Reincarnation

If you're not even going to allow a discussion of how there can be hits when you throw out a bunch of predictions then I agree the discussion won't get anywhere.
 
If you're not even going to allow a discussion of how there can be hits when you throw out a bunch of predictions then I agree the discussion won't get anywhere.

I think that is a valid idea if the prediction were along the lines of "some time in the future something bad is going to happen at the World Trade Center."

But not given this specificity:

"Key times of danger for the World Trade Centre and New York in particular is September, October and November of the year 2001 with a preference on the month of September. Now how any future terrorist attack is rather unclear, I haven't had a proper feeling about that or dreamt anything that has given me a clear vision but it is an attack through or from the air, it's like a missile strike or something striking the building from the air"

I think we can safely use the term skeptical silliness in that case.
 
If you're not even going to allow a discussion of how there can be hits when you throw out a bunch of predictions then I agree the discussion won't get anywhere.

No I have no problem starting up a discussion around it, your comment just reminded me of why it always ends up in frustration and goes nowhere... it's the equivalent of using a calculator to measure the weight of an object. Wrong tool for the job.

It is a common tactic used by skeptics and I am not sure whether it is done deliberately to discredit something or through a lack of understanding. The strength of a Psychic, Mediumship reading or Prediction is in the entirety of the information not in 1 or 2 pieces. Anyone that has been to a talented Psychic or Medium knows it isn't about the 1 or 2 things... it's about everything. How they capture the personality, the names the dates the way they felt before they died etc. A Psychic saying "I can feel he passed from chest related illness because I feel pain in my chest... was it a heart attack?" If the person died from pain in their chest and it was because they were shot through the heart.... you would see that as a 100% fail. Yet any normal person would go "Yeah I can see why you would think it was a heart attack because it would have felt like it".

I don't think you can break down a prediction like that into tiny packets of information so that in the end you can use statistics to say "10 bits of info were right and 10 bits were not exactly accurate so they had a 50% miss rate so the entire prediction was wrong" because that is exactly where this is going.

The study design you are proposing to use to prove whether or not the prediction was correct... is completely flawed because it does not allow for the fact we could have human error with interpretation of symbols.

I'll show you a perfect example of where your "study design" is flawed and how it would end up disproving a real conversation between 10 living people.

You get 20 people together in 2 lines of 10 either side of a room. The line on the left is playing Chinese whispers. The line on the right is PRETENDING to play chinese whispers but you don't know which is doing what. Both lines get told what subject the phrase is about "Cooking for a family member".

The line on the right pretends to whisper but don't actually have anything to say... they only know it's about "cooking for a family member".

The line on the left have a factual statement so they start by whispering the following:

"Tomorrow night I'm cooking a special meal for my step brother, in laws 50th birthday. I'm making ricotta balls baked at 220 degrees with tomato relish and a side of crinkle cut chips. I'll also be serving it with home made ginger beer"

Finally once it gets to the 10th person in each queue they have to say out aloud what they heard.

The person in the right line (who did not have a statement so are "cold reading") says the following:

"I'm cooking a meal for a relative... their favourite is chicken but I've decided to make something different this time and looking at Italian or maybe some Authentic Asian"

The person on the end of the right line who DID get the statement said the following:

"Tomorrow I am cooking a special meal for my brother who is 50. I'm going to make ricotta ravioli with tomato sauce and we'll have potato chips as well to snack on. I'm also going to serve some of my home made beer.

Now you don't have to be Einstein to see which people were "Cold reading" or "guessing" and who obviously was communicating and receiving information but in a difficult way that involved some misinterpretation because of how quickly and quietly the information came in (Such as through 10 people playing Chinese whispers) as happens exactly in a reading.

But using your study design... you are going to end up coming to the conclusion that they are both making it up... and that there is no evidence that they were ever playing chinese whispers and had communicated... even though the person on the left queue's statement was obviously coming from someone.

Using your design would be breaking down the "reading" into almost entirely misses... because he said "brother" instead of "brother in law", "ricotta ravioli" instead of "ricotta ball", "potato chips instead of "chips" and "Beer" when it was actually "Ginger Beer".

