TheVat

Non falsifiable, for sure. Couples often sense some paranormal connection. An example of how confirmation bias works there is when I look out the window from a dim room during bright daylight outside (closed window, so I'm sonically and visually isolated from the exterior) and see her in the yard - and she looks my direction as if sensing my fond gaze. But I also am aware that she is often not looking towards the house...and I quickly forget those incidences as they don't fit the romantic deep-connection narrative. I've noticed couples tend to do this with unusual stress events, e.g. spouse A gets in a car crash at 4 pm. Later, spouse B recalls, that's odd, I dropped a coffee mug at that same time and it gave me this ominous feeling. (never mind that B often drops his mug and gets vague ominous feelings that don't pan out) We use such narratives to strengthen and maintain our bonds with others.

The crucial roles of the umbilicus and placenta (requiring them to come along with the fetus), and the difficulty of separating them without harm and then somehow attaching them to another uterine wall (with attendant compatibility and host endocrine issues) would seem to be beyond present medical science. Uterine transplants were recently achieved, but not with embryos or feti in them, and that again would seem to be beyond present technique.

Antifreeze degrades faster in the bottle than in your car's cooling jacket. They add silicates, which tend to polymerize to a gel in a couple years if the solution is just sitting on a shelf. In a car, the heat/cool cycles and circulation actually prevent that silicate instability. However... The glycol portion degrades in the presence of oxygen, which means if air gets into the cooling system it will break down faster. This process forms acids like glycolic, formic, acetic and oxalic acids. These can corrode the radiator over time. So changing the coolant is a good idea. - former shade tree mechanic

The thing about social skills is that learning them seems so critically dependent on entering into real but structured social situations. I've wondered if some of the clubs (currently in more budgetary peril) in US primary schools sort of function (with an experienced adult supervising and stepping in) in that way. Fine arts clubs (drama, dance, choral, e.g.) seemed to work well for that.

Wesley was right up there with picardian shirttail tugging on my list of most annoying STNG things. That and Riker perpetually leaning or slouching against things (which I suspect was an attempt to have some rakish Kirk-like vibe, in the ship's command, given Picard's* lack in that area). *not that JLP wasn't an excellent captain, and far more believable holding that Starfleet rank in terms of age, intellect and professional persona.

Yeah, who needs polling or survey data? You met and talked to some people! And they were a perfect cross section of society because, like, people mojo and the scientists are all Commies and lying dirt bags! Once you learn to cut a birdsmouth joint on a rafter, you are incapable of being fooled!!! Forget all that silly fear mongering and conspiracy stuff! This guy talked to people! And it seemed like they were pretty darned smart in spite of their low IQs. Clearly they have AWESOME critical thinking skills because...well, they believe everything G. Edward Griffin says, like how cancer is just a vitamin deficiency easily cured with peach pits! F*** all those eggheads with their college degrees and obsession with "facts" and "evidence" and "peer-reviewed research." Here, hold my beer... I'm going to disprove the germ theory of disease! Because, like, NOBODY on my shift washes their hands and they're never sick!

Something circular about all this. Saying sciences are philosophically biased towards a physicalist worldview is like saying lawyers are biased towards a legalistic worldview. Yawn.

Citation for Chomsky, please. And look up brainwashing in a dictionary, please. As for your last sentence, some survey data to support that would be welcome.

Interesting to contemplate that a felon cannot have a gun but can be president. Does that mean that if elected, TFG cannot be in possession of the nuclear launch codes? I leave that to better legal minds, but I could certainly see an "intent of the law" argument there.

How are you aware of this? For you to know the reported correlation between streams/electrical towers and apparitions would suggest some scientists studied this, and got data that was inconclusive - that happens sometimes. Was this subject to peer review? Did the scientists check for black mold, where streams ran under the house? What about strong electrical fields having effects on the parietal region? Were demographic factors considered? (perhaps low income people live in cheaper, poorly maintained rentals more likely to have moisture problems or be near to electrical towers) Nothing in that example shouts disembodied minds, or suggests that as the first hypothesis, any more than the smudge on Becquerel's photo plate suggested he look for ghost rocks. I am not ridiculing, just trying too suggest that scientists choose testable hypotheses and with respect to the existing body of knowledge and Ockham's razor.

So you are saying that philosophical bias has some responsibility in scientists steering clear of what is often called fringe science? I am wondering: could this avoidance also be feasibility challenges? How would you propose to do an inquiry into the nature of ghosts or disembodied minds? It would seem that practical obstacles, other than bias, present themselves. Being nonphysical puts quite a damper on observation, measurement and the other method tools available. I've noticed you not mentioning bias in regard to our massive apathy about studying fairies. Tinkerbell seems to provide little opportunity for research, and almost everyone over age ten seems to understand that, as a discipline, Tinkerbell Studies is a dead end.

