Why scientism is bunk

Oh boy, do you really believe that? Science is performed by human beings with all kinds of predjuces, and it is funded by people who make no attempt to be unbiased. Do you think the scientific method is immune to such factor?

I'll give you one example, that should give you pause for thought. Dean Radin has done an immense number of experiments that test the idea that the body reacts to upcoming shocks up to 4 seconds before the shocks happen - even when their timing is controlled by a quantum random number generator. He calls the effect presentiment - you  may be aware of it. He has replicated his experiment in a variety of forms, others have replicated his experiments, and he has even found a few experiments done for other reasons where it was possible to reanalyse the data to look for presentiment. Sure enough the presentiment effect was present there too.

Now Dean Radin's experiment used completely standard equipment, that is used in many conventional psychological experiments. That means that if this experiment is wrong for some trivial reason, it would be well worth discovering the error because it will happen in many other experiments too. If the effect is real, and short term precognition is happening all the time, this is utterly revolutionary!

How does science treat the preseniment experiments - it ignores them as far as possible.


Well my understanding is that the nuclear force comes from the quarks and gluons that are supposed to comprise the protons and neutrons. The trouble is, isolated quarks and gluons have never been detected, and after years of searching for these particles someone has come up with a theory that the forces involved are structured in such a way that free quarks can't be observed!

I don't see much rigor in that way of thinking.

Well if science can study quarks that have never once been observed, I think it could hold its nose and study NDE phenomena more seriously - or just take on board the results of those scientific studies that have been done.

Most scientific bias comes from ignoring experiments that don't agree with preconceived notions.

David

While Radin's research is undoubtedly intriguing, substantial critiques have emerged, pointing to methodological shortcomings in his studies. It's surprising to see a heavy reliance on the findings of one individual, especially when juxtaposed against the meticulous research and contributions of thousands of scientists dedicated to rigorous and systematic inquiry.

For a more detailed critique of Dean Radin's presentiment research, I'd like to highlight the following:

“Prior work by Radin et al. (2012, 2016) reported the astonishing claim that an anomalous effect on double-slit (DS) light-interference intensity had been measured as a function of quantum-based observer consciousness. Given the radical implications, could there exist an alternative explanation, other than an anomalous consciousness effect, such as artifacts including systematic methodological error (SME)? To address this question, a conceptual replication study involving 10,000 test trials was commissioned to be performed blindly by the same investigator who had reported the original results. The commissioned study performed confirmatory and strictly predictive tests with the advanced meta-experimental protocol (AMP), including with systematic negative controls and the concept of the sham-experiment, i.e., counterfactual meta-experimentation. Whereas the replication study was unable to confirm the original results, the AMP was able to identify an unacceptably low true-negative detection rate with the sham-experiment in the absence of test subjects. The false-positive detection rate reached 50%, whereby the false-positive effect, which would be indistinguishable from the predicted true-positive effect, was significant at p = 0.021 (σ = −2.02; N = 1,250 test trials). The false-positive effect size was about 0.01%, which is within an-order-of-magnitude of the claimed consciousness effect (0.001%; Radin et al., 2016). The false-positive effect, which indicates the presence of significant SME in the Radin DS-experiment, suggests that skepticism should replace optimism concerning the radical claim that an anomalous quantum consciousness effect has been observed in a controlled laboratory setting.”

I do agree that fine tuning being explained by Luck seems to be an absence of explanation in that the range for constants seems quite low to just have it all be chance.

However, I don't fully agree that teleological principles must have a top-down designer. There are Proofs of God that turn on questions such as why don't the laws change or how can there be laws at all if there is no entity making these rules and ensuring they subsist over time. But I don't think this turns on the exact constants but rather metaphysical considerations of causality itself. 

Also, it seems to me if a soul/spirit is an animating principle and-or if all causation is mental causation...then it seems that what fine tuning shows is that life as we know it would not exist but that doesn't preclude other forms of life that might be radically different from the ones whose make up falls (partly?) under organic chemistry.

