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Paranormal and Science
- Thread starter Fool
- Start date
They don't. But when these things were investigated in the past, nothing was found (when correct statistics were used). At some point, people realize there is nothing there and move on.
As mentioned scientist have tried to study and research the paranormal, but nothing paranormal was found.
these are just a few studies in paranormal
NDERF Home Page
IANDS - the most reliable source of information on NDEs
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/
13 universities with studies in the paranormal
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Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Can't test ideologies. There needs to be something more substantial.
phenomena is testable.
science is supposed to represent the investigation of the unexplained, science is not the explanation of the uninvestigated.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
What's testable?
What I mean by that is there anything that has been tested had results that can be concurrently tested by others and reach a consensus that it is indeed a/the fact?
There has been significant positive research into reincarnation.
Ian Stevenson’s Case for the Afterlife: Are We ‘Skeptics’ Really Just Cynics?
Ian Stevenson’s Case for the Afterlife: Are We ‘Skeptics’ Really Just Cynics?
Maybe, because they might find God?
Or really, I should say, a reason to believe that there could be a God. If science discovered an invisible realm from which Intelligent paranormal activity originated, that could very well indicate, or be, the same realm / reality where God exists.
Science doesn't want that, and neither do the intelligent entities behind these current paranormal events....they don't want exposure to all humans, only to humans who desire it, like Spirit Mediums, Fortunetellers, etc.
HonestJoe
Well-Known Member
Many of the things scientists study are outside the norm, that’s often why they’re studied in the first place. That isn’t really what you mean when you say “paranormal”, despite the quirk of etymology. Throughout history there have been all sorts of phenomena some people believed (or claimed to believe) had “supernatural” causes which, following scientific study, were found to have perfectly understandable “natural” ones.
HonestJoe
Well-Known Member
Loads of scientists believe in a god and many of those who don’t will be honestly agnostic. Plenty would like to provide evidence for the existence of a god and some have tried. Of course, the religious beliefs of some scientists may well turn them away from wanting to study other “supernatural” claims since they could contradict or be explicitly prohibited by their faith (e.g. communicating with the dead).
That’s like saying Driving doesn’t want to go in to the city at rush hour. Science is just a concept, it can’t “want” anything. Scientists is a massively diverse grouping of individual human beings, so they can’t be said to “want” any singular thing either.
so if science can't control and repeat the phenomena, then the problem lies with science?
The Foundation for Shamanic Studies
https://www.amazon.com/Studies-Siberian-Shamanism-Institute-Anthropology/dp/B000GR3LIA
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i didn't use the term supernatural. i used the term para-normal; which means para = beyond and normal = common. in other words phenomena that aren't common to most every day life.
case in point, ufo phenomena
Countries that have released their UFO files
HonestJoe
Well-Known Member
The common usage of the word “paranormal” doesn’t match it’s literal etymology (like lots of words, especially in English). I did address both interpretations in my answer though. Many of the things scientists study aren’t common so it that was your meaning, your opening assertion is simply wrong.
That isn’t really a single phenomenon (covering a vast range of incidents with a range of likely causes) but plenty of UFO sightings have been investigated, which is why many of them are subsequently identified. There’s nothing really special about the field of study other than the large number of people who have strongly held beliefs about specific explanations and who make it very difficult to apply proper scientific process to (given the answers will commonly contradict some of those specifics but generally conclude “we’re not sure”). A major limitation to formal scientific study is the lack of solid evidence since we’re generally just dealing with something people see.
what is proper scientific study apart from the simple scientific method?
HonestJoe
Well-Known Member
I’m not sure what you mean. It is essentially just simple scientific method but a formal study will have the systematic checks and balances to try to ensure they’re adhered to and produce complete and proper records.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Science is perfectly fine.
The problem lies with the charlatans who will never ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, actually go to a lab to establish what you see on these types of videos under controlled and scrutinized conditions.
