Reality and the Extended Mind - Part 1
A portion of a film by Adrian Nelson
Skeptic agrees that remote viewing is proven
Excerpt from a January 2008 item in the UK's The Daily Mail newspaper: In 1995, the US Congress asked two independent scientists to assess whether the $20 million that the government had spent on psychic research had produced anything of value. And the conclusions proved to be somewhat unexpected. Professor Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California, discovered that remote viewers were correct 34 per cent of the time, a figure way beyond what chance guessing would allow. She says: "Using the standards applied to any other area of science, you have to conclude that certain psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing, have been well established. "The results are not due to chance or flaws in the experiments." Of course, this doesn't wash with sceptical scientists. Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, refuses to believe in remote viewing. He says: "I agree that by the standards of any other area ...
Comments
Many thanks for your time
From my casual study of hardcore skeptics, I would say that one commonality leading to such extremism is someone who had uncritically accepted a religious belief in their youth, then something happened to crush their faith, they subsequently felt disillusioned or betrayed, and so they became hardened to never again accept anything without overwhelming proof. This is an understandable coping mechanism, but in strong cases it can also lead to depression, pessimism, cynicism, or nihilism. None of these outcomes are psychologically healthy, and there is evidence that they are also morally destructive.
When such people find that there are others like them, they naturally form affiliations to support their new beliefs. And then they unwittingly fall into the same trap that got them there in the first place. They uncritically revere their saints (the fawning over celebrities at skeptical conferences is reminiscent of swooning at religious revivals), and they learn that in some circles (e.g., journalism and academia) declaring oneself as fiercely skeptic is socially rewarded. So there are motivations to maintain this stance.
Note that this sketch does not pertain to genuine skepticism. The distinction between true and false skepticism can be seen most clearly when critical thinking skills -- which I regard as essential -- morph into mindless sneering.
A couple of tentative thoughts around the discussion on skeptisim.
This is an area I continue to puzzle over. Whilst I think Dr Radin's comment has much merit there may be a couple of other aspects.
There is a curious symmetry to extreme opinions or beliefs. This can be seen in political ideologies which, whilst claiming to be opposites, often provide a very similar experience to anyone living under them. We can a psuedo-religous like aspect to both the extreme skeptic (who seems to believe that nothing knew will ever be discovered) and the extreme opposite where some individuals seem to accept ideas without good, objective, evidence. Personality types that 'need to believe', perhaps in terms of pychological security seem prone to these extreme positions.
A second aspect is the nature of normative science, which effectively prevents fundamentally new ideas from being accepted until the previous paradigm has hit a crisis and the new ideas are fully developed enough to fully incorporate the previous paradigm and solve the problems that caused the crisis...quite a tall order. Whilst there are certainly pyschological and sociological aspects to this, there is a net benefit in that ideas must be exceptionally secure before being accepted. What can appear as complete irrationality in rejecting strong evidence can also be seen as an ultra-conservative threshold for 'accepted' knowledge. This is hard on those of us who feel certain phenomena, including psi, now have exceptionally secure data in terms of their basic existance. The fact remains, however that we have yet to provide a model which predicts psi from physical theory (and that model must be fully consistent with all other data). It will not therefore be accepted yet, and so be it. it is up to pragmatists such as ourselves (and others such as the intelligence community, and perhaps in the future business) to sort it out and then present the finished product to mainstream science, gift wrapped and ready to go...
Any thoughts would be most interesting! (ps - i am an exception to the rule - ex Catholic, now an atheist, but try to follow the data critically but rationally whereever it goes).
As for hard core skeptics, I think it is important not to focus attention on conflict. What we focus upon expands, and a certain victim consciousness can ensue. Lawrence LeShan takes a similar view in his book "A New Science of the Paranormal". I really like his attitude. It seems to me he has just accepted that he has a genuine contribution to knowledge to make, and is not going to get around apologising for it. For Dean and parapsychologists, there is a professional requirement to deal with these people, but for most other people there isn't.
The reality is that hard core skeptics are not as common as you think (they are a small minority), and by giving them too much attention your view of the world becomes distorted into a conflict/ego us-vs-them drama.
I have been having a brief look at their work and their philosophy they are proponents of eliminative materialism. Their view seems to eliminate free will, feelings and even conciousness itself. I wonder if they have ever launched an attack on PSI research before. The reason why I'm posting this is that I was reading irreducible mind and they're mentioned a fair bit.
Many Thanks
I also want to point out a passage from the British analytical philosopher, AJ Ayer, on causality, which has an obvious bearing on this. It's in his book The Problem of Knowledge (I can't give page ref's as I don't have it to hand). There's a short section (about five pages), where argues with great clarity that there is no logical reason why causality should not work backwards, i.e. from future to past. He remained open minded on whether it actually does, but also suggested that the reason we experience causality as we do is due to the way memory functions - we remember the past but not the future. Again there is no logical reason why this must be so.
Ayer was famous as philosophers go and logically very sharp. He had no truck with religion, but he was I think fair-minded and sceptical in the genuine sense.
As precognition challenges our assumptions about causality, one thing we need is a much clearer understanding of cause and effect. I'd like to know what others make of his argument.
telepathy inside our own brains?
http://www.kurzweilai.net/unexplained-communication-between-brain-hemispheres-without-corpus-callosum?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c5e3abd30a-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email
I do note that the comments posted on these discussions are mostly critical of the idea that electro-magnetic fields are involved in the 'transmission' of consciousness. Of course it may be true that the process is not electro-magnetic, but that the 'telepathic' process is working nonetheless, via some 'mechanism' that is not understood, or not being considered. I still find it incredible - much more incredible than the idea of the extended mind - that mainstream science is so far out of touch with 'reality' when it comes to understanding consciousness. But then again, most of my own understanding comes from two decades of introspection, meditation, and work on the emotional body. Almost nobody in mainstream science is engaging the psyche and the body in a way that enables them to experience non-local mind at a first-person level. And those who are doing the work are afraid to talk about it, thanks to what Dean calls "the psi taboo." All this is frustrating, as there are many people who feel they have an important contribution to make to the understanding of consciousness, but they are effectively forbidden to speak.