skakos wrote:
what do you mean by "I do not find his work convincing, particularly in those places where there is a demand that fundamental laws of physics are violated"? Most of the times the opposite is the case: we believe that all physical laws MUST apply everywhere/ anytime, so we find it easy to reject as true anything that violates them...
My fundamental problem is a methodological one. We do not change the laws of physics by measuring human beings in labs, or by taking opinion polls. Word-of-mouth does not constitute the type of evidence that is collected in order to amend the laws of physics. You might not like that personally, and I might not like it -- but there is a well-established methodology for this now.
So for example, Dean Radin has measured the pupils of women in a lab who were being shown horrifying or stressful images flashed in sequence against images of flowers, puppies, and landscapes. His statistics suggest women's pupils dilate prior to a horrible image being shown. That's called predicting the future. Predicting the future, is, of course , in violation of Special Relativity. The problem for paranormal research is that no matter how much evidence Radin collected, and now matter how compelling his data was, that data is never used to change the laws of physics. It is the wrong type of data for that science. I don't think this is a conspiracy and I don't think it's a taboo. Rather it's just an entrenched methodology.
At some level, Dean Radin knows this -- that is why he has changed the name of his research to "Paranormal Psychology". Psychology is the correct word here. (Since I'm on the subject, Radin's actual published evidence is not very compelling. Female pupils dilate roughly 7% above random chance, which is a fluke in my opinion.)
Human pupil's dilating is
...just nearly.. physical in nature. I mean we are dealing with body tissue moving after all. But back to this issue of word-of-mouth, and how word-of-mouth is used in sciences, particularly the hard sciences. By and large, there is no space for word-of-mouth in physics or chemistry. Outside of psychology and psychiatry, I can't think of any science that allows word-of-mouth to act as data points for evidence. For this reason, Near Death Experiences and Out-of-body have a hard road to climb.
What the paranormal advocate usually says:
"While the person was floating outside their body they saw something they could not have seen, or they overheard some conversation in a far away room." This is an attempt at corroboration of word-of-mouth. That is, the paranormal advocate is aware that word-of-mouth is highly suspect. The more conservative example is
Remote Viewing. More conservative because it does not rely on all sorts of middle concepts like souls floating around "outside the body" and such. Occam's Razor would say that Remote Viewing is easier to corroborate than OBE.
Let me add a final note on OBE here. Today we have a very good understanding of why human beings bodies can sense the outside world. Light of a certain narrow spectrum is emitted from surfaces as radiation. The lens of the eye focuses this radiation on the back of the eyeball. Retinal cells respond to this light and send nerve signals to the visual cortex. This was not understood during the medieval ages. That is to say, the method by which the environment is perceived was a form of "magic" as far as anyone knew. OBEs require that I accept that a spirit floating around outside a body would "see" the environment. Worse, this "spirit/soul" thing happens to perceive the environment precisely as a human eye-brain system would see it, precisely in the visual range of EM radiation. I don't think that makes very much sense. It makes sense only from some magical medieval context, not from a context of modern biology.
