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No but I believe the human brain is a slapdash hunk of electric jello and it's very good at convincing itself of things
If they were real we could study them scientifically but every attempt to do so has produced bupkus. That said we still have plenty to learn about the experience of consciousness so it's worth keeping an open mind.
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/remote-viewing#Emergence_of_Remote_Viewing
That research had very serious flaws and didn't hold up to scrutiny. There's some writing on it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing#Scientific_reception
Martin Gardner has written that the founding researcher Harold Puthoff was an active Scientologist prior to his work at Stanford University, and that this influenced his research at SRI.
Hexbear scientology arc
Yeah that all looks legit. The main reason I think it's true is because I've tried it myself and it just works too well to be explained by cope.
I just use thetargetpool.com
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Remote viewing isn't interesting or useful or anything like other psychic abilities are. But it's easy and everyone can do it.
Remote viewing isn't interesting or useful or anything
What a mad sentence! What do you mean? How could you say that?
While I understand that's usually a great point in discussions on hexbear, It's perfectly adequate topics which aren't policitcally charged.
There are organised brigading groups deliberately tilting Wikipedia to their bias.
This is well-documented; they're surprisingly brazen about it.
It is particularly bad for charged/controversial topics like this.
If they were real we could study them scientifically but every attempt to do so has produced
That's not true there's mountains of research. You could dismiss it if you were so inclined but it's not true to say no evidence has been produced.
You're exactly right. It's always so telling when people who are "invested" in these go to proselytize to amateurs who are low information people rather than discuss the topic with those actually familiar with the studies.
It's just tired and really shows their hand that they won't engage with experts of psychology to try to show/convince them with the mountain of evidence that supposedly exists. It's the "canola oil causes cancer" of psychology.
Everything that exists is, by definition, natural. If by "parapsychological powers" we mean supernatural powers, then no. However, there's a lot about the world that we don't have a perfect handle on yet, and brains are marvelously complex systems that are exquisitely tuned to sense survival-relevant patterns in very noisy environments and make sweeping inferences based on those patterns. I think that, under at least some circumstances, we might be capable of (correctly) acting on very, very little information in a way that looks supernatural. The explanation is probably partially luck and partially our being sensitive to stimuli that we don't normally think of as information-bearing.
Any time anyone had a premonition about a car accident, switched lanes, and then nothing happened, or any time someone had a dream or an emotional sensation that their relative died and then they didn't, is not only not here telling their story, but has also probably forgotten about their one out of place thought that one time entirely.
any time anyone had an attempt to hit a nail with a hammer, and then they missed and hit their thumb instead, howling as their thumb swells up to 13 times its size, is not only not here telling their successful carpentry story, but has also probably forgotten about their one attempt at carpentry entirely
Selection bias.
Yeah, thi explains a lot of the anecdotal stuff.
Can be filtered out with statistical analysis of course.
ITT several "communists" out themselves as being anti-materialists.
Materialism vs idealism is different from materialism vs spirituality and magic. Not that you should think magic is real though.
Yeah I think a lot of hexbears don't understand the meaning of materialism. I don't see a problem with having spiritual believes as long as you're not making your revolutionary praxis be sending good vibes telepathically to the npp . I think a lot of users here are le epic reddit atheists at heart still and think theyre right about everuthing because they saw the light of Marxism and having a more correct framework for the world than most people around you can make you a little cocky
I agree. Also I think a lot of people these days are moving away from pure rationalist vulgar materialism as their sole guiding philosophy and bringing some kind of spiritual beliefs into their lives, which I see as a good thing. for me I found relying solely on the former to be unsatisfying. A lot of people have Anglo enlightenment brain and can't conceive that in all likelihood phenomena exist that can't be explained by our current understanding of e.g. physics or hard sciences. Saying spiritualism is anti Marxist is super reductive and pretty Reddit atheist brained like you say.
