E.S.P. vs Luck, If There Are Such Things
 

There has been a debate continuing through the ages whether ESP is a reality. I think there are snake oil salesmen out there, I also believe there are a great many things still undiscovered in human abilities.

I have pretty good grasp of the reasons why some believe in ESP. What I’m curious to find out is those that don’t believe it, if they see any validity in someone having a “hunch”. For someone that subscribes to the belief that currently what you see is what you get, if the see a difference between intuition and ESP. Do they see the people that are not on psychic hotlines, or shows communicating with the dead, but being utilized being police departments for help, or studied in remote viewing as just being merely; lucky?

http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m...ip/esphead.gif

I have hunches all the time, sometimes they work sometimes they don't, often they are based on past experiences of similar circumstances.

Having a feeling and claiming super normal abilities are two very different things. I had a feeling NE would beat the Colts, I was right, it doesn't make it ESP.

Neither, I see them as silly, and over hyped as real by the popular press. There is nothing wrong with investigating things like ESP or testing its use, but lets see some real results for one, I'd settle for someone who could have a positive ratio guessing heads or tails, I don't require they solve a crime.

I know of someone who has intuition, but it occurs occasionally, but is usually right. I can't call it ESP, but I do believe that some people get a sign that something is wrong before it happens. She told me a few instances which I was also involved in and they really happened.

This can also happen subconsciously. You can notice things without becoming consciously aware of them, and your mind puts them together, notices a similarity to a past event, and suddenly you get a feeling seemingly out of nowhere.

Like when you and a friend start to hum the same song. Something you saw triggered the same thought.

I see the human brain as a machine designed for predicting the future: we make plans for ourselves and the ones around us, we think of dangers that could befall us, we imagine things that could be, we plan out interactions, and we do all the things that make us human with the implicit assumption that there’s going to be a future. However, this machine wasn’t built by some mystical process that can’t be in principle understood, it was natural selection. That explains why we jump at shadows, we’re scared by weird noises, and get funny feelings randomly. We forget all the times we were wrong and harp on the ones that were right because our ancestors that had it in their genes to do this survived more often.

I don’t believe in ESP because I have never seen anyone do it repeatedly in a controlled environment. Discounting the charlatans I think everyone else who thinks they have ESP is pretty much covered under the explanation above.

One more time, its worth repeating, maybe somebody will read it this time. Stranger things have happened.....:)

http://www.viewzone.com/ESP1.html

I wrote I have never seen it done repeatedly in a controlled environment. That’s pretty much the only way I would believe ESP was true at this moment and time, if I could see it with my own eyes under stringent conditions.

Now in regards to what you’ve quoted above, I’ll admit I’ve only read about the first half of it. The questions that come to mind are as follows: Where was this research published? Was it published? (The cited sources from your link list 4 or 5 books, and no scholarly articles). There is some mention of methods, but not nearly enough imo. How did they select the people for the tests? What were the people subject to the tests told exactly? There are a myriad of other questions I could come up with, but it all rests on this. Any experiment is about more than quoting the results. The method, especially in something that is nonstandard or controversial, should garner specific attention. Something that in my opinion isn’t outlined to satisfactory degree. Perhaps it is elsewhere.

The article seems also to throw statistics and percentages with no clear explanation as how they got those results. Mathematics can give some pretty non intuitive figures to how likely an event really is. Take for example this math puzzle(reworded by me for this discussion, you can skip it if you like, it sums up to: crazy shit can be explained logically):

In a far away land live a group a people called the espers, they purport to have magical abilities related to clairvoyance and the like. An unscrupulous scientist decides to put their ability to the ultimate test. He rounds up 100 of them at a time numbering them as he does so. Also, they are allowed to talk among themselves in the group. Then he lines up 100 boxes and in each box he puts a piece of paper with the number 1 to 100 (the method with which he does this is up to his liking). Then one by one each of the 100 espers is lead into the room with the boxes. An esper has at most 50 tries to find a box with his number in it, making sure to put the papers back in the box after he’s done. If he doesn’t find his number within 50 tries he is killed otherwise let go. The same holds for the rest of the espers. So in groups of 100 the espers are forced to perform the devilish experiment. In the end the scientist finds that about 1/3 of the time all 100 espers survive. Is there any explanation other than some natural clairvoyant ability of these people?

The answer is yes, the mathematics is complicated enough that very few people would appreciate it (and it would be non trivial for me to recreate). However, there is a strategy that allows for all in a group of 100 to survive about 1/3 of the time. I’m trying to show that there are unexpected and very non-intuitive results that do not require explanations outside mathematics. Regrettably, this is the best example I could come up with. I’m sorry I’ve not given you a detailed proof of the result, but I hope you’ll trust me enough to believe my assertion. The article states that statistics predict x(insert random percentage) but perhaps the people performing the experiments were not clever enough mathematicians to figure out the correct predictions. It all depends on what they did which isn’t outlined clearly enough.

Finally, this business of mainstream science not accepting the “solid” research outlined in the article. I’m a physics guy, so let me relate to you what a professor I respect once told our class. In physics when you publish something that is wrong usually no one ever publishes a paper stating outright that you’re wrong. Instead, all that happens is that what you wrote never gets referenced in other papers and it quietly goes away into obscurity. Though I’m not as familiar with other fields I assume that generally the same thing happens elsewhere. So if scientists are dismissing something as exciting as what’s outlined in the article there are two likely explanations: One it’s not as exciting as is made out to be. That is were getting an incomplete picture of what actually went on. The other possibility is that something similar to what I outlined above(with respect to a wrong physics paper) is happening. In either case my conclusion is that what you’ve posted is not at all a satisfactory proof that such a thing as ESP exists.

And it seems like that's the biggest problem with "supernatural" research right there. If a scientist does this testing and says they've discovered a new chemical, or new rule governing physics, it would be properly studied by other scientists. But with ESP, people wind up just righting it off more often than not. Not that I'm saying that you should just take their word for it, but but it through the neccesary tests because that's how science works, NOT because it goes against your current belief system.

:lol:

I do not take any article that cites the SRI studies as credible sources seriously. They were performed by a private institute, were not peer reviewed and had a vested interest in returning positive results, since their funding was dependent on it. Unsurprisingly, when independent inquiries were made, their testing methods were found to be flawed and biased. Hence why the CIA pulled funding.

