The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #58954   Message #936632
Posted By: Amos
19-Apr-03 - 04:19 PM
Thread Name: BS: Bogus science--warning signs
Subject: RE: BS: Bogus science--warning signs
Guest:

The sort of science which Gardner and company promote is extremely hard science; for example this notion that being able to improve the signal to noise ratio is a requirement is not part of traditional scientific method, which calls only for replicability and empircal verification by others -- in material science it is a good test to require that the same experiment can be done with the same results in a different place and time by different people (of course that means it really is NOT the same experiment, obviously, but we'll over look that part).

While this is fine for material science it is absolutely absurd to try to impose these standards on a field of phenomena as little understood as life, awareness, and "para"psychological things. It is a self-defeating, self-referential loop that essentially argues that all phenomena of life are molecular, therefore awareness is molecular, and all molecular phenomena are replicable and therefore the standards of physics experiments apply to experiements in -- for example -- remote viewing or precognition. The discontinuity in the phenomena sets are just not taken into account.

This sort of steam-roller cogntiive process is also typical of knee-jerk thinking at both ends of the political spectrum.

A