Here’s my post...sorry it’s so long, I was just trying to be clear and thorough
(sheesh, and here I told myself I wasn’t going to go near this debate forum! :
Quote:
How would you respond to someone if they told you they'd discovered a "never-before-seen magical creature" with a single horn extending from it's head (much like a unicorn)? Would you humour them, take a look at the creature only to find a mammal with a bone grafted on it's head?
Those things are easy to prove or disprove because it's physical.
Telepathy, and other such things are a different beast altogether.Sorry, but you entirely missed point about the ‘magical unicorn animal’ example: it was not regarding whether or not evidence is physical...it was to illustrate how people tenaciously cling to illogical beliefs and blind themselves to other suggestions. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable to some...even unbearable. It’s about telling yourself what you want to hear so you don’t really have to think or face the fact that there is no ‘magic’. Telepathy still doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny, scientific, statistical or even good old horse sense.
In watching the video, right off the bat, I noticed how Sheldrake starts off by describing how consciousness is ‘in your head’ or a self made illusion, but certainly picks and chooses when “phenomenon” occur, such as one’s consciousness being a force which ‘projects from the skull beyond one’s head and inner self”. The extended mind seems to appear only if it is in favour of his data, it seems.
He also uses a lot of anecdotal evidence claiming that ‘the plural of anecdote is data’! No, actually, it’s just a number of people who hold a belief, and many people once believed anecdotally that the earth was flat, remember? Large numbers of people’s story’s does not make it true simply by the volumes who believe it.
His example of cats ‘sensing’ when they’re going to be taken to the vets...cats are just picking up on nonverbal body communication (tension in body language that is out of the norm) and tonal inflections which may not come out and say “vet visit time” but indicate that ‘something is up’ and the cat responds to that. He speaks of the synchronized movements of birds and fish as ‘social fields’ concernin movement, and tries to link this with telepathic fields. His claim that telepathic communication is evolved as it is transmitted through social fields, not through body language or signals, but the mind. Here, he is comparing apples to oranges and hoping that this circular reasoning will support his telepathic claims. His ‘social field’ theory falls flat on itself as it goes nowhere, unfortunately. He tries to say, "It is because it is what it is", which really tells us nothing.
Regarding dogs/cats illustrating knowledge of their owners' arrivals...expected and unexpected: A dog will get habituated to events occurring at the same time each day and will express their expectations no matter where they are. Of course the highest amount of time by the window by the animal is going to be closer to when the owner comes home. That’s just common sense. It’s just like humans...you may have often been at work, and then just get a feeling that it’s getting close to lunch and you always eat with a certain someone. It’s not that you’ve magically or telepathically sensed this...your circadian rhythms are just calibrated to this routine. Sheldrake tries to use an unknown departure time to assess this telepathy as well: it is easy to read into the dogs or cats behaviour that they are ‘anticipating’ their owner’s arrival, such as by the measurements of time by the window, but Sheldrake also dismisses any lack of anticipatory behaviour as ‘disinterest’?! How convenient! Sheldrake also calls his results ‘clear cut’, too. Clear cut in such manner that he is again only reading what he prefers into his 'data'.
He also points out that reptiles do not seem to have this ability as mammals do, but we must realize that the mammalian brain is without mammalian hardwiring, capable of picking up more stimuli and processing it further than a reptile would. Reptiles just don’t have the same communication skills because they aren’t needed...they’re not a social species or ‘pack’ animal to the degree mammals are, so of course their behaviour is going to be different, it does not support anything to do with telepathy or lack thereof.
He also tells us that animals know when they’re being stared at and can sense presence...how can this be possible when the human race has survived so well because of hunting them? You’d think their telepathy and sensitivities of ESP or telepathy would have saved them, no? Really, we can only find that animals bear a higher (but not foolproof) sense of smell, sight, hearing and the like than humans can even imagine. If animals had telepathy, why would they need manners of communication such as sound (some with sound frequency, such as elephants or bats) or body language? Same with humans, they use the same sorts of communication...the five senses can serve in unconscious ways which can give rise to ‘sensing telepathically’. We are more hardwired to pick up subtle signals than we realize...change in temp, slight colour changes, smells, etc. and this is often misperceived as a sixth sense of sorts. Psychics, fortune tellers and con men use these senses all the time to dupe people. We also send subtle signals without being aware of it, and these, too are picked up on and sometimes taken advantage of by others.
Regarding his mentioning breastfeeding mothers as an example: We must remember that all breastfeeding mothers are going to let milk one way or another, and often, as are baby’s becoming fussy frequently, it’s pretty much symbiotic (engorged boobs HURT! Lol!), not telepathy needed.
