Psience Quest

(2017-09-18, 12:45 PM)fls Wrote: [ -> ]I don't want to talk to you. You've been nothing but an ass to me in the past.

When you opened your post with accusations of game-playing, even though I don't engage in that, it was your third strike for me on this forum.

That's fine. But just for the record, in response to your name-calling, I'll copy the whole exchange here, so that people can judge for themselves whether it was inappropriate for me to mention - in my third post of the exchange - that I had been "trying to be positive and to assume everyone is genuinely interested in discussing psi, rather than games-playing."

(1) fls [to jkmac]:

So far, they seem to have the same sorts of things in common. 

If you think that a particular phenomenon has better evidence in its favor than the Ganzfeld experiments, please share. 
Linda

(2) Chris:

I have a feeling I may regret this, but - the reason I started the thread on the Global Consciousness Project is that (according to the organisers) for the formal series of experiments, all the details including the statistical hypotheses were fixed in advance, an extremely high overall level of statistical significance was reached (Z=7.31), and (pace the general concerns Max has raised about the behaviour of the random number generators) no one has suggested a conventional mechanism by which the observed correlations, which are absent from the data as a whole, could be produced.

It's an odd state of affairs. Nearly always, the sceptical comment is simply that the GCP involves retrospectively looking for patterns in the data at the times of global events. As that is the opposite of what they say they are doing, that tells us more about the poor quality of sceptical comment than about the GCP.

(3) fls:

I'm not sure how these results are supposed to be psi-like. How would they be connected to reincarnation, for example?

Linda

(4) Chris:

As far as I know, no one has suggested they are connected to reincarnation.

I must say I find your question very surprising. Do you know anything at all about the Global Consciousness Project?

(5) fls:

Okay.

Yes.

Linda

(6) Chris:

In the new spirit of the new discussion boards, I've been trying to be positive and to assume everyone is genuinely interested in discussing psi, rather than games-playing. I'll try to persevere, despite the not-very-encouraging one-word answers.

So, as you do know something of the GCP, probably you're aware that it was an outgrowth of the PEAR lab's experiments on micro-PK. Perhaps you also saw my earlier post in this thread - immediately following the one you replied to, quoting J. E. Kennedy, who wrote "If there are psi effects in these data, I expect that experimenter effects will remain the most parsimonious explanation for the foreseeable future."

In the light of that, perhaps it would be easiest if you explained why you're not sure why the effects are supposed to be psi-like. Or, equivalently, what alternative non-psi mechanisms you see by which they could be produced.

And of course, as fls has said she doesn't want to talk to me, I won't respond to her posts in future.

(2017-09-18, 12:52 PM)fls Wrote: [ -> ]BTW, when I say "fooled", I don't mean trickery, per se (although it could also be that sometimes). I'm thinking more of being fooled by circumstances.

Linda

Oh I get that.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that BY FAR, the biggest, and most pernicious enemy we have, in terms of being fooled, is of course ourselves.

(2017-09-18, 12:59 PM)jkmac Wrote: [ -> ]Linda:

Great info. Thanks!

BTW: I am a lucid dreamer. I have had an experience that is a bit convoluted but I find convincing. Rather than spend who knows how long to arrange it and write it, I am pasting a link to a video where I discuss it.

Pardon the video quality, I know it is poor, but I was using is as a working tool for planning a lecture series I'm doing in the Spring.

The section I would point you to starts at 46:00 and ends around 1:05:00. If you have 20 minutes, check that part out. It's shows something similar to what you are describing.

Thanks for that. It helps.

I don't have confidence in my imagery, but I think writing will be specific enough to convince me.

Linda

Linda and Arouet,

I will respond to your posts. Really busy today through Wednesday, though there may be some time tonight. I want to make sure I read and understand them fully before answering. I read them once through already and want to make sure my response isn't rushed. Thanks for your patience.

