Brian Cox is wrong about the large hadron collider

https://gizmodo.com/does-the-large-hadro...1792686748


"In other words, he explained, if ghosts existed, then they should be able to interact with the existing particles of the standard model, at the energy scales that life occurs at.
Now, usually I would jump at the opportunity to debunk the paranormal... but honestly, that explanation is bullshit.
I’m not saying there are ghosts. I do not believe in ghosts. But there are plenty of theorized particles the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t discovered yet, from so-called supersymmetric particles to tiny dark matter particle candidates called axions. “The investigation of very low mass low energy dark matter is an ongoing thing,” Bob Jacobsen, professor at the University of California, Berkeley who works on the LUX dark matter detector, told Gizmodo. “We still don’t know whether axions exist. How do you know ghosts aren’t made out of axions?” Jacobsen told me to caveat this with the fact that he hasn’t dug into methods for detecting ghosts with particle physics thoroughly, and could be wrong."


http://breakpoint.org/2017/03/ghost-larg...-collider/

"There’s an old story intended to illustrate the observational bias that plagues certain branches of science. No one knows for certain who first came up with it, but QuoteInvestigator.com tells it thus:

A police officer sees a drunken man intently searching the ground near a lamppost and asks him the goal of his quest. The inebriate replies that he is looking for his car keys, and the officer helps for a few minutes without success, then he asks whether the man is certain that he dropped the keys near the lamppost.
“No,” is the reply, “I lost the keys somewhere across the street.” “Why look here?” asks the surprised and irritated officer. “The light is much better here,” the intoxicated man responds with aplomb.

The so-called “streetlight effect” is the manifestation of this kind of laziness or confusion in any discipline. The investigator asserts the nonexistence of something based on his inability to study it using a given methodology or sample.
Natural sciences have fallen into veritable slavery to this illusion. We regularly hear neurologists attribute consciousness, morality, emotion, and any number of other intangible experiences to chemical reactions in the brain. Late last month, particle physicist Brian Cox joined them by declaring with cringeworthy confidence that the missing keys of metaphysics must be under the streetlight of his particular discipline."

https://blog.theuniversesolved.com/2017/...of-ghosts/


"The underlying assumption is that we live in a materialist reality. Aside from the fact that Quantum Mechanics experiments have disproven this (and yes, I am comfortable using that word), a REAL scientist should allow for the possibility that consciousness is independent of grey matter and create experiments to support or invalidate such hypotheses. One clear possibility is the simulation argument. Out of band signaling is an obvious and easy mechanism for paranormal effects.  Unfortunately, the REAL scientists (such as Anton Zeilinger) are not the ones who get most of the press."

I don't know much about philosophy, but this argument by Brian Cox seems philosophically very naive, considering how much debate there's been about this issue over the centuries (or perhaps the millennia).

But what really surprises me is how frequently the argument by Brian Cox and a similar one by Sean Carroll get recycled by the media. Here's the NZ Herald two days ago, repeating a story in the Express on 3 September 2017, based on a blog post in Scientific American dated 23 May 2011 (!):
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/new...d=12047444

I do find it difficult to reconcile much of what gets reported as "psi" with the predictable models of physics (on the macro scale) that results in dependable engineering.

If someone can, for example, bend metal with their consciousness, where does that leave the engineers' formulae when they are designing a bridge? 

Would anyone here think it is reasonable to charge a PK proponent with murder for stopping someone's pacemaker?

I would say that, because no one has any real idea how psi might work. Your questions are unanswerable.

I would say that, because no one has any real idea how psi might work. Your questions are unanswerable.

 
Maybe we can hide behind that sort of special pleading, but I’m not so sure. I think the point I’m making is independent of nailing down a mechanism for psi.

I do find it difficult to reconcile much of what gets reported as "psi" with the predictable models of physics (on the macro scale) that results in dependable engineering.

If someone can, for example, bend metal with their consciousness, where does that leave the engineers' formulae when they are designing a bridge? 

Would anyone here think it is reasonable to charge a PK proponent with murder for stopping someone's pacemaker?

I'm not sure why the engineering considerations would need to change even if Psi was widespread. Or perhaps psi could somehow be injected into the beams to block attempts to bend them. Logically two minds working against each other should cancel out proportionally to their strength. At least in my experience with poltergeisting and similar there's really no conflict between the rest of physics and these effects. I'd argue they do more to support known physics than refute any of it. Which actually makes it really mundane and boring at the end of the day.

I'd be all for prosecuting someone for stopping a pacemaker provided you could actually demonstrate it was them who did it.

I would say that, because no one has any real idea how psi might work. Your questions are unanswerable.

No one? No human? No being?

I do find it difficult to reconcile much of what gets reported as "psi" with the predictable models of physics (on the macro scale) that results in dependable engineering.

If someone can, for example, bend metal with their consciousness, where does that leave the engineers' formulae when they are designing a bridge? 

Newtonian mechanics seems to be a reasonable analogy. It seemed to predict the behaviour of the physical world accurately for a couple of hundred years, but it turned out to be an approximation that's useful only under certain conditions.

Having said that, macro-psychokinesis is mind-boggling in a way that micro-psychokinesis isn't, and I think the same is true of the anecdotes involving really accurate and detailed ESP, if you think about it.