Scientific Parapsychology: Physicists weigh in

Laura

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Ark was reading this article today at lunch. It was so interesting, and so typical of the state of science in these times, and so typical of what we have been up against all these years, that I thought I would share it.

_http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/06/26/parapsychology-an-exchange/


Parapsychology: An Exchange
Olivier Costa de Beauregard, Richard D. Mattuck, Brian D. Josephson, and Evan Harris Walker, reply by Martin Gardner
June 26, 1980 Issue

To the Editors:

In a recent article,1 J.A. Wheeler has violently attacked parapsychology, calling it a “pathological science” and a “pretentious pseudo science” and he suggests that it “will serve science well to vote ‘parapsychology’ out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.” In addition, he criticizes physicists who are investigating a possible connection between quantum theory and parapsychology,2 stating that “in the quantum theory of observation, my own present field of endeavor, I find honest work almost overwhelmed by the buzz of absolutely crazy ideas put forth with the aim of establishing a link between quantum mechanics and parapsychology—as if there were any such thing as ‘parapsychology,’ ” and “Where there is meat there are flies. No subject more attracts the devotees of the ‘paranormal’ than the quantum theory of measurement.” Wheeler’s attack has been reproduced in an article by Martin Gardner, entitled “Quantum Theory and Quack Theory,” published in The New York Review of Books.

The authors of the present note are all physicists who have for some years been engaged in research on a possible connection between quantum mechanics and parapsychology. We are very much shocked by Wheeler’s remarks, which we feel show no trace of the open-minded, imaginative, rational approach to science for which Wheeler is otherwise so famous. We will now answer Wheeler’s objections in turn.

Wheeler calls parapsychology a “pseudo” or “pathological” science on the grounds that “every science that is a science has hundreds of hard results, but search fails to turn up a single one in parapsychology.”

In our opinion, no new science can be expected to present “hundreds of hard results” in its infancy. There are even older, accepted sciences which cannot meet this criterion, such as, e.g., general relativity, where there are only three or four “hard” confirmations of the theory. What entitles a field of research to be called “science” is not “hard results” but rather the intention and care with which its investigations are carried out, and the competence of its investigators. We feel that there are several pieces of research in parapsychology in which these criteria have been met. For example, there is Dr. C. Crussard and Dr. J. Bouvaist’s investigation of the French medium, Jean Pierre Girard.3 Girard produced large changes in the physical properties of metal bars, without the use of physical agents, under what appear to be rigorously controlled conditions. For instance he increased the hardness of an aluminum bar by ca. 10 percent, without using any known physical means. The experiment was repeated four times in three different laboratories, two in France, one in England.

A second example is the investigation of remote bending produced by English school-children,4 carried out by Professor. J.B. Hasted, chairman of the physics department at Birkbeck College, University of London. Under controlled conditions, the children produced large bending and stretching signals in metal objects equipped with strain gauges, without being in contact with the objects. The signals were of a character such that they could not have been produced by any known physical forces under the given experimental conditions. A third example is Dr. H. Schmidt’s investigation of the influence of selected subjects on the output of a random number generator based on radioactive decay.5 For example in rigorously controlled experiments, Schmidt found two subjects who could, by an effort of the will, cause the generator output to be non-random. The probability that the result was due to pure chance was less than one chance in ten million. A fourth example is Dr. H. Puthoff and R. Targ’s investigation of remote viewing.6 In their experiments, several subjects were able to acquire statistically significant amounts of information about randomly chosen targets blocked from ordinary perception by distance or shielding.

If Wheeler has any concrete criticisms of the above experiments, we would like to hear them. Moreover, we challenge any magician to duplicate these results under the given controlled conditions.