Materialism is definitely when you do believe in literally anything you want especially when it's completely unscientific and divorced from material reality, then? Ok, got it! A real MArxist materialist just can't believe that it was fairies' and ghosts ideas that were the driving force in history. Makes sense. lol
What are you talking about, no they aren't. Besides, when did it become not ok on hexbear to treat harmful and false ideas with the condescension and disdain they deserve? You do know about the Posting Policy Bulletin at the bottom of every hexbear page, I hope. Also, telling someone to relax is pretty condescending, just fyi.
Being hostile and condescending is reserved for dunking in chuds, not comrades you disagree with. There's more to this place than ppb and part of that is also a culture of good vibes in between users.
Yes that's definitely what I said, good on you. I definitely believe you should go by some crystals and dangling them over your bed is an adequate substitute to analysing the material world. You really got me with this one.
I'm a registered Democrat, and I would have voted for Obama a third time.
No. There's no evidence of any kind.
You're the third person who's said this, but what about the large body of parapsychology research that's been going on for 100+ years? Why doesn't that count?
Every instance that I'm familiar with was either directly debunked or suffers from really obvious experimental design problems. I've never seen a single well-designed controlled study that shows unambiguous paranormal results.
Every instance that I'm familiar with was either directly debunked or suffers from really obvious experimental design problems.
Here's a skeptic saying the opposite: that there are no methodological flaws so we must find some other grounds for disagreeing: https://web.archive.org/web/20170616174455/http://mceagle.com/remote-viewing/refs/science/air/hyman.html
PS: He says: "The SAIC experiments are well-designed and the investigators have taken pains to eliminate the known weaknesses in previous parapsychological research. In addition, I cannot provide suitable candidates for what flaws, if any, might be present. Just the same, it is impossible in principle to say that any particular experiment or experimental series is completely free from possible flaws.... We also agree that the SAIC experiments appear to be free of the more obvious and better known flaws that can invalidate the results of parapsychological investigations. We agree that the effect sizes reported in the SAIC experiments are too large and consistent to be dismissed as statistical flukes.... I agree with Jessica Utts that the effect sizes reported in the SAIC experiments and in the recent ganzfeld studies probably cannot be dismissed as due to chance. Nor do they appear to be accounted for by multiple testing, file-drawer distortions, inappropriate statistical testing or other misuse of statistical inference. I do not rule out the possibility that some of this apparent departure from the null hypothesis might simply reflect the failure of the underlying model to be a truly adequate model of the experimental situation....." – so I don't think it's valid to say that all the well-known research "suffers from really obvious experimental design problems" when peer-reviews by its opponents claim the opposite.
Link me a peer-reviewed study that proves the existence of telepathy and premonitions and I will retract my statement.
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Premonitions about the output of a RNG, significant results to the p<0.01 level: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-a0021524.pdf
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Meta-analysis of ganzfeld studies: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1037/0033-2909.127.3.424
Will you retract your statement now?
shot:
Premonitions about the output of a RNG, significant results to the p<0.01 level: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/psp-a0021524.pdf
chaser:
The future failed: No evidence for precognition in a large scale replication attempt of Bem (2011).
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I'm discounting parapsychology because there is no scientific evidence of any kind
I can't confidently say something doesn't exist (e.g. "There are definitely no pink monkeys in Madagascar! I've never seen any!") if I have never searched. It seems weird to say "there is no scientific evidence of any kind" when there is, in abundance.
When you say "there is no scientific evidence of any kind", do you actually mean "there is no scientific evidence of the kind I like"? Or do you mean "I have never looked"?
Link me a peer-reviewed study that proves the existence of telepathy and premonitions and I will retract my statement.
Just off the top of my head, not necessarily the best/only ones:
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https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/A-Rapid-Online-Telepathy-Test.pdf
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https://web.archive.org/web/20230929002713/https://www.parapsychologypress.org/jparticle/jp-86-1-125-134
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https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris-Roe/publication/233705929_A_Review_of_Dream_ESP_Studies_Conducted_Since_the_Maimonides_Dream_ESP_Programme/links/575ed85c08aed884621b7c7d/A-Review-of-Dream-ESP-Studies-Conducted-Since-the-Maimonides-Dream-ESP-Programme.pdf
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or just look at ANY issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research or the Journal of Parapsychology. Are you claiming these journals do not EXIST?
