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I think you're confusing science with politics and businesses. Like someone else said, science can tell you how nuclear fission works or how to perform genetic modification, but it doesn't tell you that you should create a bomb and drop it on someone or that it's OK to genetically modify animals.

Honestly, this has all gotten rather ridiculous. What exactly is your alternative to science? And since you seem to despise it so much, I'm assuming you're forgoing anything that the scientific method has helped to discover? Water purification? Antibiotics? Modern medicine? Automobiles? Computers? I imagine you're posting to this forum via TCP over smoke signal right now, correct?

Really, the lady doth protest too much.

Seems like a good thread to reference my favorite comedian-pianist, Tim Minchin, and his delightful song, "If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out":

"Although skeptics galore decry the use of psychics for anything but entertainment, police departments around the country call on certain psychics when all else fails. They've been doing that for more than a century, and when forbidden to do so, they sometimes use unofficial means."

From Psychic Detectives
By Katherine Ramsland

Must be a lot of law enforcement professionals out there whose brains have fallen out:)

Sure, they're soooo great at solving crimes.


"No psychic detective has ever been praised or given official recognition by the FBI or US national news for solving a crime, preventing a crime, or finding a kidnap victim or corpse.[13][14]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective


I also remember this from a podcast....A few years back the paranormal folk had to come up with their best example of using "Psychic powers" to find missing people. They submitted their "best" example, where they believed a psychic had cracked a case. They submitted it to a sceptic site (James Randi OR Michael Shermer or something like that). When they followed up on the claims there was NO EVIDENCE whatsoever.

All they do is give vague information which leads to nothing.
This is a sick practice.

I don't know how any study could have effectively isolated all the variables in how psychic phenomena operates to come up with such conclusions, especially when all the cases couldn't possibly be documented since the practice has a stigma attached to it by society which keeps it secret and which would discourage many from open disclosure in such a study. (which could also account for the fact that "No psychic detective has ever been praised or given official recognition by the FBI or US national news for solving a crime, preventing a crime, or finding a kidnap victim or corpse.[1"

The controls that would operate under "non-paranormal" conditions are not the same that can be used to measure intuitive processes. For instance, we do we do not know how the intuitions and hunches of psychics have effected the officers abilities to hook into their own intuition and put together the case in a way that wouldn't be possible by purely logical means.

As more than one poster has already pointed out:

"science ever really proves anything - it makes a provisional explanation based on available information, but the information is never complete, and the "proof" is always subject to revision in light of new data."

As further has been observed here:

"the principle of faith that underlies science is not in induction, but in the belief that nature is parsimonious. That is, we tend to believe that simpler, economical explanations are to be preferred to more complex ones. The belief that the principle of induction will work for what goes on in the centre of stars because it is so effective in understanding what goes on in day-to-day observation is a matter of parsimony, not of proof. It's just simpler to work on the basis that the same methods will work, than to form complex theories which have no greater explanatory power."

The simplest, most parsimonious explanation for the fact the practice continues to be employed in the face of institutional opposition and social stigma over many years by trained professionals with experience in their fields is that they have observed it to be effective and to have yielded results in the past.

Which would be believable if there was evidence that it has yielded results in the past. Perhaps you could point us to that evidence?

Ah yes, the "Seal Team Six" excuse for why there is no evidence. The unsung heroes of crime-fighting. If one of these people ever did solve a case we've all know about it. Documented proof of psychic powers would be world-wide news. I wouldn't need to tune into Montel Williams or whatever to see this nonsense.

Why is it banned in the first place if it worked? Because it’s a con and cruel to give people false hope or even worse tell their families they're dead when they're not.

People should stop making claims and excuses when you routinely can't back up anything and then make excuses as the why it is "un-testable".

The number of cases is zero because they didn't help. Plain and simple.

The Paranormal Method

It seems when the paranormal stops winging about the scientific method and pretends to provide evidence its always.....

1. The evidence is hundreds of years in the future or hundreds of years in the past, but not around today. How convenient.

2. The evidence is somewhere far, far away where the laws of physics are different.

3. The evidence is in a parallel universe.

4. They have to keep it secret. “Seal Team Six”

Jeez, talk about your dog eating your homework.

Well in this universe on planet Earth in 2011 that’s a load of bull.



Yes, but that is just a total load of hippie language nonsense. This little cliché tries to put forward “because it will change in the future it is wrong now” and “therefore my made-up nonsense with my array of excuses is just as valid”. Wrong…….Scientists earn their knowledge.