Now if you can't use that study design to prove an actual conversation between 10 people talking about a meal they are cooking tomorrow ever existed when it actually did... I am not sure you can use it to prove PSI where the information comes to a psychic in pretty much the say way... quickly and in symbols that need to be interpreted and put together. It is way too flawed and doesn't allow for interpretation of data.
 
Frank - which "study design" of mine are you referring to? I didn't set out a protocol. I mentioned some things that should be considered?
 
No I have no problem starting up a discussion around it, your comment just reminded me of why it always ends up in frustration and goes nowhere... it's the equivalent of using a calculator to measure the weight of an object. Wrong tool for the job.

It is a common tactic used by skeptics and I am not sure whether it is done deliberately to discredit something or through a lack of understanding. The strength of a Psychic, Mediumship reading or Prediction is in the entirety of the information not in 1 or 2 pieces. Anyone that has been to a talented Psychic or Medium knows it isn't about the 1 or 2 things... it's about everything. How they capture the personality, the names the dates the way they felt before they died etc. A Psychic saying "I can feel he passed from chest related illness because I feel pain in my chest... was it a heart attack?" If the person died from pain in their chest and it was because they were shot through the heart.... you would see that as a 100% fail. Yet any normal person would go "Yeah I can see why you would think it was a heart attack because it would have felt like it".

I don't know who made that suggestion, but I agree with you that it doesn't make sense to call something like that a miss. Most mediumship protocols nowadays seem to let the recipient judge whether something feels like a hit, and the control comes from also asking non-recipients (blinded, of course) whether something feels like a hit.

I'm not sure how to undertake this for reincarnation research, though. I guess the best thing for now is to at least strive for Stevenson's ideal of collecting statements under blind conditions.

Linda
 
It seems to be generally accepted that improved medical techniques for patients suffering cardiac arrest are behind the increase in NDEs being reported (although this is probably also a reflection of the growth of the mass media). However, it seems likely that NDEs occurred more often in the past than this would seem to imply, but were probably not reported widely.


One reason I say this is that I have recently been reading about cases of people buried prematurely in the county of Suffolk, England, in the late 19th or the first half of the20th century, because the tests for death were very unreliable, certainly in rural areas, in those days. In one such case a woman was actually put inside a coffin on three different occasions and is said to have had experiences of the afterlife (see Ronald Blythe, “Akenfield”).


Of course, not all these people would have been technically dead. However, the Suffolk grave-digger who told the story about the premature burials said he could always tell when a person was dead –by looking at the eyes. Can someone give an informed opinion on this technique?


I also learned today about the phenomenon of the “safety coffin”, fitted with a bell or some such device for the interred person to ring or make signals with if they discovered themselves underground –according to Wikipedia, these coffins came into fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of cholera epidemics.


Edgar Allan Poe’s story, The Premature Burial, as is well known, was based on catalepsy, which has for a long time been induced by “vodouists” in Haiti –won’t go into that here. But it seems a possible place to look for further examples of NDEs in the past –and even today. Has anyone heard of people having NDEs during cataleptic fits?
 
No I have no problem starting up a discussion around it, your comment just reminded me of why it always ends up in frustration and goes nowhere... it's the equivalent of using a calculator to measure the weight of an object. Wrong tool for the job.

It is a common tactic used by skeptics and I am not sure whether it is done deliberately to discredit something or through a lack of understanding.
Both. So why bother?
The strength of a Psychic, Mediumship reading or Prediction is in the entirety of the information not in 1 or 2 pieces. Anyone that has been to a talented Psychic or Medium knows it isn't about the 1 or 2 things... it's about everything. How they capture the personality, the names the dates the way they felt before they died etc. A Psychic saying "I can feel he passed from chest related illness because I feel pain in my chest... was it a heart attack?" If the person died from pain in their chest and it was because they were shot through the heart.... you would see that as a 100% fail. Yet any normal person would go "Yeah I can see why you would think it was a heart attack because it would have felt like it".
The criteria on which I value any medium is their ability to mediate verifiable, impossible to be known to the medium, survival of death information for the discarnate-incarnate communication. The rest is entertainment.

If a medium or anyone else wants to predict then they need to supply exacting information that is so fine to detail and acutely verifiable that there is no chance of good luck. Frankly, Frank, :D predictions bore me. They are rarely acted on and I can get much more complex data from a future life progression.
 
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