Chance would dictate that the participant would guess correctly 25% of the time. The results showed a 26.6% hit rate. This is already easily explainable by pure chance.
"In a total of 6,000 trials, there were 1,559 hits (26.7%), significantly above the chance expectation of 25%" – the p value in that case is 0.041
I won't be investigating your other sources, because there is no evidence
"I will not look at the evidence because there is no evidence"..... thank you for conceding have a nice day.
It's just literally impossible lol
Magic isn't real. Your expectation for random people online to look through X amount of random studies reads the same as anti-vax garbage. Go talk to people in the field and publish and argue with them about this information if you really think it matters. Otherwise you're trying to convince a bunch of low information amateurs who don't really have the background for the conversation. Which frankly leads me to heavily doubt all that you have to say.
Nah you kinda deserve it though. Your false ideas are at best an idle distraction, at worst actively harmful.
You've had people be very rude to you in this thread, which I think is undeserved despite the fact that I also think your position is unequivocally false, but Jewish_Cuban here was being extremely reasonable in his critique of your approach.
your position is unequivocally false
It's a question of evidence. We'll know that from the evidence
26.7% really doesn't strike me as significant. Certainly not enough to be convincing of such an amazing claim on its own. It does mean the study is worth scrutinizing to rule out any issues.
https://www.graphpad.com/guides/prism/latest/statistics/common_misinterpretation_of_a_p_value.htm
I just ran a script to generate 6000 random numbers between 0 and 1, then count what proportion were below 0.25. One result was as low as 23.9%
I agree p=0.041 is not very conclusive.
I'll also note that saying the evidence should be approached as an "amazing claim" is explicitly saying you bring a biased approach to the evidence.
No one study is conclusive really, that's why we need meta-analyses
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No. I'm a materialist. Unless significant evidence of such phenomena existing appears, I do not believe that they exist.
Careful, talk like that around here and a bunch of Marxist ghost hunters will tell you that you don't understand what Marx meant by materialism, that he totally meant you could believe in ghosts and magic unicorns and telepathy, just not be one of those idealists! And then they'll say you're just a reddit atheist for claiming otherwise.
Marx wrote about vampires. You’re telling me Dracula is a myth?
indeed they are, and they're full of cringe.
materialism literally is not about no spiritual stuff existing though. like it’s literally just not what the term means. your parody of the person saying what you think is a dumb characterization of it is more accurate
like we’re talking about people believing behavior is affected by reality vs behavior is affected by ideals, those are different from any specific thing existing or not existing or needing or not needing proof. Like if we found out general relativity was fake and people had the ability to shoot fireballs out of their hands using glorb schlorbs as fuel, materialism would still be a relevant concept
You are right that lots of those things shouldn’t be believed in because most of them are unfalsifiable, but that’s not the same as it being non-materialist
That is in fact (part of) what it means in every Marxist text I’ve come across so far, for example Georges Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy.
that’s kinda weird though. because there are plenty of “immaterial” (actually probably material in weird ways) things that provably exist in material reality. like radiation is fucking weird and nobody even knows what’s going on with consciousness. Weird shit can still exist in a material world, it’s just material weird shit. So “ghosts” could exist but they’d probably be part of a natural law or phenomenon of material reality we just don’t understand yet. I mean they almost definitely don’t because there’s like no falsifiable proof or evidence, I just mean as a general principle for weird shit in general
(actually probably material in weird ways)
That's the key - air, radiation, gravity, all the "invisible" parts of the universe are material. They have material effects that are distinguishable from them not having an effect. Putting gold foil in front of a radiation source will prove radiation's realness as the particles punch holes in the foil.