They know fully and perfectly well the reason why. And that is there simply is no phenomena involved.
Science will trump anything out there in terms of finding out what's real and what's not, and how things actually and really work.
Paranormal isn't just "outside the norm". After all, almost the entirety of clinical psychology, psychiatry, and many other fields are entirely devoted to phenomena outside the norm (as are whole swathes of researchers in sociology and other sciences). However, as concerns the paranormal, the answer is that mainstream scientists don't typically bother mostly because of issues relating to funding, lack of interest, lack of motivation, and the fact that by definition (their being mainstream scientists and all) they don't make a practice of involving themselves in such research projects.
For some time, many of the research projects I consulted on were actually concerned with the paranormal (mostly parapsychology) because I was interested in trying to improve the quality of these. There exist plenty of research groups and journals devoted to studies confirming the paranormal, but as the research teams are all peopled by believers and the journals run by people who set them up specifically to publish studies confirming paranormal phenomena, most mainstream scientists pay no more attention to these than they do to literature in non-scientific fields or to sensationalist popular science nonsense. Usually, research groups studying such phenomena seek to design experiments in which they can manipulate the manner in which an "effect" that has already been determined to be of paranormal origins can be found without either positing any causal mechanisms or even addressing how they might explain their results without reference to the phenomenon in question.
Also, they will generally continue to tinker with the study design and statistical methods used until they find the sought outcome that is then claimed can be attributed to some paranormal cause.
Arguablly, we can only test ideologies. Or at least, all tests/experiments in the sciences involve somehow relying on an ideological framework to test some component/aspect of it or to attempt to clarify the same (or to extent the framework) or to rule out competing ideologies.
Phenomena are not generally testable. What are generally "tested" are, depending upon the nature of the science in question, latent variables or similar unobservable factors presumed to underlie some theoretical construct that was defined into existence as consisting of some property or properties that are all that can be tested (and therefore determine, or at least severely constrain, any possible experimental outcomes). One cannot, for example, "test" the nature of religiousity, episodic memory, PTSD, the language faculty, etc., without first defining these in terms of some set of properties. These properties are then investigated via quite indirect methods that cannot even be said to test the desired phenomena at all even granting there existence as something "real."
In the natural sciences, things are better and worse. Physics beyond the standard model are consist of phenomena that are not only untestable, but currently even in principle unknowable because they are components of theories that we haven't even adequately formulated in a way that would suggest how tests might be performed. Meanwhile, most of the standard model consists of a series of failures of theories like quantum field theory both before QED and then after, the bootstrap program and its associated S-matrix, etc., that were overcome not by tests or experiments but mathematical innovations. The resulting theories rest upon the application of group theory and other abstract mathematics to the general structure of certain unification paradigms such as the electroweak theory or of violations of conservationslaws and symmetries to experimental failures in order to make sense out of the mass of data from HEP experiments.
As a result, particle physics will speak of things like naked charm and the colors and flavors that subatomic particle come in (and penquin diagrams, because physics isn't complete without plenty of references to cats and kittens and now apparently penguins are getting in on the action) and how accurate our measurements of anomalous moments in QED are (once we fix the theoretical predictions by setting infinity to the measured result, forcing the theory to agree with experiment by plugging in the measured value where we would have infinity) and so forth, but will rarely tell you how any of this is all "tested" mathematically to the extent that the experimentalists who actually perform the experiments don't really understand the theories they are supposed to be testing nor how the entities/phenemena that these tests are supposed to related their experiments.
?
There is no such thing. That's a lie found in textbooks that was known to be fundamentally flawed when it was proposed as an easy oversimplification to reduce "science" to an algorithmic process that could be taught easily to pre-college students and even to some college students rather than the vastly more complicated manner of how various sciences use differing methods and standards to implement fundamentally different types of research projects specific to their fields in fundamentally different ways to fundamentally different concepts, phenomena, etc.