Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish today’s entry in my daily journal of “musings of Quiet Desperation”.

Word for the ages.

If you publish, do recall that’s intellectual property, that is.

Not really. It was more fun thinking I was some sort of iconic figure for some stranger I never met.

Sheesh… the ego on some people! Get over yourself!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish today’s entry in my daily journal of “musings of Quiet Desperation”.

heh… I could have and should have more accurately stated “I hate it that you’re right about that particular statement.”

Oh.

Better?

Not really. It was more fun thinking I was some sort of iconic figure for some stranger I never met.

Wow! You must be psychic! That’s exactly what I was going to tell you next! I guess psychic powers are real after all.

Premature as right. I’d need to see some evidence for the existence of this so-called “stage manager” before considering the rest of it.

Next you’ll tell me the spaceship, the swamp, even the character wiggling his fingers all existed & were acting according to some magical “script” handed down from some on-high creator.

“If we see a guy lift a spaceship out of a swamp by wiggling his finger at it, we ought to be taking data and forming hypotheses. But to start formulating hypotheses about how someone MIGHT do that, seems a bit premature.”

It may be premature, but here’s my hypothesis. His wiggling his finger is a visual cue to the stage manager, who cues the stage crew to raise the spaceship. But then, this is coming from a theatre techie bias. [/snark]

Viewer3: “… I have to believe that there are quite a few unknown, untestable forces that could carry such information straight to the physical receptors of the brain.”

Now you’re talking about the unknown unknowns. But anything that happens can be tested. Suppose Mr X has “psychic powers”. That’s a bit general, so let’s narrow it down to “Mr X can tell what I’m thinking”. That’s easily tested. I even have a good experiment: Most people concentrate very hard when they’re opening a spin-dial combination lock. Even when you know the combination, you’re extemely focussed. All we have to do is bring Mr X and Subject Y to a safe, have the subject open the safe and ask Mr X for the combination.

Now maybe psychic powers are like golf: even Tiger Woods has a bad day. So Mr X might say that the time was not auspicious. Fine, run the test over a series of days. We’ll even pay Mr X an agreed-on fee for participating – but with the proviso that if he doesn’t demonstrate his gift, he forfeits the sum and has to pay all his expenses.

Now let’s look at another possibility: that there are some people with these gifts, and they realize full well that if word got out, they’d either be hounded to death by People Wanting to Know, or beaten to death by townspeople with pitchforks and torches. That theory doesn’t help. All it tells us is that “IF there are people …….”.

Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle tried very hard, and very long, to find any example of paranormal phenomena. They never did.

Every high-profile “psychic” has been exposed. Uri Geller, for one, but he seems to just keep rolling along, bending spoons all over the world.

Centipede: Good point: “Electrons could actually, in objective reality, be tiny little sky pixies and as long as they act like electrons are predicted to act ” In fact, they behave very much like little teeny particles when you do experiment A, and very much like teeny little waves when you do experiment B. To the designers of radios and such, the difference is academic, just so long as they aren’t caught violating Maxwell’s equations.

On the other hand, we’re supposed to be empiricists. If we see a guy lift a spaceship out of a swamp by wiggling his finger at it, we ought to be taking data and forming hypotheses. But to start formulating hypotheses about how someone MIGHT do that, seems a bit premature.

Another thing that you will find commonly mentioned is self-deception, which is really just misinterpretation of the events.

At any rate, in this forum, it is impossible to discern whether your experience was real (in the broad, objective sense) or a case of self-deception. Either one is possible.

Cheers! That’s all I ask. Actually, I just want to make people aware that for some it’s very real, and it may be for good reason. I.e I wasn’t bamboozled by some dude on TV or tarot card scam artist, which is a sort of a popular stereotype around here.

Also, I wouldn’t call it a power because it’s not very useful.

Some are simply set in their it’s-not-possible-if-it-can’t-be-seen-and-studied ways.

I think you’re confusing what’s “possible” with what’s “real and factual”. Scientific process is all about taking what’s “possible” from the unknown and developing theories that are tested, refined, and sometimes rejected until the “possible” becomes “plausible” based on the preponderence of evidence.

I’m more than willing to accept that things like “psychic powers” are possible… but until someone provides real evidence for it, I simply file it away under the same category as “alien abductions” and “unicorns”. Might very well be possible… certainly not real based on any evidence we have so far.

Understood. I was trying to salvage what was quickly descending into ad hom territory and bring it back to the central topic that started the arguments.

As it stands, yeah, the study as presented is inconclusive (not knowing how the images were selected or if participants could have been tipped off in some fashion to what the possibilities were beforehand or during, whether or not they realized it, as well as results consistent with or worse than chance). Also, because of the lack of info about how the images were selected, there could be a major flaw regarding blinding.

As to ED’s beliefs that he or she (hard to tell from your handle) has precog powers, again, there is no evidence to convince the rest of us (admittedly you weren’t trying to convince us), but I would say we concede that, at least for you, the powers are real, based on your experiences and current interpretation of those experiences.

Don’t worry, the fact that you went through the trouble of creating an entirely new post simply to correct a misspelling to salvage the “intellectual” reputation that you tried to establish for yourself in your previous post speaks for itself.

As for the other responses, I suppose that why I’d never make it in the stereotypical “scientific community”. Some are simply set in their it’s-not-possible-if-it-can’t-be-seen-and-studied ways. Which is fine. I suppose that’s what many would call “real science”. And that’s not bad at all- seems fairly rational to me.

“I have also had a whole bunch of psychic/precog experiences.”

My concentration on his “psychic test” was because that was the example he gave, and I thought there might be some data there that could be explored. There isn’t. The conversation took a downturn when he accused me of being “intentionally stupid”… at that point I’m gonna take him to task.

You feel you have enough info about ED’s experience, or do you want more?

No idea. But they all were pretty simple, an object with a background.

Of course, Gabriel also once gave all his employees a talk about Dr Emoto: http://www.emotoproject.org/english/home.html

Okay. Thanks for the procedure. Do you remember how the images were selected initially, before being placed in envelopes?

Repeat from step 3.

But, seriously, what I did I do? I’m religiously nonideological (hmm…) so what do I represent to you that you hate it when I’m right?

heh… I could have and should have more accurately stated “I hate it that you’re right about that particular statement.”

Better?

Do you know how the images were chosen before they were placed into the envelopes? Were the participants involved, in any way at all, in suggesting images?

Just to make sure I understand correctly, there were, just for example, 30 images, each placed into an envelope. 1 image per envelope. 10 of these were then picked out. These 10 were then pinned up one by one. After each envelope is clipped up, the students write down words they feel might be depicted in the image.

Did each envelope have a number or other unique identifier so that they could be matched to students’ guesses?

Noble causes need noble people. You go for it.