[ExI] ESP

[Stefano Vaj]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 7:58 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>
wrote:
> At 04:26 AM 9/13/2008 -0700, John Grigg wrote:
> Star Gate didn't "fail". Read Prof. Utts's AIR reports (
> http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/response.html
> http://www.stat.ucdavis.edu/~utts/air2.html ). The relevant sections of my
> book (which Lee tells us he owns but hasn't read; cough groan) sketch some
> of the contortions in this whole long process.

I have carefully perused Damien's
book<http://www.amazon.com/Outside-Gates-Science-Time-Paranormal/dp/1560259868/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221479081&sr=8-1>,
which is absolutely the best source on ESP I have ever stumbled upon,
besides being a very pleasant reading, and I took from it confirmation of a
few old ideas of mine:
- phenomena that can hardly be explained away by conventional science do
exist;
- we have not the foggiest idea of how they "work", which would be the first
step to make them of any practical use besides the traditional, trivial and
inevitable profiting from individual hunches face to insufficient data, and
to establish the framework for value-added reliable ESP-based "technology";
- scientific research is far from a disembodied, angelic field where
everybody is impartially and unbiasedly working in the quest of the truth,
availing himself of all the necessary instruments and progressing every area
of knowledge at a similar pace.

An interesting comparison could in this respect be made with what is
reported at a more journalistic level in * Bonk: The Curious Coupling of
Science and Sex*
<http://www.amazon.com/Bonk-Curious-Coupling-Science-Sex/dp/0393064646/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221479477&sr=8-1>by
Mary Roach, documenting how little was known about the physiology of sex, as
opposed to, say, digestion, well into the second half of the XX century, and
how much remains to be investigated beyond anedoctical and empirical hints!

Stefano Vaj
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