All this said I do lean toward some kind of "Limited God(s?)" hypothesis over more atheistic teleology, in part for reasons Goff talks about in this Aeon article:

(from the Aeon article): 
 

But the cosmopsychist has a way of rendering axiarchism intelligible, by proposing that the mental capacities of the Universe mediate between value facts and cosmological facts. On this view, which we can call ‘agentive cosmopsychism’, the Universe itself fine-tuned the laws in response to considerations of value. When was this done? In the first 10-43 seconds, known as the Planck epoch, our current physical theories, in which the fine-tuned laws are embedded, break down. The cosmopsychist can propose that during this early stage of cosmological history, the Universe itself ‘chose’ the fine-tuned values in order to make possible a universe of value.

This notion seems incoherent to me and solves nothing, because all he does is to blithely assume the existence of the miracle of consciousness being somehow embodied in the entire early Universe, with no indication of why, how, originated by what, etc. It's kicking the can down the road again. Again, nothing can come from absolutely nothing, and the great mass of coherent functional complex specified information constituting reality including the Universe can not have come from absolutely nothing. Such an intelligent Universe as proposed by the author amounts to a teleological intelligent agent and demands an origin story, which is not furnished. He just substitutes one mystery with another.

(from the Aeon article): 
 

This notion seems incoherent to me and solves nothing, because all he does is to blithely assume the existence of the miracle of consciousness being somehow embodied in the entire early Universe, with no indication of why, how, originated by what, etc. It's kicking the can down the road again. Again, nothing can come from absolutely nothing, and the great mass of coherent functional complex specified information constituting reality including the Universe can not have come from absolutely nothing. Such an intelligent Universe as proposed by the author amounts to a teleological intelligent agent and demands an origin story, which is not furnished. He just substitutes one mystery with another.

I don't really see why Goff's version of God is not a form of ID. You seem to be asking "Who made God?" but this then leads to an infinite regress...

While Radin's research is undoubtedly intriguing, substantial critiques have emerged, pointing to methodological shortcomings in his studies. It's surprising to see a heavy reliance on the findings of one individual, especially when juxtaposed against the meticulous research and contributions of thousands of scientists dedicated to rigorous and systematic inquiry.

For a more detailed critique of Dean Radin's presentiment research, I'd like to highlight the following:

“Prior work by Radin et al. (2012, 2016) reported the astonishing claim that an anomalous effect on double-slit (DS) light-interference intensity had been measured as a function of quantum-based observer consciousness. Given the radical implications, could there exist an alternative explanation, other than an anomalous consciousness effect, such as artifacts including systematic methodological error (SME)? To address this question, a conceptual replication study involving 10,000 test trials was commissioned to be performed blindly by the same investigator who had reported the original results. The commissioned study performed confirmatory and strictly predictive tests with the advanced meta-experimental protocol (AMP), including with systematic negative controls and the concept of the sham-experiment, i.e., counterfactual meta-experimentation. Whereas the replication study was unable to confirm the original results, the AMP was able to identify an unacceptably low true-negative detection rate with the sham-experiment in the absence of test subjects. The false-positive detection rate reached 50%, whereby the false-positive effect, which would be indistinguishable from the predicted true-positive effect, was significant at p = 0.021 (σ = −2.02; N = 1,250 test trials). The false-positive effect size was about 0.01%, which is within an-order-of-magnitude of the claimed consciousness effect (0.001%; Radin et al., 2016). The false-positive effect, which indicates the presence of significant SME in the Radin DS-experiment, suggests that skepticism should replace optimism concerning the radical claim that an anomalous quantum consciousness effect has been observed in a controlled laboratory setting.”

The original article criticising Radin's presentiment results : https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....01891/full . It involved claiming an unacceptable false-positive rate.

In their comment in the same issue of Frontiers in Psychology Dean Radin and colleagues showed that this false-positive criticism was invalid, in their response in the journal Frontiers in Psychology at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....00726/full .

A later response by the authors of the first paper tried to overcome these last conclusions.

A very contentious interchange, not resolved at present.

While Radin's research is undoubtedly intriguing, substantial critiques have emerged, pointing to methodological shortcomings in his studies. It's surprising to see a heavy reliance on the findings of one individual, especially when juxtaposed against the meticulous research and contributions of thousands of scientists dedicated to rigorous and systematic inquiry.

