I think the most in-depth analysis I ahve read on the topic of science, out-of-science and non-science items has been given by thatbritguy. He posted some of the best comments on this issue and any issue I have read (well, actually the best idea I have read on the issue, period).
Science is a narrative which has a small set of magical thinking in its core. You are a scientist because you beieve in this small set of magic... and with this small set of magic and a proper fundamental narrative (or called mythology in antrhopology 101) you can explain a lot of things.. but not all of them. A bunch of things can not ahd will never be able to be analyzed by science...Science requires repetition ans testing, everything which does not happen constantly or with a certain regularity is out.. It msut be dealt with other mythologies/paradigms, not with science
If I told you that one day by gran grand mother spoke to me from the past (not happened but imagine),there will be no way for anyone to test wether is true or not. The same with any personal experience that can not be tested.
Thatbritguy had a partiucalr brilliant insight about a bunch of things which present certain repetitivity but are outside the realm of science by cultural decision and the backstory behind those repititions... I hope he will be around and will send you to the appropriate comments..
Regarding your near death experience, it has nothing to do with science, it can not be explained or not not explained or qualified or disqualified or even itnerpreted int he framework of science.. it has nnothign to do with science...
Regarding the repetitive phenomena that a lot of people describe experiences similar to NDE could be a subject of science but..well I think Thatbritguy will give you the answer on why it could happen, but it is difficult.
A pleasure I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude
Regarding your near death experience, it has nothing to do with science, it can not be explained or not not explained or qualified or disqualified or even interpreted in the framework of science.. it has nothing to do with science...
beautiful...
what i find so liberating about what you say, is that it makes me confront some social conditioning that i have imbibed along the way somehow that tries to dictate that something that science has not understood yet is beyond the pale, 'out there', or 'woo-woo'.
this assertion, however subconscious, has conditioned some of my attitudes, sometimes in rebellion against it, in that i recognised a certain insecurity in human nature that makes us crave certainty, however illusionary, as a fixed point, a north star, against which every supposition is aligned.
this is how groupthink can be so destructive, as it offers a kind of herd-pleasure, during which one's critical intelligence can easily abdicate, following someone else's lodestone...
science, like some octopus, likes to stick its probes and tentacles into and around everything and 'regularise' it by attaching it to some certainty, some predictability, some set of laws, so then it can be 'safe' to acknowledge, 'sanely' etc.
problem being, science reverses its opinions all the time!
it's natural to catalogue, pigeon-hole, quantify and summate, and perhaps eventually the states of mind/soul in wales, crazy horse and others describe here will one day be as mysterious as a phone call, which in turn would have seemed impossibly fanciful to most cavemen.
most of us couldn't write a scientific paper on how a phone works, but we make calls blithely every day. unfortunately, if a mind is raised on too much (false) certainty, it goes into spasm while trying to embrace something too abstract for its cognition, and even locks down and even strikes back, threatened that its foundation may be rocked by something that hitherto has resisted scientific explanation.
there's an amusing irony i find about ET, in its earnest desire for rigor, spending countless computer man/hours debating the finest points of complex, arcane, financial constructions of diabolical import, all based on disastrously misconstrued axioms and assertions as arrogant and results as inhumanly uncompassionate as any weird cult you could name!
yet...
god forbid we stray too far off the beaten track...
i also find it fascinating how much interest there was in rg's tarot series, how until jerome 'banned' astrology how much people opened up about all sorts of interesting stories about themselves around that most unscientific of subjects.
it looks to me that by sticking to the subjects under the rubric of ET, we get very few females interested to stick around or do more than lurk, which has brought on the interesting conversations when fran opened that box on friday, and that while we can have long, fun-packed threads on very 'male' subjects, all well and good, but there's a plethora of human interest stories that presently is somehow squelched by a somewhat insecure fear we won't be seen as Serious PeopleTM if we go into woo-woo land.
me, i live there, so no biggy!
...but i didn't come to ET for some kind of affirmation of my spritual beliefs, i came because of some very wry, astute, occasionally visionary commentary on hard-core issues like energy, finance, ponzi schemes, and political skullduggery.
but i stayed for the shoe-blogging, putin beefcake pics, and because like any self-respecting masochist, i enjoy having my tender, fluffy lttle soul getting slapped around by hardcore rational materialists on a gleefully debunking roll...
