[ExI] ESP

[Stefano Vaj]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 10:38 PM, John K Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> Stefano Vaj On  Monday, September 15, 2008 Wrote:
>> The prob is with statistical divergences that resist
>> attempts to make them  predictable and repeatable
>> within an adequate theoretical framework, thus
>> preventing any real technical "appropriation".
>
> That is quite simply untrue. Spectacularly untrue! It is the dream of
> ALL experimenters to find something that existing science can not
> explain, and it is the dream of theorists to find red meat to sink
> their teeth into, it's the only reason people do science. If the good
> people who run the LHC don't find a "statistical divergence" from
> the known physics then a large number of them will need to be put
> on a suicide watch.

I must have been explaining myself very poorly. *Of course* you are
right, and "It is the dream of ALL experimenters to find something
that existing science can not explain, etc.", so that they can do
their job and find the relevant "explanation".

Conversely, as long as it does not happen, the problem remains there,
unresolved, challenging them, and by extension all of us. Or at least
it should, in the case of ESP and other fields a trend being possibly
there to sweep the phenomena under the carpet and forget about them.

> Spiritualism became ESP
> which became PSI, but other than that the substance of our
> conversation would be virtually identical.

In fact, I do not care much for past and current PSI community and
dominant ideas, not much more than I do for rainman's metereology.
Yet, I am inclined to admit the reality of the rainfall, and to wish
that whatever has to be known there be investigated and discovered.

Even if the entire "Psy" background had to be discarded as consistent
with statistical fluctuations and/or "tricks", some effort would be in
order to explain more in depth the epistemological, cultural,
sociological and methodological aspects that come into play into both
structured experimenting and anedoctical evidence concerning those
very phenomena.

An entirely different aspect is the current "state of the art". While
I do not claim to be an expert myself, it is rather apparent that we
have never really developed any technology  pertaining to the
selection, training, reinforcement, artificial reproduction of Psy
phenomena with a significant edge over "ordinary" intuition, whatever
the psycho-physiological mechanisms of the latter might be. In fact,
were it the case, casinos would be out of business.

Guessing where missile silos are located with unusual luck does not
change much if the guess is performed while being watched by a man
with a white smock.

Stefano Vaj