yes great article... but I just want to talk about the "Now if you happen to maintain a belief system in which you’ve concluded that communication with the other side is impossible..."
Yes so I'm a skeptic. "I’m sure the skeptics could use the exercise." I guess I step up to the challenge... but I want to believe.
I know that your (people in general)
beliefs influence your perception (and a link here too), and therefore logically if you believe that people have the ability to speak to you then you are more likely to interpret your experiences as confirming this belief.
But anyways, I was wondering because it seemed to Steve like Ron had an influence on blackjack, which has a luck component to it, that
if there are people on the other side who can talk to us, like Ron did with Steve, why couldn't they just make it obvious beyond a doubt to the skeptical earthly beings that they can in fact influence us, and that its just not our own believes influencing our perceptions and our interpretations of our experience and reality?
And by that, can anyone ask them to make a statistically significant difference in this world?
Steve said, "Doubling my money would have been outstanding." well... it'd be nice to puts some numbers on that... what's the probability given Steve's ability that he'd be able to do that with or without Ron's help?
"To have it happen again makes it harder to dismiss as a fluke."
Well... n=2.... that's only a sample size of two... to be statistically meaningful... well i guess you'd need a few more trials that n=2. Maybe something like n>5 and n>10 would be great.
What would be great is if Steve could put an end to it all, and ask Ron to participate in a repeatable experiment for us, have a statistically significant influence on reality and let him double his money like 10 times in a row (in a reasonably fast time frame), or some number of trials, so that Steve could win a million to give to the charities, and that we could have statistical confidence of like 70 or 90% sure that in fact Ron was helping Steve out in winning blackjack.
But anyways. Say Steve did the experiment, where first he tried with not asking Ron for help, and then again, he did ask Ron for some help... for 10 or 20 trials and the results turned out to not be statistically meaningful. Does anyone have a guess of why it is against the rules of the people on the other side that they are not allowed to influence physical reality in a statistically significant way, or maybe the reason why they don't want to do so, so that we could in fact be sure that it just wasn't our beliefs that was influencing our interpretation of reality? Do they just get bored with the experiment maybe or don't want to be bossed around, so they go and find something more exciting to do?