Yes, Science doesn’t stop learning. More often than not it is fine-tuning. Even if something was completely revised years later at least one can say it was based on facts, made predictions ,was cross-examined by peers based on the knowledge at the time. And no dogs ate their evidence.

All the paranormal brings to the table is an excuse-fest to explain why there no evidence of what they do. They have no interest in testing their claims whatsoever. Its a delusion.


For starters take that million dollar cheque from James Randi he has had for decades at least. Come on…..no excuses, we've heard them all before.

I wouldn't hold your breath. In another thread that went OT someone brought up info on some guy "the most scientifically studied man of all time.....for psychic powers".

When I asked for evidence the only thing I was overwhelmed with was their angry for asking questions and got a load of philosophy essays that say nothing. Deja-vous.

I look him up myself......all it was one guy met this magician and was impressed. This made the local paper at the time.

I'm sure Stephen Hawking can't figure out Derren Brown's mind-reading tricks etc. Thats not evidence though...in the real world.

But this is my point. There is no way of measuring consciousness by any physical means. There is no way one can get inside another person and tell if they are really seeing a ghost or having a spiritual experience. This is not to say that the experience can’t be linked to outer events and have a transforming effect on those events, just that they cannot be observed objectively nor proven except by those experiencing and observing the outer events with the same interior depth of perception, a perception that is non-linear and synchronic.

But I still think most people would rather live in a world where that vision were possible than in a world where they were attacked for placing a value on faith and belief in anything higher than their own reason, which can also be marshaled as a defense mechanism to personally attack anyone who didn’t share their faith in that particular belief.

Again, can you point us to where they yeilded results in the past?

Yes organized religion needs to die a long overdue death.

And "Science" is NOT the cause of the majority of the world's problems.
People are.
Back when we only had clubs and stone knives people used to butcher each other with them.
Their science was the stone tools that they had.
So if you want to say that people will use whatever they have available to them to cause problems then that is different than blaming it on a generic concept of "science".
We can't go back to living in caves because some people don't like technology.
Technology (ie. "Science") is merely the understanding, and subsequent making use of, how some of the laws of the Universe work.
Just because some of our learned usage of some fundamental laws of the Universe may have gone awry at times it is NOT those laws (Science) themselves that are causing the problems.
Merely our usage of them.
Pianos are "science" by the way.
You are going to have to be MUCH more specific in what you are trying to say rather than a vague outrageous statement of "science is the cause of most of our problems".
An example would be nice.

This is simply an appeal to ignorance. "You don't know the answer to a question, therefore the answer must be supernatural or otherworldly." This is a common fallacy.

But more to the point, why do you need supernatural explanations at all? Why can't you be content with simply saying "I don't know?" What evidence do you have that there is anything "beyond" us?

I should also point out that you can't prove the non-existence of something. So if spirits and other hocus-pocus don't exist, then science will never know, this is why there are people who still believe in unicorns, and lake monsters.

One last point, It is true that you cannot measure consciousness in the sense of knowing what it is a person is truly thinking, but if a person is seeing ghosts or hearing spirits then certain things must be occurring. For instance, if a psychic truly is hearing spirits then when you place them in a fMRI and have them conjure the spirits then their temporal lobes should light right up. Or if you hook them up to a EEG you should see certain types of potentials generated in the temporal regions of the brain. The simple fact is, if these things don't occur then they are not hearing anything and are just lying to you.

On the contrary -- most UK food retailers quite openly admit that what's on their shelves _might_ contain GM ingredients. That's particularly a problem for animal-based products, because commercial vendors of animal feed are (usually) not able to cetify that their own products are GM-free.

You can buy products that are certified completely GM-free, but the indications are that the majority of UK shoppers are unwilling to pay the modest price premium for these products.

It's actually quite easy to avoid food 'laced with preservatives', etc. because, in the EU, food-labelling laws are quite strict. It's much harder to avoid GM ingredients -- should you wish to -- because the extend of propagation through the food chain is hard to determine.

I've been away for a while, and I see this thread grew tentacles... On the question of "faith" in the scientific method:

Yes, we have to make a leap of faith to trust scientific methods, but it is a primal leap as opposed to the learned leap one must take to embrace spiritual faith. By "science" in this respect I mean trust in the empirical evidence delivered by our senses. While the principles of science may not have been codified until the Enlightenment, I can't agree that experimentation and inductive prediction done prior to that time isn't in essence science. The defining characteristic of science from a philosophical perspective isn't the codified methodology but the empirical aspect.