(2017-09-18, 08:28 PM)Dante Wrote: [ -> ]Linda and Arouet,

I will respond to your posts. Really busy today through Wednesday, though there may be some time tonight. I want to make sure I read and understand them fully before answering. I read them once through already and want to make sure my response isn't rushed. Thanks for your patience.

Thank you. No problem with going through them on your own schedule. I'm not jkmac (I'm never going to let him live that down  ).

Linda

(2017-09-18, 12:11 AM)fls Wrote: [ -> ]As far as I can tell, Stevenson implies that the concerns he raised would apply in each case. And unblinded assessments would be expected to cause problems in each case in which they are used. So it isn't a matter of trying to come up with 50 different explanations for 50 different cases. It's a matter of looking at which issues are present in which cases.

It's not that they couldn't feasibly apply to each case. And I understand that completely... I know that. That's exactly why I'm saying specificity is important. I'm saying that if you read the cases, I think it's difficult to attribute bias, coincidence, or something similar to each and every case. There are many where those explanations don't seem likely. 

Quote:My point was that it wasn't just me that is doubtful, it is scientists in general. Trying to pin this on defects in my character doesn't really help you overall. Also, I'm not sure why you insist that no one has mentioned "normal" explanations for the results.

Scientists in general are always doubtful of this stuff, and that's for a wide variety of reasons. Just because that's the case doesn't mean it's accurate or reasonable, especially when the vast majority of those scientists won't give this research the time of day and dismiss it out of hand before looking into it in any capacity, let alone enough to genuinely and legitimately critique its methodology. So to me that doesn't mean too much. I'm not pinning it on defects in your character and I don't think anything I said would suggest that - it's not any different than criticizing proponents as being biased for thinking the evidence is legitimate or not weak.

I insist it because I haven't seen it and I've looked. You haven't presented anything to the contrary save for one document by Stevenson in his early work. As I've said, the work has been taken up by others and progressed a great degree. I haven't seen or read anything claiming to explain it via normal means. How do you suggest it might happen via some normal, physical phenomena if the evidence is legitimate? For example, people have no trouble coming up with ways that OBEs or NDEs might occur via normal bodily function (regardless of how accurate or not those theories are). There's not remotely that sort of response to the reincarnation research. 

Quote:Lol. Yeah, that's not what I meant. I was referring more to the proposed explanations for what the kids say, like "reincarnation".

I understood what you meant, sorry for making that unclear. This goes hand in hand with the normal explanations thing above. For NDEs, if you somehow were able to study it as rigorously as you have suggested, there are at least theories for how the NDEs would then be explained in normal terms, where the "effects disappearing" would mean that the idealistic, dualistic, or something along those spectra wouldn't explain it, and instead something "ordinary" or purely physical would.  

For the reincarnation research, I'm not exactly sure what effect would replace the "disappearing" reincarnation "effect". It's just speculation to assume that it would, especially when I'm not seeing exactly what kind of methodological changes might result in that change. I've thought long and hard about this and haven't been able to come up with some normal explanation that might account for this at large. 

Quote:I think that general scientific acceptance would count as "serving a real purpose".

Sure, but that's likely the last step in this whole process. I don't think this needs to be the immediate goal, and I don't think it needs to be achieved in order for something to not only be taken seriously, but to be believed with a sense of respectability and reasonableness.

Quote:This is the standard I am referring to:

http://cccrg.cochrane.org/sites/cccrg.co...r_2016.pdf
http://cobe.paginas.ufsc.br/files/2014/1...e.RCT_.pdf

I don't think these links are changing anything as far as how I or most reasonable people who are familiar with the scientific method understand that standard. I know what standard you're referring to, I know about risk of bias, I understand blinding, etc, etc. And I can guarantee you that the reincarnation researchers also understand this since many of them are trained medical physicians and scientists. Again, I'm not unaware of the standards in general science. I'm saying that to declare evidence that is of a fundamentally different nature weak or unreliable based on standards established for studying things that we are much, much more used to studying and that we have a lot of practice researching, is not a reasonable approach. 

