And many other scientists would look at the very same facts and draw different conclusions. If this were not so, than we wouldn't have scientists debating what consciousness is. We wouldn't have the "hard problem" to contend with.
Okay, but you cited this as an example of a study on one "side" of a debate about whether consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, or not. You seemed to be suggesting (incorrectly) that the results of the study--that meditative practices can alter brain circuitry--was inconsistent in principle with the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. There may be studies whose results are inconsistent with that hypothesis, but as I explained, the particular one you cited is not an example. Will you concede this?
Open_Minded said:
Mr. Spinkles - you seem to think mainstream science has disproven PSI. I'm here to tell you, they have not. If they had disproven PSI, people like myself (and there are millions and millions and millions of us from all the worlds cultures) wouldn't dismiss the scientific "explanation" for our experiences.
I'm not saying that science has disproved every conceivable form that 'PSI' could take. I am saying that every 'failed' PSI experiment has indeed disproved the particular form of the PSI hypothesis that was being tested in that experiment. That is true almost by definition. If you want to bend scientific standards of evidence to accommodate the superstitions of millions and millions and millions of people, that's up to you. I think you underestimate the power of superstition.
Do you acknowledge what I said about the scientific method, that the goal of an experiment is to disprove (not prove) a hypothesis? And furthermore, that by design, any outcome of an experiment--including the absence of any discernible effect--counts as evidence, for or against? I put a lot of thought into what I wrote.
Open_Minded said:
Many times, in this conversation, I've stated that there was a time when I tried to accept the "explanation" of science. But - I just couldn't do it. The explanation fell flat in the face of my real life experiences. It came to a point where I logically decided it was healthier for me to accept my experiences for what they were than write them off as "tricks of the brain" or "coincidence".
Just one example of why I don't accept mainstream science's "explanation" follows:
...
There is no way I could have known those details by coincidence, luck, or mind tricks. There just isn't.
The experience you have described is very interesting, IMO from a psychological rather than parapsychological perspective. But whether you believe in PSI or not, your conclusion cannot be reached from the information you have given. The only way you could rule out coincidence, luck, or mind tricks, would be by keeping careful written records. Instead you are relying on subjective, error-prone memory, when it should be quite straightforward to test the validity of your visions.
In this case, the particular phenomenon you have described is called
remote viewing. It can be and has been tested in many people for many years--by the military, scientists, psychologists, magicians and skeptics, etc. Most scientists attribute this kind of thing to (unintentionally) remembering the 'hits', and forgetting the 'misses'. It is impossible to rule out this possibility based on your memory alone, without keeping a record. So, to disprove the skeptics, I suggest the following method:
(1) When you get a vision, take out a piece of paper and at the top of the paper write "VISION". Write down the target (THIS house, not just any house you might visit today) and write down the details of the vision as an itemized list. The more specific, the better. Anyone could guess from the photo the house may have had only one child's bedroom, and many houses have reading lamps and rocking chairs and colored walls. If you know the house is in suburbs near schools, your intuition is probably accurate that there will be neighbors' children playing nearby. Many houses for sale probably have empty rooms with neatly rolled up sleeping bags--the owners probably sold or moved their furniture, and hadn't yet been able to sell the house. But 'a neatly rolled-up sleeping bag on the far wall of the main living area with brown carpet, next to a reading lamp with a child's rocking chair in the corner, and no other furniture'--that would be specific.
(2) On a second piece of paper, write at the top "KNOWNS". Write down some things you know about the target, apart from your vision. E.g. you know what the outside of the house looks like, you know your realtor thinks you may want to purchase it, you know it is in the suburbs near schools.
(3) Once you have written these things down, you can't change it. This prevents you from unintentionally biasing the results, by improving the accuracy of your visions after you get more information about the target.
(4) Furthermore, once you have seen a target, you cannot go back and write down any visions you remember having about it. If you didn't write it down beforehand, it doesn't count. This prevents you from retroactively including the 'hits' while ignoring the 'misses' after you have seen a target.
(5) If there are times when you DON'T have a vision about a target, you should get two pieces of paper anyway. On the top of one, write "KNOWNS" as before, and on the top of the other paper instead of writing "VISION" you should write "GUESSES". If you are capable of guessing details about the target, without having any visions, write them down. Even if you have "partial visions" which interfere with your guessing, you should commit to categorizing your predictions as completely visions, or completely guesses. Overall, if visions are genuine a pattern should still emerge distinguishing the two data sets. If you are incapable of guessing without having visions, you might ask a skeptical friend to write down his/her guesses (and knowns). Try to use the same level of detail that are in your visions. For example, don't guess "this room is precisely 9 x 11 feet" unless your visions also provide that level of detail.
(6) When you visit a target, go through your list (either "VISION" or "GUESSES"). For every item on the list (not some of them--every one!) mark it as either a hit or a miss. Do not count near-misses as hits, count them as misses. For example, if you said the living room carpet was an unusual zebra print, but actually it's white while the guest bedroom carpet is zebra print, that is a "miss". This prevents you from (unintentionally) introducing subjective bias in your favor, and yet it does not prevent a genuine signal from coming through: just as a more accurate rifle hits the bull's eye more often while also having more near-misses, genuine visions should still score more "hits" even if you are obliged to count many "near-misses" as misses.
If you follow these instructions, then over time, a record should build up. At this point the pattern (or lack thereof) might already be obvious. Sometimes, a prediction seems extraordinary to you until later, when you read it back to yourself. Gee, is it really remarkable that my vision correctly predicted kids playing in the neighbor's yard? Especially since I knew this was a house in the suburbs, near schools? Would I expect kids to be playing in any yard other than the neighbor's? After all, the only other yard to play in is the house I am visiting--but it is for sale, and it has been scheduled for a visit by me and the realtor during which the owners are supposed to be away. Wouldn't it be remarkable if there
weren't any kids playing in any of the neighbors' yards, in this situation? Isn't it possible that my brain intuitively expected this, based on the information it had, even if I didn't
consciously work out the logic justifying this expectation?
But if the pattern (or lack thereof) is not obvious by now, you can calculate the results explicitly and unambiguously as follows.
For each target, whether it was a "VISION" or "GUESSING", take the number of hits divided by the total number of predictions as your accuracy score. Then take the average of all the accuracy scores in a category (VISIONS or GUESSING) as your overall accuracy in that category. Take the uncertainty in that average as plus-or-minus the standard deviation of the average. Is the VISIONS number larger than the GUESSING number beyond the uncertainty range? This would be a start.
Various additional measures could be used. It would be interesting, for example, if in addition to recording the visions yourself, half the time you speak aloud your predictions and have someone else write them down for you. Then, without looking at what was written down, you go look at the target and judge, from your own memory, how accurate or inaccurate you think your vision was (a scale of 1 to 10, say). Then we compare your perception of vision accuracy based on memory, to the actual vision accuracy. It would be interesting to see if, over many trials, your perception of vision accuracy based on memory was biased in a particular direction. If your visions don't seem to "work" when you record them, even though you remember them working when you didn't record them, this kind of bias in memories could explain why.
Anyway, those are just suggestions, since you repeatedly brought it up and asked for my suggestions. Now you have described something specific enough to test, in principle.
Anyway here's some more info. on remote viewing which, I think, is quite fair: [youtube]40QVp8_P0LY[/youtube]
Michael Shermer Remote Viewing Experiment Part 1 - YouTube