Are there any paranormal phenomena AT ALL??

chuck.drake said:
Interesting. So what other fields of science could benefit from having magicians on staff? I mean not just for entertainment. In a consulting capacity.
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Possibly the medical field. The psychology field, if the magician has a good grasp on ways in which people fool themselves. Anthropology.

One question is whether parapsychology tends to attract more subjects who try to fool the experimenters.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
Possibly the medical field. The psychology field, if the magician has a good grasp on ways in which people fool themselves. Anthropology.

One question is whether parapsychology tends to attract more subjects who try to fool the experimenters.

~~ Paul
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Your theoretical magician sounds positively magical. I would love to see the response of leading anthropologists to the idea that perhaps magicians can help them do their jobs better. And doesn't psychology study the ways in which people fool themselves? I guess maybe magicians know better.
 
chuck.drake said:
Your theoretical magician sounds positively magical. I would love to see the response of leading anthropologists to the idea that perhaps magicians can help them do their jobs better. And doesn't psychology study the ways in which people fool themselves? I guess maybe magicians know better.
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They know some aspects better, because they practice those aspects. I'm sure anthropologists would holler, but what do I care?

~~ Paul
 
fls said:
MysticG, what are you calling an "anecdote"?

Anecdote means "undocumented story" and the problem with them is that the events may not have occurred as described. But if you have someone conveying the results of their research, the reason they are trusted is because they are referring to events which are documented and that documentation can be experienced by others. So no, "facts" are not the same as "anecdotes". They're kinda the opposite. Discrepancies can be resolved by reference back to unwavering documents (which take precedence over all the ways in which stories have changed and events fabricated).

Linda
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It appears we are using different definitions. Merriam-Webster defines an anecdote as "a usually short narritive of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident". Perhaps I should have used the word story. To your credit, I notice now that in the section about the origin of the word, MW also says "French, from Greek anekdota unpublished items, ... ". So perhaps "undocumented" may be a common way of using it. Either way, I apologize for the ambiguity, and I agree that using your definition, fact and anecdote are contradictory by definition. At least I learned something about the origin of the word, so thanks.

steve001 said:
You see. Now let me lift that veil a bit more.
A scientific fact is defined one way as being something so well established that to think it is not true would be ludicrous. Yet the type of anecdote seen on this forum and across the web never rises to the position of scientific fact. It remains a personal fact: personal facts are not scientific facts. That's the problem with anecdotes.
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To be more clear, I will use the term story -

I don't mean to imply that all stories are the same as facts, or that every story should be treated as a fact. I am saying that a fact is a subcategory of story - a type of story for which we have sufficient evidence to be very convinced that it is true. But if you dig into a fact, you find at its core, a story. Peer review and replication are methods to distinguish whether a story is worthy of being put into the "scientific fact" category of story.

Honestly, I feel like I am rambling, and I don't even know if this is related to anything 'on-topic' or worth talking about anymore. It feels more like a linguistic exercise. Am I just explaining something simple in a needlessly complicated way? Probably :)
 
MysticG said:
It appears we are using different definitions. Merriam-Webster defines an anecdote as "a usually short narritive of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident". Perhaps I should have used the word story. To your credit, I notice now that in the section about the origin of the word, MW also says "French, from Greek anekdota unpublished items, ... ". So perhaps "undocumented" may be a common way of using it. Either way, I apologize for the ambiguity, and I agree that using your definition, fact and anecdote are contradictory by definition. At least I learned something about the origin of the word, so thanks.


To be more clear, I will use the term story -

I don't mean to imply that all stories are the same as facts, or that every story should be treated as a fact. I am saying that a fact is a subcategory of story - a type of story for which we have sufficient evidence to be very convinced that it is true. But if you dig into a fact, you find at its core, a story. Peer review and replication are methods to distinguish whether a story is worthy of being put into the "scientific fact" category of story.

