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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Jul 15, 2010 - 11:07pm PT
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Link with details please, Werner? As that's a pretty vague question to have to answer.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 15, 2010 - 11:08pm PT
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I was on this search budy.
The psychic perfectly described the location.
You rant too much Dr F .....
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go-B
climber
In God We Trust
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Jul 15, 2010 - 11:16pm PT
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Unexplained stuff does happen! My grandmother knew something happened to her brother and he drowned at another location!
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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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Jul 16, 2010 - 12:04am PT
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I was on this search budy.
The psychic perfectly described the location.
That's it?
There must be a newspaper article about it, since it was a missing body, right?
You know... My horoscope last month 'perfectly described' what happened last month. But then so did one for another sign.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jul 16, 2010 - 01:30am PT
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Dr. F.-
"all claims by psychic detectives have been debunked
There has never been an actual criminal case solved by a psychic detective
nor have they ever lead police to a dead body"
is just plain wrong and in any case is not a statement a hard core scientist would make as it violates the same critieria of 100% replicability that you say you are demanding of psychic research.
Ed has already told you something along these lines about a thousand posts ago when you were making similar absolutist statements.
As for winning at gambling, if it only happens a few times you will label it a statistical anomaly and for sure the casinos will find a way to exclude those individuals after a very short time.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Jul 16, 2010 - 01:32am PT
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i once "solved" a murder mystery in a small town where i reported, but couldn't publish the story. it was a psychopathic murder, and i wouldn't be suprised if the killer went to his grave without being arrested. a psychic was brought in on the case, and although the murder weapon couldn't be found, the psychic's intuitions strongly implicated the prime suspect and corroborated other evidence and suspicions, none of which were strong enough to warrant an arrest. justice never comes easy.
psychic things are like that. when they happen, they comprise evidence of legitimate intuition. no, you don't put in your dime and get a prediction. but information does come across, and that information itself is scientific data. in my own experience, i had a psychic talk about events in my earlier life she had no way of knowing. that's data. you don't have to believe me, but you will find others who are similarly convinced by similar experiences. it doesn't make us any better or you any worse, but it's something you have to encounter before it really registers. not everyone encounters such, but maybe that attests to its scientific aspect. lots of things in science can be elusive that way.
another area of the paranormal is ghosts. if you ask around, you will easily find people who have seen real ghosts. i've already talked with one such witness here on ST. the experiences don't make very good horror movies, but they're real. there are many aspects of ghost science, and the phenomena fall into categories and patterns that are the legitimate foundation of any science. ignore, ignore, deny, deny, but it's there. the problem is that it isn't what you want it to be, but that doesn't make it any less real.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 16, 2010 - 01:40am PT
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I've always thought that the best argument against "psychic" powers is based on evolution and selection...
...this is a "materialist's" argument, so for those of you who don't think that mind, consciousness, etc are the result of evolution you can go on to the next post...
let's say that it is possible to "see the future," that it is an attribute of our thought
let's say there is a range of ability to "see the future"
those who have this ability are better able to survive, they know when there is danger, they know where there is food, they know how to mate efficiently, etc...
before too long, this attribute is amplified, people who have more of it can anticipate what is going to happen, and those that do not have it can't, and thus are eliminated at a higher percentage than others
the fact that it is not a major attribute of our abilities indicates that it does not exist at all...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 16, 2010 - 02:02am PT
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HERE is Nature's review of the book Jan is reading
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jul 16, 2010 - 02:44am PT
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Good point about evolution Ed. That's why I was interested in Radin's statement that of the tens of thousands of psi test subjects over the years only 1% seemed to have real abilities.
Now take the fact that shamanism is one of the world's oldest forms of religion and shamanistic gifts are said to be passed down in families, something said about psychics as well. This seems to indicate that such talents have a genetic component. Like tends to marry like so they were conserving their talents, not spreading them around. Anthropologists have also discovered that among the 6,000 societies we have studied, a full 1/3 of them preferred to marry their first cousins. More concentration.
