Ringer

I think this pretty much shows you blatantly ignore whatever you feel doesn't fit into your little "people are just out to get me' show. How many times have I said that's not what is required? You have nothing going for you in this entire discussion other than repeating the same thing over and over even if it's already been showed to be crap. Can you not even attempt to answer or respond to my criticisms? If not I guess I'll just have to assume I'm correct and you don't have anything useful to actually bring to the discussion other than what others have already shot down. Yeah, and him having the pages he needed to know didn't hurt either.

The nerve cluster thing is one of those things that is so vague as to be meaningless in this context. Touching any sort of sensory nerve is going to cause a reaction in the nervous system, but it doesn't mean the effect felt it due to that reaction. As an example if I massage the nerve clusters in my eye I won't be able to see better or my headache being less intense, I use to do this when I would have migraines, is because nerves in my helped my headache. Not to say it doesn't work, but the extremely vague wording annoys me. Makes it too difficult to actually look anything up.

But it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion if you are using something as evidence that is not considered evidence in a scientific format. Just because you advocate a broader focus doesn't mean we have to follow along. That's a whole different topic, as a whole if we are not focused on that we should focus on what can be accepted as evidence. You need to first show that the events aren't random chance before you can say they are possibly paranormal. Like I have stated repeatedly, it's not every single thought or feeling. Bad events in which there was no feeling and events when you had a bad feeling and nothing happened must be taken into consideration before you can start trying to explain the phenomena. Short version, you must show there is a phenomena before investigating that phenomena. Since you don't know the odds of it being an accident you can't logically conclude there was anything happening that wouldn't be normally happening. The log is not every single thought and feeling, only ones that could pertain to being telepathically induced as well as times when there was no instance of telepathy. No, you are begging the question. Nothing you stated qualifies the conclusion, and it assumes the condition was communicated. I have said it doesn't discard all anecdotes, but they can not be used for evidence. It doesn't matter if you agree or not, that is how things are. You have thrown around quite a few credentials as well IIRC. More to the point, I don't believe he was saying he is a scientist to be superior, but that he can be more of an authority on how scientific processes are than amateur scientists.

Are you saying that post was just a sideshow for personal attacks at swansont and you haven't been focusing on science? Finally we are starting to agree on things.

Holy mother of god, did you really just say you would leave the personal attacks behind and then make an entire post of personal attacks? I . . . I just don't know what to say.

You keep using that word. . . I do not think it means what you think it means. What? Yes, I made a spelling error. I actually do it fairly often. I might be able to if you actually addressed any points I make. Since that doesn't seem to be the case I will have to piggy-back Swansont and hope his back doesn't give out. Did you even read what that was a response to? No one has said to record every single thought, unless every thought you ever have is a bad feeling. If so that would really throw your telepathy idea out the window. It doesn't discard all anecdotes, sometimes they are used as a starting point, but they are not evidence. *Sigh* . . . Yes, that's the point.

Before I actually get into this discussion I'm going to need you to define consciousness because without a definition it will all just be arguing semantics.

He's not saying paranormal things are uncaused, he is saying that you can't show that his ulcer caused your stomach. Without the causality the incident can be considered uncaused or accidental. As to the personal contempt thing I'll quote what I've said about it before: Two events that coincide without relation to each other. I believe he is using accidental as a why to strengthen the idea that the two events have no causal connection and just happen to coincide. Still not what people have been saying as explained in detail above. No one is trying to say they are an expert in paranormal studies, but the majority are familiar with what is required for scientific investigation. If I say I have the ability to move objects at a distance and I only record the times when objects move I am not doing science, I am reinforcing a personal belief. It isn't off the wall or irrelevant, which reminds me, I would still like to know how your cranial nerve was pinched by the spinal column. There are people who have won the lottery multiple times. Why would they not be considered for paranormal ability?

Then please explain what this has to do with instincts.

Yes, but that is not what I have been suggesting. That's science. If you say you can 'feel' when something bad happens and seek to give evidence you need to record every time something bad happens and every time you have an unexplained 'feeling' and see if the correlation is significant and not chance. And that journal is, then, not a scientific journal, but a personal journal. You cannot use that to support your cause because it is cherry-picking. Welcome to the scientific method. I don't think his point was to appeal to authority. You are saying that science is one thing and he is saying it is another. Since his authority is valid it is not a logical fallacy. It would be like him telling you that what you do/did was not counseling because he thinks counseling is should be something it is not. [edit] I just remembered something that reminds me of this conversation. My Organic Chemistry professor was talking about our lab journals and what we needed to write while doing things in the lab. His words went something like: "Record everything. If you have an unknown record the color, smell, consistency, if it hurts you when you spill it, if it's pretty, if it reminds you of an old fling or your grandma. Not only the things involved in the experiment, I don't care if you pick a wedgie in here. If I see you pick at your arse I better see it in your lab report." [/edit]

And I'm pretty sure ddt is banned world wide. [edit] For agricultural use that is [/edit]

But you are not recording possible paranormal phenomena, you are only recording positive results. Then record every time something bad happens and you don't feel something, and every time you feel like something is wrong and nothing is. We were just being overly specific about the stomach pain, but anytime you wouldn't normally explain the feeling or pain with obvious cause it could qualify as a possible paranormal experience would it not? If you only record positive results it is cherry-picking. End of story.

