Posted: May 25, 2014 12:47 pm
Shrunk wrote:UndercoverElephant wrote:But there's some things you simply can't use science to examine, and this is a perfect example. It's a one-off. You can't re-create the situation. You can try to do something similar under scientific conditions, but the very fact that it's being done under those conditions make the situation significantly different. That would be that; this is this. As presented, this is just what it is - an anecdotal account of something that happened under non-scientific conditions, can't happen again and is open to interpretation and subjective judgement. Science can't resolve this one way or another.
But what are you expecting science to "resolve" here?
I'm not expecting science to resolve anything here. As far as I'm concerned, it has nothing to do with science.
That the two cards resemble each other in some way? That is not the question in dispute. The question is whether his resemblance is one that is entirely explicable due to chance, or whether it so exceeds something that could be predicted to occur thru thru simple application of probabilities that it indicates the existence of "something else" previously unknown to science.
Yes. Although I'd rephrase it slightly different and simply say "the existence of something unknown to science."
That is a question that is absolutely resolvable thru the scientific method.
How? Science requires you to be able to replicate a situation and get the same results over and over again, or at the very least to have set certain conditions beforehand so there are controls in place for a one-off event that is expected. Neither of those things are possible in cases like this. You have no idea when it is going to happen, you can't replicate it and it isn't even clear how you could apply science to answer that question anyway. It all depends on the nature of the "something else" - why and when these things happen, and what is causing them. It also involves meaning, and science doesn't really do meaning. "Meaning" is something very human and subjective.