I, and others, would like to know why people who claim to have supernatural or special abilities, such as telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis, speaking to the dead, and the like have NOT attempted to win the $1 million prize offered by James Randi.

http://randi.org/research/index.html

I have heard so many references to studies and the "evidence" that "proves" psi abilities exist. Come on, people. Prove it once and for all. Randi and his scientists have nothing to lose or gain. A corporation is putting forth the money. They neither support nor oppose the probability of psi abilities. All the claimant has to do is show through experiments performed by Randi's scientists that they have supernatural or "special" abilities they claimed to have.

It does not give them any merit to just appear on television and write books. This tells us nothing. It becomes nothing more than superstition and mere belief. Randi is giving the "special people" the opportunity for the world to know.

I would like to know. Tell me why they haven't taken up this offer, knowing full well that this offer exists. Sylvia Browne, the self-proclaimed medium said she would take up the offer, but never did.

What is going on here?

I'm going to warn you right now that the people who are about to argue with you do not believe in logic... or even thought. It may be best if you avoid drinking as you read the posts, as you will likely choke laughing.

I'm going to warn you right now that the people who are about to argue with you do not believe in logic... or even thought. It may be best if you avoid drinking as you read the posts, as you will likely choke laughing.
You're on a roll....trying new beverages of the alcoholic kind perhaps?

The only responses I have ever heard when Randi's offer was mentioned to believers were those of "they don't need the money," "scientists are biased," "science is fake," "that ability doesn't work when you're watching"...

Unfortunately, those are things I truly have seen. I am hoping some of those are here. It will be quite amusing. Drinking will have to be kept at a minimum.

Where is everyone? Get out here! Support your strongly held beliefs.

I have this thing about one being unable to support ones beliefs kind of takes away from his/her merit. Much like my government class. I offer my opinion and observations of the american government, and then after class 3 or 4 people tell me they are mad at me because they disagree with me. Upon asking why they didn't respond in class, they said, "I don't know... You would have said I was wrong..."

Ha, fun.

You're on a roll....trying new beverages of the alcoholic kind perhaps?Ah, boom put me 'in the mood'. Must have been all the horse sex talk *shakes violently*

The only responses I have ever heard when Randi's offer was mentioned to believers were those of "they don't need the money," "scientists are biased," "science is fake," "that ability doesn't work when you're watching"...It's funny how many people use those... not even original:)

In the application it says: "In all cases, applicant will be required to perform the preliminary test either before an appointed representative, if distance and time dictate that need, or in a location where a member of the JREF staff can attend. This preliminary test is to determine if the applicant is likely to perform as promised during a formal test. To date, no applicant has passed the preliminary test, and this has eliminated the need for formal testing in those cases. There is no limit on the number of times an applicant may re-apply, but re-application can take place only after 12 months have elapsed since the preliminary test. "

So there you have it, nobody has passed the preliminary test.
I would love to apply because I would looove to have one million dollars! But I have found psychic abilities to be very unreliable and unpredictable and something that is very hard, impossible in my case, to control and perform on cue. And, I can't afford to go there anyway.

I have found psychic abilities to be very unreliable and unpredictable and something that is very hard, impossible in my case, to control and perform on cue.

=

"that ability doesn't work when you're watching"

HAHAHAHA!!! ::cough cough:: damn gin.

For the rest of you, whose abilities are reliable, I think the 1 mil+ dollars will more than enough cover your travel expenses.

For me, it's not even "that ability doesn't work when you're watching". I have no control over it whatsoever, it comes whenever I least expect it. So maybe it's in the nature of this ability to be unpredictable, for many.
And, it's not like the person who does the test gets a million dollars in advance. Only if you succeed you get the money. So if you're not living in the immediate Fort Lauderdale area, or are going there anyway, it's an economical risktaking if you're not 100% sure that you will pass the test.
Since I'm living on another continent....

If you cannot control it, then perhaps it isn't anything out of the ordinary.