Wheeler talks of “crazy ideas put forth with the aim of establishing a link between quantum mechanics and parapsychology—as if there were any such thing as “parapsychology.’ ” We feel that the above experiments are of sufficiently high quality to warrant the assumption that there is indeed such a thing as parapsychology. However, assuming the existence of, paranormal phenomena, we seem to lack a way of putting these phenomena into our present picture of the physical universe. In fact, this lack is probably one of the main reasons for the irrational attacks on parapsychology. Therefore, we feel that it is imperative to try to extend the framework of modern physics—in particular, quantum mechanics—in order to include the new phenomena in a rational and coherent fashion. We feel that this requires a new approach in physics in which consciousness plays an important role, and we are trying to find such an approach.7 The theories we are working on are completely rational, and lead to results which can be tested in the laboratory, although so far there have been only preliminary attempts in this direction.
Wheeler states his belief that “not consciousness but the distinction between the probe and the probed [is] central to the elemental quantum act of observation.” That is, in contrast to us, consciousness is not a part of Wheeler’s model. In fact he states “I would have felt very uncomfortable if Bohr had used the term ‘consciousness’ in defining the elemental act of observation. I would not have known what he meant,”8 Therefore, we find it indeed regrettable that, as Gardner puts it, “Wheeler’s views on quantum mechanics have been widely cited by parapsychologists as strengthening their own.” This serves only to confuse the issue, and we sympathize fully with Wheeler’s irritation on this point. The issue as we see it is this: Assuming that the phenomena of parapsychology are real, then which model—Wheeler’s, or ours, or some other model—gives the best description of these phenomena? We believe that this question can only be answered by further experiment, not by attempting to legislate parapsychology out of existence as a respectable field of research by removing it from the AAAS.
Wheeler states that Langmuir’s “table of symptoms of pathological science” is appropriate to parapsychology. We do not believe this. For example, one “symptom” is that “the effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability.” As, pointed out in 1. above, Girard produced an easily detectable change in hardness of a metal bar. Hasted’s bending signals were also well above the noise level. Another symptom is “fantastic theories contrary to experience.” Do we have to remind Wheeler that many new theories looked “fantastic” when they were first proposed—for example, relativity and quantum theory? The criterion for accepting or rejecting a theory is not how “common sense” or “fantastic” it appears, but rather, how well it describes the observed data and gives them coherence and meaning.

It would be a good idea for Wheeler to reread p. 38 of his own book Gravitation.9 On that page is a quote from the great physicist Galileo Galilei ridiculing Kepler’s belief that the moon is the cause of the tides:

Everything that has been said before and imagined by other people [about the tides] is in my opinion completely invalid. But among the great men who have philosophised about this marvellous effect of nature the one who surprised me the most is Kepler. More than other people he was a person of independent genius, sharp, and had in his hands the motion of the earth. He later pricked up his ears and became interested in the action of the moon on the water, and in other occult phenomena, and similar childishness.

Galileo Galilei (1632)

So Wheeler is taking quite a risk in ridiculing parapsychology!

Wheeler writes that parapsychology “siphons” between 1 and 20 million dollars per year away from the American taxpayer. We would like to point out that this sum is negligible compared with the amount of money going into other areas of science. Assuming 50,000 scientists in all other fields of science, with an average cost of 100,000 dollars per year per scientist yields $5 billion. Thus, less than half of one percent of research money is going into parapsychology in the United States.

In conclusion, we find that Wheeler’s claim that parapsychology is a “pseudo” or “pathological” science is unsupported. Unless he is able to prove that the experiments described in part 1. of this rebuttal were carried out incompetently, we feel that his argument has no basis in fact. With his immoderate attack on an embryo science, we believe that Wheeler is in grave danger of repeating the mistake of the great French chemist Lavoisier, who declared, after examining a meteorite which others had seen fall on a meadow September 13, 1768: “We must conclude therefore that the stone did not fall from the sky. The opinion which seems to us the most probable and agrees best with the principles accepted in physics is that this stone was struck by lightning.”

Finally, Wheeler concludes with “now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.” On the contrary, we feel that all those who believe in the “rule of reason” should examine the research on paranormal phenomena in an open-minded fashion, and start thinking of how one might extend the borders of our present theories so as to include these phenomena within them.

