Here a link to some SCIENTIFIC research on meditation. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/46/16369 :-)
you are always so reactively dismissive of anything you don't approve of.
why would that be, do you think?
it smacks of a kind of absolutism, in its way, doesn't it?
hope that's not too tiresomely sanctimonious....lol!
if you are going to be ET's james randi, it's nice to have emil back for balance, n'est ce pas?
what made you so allergic to anything 'mystical'?
enquiring minds... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
We're not saying that we understand everything, but that if you have claims about the world, it should be possible to make these claims in ways that can be proven or disproven. Just responding "you don't get it" when we ask this takes us nowhere.
If you are saying anything beyond "we don't know everything yet", than say what !! In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
If one wants to take the proof from that domain to one lower (the intellectual), this is not possible. Same applies when going from the intellectual to the physical.
Re 'what': perhaps comparing people from the headlines nowadays with people from http://web.hec.ca/leadergraphies/ and http://www.big-picture.tv/ can give you a taste.
All psychological models I know of indicate a growth pattern. Names differ, trend is always similar. See http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/inpsyc_preface.cfm/
'Growth' is from Pol Pot cs to Albert Schweizer cs.
Personal note: I am rather taken aback by the sharp tone, a lack of curiosity and the über like status of 'science'.
Is there something inherently good and/or defenseless being discredited and/or hurt?
Emil
How come I have to repeat myself so often?
How often should I do this in order to make a point? Or am I being gullible / naive and am I being tossed around by the real science guys or thereabouts?
Step by step:
Cheers,
More to the point - why should I be doing anything? You're the one trying to convince me of something. At least show me something to tempt me, insterad of just telling me how narrow-minded and boneheaded and stupid I am. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Stating on the outset that you've failed means you don't want to enter the trajectory proposed.
That's ok, but that does not mean that you can't; it's not your inability in the sense of insufficient qualities.
Stating that one can't while one doesn't want is what Sartre calls bad faith.
I'm not calling you the names indicated or any other. I try to make a case without any penalizing labels, since that is neither my style nor productive.
You as Jerome don't have to do anything. You as an intellectual have a moral obligation to use your qualities to relief suffering on this planet.
When confronted with fundamental issues as I tried to raise here, an intellectual should be curious in the sense of inquiring within and go out on a limb to get to the root of the matter.
Are you not tempted by the perspecetive to develop your Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Albert Schweizer cs qualities?
1) determine if you appreciate the human qualities in http://web.hec.ca/leadergraphies/ and http://www.big-picture.tv/. When in doubt: use as reference current headlines, Cheney, Guantanomo Bay, Josef Stalin, Hyjacking Catastrophe, The Corporation, Who killed the electric car, Edgar Hoover, Mao see what the people whose qualities you appreciate have in common / what distinguishes them from the reference group explore methods and tools having the potential to bring forth those qualities in yourself Blog your findings
Argumentum ad handwavium, in other words... Can we cut back on the logical fallacies, please? They're getting tiresome.
Horses [Sceptics] can be led to the water [kool-aid], but can't be made to drink.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
First show that the domain that your "tools" work in even has any meaning.
I am very suspicious of appeals to higher domains that are by definition not subject to appeals to evidence as representing running away from the messiness and imperfections of immanent reality to a transcendent "higher reality" that is neither messy nor imperfect. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Maybe you can give me such links and then I can tell you why the mentions of QM are a load of humanure.
All too often in connection with these topics QM is mentioned by the likes of Chopra to confuse, not to enlighten, since the audience doesn't know much about QM in the first place and so they have to go by things like "it sounds scientific" and "it sounds reasonable" or, worse, "it is intriguing" or "why not?". We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
b) Why is it, when the the people that do understand what QM is about point out that various mystics are in the habit of citing QM - or relativity, or whatever - to give their beliefs a spurious flavour of science that everyone starts calling us meanies? If their beliefs are so wonderful why do they need the patina of science?
But the sort of mystisism that this seems to be about involves a strange leap of faith: JakeS:
1994: Awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his experimental conclusion from a rigorous scientific study, published in the peer review journal "Social Indicators Reserarch", that found that 4,000 practicitioners of the TM-Sidhi program who gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Summer, caused a 23.3 percent decrease in crime in that city during an 8 week period.
Okay, how does that work? What is the method of action where by this gathering of people caused a drop of crime in the area in which the collected? Because if none can be proposed one would be inclined to think it was coincidental. But what is really not convincing is a bunch of drivel about energy fields or cognitive synergy or whatever. Really, one has to do more than mimicry of the language of science to be scientific.