Seriously. SRI is not a credible source. Show me a peer-reviewed study from a reputable institution and I may concede you have a case.

As always, if you don't agree with the evidence presented its flawed & biased. The political threads often employ the same methodology.

No, you've got it backward. It's not that the evidence is flawed and biased because I don't agree with it. It's that I don't agree with it because of the flaws. Their results were independently reviewed and serious faults in the testing method cast the significance of the studies into doubt. That, combined with the fact that nobody has been able to replicate their results independently, pretty much debunks the SRI studies.

But really, don't take my word for it. I have sources!

Sometimes my feelings are based on patterns that my subconscience compiles. Other times, unexplained images and sounds or phrases come to me unannounced and unprovoked.

I dont know what it is. I dont analyze what it is, or even if its a what or a who.

I just listen and acknowlege, because often it is valuable information or insight.

I think its important to stay in a receptive frame of mind, regardless of reality or perception.

Or.
Or.
Or.

I used to believe in ESP, now I'm very skeptical to the idea. Sure, there are a lot of things that seem supernatural, but there are logical explanations even if we don't always see them. I really wanted to believe in psychic abilities, mostly because I wanted to be one of those special people who could do it. I still have books around on "Developing your ESP powers," but I've recognized that I don't have some sort of sixth sense. What I have is an uncanny ability to notice tiny things that most people ignore, and quickly process the potential effects of these things.

In the end, none of it stands up to scientific scrutiny. Even if we weren't able to observe the mechanisms by which results are produced, believers claim that ESP is an observable phenomenon, and no correlation has been found between claims of psychic abilities and actual results, even with large cash prizes offered for positive results under controlled conditions. Logically, the only conclusions I can draw are that tests yielding positive results were flawed, and that ESP does not exist.

I believe that people may believe they have ESP, but I think what is really happening is that they are making guesses based on information that may not be obvious. The brain is complicated enough to detect patterns and give you feelings about conclusions without you consciously knowing why.

Yeah yeah yeah.

But where is it written that the world, the universe, etc., all must be explicable by logic, science, or even....at all?

Further, why does it need to be? Just for us? To give us meaning? As if were the most important things ever, in all of existence in the perception of some great maker? Because in my opinion, were probably not.

Even the most dedicated scientists and geniuses in all of humanity were people of faith - and knew that aside from logic and explanation, there were going to be things that defied all of that.

Im all for proving paranormal phenomenon. I really am. But Im also all for allowing the extraordinary to occur without immediately thinking its bogus.

This is exactly what science and logic are all about.

Science is not a fixed edifice that never changes. It was, once upon a time, considered that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that all illness was caused by an imbalance of humours. As we've discovered more about how the Universe around us works, we've adapted our scientific models. Understanding begets new theories, begets better understanding. It's a constant cycle to describe the workings of the world around us to the best of our abilities.

Frankly, I don't think anybody is even particularly concerned about the scientific explanation for paranormal phenomena such as ESP at this point. For now, evidence of their existence would suffice. And the point is that despite years of of research (and discounting one unreliable study for reasons cited above) nobody's been able to come up with anything to even suggest that this sort of thing actually occurs.

I'm very receptive to new ideas. If you can demonstrate a new concept for me, I'll learn everything I can about it. Indeed, I have learned a fair bit about ESP. One of the things I've learned is that it is a refuge of frauds and con artists, and that there is no solid evidence anywhere that such abilities actually exist. It's a powerful fantasy and subject to the Barnum effect, but if one can disassociate that desire and view the matter some objectivity, it becomes much harder to put any stock in such claims.

If someone can conclusively demonstrate to me or a source I trust in a controlled environment that such abilities do actually exist, I'll eat my crow like it's caviar. Until then, I maintain that it's all lies and scams.

Do you believe in luck? Or is life a bunch of simple carbon based organisms bumping into one another inside a mathematical equation peppered with chaos?

Define luck. In some circles, the traditional concept of luck is eschewed in favour of the idea that everything is affected by quantum fluctuations; in these circles, one would wish a peer 'good fluctuations' instead of 'good luck'. In a practical sense, it serves the same purpose. If one wishes to take a deterministic view, one could argue that with a sufficiently advanced algorithm one could predict the future with perfect accuracy; I think, however, that this discounts the not inconsiderable human factor. We make decisions that alter the outcomes of everyday events in ways that aren't always immediately obvious. At any rate, even if such an algorithm could theoretically be possible, it would likely be far too complex to be useful in any practical sense, and would most probably require access to data that we have no way of acquiring. Whether there truly is such a thing as random chance or if everything is pre-determined and we simply lack the means to make the necessary calculations, it all comes out the same in the wash. Sometimes events work out in your favour, sometimes they don't. Call it luck or God or fate or whatever makes you happy. I reckon it's semantics, really. And I'm not sure what it has to do with ESP, unless you're arguing that statistically insignificant fluctuations are evidence.

I think luck is merely entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics.

Stephen King is quite qualified to talk about ESP and luck... seeing as how he should be dead and yet isn't.

Chance, chaos, randomness, jittering white roulette ball on the wheel of life. Sanity! Like Coca-Cola... it's the real thing!

Im not arguing anything, just inquiring for other opinions and thoughts. I was referencing luck in the sense a psychic being right by making a "lucky" guess. Or situations outside of palm readers that may have exsisted in anyones life where utilizing gathered memory and, critical thinking, and deductive reasoning were not factors; if you or perhaps anyone especially those that don't believe in ESP, feel they may have used (terms that are used interchangably) gut, instinct, hunch, etc. If the belief that these exsist only in the person's perception the believes in them, if luck happens if favorable outcomes occur consistently.

It seems that it has become the norm to address everyone in an almost confrontive tone here at TFP, but it wasnt my intention to across as that if that is how it sounded.

To say that science will be capable of explaining everything is tautological. The whole point of the scientific method is that by observing or testing something under controlled conditions, presumptions can be proven true or false. Any failure to explain something is based on an inability to measure the results.

Logic is. in the simplest terms, a system to determine whether a conclusion follows a set of presumptions.