That makes science part of first philosophy. Sensation is absolute in an existential sense. The evidence that "I am" isn't merely that I think, but also that I'm the recipient of sensory data. I don't initially understand my sensations, but their presence is indisputable.

The first dichotomy I recognize, and the only one I can recognize inherently, is between Me and Not-me. (The separation of mind and body is an after-the-fact exercise in classification, but that is a digression.)

The conduit between Not-me and Me is sensory data.

Sensations exist wholly within Me, and one of the most prominent, at first, is a compulsion to put some Not-me into my stomach. I don't understand this compulsion, but I soon realize a fluid from my mother's breast assuages it, also that it stimulates a sensation I call taste. Moreover, the fabric in which I'm wrapped has a different taste and does not assuage my compulsion.

Thus I begin my encounter with the world, noting with increasing skill and efficiency which actions I may take to yield sensations I deem desirable. Sometimes my experiments fail. The pot on the stove yields a burnt finger, but the jar on the counter has cookies almost every time.

Once my experiments become more sophisticated, I discover a serious problem: The information my senses deliver about Not-me is never the whole story. All the people, toys, kitty cats and what not in my world have an independent existence, and all I can know about them are their surface appearances, tastes, smells, sounds and textures. How can I know what color the ball is when it looks bright red in the sun light but dull brown at night? How can I be sure I'm seeing the same kitty day after day rather than a new kitty each day that just looks like the previous one?

At this point I really have two choices. I can accept that my limited sensory data is my best window on the world and let my understanding accumulate over time, with some hypotheses achieving near certainty, like gravity, and others highly tentative, like the power of minoxidil to grow hair; or I can reject the data from my senses as too unreliable, and place my faith in something else, like chanting om under a banyan tree, or the belief that a carpenter is going to lift me bodily into a cloudy paradise.

I know people are going to say this is a false dichotomy; that you can grant some validity to science and still seek spiritual enrichment. And as a practical matter that's true. People do it all the time. But I believe it's logically inconsistent, maybe even schizophrenic, to live at once in the sensory world where you are breathing the air and reading the words on your computer screen right now, and another world that you stipulate on the basis of an extra-sensory belief.

So, yes, I would agree, one takes a leap of faith to hold a scientific world view. But I observe it to be a natural way of embracing the world. It emerges alongside our physical development and doesn't depend on any culture-specific dogma or tradition in order to develop.

While I agree with your general position, I think you might have descended somewhat into straw man territory at this point, although I'm sure it wasn't intention. The problem is that relatively few people do, in fact, have faith that they will be lifted bodily into a cloudy paradise. OK, so I concede that the non-arrival of the end of the world last weekend did, in fact, raise public awareness of such beliefs.

Religious beliefs do not _start_ as faith, although that's generally where they end up if they survive long enough. They start with particular experiences that people have, which they try to explain. Fundamentally this isn't different from what science seeks to do. The problem is that most foundational religious events were, if they happened at all, singular events. They generally aren't repeatable and therefore aren't particularly amenable to scientific scrutiny.

Yes,thats it lefty, I am confusing science with politics and business, I thought most scientists worked for Big corporations like drug compnays, Industry and the military,I know see (thanks to you) that the Pixies do instead, and scientists are usually self employed struggling to afford even vinegar and water to mix together in a teacup.

My "alternative" to "scienece" is to be left alone by the crazed lunatics that think their way is the only way to experience ones life.

I am foregoing "Water purification" by the scientists, Because in the UK , without my consent, without my permission, They have put Chlorine and fluoride in the tap water, I dont want to drink these chemicals,and dont see why I should be forced to by folk that "know" whats "best" for me.

I get my water from a natural spring, filtered and purified in a way that has worked for tens of thousands of years ,vis a vis natural.

I am glad you mentioned "anti-biotics" did you guess I am allergic to them? That was very clever of you , but "Guessing"
isn't very "rational" is it.

Be that as it may, I take your point on board about the drugs that science has made for me and have decided to try some.

Here is a small list of drugs that I will try.

Barbiturates; science made these to help me sleep,If I wake up in the night however, like thousands of old ladies do, in my barbiturate stupor I will of course have forgotten if I have allready taken my sleeping cure, and will probably take more and die.

dont be too upset though, because this can be "countered" with the wonderfull branch of "Amphetamines" my nan takes these, proscribed for her weight, they keep her awake a little and she comes to chat to me at night, she talks a bit too much sometimes,and shakes a little, some folk think she has "psychotic" episodes due to these pills, But that cant be right can it, after all the scientists made them.

