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Spirit as Science

SMAC said:
Man's unfailing capacity to believe what he prefers to be true rather than what the evidence shows to be likely and possible has always astounded me. We long for a caring Universe which will save us from our childish mistakes, and in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary we will pin all our hopes on the slimmest of doubts. God has not been proven not to exist, therefore he must exist.
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I think Willow hit the nail on the head...
 
willow11 said:
Perhaps some scientist are not interested in spirituality? I don't think we need to invoke the great Conspiracy Theory Toothbunny here.

With things like Psi, every attempt to study it fails. Why would scientists keep trying to study something that they simply cannot or which they may have disproven? Even these facts are meaningless; in truth, many studies actually suggest that many humans believe their minds can control or influence external events, even when this is shown to be incorrect. It would seem to be ingrained in us to assume psi powers given the immediacy and potency with which our mind enacts changes in our unique internal worlds.

Note, that I don't think these sort of things have been disproven by science, but just that they have eluded study and are perhaps not something fit to be studied. That doesn't specifically speak to their truth or not.

Perhaps the entire world is actually a giant placebo-button? Maybe nothing we do makes any impact.
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Which would lead to a conclusion there is a basic divide between things of the spirit and science... :D
 
Psychic functioning has been proven time and time again in peer reviewed scientific journals. Even some prominant skeptics conclude results are statistically significant. By the standards of any other area of science psi has been proven.
 
^Can you back that up?

Journyman16 said:
Which would lead to a conclusion there is a basic divide between things of the spirit and science... :D
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Well, it could demonstrate a sort of complimentary relationship between the two. I'm talking about psi or extra-sensory powers by and large. As a spiritual subject, science has no real role to play in investigate psionic powers. In terms of measuring it physically, science has shown that it can't and concludes that it/they do not exist. Either you choose to therefore discard it; or you can explore it through other means. In this case, science and spirituality can compliment each other; where one fails, the other might step in.

Good grief, are you sick of hearing The Last fucking Post too?? :D
 
Willow, I cant link on my shitty phone, sorry. But if you google Dean Radin psychic evidence, it should be the first link, something like deanradin.com/evidence.html The page contains a number of peer reviewed journals, and the list is by no means exhaustive, theres plenty more out there!
 
^Fair enough. I can't get the page to load anyhow.

If I google that guy, I get way more negative information then otherwise. It seems that very few scientists seem to think his work is actually worthwhile. His field of study is parapsychology, which Wikipedia at least calls a pseudoscience.

This place was strange with an awesome name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab
Creepypasta in the making.

If you've read about the ganzfeld experiments, this may be interesting to you: http://drsmorey.org/bibtex/upload/Hyman:2010.pdf I can't say I've read it all, but there are pertinent bits.

I'm not saying that science has disproven psi powers, just that they, whatever they are, are neither predictable nor replicable. Science can at least confirm that.
 
Shame about the link, when im next at a comp, i will source you some stuff, i have quite a few links i can provide. Radin does get a hard time by many, but most of the work he sources on that page is by other researchers. I concede there is no definitive agreement on the legitimacy of the evidence, but i suspect that stems from a lack of objectivity from the more millitant skeptics, or even just a lack of awareness of the evidence so far. I shall return to this thread in about a week when i dont have to type on my wank phone, bear with me!
 
willow11 said:
Good grief, are you sick of hearing The Last fucking Post too?? :D
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O/T

Very much so. It is supposed to be to commemorate the fallen at a Dawn Service, NOT a commercial tag for whatever bloody thing they want to sell/promote. It's been bad enough at the Pies - Bombers game, but even that is now spectacle, not just a brief commemoration and minute of silence. They even played a song called 'One minute of silence' and there wasn't a single moment of quiet all through the bloody thing. :D

For those interested, Rupert Sheldrake has some rather good results... http://www.sheldrake.org/ And you can participate online if you want.
 
CfZrx said:
There's hardcore christians on BL now??
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It's passing strange, don't you think? You'd kinda think this would be a place of the devil given it's about drugs and doesn't rave on about never polluting the temple of the lord etc.

But then maybe that's why they come here? I think it was the 7th Day Adventists who used to go door knocking when they were sick to earn their healing or something - maybe coming here and preaching is a way to earn a closer position in the line to the Pearly Gates? :D
 
I tend to think the area of metaphysics that deals with extra-sensory perception skills must be about completed by now. There has been research done on it for centuries and I remember a lot of the material I read in university libraries, etc. was from research done in the 50s-70s. At least the way I understand it there's not really a question of whether there are people with these skills or not.