For a more detailed critique of Dean Radin's presentiment research, I'd like to highlight the following:

“Prior work by Radin et al. (2012, 2016) reported the astonishing claim that an anomalous effect on double-slit (DS) light-interference intensity had been measured as a function of quantum-based observer consciousness. Given the radical implications, could there exist an alternative explanation, other than an anomalous consciousness effect, such as artifacts including systematic methodological error (SME)? To address this question, a conceptual replication study involving 10,000 test trials was commissioned to be performed blindly by the same investigator who had reported the original results. The commissioned study performed confirmatory and strictly predictive tests with the advanced meta-experimental protocol (AMP), including with systematic negative controls and the concept of the sham-experiment, i.e., counterfactual meta-experimentation. Whereas the replication study was unable to confirm the original results, the AMP was able to identify an unacceptably low true-negative detection rate with the sham-experiment in the absence of test subjects. The false-positive detection rate reached 50%, whereby the false-positive effect, which would be indistinguishable from the predicted true-positive effect, was significant at p = 0.021 (σ = −2.02; N = 1,250 test trials). The false-positive effect size was about 0.01%, which is within an-order-of-magnitude of the claimed consciousness effect (0.001%; Radin et al., 2016). The false-positive effect, which indicates the presence of significant SME in the Radin DS-experiment, suggests that skepticism should replace optimism concerning the radical claim that an anomalous quantum consciousness effect has been observed in a controlled laboratory setting.”

I honestly don't understand what this means!

Furthermore, I was referring to the presentiment experiment. This is the one in which subjects were asked to watch trials in which calm scenes were shown to subjects, with randomly included disturbing scenes (erotic scenes seemed to work best). The subjects' skin conductance was monitored continuously.

The skin conductance increased slightly up to 4 seconds before a disturbing stimulus - even though these images were inserted by a quantun-random process just before the image was displayed.

I am aware that Dean Radin has done experiments on mental affects on double slit devices. Some time ago, I wrote to him pointing out that there really was no way to tell if the mental effect distorted some of the components (think micro-spoon-bending!) or actually interracted with the quantum interference process directly. He accepted that it was not possible to distinguish the two possibilities.

David

I don't really see why Goff's version of God is not a form of ID. You seem to be asking "Who made God?" but this then leads to an infinite regress...

You're right - this theory is really a rather strange form of ID. The author at least overcomes the closed-mind orthodox science barrier by actually proposing a teleological intelligent agent as being behind the formation of the laws of our reality and Universe. Which is what is so doggedly and fanatically opposed by establishment science. However, it seems especially lacking in credibility, because this notion is actually materialist and very deficient, apparently excluding the whole range of paradigm-breaking paranormal phenomena, since the Universe as a conscious agent would still be limited to a sort of meta-physics.

You're right - this theory is really a rather strange form of ID. The author at least overcomes the closed-mind orthodox science barrier by actually proposing a teleological intelligent agent as being behind the formation of the laws of our reality and Universe. Which is what is so doggedly and fanatically opposed by establishment science. However, it seems especially lacking in credibility, because this notion is actually materialist and very deficient, apparently excluding the whole range of paradigm-breaking paranormal phenomena, since the Universe as a conscious agent would still be limited to a sort of meta-physics.

Goff is a panspychic though?

Is your objection the idea that the designer in this sense would make the decisions at the start of the Universe and never do anything after?

Not sure this implies materialism though?

Plus, if physicists convince themselves they have found the fundamental laws from which nature springs, they must still explain where those laws came from

This is an almost wilful misunderstanding of the word "laws" in this context. Observable predictable behaviour is not the same thing as legal laws.  Besides, scientists don't have to explain anything in this regard because of what science is.  Science creates an model (or an understanding) of the universe on the basis of what it is capable of observing.  Scientists are under no obligation to explain the unobservable causes of such.

Well if science can study quarks that have never once been observed, I think it could hold its nose and study NDE phenomena more seriously

Why should it?  Are you willing to pay their wages in the vague hope of finding some indisputable proof somewhere within all the "evidence?"  When the vast majority of people who are brought back to life make no claims to have experienced anything at all, don't you think it is a flimsy thing to be wasting tax payers money on?

Why should it?  Are you willing to pay their wages in the vague hope of finding some indisputable proof somewhere within all the "evidence?"  When the vast majority of people who are brought back to life make no claims to have experienced anything at all, don't you think it is a flimsy thing to be wasting tax payers money on?

Have you not seen what huge amounts of taxpayer money is currently spent on? NDE research would objectively be an improvement. Which is why it will never happen.