Olivier Costa de Beauregard

Institut Henri Poincaré

University of Paris, Paris, France

Richard D. Mattuck

Physics Laboratory I

University of Copenhagen

Copenhagen, Denmark

Brian D. Josephson

Cavendish Laboratory

Cambridge University, Cambridge, England

Evan Harris Walker

Department of Mechanics and Materials

Sciences, Johns Hopkins University

Baltimore, Maryland, and Ballistics Research

Laboratory, Aberdeen, Maryland
Martin Gardner replies:

One may have the highest respect for the signers of the above letter—one of them, Brian Josephson, is a Nobel Prize winner—at the same time recognizing that knowledge of physics no more qualifies a scientist to evaluate psychic claims than does knowledge of chess or medieval Latin.

The comparison of parapsychology with general relativity is singularly inapt. Special relativity was initially confirmed by hundreds of tests. General relativity, which extended the theory to accelerated motion, had an enormous elegance and unifying power (the equivalence of gravity and inertia alone made it persuasive); soon it, too, was being confirmed by all tests capable of refuting it. More to the point, it was confirmed by skeptics. In contrast, after a century of research parapsychology has only vague suggestions for theories, and has yet to produce a single experiment that can be reliably replicated by unbelievers.

The letter signers cite four investigations they consider outstanding. It is a curious list. First we have the testing of Jean-Pierre Girard by Charles Crussard, a French metallurgist. Like Uri Geller, Girard began his career as a conjuror. Marcel Blanc’s article, “Fading Spoon Bender” (New Scientist, February 16, 1978) reproduces a photo of Girard from a 1975/76 Magicians’ Annual which shows him doing the now-standard bent-key trick. In the accompanying autobiographical remarks Girard says his specialty is “devising tricks based on optical illusions.” Gérard Majax, a French magician, reveals in his recent book on cheating in parapsychology that Girard once told him he planned a gigantic joke to show how easily leading scientists could be fooled.

The American magician James Randi had no difficulty detecting Girard’s simple methods when he saw Crussard’s films, and in 1977, in a series of tests based on controls proposed by Randi, Girard failed to bend a single piece of metal. (See Blanc’s article and Randi’s soon-to-appear Lippincott and Crowell book, Flim-Flam.) Crussard remains convinced of Girard’s power. He has stated that Randi also has it, and secretly used it to inhibit Girard during the 1977 tests! Like Geller, Girard performs a variety of standard magic feats, such as driving a car while “securely blindfolded.” That four distinguished physicists could consider him a “French medium” is almost beyond belief.

It is worth noting that had their letter been written a few years ago Geller would have been heralded as the star demonstrator of the “Geller effect” (psychic metal bending). In Quantum Physics and Parapsychology (Parapsychological Foundation, 1975), the proceedings of a 1974 Swiss conference, Geller’s name is never mentioned without respect. On page 274 Walker, a signer of the letter, praises Uri’s PK ability, and on page 279 he tells of once seeing Geller fail to produce PK effects because the “powerful wills” of unbelievers in the audience were “directed in the opposite direction.”

All four writers contributed articles (two are cited in their notes 4 and 7) to The Iceland Papers, an anthology edited by Andrija Puharich. This is the Puharich whose notorious book, Uri, claims that Uri gets his powers from extraterrestrial spacecraft, and that Uri once teleported himself from down-town Manhattan to the back porch of Puharich’s house in Ossining. Why is Geller, who started the metal-bending flap, so thunderously missing from the letter? Can it be because Geller is now discredited whereas Girard is still almost unknown outside of France?

Next we are told about England’s spoon-bending children as reported in Puharich’s book by John Hasted. I suggest that interested readers look up this hilarious paper to judge for themselves whether Hasted is a competent psychic investigator. Physicist John Taylor, Hasted’s London colleague, was so bamboozled by Uri and by spoon-bending youngsters that he wrote an entire book about it, Superminds. As a result of learning some kindergarten magic, and making a few better-controlled tests, Taylor is now persuaded that the Geller effect does not exist, and that there is no evidence whatever for ESP and PK. See his just published Dutton book, Science and the Supernatural, in which he details his disenchantment. Hasted’s work is demolished by pointing out that Hasted failed to take into account amplification by his sensitive strain gauges of slight static charges produced by body movements.

