Let's plumb the "paranormal" depths of the World's weirdness

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sciborg2

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« on: February 12, 2014, 01:12:40 am »
Want to get people's thoughts about the Weird in real life. As this is a side hobby of mine feel free to say you think it's all bullshit. ;D

So some time ago I came upon this article about Krippner in the SF weekly.

The part that piqued my interest was:

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The knock on parapsychology studies has long been that any so-called evidence of ESP is usually limited to negligible effects only detectable after scouring massive bodies of data. "Those to whom this criticism has any appeal should be aware that the Maimonides experiments are clearly exempt from it," wrote Irvin Child, Yale's former psychology department chair, in American Psychologist, the APA's flagship journal. "I believe many psychologists would, like myself, consider the ESP hypothesis to merit serious consideration and continued research if they read the Maimonides reports for themselves."

Now I didn't have much knowledge about this stuff though I felt like I'd heard of Child before. Strangely enough I later met a former grad student of Krippner's, and I asked him why Krippner's attempts at replication had all resulted in failure.

Said student actually passed along a message from the man himself:
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First of all, our original dream telepathy results were repeated several times in our own laboratory. We published both the successful replications and the unsuccessful replications. All of these articles are referenced at the end of our book DREAM TELEPATHY (by Ullman, Krippner, and Vaughan). A meta-analysis of all the studies produced high significant results and was published in a 1985 article by Irvin Child in The American Psychologist, flagship journal of the American Psychological Association..

Several other researchers attempted to replicate our work. Both the successful replications and the unsuccessful replications have been published in the chapter by Roe and Sherwood in ADVANCES IN PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH, VOLUME 9 (edited by Krippner and Friedman). A meta-analysis of all these studies produced highly significant results. They were not as strong as the Maimonides data, probably because they used "home dreams" instead of "laboratory dreams," the latter involving psychophysiological recordings. In the lab, participants can be awakened once they have been in REM sleep for a while. For home dreams, participants are usually awakened randomly by telephone, hence many dreams are lost.

I'm thinking of buying the book, doubt I'll get Volume 9 of something I'm not really sure is real.

sciborg2

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« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2014, 08:48:41 pm »
Waiting for this Dream Telepathy book, in the mean time what's up with those Hessdalen Lights?

"In spite of ongoing research there is no convincing explanation of the origin of these lights. However, there are numerous working hypotheses."

sciborg2

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« Reply #2 on: February 15, 2014, 10:42:26 pm »
Stanley Krippner [with Christopher Ryan] on Joe Rogan Experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_k_AM2aljg

Great dialogue on a variety of topics. Shamans and medicine plants, environmentalism, psychic powers, history of drug culture and some other interesting stuff. :)

One thing that impressed me was that Krippner managed to stop having claims of dream telepathy be a case for mental disorder.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2014, 11:08:04 pm by sciborg2 »

sciborg2

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« Reply #3 on: March 18, 2014, 09:52:36 pm »
Why ghosts are good for you: Patricia Pearson at TEDxTucson 2012

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Patricia shares her latest research for an upcoming book about mysteries of consciousness around death and dying, to be released in 2013. Patricia Pearson is an award-winning novelist and journalist whose most recent book is the critically acclaimed memoir Brief History of Anxiety...Yours and Mine, assigned "major points for wit and flair" by the New York Times.

sciborg2

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« Reply #4 on: April 01, 2014, 02:07:53 am »
1) Clairvoyant chemistry:

"A strong contender for the strangest book ever written about chemistry is Occult chemistry by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater published in 1909. It offers an element-by-element account of the form and structure of atoms, with astonishingly rich substructure and detail – some like ornate frozen splashes, others resembling the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals. Far from being unsplittable – this was eight years before Ernest Rutherford astonished the world by ‘splitting the atom’ – these atoms are composites of more fundamental particles, of which hydrogen is composed of 18 and nitrogen of no fewer than 290.

You’re wondering, no doubt, how on earth the authors knew all this in the days before x-ray diffraction, electron microscopy and high-energy particle physics. The answer is that they saw it with their own eyes....

...So far, so deluded. But this was a strange time, and one can’t quite just dismiss Besant and Leadbeater as mad fantasists. They were connected with several leading scientists of their age, some of whom read the book (with varying degrees of scepticism). Like it or not, Occult chemistry is a part – a bizarre, even unsettling part – of chemical history."

2) Sayana supposedly calculates speed of light from the Vedas:

"Strictly speaking, Sayana here attributes a (fantastically high) speed to the Sun (Surya), not to light itself. Depending on what values one assumes for a yojana and for a nimesha, this speed corresponds to about 186,000 miles per second, roughly equal to the speed of light. This was pointed out by P.V. Vartak in his Scientific Knowledge in the Vedas (1995, p. 95)....