From above: emilmoller:
The way this thread develops to me is an important pointer as to why our world community is in the lamentable state it is in. Jake cs uses the proper tools for the material and intellectual domain. For the spiritual domain other tools are required. When tools for domains are confused, threads like this and other non life serving phenomena appear. 'models' are tools from the intellectual domain. These can be used to give hints of results of investigations in the spiritual domain, but no more 'spiritual' = the domain where all esoteric traditions refer to as being the common ground for all and everything
Jake cs uses the proper tools for the material and intellectual domain. For the spiritual domain other tools are required. When tools for domains are confused, threads like this and other non life serving phenomena appear.
'models' are tools from the intellectual domain. These can be used to give hints of results of investigations in the spiritual domain, but no more
'spiritual' = the domain where all esoteric traditions refer to as being the common ground for all and everything
I don't understand how we need the spiritual to solve the problems of the world. Unless: BruceMcF:
Yes, technology, so while engineering is a ... part of it, its only a part. Much of the trickiest aspects of technological change will be in the social arrangements that are complements of the engineering.
And we do have to defend science from the kind of intrusions that uses the language of science and claim to be scientific, and are anything but. Or someone will convince us that all we need to do is meditate for an hour a day, and the collected energy-consiousness field will make everything great. No need for actual action in the world, no need for actual reduction in driving. Just meditating will suck the carbon right out of the air!
So, to sum up: meditation as mental training: just fine, no problem. The link Fran provides, its about measurable changes in the brain due to meditation. Seems scientific and believable. (I haven't looked in detail)
Meditation as some kind of mystical link to spiritual whatever... Either this is religious, has no bearing on material reality and I don't care, or else you have a lot of work to do to show a link to the real world. And, no, "try it and have faith" doesn't cut it. Now we are back to religious nonsense again, no different from all the other lies being peddled by other faits!
Okay, how does that work? What is the method of action where by this gathering of people caused a drop of crime in the area in which the collected?
There are experiments going on on this topic and others. I don't know how serious they can be taken. But I consider it a good thing that they are done, at least they might help to clarify the next step.
If you are interested, there is a site where you can participate in some of the experiments.
THE LARGEST MIND OVER MATTER EXPERIMENT IN HISTORY
The Intention Experiment is a series of scientifically controlled, web-based experiments testing the power of intention to change the physical world. Thousands of volunteers from 30 countries around the world have participated in Intention Experiments thus far.
I am curious about the outcome - and just want to stay open minded. To many things I didn't believe in or even smirk about when I was younger, just to find out that there might be more to them and have experienced them myself. :-)
There are experiments going on on this topic and others. I don't know how serious they can be taken.
They generally can't. I don't exactly have in-depth knowledge of the field (it's a bit - ah - esoteric for my taste), but my impression is that they completely lack a viable model for what they claim to be looking for. They get a lot of anomalies (especially when their controls are (deliberately) sloppy), but there's anomalies in any data set, and you can always fit some non-trivial function to any kind of noise. Without a model to fit against, that tells you less than nothing.
But I consider it a good thing that they are done, at least they might help to clarify the next step.
Well, they take up space in the university basement. And funding. And they aren't exactly doing wonders for the good names of the universities in question. So it's not entirely without costs. And as long as they don't have a plausible model for what they think is supposed to be going on, it's hard to see how they can prepare for any next steps... But sure, let's give it a shot - after all, it's not my university's funds they're siphoning.
<blockqoute>If you are interested, there is a site where you can participate in some of the experiments.</blockqoute>
From what I can read of their website, they're associated with Princeton's ICRL project, which is an off-shoot of the PEAR project - a poster child for precisely the failures that I lambast such projects for above (AFAIK, PEAR was closed down recently for failure to produce results, but that's another story).
Also, they're shilling for a book, which is usually A Bad Sign.
The mini-Gaia project. An ecosphere with an artificially raised temperature - a little like global warming. Can we lower the temperature with our thoughts?
To impede our current trajectory of increase in atmospheric temperature due to heat trapping due to increased concentrations of, among other gases, CO2, we need to do a bit more than sit around going "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can". Can we please have some serious approaches to solve serious problems? This is like the other (new-age mysticism) side of the reckless optimism coin that hope for groundbreaking technological progress so that we may live the easy life. Not so different that the free-marketistas and their endless faith in 'innovation' and 'spontaneous' technological 'evolution'.
As far as I can tell, the only difference between these people and the Governor of Georgia's approach to problem solving is that the latter puts Jesus in the mix: Georgia governor leads prayer for rain - Los Angeles Times
Bowing his head outside the Georgia Capitol on Tuesday, Gov. Sonny Perdue cut a newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for rain to end the region's historic drought."Oh father, we acknowledge our wastefulness," Perdue said. "But we're doing better. And I thought it was time to acknowledge that to the creator, the provider of water and land, and to tell him that we will do better."