Next we have Helmut Schmidt’s testing of psychics who seem to influence his random number generators. This work is considered “rigidly controlled” only by himself and by true believers. Schmidt seldom works with another investigator, skeptics have not had access to his raw data, nor have they been able to replicate his experiments. There also have been failed replications by sympathetic parapsychologists. For a probing of the weakness of Schmidt’s experimental designs see C.E.M. Hansel’s ESP and Parapsychology: A Scientific Reevaluation, recently published by Prometheus Books, pages 220-233. Schmidt is best known in psi circles for his research on the PK powers of cats and cockroaches. He, too, was once a Gellerite. In his paper in Edgar Mitchell’s anthology, Psychic Explorations, he speaks of Uri as a “particularly strong” source of PK, whose ability to bend “heavy metal objects ‘mentally,’ just by touching them slightly or even without any touch” has been observed by “critical researchers.”

Finally we have the remote-viewing (clairvoyance) experiments by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ. No hint is given of the fast-growing literature on the carelessness of this work, especially as detailed in a forthcoming Prometheus book, The Psychology of the Psychic, by psychologists Dick Kammann and Richard Marks. The latest failure to replicate was an extremely rigorous experiment, following all the original protocols, by four researchers at Metropolitan State College, in Denver. They reported their negative results at the 1980 annual convention of the American Institute for the Advancement of Science, in San Francisco last January.

Reminders of Galileo’s ridicule of Kepler, and of scientists unable to believe stones fell from the sky, were tired clichés even in 1952 when I mentioned them in my book Fads and Fallacies. They only prove what everybody knows, that great scientists can be mistaken. But as hard evidence accumulated for the lunar theory of tides and for elliptical planetary orbits (which Galileo also refused to accept), and for the fall of meteorites, no one suggested that beliefs were necessary for confirmations. This Catch 22 is peculiar to parapsychology, making it difficult in principle for skeptics to disconfirm any claim.

Instead of thinking of themselves as having the great insights of a Kepler, the writers should ponder their close resemblances to those eminent physicists who not so long ago were convinced that mediums could photograph the faces of departed spirits and exude luminous ectoplasm from their noses. If the four investigations listed in their letter are the best evidence they can muster for the reality of psi, their letter is a sad reinforcement of what John Wheeler had to say.
Letters

Parapsychology & Physics December 18, 1980

1

J.A. Wheeler, appendix to lecture delivered at the January 1979 meeting of the AAAS, reproduced in “Quantum Theory and Quack Theory” by Martin Gardner, NYR, May 17, 1979. ↩
2

J.A. Wheeler, in letter to Wm. D. Carey, ibid. ↩
3

C. Crussard, and J. Bouvaist, “Etude de quelques deformations et transformations apparemment anormales de metaux,” Mémoires Scientifiques Revue Metallurgie, February 1978, p. 117. ↩
4

J.B. Hasted, “Physical aspects of paranormal metal bending,” J. Society for Psychical Research, 49, 583 (1977); “Paranormal metal-bending” in The Iceland papers (see under ref. 7). ↩
5

H. Schmidt, “Instrumentation in the parapsychology laboratory,” p. 13 in New Directions in Parapsychology, ed. J. Beloff, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen (1975). ↩
6

H.E. Puthoff and R. Targ, “A Perceptual Channel for Information Transfer over Kilometer Distances: Historical Perspective and Recent Research,” Proc. IEEE, 64, p. 329 (1976); “Direct Perception of Remote Geographical Locations,” in The Iceland Papers (see under ref. 7). ↩
7