That is reasonable.

Most abilities are only coincidences. Like the infamous, "When I picked up the phone to call my friend, she was calling me at that instant."

Well, what about the other thousands of times you picked up the phone? How many different people do you call? How often do you and she talk?

Critical thinking needs to be implemented in claims of supernatural abilities. Think about what you believe about yourself and come back.

My "supernatural" abilities involves clairvoyant dreams mostly. I'm also very critical, I often dismiss coincidents just as coincidents. Sometimes they can't be dismissed though and then one has to accept that something out of the ordinary happened.
I think psychic abilities have a similar function as inspiration, or any other feeling for that matter, for example. That can also be hard to produce on cue. So how do we prove feelings?

Merely because one cannot explain something does not give it psychic value or that it is out of the ordinary. That is how theists think. Well, I don't know how this works, so the gods must have done it.

I, too, have had "clairvoyant" dreams. Usually, you don't know they were clairvoyant until after the event actually happens... Then, it can be attributed to false deja vu.

There are many possible explanations for such subjective ideas such as psi abilities. They just need to be understood.

It is possible that the test is designed for failure. Like having two people tossing a ball back and forth to study gravity.

You do not seem to understand. If you claim to have an ability it must show itself some time. Having dreams which happen to come true is not an ability any more then luck. There are tons of people who claim they can move things with their minds, have ESP, can talk to dogs, whatever. All of these are obviosuly testable... and even if they don't work 100% of the time, that is what multiple trials and statistics are for.

Persol,
You do not seem to understand that the so-called esp thing may exist outside the parameters that you want to impose.

Fine. Within what parameters does it exist?

Part of the problem is that those who believe in the exsistence of the paranormal don't subscribe to a philosophy that involves logic or understand the value of the scientific method.
They can't appricate that most of the things they take for granted in the modern world were developed using the scientific method. (Not to say that these discoveries all ways work out for the best, but that's another discussion.) They are basically living in a fantasy world.

This looks interesting,

I would apply to do this test, I wouldn't accept the money though..

Right now I can't afford to fly to the USA, I am a poor student, but maybe in a years time. I can use the time to perfect the skill, it's not too reliable right now.

You can't afford to fly to the USA? Uh huh. You could just accept enough money to pay for your troubles.

What exactly do you think you can do?

I do not believe we have the level of technology to define what we precieve as the paranormal. We get hints about what it may be but defining it is beyond our capabilities. We have been able to document the work of some medical intuitives but how they do it is not known.

I'd be interested in seeing this 'documentation'. Nobody that I know of has been able to demonstrate anything at a level consistently above what probability states.

I know this will have Persol Choking on his drink of mineral water, but I would do it, But for no less than $100,000,000.00 and there would be Recordable Outcomes proven.

Infact I think if it was raised to $100,000,000.00 I think I could get Persol to stand on his head, and forgive past transgressions.

Perhaps you do not know as much as you think Persol. Do some research on Caroline Myss and Mona Lisa Schulz.

Mrs Myss offers nothing but anecdots as 'proof'... no actual evidence that anything she says is true.
Schulz has povided just as much.

I too would like to see someone demonstrate a paranormal ability that actually works. Too many times do people claim things but when asked to prove it they shy away because they have lied.

I do think the abilities are real, but I think that most (90-something%) of people who claim to have them are just liers, cheats, or on something.

http://www.canada.com/national/story.asp?id=4E427ECA-6888-4197-A408-51665470BA80

That is all it is.

That may the one of the sources of what people consider "special abilities".

I think that this (meaning the mind interpretting standard input in an 'odd' way) is the reason for most beliefs in these abilities

Well perhaps they used the method I just put in a Flash to explain.

Alright the graphics are cheap, the animation sloppy, but if it gets the
theory across then so be it.

http://chatsoba.sprawl-vr.com/archives/archives.html

Wow. If only it had something to do with the thread....

Well if it worked Persol, It would be "Parapsychological".

