were extremely surprised.
It’s a field full of blatant frauds on the one hand, and honest people who, whatever they do, can’t seem to do it under rigorous protocols. Take those mediums who needed the name of the person to do their reading. Why? Because a name tells you one heck of a lot about a person. You don’t need to have paranormal powers to find that information out, although you may need unconscious skills you are not aware of possessing.
Fortunately, I never claimed that every case of gathering scientific data was amenable to blind protocols. In fact, I’ve already stated otherwise. Picking what would be a particularly absurd specific case and using it as if I had made such an example is, IMO, another case of you attempting to smear me for things I never said or implied.
Obviously meant as a rhetorical device to belittle & smear me.
My actual point has been that much of science is conducted in a manner that is predicated upon the materialist assumption that mind cannot directly affect non-local matter. Sheldrake’s article supports this argument by pointing out that a lot of science is conducted without even setting up protocols to guard against normal experimenter effects, much less mind-over-matter intrusions that experimenters – for the most part – don’t even believe exist.
You are, of course, free to inform me of the double and triple-blind protocols taught in universities and employed by mainstream science that are designed to check for and/or prevent non-local, mind-over-matter effects from intruding upon the research.
Or, you can continue your pattern of misrepresenting and smearing me.
Liz,
Your on-pattern smearing of an entire field of research and investigation without evidence is duly noted.
Your conflation of “science” and “the materialist ideological narrative masquerading as science” is duly noted. I have no bias against science; what I find problematic is the materialist ideological narrative that is currently masquerading as “science”.
Here is Sheldrake’s published study.
It is a hilarious example of precisely the lack of rigor he set out to discover in the scientific domains he investigated. Where is the blinding? Where are the inter-rater reliability reports? Where are his criteria for what constitutes “blinding” and “double blinding”? How do you even “double blind” a study without human participants? What is supposed to be “blinded”? What equivalent terms were sought? For instance did he search for “anonymised”? or “shuffled”? or “randomised”? or “inter-rater reliability”? Did he even look at the methods of each paper to determine what kind of precautions should have been taken, and ascertain whether they were?
Apparently not.
Then he phoned a number of science departments and asked two questions:
1.Do you ever use blind experimental methodologies in your department?
2.Are students taught about blind methodologies and experimenter effects in general?
Well, he should have thought about “experimenter effects” when he designed those questions. What is a chemist going to respond when asked “Do you ever use blind experimental methodologies in your department?” Well, we know what one answered:
Quite so. How do you measure what’s going on in a test tube blindfold? It’s as well his next words were not reported.
What else do you think is behind the idea? If experimenter expectations (and patient expectations) are not behind the nature of the placebo effect, what do you think is? What do you think the experimenter effect thinks is?
Here’s news for you, William: “materialist” scientists think that the placebo effect includes physical effects produced by the expectations and mindsets of the patients and the experimenters
And that’s precisely why we do double blind controlled studies.
In fact a number of studies have shown (review here) that naloxone, a drug that blocks the effect of opiates also blocked the placebo effect, suggesting that the mechanism of the placebo effect in question was the production of endorphins, a brain-produced opiate analogue, that were also blocked by the naloxone.
In other words, they nailed the placebo effect to an actual molecule produced by the body in response to the patient’s expectations.
Imaging studies have also supported this hypothesis.
It’s not the only placebo effect of course, but that should put paid to your idea that materialist scientists don’t think that expectations cause physical effects. Of course they do.
It’s just that they don’t think that any old expectation can produce any old physical effect, for example making your number come up on a roulette table, or a DNA sequence in some cell from some other organism appear on demand.
Since Stapp is a well-regarded physicist for other work he has done, I thought it worthwhile to try to understand his arguments. I took a look at the references in the original post and at some of the documents on his web site.
Stapp has answers for your point and also for the original question about how the mind senses the world. However, his answers depend on a very special interpretation of QM and on an idealistic ontology for the universe, which some people who use his ideas may not be accounting for. Also, he does not accept psi phenomena, so it would be wrong to use his ideas to justify them.
For the freedom of an agent, Stapp does not rely on the randomness of the result of a quantum measurement. Instead, he focuses on the first step in the Copenhagen description: deciding what to measure. He appeals to von Neumann’s formulation. His view of what von Neumann said (over 80 years ago) is that:
He also says:
In short, agents can act for their reasons without being determined by the previous physical state of the universe.
He has been challenged by (eg Donaldson) saying the this formulatiom is meant to apply only to a given experiment and so the agents choices could have been determined outside of that context, but he does not accept this. He believes that the freedom specified in the above takes priority.
As to how immaterial minds can know about the world, I believe that follows from his idealist description of the universe:
So it seems to me that he is saying the mind has direct contact with the quantum state of the universe.