Most will know someone with some degree of psychics skills, if they don't have them for themselves. And I think most will have at least one of them developed to some degree even if they're not aware of it. It just seems like one of those areas of science there's not much reported on. It's just one of those things that doesn't fit in with our reality picture very well and many would probably freak out if they knew how many people are clairvoyant and how well some can read their minds, etc.

At least I know I have telepathic skills and it's not that unusual. I don't pick up on thoughts as much, but I seem to pick up on what someone is feeling 99% of the time, and it can make me uncomfortable as there's not only beautiful things in this world. Sometimes it's not that bad, like last week I had a court-hearing (about illegal import of benzo-analogues) and the judge's state of mind was very positive towards me so that was very re-assuring. But it could have been very unpleaent if things had been different.
 
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sekio said:
if telepathy, clairvoyance, etc had any grounding in reality then we'd see much more widespread usage of them. My two cents is that they're no more "real" than love or religious ecstacy- e.g. they are excursively the domain of self-delusion.



Well, except they can. And that's why we call things like the study of gravity 'physics' and not 'metaphysics'... we can do things like measure the gravitic deflection of huge lead balls for instance. Or measure the deflection of light by large stellar masses.

The thing that rubs me the wrong way is that telepathy clearly isn't some sort of underlying cosmic force if any sort of experiments make it fall apart under even the lightest attempt to control or scrutinize it.
Given the times and distances involved, it'd also be a clear violation of causality, and then... well, I dunno.
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Damn. I didn't realize you were that decided on the nature of we all.
 
sekio said:
if telepathy, clairvoyance, etc had any grounding in reality then we'd see much more widespread usage of them. My two cents is that they're no more "real" than love or religious ecstacy- e.g. they are excursively the domain of self-delusion.
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This is just untrue. It doesn't correspond with my life-experience at all. I know we all see things differently but I feel sorry for anyone who feels like that.
 
Ninae said:
This is just untrue. It doesn't correspond with my life-experience at all. I know we all see things differently but I feel sorry for anyone who feels like that.
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You've sort of demonstrated Sekio's point. He said:

sekio said:
"if telepathy, clairvoyance, etc had any grounding in reality then we'd see much more widespread usage of them"
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You say it doesn't correspond to YOUR life. That is great for you, but he was clearly talking about the majority and you were talking about yourself. Sad to say that the reality is that, for most people, these powers do not exist. It seems like you need to believe in them for them to be "real". Anything that requires belief to become a reality is probably just an idea. Something which is "real" is real regardless of whether people believe in it.

I would love it if we all had latent psychic forces. In my own life, I see no signs of them. If they are real or if they aren't, these forces are absent from my life. I'd have to say that, real or not, these powers don't seem to be all that powerful- or, at least, I cannot detect them playing a role in my life, so if they exist or don't is almost unimportant.
 
Im so happy i found this post. i recently started listening to my gut and letting myself see everything that was already in front of me and connect the dots and find the truth of things myself no matter what others thought or would say about it, including my best friend who is an athiest and a cynic. but how can you deny how connected we all are to each other and with everything around up and the universe. Love unconditionally and let your third eye open to the truths of our existence. and grab hold of it with all your might and know in your heart that you are a part of one big consciousness :) namaste
 
socko said:
Ninae, have you ever thought the problem might be with the way science looks at it and the way scientists objectively and subjectively understand spirit? In other words, maybe the problem is that the current scientific paradigm, as defined by Thomas Khun, cannot see spirit as a valid topic and therefore cannot address it? I admit it's a big stretch, but it is interesting.

Thomas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn
and the link to his book: http://projektintegracija.pravo.hr/_download/repository/Kuhn_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions.pdf
The book is dry, but it's worth reading and might offer a way to think of your question from the viewpoint of a scientist. What do you think?
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THX for the advice of Kuhn, for a long time I dont herad anything about him but you fill up this gap - thanks!

In my humble opinion, the whole spirit and god being is theoretically proofable with mechanics instruments, but our technology isnt far enough for it. Know what I mean? i mean, one day the human soul will be displayed in a monitor and THEN the world have the proof that there is much more than only material and genetics.
 
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