I find it funny that he calls anyone who might question his research or anything supernatural as ‘vigilantes’, and goes on to compare the amount of sceptics to researchers. He might as well say he and his friends are being ganged up on unfairly. Wow, what a way to play victim! No one is picking on him, they’re simply able to call him on his shoddy research conclusions and point out the its illogical flaws. He, himself, takes Wiseman’s words and contradicts himself. He says that Wiseman doesn’t agree with the replicated results, but admits that Wiseman’s is a successful replication, but then tries to save himself by saying that Wiseman doesn’t agree with his interpretation. Again, the animals are just waiting at the window due to habituation, and possibly boredom. The results still don’t bolster any sort of telepathy and I noticed how he conveniently glossed over Wiseman’s results as chance without providing explanation as to why his own results aren’t chance. I guess you don’t want to touch a hot potato even when it is sitting right in front of you.
As for telepathically predicting who will call you in an experiment, you’re going to naturally whip through only 4 people before picking up the phone. This is going to happen in a split second, especially with such a small number of people to choose from. He starts of wonky by asking a person to choose 4 people a person is biased to consider as ‘possibly’ telepathically connected with. Of course, you’re going to think about and phone those you are close to more often than not, more common sense. And, let’s not forget that the participants are going to be familiar with their callers habits (i.e..Mary likes to chat during mornings whereas John is more of an evening person, or Tim doesn’t get his break till 2, so he’d probably call around that time). As well, these people are all aware of the experimental conditions and it would be silly to think that this won’t impact their behaviour or perceptions.
Same with the strangers calling, the participants still have a frame of reference to work with, knowing the habits of their friends versus that of strangers. If a call came at 2:30, logically it can’t be Tim, his break is over, he’s back working. Mary prefers morning calls, and John won’t call till later, etc. Same with text and emails: Mary is going to be really excited about this experiment, so she’s probably going to be more participatory, thereby increasing chances of guessing her correctly. Mental entanglement?....naa, just the power of the influence of others thinking when you’re in the same environment or simply happen to share a lot of the same opinions with a person. There are going to be high chances that you’ll be parallel in a lot of lines of thought, but there is nothing supernatural about it. Sheldrake himself says in the video that telepathy tests work best when done with people who know one another well. He also tries to call such things “mental resonance” when all it is is small scale zeitgeist, societal/cultural influence and a touch of pertinent groupthink, so to speak. Nice way to prime and pad one’s data, I tell ya. He admits that some people may cheat and that he has no way to tell that. Then he tells us to do this experiment with friends...now he’s advising others to indulge in pseudoscience, yet he says that research needs to be done with large amounts of samples. Self contradiction again. He then even mentions that tests done using sceptics have lower or negative evidence to support telepathy than those who believe, because in the “sheep/goat” experiments, what you believe will influence study results. Doesn’t that speak for itself?
Sheldrake also tries to say that the evolution of telepathy has involved with technology, such as phones, emails, etc and that such happenstance was scarce previous to these inventions. Actually, before industrial times, people lived very far from one another, reducing their chances of not only thinking of one another (out of sight out of mind, in a way), but there were also no ways in which to accurately record any sort of data like this.
In this so called research, Sheldrake continuously touts his results as telepathy, when it all really boils down to chance. He admits that chance comes as a caveat, but still doesn’t present any reliable evidence for telepathy. His experiment results are not valid, as in they do not measure what they are supposed to measure, as shown by Wiseman’s replication. Wiseman’s interpretation clearly revealed habit and random gazing out the window episodes, and it was this that was measured accurately, whereby Sheldrake is still trying to prop it up as some sort of ESP or ‘selective attention’.
Have you even watched the Sheldrake mention of Randi? I don't think you did.Indeed, I did watch, and from begining to end...as well, the site I had suggested has nothing to do with Randi, actually. Your refusal to explore it only illustrates your own prejudice. He calls science ‘narrow’ and sceptics ‘bigoted and ignorant in their prejudices’. He also tries to scathe Randi, saying that he’s a liar and that Randi’s data loss was pretty convenient and that he exposed Randi as failing to have watched the videos. I’d like to see Randi’s response to this, because Sheldrake certainly has a manner of decontextualizing any angle he can, it seems. As you can see, he uses ad hominem arguments when it suits him. Why did he not show these emails? He cared enough to make mention of them and I’m sure it would have been easy to reveal them. He doesn’t seem to mind calling Randi ‘dishonest’, so why not back it up? Is what is in your email inbox not your property? Can we not see Randi respond to this
“emailing”, or Sheldrake’s dog experiments for that matter?, for I believe he admits to an error which may be taken out of context, but he also asks if he can test any of Sheldrake’s claims...it doesn’t seem to me as thought he is shutting Sheldrake out at all here.