Although I guess you might just be trying it at home as we speak.
Perhaps I should attempt to answer, lol.

Medical intuitives perceive illness in people that is documented by conventional medical tests and it is not enough for you.

No. There is no reason to think this is anything beyond body language... not that you have shown any of this documentation of perceiving illness anyway.

You can't afford to fly to the USA? Uh huh. You could just accept enough money to pay for your troubles.

What exactly do you think you can do?

Well, that would be astral projection. The conciousness leaving the physical body..

However anyone can do this and everyone does it regularly. So that's why I couldn't accept money for it.

How can you show someone else astral projection/OOB experiences? That's pretty much inside your head, so to speak.

How can you show someone else astral projection/OOB experiences? That's pretty much inside your head, so to speak.

You can obtain accurate information about the [physical] world that you could not possibly have known before 'going to sleep' or guessed upon waking up.
Like projecting to a neighboring room and reporting on which objects are present there and to describe these perfectly.

some cases with experiments here: http://www.subversiveelement.com/AstralProjection.html

There are tons of people who claim they can move things with their minds, have ESP, can talk to dogs, whatever. All of these are obviosuly testable...

I can move things with my mind, though I admit it helps having a properly functioning nervous system, and spinal collumn to send electrical impulses to the muscles in my arms. . . really my hands to much of the moving, but it all gets started in the brain!

Also, I can talk to my cat, and he even talks back! No, I'm serious about this one. . . though all he ever seems to say back to me is variations of "Meow" and the only English words he seems to understand are his own name and the word "food". I am, however entirely certain, and very hopefull that he understands Spanish much better, and our lack of communication is my own failure for having taken only a single year of that language back in middle school.

I do not believe we have the level of technology to define what we precieve as the paranormal. We get hints about what it may be but defining it is beyond our capabilities. We have been able to document the work of some medical intuitives but how they do it is not known.

If it is real and it can be observed, then it can be studied, defined and known. There's no such thing as the "unknowable" at least not within the realm of observable phenomena (which is what those who report supernatural powers are certainly reporting). In other words, if you can see it then you can know it, and even if we don’t get to the ultimate cause of a phenomena, or document all of it’s properties, the fact remains that there should be enough to go on that we could at least determine that it does in fact exist, and there is an observation to be made. Thus far, there’s been very little of that.

I can move things with my mind, though I admit it helps having a properly functioning nervous system, and spinal collumn to send electrical impulses to the muscles in my arms. . . really my hands to much of the moving, but it all gets started in the brain!

Also, I can talk to my cat, and he even talks back! No, I'm serious about this one. . . though all he ever seems to say back to me is variations of "Meow" and the only English words he seems to understand are his own name and the word "food". I am, however entirely certain, and very hopefull that he understands Spanish much better, and our lack of communication is my own failure for having taken only a single year of that language back in middle school.Well done:)


Well, that would be astral projection. The conciousness leaving the physical body..
Hell... who needs to pay for a plane ticket then. Unless you only visit OTHER worlds, in which case they are called dreams.

Accurate medical diagnoses can be made on the basis of normal sensory perception; sick people smell different from healthy people, for instance. A diagnostician will sometimes be trained in signals like these to be able to diagnose diseases better, but there's no reason why someone else wouldn't either
1) Be able to do this, but claim that they can't and that they are using psychic powers instead, or
2) Not realize that this is the method they are using, and believe that the "feeling" they get that someone is sick is psychic, when in fact it arises from their unnoticed sense of smell.

One of my favorite aspects about all of these paranormal powers is that in describing them, most believers describe not just one phenomena, but instead a single phenomena that requires you buy into a dozen more unobserved elements that you must take for granted to believe them. For instance, Astral projection is when your consciousness leaves the body and goes into another realm! This requires not just that you believe a mind can leave a body, but that consciousness is something which is in fact NOT a product of the physical processes of our brain (that it is in fact entirely independent) that it can somehow move around, and that other unseen dimensions are all around us, and it is possible to move through them. . . that's quite a lot to take in all at once, especially without any supporting evidence.