Next consider warfare and the fact that it was common practice to wipe out the conquered men and mate with the conquered women and you eliminate more from the gene pool. In south China for example, something like 80% of the female lineages are southern, but only 20% of the males, and they're mostly in remote areas. Southern Chinese males were eliminated by northern Chinese invaders.
Shamans were often feared as well as respected, and since they were believed to carry the power of the tribe, would have been the first singled out for execution along with their whole families in many cases.
Then there is the persecution of people in Middle Eastern and European culture with psychic talents. At least 30,000 women were burned to death as witches during the Middle Ages.Anybody with psychic talents kept a low profile after that and still do because of ongoing ridicule by the scientific establishment.
In Asian societies not burdened by religious dogma or one religion established over others, psychic abilities are much more common and accepted. There are thought to be 30,000 professional shamans on the small island of Okinawa in a population of 1.3 million people and almost anyone you talk to here has had several psychic experiences. Okinawans are also the longest lived people in the world and have the most centenarians, so they are definitely an interesting population of fit survivors in the Darwinian sense. This would be a good place to try to establish a link between psychic phenomenon and genetic inheritance.
But who dares to risk their scientific reputation to do that?
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GBrown
Trad climber
Los Angeles, California
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Jul 16, 2010 - 03:42am PT
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rrADAM, et al.
The scientific method definitely gets tricky when it is applied to life. Which is why drug trials have to account for the placebo effect. The placebo effect has "grown" over the past couple decades such that some drugs that might have formerly tested superior enough to gain FDA approval would currently fail. Big PhRMA has had to search for foreign populations where the placebo effect has not advanced in which to do their double-blind studies.
What I have said above and will say below are not made up by me though I can't shoot you the reference articles or other material right off the cuff. I've been in the midst of litigation against Big PhRMA since around 1999 and I have had daily traffic from numerous sources including journal articles, media, web traffic on both sides of the fence, deposition transcripts, expert reports, whistle blower information, confidential pharma documents including hidden studies, emails and sometimes early info re: investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. Over the years I have read through many thousands of pages of material in this area.
"Science" as far as psychopharmaceuticals is particularly trash. Most of the drugs are "cures" or symptomological relievers for utterly subjective "diagnoses". The diagnoses themselves are subject to manipulation and creation by Big PhRMA $. Biological theories relating to brain chemicals, brain function and genetic factors are floated with great fanfare by media but receive "obituatry" treatment or no notice when the theory doesn't pan out. (I am actually am aware of one theory relating to a particular gene that appears to be valid and specific to several symptoms, the negative function of which gene is capable of being turned off by certain nutritional applications and which should be going to double-blind study soon. However, I'm doubtful that it would make a big impact since it is susceptible to nutritional control -- meaning it would not represent a profit center for Big PhRMA.)
Foreign (not natural to the body) chemical compounds which operate on body chemistry in complex and coordinated body systems are experimented with in an expanding sphere to (a) make sure it doesn't dramatically harm and (b) see if it has any effect on (in the case of psychopharmaceuticals) the "squishy" symptomology which is assumed to be of chemical origin. (Although there may be chemical phenomena present, there is also present the assumption that the phenomena is sourced in chemistry, though there is still the sticky problem of "placebo effect" that has to be dealt with and no papers that I am aware of that have ever located the chemical source of the "placebo effect".)
These chemical compounds do not exist in the pristine halls of science by the time we get to double-blind studies (which require a significant amount of $), they exist in the "pipeline" of a pharmaceutical company.
The black box warnings regarding suicidality on the SSRI antidepressants and the Congressional investigations into the pharmaceutical industry which have been ongoing for several years are in a significant part due to the dogged persistence for the truth exercised by the law firm I am with (and our clients) which unearthed some of its sordid nature AND yanked it kicking and screaming into public records rather than settle with the schmucks and let it remain hidden.