/snark
ET wants to be all things to all people, and i think it's fun to play with it, as it forms under our fingertips. my guess is that we're all much more interesting than we're letting on, and that we've got the male part sussed and solid, and should listen to the women more, allowing ET to flower into its future as an E-zine with all kinds of quirky weirdness to balance out the d-r-y analyses that are always educational, but relentlessly left-brain much of the time.
...and then maybe rg will come back and play with us more often again!
* this is not a criticism of ET, i love(d) it just the way it is/was, just an observation of how it's trying to morph into something more colourful sometimes, and an attempt to describe the forces in play encouraging or holding back that change.
thanks for your story, in wales! it was beautiful, did i say that already?
:)
ET, where the rational and the fantastic collide... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Now, just because something is not within the reach of science doesn't mean that what is said about it isn't woo-woo. I mean, science is not woo-woo free, so why should other areas of human experience be woo-woo free? Science is easy and structured enough that woo-woo tends to stick out like a sore thumb. So, when not doing science, one has to exercise more, not less critical judgement because there is no structure more or less adapted to weeding out woo-woo. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Unfortunately this gets strengthened by the many frauds out there - as Migeru says, this makes woo-woo stand out because in these cases there is no apparent rigour attached to observing the experiences and we are told we just have to believe it is true...
but equally science has it's frauds and it has those who fiddle their stats and extrapolate whatever conclusion they want without it being fully grounded with evidence. But this slips through even with peer review to be seen as legitimate research, when actually it is just as woo-woo as a woman pretending to be psychic and telling people what she thinks they want to hear in a reading, possibly causing them harm.
I think my reason for writing the diary is that when you strip away the woo-woo or fraud there are 'real' experiences that are interesting and worthy of discussion even if there is no apparent explanation for them. Some people are willing to simply accept these experiences and others are frustrated by the lack of explanation or evidence and will try to pick it apart or disregard it without realising that there can be some value to the experience just as it is. Ad astra per aspera
You totally misunderstand me. I did not say that scientific discourse makes paranormal claims stick out as woo-woo. What I said is that the good think about scientific discourse is that it provides a structure within which woo-woo sticks out like a sore thumb. I studied theoretical physics so I am well acquainted with scientific woo-woo, having dabbled in it myself. Sometimes I had to stop a discussion with 'guys, if we don't stop waving our hands we'll take off flying'.
Which is why I don't think stepping outside the constraints of scientific discourse is "liberating": if you want to get anywhere with it, it forces you to exercise more critical thinking about most claims that are made so it is a lot more work. Especially claims that are not independently verifiable even in principle.
Of course, overreliance on the scientific method leads to suspending critical judgement of scientific claims, and bad things happen
Drop the with it, it just makes things ambiguous again. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
Migeru:
I did not say that scientific discourse makes paranormal claims stick out as woo-woo. What I said is that the good think about scientific discourse is that it provides a structure within which woo-woo sticks out like a sore thumb.
I interpret these two things to be broadly the same so I'm obviously not following your logic.
And yes using a scientific structure has its worth but there are some things that don't appear to be verifiable or we don't know how to go about robustly observing and trying to seek an explanation. I don't think this necessarily means those experiences are not valid in themselves, that is all I was trying to say. Ad astra per aspera
Your diary does not contain woo-woo that I can see. Refer to the Crackpot Index. A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith
That's usually called scientism, and it's - not helpful. Although unfortunately it's not uncommon.
The problem is that the cranks and kooks who like to live on the fringes are often so ridiculous that there's so much noise that any signal becomes buried. Between authoritarian scientism on one hand, way out woo-woo watchers on the other, and the occasional deliberate fraudster, it gets to be very messy.
Fraud in science isn't actually all that uncommon. There have been studies of both graduate and post-grad papers, and falsified, or at least massaged, results aren't all that rare.
That's why reproducibility is so important. If one person says something, you can take their point or leave it. If the same thing happens to a hundred people, it's much more likely to be worth paying attention to.
