Two recommended books
The first book is Outside the Gates of Science (why it's time for the paranormal to come in from the cold), by Damien Broderick. This is a comprehensive, accurate and well written examination of psi research by a critically-minded observer of the field who has done his homework.Broderick is also author of numerous award-winning science fiction novels, and has a PhD in the comparative semiotics of science and literature.
The second is Opening to the Infinite, by Stephan Schwartz. Among other things, this book provides an answer to those who cannot accept the possibility of psi unless it has some pragmatic use. Schwartz's stories about practical applications of remote viewing is worth the price of this book, but he goes beyond that and offers a series of exercises, tips and techniques to allow the serious reader to experiment with remote viewing first-hand.
Comments
I've often wondered whether PK effects, "acting" on various stochastic processes at the level of DNA, could be responsible for some kind of Lamarkian inheritance. If a solid theory of PK eventually emerges, it would seem apt to incorporate it into evolutionary theory.
The pictures of the two books link to the same images, rather than (presumably) the relevant page on Amazon.
David
Perhaps this could have relevance for evolution/creation conflict.
Absolutely. Although I'm not a proponent of Intelligent Design or religious in any way, I think they may have a point! Perhaps "design" could come about by a means other than natural selection. That doesn't mean that natural selection doesn't happen, just that there may be another teleological mechanism that narrows down variation within a population to phenotypes more suited to their environment so that natural selection is more efficient. Or something like that. I mean, it seems to fit quite nicely since PK is hypothesised to work on the level of statistical probabilities or "variation" in this sense (Dean, correct me if I'm wrong there!).
The problem with this idea is that PK seems to involve consciousness, so any PK mediated evolution might be restricted to periods where the nervous system has already evolved enough to allow certain types of conscious processes (notwithstanding the materialistic view inherent there).
My questions fits in nicely with the announcement of these 2 books. I'm going to write a thesis in 2 years about the objectivity of science or the lack of it and I need some good sources.
So far I have the stuff of Kuhn, some good sites like skepticalinvestigations.org and the chapter on skeptics from Dean Radin his book the conscious universe.
This thesis will be very intresting and controversial because I think in Belgium there are a lot of dogmatic sceptics and especially on the free university(see free as long as you keep it naturalistic and materialistic).
So if anybody has some good book recommendations or has some ideas please contact me:
dareshdaresh@yahoo.com or leave a note here.
This thesis has to be very very solid if I want to make a point.
Tnx a lot in advance,
Filip
The three-sentence caption is odd... But the third sentence reads: “Each dot represents an experiment and the dates on the x-axis indicate the average year of study publication.”
The third sentence of the caption is indeed confusing. It appears to refer to another graph that was not included in the book.
It should say that the year of study publication in this graph refers to the cumulative average hit rate as of the year noted on the x-axis.