From Skeptic to Believer: News Anchor Gets a First Time Reading from a Medium

Based on the information on Greg Taylor's account, Amy Tanner isn't a reliable source.
http://www.dailygrail.com/essays/2010/11...al-skeptic

Greg Taylor's article is self-published. He does not attempt to refute Tanner's criticisms in depth, he only mentions her name a few times. I find it unlikely that Taylor has actually read Tanner's book. His article does not cite any pages to her book nor does he cite a bibliography. He takes his few criticisms of Tanner directly from a review by Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick.

Amy Tanner was a very influential early female psychologist (http://www.feministvoices.com/amy-tanner/).

Do you think Greg Taylor is a reliable source?

Greg Taylor is an Australian blogger and pseudoscience promoter. He is the owner of the paranormal website, "Daily Grail".

Taylor has an obsession with the medium Leonora Piper. He repeatedly claims that skeptics have failed to debunk the medium.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Greg_Taylor

As for Tanner's book it was positively reviewed in a top psychology journal.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1413084

The reviewer started the review with:

"This volume records the findings and verdict of a patient investigation sustained by a scientific conscience and enthusiasm."

Jastrow, Joseph. (1911). The American Journal of Psychology 22 (1): 122-124.

[Ninshub]

Do you think Greg Taylor is a reliable source?


https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Greg_Taylor

A reminder of the rules of the forum. Skeptics are allowed in the Extended Consciousness Phenomena forum, and this discussion seems fine to me so far. But starting to appeal to rationalwiki and talk of "pseudoscience" is the typical "debunking" fare that is reserved for the Skeptics Vs. Proponents sub-forum.

A reminder of the rules of the forum. Skeptics are allowed in the Extended Consciousness Phenomena forum, and this discussion seems fine to me so far. But starting to appeal to rationalwiki and talk of "pseudoscience" is the typical "debunking" fare that is reserved for the Skeptics Vs. Proponents sub-forum.

Apologies I admit my bias. I am involved with Rationalwiki. Bit of shameless promotion.  

At least at a localized level, perhaps genuine mediums can somehow dissipate their ego better than the general population, allowing their brains networks to become partially entrained by third parties signals.

The brain appears to be an incredibly sensitive stochastic feedback system, it's already incredibly noisy, and like other stochastic systems, such systems improve the noisier things get.

Noisy nonlinear systems like the brain, have long been known to enhance the transmission, transduction or detection of weak signals through stochastic resonance (SR). Simply put, the addition of noise to a system increases it's response to an external signal, perhaps allowing a biological system to detect, and respond to very weak external fields, far below the thermal noise limit.

What I find particularly interesting about the SR process is that it's most effective at detecting weak signals around the same frequency as the transmitter... it's a newish science, and it's still not exactly clear how SR works.

There are plenty of papers showing such effects in biological systems, and a few papers I've come across clearly demonstrating noise in neuronal systems can maximise the spiking activity coherence with an external EM signal - indicating a stochastic resonant behavior in the brain. We're detecting effects of hyperweak magnetic fields on organisms in a growing body of behavioral studies, some of these magnetic fields are really really weak... as low as 40,000 times weaker than the earths local geomagnetic field.

We're possibly talking about hyperweak magnetic fields, affecting the magnetic moment of electrons isolated in hydrophobic cavities of proteins, with amplification occurring across many repeating proteins such that an effect on the organism slowly becomes apparent.

OK, so what do you mean by local? 1 foot, 10 feet? 1 mile? 100 miles? Yes of course any electromagnetic field extends out to infinity. This claim (of a "brain field") although probably true to some degree, has not been shown to by anyone contain any distinguishable information at any appreciable distance (feet) or as far as I know, any distance at all. BTW: I'm not one to buy into the "science will figure it out" argument. That's a last straw grasped by desperate materialists looking for something to hold on to.   


All that aside though,,, 
the whole premise of "point to point" electro-magnetic info transfer has already been eliminated by multiple means:
1- medium readings have been demonstrated within shielded cages which filter out magnetic and electric fields
2- long range readings (thousands of miles) happen every day and are just as reliable as face to face readings. This eliminates "local" receptivity, but of course does nothing to refute the (as yet completely hypothetical and I believe totally fictitious) super psi.
3- Sitters have been replaced with third party sitters, who are totally unfamiliar with the details of the sitter's life, and this has resulted in very evidential readings. In these cases the information was not available from the sitter.
4- Many examples exist where the sitter was told something they didn't know.

Given these facts, we can already pretty safely say that local electromagnetic explanations are not a fit.

Greg Taylor's article is self-published. He does not attempt to refute Tanner's criticisms in depth, he only mentions her name a few times. I find it unlikely that Taylor has actually read Tanner's book. His article does not cite any pages to her book nor does he cite a bibliography. He takes his few criticisms of Tanner directly from a review by Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick.

Amy Tanner was a very influential early female psychologist (http://www.feministvoices.com/amy-tanner/).

Do you think Greg Taylor is a reliable source?

It was Mrs Sidgwick's review I was going by. I just posted a link to the full text. It is not a positive review. She says Tanner's remarks "constantly misrepresent the case and are essentially misleading," and goes on to give several pages of examples.

I really don't think it strengthens your case to rely on works which were criticised in such scathing terms by researchers of the calibre of Sidgwick and Salter.

I think it's logically impossible to prove survival, because if information is to be verifiable, the information needed to verify it has to be known by someone or has to be stored somewhere. If telepathy and clairvoyance exist, that means it is accessible through psi.

That may be true for clairvoyance but I don't think it is for the independent direct voice, or materialisation mediumship, perhaps even for trance.

@Ninshub - great example from On The Edge Of The Etheric by Findlay. It's a good example of physical mediumship and for me, the simplest explanation (assuming it is genuine) is communication from a real person as opposed to one's own psyche fishing around in some sort of cosmic database.

[Ninshub]

@Ninshub - great example from On The Edge Of The Etheric by Findlay. It's a good example of physical mediumship and for me, the simplest explanation (assuming it is genuine) is communication from a real person as opposed to one's own psyche fishing around in some sort of cosmic database.

And you're right that is phys med.