I dont think I will take the medication that my cousins mum took, because his arms are too short to play the piano, Thalidomide, is not the drug for me.

I was so glad to find out that the scientists invented Heroin as a completely safe non addictive substitute for morphine.
And am very gratefull to you for pointing this out to me.
If I get an injury that hurts, I wont take Morphine, I will take heroin as you advise. Thanks again.

Valium is so marvellous, dont you think? Millions of USA housewifes have had their lifes improved by this remarkable achievment of the scientists, they too will be happy to know it's perfectly safe and non addictive, what wonderfull folk these scientists are, I am so glad they dont make any profit from other folks misery,as you so correctly pointed out.

I love your stance on Automobiles, I too don't own one, I know some folk may find us a bit weird, But I agree with you here: car drivers have not got the road sense they were born with when it comes to approaching folk on horses.

My friend was knocked off her Horse by one of these idiots, fortunately though they did give her heroin in hospital,so she was only in pain for a little while.
She is still on methadone though, but this is so effective an invention that she doesn't crave the Hospitals heroin.
She does crave the methadone though, Like you, I do not believe this was invented by German scientists,as a mind control drug. Thats just stupid talk don't you think, after all why would western countries be still using it if that was the case?

I admit to using my sons laptop to post this.
I can say that I dont want to "own" a laptop, but feel it would be fascist of me to try and implement my particular world view of things on him, after all he allready has the scientists to contend with, I hope you agree that this is "enough" for him to be going on with, but If you don't, I will take his laptop off him.

I must admit I was puzzled by your last point: "The lady protesteth too much"

What I mean is ; I WAS puzzled untill I got your wonderfully explicit email, enquiring if I would "dress up" as a lady for you.
I need to make it perfectly clear, that whilst I have no problem (scientific or otherise) with folk dressing up as "ladies" and totally understand this is a very english "tradition" I don't actually own a corset, furthermore, they are expensive because they have to be hand made, and fitted, and have very complex patterns, just ask any dressmaker.

I hope that we are now in total agreement, I am glad you have come "off the fence" so to speak, and value our new friendship. Here is the link to the wonderfull video you asked for.

You're just too clever by half, Mr. Miniver Cheevy

Okay, I don’t know if a psychic has ever been directly responsible for catching a criminal, although I do know I’ve read of instances where they seem to have been and where science has not seemed in a position to prove it one way or the other. I know that psychics even good ones are not always right. I don’t know that Wikipedia can be relied on.

What I do know : That there is something beyond us?—not with 100% certainty but I am not totally without evidence. Here's what I know:

I know my mother reported a remarkable amount of detail about my new living situation in California after seeing a psychic in New York that she couldn’t possibly have known about any other way and I heard of similar reports from friends and family.

I know after doing intense Jungian dream work with a group for a year after my father’s death that I had many synchronistic experiences of the nature Jung describes he experienced with his own work. I also had a couple of paranormal experiences which you could easily dismissed as a meaningless hallucinations brought on by any number of factors but that was not how I experienced them. In any case all of these episodes couldn’t be taken as proof by anyone outside my subjective consciousness of a higher purpose at work, although they gave me insights into experiences and my identity and relationship with my father I had never had before, and which it appeared the whole universe seemed to be trying to communicate to me at the same time. For a while, it was every event was heightened with meaning and awareness through the correspondences between the dreaming, waking and something-in-between states.

Near the end of this period, I took a job only to find out after I was hired that I was replacing a woman who had jumped from our seventeen story office building and that I was seated near a co-worker who claimed to see the dead since she was a child. She complained of being haunted by my predecessor’s ghost. I watched the look come into her eyes once or twice when she’d see her and I know she wasn’t crazy, nor did anyone else in the office seem to think she was. She was a single parent who supported five kids as a paralegal and rarely missed a day of work even though she was having a hard time sleeping and I know that she would have given anything not to have “the gift” then. I also know my boss had to buy all new equipment because that of the deceased, even though it was relatively new had never malfunctioned before, now malfunctioned constantly and this had happened for three weeks before I arrived with temp after temp. I know that that I had a bizarre accident and was almost killed when my ankle inexplicably gave out on my first day of work. And I know now these can all be explained as unrelated coincidences but nothing seemed to be without meaning at the time. I know that Monica remarks referring to me as exemplifying someone who was so open their brains fell out seemed mean-spirited because, like my coworker, I had not really chosen to be open to ghosts. According to the latter, in fact, being in most people’s minds is no picnic, more like being in a swamp. I’m not very psychic I guess because I never felt this way before participating in this thread, although in a sense Monica was right because what happened to me next couldn’t have been more like having your brain fall out.

