24th February 2006, 1:56 PM
(This post was last modified: 24th February 2006, 3:07 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
Somehow I knew this woudl take a wrong turn... Out of fear of angering the devout, I catiously tread these waters to state this:
There is in fact no evidence that people actually can bend spoons with their minds. That fellow, Gellar, is merely a magician. He knows what he's doing and is merely deluding people. I myself can do that trick. The fact is, he is HOLDING the spoon.
Germany doing research on psychics is irrelevent, unless they actually succeeded and got some results. Germany also had projects searching for the Spear of Destiny and seeking out evidence of Germany's heritage to prove Hitler right. Those did not turn up verifiable results either.
All this said, if the evidence showing psychic powers exist did show up and was verified with reproducible tests, then I would SO dive into that. I mean, psychic powers are "awesome". Though, in the end we already have equivilant abilities as it stands. We can understand another's thoughts simply by listening to what they say. Is this not a very amazing form of communication in and of itself? We can see far away locations and search for a myriad of data thanks to our creative and logical mental abilities. Is this not amazing in and of itself? If in the future some new amazing ability was either discovered or developed, I would love to learn all there is to know about it. However, the evidence must be found.
N-Man, sorry but I've been through enough of these debates that I basically just cut to the chase. I'm not "close minded" and am fully willing to accept psychic phenomenon when evidence is discovered by scientific method, but that has yet to happen. In fact, many legitimate scientists pursued these stories many years ago. It was very legitimate to do so. However, in pursuing this, the scientists, time and again, failed to produce any evidence for these abilities. They were VERY willing to discover it, but failed. In fact, they were a little too willing and were fooled on occasion, but as is the self correcting nature of science, eventually they realized they had been fooled (thanks to a magician, the sort of person trained in deceptive arts who can point out these sorts of things). Since then, lots of scams have occured, and lots of fake research is going on (completely unpublished because they apparently don't WANT it to be peer reviewed, a needed part of the scientific method, because then it can be confirmed by many scientists over and over again by repeating the test), and some legitimate studies are still occuring, which unfortunatly are not resulting in any new evidence. This happens all the time in science. If it turns out they do exist, then give it time and eventually a scientist or 2 may actually uncover this. Until then, we must act based on the lack of evidence and enjoy the world for what it is, rather than what we might want it to be.
There are far too many known mysteries to deal with for us to be worrying about the unknown ones.
In fact, here's a thread in a magician oriented forum where you can learn some versions of the spoon bending trick. http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=7978&
There is in fact no evidence that people actually can bend spoons with their minds. That fellow, Gellar, is merely a magician. He knows what he's doing and is merely deluding people. I myself can do that trick. The fact is, he is HOLDING the spoon.
Germany doing research on psychics is irrelevent, unless they actually succeeded and got some results. Germany also had projects searching for the Spear of Destiny and seeking out evidence of Germany's heritage to prove Hitler right. Those did not turn up verifiable results either.
All this said, if the evidence showing psychic powers exist did show up and was verified with reproducible tests, then I would SO dive into that. I mean, psychic powers are "awesome". Though, in the end we already have equivilant abilities as it stands. We can understand another's thoughts simply by listening to what they say. Is this not a very amazing form of communication in and of itself? We can see far away locations and search for a myriad of data thanks to our creative and logical mental abilities. Is this not amazing in and of itself? If in the future some new amazing ability was either discovered or developed, I would love to learn all there is to know about it. However, the evidence must be found.
N-Man, sorry but I've been through enough of these debates that I basically just cut to the chase. I'm not "close minded" and am fully willing to accept psychic phenomenon when evidence is discovered by scientific method, but that has yet to happen. In fact, many legitimate scientists pursued these stories many years ago. It was very legitimate to do so. However, in pursuing this, the scientists, time and again, failed to produce any evidence for these abilities. They were VERY willing to discover it, but failed. In fact, they were a little too willing and were fooled on occasion, but as is the self correcting nature of science, eventually they realized they had been fooled (thanks to a magician, the sort of person trained in deceptive arts who can point out these sorts of things). Since then, lots of scams have occured, and lots of fake research is going on (completely unpublished because they apparently don't WANT it to be peer reviewed, a needed part of the scientific method, because then it can be confirmed by many scientists over and over again by repeating the test), and some legitimate studies are still occuring, which unfortunatly are not resulting in any new evidence. This happens all the time in science. If it turns out they do exist, then give it time and eventually a scientist or 2 may actually uncover this. Until then, we must act based on the lack of evidence and enjoy the world for what it is, rather than what we might want it to be.
There are far too many known mysteries to deal with for us to be worrying about the unknown ones.
In fact, here's a thread in a magician oriented forum where you can learn some versions of the spoon bending trick. http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=7978&
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)