The "squishy" area of mental/emotional phenomena is particularly succeptible to manipulation, however, upon moving into what one might think is "harder" biological science, like diabetes, etc., I discovered that Big PhRMA is quite consistent in their astounding willingness to deceive not only the general public, but medical doctors, regulators, insurance companies, governmental agencies, and themselves.
First, (I believe the figure is) close to 70% of "gold standard" double-blind studies will favor the pharmaceutical company's drug if funded by the pharmaceutical company. If independently funded, only (I believe the figure is) near 40% of studies will be favorable to the drug.
To gain approval from the FDA has required only 2 studies that show an effect greater than placebo (without any otherwise significant negative effects). There had been no requirement that the company reveal negative studies (no matter how many).
In the case of the antidepressant Paxil, SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline - GSK) only received FDA approval (for short term use in Major Depressive Disorder only) because it intentionally and fraudulently manipulated their statistics regarding suicidality in regard to Paxil vs. Placebo). When it was later questioned, the company provided the FDA with a metanalysis which included an anomalous study involving a study population that was already suicidal and which logically included a number of subjects who were suicidal during the study who were on placebo. This put enough "suicidals" into the placebo column of the analysis to fudge the statistical significance of the resulting figures.
During GSK's "delicate" times with the FDA, they had hidden communications with their "friends" in the FDA.
The additional thing we uncovered and brought to the attention of both the FDA and Congress was GSK's "coding" of "side effects." GSK ordered study personnel to code suicidality as "emotional lability" (which basically means getting extremely upset, crying, and all), thus placing it out of sight and out of the statistics.
Furthermore, GSK attempted to gain FDA approval for Paxil use in children and adolescents (and also approval from the corresponding agency in Britain, the MHRA) based on a study that demonstrated NO benefit beyond placebo and a marked increase in suicidality. The study authors (otherwise known as paid PhRMA whores) focused on some minor test function that demonstrated improvement and proclaimed to the medical community and the media that the study showed REMARKABLE efficacy and safety in children!
The lies involved in this resulted in an investigation by the MHRA in Britain and GSK barely avoided criminal prosecution there due to a legal technicality. They remained "haughty" to the authorities.
The focus on "ghost writing" of journal articles (by PR flunkies and then shopping around for authors) was brought to the attention of the public by our efforts and contributed to the revolt of responsible medical journal editors who have formed their own inernational organization of medical journal editors to try and retrieve some sane ethical level to their own journals.
FDA SCIENTISTS are at war with the management of FDA and have their own website. Big PhRMA settlements with individual plaintiffs and with governments, federal and state, are astronomical -- billions of dollars -- over the past several years, for myriad criminal and unethical behaviors.
Pfizer's proven criminality would have eliminated it from participation in Medicare so the federal government allowed it to have a subsidiary plead guilty rather than destroy the largest pharmaceutical company in the world (which paid some $2.5 billion in fines).
Hundreds of thousands of individuals have been killed or injured by Big PhRMA who insist they are a bastion of science. The Vioxx and Avandia cases are noted contributors.
The FDA and FTC attack nutritional products and even information (including lifestyle choices) when it is the lack of good nutritional information and products (including food) and lifestyle changes that are at the rooot of or contribute strongly to the physical (and even emotional/mental) problems from which Big PhRMA and Big Medicine grow rich.
We challenged Big PhRMA when George W. and his crowd came to the Presidency and he appointed Dan Troy to be the Chief Counsel for the FDA. Dan Troy, a year before, had earned hundreds of thousands of dollars representing Pfizer. Bush appointed as Solicitor General of the U.S. a guy who who formerly a big partner in the law firm which represented GSK in our Paxil suicide and withdrawal symptoms cases. The U.S. government logically intervened in several of our lawsuits with amicus briefs that sided with our Big PhRMA adversaries, trying to get our cases thrown out of court. (The Solicitor General has to approve any U.S. intervention in a private civil lawsuit.)
