gloggawogga:
Its still all guesswork about poeple's personal experience which you have not experienced.
Actually, it is the reasoned appraisal of a certain type of evidence, based on precedence and psychological understanding. Anecdotal evidence
is often wrong due to the exact reasons I've described. This fact, all things being equal, discredits anecdotal evidence as being compelling support for a remarkable idea. This is a
fact; it has nothing to do with individually accusing people of lying. They are not -- their experiences would be genuine. They are simply underestimating, due to unreliable memory, the number of times telepathy
didn't work, which would in turn hurt their ability to see their 'evidence' for what it is: Coincidence.
This only applies to those observations of telepathy that
are simply coincidental, and not to what you're describing -- a
second explanation for the evidence of telepathy, further support for the idea that it is not, in fact, psychic communication. As you say, subliminal communication or predicting what someone will say or do is possible based on the intimacy of a close bond -- evidence that anecdotal evidence, not being scientifically controlled, is more vulnerable to misinterpretation.
Whatever percentage of the anecdotal evidence for telepathy owes its existence to each of the above possibilities (or others, of course) is irrelevant -- the fact is, for the reasons above (and many more like them),
anecdotal evidence is not compelling support for a scientific claim. Can we agree on this, please? I think we do agree here, and I don't know why we're unable to reach common ground.
But experiences like those of my wife and I don't lack credibility.
Ahhhh, I see where some of the confusion might be. All I mean by credibility is 'trustworthy support of the presented claim.' The presented claim is telepathy and, so, experiences like those of your wife and you
do lack credibility
in terms of supporting evidence for telepathy.
I'm not implying that your experiences didn't
happen, of course, just that they are not compelling evidence for psychic ability.
I understand that you are not arguing in favor of telepathy. I am perceiving, though, that you are arguing that telepathy should be taken with some seriousness as a scientific claim (however ultimately incorrect). In scientific terms, telepathy has equivalent evidentiary standing with an invisible leprechaun; certainly, not a claim to be taken seriously.
So if you get what I'm saying, it isn't that the evidence lacks credibility, its that the evidence is misunderstood.
I do understand what you're saying; I think we mean the same thing when we say 'lacks credibility
as evidence of telepathy' and 'misunderstood.
Look at the first post in this thread. I don't think the poster is lying. And I don't think the similarity of their experiences is just a coincidence. I simply think the poster doesn't understand how deeply he and his friend think alike, and therefore reacted to the drug in a very similar way.
Exactly. Either way,
not compelling, credible evidence for telepathy as the poster suggested.
We need a clearer language. I hear Dutch has a few less words?
Winding Vines:
I see you are rather smug with the idea of what science lays in front of us is the be al end all.
It is, at least with respect to knowledge about reality.
i mearly said that there are things humans expierence that go against what science states.
No, there aren't. There are things humans experience that science doesn't
understand, but nothing that goes
against science. Regarding those things science can't understand (i.e. dreams), it then follows that
we can't understand them and so we shouldn't start trying to identify them (i.e. prophetic dreams, memories of past lives, collective thought, etc).
say what oyu want but its a natural sense that we all have that just convey things to other people or people we know without words.
Of course -- body language, the other person knowing you so well that he or she begins to predict what you'll say or do, even things like pheromones and subtle, subconscious methods of carrying yourself or affecting the tonality of your voice. These are only poorly understood by science, but nothing that would require the acceptance of something as profound as telepathy. I have no problem with that; these things have been studied scientifically, and there is definitely something to them.
Is it possible that someone who may be in the same condition/state of mind/emotional level/familiarity of person(s) in company be able to experience the same as another without discussion of influencial factors, such as communicating feelings during the experience?
Entirely; but you'd need to present some scientific evidence of it if you wanted to suggest it as an explanation.
Just becuase you feel that your level of thinking is in some way more superior to mine in the matter of anecdotal evidence, dont even compare my statement to a leprechaun.
I made no disparaging remarks about your level of thinking, so please don't make it look as if I'm being confrontational. The leprechaun counter-example is
deliberately absurd because it illustrates what an arbitrary claim is -- it's a claim that
is possible but has no evidence to support it. The same is true of telepathy, and so, the two claims are analogous: To critically consider one, you have to critically consider the other in the exact same way.
I can say that there are bonds much deeper than what science can prove,
How can you say that? Where is your evidence? Science should be right alongside you when you're making claims about the world; whatever evidence that you have in support of these deeper bonds can be two things: Scientific, or "dismissable with contempt." If it's the former, then science will draw the same conclusions you do. If it's dismissable, then... you can't draw any conclusions from it at all.
becuase science is just a means of gathering these "proposed ideas" of what is "real" and what "isnt"
You should be a political speech-writer. You've managed to trivialize what is mankind's
one and only way of learning about reality as 'just' a means of gathering 'proposed ideas.'
I could be crucified by science by what i feel, but i do know that many friends, family members, and partners have felt the same with me.
And if you lived in Galileo's time, you'd be behind persecuting him for using science to contradict something you, your friends, your partners and your family members all would have felt: That the sun rotates around the Earth, which is at the center of the galaxy. Me? I'll trust science, the one method that actually
produces new knowledge about what is real -- nothing else does.
And maybe you should read this journal article that explains how the "power of prayer" has be scientifically proven to be an actual force in nature.
I have read of that study. No, the 'power of prayer' has not been 'scientifically proven' to be an 'actual force in nature.' There is, however, evidence that people who
believe they were healed by mystics do show greater recovery rates, and even remission rates of cancers. Before leaping to the idea that God is doing it (which would be illogical, given that he seems willing to let a whole lot of other people begging for his help die), however, they have presented the idea that the strong mental conviction of knowing you've been healed can have a strengthening effect on the body's health and vitality.
Regardless, you are going to see what you want to see,
No, actually. Scientists see what's
there, regardless of what they
want; that's how science works. It's the
other mystical worldviews that let people 'see what they want to see' -- because they have no means of judging right from wrong, real from unreal.
But just remember, some people only have what they believe, and science cant take that away.
Those people deserve pity, not deferential respect.
fastandbulbous:
?? Get it right dear boy (women don't tend to have 'ego' issues nearly as badly),
I've actually been diagnosed (Hare PCL-R, Likert Mach IV) as a socialized psychopath, so I have Superego issues, not Ego issues. The name comes from the reason I'm here -- to 'egotrip' with psychedelics as a form of self-therapy. Empower the superego, develop a conscience, not turn into an Enron exec.
Hey, you had to know you'd meet weird people on a psychedelics board
I may be wrong, but to discount ideas without understanding the basic principals behind them (I gather your not an electronics geek/ham radio enthusiast) is the sort of short sightedness that is usually only found in bodies like the Catholic church
Nice dig with the Catholic church reference --
someone knows how to push my buttons. I have an undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics, the 'Engineering' part containing many electronic engineering, signals and systems, solid state devices and electromagnetism courses. So I do know this stuff. Perhaps I was a little excessive when I condemned RF transmitters as so absurdly unlikely; I was addressing the other theory of quantum communication at the same time. Regardless, my
main point holds: Until you have evidence of it, turn the page and move on from what is an arbitrary claim.
stoned_baby:
And i really find it amusing reading you people being so dead sure that this thing is impossible, ridiculizing the idea.
Had you actually 'read us people,' you wouldn't have found anything nearly as amusing as what you've imagined: No one is claiming telepathy is impossible. I'm claiming it's arbitrary, and the others are either presenting alternate explanations for evidence of it, or supporting it through scientifically feasible conjecture as a valid scientific possibility.