See, for example, E.H. Walker, “Foundations of Paraphysical and Parapsychological Phenomena,” P. 1 in Quantum Physics and Parapsychology, Ed. L. Oteri, Parapsychology Foundation, 29 W. 57 St., NY (1975); O.C. de Beauregard, “Time Symmetry and the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Found. Phys., 6 539 (1976), “Smatrix, Feynman Zigzag and Einstein Correlation,” Phys. Lett., 67 A 171 (1978). See also R.D. Mattuck and E.H. Walker, “The Action of Consciousness on Matter: a Quantum Mechanical Theory of Psychokinesis,” in The Iceland Papers; Experimental and Theoretical Research on the Physics of Consciousness, Essentia Research, Amherst, Wisc. Ed. A. Puharich (1979), O.C. de Beauregard, “The Expanding Paradigm of the Einstein Paradox,” ibid., B.D. Josephson, “Conscious Experience and its place in Physics,” paper presented at “Colloque International Science et Conscience,” Cordoba, 1-5. October 1979. ↩
8

J.A. Wheeler, “Frontiers of Time,” in Problems in the Foundations of Physics, Ed. N. Toraldo di Franca and Bas van Fraassen, North Holland, Amsterdam, 1979 (International School of Physics “Enrico Fermi,” Varenna, LXXII Course 1977). ↩
9

C.W. Misner, K.S. Thorne, and J.A. Wheeler, Gravitation (W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1975). ↩
 
A very interesting article. Authoritarians get everywhere it seems. Wasn't Darwin ridiculed for his Origin of the Species?

Deliberate ignorance of paranormal activity is clearly a mistake. Observable phenomena can't be excluded from the method just because it doesn't fit your beliefs. How can you conclude anything with such fundamental questions left unanswered?

Not sure this qualifies as a law of physics but it could! “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” - attributed to Mahatma Gandhi.

Thank The Maker for this place!
 
While reading this article I couldn't stop thinking about Collingwood's Idea of History. There were a lot of philosophers against history, some of their arguments were weaker than others, and there were the ones who were trying to focus only on natural sciences. But at the end, all of them were attacking a discipline that wasn't completely established and certainly there were many gaps on it. For some reason human beings have a tendency to attack that what they don't know, or that what is new or different. In my opinion those critics are a result of the ignorance about parapsychology and the prejudices around this subject, it's difficult for a normal person to talk about this, imagine a scientist...

This is a subject that has always caught my attention because I saw that the ones who believe this things couldn't be possible, these people had never experienced anything of this kind. There may be a factor of believing and not believing or being resistant against it, as the C's pointed out in the last session. What if for this phenomenons to manifest you need to be conscious in a sense that you need to know what you are doing or that there is something else beyond the physical world that we already know (ghosts), or if it's a matter of being able to perceive or not perceive. For example gravity: you don't need to know that there is gravity to throw something in the air and see how it falls, it will fall anyway, you will be able to observe this. What if with parapsychology is different? There are many unanswered questions from these scientists. As scientists they should be open to discover new things all the time, how can they be so sure that parapsychology is absurd? That equals to say "we already know everything, what is and what is not possible, so we establish that paranormal phenomenons are not possible".
 
Thanks for sharing, Laura.

Laura said:
Finally, Wheeler concludes with “now is the time for everyone who believes in the rule of reason to speak up against pathological science and its purveyors.” On the contrary, we feel that all those who believe in the “rule of reason” should examine the research on paranormal phenomena in an open-minded fashion, and start thinking of how one might extend the borders of our present theories so as to include these phenomena within them.

I agree with the above that such topics should be approached in an open-minded fashion.

Laura said:
More to the point, it was confirmed by skeptics. In contrast, after a century of research parapsychology has only vague suggestions for theories, and has yet to produce a single experiment that can be reliably replicated by unbelievers.

Notice "unbelievers". With that type of bias, how reliable is their checking of data and analyzing of such studies? The fact is that there are things happening that current scientists cannot really explain, so research in this aspect is needed. It's not a matter of believing or not believing, but rather about keeping an open mind about it. Calling such research 'pathological' is pretty far-fetched.
 
Oxajil said:
More to the point, it was confirmed by skeptics. In contrast, after a century of research parapsychology has only vague suggestions for theories, and has yet to produce a single experiment that can be reliably replicated by unbelievers.