Not that it isn't important to be cognizant of bias, not that blinds aren't important when possible, and not that trying to improve methodology is not a good thing. I don't disagree with any of those things. I just feel that the rigor thus far is not inadequate, nor do I feel that it renders a belief that the evidence has value unreasonable. As I've said, yet again, this is best addressed on a case-by-case basis rather than a general discussion pointing out obvious things like the fact that dealing with a discussion with a child has a risk of bias. 

Quote:I mentioned one thing already - blinded assessments.

I know for sure that Tucker, in his book Life Before Life, mentioned something about a blinded assessment that Stevenson and a colleague conducted. I recall he wrote that they intended to continue to carry that type of study out, where possible. In that case, the blind did nothing to make the case "weaker" in the sense that the results became any less mystifying. I suggest you read the Tucker research since it's more up to date with more data and more samples. I can try to find that case if you like.

Quote:To be honest, I don't really know what you mean by disproving reductionism. As far as I know, reductionism is simply one of a variety of tools used to investigate a problem. Sometimes it's useful and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes things can be looked at as the sum of their parts, but there are other situations where the whole has features that are not present in the parts (e.g. emergence).

This is an issue of defining terms and nothing more. I use reductionism to mean that everything, including memory, consciousness, and all, reduces to the physical brain. Materialism, physicalism, et al. are obviously also used. Terminology like that is tricky. Reductionism is a very useful tool in a lot of ways, but I don't find it to be persuasive for consciousness for a variety of reasons. I don't think emergence makes much sense either, but that's a different discussion entirely for a different day. I think this evidence challenges the notion that memory and all conscious experience reduce to the physical brain. 

Quote:Okay. I think of the hard sciences as physics and chemistry, followed by biology, and the soft sciences as sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc. The methodologies used in studying clinical medicine come from the social sciences (like validity). But I'm pretty sure I specifically stated that the standards I was using are rooted in science standards.

Yes, me too. And I'm aware of that - I'm saying in this case, I don't think using standards like that is necessarily a way to judge whether it's reasonable to take the evidence seriously and think that it points to something, rather than calling it weak and unreliable based on those standards, because this research is of a different nature.

Quote:Please note that I entered this discussion because the claim was made that the evidence for psi is strong.

But you've continued it with me and it's been pretty focused on reincarnation research since that point. 

Quote:What are you suggesting then? If attempts to use rigor are still flawed, what are you expecting to happen when less rigor is used?

I didn't say to use less rigor - I think that the researchers are currently using rigor and are constantly trying to improve it as best they can all things considered. I'm obviously not suggesting they use less rigor on purpose. I'm saying they are doing their best to improve it, and I think it's already reasonably rigorous given the circumstances.

Quote:I've read two of Ian Stevenson's books and several of his published papers.

You ought to read Tucker's books and publishings if you have time, as well as the work of the people he works with. I think they help address some of the issues you're posing and and indicate the progression of the research since Stevenson's time.

Quote:I don't really make up my own standards. I tend to go with the research on the subject of reliability and validity (see my links above).

I'm not saying that you're making them up in the sense that you're fabricating them out of thin air. I'm saying that you're subjectively stating that the evidence is objectively weak or unreliable unless it passes those standards, and I don't think that its nearly that black and white, nor does it seem reasonable to me that this evidence ought to make sense under empirical standards. This is, again, prefaced by my belief that the evidence is appropriately rigorous; not that it can't improve, but that it's not unreasonable to think that it has value as currently designed.

(2017-09-18, 12:56 AM)Arouet Wrote: [ -> ]Do you consider it to be a significant risk?  

It's a risk. It isn't a debilitating risk, and doesn't apply in nearly every case. Sure, if it's a long time, that's more concerning. There are lots of cases where that isn't applicable to any great degree, and there are others where it's potentially a bigger issue. Specifics are always better to discuss.

Quote:If the children have been given the suggestion that they may have a past life, combined with at least some children's propensity towards identifying with such suggestions, I think it is something that deserves some serious attention.

