Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Mon Aug 16, 2021 12:15 pm
Jim Cross wrote: ↑Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:18 amBelief in the supernatural is what makes science impossible.
How is supernatural being defined? One definition is:
departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature. So if it just means that which science currently can't explain under the provisional consensus construct, then wasn't the idea of quantum entanglement, once described as 'spooky action at a distance', and once considered impossible according to the 'natural' laws of classical physics, also once defying and transcending what had been considered 'natural'? Did that preclude further scientific investigation? Just because science hasn't yet come up with an explanation, hasn't yet expanded the current category of 'natural', doesn't mean it's impossible.
Science is based on the premise that there are natural laws and explanations. That doesn't mean that everything can be explained but it means that we are looking for explanations
involving measurable forces and objects. It means we can't pull rabbit out of the hat every time there is something that cannot be explained. It means we don't toss aside everything we know through science just because of one anomaly unless there is theory that incorporates better what we know and the anomaly.
The point is that there is a method to science that involves observations, theories, experiments and replications where possible. It is somewhat inherently conservative.
I don't know if you've heard of Arthur Reber or read any of my posts on him..
https://broadspeculations.com/2021/01/1 ... ciousness/
He engages in some pretty wild speculations about the cellular origins of consciousness. But here he writes about Cardeña’s paper on parapsychology.
While the paper bothered us on several levels, our primary concern was that it was symptomatic of a larger, more important issue that was being missed. It is not a matter of reviewing the existing database, scratching at the marginal and highly suspect findings of meta-analyses for something that passes the “< .05” cutoff point. It is not a matter of rummaging around in arcane domains of theoretical physics for plausible models. It is more basic than that: parapsychology’s claims cannot be true. The entire field is bankrupt—and has been from the beginning. Each and every claim made by psi researchers violates fundamental principles of science and, hence, can have no ontological status.
We identified four fundamental principles of science that psi effects, were they true, would violate: causality, time’s arrow, thermodynamics, and the inverse square law.
This enterprise has involved literally thousands of papers, hundreds of conferences, dozens of review volumes, and nothing has been learned. Parapsychology is precisely where it was in the 1880s. Why, we wondered, are researchers still running experiments, using ever-more sophisticated statistical techniques, reaching out to ever-broader realms of science, expanding their analyses into studies of consciousness and mind? This pattern of persistent belief in the anomalous may be the most psychologically interesting phenomenon associated with the study of psi. One of us (Alcock 1985) has argued it is likely linked with a vague sense that science, hard-nosed and physicalist, lacks that mysterianist element found in religious or spiritual realms. The lure of the “para”-normal emerges, it seems, from the belief that there is more to our existence than can be accounted for in terms of flesh, blood, atoms, and molecules. A century and a half of parapsychological research has failed to yield evidence to support that belief.
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/07/w ... t-be-true/
I would add, however, that, if and when parapsychology produces definitive evidence of what it studies, the evidence will be used to create a yet more expansive theory
involving measurable forces and objects. It won't be a science of the unmeasurable because that wouldn't be science. If you want to argue there are things unmeasurable, that would be a different debate and I might even agree with you. I just don't think it can be called science.