He also says “Sense experiences are outcomes of probing actions initiated by the individual person.” and that the mind can control the brain’s sensing actions using the Quantum Zeno Effect. So that may be another way for the mind to access information.
How would the mind then read the results captured in the brain?
Finally, Stapp has no truck with psi effects. I understand that he sees the mind and brain as linked as one person, with the mind only able to achieve effects in the physical world by acting through its brain.
If people want to appeal to Stapp to justify their world view, it seems they must recognize he is using an non-mainstream, likely idiosyncratic interpretation of QM and that he relies on a mentalistic ontology of the universe to make it work. As well, he does not claim that the mind’s intentions have any effect outside of the associated person’s brain.
(Earlier I wrote about decoherence which many quantum woo purveyors ignore. Stapp is well of aware of it: his approach assumes the a mixed (decohered) brain state.)
It seems to me that these ideas simply add things to the periphery of human mentality.
I understand that the brain is constrained/prompted by the environment (the so-called affordances), will leverage the capabilities of the senses (like frequency analysis in the ear), may rely on the muscles/nerves to coordinate the detailed, low-level actions of a limb. I also recognize that the precise connections of a brain depend on its history of interactions with the environment through the body and senses, especially during early development.
But surely all the “good” stuff happens in the brain, even if unconsciously? I’m thinking of things like:
– modelling our environment and ourselves by combining and interpreting the input from the senses;
– extracting meaning from language
– maintaining a personal identity (even if we suffer the horror of locked-in syndrome)
– setting goals, reasoning how to achieve them, and carrying out an action plan
– experiencing the taste of food or the smell or a rose
Is this not still the case even with embodiment?
Except that you seem to have made that narrative up. You have a straw man.
You asserted that psi research was the only domain of science that used rigorous blinding methodology. That is completely wrong. It often doesn’t even use rigorous blinding (rarely, in my experience) although it has to at least nominally blind, or nobody would pay any attention at all. In contrast in many scientific fields, including my own, rigorous blinding is de rigeur. So your narrative is wrong. If you bought it from Sheldrake he sold you a pup because his own research that produced the narrative was one of the worst examples of poor blinding that I’ve read.
You then accused “materialist” scientists of double blinding RCTs not because they were worried about “experimenter expectations” but something else, unspecified, instead of the “experimenter expectations” that in your view they should have been worrying about.
Again, you are 180 degrees wrong. It is precisely because of the effect of “experimenter expectations” and patient expectations that RCTs are double blinded.
Why else did you think we did it?
And you are the one accusing others of making “sweeping generalisations” about paranormal research, and of “poisoning the well”?
Here’s where I have a problem with Stapp (I can’t speak for or against the physics – could be interesting).
We know how trial and error learning works in physical terms. We probably know more about that than just about any other cognitive process, and we can model it so well we can make learning robots, pattern-learning algorithms, google can learn what products you might buy, and indeed, it’s the same, in essence, as the process proposed by Darwin to explain how populations “learn” how to survive an environment.
Let’s grant that information can be transferred from the postulated mind to the brain. How does he propose it is transferred the other way? And if it is transferred the other way, why postulated it at all? Why not just cut out the middle man?
If you really believe this – instead of just making accusations to get people angry – then you should be able to sit down and write up a set of experimental protocols that will fit your “world view” and will demonstrate without ambiguity the existence of things like “psi” and other nonmaterial “forces” that push atoms and molecules around in the brain.
The fact that you cannot do this is pretty clear evidence that you don’t know what you are talking about.
You look pretty silly accusing people of “materialism” or of “a materialistic ideological narrative” when you haven’t looked at any science in your entire life yet presume to be able to critique it. Puffery and hissing are not an argument.
You would be far more convincing if you simply demonstrated an alternative that actually works for everybody who uses it.
But you can’t do that, can you?
Lizzie,
When I first heard of Sheldrake, I took him seriously and looked into what he was doing.
Since then, I have been looking at him as an entertainer. I must admit that he has his Shtick down pretty well.
Perhaps I’ll have to start looking at WJM as an entertainer, though I doubt that he can match Sheldrake.
If the scientific credibility of design theory relies on psi phenomena, Darwinism is safe as houses.
Not in the sense that is under debate in this thread.
It’s not a straw man if that is actually what I have a problem with.
Stapp is using a combination of concepts from Werner Heisenberg and William James. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the ideas of decoherence figure prominently in his analysis in order to explain why different states of the brain become manifest.
The problem that I kept having with Stapp’s Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics was that Stapp was going through a lot of unnecessary analysis of quantum mechanics to explain phenomena that also occur at the classical level.
