Posted: Mar 04, 2010 2:17 pm
Mac_Guffin wrote:See, I don't like that "if you dig deep enough" line. It's a bit of a cop-out.
Because a lot of the evidence for paranormal effects is phenomenological and it's just not the same reading about it in a journal as experiencing it yourself. Normally, people don't have to do things like perform the double-slit experiment on their own in order to know that wave-particle duality exists, because there is a body of research generated by specialized scientists that is generally accepted. When that was in its infancy, many scientists believed electrons behaved like bullets and light like waves. It took a paradigm shift of the entire community (catalyzed largely by solving the ultraviolet catastophe) for the new beliefs to be accepted as fact.
Progress in parapsychology is comparatively hindered because a) there are thousands of times more (staying in the comparison) physicists than paranormal researchers and b) because many people in the larger scientific community (esp. CSI[COP]) outright angrily oppose paranormal research and spread misinformation about the research being conducted.
When creationists ask me about evolution and its evidence, I come back with a basic summary of why it's true.
You asked for a basic summary of paranormal experience and its evidence, and I told you: Years of reports of experiences, data collected by ghost hunters, lab research into psi, and independent researched conducted by individuals or groups in the communities.
It's not the scientists being evasive, it's elusive phenomena. Quantum entanglement has been demonstrated, however, in setups that measure for it, an entangled pair is generated in only one in a few billion emissions (IIRC). They solve that by using a coincidence counter to filter out the 999,999,999 emissions that don't do anything interesting. (it also helps that it only takes about 15 minutes to acquire several billion emissions). That's basically what experiments like massive Ganzfeld trials and Associative Remote Viewing do: they have to compile large amounts of data because a) not everyone has the capacity to demonstrate ESP at all b) very very few people can actually demonstrate it on demand. Ghost hunters have to go through tens or hundreds of investigations in order to find a single one with really good evidence. Not because they are looking for anomalies and they're waiting for the coincidences to catch up (because these 'coincidences' are often way above and beyond chance after you factor in how many investigations are performed), but because it just isn't something that you can manifest on demand.
Which is why we use science to collect more information so that one day we do know how to get it to happen on demand.