Notice "unbelievers". With that type of bias, how reliable is their checking of data and analyzing of such studies? The fact is that there are things happening that current scientists cannot really explain, so research in this aspect is needed. It's not a matter of believing or not believing, but rather about keeping an open mind about it. Calling such research 'pathological' is pretty far-fetched.

That is one of Science's forte(s), to be able to "persuade" unbelievers by sheer reason/logic and experimental facts which they by themselves can obtain.
The problem, IMO, is that those unbelievers are in fact (radical) believers in pure materialistic type of existence. Half of humanity comes to mind who are believers because of their fundamental inner nature, and a great part of other half who became believers due to programming. Keeping an open mind won't help in their case, IMO, because possibility of an idea of something non-materialistic existing in their Universe to appear in their mind is close (if not exactly equal) to zero.
 
It's a sad state of science that shuts out the unknown possibilities.

I myself can be skeptical of ghost claims and so on, after seeing some of the hazy and/or faked videos on sott.net. However, I cannot say that it does not exist. That is a logical fallacy!

Unfortunately, because science does not deem such things as worthy to be investigated, there is no proper science structure around many of the research into the paranormal. Also, some of these researchers are questionable, like the ones who promoted Uri Gellar, etc.

Science then looks back at this and blames ALL(!?) of the research as fake, despite causing the situation that lead to the conditions that made it hard, if not impossible to be able to follow a proper scientific protocol.
 
In our world, money, i.e. PTB, drives research. Budget cuts, especially for science/research have been enormous over last decades. Only "appropriate things" get financed. And the gap between ordinary world and ivory towers of academia only gets wider, which makes science look to laymen more and more like some magical religious thing than a proper method of acquiring knowledge about our Universe.

In connection to this topic, one of those "appropriate" things in cosmology is dark matter/dark energy.
_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy said:
DMPie_2013.svg

Energy distribution in the Universe according to Planck probe measurements, March 2013.

Those are things which research is being promoted and financed, but so far I haven't seen a single financed project which even remotely considered a possibility that these dark somethings are not of a "pure material" origin, however this predicted material/particle strange is.
 
Thanks for sharing!

The reply from the authoritarian scientists was difficult to read - such hate, venom and irrationality between these soft words!

The authoritarian mindset is unbelievable. Sometimes I wonder where this "materialist drive" comes from, really. Yeah, if you are indoctrinated enough, you might dismiss the paranormal etc. and just don't care, but where does this absolute zeal come from? This turning of every corner to find something to dismiss anything remotely questioning this primitive form of 19th-century materialism? It's really strange. Maybe it's like with the flat-earthers - telling them that the world is much more complex than meets the eye simply freaks them out, it's beyond their horizon so to speak.

BTW, those who want to get the full picture about the tons of scientific proof of psychic phenomena, I recommend "The Conscious Universe" by Dean Radin (here's a thread about it).
 
BrenXHkm said:
While reading this article I couldn't stop thinking about Collingwood's Idea of History. There were a lot of philosophers against history, some of their arguments were weaker than others, and there were the ones who were trying to focus only on natural sciences. But at the end, all of them were attacking a discipline that wasn't completely established and certainly there were many gaps on it. For some reason human beings have a tendency to attack that what they don't know, or that what is new or different. In my opinion those critics are a result of the ignorance about parapsychology and the prejudices around this subject, it's difficult for a normal person to talk about this, imagine a scientist...

This is a subject that has always caught my attention because I saw that the ones who believe this things couldn't be possible, these people had never experienced anything of this kind. There may be a factor of believing and not believing or being resistant against it, as the C's pointed out in the last session. What if for this phenomenons to manifest you need to be conscious in a sense that you need to know what you are doing or that there is something else beyond the physical world that we already know (ghosts), or if it's a matter of being able to perceive or not perceive. For example gravity: you don't need to know that there is gravity to throw something in the air and see how it falls, it will fall anyway, you will be able to observe this. What if with parapsychology is different? There are many unanswered questions from these scientists. As scientists they should be open to discover new things all the time, how can they be so sure that parapsychology is absurd? That equals to say "we already know everything, what is and what is not possible, so we establish that paranormal phenomenons are not possible".

