(2023-10-11, 11:37 PM)Wanderer Wrote: What do you think about the contest from 1947 that I mentions at the end of the first post in this thread? That one was arranged by psychical researchers instead of pseudo-skeptics, and the Research Officer of the Society for Psychical Research was acting as the judge of it. They reported in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research about the mediums that chose to take part in the contest, and whether or not they produced any genuine phenomena. It seems to have been something along the lines of what you are asking for.
If single experiment fails to confirm QM, do we throw [QM] out?
To me all these prizes can do, at best, is tell us whether any medium can perform reliably enough to win a cash prize under certain conditions.
Also I think it's too easy an out to claim these phenomena *must* act in such a manner as to satisfy these criteria. For example a "sensitive" my friends and I visited didn't give me any impressive results but my friends were quite convinced things that were told to them were genuine and not available online.
Even if such data was available I was the one who bought the tickets for them and they repaid me in cash, so there wasn't a way for the sensitive to research them that I could think of. Among my friends [one] of them got a ring from their mom and she didn't tell him the story - which lined up with what the sensitive told him - behind it until after.
If I had gone in alone I'd have thought she was a charlatan, but her results for others did seem to be impressive.
Obviously to anyone reading this here I could be making this up, or maybe I missed some trick. But when you add up the accounts across history it just seems to me you reach a point of wilful denial. Which is fine, everyone is entitled to their opinion on Survival, but at the least IMO one has to say something interesting is going...
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
(This post was last modified: 2023-10-12, 02:17 PM by Sciborg_S_Patel. Edited 2 times in total.)
- Bertrand Russell