Oh boy, we got a live one!

[darkstar3]

Let's keep in mind that there is no disagreement over the actual phenomena labelled as telepathy occurring.
Discuss!

Yes this is a quote from R/T. No, I won't link the thread for fear of getting locked.

[realisticphish]

1. uh, i disagree

and the argument falls apart

[darkstar3]

2. But you forget, you don't count.

Only certain scientists count. I'm not sure how we're supposed to determine which group of scientists is right according to this paradigm, but I have the feeling that it's only those who believe in telepathy.

When all else fails, IOW, everyone's crazy 'cept you.

[realisticphish]

3. there's no disagreement about the fact that I kick ass

any other opinions are the result of people not examining the evidence closely enough

[onager]

4. Appreciate your hard work in that thread...

I think I'll drop this in, though I know it is futile.

Everyone in here and the skep forum probably knows about Susan Blackmore. Here's a link to an address she gave in 1987, at a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research in London.

The SPR has been investigating telepathy etc. for over a hundred years. As Blackmore notes, without ever finding any really convincing evidence for it.

The address is fascinating. Even more fascinating - four years after she gave this speech, she was awarded the 1991 CSICOP Distinguished Skeptic Award.

With more than 10 years invested in psychical research, she had the courage to admit she had been wrong.

Now..."No disagreement over the actual phenomena...occurring?" Really?

Later on Rhine took a further step in arguing that telepathy, as it had quickly come to be known, was actually an untestable hypothesis.

The Rhines used the term extrasensory perception—not so different from the Committee's own term 'supersensuous perception'. And they distinguished telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition.

However, once they had argued for the existence of clairvoyance it was a small step to arguing that all cases of telepathy could actually be clairvoyance in disguise. And so Rhine stopped talking about telepathy and referred to G.E.S.P. for conditions which would allow either. This was despite the fact that then, as now, telepathy seems the most plausible form of ESP and is the most widely believed in.

http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/JSPR1988.htm

[darkstar3]

5. Thank you,

and thanks for the info! :hi:

[laconicsax]

6. Maybe we could start a drinking game...

Any word with "phenomenon" as its root, drink.
Any word with "holograph" as its root, drink.
Psychic nonsense, drink at each mention.
"proven" pseudoscience, drink at each mention.
Science-y sounding words in a meaningless sentence, drink at each sentence.
"materialistic paradigm," drink.
Misuse of "reductionism," drink.

The downside is that most people would pass out after a single post...though that poster may start to make sense when the room starts spinning.

[immoderate]

7. Did they say "quantum?" I like it when they say quantum.

I ask them if they know Planck's constant.

--imm

[laconicsax]

11. Do you get a response that goes like this?

Planck's constant was proven to be an untenable reductionist theory that fails to take into account the phenomenological holography of telepathy and UFOs be. That's the dilemma of the materialistic paradigm that many people accept because they don't imagine, but rather believe that the phenomenon of observation can fully encapsulate the holographical nature of existence. Hume made this readily apparent, but science limits itself to its own phenomenological ignorance of time cube.

[darkstar3]

14. ZOMG! TELEPATHY IS REAL!! HE'S SPEAKING THROUGH YOU!!!111!!!

[beam me up scottie]

20. *snort* We need a random sentence generator for woo words.

It's difficult to suspend your intelligence long enough to come up with something that ridiculous.

[beam me up scottie]

19. Oh, definitely, bonus points all around for using #10.

10.) Use the word quantum in a sentence, despite not knowing what it means. For a more impressive effect, use it with the name of your favourite superstition - "quantum dowsing" sure sounds mighty serious.

They think it means "specialer".

[darkstar3]

8. Can you say "liver damage"?

There is a single post in R/T right now that triggers every one of these rules (maybe you were looking at it when you wrote this). A note to other readers: Please do not play this game with whiskey or other shooting spirits, lest you require a trip to the ER.

[laconicsax]

12. Actually, only two of those are based on that post.

The rest are from the first encounter I had with that poster.

[ChadwickHenryWard]

16. Well, that guy's a postmodernist.

You can easily identify them by their use of large numbers of scientific-sounding words in very long and tortuous sentences that, while grammticall correct, confer no meaning. So you're going to get a huge number of those things every time that guy opens his mouth.