One of the key claims of ESP is that it doesn't act in a material way, instead being some weird vibe that nothing can detect except our brains, which are special because reasons. Electrons, neutrinos, even time travelling tachyons are actual, physical objects that exist and can be detected, electromagnetism and gravity will pull objects towards them, but ESP is based on the idea of there being something that doesn't interact with any other part of the universe, but somehow still grants us awareness of other parts of the universe.I was talking about, “materialism literally is not about no spiritual stuff existing.” Dialectical materialism, among other things, literally is about no spiritual stuff existing. The Chinese Communist Party to this day is atheist, and while it tolerates religions, its position is that their destiny is to wither away.
Materialism means we believe in a world that exists independent of our observations. This external world is in dialogue with people. There is not some kind of third thing that's not in the world, not in the people, and fundamentally unobservable/unknowable, like God or souls or woo in general. (See Engels on agnosticism in Socialism Scientific & Utopian.) Either these things are real material phenomena, in which case we can use science to analyze ghosts or whatever, or they're not. There is room in a materialist worldview for like, cryptids, but most "parapsychology" is stuff that requires discarding huge chunks of knowledge. For instance premonitions violate causality. If you give that up, what's left to be materialist about?
For instance premonitions violate causality. If you give that up, what's left to be materialist about?
A lot. The definition you gave for materialism isn’t incompatible with brainfuck basically incomprehensible weird shit, it just has to be technically observable and predictable. Humans aren’t perfect measuring instruments and often what we make isn’t perfect either, so the existence of systems and shit we might be able to eventually measure but seem completely supernatural to us now is totally possible.
What does it mean to "believe" in something you can't observe or understand? There's a sort of frontier where you make observations, form and test theories, and grow to understand the observations. We agree that crank theories, without evidence and unable to prove anything, are indistinguishable from the supernatural. So what good does it do us to consider them? We should explore things within the frontier - does infrasound cause ghost sightings? if so, does that summon ghosts or change the brain? - on a materialist basis, like some of the fringe scientists are trying to do. Invisible teapots that humans will be able to see in 3000 years should be dismissed as idealism.
I agree with you pretty much, I’m just being pedantic. Idk there’s some stuff that’s just Weird that I’ve experienced, and I love Weird shit, but if there is something unexplainable going on I don’t think it’s likely for it to be whatever invisible teapot we came up with. Just because Weird shit is real doesn’t mean it’s ghosts and insisting that ghosts or anything else specific are real is probably idealism.
No, obviously not, and entertaining the idea of such things with mountains of failed research and absolutely nothing in the way of good evidence is just... awful.
Nothing worth anything. What research have you read that proves there aren't unicorns across the galaxy, or that my house isn't made of cheese?
It is on the believers of magic to present evidence of magic, and this is a task not a single person in all of history has managed even once.
It is on the believers of magic to present evidence of magic, and this is a task not a single person in all of history has managed even once.
They keep saying this dogmatically, but you can't just keep saying "The literature does not exist. There is no published literature." when there is tens of thousands of pages of it.
Nothing worth anything.
Now this is a different claim. So what flaws are in this PDF for example?
It's not dogmatic. no one can directly perceive neutrinos or the cosmic background radiation yet we've discovered and intensely studied both. Why hold parapsychology to a lower standard?
Nobody's holding it to a lower standard. On the contrary, it's held to very high standards of rigor because of the taboo.
e.g. one research guideline is that the research team should have a skeptic and a believer (e.g. Bem and Honorton). We don't require such exacting standards for pharma research because it doesn't threaten our metaphysical beliefs (just the lives of our loved ones)
Blinded drug trials don't rigorously guard against the blinding being broken by sensory leakages (granted they do take some precautions).
The idea that "parapsychology research is held to low standards" is an old canard
Blinded drug trials don't rigorously guard against the blinding being broken by sensory leakages (granted they do take some precautions).
The null hypothesis of drug trials isn't that they're recieving information from material sources.
Vampire, I want you to understand that I'm being completely serious when I say this, and it isn't just a derogatory putdown: Shut up about things you don't understand. This is full blown "crystal healing is quantum vibrations" level of completely misunderstanding science. The placebo effect does not involve any information and isn't even comparable as a null hypothesis - the equivalent is that the effect comes from other medications than the one being tested, which is controlled for as rigorously as spoopy ghost idiots are expected to control for sensory leakage.
