Can you list any single fact for me that could not be questioned using philosophical inquiry?
Church does change its ideas, but it also openly opposes the questioning of its ideas. Science openly encourages the questioning of its ideas, even if they refer to them as facts from time to time. If you want to revolutionize decades of research with a new theory then you should be prepared for significant resistance. In fact, I would argue that the resistance should be there (as it currently is in the academic landscape). Without that resistance you'd get scientists with enormous potential, wasting their potential on overly ambitious crack-pot ideas that would be treated equally to ones that have far more research and rigor behind them.

Cosmos is about Human History. And how humans explored the explanations for the nature of the Cosmos and ourselves. This can't be done in an honest way without mentioning god(s) or religion.

Third episode was well done. Went into the intricate and sometimes ugly and messy world of science and publishing. Which had just got started in a serious way around the time of Newton. Also glad they did not gloss over the facts; Newton was indeed a strange bird. He had one foot in the middle ages and one foot in the new modern world that he helped forge.

Glad Halley received some long overdue kudos.

Exactly, so we should try to avoid making the same mistake with science as people make with religion.


You can't eliminate the effects that you don't know about.


At least you recognize it as science. I suspect many don't. In fact it is science in its truest sense when it's done right, following the scientific method objectively to answer a question instead of just ignoring the question because it seems ridiculous or because we assume we already know the answer.


There is fervent denial of those things, just not from the religious folk.

That's crap. I didn't get a degree in physics and a minor in biochemistry because I don't believe in the scientific method. I merely seek to make the scientific method live up to its promise by not behaving more like a religion, and not assuming that it's more than it actually is.

There are no Facts, only facts. 1+1=2 is an arithmetic fact, but it is actually based on axioms of set theory and logic which can be questioned. In most contexts we don't question them, and in those contexts it is a fact. When an evolutionist is addressing people with different beliefs, evolution cannot be assumed as a fact.


You mean like string theory?

But I thought your qualm was with natural selection? now you're extending it to the idea of evolution in general?
What I mean is: academic resistance to new ideas is not necessarily a bad thing (because science operates differently to religion), nor should it be surprising in any way. Of course when you frame the discussion in your mind under the assumption that science commits the same folly as religion, you will naturally be blinded to the fact that resistance to new ideas within academia is completely different to resistance to new ideas within religion.

If you read the papers you see what their criteria is for choosing the papers. The most recent did a broad keyword search and then screened to make sure the tests were randomized and provided enough statistical information. Nothing biased there.

Hyman has been the primary critic for decades. He has a paper where he points to a lot of inconsistencies in the strength of the effect from one paper to the other that are unexplained, and he objects to the statistical combining of data from different experiments. Still, the overall hit rate over all studies analyzed is impressive. That one where I said p < 0.001 was a massive understatement because they got 482 hits out of 1498 on something that would be 25% by random chance. That has a random chance probability of 1.8*10^-10. Now *that's* improbable. If this were anything else that you didn't have a bias against, you wouldn't be saying it is improbable.

Hyman said this in 1996:

"I want to state that I believe that the SAIC experiments as well as the contemporary ganzfeld experiments display methodological and statistical sophistication well above previous parapsychological research. Despite better controls and careful use of statistical inference, the investigators seem to be getting significant results that do not appear to derive from the more obvious flaws of previous research. I have argued that this does not justify concluding that anomalous cognition has been demonstrated. However, it does suggest that it might be worthwhile to allocate some resources toward seeing whether these findings can be independently replicated".

He seems more critical these days, not believing that the meta-studies constitute replication. Unlike this guy Radin from 1995:

"We are forced to conclude that when psi research is judged by the same standards as any other scientific discipline, then the results are as consistent as those observed in the hardest of the hard sciences!”


I don't know what it has to do with quacks and crackpots. That's a standard method for producing the Ganzfeld effect which is a phenomenon known in psychology, not just parapsychology.

"The ganzfeld effect (from German for “complete field”) or perceptual deprivation, is a phenomenon of perception caused by exposure to an unstructured, uniform stimulation field.[1]

It has been most studied with vision by staring at an undifferentiated and uniform field of colour. The visual effect is described as the loss of vision as the brain cuts off the unchanging signal from the eyes. The result is "seeing black"[2] - apparent blindness. It can also elicit hallucinatory percepts in many people, in addition to an altered state of consciousness."


The ping pong balls block visual input except for the red light which provides the uniform source of color, and the headphones produce white or pink noise.


We didn't know how electomagnetism worked when we discovered it, and we still don't know how gravity works. I agree with Roger Penrose that we won't completely understand the mind until we have a complete understanding of physics. That means we also won't know what the mind is capable of. It could interact using principles of spacetime or even other dimensions that we do not yet understand. There are speculations that it could involve quantum entanglement which is a known phenomenon allowing particles to influence each other no matter how far apart they are separated.

That's kindof the point, though. The method should isolate the specific variable(s) being tested as much as the experimenter can eliminate potential side effects. No one will ever claim to know that there can't possibly be another explanation for a phenomenon, but if we have enough different test cases verifying the same phenomenon and supposed cause, then the likelihood of their being another cause decreases and eventually within the scientific community we can accept it as a 'scientific fact' within the realm of what Tyson is talking about in the TV show. It takes many tests, and many years of analysis and there isn't a cut-and-dried line at which this happens so there is some element of subjectiveness to this, but certainly evolution with its 150-yeasrs of supporting evidence and tests falls into this category as much as anything ever has.

I would not claim to say inflation is a 'fact' based on this one experiment at the same level as evolution. I would say in the case of inflation that the evidence strongly supports it has having taken place. If someone is going to deny that inflation happened, for example, then they need to explain what other factor was not considered in the experiment, and then conduct a test to evaluate whether the previously-unknown factor was the actual cause of the observation. Otherwise they are just speculating and wasting everyone's time.