Dan Troy met with Big PhRMA representatives and told them to bring their problem cases to him and he would help them.
Over the years, when there was a pause in the barrage of legal documents being thrown into and around the trenches of the war (and going up aginst Big PhRMA is a f*cking WAR!), I sometimes had the wishful thought that some REAL scientists from the "pure" sciences and engineering fields would step in and examine and raise a ruckus about the despicable state of the "science" which so dramatically impacts the well-being and sanity of the population. It never happened.
I believe that any real scientist would NEVER tolerate the absolute insanity of the state of "science" in the pharmaceutical field. Looking at it now I can think of some reasons why this has not happened:
1. Real scientists must believe that other people who also have alphabet soup after their names must be as devoted to science as they are;
2. Real scientists must believe that the level of personal ethics (by which I mean "personal" rather than some written rules) must be the same in other "scientific" fields;
3. Real scientists must mostly believe that, since the scientists in the field of the mind and emotions are taking a "physical" approach, they must be on the right track. They may have to take into account the "observer" effect, but they don't really understand how different a field "science" becomes when you have to deal with a "placebo effect" which is in many cases an equivalent of a "physical effect" and which is an undefined variable in the same biological terms by which the "physical effect" is assumed to manifest.
I gotta get to sleep. I could go on for hours in this area but I need to get back to work tomorrow. We still have horrifying birth defect cases coming in regarding Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Celexa, Lexapro and Effexor. Which is why I have stopped calling such things "side effects". They are not "side effects", they are effects.
Oh yeah. Some conclusions reached after these many years:
1. Pharmaceutical companies are, today, not pharmaceutical companies; rather they are Public Relations firms. When you compare the amount of $ they spend on marketing, PR, promotion, lobbying, sales, bribing MDs, financing and manipulating CME (continuing medical education), bribing government officials, etc., it far exceeds R&D. Without such "PR" activities, their sales/income would be significantly less than 1/2 of what it currently is. So what activity is providing the bulk of their income: PR, not science. Therefore, their business category should be placed in the PR category.
2. To begin to take effective action against this overall situation, it is necessary to revert certain Congressional actions taken over the past few decades under the advisement and pressure of Big PhRMA. Specifically, cancel the Congressional act which provided for Big PhRMA funding of the FDA in order to finance the approval of new drugs. (This same law included the proviso that NONE of the $ provide by Big PhRMA could be used to fund after-market safety activity by FDA. Duh!) Also cancel the Congressional act which authorized television advertising by Big PhRMA. Only the U.S. and New Zealand allow this.
3. At initial approval of any and all drugs by the FDA, they should be prominently labeled as "Experimental Drugs" and any and all direct to consumer advertising, etc., of the same should be banned for a period of 5 years. MDs can be promoted to by provision of or direction to medical journal articles. MDs regularly contribute to such journals regarding their own clinical experiences, which is the standard route by which the efficacy and problems with drugs is revealed. Any articles in medical journals must require a full disclosure by the author of ANY possible conflict of interest, including $, goods, services, friendships, provision of prostitutes (actual example), etc. provided by anyone which could influence his opinion -- with the hard and fast provision that any failure to reveal a conflict of interest fully will reslt in the suspension or cancellation of the MD's medical license.
4. Any and all studies of a drug must be posted on a website available to anybody and must not be just a short summary but must include all statistical analyses and full explanation of results by the individuals who conducted the study. The individual(s) writing up the study must declare under penalty of perjury that they had full access to ALL the underlying data for the full study from ALL sites involved in the study. Any individual who is found to have perjured him/herself shall be subject to prosecution and upon conviction shall have whatever relevant license they may bear canceled. The complete underlying data for the statistics and analysis posted on the public website shall be forwarded electronically to a repository maintained by the FDA and which is subject to inspection and evaluation at any time by the FDA and/or law enforcement officers at any relevant level.