Collingwood immediately sprang to mind for me as well.

The scientific method has its own methodologies for discovering truth, and the scientific mindset as Collingwood describes it has its own biases and fascinations with there being a distinct mind-body duality. How the skeptic in the shared article would cite some hoaxed incidents as if that somehow proved the studies cited by the parapsychology advocate were also bogus. It just speaks of a categorical denial of any and all instances of parapsychological phenomena. I guess the ultrascientific crowd are too confounded when it comes to replicating experimental results, since the beliefs of those observing do play a role in the manifestation of the phenomenon. It makes the ability of investigators to do properly controlled experiments almost impossible.

I suppose this means that the precursor to developing parapsychology as a science is to gain as much knowledge about the world and how our own minds influence it (and vice versa). That seems to be the only way to develop reliable baselines for experimentation in this field. It also explains why this way of viewing the world is so far ahead of where our culture's mindset is. Our society is barely even able to grapple properly with the historical mindset, and seems stuck in the scientific view.

I do see some world leaders like Putin acting with a strong historical mindset, because that's the only real way to grapple with the dance of peoples and nations on the world stage. Compare this to the cookie cutter neoliberal "end of history" crowd that applies the same austerity and color revolution measures like they are some tried-and-true platonic solids.
 
I'm reminded of Collingwood as well. I have had more than enough of the materialist scientific mindset that he talks about in Speculum Mentis. This disenchantment is the one thing that brought me to the Cassiopaea website 14 years ago. It is as if these scientists are unable to fathom anything beyond their abstract thinking where they separate the universal from its particulars because they simply don't have the neural network to see beyond. Some people clearly don't appreciate thinking with a hammer and/or think they are doing it while in fact they are just parroting without questioning the official line.

From Speculum Mentis:

Speculum Mentis said:
It is the difference between the recorder of those facts which happen to be directly visible from his own empirical situation in history, and the thinker who, defying the empirical limitations of time and place, claims for himself, in principle, the power to recount the whole infinite history of the universe ; restricting himself to this part of it or that not because he happens to be planted there, but because it is his own good pleasure so to restrict himself. Even the slenderest monograph written from this point of view outweighs, as an achievement of the spirit, the whole output of the rerum gestarum scriptores

Maybe the authoritarian scientists are missing a capability to see related to the spirit which makes it impossible to grok these subjects.
 
Gaby said:
Maybe the authoritarian scientists are missing a capability to see related to the spirit which makes it impossible to grok these subjects.

luc said:
Thanks for sharing!

The reply from the authoritarian scientists was difficult to read - such hate, venom and irrationality between these soft words!

The authoritarian mindset is unbelievable. Sometimes I wonder where this "materialist drive" comes from, really. Yeah, if you are indoctrinated enough, you might dismiss the paranormal etc. and just don't care, but where does this absolute zeal come from? This turning of every corner to find something to dismiss anything remotely questioning this primitive form of 19th-century materialism? It's really strange. Maybe it's like with the flat-earthers - telling them that the world is much more complex than meets the eye simply freaks them out, it's beyond their horizon so to speak.

Yes, they seem to be trying to suppress these studies and extinct them completely, with a truly irrational vehemence. I also can understand being a sceptic, or a non-believer, but to want an entire field of study to just disappear, just seems hateful, for lack of better term.

And a field of study too that promises to study phenomena like life after death. One would think that this would be of interest to any human being aware from birth that his/her life will end, what happens after? Where is the curiosity? Or even the proper critical thinking? If any scientist wishes to criticize parapsychology, then do it properly. Bring up suggestions. As a scientist, this person should be able to say to his peers working on the subject of the paranormal: of what you are doing, this and this and this, you are doing well, but this and that and the other, you are doing wrong, here's a couple of suggestions on how to improve your scientific work on the subject.