Honestly, I feel like I am rambling, and I don't even know if this is related to anything 'on-topic' or worth talking about anymore. It feels more like a linguistic exercise. Am I just explaining something simple in a needlessly complicated way? Probably :)
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You're good.:)
 
MysticG said:
Honestly, I feel like I am rambling, and I don't even know if this is related to anything 'on-topic' or worth talking about anymore. It feels more like a linguistic exercise. Am I just explaining something simple in a needlessly complicated way? Probably :)
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I think I understand perfectly well what you're getting at, and in the end, I think it's key to the discussion of whether the paranormal exists. In one storyline, it doesn't, and in another, it does. Or maybe in one it can't, in the other it can. Or you can use words like might or should or shouldn't: there may be different nuances, and the thing is, the quality of the evidence is quite often subsidiary to a prior predilection (this can apply equally to proponents and sceptics).

This predilection may be actively denied, or people may simply be unaware that they have one. It's the source of statements like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Well actually, no. All claims require the same standards of evidence. It's not unheard of for certain claims that are widely accepted, or at least favoured by scientific elites, to have lowered standards of evidence, and for those elites to bend over backwards to aver, at least in public, stories that, ironically, may be published and so, strictly speaking, aren't anecdotes. Whether or not something is published doesn't bear a necessary relationship with the truth of the matter. "Peer reviewed" isn't a guarantee that something is true: it could actually be false, mistaken, or even fraudulent: we can all come up with examples of dodgy research, and there is increasing concern, perhaps particularly in medicine, that much if not the majority of published research is wrong.

On top of that, there are claims that are officially sanctioned, and which claims are or aren't is often a matter of fashion. Generally, the closer one's predilections are to what's in fashion, the more correct one feels one is. But the fact of the matter is that there's no such thing as correct except in mathematics, where strict rules of logic are applied and it can be incontrovertibly demonstrated whether or not a particular proof or equation complies with those rules. But the rules of mathematics, in the end, however useful they are, are a human invention. The storyline of mathematics, particularly in the physical sciences, is that if a mathematical model has a degree of predictive or explanatory power (the more accurate the prediction the better), then that's the strongest possible evidence that the model is correct. Well no: that's not actually true, the classic example being Newtonian physics. In due course, post-Newtonian physics may come in for refinements of its own. The maths of Newtonian or post-Newtonian physics will continue to be useful depending on the area of application, even if the model is (one might well say, inevitably, when it is) completely abandoned.

We all construct models of reality that have certain boundaries. That which we think is reality is actually a model of reality. The strongest evidence is actually always personal experience, because, as I've said previously, never for a moment in our entire lives do we step outside our own personal consciousness. Those who have never personally experienced the paranormal (I'm one of them) are faced with an existential choice about whether or not to make room for it in their model of reality. My personal choice is agnosticism with a leaning towards its existence; but others may completely embrace or completely reject it.

If we could all recognise that we have our models of reality and that those models could be wrong, then we could have genuinely productive discussions. We'd be open to such evidence as was available, and prepared, at least in principle, to amend our models--in other words, to change our preferred storylines. Sounds easy, but actually, our storylines are an integral part of what we consider ourselves to be. Changing the story can be exceedingly traumatic, and extraordinary claims can often be translated as I'm not prepared to entertain that, because going there would introduce intolerable uncertainty into the model, and I can't allow that to happen.

I'm not having a go solely at sceptics: this applies to everyone. There are psi proponents who can be just as closed to evidence as some sceptics.
 
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Michael Larkin said:
I think I understand perfectly well what you're getting at, and in the end, I think it's key to the discussion of whether the paranormal exists. In one storyline, it doesn't, and in another, it does. Or maybe in one it can't, in the other it can. Or you can use words like might or should or shouldn't: there may be different nuances, and the thing is, the quality of the evidence is quite often subsidiary to a prior predilection (this can apply equally to proponents and sceptics).

This predilection may be actively denied, or people may simply be unaware that they have one. It's the source of statements like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Well actually, no. All claims require the same standards of evidence. It's not unheard of for certain claims that are widely accepted, or at least favoured by scientific elites, to have lowered standards of evidence, and for those elites to bend over backwards to aver, at least in public, stories that, ironically, may be published and so, strictly speaking, aren't anecdotes. Whether or not something is published doesn't bear a necessary relationship with the truth of the matter. "Peer reviewed" isn't a guarantee that something is true: it could actually be false, mistaken, or even fraudulent: we can all come up with examples of dodgy research, and there is increasing concern, perhaps particularly in medicine, that much if not the majority of published research is wrong.