I don’t know of studies where psychics claim to see ghosts that were correlated with specific brain functioning , but I had read that certain areas of the brain are active during meditation and that certain categories of brainwaves occur. At the suggestion of a friend who knew him personally, I began auditing a class with Stanislov Grof where he discussed his holotropic breath work in which he would induce altered states of consciousness for healing purposes by changing brainwaves with breathing and music. But he also referred to the fact that once these state emerged, brain responses and neurological patterns could be unpredictable and differ widely from what would normally occur for the age or developmental state of a participant. I think he discusses this data in his book, Beyond the Brain. If you are unfamiliar with his work, it will seem totally fantastic and impossible; that’s how it seemed to him when he first stumbled on what was to be his groundbreaking research path. This is from an interview he gave about his early LSD work which led to the development of his holotropic breathwork techniques

“And then there were many, many (of course) specific insights. The first one was
that the sessions wouldn’t take us—by that, I mean myself and my clients—just to
the part of the psyche described in psychoanalysis, which is basically post‐natal
biography and the Freudian individual unconscious. But sooner or later, the
sessions started taking us into a realm that I now call perinatal. This was a major
discovery, that there was a powerful record, a powerful imprint in the psyche, of
the whole birth process…
I had to struggle with this, because in my medical training, there was no way you
could relive birth. The idea was that the cerebral cortex of the newborn is not
finished, is not myelinized (as it is called), and that there cannot be any memory,
that the newborn is unconscious and the experience is not recorded anywhere.
And so this took me a while to adjust to and realize that somehow current
psychiatry and brain research had it wrong…
But even before I got familiar and comfortable with this perinatal level, it started
opening into a new realm which we now call transpersonal, which means that
there were experiences of going back into previous centuries and other countries,
sometimes with a sense of personal remembering, and then we were in the realm
of reincarnation, karma. “


If I’ve ignored your and Lefty's brain research, it’s because I have seen Stan’s and it has persuaded me that consciousness is grounded in something “beyond the brain.”

On my very first time out to one of his workshops, I had an experience unlike anything I'd ever experienced that was totally involuntary and seemed to correspond to what the propulsion and gyrating one might feel reliving the birth process. It went on for about 45 minutes without me seeming to have any control over it. I later met people at the workshops who described experiencing past lives and out-of body experiences while participating in the workshops. And on returning to work after having a session like this, my psychic co-worker, who I hadn't told where I’d been, remarked that she never seen my crown chakra so brightly lit up before. All of this “opened” me up to an interest in Indian mysticism.

What I am trying to express is not bogus or spurious, even if I am not scientifically schooled or adept at expressing it in scientific language, it was experienced, but I’m sure you’ll have no trouble ridiculing it. The only reason I continued this long in light of your flaming is I feel there are those out there who need to hear it and who will be “open” and brave enough to let their brains fall out.

Ros -

I really enjoyed that video. It makes a strong rhetorical and artistic statement in favor of your criticism of science. But what it, and you, have failed to do throughout this thread is put forth a credible alternate vision.

No one disputes that science enables the magnification of human folly to terrible proportions, although some of us have suggested that's like blaming the hammer for building a shoddy house. What I'd like to see from you is some notion of what you think a world without science would look like.

I see barely human creatures huddled in caves unable to defend themselves from mammoths and wolf packs, shivering in the cold, dying from any mild infection, and most vividly, I see their boredom and hopelessness born of subjection to the whims of fate rather than the will to take charge of their own destiny.

I would make a video of that, but they don't have video in that reality.

At least your vision of a world without science has the wretched humans at least unable to trash the rest of the natural world. For me, a more frightening vision of a world without science can be had by studying the middle ages.

Widespread bubonic plague in an environment where even flu could kill; 30% infant mortality; widespread burnings of heretics, often by each other; 5% adult literacy; toothless and arthritic at 30, if you're fortunate enough to live that long; cities surrounded by thousands of tons of human [censored]; slavery and serfdom.

Bugger that for a lark. I'd rather huddle in a cave any day.