For the purposes of this thread, I'd like members to assign a percentage to telepathy, PK, precognition, survival of consciousness and mediumship in terms of their likelihood of being real.
The reason I like these kinds of exercises is that they show us how few people there are in the "all basically 100%" or "all basically 0%" factions. I always hoped that the original skeptiko forum would eventually embrace the fact that there are proponents and skeptics of all different stripes, and that there are people who believe strongly in one thing, but not in another. I'm sure some members will take issue with my wording or categories, but that's what the comments are for.
Anyway, hoping for good things on this new forum!
My rankings would be:
telepathy - 75%
survival of consciousness - 35%
PK - 15%
mediumship - 10%
precognition - 5%
Thanks!
Wow... Precognition may have one of the strongest cases, with presentiment experiments making a buzz (in particular, but not limited to, Bem's).
I am wary of arbitrarily assigning percents, but if materialism of any and all stripes (from naive realism to physicalism) is false, I would say that it goes like this in my book:
Telepathy (probably the most common) → Precognition (per above) → PK (it's only biasing underlying patterns. By giving it so low of a chance I'm assuming that you are in the camp that posits an objective reality independent of observer influence... Not a "participatory universe" kinda guy, are you?) → Survival (the other ones manifest in a more mundane setting, and are exponentially easier to prod) → Mediumship (a flawed, if occasionally productive, method of accessing something that is as clear as mud).
(2017-08-22, 04:59 PM)E. Flowers Wrote: [ -> ]I am wary of arbitrarily assigning percents, but if materialism of any and all stripes (from naive realism to physicalism) is false, I would say that it goes like this in my book:
Telepathy (probably the most common) → Precognition (per above) → PK (it's only biasing underlying patterns. By giving it so low of a chance I'm assuming that you are in the camp that posits an objective reality independent of observer influence... Not a "participatory universe" kinda guy, are you?) → Survival (the other ones manifest in a more mundane setting, and are exponentially easier to prod) → Mediumship (a flawed, if occasionally productive, method of accessing something that is as clear as mud).
Yes, I'm not keen on trying to estimate percentages either, but I think my ranking would be the same as this, with the first three at very similar levels (because the strength of the experimental evidence for them seems similar), but survival a long way behind them, and mediumship a long way behind survival (but I don't consider myself well-informed about the evidence for survival and mediumship).
I'd also be interested to know why berkelon put the likelihood of precognition so low in comparison with telepathy. Was it because of some kind of fundamental philosophical objection?
(2017-08-22, 06:40 PM)Max_B Wrote: [ -> ]At present I'd say Telepathy, Mediumship and Precognition are just different perceptions of a similar process... and I'd consequently put them all at 100%
PK is difficult, I'm not sure it exists in the way people might popularly think about it.
Survival of consciousness is summat totally different. I guess your asking do *I* survive death, and the answer is I don't know.
I did think about querying what berkelon meant by mediumship, but decided to assume it meant communication with the (surviving) dead, rather than other phenomena produced by mediums, either mental or physical. But maybe those need to be considered separately.
Maybe "microPK" with random number generators should also be distinguished from "macroPK".
For them to be real my rough estimates would be:
telepathy - 100%
survival of consciousness - 50%
PK - 100%
mediumship - 50%
precognition - 100%
For them with the mid range percentage I think there is something to it but it is not what it is thought to be. Something else is going on.
I am not qualified to assign percentages - I've been reading about this stuff all my (long) adult life and I still have great gaps. Also, I skip between science and philosophy and back so talking in objective terms often seems pointless given the subjectivity of much of the material I read. But I think that for the purposes of estimating progress towards a consensus, one essential is missing from the OP list: can mind exist without a physical brain? My response to that would be a high probability that it can and does which then enables ALL of the others in the list.
Indeed, for me, even that statement is too dualistic because I'm an idealist so mind is the only certainty.
(2017-08-22, 06:16 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]I'd also be interested to know why berkelon put the likelihood of precognition so low in comparison with telepathy. Was it because of some kind of fundamental philosophical objection?
I don't think the scientific evidence for precognition is as good as it is for telepathy, and I find telepathy anecdotes more persuasive than precognition anecdotes. Also, telepathy just feels more likely to me, purely from a living human perspective. If you know of recent blinded experiments other than Bem's, I'd love to read them.
In terms of mediumship, I did mean communicating with the dead. I can't have my mediumship score higher than my consciousness survival score, since I need a surviving consciousness in order to communicate with the medium, I would think. I don't find the evidence for survival of consciousness particularly persuasive, so, in turn, I doubt mediums are in contact with surviving consciousnesses. Or at least that's what I'm thinking on a random Tuesday night...
telepathy - 99.5%
survival of consciousness - 98.7%
PK - 97.2%
precognition - 90.5%
mediumship - 88.35%