The problem with so-called woo-woo is that it's not very lab friendly. And because of scientism, even when evidence piles up it's not accepted, and no one is interested in trying to reproduce it because it's a sure way to end your career.
It's not just woo-woo which suffers from the same problem. Science is fanatically political, and becoming more so, and that has blunted its effectiveness over the last few decades.
Secretary: "Oh, I don't. I split them evenly across the department."
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
It was brilliant, and still is :)
(that the spontaneous nature of blogging stimulates, unfortunately!) ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
to mig:
playing with metaphor, the overton window signifying the common wisdom, the fact that an economy/energy blog should even bother to comment on diaries like these, and the surge of interest from women as well as men when they occur, all suggest a shift, from where i stand... also peoples' attitudes to these phenomena seem a tad less judgmental than last winter, when similar discussions led to bad blood.
so it is amazing, but not how you meant, i think...
i do have a record of misunderstanding you sometimes, so excuse me if i inadvertently pushed your buttons there.
;) ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
you shouldn't lose a sense of responsibility just because you start taking the roads less travelled, to the contrary...
if you get conned, well, you partly deserved it, and next time you take more care, just as in any other field. people are people, and and some have talents that are more developed than their conscience, leading to aberrations like black magic.
if you are stupid and ignorant to get involved with stuff like that, then you'll learn the hard way sooner or later why so many warnings against doing just that abound.
you don't have to hand over your credulity lock stock and barrel just because you consult a psychic, for example, but right now it's seen as something almost to be embarrassed about, which is a sign something's a bit off, imo.
if psychics didn't work, why would police forces use them? they're known for woolly thinking... not!
it's how people get their panties in a twist about other people checking out their other realities that mystifies me.
if science were always right about everything, or hadn't a track record of birthing horrors as awesome as benefits, then i would expect people to give it more credibility. to my mind, in its search for absolutes like permanent, failsafe repeatability, science betrays its addiction to literality, and while repeatability is a valuable attribute, the very existence of the word 'singularity' should give rational materialists pause for thought, one might think.
if one wants to know the Self, then one might surely be well advised to look in all the corners, for all the clues, not just the ones that 'add up', or fit some proscribed version of a story one already feels to be crystallised.
there's sort of intellectual pride that conspires to make men blind, searching in the dark for truth and meaning, relying on a cane of 'fact' to probe the unknown.
it might be the best way of guaranteeing the bridge doesn't fall down, but it doesn't cover all the bases, not by a long shot, and has to play catch-up constantly to ideation that is inherently more imaginative than fact-finding and checking, which trundles in late to help confirm, rather than establish as holy writ, as it claims to arbiter, and has (often cruelly and mistakenly) for centuries.
not all facts are 'hard'. the ones that are belong to science, the rest are free-floating as soap bubbles.
crazy horse and in wales can tell themselves till they're blue in the face that what happened to them couldn't have happened, but it did!
the caveman got a bluetooth message...
i'm sure the fanatic attachment to 'scientific truth' is in inverse proportion to man's equally silly 'faith' in superstition, equally cruel and mistaken, which in turn was the closest we had to 'science' at the time.
science as we know it is a fabulous set of toys, but it's not the whole game, as some of its adherents/disciples falsely believe...unless ( and even as) the meaning of the word itself stretches towards redefinition.
i've had many experiences that science can't explain, like those cited here. reading intelligent posters stories, like these here at ET serves as a kind of 'peer review' of a kind...
till you have one, it's like describing the taste of a banana to a martian, limited to speaking in backwards swahili, hopeless!
till he eats one himself, that is...when it becomes redundant, like my monologues, sigh...
why do these excursions excite me so? 'tis a strange sensation sticking up for something that itself avoids proof like the plague, lol.
more fool me... i guess i like getting flamed, called delusional etc... quixotic at best.
time to up meds again!
i've gone insane, again! science, please help me!
just please don't ask me for my soul in return-
~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
which has brought on the interesting conversations when fran opened that box on friday,...
InWales: Fran, I wrote this diary about a OBE/NDE which I think you can appreciate, but which will get too beaten around if I put it on ET. Can you recommend another place to post it?