Another matter of taking something out of context wouldn’t surprise me here. And as well, if Sheldrake is so confident in his experiments as revealing telepathic ability, what does he have to lose by entering in the bid Randi has offered with a $1,000,000 jackpot. Publishing rights or not, as the scientist, he’s required to present himself and his data beyond a reasonable doubt, there shouldn’t be anything to fear. I think Sheldrake lacks confidence in himself when it comes down to it. Goodness forbid his experiment be published and exposed as faulty, as it has in the past. He tries to discredit Randi for not being a scientist, but hey, neither am I nor are a lot of people who can easily question his research methods which are speaking for themselves. It would be nice to see another side of it,
maybe even from Randi himself!To summarise, Randi criticized Sheldrake's study which has been repeted a lot of times and shows over-chance-value of predicting the caller, for example.
I still don’t see where Sheldrake’s study has been repeated many times, aside from Wiseman, who pointed out that Sheldrake’s conclusions were incorrect as he’d wrongfully misinterpreted his data in the first place, amongst other factors. I only see one other who tried replication beyond this, and this person’s work was not accepted, as told by Sheldrake himself.
But I'll submit to you that Sheldrake is more of a skeptic than Randi.
I don’t see this at all...all I see is a man who attacks anyone who criticizes him or who he thinks will criticize him. He doesn’t address anything head on which exposes him, and just seems to point fingers with ad hominems, red herrings and straw men. He’d not need such devices if his studies truly stood for themselves.
Randi on the other hand is an ideological skeptic that goes out of his way to disprove anything that might sound woo-woo to him.
Randi hasn't done any research on what Sheldrake is doing - he's not interested.
Randi hasn’t been out to hurt anyone, he just watches pseudoscience do all this to itself, as such with Sheldrake. Research and experimental science are two different animals...again, Randi just lets people like Sheldrake shoot themselves in the foot, he doesn’t have to do any scientific experiments or stats analysis to prove these charlatans wrong when they come wearing their own noose. Randi is just the messenger, and the bearer of bad news is often wrongfully shot. The only thing I see Randi saying to the public is “This has been exposed as either fraudulent or mistaken, don’t get taken by it”. No harm in that, from what I can see, he’s just exposing the truth of the matter. That, and there are many who would refuse to call Sheldrake’s work “research”.
As such, this leads to his encounter with Richard Dawkins, whom he claims ‘speaks from prejudice and ignorance’ and bears undesirable traits as a ‘professor of the public understanding of science’. From Sheldrake’s recalling of the encounter, he recalls how he said to Dawkings “telepathy isn’t a delusion...lots of people have telepathy’. Dawkins recounted how evidence, stats, etc can be misinterpreted and skewed all the time. Sheldrake goes on to finish the story with how he exposed Dawkins interviewing him under false pretenses due to a bungling by an assistant, and he wouldn’t sign a release before they left. Yet, he says that he wouldn’t mind if the whole incident was seen on tv. If that was the case, why didn’t he just sign the release if he, in all his craftiness, was able to put Richard Dawkins and his reasoning in its place, then? From the sounds of it, Dawkins was capable to debating evidence and science (bearing in mind that the methods are standard in all fields), but time constraints wouldn’t allow. Sheldrake scoffs, saying that Dawkins is only good in his own field, not his own, but yet, this doesn’t address how the scientific method transcends both their fields. Another ad hominem argument. I’d actually like to find out more about this incident, as I’m sure it’s yet another example of a situation being told to suit the storyteller. Sheldrake seems to have a habit of doing this, and this certainly hasn’t helped his standing amongst professional fields.
In all, where is the evidence and results to support telepathy’s existence? Proper experimental science has never claimed to be against the idea of it, it is simply saying that there has never been anything to establish its existence. I don’t know of any skeptic who has been brought up to disbelieve anything by default, nor to look down on others as stupid, as Sheldrake tries to state. All it is, again, is asking, for example: How does this apparent Santa person get into the house when we don’t have a chimney anyway? I’m going to check this out a bit more, because the plausibility of this may or may not be questionable”. Every possible avenue must be explored before Santa is dismissed. Sheldrake isn’t bearing the brunt of ‘sociological agendas’ or being oppressed for speaking about that which is considered ‘taboo’. It’s simply a matter of fact that the only taboos being broken are those of questioning fairy tales and superstition by a population that isn’t going to settle for them anymore. No one is trying to beat up Sheldrake and his friends, as he seems to claim. He only need to remove his fingers from his ears, stop crying in his cornflakes over being 'picked on', learn some proper experimental models, research ethics, and statisitical analysis and maybe he'd come up with something that is worth some regard. He's done this all to himself, my goodness!
Well, that’s certainly enough for one sitting. I’ll take a boo at the Randi link in the next day or two, I’m pooped today.