In general, and this isn’t always the case, but usually, if you have to invent a whole new wild phenomena just to explain another phenomena, you’re probably just fucking nuts. Though I guess the real deciding factor is when neither of them are based on any actual observations.

Truly, metaphysics is a dangerous land squid, with creeping tentacles of meaning. It coils about our assumptions with cephalopod strength, taking each in turn and bending it, crushing it into a new shape of inverterbrate design.

Who decides our meaning? We, who ask the squid for help? Or the squid?

(For a more concrete example, didja notice that in most "cyberspace" stories, if you die in cyberspace you die in real life as well? Even though this is sorta like if you said, "if you see yourself die on TV you'll really die too", it's still a convention of many stories.

I blame Neuromancer for starting this little problem.)

Maybe the reason why science makes the pseudos cry foul is because even a simple study of neurological function is seen as striking at the heart of their beliefs... for if nerves can represent intelligence without the help of any spiritual energy, their fundamental beliefs are shaken to the core.

The psychic believer already believes that all of those crackpot theories are true... tug at one and you tug at them all...

BigBlueHead,
Well although on another thread your spouting non-sense, you almost make sense.
The factor of peoples understandings crashing down around them based upon one alteration of their logic (because something occurs to prove something previously wrong) has been with us for many years.

Take for instance Galileo being condemned to Heresy by the Catholic Church, that only in the past couple of decades have absolved him for their wrong.

However this to gives reasons to many other factors, for instance if life outside our planet was spotted can you guess the shear consequences based upon it?
In one corner you'd have the skeptics saying it was a hoax, and even generating the elaborate reasons of how it was, in another corner you would have people accepting it, in yet another you'd have people that would take it as the absolute truth and try to do bizarre things, then you have the people that "Cash in" on a "Gag", that would try and generate multiple hoaxes, and there would then be people that just wouldn't care less.

Before you know it, all the countries of the world are on national alert, not because of aliens, but because of the anarchy that's being instated through all these people interacting, this causes governments to realise that sometimes people shouldn't hear the truth because they can't handle it.

However my statement there by no means implicates the book 'Neuromancer', to blame such a book for all this would be absurd, there are many other things you could blame like Raelians, Art Bell, MTV, Mork and Mindy.

At worst, I was only spouting nonsense on a nonsense thread, "When in Rome" and all that.

At best, I was reciting the trash talk that goes on between Dracula and Richter Belmont in the intro to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I had hoped to draw the new member Dracula into a dialogue of horror, but it seems he didn't bite.

As for the shifting of beliefs... every time you learn something and believe it to be true, cracks appear in a few of your other beliefs and they need to be repaired. The more fundamental the thing you learn, the more potentially damaging it is to your current world view. Generally you have two options under this circumstance:
1) Try to reform your beliefs to something that accomodate the new information, or
2) never learn anything.

Most learning is (obviously) a combination of these two solutions.

Descartes addressed this idea in the Method of Doubt that appeared in his Meditations on First Philosophy, to the extent that he believed that by questioning his most fundamental beliefs and discovering which of them could not be proved, he would bring crashing down all of his incorrect assumptions and be left with a more truthful, if much smaller and simpler, description of the world around him. (Sadly he ended up appealing to God, which totally ruined the whole thing.)

BTW, I also blame Mork and Mindy, but that goes without saying. Dreamscape too, for that matter.

I SEE DEAD EWOKS! :eek:

Yeah, Descartes' Method of Doubt for you too bandit. Oooh yeah. Start doubting - quick.

In general, and this isn’t always the case, but usually, if you have to invent a whole new wild phenomena just to explain another phenomena, you’re probably just fucking nuts. Though I guess the real deciding factor is when neither of them are based on any actual observations.

So, what your saying is that because it requires the total reevaluation of our general view of reality it doesn't actualy matter if you can actualy prove it's true?

