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Testing and repetition of paranormal events.
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16-07-2009 10:00am#1
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i understand that but i ask why the fixation?
I'm not sure what you mean by "fixation"
You asked why is it necessary. That is why it is necessary. It is a very important part of science. Would you call that a fixation?
Im sure Derren Brown could come along and do a fantastic version of a psychic till youre blue in the face, and you probably wouldnt be able to catch him out - but what does that prove? Nothing much in reality.
What does that have to do with anything?I think you have to get past the notion that just because you can repeat something, doesnt make it genuine
Whether an explanation is "genuine" and "fake" are some what of a different issue
What matters is whether a theory is accurate or inaccurate.
A theory being inaccurate due to malice (someone is lying about data) or some non-malicious reason (someone was mistaken), it doesn't really matter. The purpose of science is to learn what is happening with a particular phenomena, and if what is happening is someone is faking it then that is as much a valid thing to learn as anything else.
When exploring your theory you can not say anything beyond your theory. If you theory cannot successfully predict the results of experiment then it is inaccurate, but all that tells you is that your theory is inaccurate.
Say for example you have a theory that Joe Bloggs can see through walls. You devise an experiment to test that theory. Mr. Bloggs seems to be able to do this, so you record your experiment and your results and send them off to other scientists to try and replicate. None of them do.
At this point you know your theory that Joe Bloggs can see through walls is inaccurate. You are not saying anything about anything else apart from your theory. It predicted something that cannot be repeated in experiments.
You go back and look at your experiment and the experiments of the other scientists. Ah ha you say. There was something you didn't record. Your wall was painted yellow. This was not recorded in the details of the experiment so it is doubtful that the other scientists set their experiment up this way.
You repeat the experiment with Mr. Bloggs using a yellow wall and walls of other colours. He only sees through the wall painted yellow. You then record this in the details of your experiment and send it off to the other scientists. They repeat the experiment with the same details and sure enough they all have Mr. Bloggs apparently seeing through a wall.
Your original theory was inaccurate ("wrong" in laymans terms). Mr. Bloggs cannot see through walls. Your new theory is that Mr. Bloggs can see through yellow walls. This gives you a line of study to greater refine your theory to explain in more detail what is actually happening with Mr. Bloggs looks at a yellow wall. Lots more experiments are required.
The point of that is to highlight that when an experiment fails that is only a reflection on the specific theory it is testing.
A no point did the scientist conclude that Joe Bloggs is faking it. That is a totally different theory that is not being testing by that experiment. At the moment all the scientist is concerned with his is specific theory that he is testing at the moment.
If that theory turns out to be a complete dead end the scientist may start considering other theories, such as Mr. Bloggs is faking it. But that is a different line of scientific enquiry that requires a new set of tests to refine that theory.
And that theory may turn out to be a dead end. So the theory that he is seeing through walls appears inaccurate and the different theory that he is faking it appears inaccurate. So the scientist may move on to a different theory.
And so on and so on.
You can have competing theories trying to explain the same phenomena, and one of them could be that the person is lying, another could be that the person is experiencing an illusion, another could be that they are actually reading minds or seeing through walls.
All these are independent theories and require independent experiments and study. "He is faking it" is not a property of the theory "He is seeing through the wall". It is a separate theory that is trying to explain the same phenomena. They are two independent theories and you can assess how accurate each theory is.
If something cannot be repeatably replicated then all that demonstrates is that the theory you are exploring is inaccurate. Something is missing or wrong in the theory.
That is actually a good thing, science advances by disregarding bad inaccurate theories. In fact a theory must be falsifiable to be considered scientific. It must be possible, at least in theory, to demonstrate the theory is wrong through experiment. Otherwise you cannot test it properly.
When you say "it" what do you mean.and just because you cant, doesnt mean it isnt.
In science if you cannot replicate in repeated experiments a result predicted by your theory then it does mean your theory is inaccurate because your theory is predicting a result that is not being consistently reproduced.
Something is wrong with your theory. That is all you can say at that point.
It is the scientists responsibility to go back and look at the theory and the experiments to see what is going wrong. You cannot conclude anything other than your theory is inaccurate. But it may point you towards exploring a different theory does turn out to be more accurate.
The goal of science is to develop theories that can accurately predict experiment results.0 -
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yeah, that would be fine if you want to know how good you are at predicting a theory.
Actually it is If you want to know how good a theory is at predicting a phenomena.
Which you do, that is what science is, determining the accuracy of theories (models) at explaining phenomena.
The better a theory is at predicting a phenomena the more accurate you can say your theory is and therefore the better of an idea you have as to what is happening with the phenomena. A theory is after all simply a model of what you think is happening in a phenomena, be it the Earth moving around the Sun or a strange light in a dark ruin.
The classic example of the refinement of theory based on them failing to predict phenomena accurately is Newton's theories of physics.
They accurately predicted things like motion, heat and gravity up until the late 19th century when experiments got more sophisticated and scientists could study phenomena in much closer detail.
Then we found that Newton's theories where actually inaccurate at a certain fine grained level. The theories were missing something. There was something happening in reality that was not being accurately modelled with the theories.