Likewise if we are going to say evolution is not true then there needs to be similar testable claims made to show it is not true, and that the tests which we thought were confirming the idea were flawed in some way, or measuring some other phenomenon which we are not currently aware of.

No one is denying that inflation happened or saying that evolution^* isn't true. We have a proper word for these things, and it's "theory", not "fact". And that's a fact.

^*Monkeys-> men. That evolution occurs in nature IS a fact.

Decreases to what? How do you know it even decreases significantly? It's meaningless to talk about likelihoods and probabilities here because you don't have a proper sample space. There could be lots of explanations that would be considered equally likely if you thought of them. There could be explanations that you have no ability to even comprehend. You can't know what you don't know. And if you don't know, then you don't have a fact.

I'm more worried about the stuff that hasn't been published.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias

Actually of the 40 studies that Bem, Palmer, and Broughton analyzed, 30 in aggregate showed no significant effect, so it's not like he's only looking at good results. But the extra 10 brought the overall Z score up to 2.59. Then they did an analysis that showed the effect is correlated with how well the experiments conformed to the standard procedure, with the ones conforming the best giving the best results.

But how about many of the experiments that didn't show "positive" results, maybe negative results (!) and weren't accepted by any paper, or the parapsychologists thought they must have done something wrong, not trying to get published? You cannot know how many they were. This haunts accepted science as well. It may take decades to sort out.

If they didn't get accepted, I assume there was some good reason for that. Clearly there are a lot of studies published that didn't have significant positive results.

The distribution is most likely skewed. Biased towards positive results. That's because the researchers interested in that area wish for those results, as are the papers interested and prepared to accept the stuff.

You assuming they have a good reason for not accepting the stuff is putting too much trust in the process. You should review a bit. How about your criticism now?

What if they only publish (better yet submit to publish) the good results ones and you never find out about the other ones that revealed nothing extraordinary. There has to be an objective way to know of all studies made even those that didnt result in publication. I mean if one "wants" to disprove something they may try and fail and you never learn it but if they get lucky you do learn it. Same with proving something. Those that are publishing after a suggested result by others that was presented for the first time and was intriguing need to state from the beginning what they intend to do and eliminate any potential benefit they may have in the direction of the result establishing that their only function is to reproduce the results or show they are not attainable repeatedly to such a degree that it acquires some statistical value or that something is there needing further evidence because now it has started to look promising.

This is is why the only studies that matter in my opinion when you have no reason to trust the original work are those that are trying to reproduce a result (if you have a reason to fear the original result was due to publication bias) and will for that reason start with the intention to test and present anything they find no matter how dull or spectacular.

There have been claims of bias going the other way. Susan Blackmore was once a parapsychologist who found little evidence of the paranormal in her PhD thesis, and she's now a skeptic. It is claimed that she ignored studies with positive results that had flaws, but didn't ignore studies without positive results that had flaws.

That's fine masque, but how come with results this significant, experimental physicists aren't jumping out of their skin to see if they can reproduce this?

We are waiting for the results, patiently: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology)

They can continue another century, but hey, there are areas more likely to pay off. Do you want to deplete them of money?

It ganzfeld experiments clearly are not pseudoscience, I wouldn't care if they never got a positive result, let alone the persistent astonishingly positive results they did. That's an example of the type of narrowminded bigotry I'm talking about. They follow the scientific method more carefully and with more statistical sophistication than a lot of what passes for hard science. There are a lot of variables to be tested too. I read the critics papers, and I see quibbles here and there, but I don't see anything that explains the results. That's supposed to be science too, but they don't seem to realize that. I declare them to be pseudoskeptics.

In before skeptics here want to give equal time to alternative theories to what makes a streak across the sky every 76 years. I mean, Haley's observations were based on historical hearsay, what rubbish since we know more people think it's a bad omen from the spirit realm. I'm glad ndgt didn't say it was a fact that Haley's comet had a period of 76 years, it would receive a lot of backlash in this thread and detail it for at least a 100 posts.

The thread is derailed because of people that can't seem to understand the difference between things that happen all the time (comets) which can be observed directly and have trajectories that can be calculated, and something that allegedly only happened 1 time in the past.

It's not really derailed though. There isn't much to say about a pop science show, so we might as well make the thread useful by talking about the philosophy of science, evidence for psi, and the ethics of piracy.

Away from derail: just saw part II on the National Geographic. Liked it, looks to be an incredibly good series. Noticed specially these, experiencing new: How the protein molecules wander along the strings, how the dna is split. The organism surviving 5 extinctions. Think he said most species have succumbed after those. No, way, most succumb during the more moderate changes in between. He says we don't have to be ashamed of not knowing all; how did life evolve, maybe you will be the one finding out? Eye starting to evolve when light-recognizing organisms fled UV-light. Our eyes not very well adapted for being on land, but evolution can't go back to the drawing board. Interesting speculation about how possible life on Titan would look like. Liquid methan and ethan instead of water. Liquid anyway.

Will let my DVR talk next sunday again.

Watching part 3 now. So natural selection allowed us to evolve the ability to recognize dangerous plants and animals. Seems to me that recognizing even one extra plant or one extra animal is a very complex process. It doesn't seem like you have 1 mutation in a DNA base pair, and suddenly you can recognize a bear. If you just have a few of the many changes necessary for recognizing a bear, that's no selective advantage at all. The bear eats you like everyone else. If they had no selective advantage, then how did they get passed on so that all these changes could accumulate until we could recognize a bear?