Faith is the belief in something that cannot be proven or disproven.

From a scientific standpoint, if ESP is a real phenomenon, then a certain set of conditions will produce a certain result consistently under controlled circumstances. Under controlled circumstances, consistent results that indicate the presence of ESP have not been produced, therefore it is intellectually dishonest to claim that ESP is a real phenomenon.

Logically, it can be said that if ESP is a real spectrum of abilities, it follows that these abilities would produce observable, reproducible results (E implies R.) Because those claiming to have these abilities cannot produce results at a greater rate than the statistical average, it follows that ESP is not a real spectrum of abilities (~R implies ~E.)

ESP is not a matter of faith, because its proponents claim it to be real and observable, which is contradictory to the definition of faith.
I'd say that "lucky" people are the ones who are statistically ahead of the curve when it comes to repeated occurrences of things that are considered good rather than bad. It's not a very warm and happy outlook compared to most, but yes, I do believe that we are just a bunch of carbon-based organisms in a chaotic system and that any observable event was caused by a number of factors that could be reduced to mathematical equations with enough processing power and if it were possible to observe each fundamental particle's movement without altering its course.

I am well aware of what the scientific method is, thanks.

I guess that in the end, I guess all that matters is ones perception.
I doubt that within our lifetimes there will be measurable and scientificially observable evidence for ESP, mothers intuition, hunches, prophetic dreams, communication with the dead, etc.

That doesnt mean that it will never be provable. But it might be centuries...if ever. And dumb TV shows that perpetuate crap science or fake psychics dont help.

I personally am not about to decide that despite the lack of ability at this moment to mathematically and deductively test the theories, or despite the number of skeptics out there, that its conclusively rubbish.

We still are at the embryonic stages of knowing how the entire brain works, anyway. Its a little early to make such a decisive call, yes? Maybe the wrong questions are being asked, if the answers arent apparent?

Just because this type of phenomenon does not happen to you personally, I wouldnt be so quick to judge for all of humanity and all of existence whats real.

Why, whats so special about it can't be observed now if an effect exists?

We can detect planets light years away, we have mapped the human genome, yet we can't compare before and after predictions?

I think the obvious answer is the correct one here, and people go to great lengths to figure out ways to deny this.

Aaah, the pacification power of "magic" in other untitled forms.

I don't base my assertions on personal experience, I base them on the fact that ESP is claimed to be an observable phenomenon in the face of years of research that have failed to produce a repeatable observation. As far as hunches, mother's intuition, communication with the dead, precognitive dreams, the first two are more likely caused by subconscious processing of observations that are not consciously noticed, communication with the dead has been attempted with no positive results, and although I have had what I previously believed to be precognitive dreams (I've dreamed about being places before going there and found that the layout in my dream visits was close enough to the real thing to be able to find my was around without directions,) I feel comfortable dismissing the phenomenon as synchronicity because of the extremely poor signal to noise ratio.

:thumbsup:

Aaah, no. Not magic.
I dont think thats what it is.

Get back to me when you fully understand how the human brain works.

Because I know that I dont.
And neither do you.
And neither do the experts in the field.

I say we're nothing but animals with self-awareness as a weakness.

I am not more than happy to say that some things simply arent meant to be discovered or have no logical explanation.

It would be incredible to have the ability to chart and graph and magnetically image people into proof of this kind of thing. Whether it is ever done will not change what I personally believe.

I just dont think that at this point, we have the means to measure such a concept in a way that is irrefutable and reproducible for people who only go by that sort of data. We may not ever - as fascinating as the topic is. I think that is unlikely in our lifetimes that anyone will know for sure, because the brain is so complex. Yes, weve been guessing at how the brain works for years and decades - but thats not really much time at all.


Does that mean I believe that We arent meant to ever know? or This will never have a logical explanation? No. I hope that science does keep plugging away at answers - but Im okay with the idea that in this life, those answers probably wont ever come.
If there is to be scientific evidence for such things, it is a long way off from being figured out.

I dont think that its impossible or wrong or foolish to believe in the possibility of those things being valid. And I think its both ignorant and arrogant to assume that we are at a point of expertise, at this very, very early stage in our knowledge.

But the thing is, nobody's requesting that kind of data. The data we are requesting is simple; a repeatable, observable test that provides evidence to support the claim that these abilities exist. It need not use any equipment more technical than a set of flash cards. To date there has been exactly one series of tests that suggested anything out of the ordinary and it's not really credible for reasons discussed.

In other words, start by establishing that it exists at all, before worrying about the hows and whys of it. So far nobody's been able to do that.

This topic kind of reminds me of a movie I saw a few years ago - Suspect Zero...I think that's what it was called. In the special features, it was discussing a type of ESP that the FBI were trying to use (supposedly). It was based on the theory of how matter is constantly expanding. Supposedly, matter from the brain has somehow expanded throughout Earth, space, time, etc. Somehow or another these people were able to contact that matter to help find criminals or possible future terrorist attacks or even to help investigate a crime.

I'm not saying I believe this stuff. I just thought it was fun to listen to.

On the actual topic though, I don't really believe in ESP. Like others have said before, most likely the brain is just subconsciously processing information.

Yes, Yes, Yes!! Bravo, a real live human that realizes we don't know everything....:icare:

I've never claimed that I, or even we as a species, know everything. My argument is that 'we can't prove it doesn't exist' is not valid proof. If I were to argue in favour of the Easter Bunny on the same grounds, you'd think me a fool. And yet...

BAM! Just because something is possible doesn't mean it is to be blindly considered. I'd prefer to think that we, as a collective, keep the proverbial doors in universe of possibility closed and unlocked instead of wide open and banging around.

I like to think that discretion is the better part of science, logic, etc. You can be wrong, not a problem, and you can say you were at least reasonably humble.

Ya gotta love the Easter Bunny & Santa Claus retort that comes up in almost every thread where "scientific proof" is lacking. I especially like this one in relation to proof of God, a truly ridiculous & absurd comparison, that always comes off as condescending.

This is where the fallacy of the ‘proof’ becomes evident. How many scientific theories have been ‘proven’, only to be later overturned when new facts come to light? The answer must be countless. In science, proof is not an absolute, it merely means that we haven’t yet been able to disprove it. Scientific fact is nothing more than this year’s best guess. An educated guess, but a guess none the less, as I've said before.