I don't think that follows from what you said. You gave an example of a completely normal activity that kids partake in frequently. Suggesting to kids that they might have been reincarnate certainly isn't a normal situation, and in fact Tucker addresses in his books the likelihood that the child's parents, guardians, or those are them might have planted such a seed ahead and modifies his interpretation of the case's strength accordingly.

Quote:One thing I learned as a parent, to my surprise, was that my children, even when they could barely speak, took in much more than I thought.  For example, we'd have conversations in the car, thinking that the kids were oblivious when they would say something that indicated they had taken it all in.

Tucker also has kids, as did Stevenson. I don't think that's novel to them. If you've really read Tucker's book that surprising to me, because he does take that kind of thing into account.

Quote:The problem with many of these cases is that we have no idea to what extent such influences could have impacted on the children - even if the parents didn't believe they had.

Okay... that doesn't at all describe how they could have come to acquire the factual information that they did in many of the strong cases, for which we just aren't sure how they could have come to get that info. In most of those situations, it isn't info that their parents or people around them knew at all themselves. In lots of cases, something like the internet either wasn't around when the case was taken, or for modern day cases, lots of the recorded ones are from places where the internet isn't readily accessible. And that would be giving the kids a lot of credit in many of those cases to somehow stumble on and then retain that information. 

Quote:Remember, with risks of bias we often have no way of knowing whether the bias impacted the results or not.  That is why we identify risk rather than try to identify actual bias (see the links fls provided for more on this).

I read the links and am familiar with them, and like I said to Linda, so are the researchers. You can't ignore the other significant parts of the case (i.e., the most important part in the facts that the child "remembers), because of potential bias, without reference to a specific case. General statements aren't helpful and when I read the cases as best I could with a critical eye that didn't satisfy the skeptical part of me, which is not a small part of me.

Quote:The objective in analyzing the cases is to determine how significant the risk of bias.  If it is significant, the case must be downgraded if we are trying to approach an objective assessment.  This is the case even if we haven't identified a specific bias in play.  As the Cochrane handbook suggests, trying to nail down exactly what effect a particular bias had is a fools game. Rather, we perform experiments with the bias included, and without and compare the results.  If it is not possible to perform the experiment without, well, we're just stuck with the risk I guess.

Stuck with risk, maybe; and attempting to explain the facts that the children somehow, some way knew. As I said earlier, I think methodology is exceptionally important. I also think you are blatantly missing the point and muddying the waters by continuing to hammer this point without actually addressing specific cases and how the kids could have come to acquire that knowledge. Vague statements of risk of bias don't make that disappear. I also would say that I don't think we're going to be able to fully eliminate risk from this type of research - and I think as long as humans are involved in any sort of research, no matter what it is, there's going to be at least some chance of risk. It might be higher here, it might improve, and I'm not sure what the future holds. But I do think this research is always going to have some risk, and that if you're going to let that hold you up in general, I don't know that you'll ever find the evidence persuasive or reliable. 

Further, suggesting that the acquired facts are just somehow collected from the surroundings of the child is a discussion that is virtually worthless without an actual case discussion, if that's also partially what you meant.

Quote:Even if the researchers have done their job expertly (which is harder than one might think), it is virtually certain that the people interviewing the children before the experts arrive haven't had that training.  Like I suggested above, the risk is high even before the investigators get on the scene.

I'll repeat again: Tucker and co address this, over and over again. They are aware of that and consider it in their evidentiary analysis, and touch on how significantly they feel it impacts specific cases. 

Quote:I generally assume the researchers are trying their best.  If that were enough we wouldn't need to develop all these protocols such as double blinding.  We develop these protocols in order to overcome our weaknesses.

Yes. I get that. I'm well aware of that. 

Quote:There's more to say on this but briefly: despite the number, remember that what we are looking at is a selected sample of cases collected all over the world. By definition we are dealing with rare events. What we can infer is that there is a good chance that something rare happened in these cases, whether of mundane or non-mundane origins.  