Fran: Give me a few days. You will recognize when the soil is properly moistened for such a piece on ET. I really like what you wrote and would like the ET ScienceTribeTM to be able to read it without them triggering the slavish particulars of their worst selves.
InWales: I'll keep watching.
Fran: I don't know yet how I will approach it, but You Go Girl. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
I was referring to the conspiracy that no one has brought up yet; That Fran made the ground more stable for your interesting, yet non-science (or perhaps future-science) based diary, one that might have brought out more brazen attitudes if the "Why are there not more females writing on ET" thread been explored within 36 hours previous. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
I enjoyed your diary, and appreciated that you posted it here. There is no other place that I go to everyday, so if it was somewhere else I would have missed it, to my detriment.
In fact, I rarely read diaries, for want of time. I'll open a bunch which have titles that might be interesting, but I rarely read more than a couple lines in and even more rarely read past the fold. I am already in trouble with every project that I am working on, and each interesting thing gets me deeper in trouble. So, always the Salon, sometimes the OT and less sometimes the diaries.
But your title was provocative, at first glance seemingly counter-point to the recent "why not more females" thread...even though I don't know if 'woo woo' had been brought up there. (Without checking, I remember that Fran stomped on the sub-thread of 'meta-physical' cleverly enough, before it could gather either steam or condescension.) In fact, it was a counter-point to the mega-thread of a few months ago that still leaves a scar on ET members...at least upon me.
And thus, my attempt at humor...(he says, getting ready to explain the joke once again)...that we were set up to take your story seriously, reflecting elements of our kinder selves rather than clever rat-a-tat-style of idea enforcement.
And even though I did not otherwise comment on any of the other mentioned threads, I am more sympathetic to the side that shan't be described as metaphysical (for fear of denigrating it) than to the side that must forcefully remind us that it is science, based upon the methods that have so obviously brought sanity to the society.
Not that I don't like science, for I am a technology person. It's just that science forgets how limited its scope of understanding is, fixed at only what it can see from the narrow shelf of the subtended angle of its place(s) of expertise on the ExpandoMaticSphere of all potential knowledge. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Good week to you... Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Enjoy a fine week ahead...and thanks for efforts to keep us on our toes. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
why not post it here? the box is open now, let 'er rip!
quick, before the subject gets banned!
:) ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
We don't have the tools needed to even attempt a full understanding of the operation of the brain. We might someday.
The best argument I've seen against ever having an understanding of the brain (I think Sven has brought it up before, and I have seen it elsewhere) is "the brain can't understand itself." I don't agree with it, but it's interesting to consider.
you are the media you consume.
And if we are smart enough we may know what a machine register while In wales is having the experience... but actually you can not.. becase you will not have feedback witht he subject.. so you might guess how the experience looks in an scan...
and then maybe you can check if there is something universal in those tscans...but agan this would be the repitition of NDE... not the particualr experience. It wil eb exactly as quantum field theory... it looks like everything is asicallya quantum field if weonly knew how to put gravitiy in it.. does it mean reaity are really matehamtical functions behaving in a quantic fashion? Who knows....and as far as science is concerened, nt interesting... after all your everyday experience is the incredible thing.
So, the particualr experience of In wales, is and will always be out-of science..as Miger says, science is not useful any more... your trust of the other person, your skills to know other people, your critical skills and frienship or your particular vision of the world will make sense of it.. not science..
So, yes one day we could know how the experience looks in a t-scan and make science of out it..actually, if it were not for what brit points out, we could try out right now... but the level of noise in data makes it impossible and the different cultural background of woos-woos and unscientific scientists folks makes it almost impossible.
the different cultural background of woos-woos and unscientific scientists folks makes it almost impossible
Yep.
That depends on whether or not we have privileged access to our mental states. We're not yet in a position to answer that.
and the different cultural background of woos-woos and unscientific scientists folks makes it almost impossible.
I'm assuming our brain scanner can pick up the structures formed by the culture that the person's brain developed in along with the brain activity that occurs during the event in question. That gives us both ends of the relative nature of experience. From there it's a question of whether or not psychology is a science. I don't have an opinion on that, but the older I get the more I'm certain it's not a yes or no question, or even important, for that matter.