I don't smirk in disbelief when I read this. I bonk my head against my desk in frustration, and bury my face in my hands in despair.
When I read Emil say this:
the rest of the world suffers from the consequences of one's inability to see a larger picture. That is: a picture from the next domain [the domains are nested: material is transcended & included in the intellectual and the intellectual is t&i in the spiritual]
I am eager to see his scientific backing for it. Because I do not accept transcendentalist esoterica, I am causing suffering to all that lives? I look forward to Emil's justification for that.
Compared to that, the usefulness or not of meditation is really a bit of a sideshow, imho.
but I do agree with metavision that you do not appear to be open to new or different things.
Appearances can be deceiving. It is precisely because I am open to new and different ideas that I have to do some kind of sorting of people's suggestions. If you want me to take something seriously, you have to give me reason to believe that it isn't nonsense. Else, I could spend the rest of my life studying one strange notion after another without ever having the foggiest idea what good it's going to do for me or anyone else.
I don't think you are seriously suggesting that I ought to be 'open to the idea' that the moon landing was a hoax. I don't think you are seriously suggesting that I should be 'open to the idea' that Earth was created in six days six thousand years ago. I don't think you seriously suggest that I should be 'open to the idea' that homeopathic 'remedies' (i.e. vigorously shaken bottles of pure water) confer any real medical benefit.
So why should trancendental meditation get a free pass?
How do you want to understand meditation if you are not willing to learn the basic tools.
I'm not unwilling to learn the basic tools, as long as the expected outcome stands in some reasonable proportion to the time commitment. I am, however, unwilling to accept at face value the often outrageous and frequently worse claims of miraculous magical power that are attributed to meditation. As I said above, I do not hand out 'get out of critical scrutiny free' cards for weird philosophies just because their adherents are sincere.
If you want to convince me that meditation is a good way to spend my time, then convince me on the merits. Don't try to recruit me into a cult and especially don't try to sell me snake oil. Chopra fails on both scores, as does his local apologists.
Over the years I have learned that there is more than science.
A fairly trivial observation. I don't know why people seem to keep thinking that I disagree with it.
(But if I had to guess, I'd say that it's because they don't understand or accept that I won't go along with their rhetorical two-step and accept that 'more than science' equates to their favoured kind of hand-waving magic.)
To me science descibes what can be perceived and measured consciously at this point in time. So many things were in the realm of magic, until someone came along and has been able to either measure it or make it visible. Then they became scientifically acceptable. However, these things excisted before they were proven scientifically.
I don't know where you're going with this, because that seems to be my point you're making? Science works. If you think you have an interesting effect, submit it for scientific scrutiny. Most of the time, it'll turn out that what you thought you were seeing was in fact confirmation bias, selection bias, placebo effect, wishful thinking or sensory illusions. That's the breaks of the game. But if the effect is genuine, we'll find it. Eventually.
Typing in all caps went out of style with FORTRAN :-P
That being said, that paper isn't terribly revolutionary [1]. From what I can read from the abstract, it says that meditation is coincident with enhanced levels of certain neurological processes associated with the ability to concentrate, which is entirely plausible and not exactly unexpected. If you wanted to convince me that meditation is a good idea, then this is the kind of thing you need to put forward [2].
That is, however, very much beside the point, since the discussion so far has been about whether or not we should accept the whole mythological baggage that some feel should go along with meditation. Meditation was presented as a 'tool' with which to 'explore the spirit realm' - and it was that notion which I rejected for lack of plausible mechanism and being untestable, not meditation en bloc.
- Jake
[1] Contrary to popular imagination, few - if any - papers are truly earth-shattering, but that's a different story.
[2] That being said, further studies are required to determine whether meditation is superior as a concentration-enhancer to - say - solving mathematical problems. If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
I do not need scientific prove, I get all the prove I need from my own experience and from what I see and hear from my students. Sometimes it does seem miraculous - but I also admit, not everbody has that experience. Not everybody has the patience and discipline to pull it through until they get an effect. Meditation is work, which I consider worthwhile for myself.
Chopra is not synonymous with meditation for me. All those philosophies are not needed if you practice it regularely.
Oh, and I am a great friend of the placebo effect - isn't it wonderful that believe can effect such a change and even without the negative side-effects.
If you really want prove about meditation, there is only one way - do-it-yourself. Noone can prove it to you, it is something you have to experience yourself and you might end up dismissing it. Thats fine too. :-)
Oh, and I also like the placebo effect, although I have some ethical qualms about employing it in medical practise (since it would involve lying to your patients by claiming that you're giving them medicine when in fact you're giving them placebo). And if I get cancer, I'll go with the chemo rather than the homeopathic remedies magic water...