In other words if I could prove to you that it was true it would still not be true because it doesn't fit the standard model?

Forgive me if I have misunderstood, but that just doesn't seem right.

Exsto - When you develop a series of theoretical properties for the universe in an attempt to explain the nature of things, you should avoid reasoning of the following nature:
Premise: The world is made of caramel.
Question: So, why doesn't it look like caramel?
Answer: Well, because the caramel elves use their magic to trick us. Reality is an illusion.
Question: How do we know there are caramel elves then?
Answer: Because I was told so by a piece of bacon, and bacon never lies.
Question: Why does bacon never lie?
Answer: Because bacon is the essence of caramel, and caramel is the only truth.

This sort of metaphysics is a total house of cobwebs; every claim is implicitly backed by caramel elf deception, and so the only way to find out if it is true is to ask a piece of bacon. When was the last time bacon answered a question? So we'll never really know...

If you replace caramel with spirit energy, caramel elves with spirits, and bacon with "pure knowledge gained through dreams/meditation", then you get something similar to the world view espoused by many psychic phenomena types - a totally unprovable mess of popular superstition. The appeal to pure knowledge gained through intuition is often a symptom of unprovable theories.

I did a little more digging on the Roswell Crash, since there isn't much information released on it. Thats because the Investigating was carried out by the Military and not the FBI.

However I think I've come to a conclusion over what events really happened, but I would need to know 1 thing to give it a real conclusion, and thats the wind direction for that day.

The overall Theory that I've derived is this:

During the Second World War it was no secret that "Los Alamos" housed some of the minds responsible for the creation of the nuclear bomb, One of the very testing areas was "Trinity", as the crow flies Trinity is Due West of Roswell, although the other side of a mountain range.

It is possible that a Balloon carrying geiger meters and even shaved monkeys, was let loose to sail over Trinity, to work out the extent of Radiation coverage 2 or 3 years after a Nuclear test was done there. Afterall they would have seen a number of people (soldiers) suffer from radiation to know by that point to use other methods of testing how harmful it would be.

The balloon would have risen up over the test area, been subjected to radiation (And perhaps had it's passengers testing something that would deflect the radiation), if the wind was in the right direction, the mountains would have generated updraft creating lift to the balloon, and on the other side it would have eventually come down at about Roswell.

Preportions of the US Army would have known about but it would have been secret due to it being data collection over a sensative area. The materials and bodies would have potentially been exposed to radioactivity although anyone that wasn't notified wouldn't have followed proceedures with dealing with them.

As for the whole aspect of why someone mistakeningly thought it a spacecraft, well the material that was being tested (an alloy) might have looked odd especially with the shaved monkeys as occupants.

...
If you replace caramel with spirit energy, caramel elves with spirits, and bacon with "pure knowledge gained through dreams/meditation", then you get something similar to the world view espoused by many psychic phenomena types - a totally unprovable mess of popular superstition. The appeal to pure knowledge gained through intuition is often a symptom of unprovable theories.

How about I base it on this:

Premise: I experience reality.
Question: ...
Answer: yes.

Maybe the girl with x-ray eyes (http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,5-2004040384,00.html) will win the $million.

As the wool over peoples eyes gets too heavy it will fall off of its own accord.

Discovery of corruption of common knowledge is the key to finding what’s behind closed doors.

craterchains, how do you figure the 'wool' will fall of it's own accord?

Do you supposed the fallacy will prove itself as false?

I think this is too optimistic to think, that 'all will be revealed soon' is not a holdable arguement.
Each one of us must seek to pull away the wool from our own eyes, if we simply wait for the truth to come to us we will never find it but instead we will just see the same things, over and over again.

I think I said QUOTE;
As the wool over peoples eyes gets too heavy.

Yep that is what I said, or another way of putting it, Those that watch things happen, those that make things happen, and those that wonder what happend?

If this was so important, why hasnt Ellimist kept up?

These replies have answered my question.