[trotsky]

9. Oh you're just locked into the "materialist paradigm."

Silly darkstar3.

[darkstar3]

10. And I'm also a word nazi. :)

[laconicsax]

13. Just accept the holographicalogical duality of epiphenomenology.

Hume said so.

[darkstar3]

15. Stop,

I'm crying here! :rofl::pals:

[onager]

17. This reminds me of the Sokal hoax.

Which I'm sure somebody in here is smart enough to pull off in R/T, judging by the fine examples already posted:

The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct; it was published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue.

At that time, the journal did not practice peer review fact-checking, and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.

On its date of publication, in May 1996, in the journal Lingua Franca, Sokal revealed that “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was a hoax, identifying it as “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations (by postmodernist academics he) could find about mathematics and physics”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

[realisticphish]

18. one of the best articles ever nt

[laconicsax]

21. Looks like we may have round two pretty soon.

There's a thread in R/T that originally got locked in Science.

[darkstar3]

22. For good reason - not a shred of science to be found that hasn't been,

as someone else put it, raped and beaten in a dark alley.

[laconicsax]

23. Hey now, there are links to studies that prove that quantum entanglement exists.

Entanglement exists, therefore telepathy is real and consciousness is quantum.

Anyone who says they understand quantum mechanics does not understand quantum mechanics -Richard Feynmann (wacko crackpot materialist)

I have a complete understanding of quantum mechanics and its application to varying systems -Paraphrase of most woo.

[darkstar3]

24. Well, there's quantum mechanics,

and then there's quantum "everything else". Quantum thought, quantum dowsing, quantum...quantum...quantum...

Maybe these priests should claim that they were only participating in quantum masturbation, eh? oh...wait...that may be taken...

[awoke_in_2003]

25. I telepathically

suggested to you to start this thread :)

[lazarus]

26. I knew you were going to say that

:evilgrin:

[awoke_in_2003]

27. hey...

don't try to one-up me pal :rofl:

[onager]

28. Telepathy proven, eh?

See my post above, about Susan Blackmore. Much like their ideological cousins, Fundie Xians, the 'woos don't even know their own history.

Here's a bit more from Blackmore's SPR speech - a thumbnail history of all that PROOF!!! ZOMG!!!

For many years the experiments with Smith and Blackburn were taken as watertight evidence for thought transference, until in 1911 Blackburn 'confessed' that they had cheated (Blackburn 1985).

When Smith denied this some people chose to believe him. Then there were Coover's (1917) apparently unsuccessful experiments, which were later reinterpreted as having been successful.

Soon came the Rhines' pioneering experiments of the 1930s and 1940s (Rhine 1934). The initial value of these was later challenged (e.g. Hansel 1966) but in the 1950s the research of Soal with his star subject, Basil Shackleton, became prominent (Soal and Bateman 1954).

Although there were many who doubted their validity, these results were widely accepted as evidence for telepathy for thirty years.

That is until the investigations of Markwick in 1978 (see also Markwick 1985). The 1960s saw the rise of dream telepathy research in which it seemed that the elusive phenomena might more easily be captured during altered states (Ullman, Krippner and Vaughn 1973) but this too proved ultimately unreplicable and was abandoned.

Then came Geller and we were back to the old argument about 'once a cheat always a cheat?'.

Finally in the 1970s the ganzfeld was hailed as the latest in a long line of 'repeatable' experiments. Then during the past few years Ray Hyman (1985 and Charles Honorton (1985) initiated the 'Ganzfeld Debate' and with others are still arguing out all the issues. While many are still convinced by the overall evidence from the ganzfeld, numerous experimental flaws have been pointed out.

Moreover most of the evidence is provided by just two researchers, Honorton and Sargent and Sargent's work has recently been called into question (Blackmore 1987).

Undoubtedly there will be further research paradigms to replace this one but if history repeats itself they will only have ten or fifteen years in which they appear convincing.

All of this research can be seen as starting from the work on thought transference, but what do we make of the evidence now? Did the Creery sisters always cheat or only sometimes? And what of Soal, or Geller? We can see that right from the start psychical research fell into this problem. It was always having to judge evidence retrospectively—to decide whether something was or was not the inexplicable phenomenon they were after. And at any time thereafter newer and better explanations might be offered.

http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/JSPR1988.htm