I'll respond to these three posts together. I have to say that I agree with a good portion of what you're saying, particuarly moonrambler and Angela, but that these weren't quite the points I was arguing.
This is a problem that keeps occuring for me here. I try to argue the case for the unlikeliness of the supernatural - to debunk all the nonsense I hear about psychic readings and channeling spooks and stuff, which I consider as infantile as most of the new age claptrap from crystal skulls to crop circles - because all that mystical stuff is, for some, a central part of LoA and IM. When the objections I get back are that other things like counselling can't be proved to work objectively either, or LoA is fun and gives you a 'way of being', it's not quite the same subject at all.
I'm a great believer in the value of positive thinking, I just don't think it will move objects across tables. I'm a great beliver in making psychological meanings out of experiences (like finding dead fish and assessing your behaviour towards a friend because of it), but I don't think the universe puts these things in our way to teach us spiritual lessons, we choose to contemplate them and think about them.
I think we
make meaning
out of these things rather than
discover meaning
in them, which is actually a more empowering position, making more use of the subjective process than many interpretations of LoA, where you try to read hidden spiritual messages in events, almost like you're a rather stupid child trying to understand the mind of God, who can't be straight with us but has to leave clues.
This is actually one of the things I'm trying to bring attention to here - the way many different beliefs - with very different implications and levels of spookery - seem to get lumped together under the banner of LoA or IM or SR.
Cylon, apparently you believe in psi. Again, I think it's worth noting the differences. You can believe in messages in events (passive) which we can try to interpret without necessarily believing we can levitate (active) or predict the roll of a die (view at a distance, timewarp, or whatever).
And it's important, I think, to distinguish between what is measurable by science and what is not. You can say that a dead fish has significance in a human-spiritual-psychological realm (say, like a message from God or the universe), and it is almost impossible for anyone to prove otherwise (or prove correct) by objective science. If, on the other hand, someone says they can predict the roll of a die, then that can be established fairly convincingly through science. Now, for people to agree on the meanings of the outcome, they must also agree on the terms, the rules of the experiment.
What, for instance, does it mean in terms of accuracy: is the person saying they do their predicting and get it right every time, or almost every time, or more than you'd expect by chance? Science, bless it, doesn't even demand that if someone says they can do such a thing they must be able to do it every time (and you might argue that if someone has a genuine gift, what's to stop them getting it right every time?), but uses one of the least demanding measures - you have to get it right enough of the time to be considered statistically or experimentally significant, i.e. a reasonable amount more than chance would predict if you were absolutely totally un-psychic and just guessed. Surely that's reasonable enough? Surely it's objective enough (even though, theoretically, nothing is completely objective - you can always appeal to multiple universes and say that the person is getting great results in another, or to quantum effects making the measured effect much smaller than the mathematics being used, etc., etc.)?
Surely it's pathetic to complain that there was a sceptic in the building at the time? I disagree that Randi failed to find psychic phenomena because he was trying to debunk. People have been trying to find evidence for psi for centuries, a great many of them utterly convinced of its reality, and a great many being converted in the process, whereupon some of them had an epiphany and commented on something very profound in the psychological realm: we are extremely gullible, every one of us, and tend to believe there's a pattern emerging from our hits and misses despite a lack of real evidence. Even when we are convinced of it in a particular run and then analyse the playback, we can see how we love it to be true so much that we unconsciously convince ourselves it is.
I haven't counted, but I know there are more than a few scientists who devoted years of their lives to demonstrating what they genuinely believed must be true, risked their reputation in the scientific community, and finally gave up trying or announced to the world that they were almost certainly wrong.
By way of example, this
First Person - Into the Unknown is Dr Susan Blackmore, who spent a career in parapsychological research after an out-of-body experience, struggling with her
addiction to spookiness. And this article
Dr. Susan Blackmore (also linked from the other) gives a more detailed account of why she stopped banging her head against the lab wall. Finally, when one more paranormal case came to her for investigation, she reaslised she'd had enough.
I think the fact that she still thinks of it as an addiction and struggled to throw a load of old papers away demonstrates just how the mind desires these things and will ignore science, common sense, endless failure to find evidence, to either keep believing it or, in her case later on, keep keeping an open mind. In fact, I think the way she describes trying to throw those papers away demonstrates that she wasn't even a dutiful sceptic - a part of her, like everyone, gets off on thinking it might just be there in front of me ready to be discovered. I imagine her waiting for a sign, a paper hanging there in her hand a moment longer, falling outside the bin instead of inside it...
Yeah, Angela, it's fun. Yeah, moonrambler, it can be very instructive if we take it the right way. No, cylon, there is no such thing as magick. And it is at least potentially risky - and perhaps seriously dangerous - to live with superstitions and nurture them. Testing our beliefs against reality is the main feature differentiating us from the first humans. Shall we continue to bow and offer sacrifices to the local volcano? If it's because it's fun, postmodern, keeping ancient traditions alive because they're precious to us on a human level, ok. If we value humility and use this as a way of paying respects to the earth, fine. If we think it's going to stop the volcano errupting, we are superstitious idiots who deserve to be petrified in superheated pummice.