Big PhRMA has effectively taken over the practice of medicine. The practitioner is (as a workable generality) the pharmaceutical company rather than the physician himself. His/her judgment has been superceded.
Damn, I gotta get to sleep.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Jul 16, 2010 - 03:48am PT
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Ed writes
I've always thought that the best argument against "psychic" powers is based on evolution and selection...
...this is a "materialist's" argument, so for those of you who don't think that mind, consciousness, etc are the result of evolution you can go on to the next post...
let's say that it is possible to "see the future," that it is an attribute of our thought
let's say there is a range of ability to "see the future"
those who have this ability are better able to survive, they know when there is danger, they know where there is food, they know how to mate efficiently, etc...
before too long, this attribute is amplified, people who have more of it can anticipate what is going to happen, and those that do not have it can't, and thus are eliminated at a higher percentage than others
the fact that it is not a major attribute of our abilities indicates that it does not exist at all...
This is silly materialist thinking Ed, which is, of course, incompatible with "Seeing the future." Materialism doesn't have a mechanism for the future to be seen.
Because if it's possible to see in to the future, there is obviously some kind of "Fate" or "Karma" at play which would mean that "seeing" into the future wouldn't necessarily allow somebody to change the future nor avoid their fate, thus negating any evolutionary advantage. I might know that I'm going to die of a heart attack, but that nothing I do will change that.
For example, 2-3 years ago I had an astrologer (who had already made a series of amazing and specific predictions for me in previous years) tell me I would be subject to accidental injury in the fall of 2009 in my shoulder or ankle. I kept my insurance up but I couldn't keep an alien from pulling on Zodiac and leading to me rupturing my achilles tendon. I could have ruptured it stepping out of my front door if it was bound to happen. That same astrologer in India, for $15, had told my friend, whose legal name he did not have, that between her and her brothers, they had 8 kids between them. She told him he was wrong, that there were only 7 kids. He said, no there were 8, but that one of them had died. A light went off in her head, one HAD died and she forgot to add him in the list of kids.
Of course the "deniers" in this thread will skip this "hard to explain" little tidbit, of which I have dozens of such stories, which is why I don't tell them. But don't think it doesn't happen.
Also, the same spiritual skills to "see the future" might require so much dedication that the practitioners would be less likely to reproduce and pass those genes along. No natural selections with out procreation. How many 5.15 climbers have 3-4 kids?
Peace
Karl
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TripL7
Trad climber
san diego
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Jul 16, 2010 - 04:03am PT
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Tbird- "locker...you broke my heart with the woman before that, however."
Locker has a wonderful and beautiful daughter(and also a son)from the "woman before that" FYI...
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Jul 16, 2010 - 09:41am PT
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you will find intelligence evolving again and again in the history of life. no, there haven't been mozarts and einsteins in other species, but we have great brains in dolphins and remarkable intelligence in certain cephalopods. so perhaps psychic ability is like intelligence. it crops up here and there, doesn't necessarily lead to any great superiority or survival mechanism. look at all the extinct hominid lines. their great intelligence didn't lead to survival. evolution is something which happens freely. don't make an engine out of its attributes.
psychic ability isn't necessarily a good thing. i've known of psychics who don't seem to lead happy lives. it's kind of a burden and it deals with strange and difficult territory. it can easily become disruptive to your life if you don't approach it with some circumspection. i've encountered this stuff, yes, but i'm not real comfortable getting immersed in it, and perhaps that in itself requires cultural mechanisms of which we only have vestiges in the west. i think it's foolish to take too much direction from the psychic. it's just a wider way of perceiving, that sixth sense.
there are many reports from those who have been intimate with the aborigines of australia of their ability to communicate over distance psychically. it seems to have developed culturally over time, and it involves both ritual and circumstance. no, it isn't like picking up a telephone.