In other words, when it comes to these cases we should expect the unexpected to be involved.  We must be careful not to lose the forest for the trees.

I don't disagree with the first paragraph at all.

Funny you should say that. I would caution you to do the same.

(2017-09-18, 12:03 PM)jkmac Wrote: [ -> ]Thank you... 

I want to take a closer look and think and then ask a question or two...

One question does come to mind immediately though. 

Since much of this data in literature comes from non-controlled, non-lab situations, I was really curious if there is a "non-managed" (not prearranged) situation that you would find convincing? Or is the very nature of this sort of evidence not reliable to you on a prima facie basis?

snip They are more about whether our sensory perceptions can be non-physical.

Question Linda-
Looks like to you, the fundamental question for validating NDE and OBE is whether we can "prove" sense data from our physical world while in these states. (I put prove in quotes because I believe there is no accepted universal standard for this)

What makes the following examples fall short for you? Assume you are familiar with each.
1- The Maria "tennis shoe on the ledge story" from the Seattle hospital.
2- The dentures story
3- The Pam Reynolds story 
4- The Anita Moorjani story (specifically where she senses her doctor's conversation with her family which took place down the hall)

It seems that each of these include unexplained ability sense data when this was impossible.

Dante, that was very helpful. I now have a better idea of what you are looking for. 

I'm going to start by explaining how this is perceived/explained from a 'normal' scientific perspective, and then discuss the rigor of the ongoing reincarnation research in that light. A lot of this will come from the mediumship research as there are strong parallels between the two in terms of how the appearance of 'knowing' comes about.

Some children talk about being another person living another life and describe that other life/person. Similarly, mediums have visual, auditory and other sensory experiences which seem to involve other people (plus places and things). Whether or not this can be taken to be knowledge depends upon attempts to match this information up with other people, places and things. This process, when done unblinded, tends to be fairly easy in the case of mediumship. It is also fairly easy for reincarnation in that a search is made for a discarnate which matches the description which automatically leads to the appearance of knowing - a failure to match isn't considered a failure of the 'knowledge', but a failure of the search.

What we know from mediumship research is that readings are found to be much stronger when unblinded evaluations are performed, and become fairly weak when blinded. Testing of specific biases, like "believing that the reading is for you" and "believing that the reading isn't for you", or providing increasing amounts of feedback to the medium, show that that a substantial portion of the 'knowing' attributed to these readings are the result or these ordinary ways of knowing, rather than anomalous knowing.

http://deanradin.com/evidence/Beischel2015.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...rticipants

The search for a previous personality and the evaluation of that match is done unblinded in reincarnation research in the reports published by DOPS. (I didn't mean to imply that I hadn't read Tucker's research. I have read some of his published papers, trying to focus on the best studies.)

Knowing that unblinded evaluations can result in the bulk of the appearance of 'knowing', it becomes very difficult to attribute that 'knowing' to an anomalous effect like reincarnation. And if you read the reincarnation case reports, you see that these matches are similar to the unblinded matches made with mediumship readings, where information which is incorrect doesn't seem to bother anyone in the setting of one or a few remarkable correspondences.

However, when it comes to remarkable correspondences, we also know from mediumship research and from Ganzfeld research that remarkable correspondences are regularly produced due to happenstance, even under blind conditions (never mind the increase in production under unblinded conditions). So even apparently remarkable correspondences don't distinguish between ordinary knowing and anomalous knowing.

http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/Kelly2011.pdf
http://w3.psychology.su.se/staff/jwd/cs06westerlund.pdf

It doesn't matter whether or not you want to assume that the reincarnation researchers know about various methodological problems and have taken them in to account. The published reports I've found show that there is little difference from Stevenson's reports and more recent investigations. And that these methodological issues are still present.

If you know of a paper in which this has been addressed, please let me. I don't know that my search has been exhaustive. It's been a couple of years since I looked at this in depth, and I did a quick search again to see if I could find something new/different.

Linda