The Science of Things Spiritual: Live in Lily Dale

Weird Studies: The Science of Things Spiritual: Live in Lily Dale


JF Martel & Phil Ford

On the last week of July, 2023, Phil and JF were delighted to speak at Shannon Taggart's Science of Things Spiritual Symposium in Lily Dale, the nerve centre of the Spiritualist movement. As speakers, your hosts were part of an inspiring lineup of scholars, artists, and researchers committed to exploring the borderlands of art, science, religion, and the paranormal. They also had the honour of launching the symposium with a live recording held on the evening of the July 27th. The topic was Frederic W. H. Myers' autobiographical essay, "Fragments of Inner Life," first published in full in 1961, some sixty years after the author's death. Myers was one of the original members of the Society for Psychical Research in England. A poet and classicist, he remained committed to the scientific promise of paranormal investigation until the end of his life. His book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, also published posthumously, argues that psychical studies have confirmed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that death is just the beginning. In this talk, JF and Phil discuss Myers' relevance to 21st-century thinking on the Weird.

REFERENCES

The Science of Things Spiritual Symposium: July 27-29, 2023
Frederic Myers, Fragments of Inner Life
Alan Bennett, History Boys
Arthur Machen, A Fragment of Life
Alan Gauld, The Founders of Psychical Research
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan
Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug
Daniel Dennett, American cognitive scientist

Frederic Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being
Phil Ford, Dig
William James, Principles of Psychology
Akashic Record, Theosophical idea
Jeff Kripal, Authors of the Impossible

They use the word "science" in the title and the description but mention no scientists, only poets artists and people with an obvious connection to anomalous phenomena. I'm skeptical (as always)

They use the word "science" in the title and the description but mention no scientists, only poets artists and people with an obvious connection to anomalous phenomena. I'm skeptical (as always)

Yeah history of science may have been a better descriptor given the speakers.

Though the boundary of what counts as science can get complex, for example the fact AFAIK nothing from the Intelligent Design community really approaches the kind of application/replicability we ask from even "softer" science fields like psychology.

Yeah history of science may have been a better descriptor given the speakers.

Though the boundary of what counts as science can get complex, for example the fact AFAIK nothing from the Intelligent Design community really approaches the kind of application/replicability we ask from even "softer" science fields like psychology.

Not so in a big way. Most of the scientific paper authors in the list below (which contains just the most prominent work from the much longer total list) are affiliated with Discovery Institute, the natural result of there being a general taboo against ID in the scientific community, with of course no funding for research in it with the prominent exception of some research funded by Discovery Institute. 

Please explicate in a little detail how these papers and this work are of low quality and are so unscientific that they are even worse than studies in the field of psychology which has such a poor record of replicability.

From https://www.discovery.org/id/peer-review/ :

Selected List of Peer-Reviewed Scientific Publications Supportive of Intelligent Design: 

The list below provides bibliographic information for a selection of the peer-reviewed scientific publications supportive of intelligent design published in scientific journals, conference proceedings, or academic anthologies:

Stephen C. Meyer, “The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories,” Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004) (HTML).
Michael J. Behe, “Experimental Evolution, Loss-of-Function Mutations, and ‘The First Rule of Adaptive Evolution,’” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 85(4):1-27 (December 2010).
Douglas D. Axe, “Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 341:1295–1315 (2004).
Michael Behe and David W. Snoke, “Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues,” Protein Science, Vol. 13 (2004).
William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol. 14 (5):475-486 (2010).
Ann K. Gauger and Douglas D. Axe, “The Evolutionary Accessibility of New Enzyme Functions: A Case Study from the Biotin Pathway,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2011(1) (2011).
Ann K. Gauger, Stephanie Ebnet, Pamela F. Fahey, and Ralph Seelke, “Reductive Evolution Can Prevent Populations from Taking Simple Adaptive Paths to High Fitness,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2010 (2) (2010).
Vladimir I. shCherbak and Maxim A. Makukov, “The ‘Wow! Signal’ of the terrestrial genetic code,” Icarus, Vol. 224 (1): 228-242 (May, 2013).
Joseph A. Kuhn, “Dissecting Darwinism,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings, Vol. 25(1): 41-47 (2012).
Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, and Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, pp. 3047-3053 (October, 2009).
Douglas D. Axe, Brendan W. Dixon, Philip Lu, “Stylus: A System for Evolutionary Experimentation Based on a Protein/Proteome Model with Non-Arbitrary Functional Constraints,” PLoS One, Vol. 3(6):e2246 (June 2008).
Kirk K. Durston, David K. Y. Chiu, David L. Abel, Jack T. Trevors, “Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins,” Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Vol. 4:47 (2007).
David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Self-organization vs. self-ordering events in life-origin models,” Physics of Life Reviews, Vol. 3:211–228 (2006).
Frank J. Tipler, “Intelligent Life in Cosmology,” International Journal of Astrobiology, Vol. 2(2): 141-148 (2003).
Michael J. Denton, Craig J. Marshall, and Michael Legge, “The Protein Folds as Platonic Forms: New Support for the pre-Darwinian Conception of Evolution by Natural Law,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 219: 325-342 (2002).
Stanley L. Jaki, “Teaching of Transcendence in Physics,” American Journal of Physics, Vol. 55(10):884-888 (October 1987).
Granville Sewell, “Postscript,” in Analysis of a Finite Element Method: PDE/PROTRAN(New York: Springer Verlag, 1985).
A.C. McIntosh, “Evidence of design in bird feathers and avian respiration,”International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Vol. 4(2):154–169 (2009).
Richard v. Sternberg, “DNA Codes and Information: Formal Structures and Relational Causes,” Acta Biotheoretica, Vol. 56(3):205-232 (September, 2008).
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig and Heinz Saedler, “Chromosome Rearrangement and Transposable Elements,” Annual Review of Genetics, Vol. 36:389–410 (2002).
Douglas D. Axe, “Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors,” Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol. 301:585-595 (2000).
William A. Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Not so in a big way. Most of the scientific paper authors in the list below are affiliated with Discovery Institute, the natural result of there being a general taboo against ID in the scientific community, with of course no funding for research in it (with the prominent exception of some research funded by Discovery Institute). 

Please explicate in a little detail how these papers and this work are of low quality and are so unscientific that they are even worse than studies in the field of psychology which has such a poor record of replicability.

From https://www.discovery.org/id/peer-review/ :

I'm not talking about quality of research, I'm talking about experiments that can be replicated.

For example I am convinced by the witness reports related to Survival, but nevertheless I cannot claim this is replicable evidence like that of QM which we believe in spite of seeming illogical or at least bizarre findings.