Or just continue doing their own scientific work and let the others go on with their own. Not act in such a childish manner, as if the mere possibility of anyone presenting evidence that might threaten one’s worldview is the most frightening thing and just has to go. "Mommy, I am scared, make it go away!" This is so far from proper scientific thinking, real laziness at best, or there is something essential missing from their physiological/spiritual make-up indeed as Gaby says, and they just can't see/perceive reality as some scientists/some of us do.
 
Saša said:
In our world, money, i.e. PTB, drives research. Budget cuts, especially for science/research have been enormous over last decades. Only "appropriate things" get financed. And the gap between ordinary world and ivory towers of academia only gets wider, which makes science look to laymen more and more like some magical religious thing than a proper method of acquiring knowledge about our Universe.

In connection to this topic, one of those "appropriate" things in cosmology is dark matter/dark energy.
_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy said:
DMPie_2013.svg

Energy distribution in the Universe according to Planck probe measurements, March 2013.

Those are things which research is being promoted and financed, but so far I haven't seen a single financed project which even remotely considered a possibility that these dark somethings are not of a "pure material" origin, however this predicted material/particle strange is.

By the way - It is my understanding that "dark matter" was invented to explain why they could not find as much matter as they thought should be there...well, some of that matter may have been found! Here is one article:

_https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149742-half-the-universes-missing-matter-has-just-been-finally-found/

Those same materialist scientists also call "Electric Universe Theory" a pseudo science as well.
 
FireShadow said:
Saša said:
In our world, money, i.e. PTB, drives research. Budget cuts, especially for science/research have been enormous over last decades. Only "appropriate things" get financed. And the gap between ordinary world and ivory towers of academia only gets wider, which makes science look to laymen more and more like some magical religious thing than a proper method of acquiring knowledge about our Universe.

In connection to this topic, one of those "appropriate" things in cosmology is dark matter/dark energy.
_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy said:
DMPie_2013.svg

Energy distribution in the Universe according to Planck probe measurements, March 2013.

Those are things which research is being promoted and financed, but so far I haven't seen a single financed project which even remotely considered a possibility that these dark somethings are not of a "pure material" origin, however this predicted material/particle strange is.

By the way - It is my understanding that "dark matter" was invented to explain why they could not find as much matter as they thought should be there...well, some of that matter may have been found! Here is one article:

_https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149742-half-the-universes-missing-matter-has-just-been-finally-found/

Those same materialist scientists also call "Electric Universe Theory" a pseudo science as well.

The WMAP experiment gave percentages for dark energy, dark matter, and ordinary matter. Lots of the ordinary matter was not observable. I don't think this overly worried anybody since observing all the ordinary matter isn't easy. That article is just saying they have detected much of the previously undetected ordinary matter. They weren't detecting any of the dark matter.

Dark matter has two uses, one to explain the missing "not ordinary EM interacting" matter and the other to explain galaxy rotations. I personally think it is needed for missing "not ordinary EM interacting" matter reasons but I think dark energy and galaxy rotations can be handled by the conformal group so(4,2) algebra gravity that Ark works on. I also think that the conformal group can handle parapsychology/time travel things too (it's hyperdimensional aka it's a 4+2=6-dim instead of 3+1=4-dim spacetime metric).

I think the "kairons" from Ark's SOTT article on Daryl Bem's precognition research would be conformal group related. Solar/brown dwarf/comet/plasma/electric universe physics I think gets into conformal group/vacuum/superluminal physics too. Math can work even without rigid materialism/linear time; information theory is math too.

There are time travel solutions for regular old general relativity. No reason researchers should not look into it. String theorist Brian Greene had time travel skits on his TV specials for this general relativity related reason. Greene I'm told has a bias against this relativity math when it doesn't make for entertaining TV but it should be considered a good thing to look into by somebody. Even if there were no parapsychology/time travel in reality, somebody should be verifying that.

I remember Ark mentioning the Zeno effect for the fly-by anomaly which seemed to disappear when researchers tried to closely look for it (an anomalous anomaly as Ark called it). Parapsychology seems like it would have similar problems even if mainstream science was trying to closely look at it. The normal methods of science seem to fail in these areas.
 
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