How do those three differ from each other? They seem like synonyms. So then you are positing that spirits are physical entities consistent with natural laws? What do you think their physical composition might be? Presently known? Confused now. This doesn't sound like spirits that are part of nature, i.e. the physical universe. Confused again. You said that existence of spirits can't be measured or observed, proven or disproven. So that would seem quite different from the ET hypothesis, which presents various avenues of scientific testing. Also: a more on-topic title would be helpful. Passive-aggressive is not an attractive look for thread titles.

In America, the preference is throwing people into lakes more than coins. Really, hadn't given much thought to how coinage gets into lakes but that could be one way. Does magnetic fishing just retrieve coins with nickel or iron in the mix?

He is funnier when viewed from across an ocean, I'm sure.

There are easier ways to catch fish. It takes 16 Teslas to levitate a frog, so you'd need at least that, and several megawatts to power the magnet, for the average fish. 😁

What have you found so far, looking up these terms on a search engine or bacteriology textbook? What answers are you not finding in your research? BTW, I doubt anyone would call any of the cell-surface proteins, like SPA, "popular," given their role in staph virulence. Possibly you meant "common."

Somehow, after almost a decade since the TFG splooged onto the national political stage, a thread about how horrible a person he is seems like a topic akin to Poop Stinks or Water is Wet or Puppies are Cute. The principal difference being that dwelling on poop, water, or puppies are all far better uses of your time. All you need to know is what you probably knew by 2017: he is a sociopath and narcissist currently well on the way to full blown dementia. God or Ontologically Neutral Universe help us all, if he wins in November.

By fraudulent or shoddy science. It is important to understand that if I go to the trouble of gathering data in good faith then I am not going to ignore it. If others do the same experiment and it looks like they get really different data, then there will be intense peer review and scrutiny of our datasets and methods. A common fraud is someone getting data that doesn't support their favored hypothesis and so they massage the data to fit. Because very few scientists are the sole researchers in an area of inquiry, this kind of fraud has a way of being discovered. Someone reported that transcranial magnetic stimulus of the parietal lobe caused people to see God. Turned out to be bad interpretation of data and experimenter asking subjects leading questions and limiting the sample to religious people. Then others repeated the TCMS experiment with a better cross-section of population, more open and neutral questions as to what was felt, more longitudinal data (repeating experiment with a subject multiple times over a couple years) and so on. From those experiments it seemed the parietal lobe simply generated a sense of presence and then people filled in with details that, in their cultural context, made sense to them. Shoddy science and fraud, ignoring evidence, tends to reveal itself.

And yet there you are, crossing bridges, stepping aboard jetliners, flipping on lightswitches and computers and stoves, taking pharmaceuticals, reading weather forecasts before you select your day's wardrobe, etc as if they were going to work properly, based as they are on empirical science. You must not be that worried about bias. And when there is bias, like the over-dependence on computational models of mind, prominent scientists (like my cited one, Robert Epstein) make beaucoup de bruit about it and there are massive critical discussions all over the Web and in professional journals and pretty soon MIT Technology Review and Nature and Scientific American are devoting feature stories to how computers are a weak and sometimes misleading metaphor for how brains work. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any other human mode of knowledge that is so brutally mean towards bias. The glee that scientists bring to finding bias, in peer review, is breathtaking.

Yep. Both are a metaphysical stance. The scientific stance is simply that consistent patterns appear in the phenomenal world as we observe it, and that it is governed by formulae which are uniformly applicable throughout spacetime. It is an ontology that is known as empiricism. It is premised on the notion that that which is real can be observed or known by inference from what is observed.

Not sure, but Luc might be letting panpsychism in the back door. If its conjecture, that all matter has some residual consciousness, were somehow supported (so far, zilch in the evidence department) then it would retrofit the hard sciences. It's a bit like the Star Trek Discovery rubber science idea that outer space is permeated by a mycelium - mind-blowing but lacking in empirical basis. Science has the method tools it has - where observation and objective measure can't go, is meta to science.

It's been a good question. I think there have been assumptions made by many in cognitive sciences on how the brain works, that are a sort of bias. Once again, cognitive scientist Robert Epstein's famous article which takes down the notion that the brain is like a computer.... https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

The requirement of time-reversal symmetry plays havoc with causality. In FWAT, emitters and absorbers are interchangeable. I think later interpretations like Cramers TIQM have tried to resolve this. Or maybe one just throws out all the advanced wave solutions and restores the traditional arrow of time? You don't have to use ALL the math. 😏

Time flies like the wind, fruit flies like a banana.

I do not believe that is the case for any of those four thinkers (two of whom have retired from horsemanship, may they rest in peace). They do assert, in various ways, that some areas of knowledge will not yield useful explanations of their objects of study purely via subjective experience. But none would argue that the study of big toe pain would not include gathering subjective reports of people experiencing big toe pain. To say the subjective has its limits in unraveling mysteries is not saying that the subjective doesn't exist.