...Kak points out that the Vayu Purana (ch. 50) has a comparable passage, where the "speed of the Sun" is exactly 1/18th of Sayana's value. While he is also susceptible to assuming "scientific foreknowledge" by mystical means, he also accepts that "to the rationalist" the proximity of Sayana's value to the physical constant is simply coincidence.[4]"

Royce

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« Reply #5 on: April 01, 2014, 05:04:38 pm »
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Great dialogue on a variety of topics. Shamans and medicine plants, environmentalism, psychic powers, history of drug culture and some other interesting stuff. :)

I heard this podcast when it came out actually(I used to listen to JRE a lot awhile ago). So this is the Krippner fellow you are referring to? He is such a fresh old guy, and really fascinating and interesting to listen to.

You should check out The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast if you like this kind of conversation.

sciborg2

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« Reply #6 on: April 03, 2014, 03:56:54 pm »
Thanks for the rec!

The paranormal, in scare quotes or not, as long been an interest of mine. I find even when the explanations are grounded in known science there's still a lot of ethnography and psychology at work that can say something to about human beings.

The prevalence of possession - willing or unwilling - among the downtrodden is an example of that.

I also liked this retrospective on John Mack by his stepdaughter.

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...To his enemies, he was a crackpot, fraud, and a cheat. And to his patients, and many of his friends, he was a source of support, an open listener, a sage and protector.

Dr John E Mack was many things to many people. A Harvard-trained psychiatrist, tenured professor, and one of the founders of the Cambridge Hospital Department of Psychiatry (a teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard University), John held an impressive command and was respected in his field. After an early career spent working on issues of child development and identity formation, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for his psychoanalytic biography of Lawrence of Arabia, entitled A Prince of Our Disorder (1976). Then, in the late 1980s, John put his reputation on the line when he started investigating the phenomenon of alien abduction...

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...But if I reflect on the impact of my childhood experience, I think it left me with a profound openness, and a generous ear. John taught me the power of listening; really hearing people out and having the courage and resilience to question established orthodoxies. I still remain entirely agnostic about the existence of aliens. I have a commitment to preserving unknowns, and I thrive on ambiguity and complexity in my work and my relationships. John’s legacy has also left me with a certain reverence for misfits, for outliers and challengers of the status quo: for the type of person who walks the line between delusion and insight.

John, too, remains immortalised in my mind as someone with great courage and empathy...

sciborg2

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« Reply #7 on: April 07, 2014, 01:20:13 am »
Here's a new take - bring the paranormal directly into the humanities:

http://chronicle.com/article/Embrace-the-Unexplained/145557/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

"...I suggest a way out of our present impasse: We should put these extreme narratives, these impossible stories, in the middle of our academic table. I would also like to make a wager, here and now, that once we put these currently rejected forms of knowledge on our academic table, things that were once impossible to imagine will soon become possible not only to imagine but also to think, theorize, and even test. I am betting, in other words, that we actually need these so-called impossible things to come up with better answers to our most pressing questions, including the biggest question of all: the nature of consciousness..."

sciborg2

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« Reply #8 on: April 08, 2014, 08:26:36 pm »
A Nonbeliever Tries To Make Sense Of The Visions She Had As A Teen

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To make her new book an even more unlikely subject, Ehrenreich describes herself as a rationalist, a scientist by training, and an atheist who is the daughter of atheists. Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything draws on her journals from 1956-'66, and on the extensive reading she's done in the past decade about the history of religion. She never discussed these mystical experiences before writing the book — and she suspects she's not the only one keeping such things to herself.

"People have these unaccountable mystic experiences," Ehrenreich tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Generally they say nothing or they label it as 'God' and get on with their lives. I'm saying, 'Hey, no, let's figure out what's going on here.' "

sciborg2

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« Reply #9 on: April 14, 2014, 06:19:13 pm »
Do Humans Have the Ability to Sense the Future? This Study of Experiments So Far Says....Yes!

Hmmm, will have to keep up with the skeptical response. I don't know if meta-analysis is going to be enough for a paradigm change.

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...The meta-analysis paper, co-authored by Daryl Bem, Patrizio E. Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan, began with a search for all potential replications of Bem's method between the year 2000 and September of 2013. The experiments were then categorized according to the type of effect tested for, the number of participants involved, the statistical techniques needed to measure the effect, whether the study was published through peer-review, and the type of replication (exact, modified, or independently-designed). They found that 51 of the 90 experiments (56.6%) had been published in peer-reviewed journals or conference proceedings.

But could the positive results have been an outcome of the 'file drawer effect', where mostly positive results were published but negative replications were not - put in the file drawer, so to speak, due to no interesting findings? The authors of the paper did the math, and found that the number of 'missing' experiments needed to reduce the overall effect size to a trivial value was (conservatively) 520. This seems unlikely...