The “collapse of the wave function” is also a phenomenon in classical systems. Anyone who has learned the techniques of playing harmonics on a stringed instrument will be familiar with “collapsing the wave function” by suppressing certain harmonics by merely touching a vibrating string at a given point.
Many complex, classical systems can be reformulated as a superposition of states. There are many ways to do this, Fourier expansions being only one of many sets of orthogonal functions which can be added up to produce a given state. The more general mathematical area involved in this is Hilbert spaces.
Most of the mathematical analysis of quantum mechanics falls into the category of Hilbert spaces. And this is where I had my issues with Stapp. Just because he is speaking in the language of, and in the context of, quantum mechanics doesn’t mean he isn’t talking about classical systems that have the same behavior.
Everything he describes can simply be switched over to a classical system with the same kinds of properties and subjected to the same “collapsing of the wave function” upon a small perturbation.
From what we know at this point about the brain and the nervous systems of living organisms, there is little reason to think that quantum mechanics plays a role.
This is not to say that there aren’t “coherent states” that are maintained by being synchronized to either internal or external stimuli; such things are common in complex, classical systems. But the temperature ranges and the numbers of molecules involved make deBroglie wavelengths far too small and position sensitive to ever add up into a coherent state.
So, as I mentioned earlier, Stapp’s ideas can be read as an analogy to classical systems that can be described as a superposition of states, any one of which can be selected out by a “light touch.”
I’ve already pointed out that this is incorrect. I made no such assertion. I commented that it was interesting to find that out from Sheldrake’s article.
I guess you don’t know what “non-local” means, or else you’d realize this kind of placebo effect has nothing to do with the kind of non-materialistic experimenter effects I’m making a point about.
I didn’t “buy it’ from Sheldrake’s article; Sheldrake’s article is largely irrelevant to my point, other than it got me to thinking about the gaping ideological hole in any blind protocols mainstream science might be using. I was actually looking for the triple-blind paper wrt mediumship research when I stumbled on Sheldrake’s article, which had interesting information in it about the lack of normal blind protocols in hard-science research.
Sheldrake’s article is entirely about the materialist version of blind protocols, not about experimenter effects that might be caused non-locally via quantum collapse from a distance. THOSE protocols are the ones that have been developed by psi/mediumship researchers for non-material, non-local influences.
Why don’t you just stop playing word games and lay out an explicit research program and a set of research protocols that will demonstrate the “non-materialistic experimenter effects” you claim you know all about.
Presumably one would have to first develop the protocols designed to eliminate “non-materialistic experimenter effects” (based on some theory or other about what those are), apply them to some experiment which has a well-known result in which those protocols are not employed, and then see if the result is different with the new protocols.
If the result differs to a statistically significant degree, and positing psi phenomena is the most parsimonious way of accounting for the data, then — but only then(?) — we could begin having the conversation that William wants to have now.
WJM could start with any of the reference toxicity tests used to monitor the performance of any number of animal models used in these tests. Rainbow trout and copper would be a good choice for starters. In our experience it matters not (once proficiency in handling test animals, making dilutions, and use of standard lab equipment [balances, pH meters, conductivity, ect] has been demonstrated by technicians) if one person follows an experiment from start to finish or if one person starts the experiment, several others make daily water changes, and someone else in the lab takes down the experiment in the final results. There is absolutely no evidence to support WJM’s bald assertion that lab techs (or anyone else for that matter) the world around have any immaterial effects on experimental outcomes.
I doubt that WJM could describe which types of experiments should be blinded and why the need for blinding let alone put forth any coherent methodology to detect the thing he asserts exits. He has been asked now we will see if he delivers the support he always demands from others.
He will have to do it at least as convincingly as nine year old Emily Rosa did in debunking “therapeutic touch.”
This is a level of research ability that ID/creationists have never achieved or understood.
thanks for bringing Emily Rosa’s study into the conversation, MIke. I thought of it while I was running errands in town but forgot about it upon arriving home to a flooding house (damn ice maker tubing). WJM should take some time and study this article about how a young scientist’s simple experiment put TT advocates to shame. A great demonstration of the bogus nature of psi and other woo folks try to call science.
I’d like to know why William brought up the subject of parapsychology if he can’t point to any instances of psychic phenomena.
So he could demand that you have to demonstrate there are no instances of verified psychic phenomena.
Shifting the burden of proof and demanding you prove a negative is one of the oldest and lamest rhetorical evasive devices.
What conversation is that?
Of interest:
That’s a pretty decent collection site for published papers on psi research, for those so interested.
Great. A huge chunk of copypasta from a new age woo woo website, “The Institute of Noetic Sciences”. That always adds to a scientific discussion.
