Edmund Storms wrote:
To get back to science, a lot of scientific study has been done to reveal the existence of this ability. The results of this work, at least to me, show that thought transfer is real. But like all such claims, this belief is rejected by conventional science. My question is, what would it take to change this attitude? Or is this possibility too scary for it to be accepted regardless of the evidence or logic?
What it would take, for me at least, is an experiment which can't be shown to be flawed, and which can be reproduced by other labs. I'm not aware of such. Are you aware of such, and can you provide a reference?
I was very interested in this at one point, but as I seem to recall Rhine's research, which was the "big one" for a long time, came to a dead end and was dropped. My general impression is that his earlier results, which looked great, were flawed, possibly by "data selection" (dropping the bad runs out of the dataset) but it's been a long time and I'm hazy on the details now; his later results, which were not apparently flawed, saw the results recede to about the level of chance.
I recall some results showing either precognition or telekinesis using a "quantum" random number generator, not at Rhine's lab, which looked very promising but again I recall it came to naught and I'm no longer sure why; that, too, was a long time ago.
There have been others, of course, many others, but I'm not aware that anyone managed to produce solid results which were above reproach and which could be reproduced.
Reproducibility has plagued the field, that's for sure, as have charlatans, who make this area into a mine field. Geller is the most obvious example, but as far as I know all the individuals who've turned up showing exceptional ESP talent can be shown with reasonable confidence to be fakes. This is not to say the researchers at ESP labs are intentionally faking anything -- but unlike the field of LENR, where the beaker of electrolyte just sits there innocently, the subjects they're studying don't just sit there and a lot of them aren't innocent. Makes it tough to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Randi has had a field day debunking stuff in this area, and unlike his efforts at debunking "hard science" experiments where he flounders around like a pig on roller skates and relies heavily on "proof by assertion", this sort of thing actually *does* lie within his area of expertise. "Mentalist" acts are stock and trade of magic shows and the techniques used by magicians can be used to very good effect to produce apparently positive results in ESP experiments.
