Quote:
Originally Posted by cdn2wheeler  I can't speak for the Ganzfield, clairvoyant dream or Pearce-Pratt experiments, but I did wade though Sheldrake's "sense of being stared at" work.
Sheldrake's methodology isn't even close to being called reputable science, which is why it isn't taken seriously.
And even if there was something "weird" going on, that doesn't mean for a moment that it's supernatural. It just means that we don't understand it. To "draw a straight line between something we don't understand and supernatural phenomena isn't rational. I personally don't understand how electricity works, but that doesn't mean it's particularly weird.
That's not to assume that there isn't something supernatural going on. It's just that we can't automatically leap to that conclusion everytime something happens we don't understand.
*edited to add*
I just did a quick Google search on Pearce-Pratt experiments. Seems that proper double-blind protocol wasn't used, and both Pratt and Rhine (one of the investigators) were already believers. A 1960 research project about the P.P. experiments showed that there was ample opportunity for errors - however unintentional - to creep into the process. There's a brief look at it here. |
If the controls were tight enough and the results were statistically significant the only explanation is a mental effect, coincidence and human error already having been ruled out.
What exactly was wrong with Sheldrakes methodology? Seldom do I hear any specific complaints, just the usual "no way it can be true" argument.
As for Pearce and Pratt:
"... And then Pearce supposedly stood on a chair near a door and looked down through a transom in the door into Pratt's office, where he watched him record the sequence of cards. To bolster his explanatory scenario Hansel included a diagram of the rooms as he remembered them. The diagrams were not up to scale because Hansel couldn't get a hold of the floor plans. If you had he would have found his peeking hypothesis impossible."
"On the few occasions when Pratt and Pearce met and compared their unsealed duplicates before both of them had delivered their sealed records to Rhine, the data could not have been changed without collision, as Pratt kept the results from the unsealed records and any discrepancy between them and Rhine's results would have been noticed."
As for the claim that Rhine was the only evaluator of the material this is false:
"After the study ended, other researchers examined the raw data sheets to double check the hit rates (they matched), to see whether the sequence of trials were adequately random (they were), and to see whether the results tended to cluster in bursts of hits (they didn't)".
So, much for improper double-blind protocol. The controls were sufficient (whether they were believers or non-believers) and the results were astronomically above chance. The only explanation appears to be telepathy.
Another interesting experiment was reported in 1923 and was done at a university (forget which) in the Nederlands. They experimented with a man named Van Dam who claimed to be telepathic. Their results were also statistically significant.
I know remote viewers have been tested as well. As article was published in
Nature (in the 1970s I believe) by scientists Targ and Puthoff in which they reported positive results. Although they received criticism, the detailed examinations of the critiques found them unable to explain away the reported results.