I know you said that, but it's still wrong. If you only write down positive results you are cherry-picking. Just because you say something should work a certain way doesn't mean it does or will. Not accepting anecdotal evidence as positive evidence of a phenomena is the accepted methodology. Just because you don't agree with that isn't going to change it. It seems you are saying that results don't need to be replicated to be acceptable. Also, my bias of proper experimental controls and replication is a plague upon science. It's a shame we can't go back to the days when something is true because someone said their friend heard someone say it might work sometimes.

In what way would only recording positive results not be cherry-picking? What are the statistics of positive and negative results of your log? You admitted no one was there when you experienced the pain or feeling, so you were the only one there to confirm it (you told your wife and son, but confirmation based on anecdotes is not scientifically confirmed).

You know carbon dioxide dissolves in water right?

It's not an opinion, personal experience is, by its very definition, subjective. Sometimes the methods they use are unscientific and sometimes they are not, it depends on how they go about it. If they take mythology and stories of magic from another culture at face value than they are being unscientific. Why would I think physics is the only legitimate science when I don't even study physics? Don't move the goal posts. Yeah, we talked about this in another thread, if you want to go back into all that we can do it there. Yes and it does this by replication, as I've stated before, that is one of the major ways science retains objectivity. Someone in the field makes an observation of anything relevant to what he is studying. If the swarm of fruitflies interacts with the pissant it will be recorded. For the paranormal 'feeling' every time you get a stomach cramp, or any 'bad feeling', you would have to record it and measure the positive results with the negative results. Other wise it would be cherry-picking.

As we have discussed in previous threads, anecdotes are completely subjective. With that in mind I, personally, cannot at all see how you can hold that science is needs to be more objective while pushing that anecdotes should not be discarded.

I think knowing rules for valence electrons is pretty useful when you're starting out, but like CaptainPanic said there's nothing really absolutely necessary you need to know.

So you are going to ignore that I already stated we are not talking about, say, giving me a new brain and expecting it to be me, but putting my brain in another body and it still being me?

It's similar, but the law tends to leave quite a bit of room for interpretation in phrasing, even if they don't in words. In science leaving room for interpretation causes misunderstandings that are detrimental to communication. To an extant yes everything in science is a best guess, but the terms themselves tend to be strictly defined in most sciences. If I talk about, say, oxidation of NADH the boundary of NADH/NAD in its oxidized and reduced form is easily defined. The problem is life tends to be a bit of a mess for easy definitions. Since biological systems are always changing and are always branching off of each other there isn't a good way to really say This is species A and this is species B unless they are very distantly related. The closer in relation they become they more fuzzy the boundary becomes. Not to say species is not a valuable concept, if it was not it wouldn't be used, but when talking about evolution it is necessary to look at populations. Even more so when ancestral species is brought into the discussion because it's virtually impossible to tell if the ancestral population could mate with the extant population even if their morphology seems to be exactly the same. I'm not sure what it brings to the discussion but I am a student in biology and psychology, focusing on neurobiology.

I don't think different perspectives on what 'real' may mean has a big influence on the scientific merit of their discoveries. Not to say it wouldn't influence their thought process, but that is way these things must be verified experimentally, so individual bias can be minimized. His concept of real may have helped him conceptualize his ideas, but they didn't necessarily influence those those attempting to verify his ideas. Indeed, but I don't think I can handle a philosophical discussion in semantics right now (it's finals week and my brain is pretty jumbled at the moment). Yes, but my point was that even if my measurement was biased towards being low the replications should minimize the effect of my bias. That is why replication is so necessary to science, if only one experiment was done for any given hypothesis there wouldn't be any way to tell if the experiments were actually valid. Again, since theories such as these, ones that virtually change the game, are tested continuously the room for bias is fairly small. It's not the individual who removes subjectivity, but the theory being blasted by others to try to verify it or disprove it.

. . . I don't believe anyone said anything about getting a new brain. If your brain was successfully transplanted into a new body it would still be you, though motor and sensory neurons would need to be established and integrated into the new body. I would assume a brain transplant procedure would take that into account though.

In scientific communication definitions are very strict so communication can be as unambiguous as possible. Your example was a personal communication, it is the same thing when people say evolution is only a theory. They refer to a common usage, not a scientific one. When I say the lines are arbitrary I mean that the boundaries are not strictly defined and so the boundary is a sort of best guess. To show taxa are not arbitrary you must show that the boundaries are strictly defined, not attempt to use an alternate definition of arbitrary.

[emphasis added] Just because you could doesn't mean you do. How does you example of a single person making a claim invalidate the fact that the boundaries of taxa are arbitrarily decided? And yes I am a different person than Arete.

Like most of the others my writing is more formal than how I usually talk, but I suppose I'm also nicer on here than I usually am in person. Personally I don't think I'm mean but I do have a tendency to be sarcastic and make jokes that don't get translated well through text so I don't ever write them but would not hesitate to say it in person. Just this week I've been told to not be an @$$hole twice, but I don't think I've ever been called that, or any synonyms, on the forum.