When a new theory fits the observed phenomena better than an old theory, generally speaking, it then becomes the accepted model. Sometimes this can take a while, as was the case with the heliocentric solar system or the dangers of cigarette smoke. Often, this new model is then overthrown when a later and more sophisticated theory offers slightly more, or slightly better, answers.

Time will tell......new theories will evolve & new evidence will no doubt be found regarding ESP....

...

This is so absurd, I literally cannot come up with a reply. I don't even know where to start.

Is your argument, then, that because some hypotheses have been proven invalid or inaccurate in the past, that we should accept new ones with absolutely no evidence to back them up, because they're what people want to believe? Well, if that's the case, then to hell what people think! The Easter bunny exists, dammit! I can't prove it, but I know in my heart that it's true!

God has no place in this discussion and evidence has no place in a discussion of God. Religion is based on faith. People who follow Christian dogma pride themselves on the fact that they hold to their beliefs without any proof (that being the very definition of faith). When it comes to supposedly real and observable phenomena, however, we're not just in a different league, we're in a whole other sport.

Yes, occasionally we come up with models that better describe observed phenomena. This is where we get a progression from, say, Newtonian physics to quantum physics. However, this still has no bearing on the discussion. I could walk you through the scientific method (since, based on the above post, your grasp of it seems to be tenuous at best) but that's not relevant to the current debate either. Science is the process of explaining the world around us; designing and testing hypotheses to explain observed events. Before we can design and test hypotheses to explain paranormal phenomena like ESP, they need to be observed first. Observed doesn't mean that your cousin Jed saw some guy bend a spoon with the power of his mind once; such things can be and very often are faked very convincingly. Therefore, observed means the phenomenon must be demonstrable and repeatable in a controlled environment. To date, there have been a huge number of people who have claimed to be able to accomplish this; yet the JREF's prize money still hasn't been spoken for. Nobody has been able to back it up. One study out of more than I'd care to count has shown results that indicate there may be something to such phenomena, and that single one was shown to be flawed in design.

So, once more for emphasis. Before we worry about how or why something works, we need to see that it works at all. Give me one single shred of conclusive evidence behind psychic abilities and I will forever concede the point; until then, all the rest is just so much semantics and feel-good rationalizing bullshit.

Psychic powers do not exist.

I like to think of science as a bunch of boxes labeled "Proof," and on top of that, I like to think of this boogieman voodoo magic crap as a smaller set of boxes set aside from the primary row which are full of evidence and thus has more weight.

It isn't that we know or don't know or will ever know or (faith / religion), it is that we don't have anything to put in the damn box.

This analogy works surprisingly well. Nothing in the damn box, indeed.

Public school education. No fancy words, but I get to use box analogies.

I can see your grasp of condescending remarks is quite well rounded. You certainly have a long way to fall from the lofty throne you sit upon.

My comment about your condescending Easter Bunny post was indeed valid. As previously stated, I see this in every thread where scientific proof is lacking, making it more than valid. Whether you compare God to the Easter Bunny, or ESP to Santa Claus its still the exact same thing. A ridiculous and absurd comparison, with no basis in fact. Its the way you make yourself feel superior, much like your (since, based on the above post, your grasp of it seems to be tenuous at best) comment. Childish at best. Then you cant seem to spell hypothesis, and throw around some more big words, basically saying nothing at all. I see no valid argument whatsoever.

It was once assumed that communication through invisible waves traveling through the air was impossible. Now we realize that although radio & microwaves are invisible, communication is possible with them. Hey we can even use light now......I'm certain this was all "magical" & "mysterious" in the day, the stuff of science fiction. Yet some "open minded" individuals decided to endure the ridicule and move science forward...as often happens.

The scientific truths of today are often obsolete tomorrow....

Other than that, I'm done here. Going in circles makes me dizzy.

So you learned to spell hypothesis......wow.

I simply find it amazing when somebody categorically states that ESP does not exist. That is the height of arrogance since there is no possible way to know that. Much like your statement that squeebs PC was Virus Free!! Although invisible processes might be rare, there is no possible way for you to know that one is or isn't present based on a HijackThis log.......I find your superiority complex amusing.......:)

If you feel that you can counter my arguments, by all means do so. However, I have done my best to restrain my own critiques to the content you post, rather than your individual character. I'd appreciate it if you could do the same.

ok so...

this is a deceptive complicated matter in my view.

here's why...i do alot of collective improvisation, much of which involves sound spaces that turn on a dime--often quite radical changes of sonic direction without a score to set them up----so i KNOW that there are types of intersubjective alignment/communication--not only that but these routine..ordinary features of being-in-the world. improvisation simply works them--but indirectly (and i think that because we are marooned in language, that's the relation we are stuck with. there's nothing wrong with it, nothing to be done about it. it's just like that.) i have been doing this kind of work for 30 years (geez....) in one form or another, so there is no possibility of anyone telling me it doesnt happen.

but i also think that there is nothing particularly surprising about this, that it can be explained by way of complex dynamic systems model, through the notion of coupled oscillators.

so while the soundwork i do presupposes this kind of coupling, i dont think that there is "esp" nor do i think that any of the other discourses of mysticism apply or are necessary.

collective improvisation involves commonality of intent, physical proximity and closely related types of psycho-kinetic activity. there is also a common referencepoint in the sound formations that are being generated--but the complication there is that you cannot say that what all the players in a collective improvisation are doing is reacting, simply because the sound formations emerge and change too fast for that--and improvisation involves a particular type of awareness that in a sense bypasses the language-based structuring of being-in-the-world that constitutes what (for shorthand's sake) i'll call the platform across which we organize our regular experience.

again, there is nothing unusual about this bypassing--you do it all the time--think about the process of writing the sentences that make up the post that you might write in response to this. think about how you would describe that process in terms shaped by the sentences that result from it.

language structures lean on/generate a conception of causation that is primarily mechanical. this is obviously one type of causation, but is not causation tout court. that is a problem. that linguistic structures cannot account for everything is self-evident: they cant even account for the practices involved with using language itself without fundamentally altering the problems they purport to address (pace merleau-ponty on this one--the best essay on the problem of representing practice is "indirect speech and the voice of silence" in the collection "signs"--read it if you want to see how very rigorous philosophy bumps up against the question of practice---because that is what is at issue here, really, it seems to me.)