Plus, even if you had any idea what you were talking about with the placebo effect - that's fucking controlled for! That's the whole point! That's why you have to fucking do a placebo group and double blinds and shit! This is all basic things you'd understand if your spookum had any relation to real sciences.
I can't make statements about anyone here, but I have a very low opinion of the people in my life who "believe" in this shit because, honestly, they don't really believe it, they just really love roleplaying a little fantasy that gives them a sense of purpose and empowerment. If they really believed it, they would be doing something about it, but you can tell that they don't believe it because it's just a dalliance to them, some social currency.
The one person I knew who took it seriously isn't around to talk about it anymore, and those two facts are closely connected, but in many ways I respect them more for having earnest beliefs compared to these fucking dilettantes of self-delusion that I've been left with.
If anyone here takes this stuff seriously, please be careful.
To anyone else, please consider putting firmer demarcations on what you think you have reason to believe and what it's fun to act like you believe. There's nothing wrong with games until you lose awareness of them being games.
Magic is real. It's just very, very, extremely, incredibly small.
slaps the top of my plastic box that lets me draw shapes and colors, then send them to people on the other side of the planet near-instantaneously
Magic is NOT real.
-wondrous items capable of impossible feats
-made of rare hard-to-obtain material components from the remotest of places deep undergound, secured with slave blood sacrifices
-hundreds of lifetimes worth of man-hours of virgin recluses learned in obscure ways goes into designing and engineering each component
-must be assembled in exactly the correct order by masses of people and machines moving in precise, pre-arranged rituals
-complicated symbols and rituals required for startup, maintenance, and usage
-always goes wrong in unexpected ways and has horrific ramifications for society
nope, no magic here, no sir
when magic is a real phenomena of nature it can be systematized and studied.
Turns out when the magic is real small you can fit a lot of it into one of those bad boys.
Honestly, a little, but in the sense that consciousness is a very complex thing and has mechanics we may not be fully aware of that aren't exactly "ESP" or anything, but maybe a little closer to that than we might think.
Like we have a "danger sense" can make us unnerved and feel like we have to get out of a situation ASAP because our body has picked up on environmental cues we never consciously registered. I feel like it might be possible to "divine" certain things that we wouldn't be consciously aware of through teeny tiny stimuli our body picks up.
No, what is there is an understudied case of the brain being an excellent pattern detection organ, the slightest subconscious cue of some sort being enough to generate a world of potential and also responses to that. A lot of stuff seen as parapsychology with more rigid examination ends up being quite mundane, like the benefits of meditation, lucid dreaming or out of body experiences. I'm sure the what is tangible rather than purely psychological or sociological of the more 'out there' things will fall into line.
The main thing in designing a parapsychology experiment is ruling this out.
Like in the Bem-Honorton Ganzfeld experiments, subjects were in sensory-deprivation.
Or in Sheldrake's experiments on telephone telepathy, how can a sensory leak tell you what person is on the other end of the telephone?
There were some silly experiments published decades ago easily explainable by sensory leaks, like the Zener card stuff, but the field has moved on since then.
I feel like "oh it was sensory leaks" is one of the go-to explanations people use to support their preconceptions. But is it a good explanation? How is it a good explanation of the Ganzfeld experiments or telephone telepathy experiments?
And that's the difficult part, to catch every confound you can think of, or at least minimize them. For sensory leaks if you catch anything it's enough for you to go off of previous experience and make connections, with better accuracy than pure guessing or going off 'nlp' (or whatever sense of interest, could be something 'common' like prioprioception v hit detection in sports) alone since its more data to process, but not too much to overwhelm, enough to the subjects to 'cheat' having more sensory tools at their disposal and generate noise. Things in the world tend to have certain sensory attachments to them that are obvious in some ways depending the sense in question and symbolic/subconscious in others.
Parapsych seems at this point a temporary catch for these things before a particular focus gets shuffled into one of the older areas of study, I find it easier to catch it on that end rather than at the beginning, especially as removed from all things remotely academic as I am.
let me consult my orb.... no.