On top of that, there are claims that are officially sanctioned, and which claims are or aren't is often a matter of fashion. Generally, the closer one's predilections are to what's in fashion, the more correct one feels one is. But the fact of the matter is that there's no such thing as correct except in mathematics, where strict rules of logic are applied and it can be incontrovertibly demonstrated whether or not a particular proof or equation complies with those rules. But the rules of mathematics, in the end, however useful they are, are a human invention. The storyline of mathematics, particularly in the physical sciences, is that if a mathematical model has a degree of predictive or explanatory power (the more accurate the prediction the better), then that's the strongest possible evidence that the model is correct. Well no: that's not actually true, the classic example being Newtonian physics. In due course, post-Newtonian physics may come in for refinements of its own. The maths of Newtonian or post-Newtonian physics will continue to be useful depending on the area of application, even if the model is (one might well say, inevitably, when it is) completely abandoned.

We all construct models of reality that have certain boundaries. That which we think is reality is actually a model of reality. The strongest evidence is actually always personal experience, because, as I've said previously, never for a moment in our entire lives do we step outside our own personal consciousness. Those who have never personally experienced the paranormal (I'm one of them) are faced with an existential choice about whether or not to make room for them in their model of reality. My personal choice is agnosticism with a leaning towards their existence; but others may completely embrace or completely reject them.

If we could all recognise that we have our models of reality and that those models could be wrong, then we could have genuinely productive discussions. We'd be open to such evidence as was available, and prepared, at least in principle, to amend our models--in other words, to change our preferred storylines. Sounds easy, but actually, our storylines are an integral part of what we consider ourselves to be. Changing the story can be exceedingly traumatic, and extraordinary claims can often be translated as I'm not prepared to entertain that, because going there would introduce intolerable uncertainty into the model, and I can't allow that to happen.

I'm not having a go solely at sceptics: this applies to everyone. There are psi proponents who can be just as closed to evidence as some sceptics.
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Michael, we are definitely on the same page with this. I pretty much agree with everything you said, and what you have written is exactly the direction in which I was attempting to go, except that you stated and expanded the idea much more clearly than I was able to. Your writing is very lucid and enjoyable to read. Thanks.
 
MysticG said:
Michael, we are definitely on the same page with this. I pretty much agree with everything you said, and what you have written is exactly the direction in which I was attempting to go, except that you stated and expanded the idea much more clearly than I was able to. Your writing is very lucid and enjoyable to read. Thanks.
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Cheers. One thing is, I didn't want you to think that you weren't talking good sense and putting your finger on something important and highly relevant: IMO, you were.
 
Michael Larkin said:
Nice post, MysticG. When it comes to mythopoesis, I think all human affairs have an element of it, even maths and science. WRT maths, for example, Euclidean geometry, which reigned for millennia, was heavily coloured by a certain view of the universe. In modern times, one can think of the mathematics associated with dark matter and energy, black holes, the big bang and inflation. The maths doubtless has consistency, but are there actually any such things as dark matter, etc? And even where we feel we are on firmer ground, like, say, gravity, what the heck is gravity, any way?

At any given time in human history, we've always felt we had a firm idea about what was real and certain, and that what was formerly taken to be the case was more myth than fact.
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This in a sense is what this whole thread has been about.. There is no "value neutral" take on the business of existing. There is no process by which the creative language of forms, ideas and imaginations can step outside of itself. However, the division into fact and myth is still dividing the world between the literally real and the literally not real. I find myself moving towards the view that what we call the literally real is first a kind of deeply entrenched invariant of our perception and secondly the "basket case" or sediment of a more fluid language of being...and that fluidity begins to make itself known in story, in myth, in paranormal accounts. Like consciousness, the reality of these things is a creative dialogue not a static entity. As I said much earlier in the thread, literal reality tells us embarrassingly little about why the speech at Nuremberg diverted the 20th Century, why Shakespeare or the Beatles or Tolkien have changed the minds of millions, or why a small man living in a small house would sell everything he had to fuel his shoe fetish.
 
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