basically, i think that the category of esp is worthless.
i think it is based on a mis-mapping of ordinary forms of human activity that fall outside discourse, that it is a variant of older ways of talking about these capacities which were routed through the language of mysticism, which i also think worthless. (CAVEAT: worthless here extends in strange ways--it might mean only that i personally find them worthless in that they tell me nothing, they do not appeal to me aesthetically, i cannot use them to formalize or think about anything nor do they function to extend the working of improvisation--this to stick with the example that i introduced earlier---BUT i know folk for whom the above is not the case insofar as esp or mysticism are viable languages/terminologies for talking about this process, mostly because FOR THEM it enables a refinement and extension of the activities themselves...so it follows that to the extent that i think these languages are trying to talk about the same thing as i am in this post, i think they're wrong, useless--but that presupposes alot--at any rate, i evaluate these languages in terms of what they do in particular situations for these folk, whom i encounter in the context of soundwork---but transposed onto an analytic level, as devices that say something ABOUT what happens, i think they're useless. there is a difference between these claims--one is about functionality, the other about analytic power. these aren't the same. so the problem really is whether--to get back to the topic of the thread--esp names anything. i dont think it does.)

to the extent that esp names a process of register-crossing (you know, "bend the spoon") i think it useless. it seems to me that it misnames a feature of collective psycho-kinetic activity, fetishizes it, places it into a false position, imputes arbitrary operations to it and looks for arbitrary effects. it sets it up as a double of intentionality (the directing of attention toward objects in the world), which i think is false, simply because it maps onto a language-based structure an operation that is not containable within it. the idea of esp misstates everything about what it would purport to explain.


problem no. 1: we tend to impute causation to phenomena that occur in sequence. we do it even more strongly when phenomena unfold simultaneously---you see this all the time in social analysis---the assumption that amounts of zetigetist history--esp is a playground in which these limited notions of causation get mapped arbitrarily.

problem no. 2: verification. the mistake outlined just above explains the problems of verification. you are looking the wrong way, in the wrong place, for the wrong type of operations, when you invest in the category of esp. you are looking for the effects of the name "esp"---you create a false circle with the category.

this is probably confusing as a post, because i think it appears to be saying two different things---i dont see it that way, but i am not sure that i've explained myself well. we'll see.

Ever see Se7en, Dave?

Show me what is in the box.

Something worth reading.
 

Isaac Asimov - The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 14 No. 1, Fall 1989
The Relativity of Wrong
pg.. 35-44

I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.)

It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight.

I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930.

These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see.

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.

However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.

...When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? Let's take an example.

In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on.

Of course there are plains where, over limited areas, the earth's surface does look fairly flat. One of those plains is in the Tigris-Euphrates area, where the first historical civilization (one with writing) developed, that of the Sumerians.

Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days.

Another way of looking at it is to ask what is the "curvature" of the earth's surface Over a considerable length, how much does the surface deviate (on the average) from perfect flatness. The flat-earth theory would make it seem that the surface doesn't deviate from flatness at all, that its curvature is 0 to the mile.

Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.

There were reasons, to be sure, to find the flat-earth theory unsatisfactory and, about 350 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle summarized them. First, certain stars disappeared beyond the Southern Hemisphere as one traveled north, and beyond the Northern Hemisphere as one traveled south. Second, the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle. Third, here on the earth itself, ships disappeared beyond the horizon hull-first in whatever direction they were traveling.

All three observations could not be reasonably explained if the earth's surface were flat, but could be explained by assuming the earth to be a sphere.

What's more, Aristotle believed that all solid matter tended to move toward a common center, and if solid matter did this, it would end up as a sphere. A given volume of matter is, on the average, closer to a common center if it is a sphere than if it is any other shape whatever.

About a century after Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat). From the difference in shadow length, he calculated the size of the earthly sphere and it turned out to be 25,000 miles in circumference.

The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth.

Mind you, even a tiny difference, such as that between 0 and 0.000126, can be extremely important. That difference mounts up. The earth cannot be mapped over large areas with any accuracy at all if the difference isn't taken into account and if the earth isn't considered a sphere rather than a flat surface. Long ocean voyages can't be undertaken with any reasonable way of locating one's own position in the ocean unless the earth is considered spherical rather than flat.

Furthermore, the flat earth presupposes the possibility of an infinite earth, or of the existence of an "end" to the surface. The spherical earth, however, postulates an earth that is both endless and yet finite, and it is the latter postulate that is consistent with all later findings.

So, although the flat-earth theory is only slightly wrong and is a credit to its inventors, all things considered, it is wrong enough to be discarded in favor of the spherical-earth theory.

And yet is the earth a sphere?

No, it is not a sphere; not in the strict mathematical sense. A sphere has certain mathematical properties&emdash;for instance, all diameters (that is, all straight lines that pass from one point on its surface, through the center, to another point on its surface) have the same length.

That, however, is not true of the earth. Various diameters of the earth differ in length.

What gave people the notion the earth wasn't a true sphere? To begin with, the sun and the moon have outlines that are perfect circles within the limits of measurement in the early days of the telescope. This is consistent with the supposition that the sun and the moon are perfectly spherical in shape.

However, when Jupiter and Saturn were observed by the first telescopic observers, it became quickly apparent that the outlines of those planets were not circles, but distinct eclipses. That meant that Jupiter and Saturn were not true spheres.

Isaac Newton, toward the end of the seventeenth century, showed that a massive body would form a sphere under the pull of gravitational forces (exactly as Aristotle had argued), but only if it were not rotating. If it were rotating, a centrifugal effect would be set up that would lift the body's substance against gravity, and this effect would be greater the closer to the equator you progressed. The effect would also be greater the more rapidly a spherical object rotated, and Jupiter and Saturn rotated very rapidly indeed.

The earth rotated much more slowly than Jupiter or Saturn so the effect should be smaller, but it should still be there. Actual measurements of the curvature of the earth were carried out in the eighteenth century and Newton was proved correct.