General relativity filled this gap of knowledge and can be considered sort of like a refinement of the earlier theories which while appearing accurate for a long time were in fact inaccurate.
NoYou seem to be saying that in science if you cant predict a result then that result does not exist, or cant exist. I've no idea how you got that from what I wrote.
If your theories predictions do not match the results of an experiment or observation then the theory is wrong. It is inaccurate in some way.
It could be greatly inaccurate or just a little bit inaccurate. But it is inaccurate in some way.
In fact all scientific theories are probably inaccurate in some way, science is a continuous process of producing theories who's predictions closer match experiment by refining and changing the theory based on experiment. And if a scientists ever does produce a 100% accurate model of some phenomena it is impossible to know they have done that since it is impossible to know before hand that there is not something you are missing. You only discover that you are missing something when you discover a part of the phenomena that is not modelled accurately by your theory.
For example general relativity, which improved upon Newton's theories, ran a-ground some what in mid-20th century because it does not accurately predict quantum physics. It does accurately predict the movement of large bodies but falls apart at the quantum level. We are missing something, the model we have is incomplete. And scientists have been working long and hard trying to come up with theories that both accurately model the big (gravity, planets, suns) and the small (atoms, quarks, electrons etc) in the same theory.I say once more, stop hiding behind the word 'science' and start grasping what scientists do and think.
That is what I'm doing. This is, to the best of my understanding, how scientists "do and think"
Perhaps it would be helpful if you explained what you believe scientists do and think. We could then perhaps clear up any confusion or differences.you make long posts, but which lack in actual information.
Ok, if there is some part of my posts that you feel I'm brushing over or not explaining properly just ask. I am more than happy to go into further detail.
So far my "long posts" have be answers to questions you have asked.0 -
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That is the million dollar question. :pac:But how can this be practically applied to paranormal phenomena?Just for the sake of discussion, I'll give three specifics, in order to give an idea of the repeatability problem as I see it:
A 'haunted' house where apparitions have been seen
Someone who talks to dead people
Crop circles
The easiest of those to form controlled repeatable experiments around is the man who talks to dead people as it is possible to isolate him/her. Assuming they are up to it you can then experiment at length with them
Crop circles would be more difficult as in most cases it is only the after effects of the phenomena that are observed not the actual formations themselves (unless you are the one faking it of course :pac:)
The best way to approach them is probably the way they have been approached, by people trying to replicate them as close as possible. This method of replication is essentially your "theory" and the matching of prediction is matching the type of crop circle you can make using your method with the evidence of real world crop circles.
The haunted house is trickery still because of lack of control over the environment. Again a possible line of scientific enquiry would be to try and replicate the pheneomena using known laws of physics. At the very least this will narrow down exactly the unexplained bits in the unexplained phenomena.
They are certainly interesting challenges, ones that are mirrored in the rest of science. For example scientists have no clue what Dark Matter is (or even if it is "matter") they simply know something is there because of the effect it has on visible matter. But studying it and experimenting with it is near impossible because it doesn't seem to interact with anything in the universe except through gravity (a possible explanation is that it is matter in a higher dimension, and that it's gravity seeps through to our dimension).
At least with "ghosts" you can see something
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That sounds almost fiendish.That is the million dollar question. :pac:
The easiest of those to form controlled repeatable experiments around is the man who talks to dead people as it is possible to isolate him/her. Assuming they are up to it you can then experiment at length with them
So what would the experiments consist of?
That has been done, didnt they find differences in the breaks in the stems or something? For the record I think crop circles are most likely all fake btw. Just stating my bias.Crop circles would be more difficult as in most cases it is only the after effects of the phenomena that are observed not the actual formations themselves (unless you are the one faking it of course :pac:)
The best way to approach them is probably the way they have been approached, by people trying to replicate them as close as possible. This method of replication is essentially your "theory" and the matching of prediction is matching the type of crop circle you can make using your method with the evidence of real world crop circles.
Anything can be replicated, how would doing so help? I just dont follow that logic.The haunted house is trickery still because of lack of control over the environment. Again a possible line of scientific enquiry would be to try and replicate the pheneomena using known laws of physics. At the very least this will narrow down exactly the unexplained bits in the unexplained phenomena.0 -
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That sounds almost fiendish. So what would the experiments consist of?
Depends on what you theory is, ie are you exploring the theory that he is actually communicating with a dead person. Brake down that into its component parts. That may mean to getting right down to looking at what his brain is doing as this is happening.
Have a think about a prediction of that theory if it were true and then try and falsify it. Most experiments work by trying to disprove a prediction of a theory, thus demonstrating that there is a problem with the theory. If you do this a lot and the improved theories begin to survive your experiments you know you are on to something.
This is not the same as trying to support the theory he is say faking it, that is a different theory.Anything can be replicated, how would doing so help? I just dont follow that logic.
The closer you replicate the results the better idea you have of what could be causing the phenomena.
If you come across an observation of the phenomena that you cannot replicate then this is something to have a much closer look at. You are basically discarding stuff you can already explain to try and get at the core of what you cannot explain. That is the interesting bit.0 -
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