that review of radin's book seems fairly trivial and focuses on the probability aspect of certain paranormal experimentation. things have moved on from that. as jan says, this stuff has been stigmatized in american academia. she might also be interested in thelma moss's book, the probability of the impossible, if she can get her hands on it. thelma was a legit ucla academic in her day, but it seems her memory is being drummed out of existence now.
religious belief is perfectly acceptable in american society. you can believe in all sorts of miraculous events taking place across the comfortable separation of a few thousand years of spacetime. many scientists have personal religious beliefs, and they seem to have learned to function separately in two different realms. but the minute you try to integrate the two, you're up against all hell. i've taken to rethinking a lot of religion from the point of view of what i know of the paranormal. i think that's the course that holds the most promise.
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nice rant, GB. another kind of pseudoscientific orthodoxy being foisted on us.
thanks for that note, tripl. family can be a wonderful thing.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Jul 16, 2010 - 10:39am PT
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"This is silly materialist thinking..." Till you present some "practical definitive" application (otherwise evidence) to support your (ages-old) stance, the "material functionality" model (aka materialist model) gets my vote and is the model of choice. -Which (a) has the full support of all modern science, engineering and technology applications behind it; which (b) jives point for point with my own lifelong study and experience in regard to how the world works and how life works.
The mantra: "Material functionalists unite!" The good news: They are. We are. It's just a matter of time.
Food for thought: (1) Those who are not "material functionalists," - those who diss material functionality- disrespect matter, the power of it in structure and function. Too bad. (2) "Attitude is everything." A better atitude: Respect material. Respect material functionality. By learning about it. How it is structured. How it evolves. How its myriad structures - at micro- and macro- levels- beget powerful functionalities.
To the material "deniers," ask yourselves: (1) Do you dis "material functionality" because it implies the lives of living things are finite? because it threatens conventional faiths? (2) How much science and engineering (like control systems engineering) have you had across multiple disciplines to give yourself a substantive broadband HD picture? Answers to these questions might be the solution to the problem.
Challenge yourselves: Leave behind your psychic books, also your 3rd- 14th century theology books, once in awhile, learn about the marvel of the Kreb cycle, actin-myosin mechanics, the photosynthentic pathway, electromagnetic spectrum, radio transmission, information science, analog and digital electronics. Insofar as one learns about these things and a 1,000 more, and how they all tie together to yield a coherent picture, it is attitude-changing.
"Attitude is everything."
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Jul 16, 2010 - 11:21am PT
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Tony-
i've taken to rethinking a lot of religion from the point of view of what i know of the paranormal. i think that's the course that holds the most promise.
Welcome back! Care to elaborate on this a bit?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 16, 2010 - 12:00pm PT
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the point is, most people trust there experience and feelings over analysis... it is certainly evident on this thread
that is a natural, and common reaction, but it doesn't lead to science, and in the end is profoundly anti-intellectual, (the definition of intellect: the power of knowing as distinguished from the power to feel and to will : the capacity for knowledge, from Merriam-Webster online).
these experiences are so powerful that we dress them up with all manner of significance, and construct fantasies regarding their nature, and also vehemently insist that they are "real" when the only demonstration of their reality is our experience, unexamined
it is pointless to argue, those who believe that their experience and feelings are a portal to a universe somehow separate from the "rational" universe, the "paranormal" universe, the "spiritual" universe, a universe that contains omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being(s), simply based on the collective stories of human experience will not abandon that position simply because it is easier to "know" that the experience is real and significant than to actually understand what reality is
weirdly the scientific objectivism is dismissed as leading to existential nihilism, which somehow is worse than being an atheist, amystic or aspirtualist... simply by observing that in the material interpretation of reality, there is no objective meaning, purpose or value to our existence... we just are...