The earth has an equatorial bulge, in other words. It is flattened at the poles. It is an "oblate spheroid" rather than a sphere. This means that the various diameters of the earth differ in length. The longest diameters are any of those that stretch from one point on the equator to an opposite point on the equator. This "equatorial diameter" is 12,755 kilometers (7,927 miles). The shortest diameter is from the North Pole to the South Pole and this "polar diameter" is 12,711 kilometers (7,900 miles).

The difference between the longest and shortest diameters is 44 kilometers (27 miles), and that means that the "oblateness" of the earth (its departure from true sphericity) is 44/12755, or 0.0034. This amounts to l/3 of 1 percent.

To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On the earth's spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On the earth's oblate spheroidal surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile.

The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat.

Even the oblate-spheroidal notion of the earth is wrong, strictly speaking. In 1958, when the satellite Vanguard I was put into orbit about the earth, it was able to measure the local gravitational pull of the earth--and therefore its shape--with unprecedented precision. It turned out that the equatorial bulge south of the equator was slightly bulgier than the bulge north of the equator, and that the South Pole sea level was slightly nearer the center of the earth than the North Pole sea level was.

There seemed no other way of describing this than by saying the earth was pear-shaped, and at once many people decided that the earth was nothing like a sphere but was shaped like a Bartlett pear dangling in space. Actually, the pearlike deviation from oblate-spheroid perfect was a matter of yards rather than miles, and the adjustment of curvature was in the millionths of an inch per mile.

In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.

What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.

This can be pointed out in many cases other than just the shape of the earth. Even when a new theory seems to represent a revolution, it usually arises out of small refinements. If something more than a small refinement were needed, then the old theory would never have endured.

Copernicus switched from an earth-centered planetary system to a sun-centered one. In doing so, he switched from something that was obvious to something that was apparently ridiculous. However, it was a matter of finding better ways of calculating the motion of the planets in the sky, and eventually the geocentric theory was just left behind. It was precisely because the old theory gave results that were fairly good by the measurement standards of the time that kept it in being so long.

Again, it is because the geological formations of the earth change so slowly and the living things upon it evolve so slowly that it seemed reasonable at first to suppose that there was no change and that the earth and life always existed as they do today. If that were so, it would make no difference whether the earth and life were billions of years old or thousands. Thousands were easier to grasp.

But when careful observation showed that the earth and life were changing at a rate that was very tiny but not zero, then it became clear that the earth and life had to be very old. Modern geology came into being, and so did the notion of biological evolution.

If the rate of change were more rapid, geology and evolution would have reached their modern state in ancient times. It is only because the difference between the rate of change in a static universe and the rate of change in an evolutionary one is that between zero and very nearly zero that the creationists can continue propagating their folly.

Since the refinements in theory grow smaller and smaller, even quite ancient theories must have been sufficiently right to allow advances to be made; advances that were not wiped out by subsequent refinements.

The Greeks introduced the notion of latitude and longitude, for instance, and made reasonable maps of the Mediterranean basin even without taking sphericity into account, and we still use latitude and longitude today.

The Sumerians were probably the first to establish the principle that planetary movements in the sky exhibit regularity and can be predicted, and they proceeded to work out ways of doing so even though they assumed the earth to be the center of the universe. Their measurements have been enormously refined but the principle remains.

Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.

So the brains know more as the tools get better...

God damn... what's in the box?!

incompleteness is a key notion.
its good to keep in mind.
i'm not sure that really keeping it in mind does anything good for claims to certainty..quite the contrary. if mathematics as a formal language is incomplete, and it is only within a formal language that there is even any possibility of claims that approach certainty, then what does it do to other types of claims?

incompleteness is constitutive.
nothing you can do to make it go away.
any scientist who knows anything about philosophy knows this.

so i'm not entirely sure i understand who the asimov quote was directed at, ustwo, and i dont know how you understand it (in the sense that i dont know which aspects of it you emphasize and which you do not, simply because you posted it without comment), but it *is* interesting.
so thanks.

Also Worth Reading.......
 

I assume your point is, once again, that we don't know everything and that what we find in the future might be completely different from what we're capable of conceptualizing. In relation to this discussion, however, I don't see how it's relevant. Scientific progress has been made when something (or nothing) is observed that doesn't fit the mold that we have. Einstein wouldn't have had to come up with relativity if everything we observed fit Newton's model.

My point continues to be this: under controlled conditions in peer-reviewed studies, nothing has been observed that indicates that ESP exists. Common belief in the scientific community is that ESP does not exist. The observations and the theory are consistent, therefore no new theory of how things work has to be proposed. If new evidence arises that is inconsistent with the belief that ESP does not exist, then a new theory has to be proposed, tested, refined, and possibly replaced. If, in the study of the brain, something is found that does something but cannot be mapped to an internal body function, then the answer may be that it processes a sense that we currently do not know or understand.

I am confident that ESP does not exist. I have been wrong about things before , and new evidence has surfaced in the past that forced me to change my way of thinking. Until hard evidence indicates otherwise, I will maintain my stance.

I like propping up the ESP argument with astrophysics.

Uh, I think you missed the point there bro, my post was in response to Ustwo's assumption that theories evolve in a way as to include previous older theories, which is the case sometimes but not always. In the case of Newtonian physics being applied to the very big or small (see article), they simply didn't work, became obsolete, and were replaced by Einsteinian physics.

Of course Newtonian physics is still quite helpful if you need to calculate the trajectory of an artillery round, but doesn't cut it with astrophysics or quantum mechanics.

No, no... I got the point. I fail to see how it presents evidence of ESP.

Newton kinda had the right idea, Einstein fixed it.

Just like DeLamarck sparked an idea and Darwin fixed evolutionary theory.

Just like the guy who invented checkers had the right idea, but the guy who invented Hungry Hungry Hippos fixed boardgames.

This isn't a valid argument for ESP because it features big words and household science names.

What's in the box for ESP?

Not sure if you got this, but he spelled it right the first time. Plural of hypothesis is hypotheses.

I don't know what all this stuff is about squeebs and viruses, but have a point to make here.

Nobody can say categorically that ESP does not exist, any more than someone can categorically say that Thor the Norse god of thunder does not exist (or to use a less trite example, that pyramids don't have the power to sharpen razorblades). You can't prove a negative, as we all know.

