--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" <anartaxius@> > wrote: > > > <snip> > > There have been a number of large well-designed studies > > recently, such as the Templeton study, of 'intercessionary > > prayer', which seem a lot like yagyas. These studies failed > > to show any effect. > > Is intercessory prayer *enough* like yagyas to extrapolate > the results of the prayer tests to yagyas? I can think of > several differences that could render such extrapolation > pretty weak.
Judy, Yagyas and intercessory prayer are different but they both seem to rely on 'action at a distance' through some kind of non-physical intervention via the human mind and experience. The philosophical conundrum here is how does something that is non-physical affect a physical entity. A physicist would currently have to rely on gravity, the strong interaction, the weak force, or the electromagnetic force to attempt to explain such a thing. Saying it is 'consciousness' does not help at present because scientists cannot agree on what consciousness is or whether it can actually do anything. > > > Psychic, long-distance phenomena have been studied for years > > without making a dent in the scientific community as the > > results have never been clear cut, and studies have been > > found to contain serious flaws which became evident when > > replication attempts failed, such as the Targ-Puthoff long > > distance viewing study many years ago. The result of this > > study seems to have been mentioned by MMY in the Science of > > Being and Art of Living as an established fact, but in fact, > > the result was disproved. > > Or rather, the results were not confirmed, right? Yes, not confirmed, the null hypothesis confirmed. 'Proven' is loose usage. > Do you have a cite for this? Marks, D.F. & Kammann, R. (1980). The Psychology of the Psychic. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books.ISBN 0-87975-121-5 (cloth) I read this many years ago and I think there may be a second edition. It went over the Targ-Puthoff remote viewing experiments. As I recall, a replication of the experiment failed to confirm. Their subsequent investigation showed that the replicators had removed verbal queues that allowed the graders to match up locations with drawings. This had something to do with how the hits and misses of remote viewing experiment were categorised. When they were able to get raw data from Targ and Putoff, they found such verbal information in the data. When the same data was truly blinded, the remote viewing failed with the original experimental data. The Templeton Study was done by Herbert Benson. http://www.ahjonline.com/article/S0002-8703(05)00649-6/abstract