...and it violates our human conceit and our human aesthetic. As humans, we see the universe through our own eyes, and believe it must exist as some human form
As a footnote, hopefully Tony can examine his own reasons for posting to a thread he wanted killed, he is a victim of being a bit of a drama queen and an attention whore which is unavoidable in such forums.... hopefully he doesn't expand to LEB proportions
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Jul 16, 2010 - 12:17pm PT
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back, jan? i don't think so, but i've had enough of what you might call jacob's ladder-type commerce, and encountered it with others, to know that the spiritual world impinges on the material, is somehow tied to it, and that there are unusual cases of the former affecting the latter. i still agree with the idea, however, that if you meet the buddha on the road you should kill him. interesting how they did that with jesus, huh? but buddha never pretended to die for our sins.
i will concede that all of the fuss around jesus might be due to an "affect" like this, but it isn't what mainstream christianity has cracked it up to be. more than anything, it's a sphere of mythic influence, and one which leaves much to be desired in face of its claims to divinity and the dismal fascism which seems to accompany it.
dr. f, sounds like werner has personal experience of a case at variance with your study. i'd like to hear more from him. people with preconceived notions love to try to stamp things out that don't fit their beliefs. such studies invite study as well. this is from the central clearinghouse of scientific truth, right?
aw, ed, you're not being nice. it works the other way too, i hope you realize. intuition is probably the greatest driving force in scientific breakthrough. i won't ask about your scientific credentials. i'm afraid we might find ourselves in the red light district as well.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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Jul 16, 2010 - 12:49pm PT
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you know ed, a couple days ago it was "tony, you seem to have a lot to say but you never post about climbing". so i came up with the chingadera thread, and i guess i kinda have to thank you for that.
if you want to know the short story, i am enough of a professional writer and editor to have made my living at it in the past. i'm self-taught in the sciences, but have done a share of scientific reporting and have also been involved in science-related issues like transportation technology. my graduate education is in folkloristics, a sub-sub category of anthropology and very much related to issues on this thread here.
i like to chat online, usually one-to-one. i wouldn't be on supertopo if i hadn't first come to help my friend ben chapman, who i think was taking uncalled-for heat over the situation at echo cliff down here. but you know what? i've wound up having tons of fun. it's like the old RCS campfires, only you don't have to wait for the weekend. i wonder if you've allowed your fun instinct to atrophy, you old coot.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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Jul 16, 2010 - 12:57pm PT
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Word for the day: ideomachy.
ideomachy: (1a) battle of ideas, (1b) war of ideas.
Who besides me thinks ideomachy is a good thing, e.g., in advancing the "practice" of living?
Or, perhaps I am the lone wolf.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Jul 16, 2010 - 01:01pm PT
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Ed
The state of science at this time does not have tool subtle enough to quantify the spiritual world, although the direction of science moves closer and closer all the time.
Thousands of years ago, mystics stated the universe is comprised of the same vibrating energy. Science didn't believe that, but came around.
Even all this "Dark Matter" stuff, now allegedly the most common stuff that exists, was unknown a short time ago and we still barely know squat about it. So it's the height of hubris to say much except "We don't know" and maybe "Ancient religions are full of superstition and cultural relics" regarding a spiritual world. Science ain't there yet.
And while you appear to like to retain an air of empiricism, the experience of the astrologer knowing the exact number of kids that I stated in my last post is an example of a kind of denial. When something is unexplainable but that plainly contradicts our worldview in a non-subjective way, we just forget it. You have to assume I'm either nuts or something is afoot. But being nuts like that doesn't suit me. I'm not making this up and I have a friend who could correlate this story. Nobody within 6000 miles, not even my friend, had the right answer to the question until the astrologer pointed out the error. He didn't have her name. He didn't know she was coming in.
But let's just ignore that.
The human capacity for denial is probably greater in the religious than in the scientific, but I promise you, a unmistakable spiritual event could beat you over the head, and you could decide to ignore it,
Peace
karl
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