The fact is, however, that despite various efforts to detect such an effect, no peer-reviewed study has found any evidence that ESP is real phenomenon. Is it possible that ESP exists but simply has never been reproduced in a study? Yes. Does that mean you should believe it exists? Up to you, but as has been pointed out already, if all the evidence you need that something is real is that nobody's proven it isn't, then you should be believing all sorts of wacky ideas. So, putting the question back to you - why do you believe in ESP when there is no proper evidence to support it? Why this phenomenon and not others?

Martian is absolutely dead on about your misunderstanding of the scientific method.

You do realize that there is a difference between something being "impossible" and nobody knowing how to do it (or even to think about doing it) right? Radio waves - I'd have to check but I suspect nobody knew they even existed for very long (relatively speaking) before Marconi figured out how to transmit information over them.

Dude you are either really slow or don't realize when I'm trying to make light of a situation. Wake up & smell a bit of teasing......:)

All you've done is repost whats already been said, and taken on the same superior attitude. You do realize that is a perfectly logical argument to assume that science will evolve and that our current testing methods are insufficient to study this phenomenon??? I also hope you realize it is also a perfectly logical argument to to state that most scientific theories are not 100% infallible, scientific theories are simply our current best guess, whether you realize that or not.
So proving a positive beyond any shadow of any doubt seems to be a tad difficult too....:)

http://www.synchronizeduniverse.com/...PARANORMAL.htm

http://i129.photobucket.com/albums/p...R20LAB20PK.jpg

There are also several other studies showing the existence of ESP, there was a 25% chance of choosing the correct target by "luck", yet the studies yield a 38% hit rate. I may dig them up, but it seems pointless since no matter what studies I post the detractors will always say the data is flawed. Its just much safer to agree with the majority, and maintain the status quo.

What an interesting website that is...breaking down the current scientific paradigm.

Please tell me you don't rely on sites like this for understanding and you are just trolling this thread like the homeopathic medicine one.

Big talk from someone with an 80% warn, You seem to be the biggest troll of all....:)

If making posts relevant to the original OP is trolling, then ya got me. It appears to me I'm presenting an opposing viewpoint, with pretty graphs and all....:)

Its 70% and I only get when I get fed up with idiots, but if in your world thats somehow proof, well then, who am I to judge.

I find it odd that the "status quo" is often used with disparagement, especially in the context of ESP and scientific research. The research methodology and resulting studies are disappointing.

The status quo is often preferable.

Let's try to keep things civil here folks.

And let this be a lesson not to brag about your warning rating to the other members...we keep them private for a reason ;)

(And before anyone starts thinking Ustwo is a liar in this thread, he does have a different warning rating now and it's none of your business as to why)
<hr>
As for the thread itself, a simple observation (more like a rhetorical question): why is it that the majority is necessarily bad? This is a common theme among believers in....stuff like this (for lack of a better term/phrase). People post over and over again with what amounts to "95% of the scientific community says this is B.S." and then believers come by and post something done by that other 5% and imply it's better because it's not the majority or the status quo. Perhaps sometimes something is the majority and the status quo for a reason?

Similarly, I always find it interesting (and frustrating) when I see comments like "it seems pointless since no matter what studies I post the detractors will always say the data is flawed." The phrase "pot calling the kettle black" comes to mind. 1) If 95% (or whatever) of respected and educated scientists disagree with your 5% of scientists (which is most certainly the case when it comes to things such as E.S.P.), which is the group being presented with information and ignoring it? 2) Again, if the large majority of the scientific community rejects the claims....maybe there's merit to the idea that the data is flawed?

Not that I expect anyone here to admit to this - and some will probably be offended and upset that I even make this assertion - but I think some people have a certain need to be special, to be outside of the mainstream, to have some sort of uncommon knowledge. In many people, this takes the form of religion, and then there are those who replace the more standard religions with something like belief in astrology, or E.S.P. or whatever else. One common thread though is this idea that because the opinion is "mainstream" it is inherently bad. This is a very strong indication that there is an ulterior motive to belief in such things...that being outside of the mainstream is a necessary characteristic of that person's personality. It's also interesting that many such people are drawn to what they must know, subconsciously at least, is a losing battle. You're not going to convince the majority that E.S.P. exists, and that's OK, because it's not actually about convincing the majority, it's about being in the minority...feeling somehow special. If, by chance, the majority DID become convinced that E.S.P. (or whatever other supernatural, new-agey phenomenon) is real...most of the people who so easily shrug off the majority opinion against E.S.P. now would find some other new-agey phenomenon to follow instead.

And just like other religious people get offended when you imply that there may be more going on under the surface of their religious dedication than they admit, I expect plenty of people here to be offended and adamantly deny everything I said here. That's OK though, because I'm not trying to win you all over...but maybe one person will be encouraged to take a closer look at why they are who they are and choose to believe what they believe.

Either way, I doubt I'll be participating much more in this thread. I only have so many endless-debates-that-go-nowhere in me per year.

I am reading the original questioners question in this thread.

'If people that don't necessarily believe in esp still believe in the validness of a hunch or intuition, and how using these abilities can manifest outside current television programs to the community'

This is the gist of what I read and if I quoted anything incorrectly let me know.

I freaked out rather severley the first time I witnessed my sister 'channeling'
My mind wanted to go so many other places at that moment.

She has to go through a rather intense physical preparation for this experience that involves eating very little yet healthy.

She is not in any state that could be misconstrued as sleep deprived-over stressed - magic mushroomed induced visionary whatever, I realize I am having trouble with my thoughts here.

We come from a long line of psychics so to speak.

I tried to push away my own abilities for decades, frankly I am not ready for the responsibility that comes with that power.

I see basic intuition as a gift that has never steered me wrong yet,
if I am truly selfless to listen to it.

Happy horizons,
peace.

Boasting is the recourse of a pseudo-superior intellect.

I could care less why.