Some of Noetic’s highly publicized work:
“Afterlife Encounters”
“UFOs and the National Security State”
“Science of Spiritual Transformation”
All science so far!
WJM, you may or may not be aware that there is a congressionally mandated funding program (sadly) that funds all manner of nonsense. The program has also funded self-proclaimed astral voyager Marilyn Schlitz.
She is also mentioned in this rebuttal submitted to congress by Dr. Tm Gorski in response to the large number of $ being flushed down the toilet by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine(NCCAM) program.
this comment sums up the state of affairs in the world of woo:
have a read, William:
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Hearing/gorski2.html
To be fair, he did admit that he wasn’t proficient in science. Probably why he’s so enamored with all that new age woo and ID.
Does make one wonder why he keeps pontificating on things he doesn’t understand though.
(snip the woo)
More copypasta of new age woo. I wonder what the point is?
From Wikipedia:
Merit citation reads:
William J. Murray,
Everyone knows that Stargate Command is run by the U.S. Air Force, not Army intelligence!
Also from Wiki
“McMoneagle’s future predictions include the passing of a teenager’s “Right to Work” Bill,[16] a new religion without the emphasis of Christianity, a science of the soul,[17] a vaccine for AIDS,[18] a movement to eliminate television,[17] and a ‘temporary tattoo’ craze that would replace the wearing of clothing,[19] all of which were supposedly to take place between 2002 and 2006.”
Is there a point to your C&Ping of all this unverified nonsense?
Another interesting link, for those interested: The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities by Russell Targ
http://noetic.org/noetic/issue-twenty-two-may/the-reality-of-esp-a-physicists-proof/
Targ and Puthoff and Uri Geller.
This is your evidence?
Wow. I knew those gullible enough to support ID often are into all sorts of other anti-science woo-di-woo, but I’ve never seen such a prime example.
I wonder if he thinks his garden is filled with pixies and fairies too?
Wait until he starts citing the Time Cube Guy.
Uri Geller is or was a fraud and liar who was caught cheating on camera. He is an accomplished stage magician who chooses to be a fraud rather than a performer.
For dishonest people, it is easier to fool scientists than to fool other stage magicians.
If remote viewing can actually be done, it seems odd that only confirmed liars and cheats can do it.
WJM, here is something that you might be interested in pursuing. It seems like it would be right up your alley. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s an amazing device.
The Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface
http://www.quantum-biofeedback.net/how.html
Another item you might find convincing is Dan Dial’s molecular enhancer. Now you might ask what is a ‘molecular enhancer’ and who but to answer but Dan himself:
and as you can see from the description above there is ample evidence for its efficacy!
I remember when Johnny Carson set him up and allowed him to expose himself on TV.
Johnny was a fellow magician, not a physicist.
You said:
Are you trying to claim that: when you said that “the only area where blind, double-blind and triple-blind protocols are stringently employed is that which doesn’t assume a materialist perspective – psi research” you were saying something other than “psi research is the only domain of science that uses rigorous blinding methodology”?
Because I don’t see the difference. Mine seems an exact paraphrase of your words, except I said “rigorous” instead of “stringent” and “domain” instead of “domain”.
And what makes you think that Sheldrake’s article is correct, when he himself violates the very principles he is advocating in the “research” he did to support his claim? Why should I believe there was no “experimenter bias” in his research, when his literature search methodology is so shoddy, and so patently biased in favour of a conclusion consonant with his own position? And, more to the point, why should you?
“
Yes, Carnack the magnificent knows all and sees all……
my better half informs me that James Randi’s consultation with Carson and his staff set the conditions which prevented any tomfoolery by Geller.
Not everyone has free will – but William J. Murray does.
Not everyone can apprehend moral truth – but William J. Murray can.
Not everyone has psychic powers – but I’ll bet William J. Murray has.
Could someone text me when this self-proclaimed Torch-Bearer of Rational Civilization is about to ascend to heaven, I’d like to watch.
Or at least set the video.
On the one hand, we have William citing lots of examples of extremely badly controlled experiments supporting psi. On the other hand we have William claiming that psi is the only (yes, William, you said “only”) area of science where stringent blinding is done, apparently on the basis of an extremely unstringent literature search on protocols to prevent experimenter bias conducted by an experimenter with a vested interest in psi research, and who has been frequently accused (with justification) of shoddy experimental protocols and inadequate blinding.
William: if you seriously think that psi effects have been demonstrated using stringent blinding protocols, please cite such studies. And if you think that non-psi effects have been demonstrated in science that may be compromised by the lack of stringent blinding protocols, please cite such studies.
I can probably help you with the latter. So could lots of scientists. That’s because we are trained to spot holes in blinding protocols and opportunities for experimenter bias.
It’s the former I’m interested in.