(2017-09-19, 12:09 PM)fls Wrote: [ -> ]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
For more than a few reasons, I don't find the mediumship research to be analogous to the reincarnation research in a meaningful way, save that they're both researching paranormal phenomena and are allegedly indicative of some consciousness or memory that is distinct from the physical processes of the brain.
Mediumship deals with adults pretty much exclusively, as far as I know, while the reincarnation research deals with children. The mediumship, in my eyes, is far, far more susceptible to fraud and cheating, since adults are the sources of the alleged phenomena. Not to say that the reincarnation research can't be fraudulent or that an adult couldn't tamper with the intent to deceive for whatever reason, but I don't think it's nearly as susceptible to that kind of issue. There are a variety of reasons that having children be the focal point makes the reincarnation research dramatically different than the mediumship stuff.
I know I've looked into mediumship at a fairly cursory level and been hardly impressed with most of what I've seen, whereas the reincarnation research is far more impressive and more difficult to explain away, to me at least. I can draw this out more but wanted to preface my response with that, to begin with, because I think mediumship is more likely to have fraud involved, and certainly more risk and is less likely to be reliable; for me, it has substantially more opportunity for problems to creep into the picture. The source of the phenomena, again, is one of the reasons I wouldn't consider the two to be under any sort of specific umbrella together. So to compare the two and try to draw on the weaknesses of mediumship and apply them to reincarnation does not appear to me to be an accurate way of approaching things.
As I said, I know I have read of at least a case at this point that involved a blind or double blind study. I would be more than happy to contact Jim Tucker to see if he has any other examples of such a thing, but the one I read, which will require some digging to find, was still a strong case, even in the face of the double blind. Again, if you want me to try to find it, I will. I do not remotely buy into the notion that blinding alone would make it clear that the phenomena are a product of the methodology and little else.
I would argue that it's irrational to consider the "knowings" in the reincarnation cases to be coincidental or due to happenstance. And I think the reincarnation studies are strongly illustrative of that fact, significantly, and I mean much more significantly, so than the mediumship cases. I'm not as familiar with Ganzfield as I ought to be. The staggering amount of detail and facts that the children have access to and speak about is just something I don't think a reasonable neutral person could possibly attribute to blind luck or coincidence. I feel that if someone read a large number of the cases and that's what they take away, they weren't very open to it to begin with.
With regards to a lack of progress in methodology, that's partially true and partially false. There are different cases from different places than when Stevenson was alive, as well as technology he didn't have access to to assist them in honing their methodology. There has certainly been progress made in the way that they try to conduct the research in as scientifically sound a way as possible. Where your statement is true has to do with what I've been harping on this whole time, that the research, by its very nature, is always going to have some of those issues, because it's dealing with entirely subjective information and data (which the scientific mainstream does not like). Those issues are inherent to the research. They won't go away.
Like I said, I'd be happy to contact Tucker to see what he has to say as far as blinding and methodological progress go, if you like. I might just do it for myself when I have some time. We're also still speaking generally and broadly without reference to actual cases.
Now you had a tiny taste of what I have had to put up with.