The same comments (give or take) have already been posted in response to other threads regarding the paranormal. I am also tired of trying to enlighten the closed minded entities which inhabit this domain. If I wasn't so full of tryptophan I would elaborate, but as SM70 has already stated, this endless circular argument has become tiresome.

http://skepdic.com/pear.html
It's a long read, so I'll post a few highlights. The gist is that while the PEAR study looks good on the surface, it's not nearly as definitive as it seems at first. I'll concede that the methodology needs to be looked into in order to determine whether results are flukes or results of an actual phenomenon; I won't dismiss it outright. I still remain skeptical, though.

Once again, my main problem with the machine event studies is that they were uncontrolled; a number generator might be close to random, but only after millions of trials would slight imperfections showing it to be pseudo-random become apparent. This is mentioned toward the end of the article.

The Uncanny becomes something else in entirety when it regulates itself in regularity.

I question it increasingly more each day, yet have not as of thus far found that singular catalyst to propel historical cross-writings and obsession to discover blind spots not obvious in practice. Time shall tell, as will I.

Talk about semantics :shakehead:

Everyone does agree but is too blind to see it. This is nothing but terminology. Statistics and required proof and the laws of science make it so the most brilliant and logical minds will refuse to believe something they can't explain.

American Heritage define ESP as "Communication or perception by means other than the physical senses".

The quotes above are all instances of extra sensory perception and would be unexplainable to dear Dr Spock. But you have readily admitted "uncanny abilities", "information that may not be obvious", "noticing tiny things" -- all EXTRA sensory feats, if you will. Not everyone is capable of these things at all times.

Telepathy and clairvoyance, the ESP scary stuff to the logic heads, are gifts for those who have the talent, patience, creativity and capacity to develop those traits even further.

Yes, I believe that we all have it to some extent. And I don't believe in luck, not even for auditions or job interviews.

I got to disagree with you jewels about semantics, so forgive me if I misunderstood or am going the wrong way.

I wish I could find a better definition than that as I dislike the ambiguous word "senses." This can go to mean: (1) the total stimuli sent to the brain, or (2) only the stimuli which gets consciously interpreted by the brain. I happen to agree with (1).

There isn't anything ESP about these statements---only they have a little extra perception of their senses. One of the five senses stimulated enough neurons lost somewhere which fired information to whichever higher level conscious-related neurons. They were not conscious of those first neurons, but those first neurons were just wired right. Does a man with 20/10 vision have ESP? Does a mentalist have ESP for picking up on the subtle things we communicate in our voice, words, and body language?

With ESP, especially the ESP most here are describing or debating, there is no input through the known five senses that would explain some uncanny ability. Since science is already starting to sound more and more like fantasy (like Feynmann using the idea that positrons are just electrons moving backward in time for his theories in quantum electrodynamics), I don't dismiss the idea that there could be some sense outside our five senses. We just haven't picked up on it. Quantum entanglement is a prime example for ESP, despite disallowing the sending of information, who knows what other phenomena exist within the universe, between us and the world, or a mother and child.

But even I have to say that the box is empty, regardless of how much I want there to be something in it.

And do you really want to drag Spock into this, as his race is psychic? Mr Spock did not like guesses, as he could not consciously and logically account for all variables.

I knew you would say that :) ...

I generally agree with the analogy for a number of things. It's not that I don't agree/disagree with ESP, etc. IMO there's usually nothing of substance "in the damn box" to convince me either way. I admit I have my initial biases based on personal experience.

BTW - I actually have ESP

...uh, an ESP Eclipse II
http://www.espguitars.com/images/gui...ipse_II_VB.jpg
the EMG's are sweet.

If my friend and I are driving on LSD and see a yellow speed boat, and a short time later start to hum 'yellow submarine' its not ESP.

Of course not. You would have used your physical senses in that example.

An entire discussion about ESP without a mention of James Randi and the JREF $1,000,000 prize? Ring, can you (or your sister, or one of the other psychics in your family) really not use an extra million dollars, plus the invaluable worth of convincing the entire world, without a shadow of a doubt, that you really have the powers you say you have? It would alter the whole of modern science, and be the most important discovery in the last hundred years!

well, my position about this stuff is complicated...i have no problem with the fact--in my experience anyway--that in certain types of directed activities, what seems like intersubjective communication that happens too fast to be explained rationally can and does happen. almost any collective improvisation will show you that. but i dont believe in esp--that this sort of thing can be understood as a double of intentionality, directed onto the world, used to manipulate objects, etc.

these two positions actually reinforce each other: in my experience, this trans-subjective work is bounded by a shared project, immersion in a type of activity/medium and disposition. in other words, the environment within which this sort of phenomenon unfolds is tightly bounded, and you could see it as a result of a sustained engagement with improvisation as a type of practice.

listening--and most other sensory zones, work quite a bit faster and in a more open manner than you'd think---improvisation is a temporal activity, while language tends to stabilize relations to and amongst elements encountered in time...if you think about this distinction, it's pretty clear that the transition from temporal practice to statements about temporal practice involve some shearing off of possibilities that may remain open and usable in the context of temporal practices.

i tend to think of improvisation as a space of coupled oscillators, generating and working within a complex dynamic system.

so i don't see it as a particularly extraordinary activity--i think we do this sort of thing all the time, but we also operate within a conceptual framework that has no way of either accounting for or talking coherently about not just improvisation but temporal processes in general.

improvisation on a musical instrument is just extending this space, training yourself to think through the development of structures rather than through the movement of sentences.

but it's a tightly bounded space, musical improvisation, the possibilities of which are--to my mind--a function of working with your instrument. so while this may rely on capacities that everyone has but may or may not have the occaison to extend and work as a discrete type of activity, fact is that what happens in a collective improvisation--how things come together, how they alter, where the capacity of a group of people who may not even know each other to stop and start, change directions, develop structures and dissolve them---is a function of training yourself, directly and indirectly.

the problem with notions like esp, it seems to me, is that they abstract this practical engagement with materials/a medium and make it into the duplicate of directing your attention at an object in your visual field. it ain't like that, i dont think.

but there's another problem: if i am right about the above (it corresponds to my experience, but also to how i understand my experience) then it would be pretty much impossible to separate these communicative possibilities from the practical interactions that condition them, that make them possible, that enable them to move or develop. scientific proofs presuppose discrete objects of analysis, or discrete relational systems. making this discrete is a problem--so i would imagine that scientific investigations of this sort of capacity would also turn it into esp.