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« Reply #10 on: May 04, 2014, 11:11:55 pm »
The Control Group Is Out Of Control:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/

Interesting retrospective/critique on Bem's recently published results that purportedly demonstrated precognition as real. It shows why this stuff can be interesting even if there's nothing going on, with good discussion in the comments between Alexander and Psi proponent Johann:

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Schiltz is a psi believer whose staring experiments had consistently supported the presence of a psychic phenomenon. Wiseman, in accordance with nominative determinism is a psi skeptic whose staring experiments keep showing nothing and disproving psi. Since they were apparently the only two people in all of parapsychology with a smidgen of curiosity or rationalist virtue, they decided to team up and figure out why they kept getting such different results...

..The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.

Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus, having no contact with the subjects except to introduce themselves and flip a few switches – and whether one or the other was there that day completely altered the result. For a good time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.
« Last Edit: May 04, 2014, 11:30:18 pm by sciborg2 »

Royce

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« Reply #11 on: May 13, 2014, 08:35:29 pm »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYJqhMAgOcs

Terence Mckenna on UFOs. He kind of presents a Jungian view towards this phenomena, that they are projections from the unconscious. Like an archetype.

sciborg2

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« Reply #12 on: June 05, 2014, 09:47:41 pm »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYJqhMAgOcs

Terence Mckenna on UFOs. He kind of presents a Jungian view towards this phenomena, that they are projections from the unconscious. Like an archetype.

I kind of like the idea that the unconscious is the firmament. Idealism sort of gets us to the same place as materialism since most people act without consideration for either paradigm. So whether Mind comes Before or After everyone pretty much acts the same.

But Idealism lets me think UFOs and ghosts are real, so I figure it's more entertaining. ;-)

=-=-=

Can Science See Spirits?

http://dailygrail.com/Guest-Articles/2014/5/Can-Science-See-Spirits

"...Spirit mediumship is a complex, near universal phenomenon (see Talking With the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds for a cross-cultural snapshot of just a few of the world’s mediumship traditions), which, despite over 130 years of investigation from psychical research and the social sciences more generally, continues to evade scholarly attempts to pin it down and neatly explain it. Countless attempts have been made, however, from the debunkers who suggest that all mediumship is a mixture of fraud and delusion, to the social anthropologists who argue that spirit mediumship is a purely social phenomenon, performing specific social functions, and certain parapsychologists who suggest that spirit mediumship offers proof of survival after death. And yet, none of the theories that have been put forward quite seem able to offer a fully satisfying explanation for what is going on.

In this series of short articles I would like to highlight some of the reasons why spirit mediumship is such a difficult phenomenon to get a grip on through outlining some of the research that has been conducted, and pointing out gaps in our understanding of the underlying processes. This first article will present an overview of the, really rather sparse, neuroimaging data on spirit mediumship, and will briefly discuss what it does and doesn’t tell us about the phenomenon..."

« Last Edit: June 05, 2014, 09:59:31 pm by sciborg2 »

sciborg2

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« Reply #13 on: June 12, 2014, 06:03:13 pm »
Interesting to see this in Psychology Today:

Do Psychic Phenomena Exist?

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Other psychologists and academics are often surprised when I tell them that I'm willing to accept the possibility of psychic phenomena such as telepathy and pre-cognition. For many intellectuals, these things are seen as superstitious nonsense, remnants of an irrational view of the world which has been superseded by modern materialistic science. Here I will explain my reasons for believing that some "paranormal" phenomena are genuine—in particular, telepathy and pre-cognition, since these are the ones I feel there is most evidence for, and the ones I have experienced myself. (Other types of psychic phenomena—mediumship, ghosts, or faith healing—I’m more doubtful about.)

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« Reply #14 on: June 14, 2014, 06:11:21 pm »
I'd not realized that Maaneli, who believes in some psychic phenomenon, was actually a student of the skeptic Massimo:

An alternative take on ESP

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On many past occasions, I have heard Massimo publicly claim that ESP has been refuted, such as in a Skeptiko podcast interview last year in which he said “... research on the paranormal has been done for almost a century. We have done plenty of experiments, say on telepathy or clairvoyance or things like that, and we know it doesn’t work.” And in his recent book, Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, Massimo even implies that parapsychology is a pseudoscience on par with astrology.

It would be reasonable to expect, especially from someone as learned as Massimo, that these bold claims about research on telepathy and clairvoyance, and the status of parapsychology as a discipline, were derived from a thorough assessment of the parapsychology literature (a literature which includes informed skeptical criticisms of parapsychology experiments). However, in my assessment of the parapsychology literature, I have been unable to find an evidenced basis for Massimo’s claims. Not only that, my study of the literature has turned up evidence that strongly supports a conclusion contrary to Massimo’s. Here’s why.