ya ok.

that's not what I asked anyway. even though you probably pulled this statement out of ass.

I have come to the conclusion that maybe a "qualitative approach" experiment would defend its place here.

The principle would be: "don't contact us, we will contact you". The "victim" would leave enough money in his will to carry this out. When he has died some sceptics would be given the opportunity to freely pick different mediums. Each medium would, with audience, try to contact the "victim", and he would keep his "antenna" up, so be it in heaven, hell, or as a ghost.

The "qualitative approach" is this: The mediums would just be pepped with so much information by the "victim" when they get in contact, that when they are reporting it, the sheer mass and correctness of it would start to convince.

I was just reading this book and came across one guy who pulled this off (though am not completely convinced of his design). He sent 3 different mediums different pieces of info that only made sense when put together. But as I said it's a secondary resource and the experimental details are not thoroughly presented.

You just need someone (Randi?) with enough dough to make a bequest. The money is in a porta-safe inside the vault of an unnamed bank. The first medium to successfully contact the departed will receive the location of the bank, the details of the account and the combination to the safe. Ezgame. The furthest cheating can get you is inside the vault; the safe will be crackable alright but you don't get to keep the money unless you open the safe then and there.

It might be better to have the money in a separate high-yield account and just the details of that account in the safe. With a proviso that the account can only be accessed by someone who can prove they obtained the details via the safe. Then after X years the money can go to charity.

Or maybe the very best of all would be to pretend there's money in the safe, but really there's just a note saying "Cheating is wrong."

Fwiw, Randi would be a terrible choice to participate in any form of objective investigation.


The problem with this is that it doesn't rule out clairvoyance as a means of information transfer. The medium may not need contact with the deceased to be able to find the answer

If you're worried about confounds as exceedingly implausible as clairvoyance, it will probably be impossible to devise a test in which a positive result implies the hypothesis to be tested.

I am not "worried". It's the whole point of the exercise. and I don't think you can say it's impossible.

I don't really understand the clairvoyance objection. I would expect that the bequest would not be public knowledge until after the guy's death. IOW just out of nowhere "This rich guy died, and his will says..."

Randi wouldn't be 'participating' as such, since he'd be the dead guy. And presumably would be eager to spread his new-found knowledge of necromancy being a real thing.

You mean there aren't logically possible (though extremely implausible in real life) explanations that can account for a positive result that are not equivalent to the hypotheses you want to test?
As with virtually every empirical test, you'll have to settle with evidence less than proof.

yes, as long as you don't have gaping holes in your design, which you would if you left the target envelope lying around in a safe.

In this case we are already testing something that you deem implausible so you have to control for implausible confounding factors.

basically, for me, I have much less problems believing that someone can do telepathy/clairvoyance/precognition than believing that someone still exists and is able to communicate after death. There is just far more obstacles in the face of that happening. So if I were to design an experiment to test the claim, I want to be fairly certain the results are meaningful

maybe I misunderstood your design. What would you ask the medium to do exactly?

I was just pointing out that one could construct logically possible explanations that can account for any result, so a positive result doesn't amount to a proof of the target hypothesis regardless of the design of the experiment. Fairy certain, sure.

possible, maybe, as long as they're highly improbable. nothing is ever 100% but you can certainly get damn close. However, when your hypothesis is just as improbable as the alternative explanation, then I wouldn't consider your results conclusive or useful.

The funny thing is that debunkers don't seem to realize the above and always use the possible but improbable explanations to tackle and slow down parapsychology research. With this approach you can take in your hand any scientific journal and throw it in the trash because science would be impossible.

So we're agreeing (except for how plausible certain theories are..).

yes. though in parasychology research design it's a big flaw not to consider other means of ESP. It is as if saying parapsychology research is full of ****.

Contact the dead guy and get the details of the account needed to access the vault, as well as the combination to the safe stored in the vault. The existence of the whole setup need not be known in full by any one individual other than the dead guy. If I understand your 'clairvoyance' objection, you seem to be worried that a clairvoyant might be able to glean the info from the dead guy before he actually dies. But that can't happen if no-one but the dead guy knows of the plan.

If by 'clairvoyance' you refer to some kind of precognitive or telepathic faculty enabling someone to divine the existence of the plan and the relevant info before the guy croaks and the plan is announced then I suppose you might have a point. But such a person is unlikely to present themselves in any case; they will presumably have no need of the money and could easily reveal their abilities through other means if they wished to. So to be honest I don't think either form of 'clairvoyance' is a serious confounder. Maybe there's a third option I'm not seeing.

numbers are not conducive to psychic phenomena based on what research we have now. It has to do with side of brain being used.

I would not expect a medium to be able to get a number accurately even if there was communication


clairvoyance (clear vision) is remote viewing. the ability to "see" things far removed from your location in space-time

Also, keep in mind that even if these phenomena did exist, they are not expected to be perfect. neither in frequency nor quality so the message can't be too complex. though I can see now how it can be used if we associate the numbers with other things that can be communicated more easily.

I'm afraid I don't see much here beyond refining the hypothesis when it threatens to become falsifiable.

In light of recent events reminding us of 9/11 and all the conspiracy theories my friends like to eat up from Alex Jones (i'm not sold on him), I thought it might be a good topic to discuss the legitimacy/debunking of false flag incidents that led to wars.

For example, the 1898 attack on the USS Maine which led to the Spanish-American war has often been speculated to be one.

In 1933 the Reishstag fire blamed on communists a week before elections that put enough Nazis in office to allow Hitler to rise to power, this most definately was one.

Go wild.

This would be a good place for this: twoplustwo.com/190/history/low-content-thread-history-buffs-991676/.

Could humans be subspecies?

I'm not here to offer any proofs or asking you to believe me.. for anyone to be 100% certain is ignorant.

I'm just presenting correlations that may or may not be related. Too many times people present 'correlations' and are automatically misinterpreted as 'proof'. Any statistician will tell you that correlation =/= causation.

All I am asking for is open mindedness to consider the co-existence of humans and aliens.

Some correlations with religion:
http://www.netscientia.com/egypt.html

Ancient astronauts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts

So-called scientific discovery:
http://scienceray.com/biology/alien-...#ixzz1LjXbrP1O

If anyone is interested in a History Channel Doc:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgJ7-R4Zpbk

I'm 100% certain the subject line is false. Rudimentary biology and genetics knowledge says it's impossible.

At the end of the day, the evidence (the fact that we have human-like ancestors (*****) and cousins (neanderthals et al) and more distant cousins (chimps, organs, etc)) overwhelmingly suggests that we evolved on Earth. None of our biological structures are remarkable or even particularly different. They're just larger versions of what monkeys have. We run on the same neurotransmitters. We have the same basic brain structures (amygdala, etc). It's a slam dunk that we're a branch off from monkey ancestors with a handful of genetic changes.
This is the only possibility. But it gets sliced up pretty hard by Occam's Razor.

Has the history channel ever been right about anything?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...sts-claim.html

sounds like a big load of BS... but then again, so did alot of the things we believe in now before we believed in them.