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Originally Posted by Open Mind  Still can't explain Sheldrake's results, these have to coincide with the random, non-regular return times. . |
Open Mind, you don't seem to understand the point I'm making. You say that they seem to coincide with the random, non-regular return times as though it's a criticism of my alternative suggestion, but that IS my suggestion.
Seriously, if there are a LOT of potential other sources of distraction for the dog, then some of them will just happen to occur in the return time. You act as though the results of Sheldrake's trials are consistent, but that's simply not the case. I've looked at the results, and sometimes the dog spends a bunch of time near the window in the return period, sometimes doesn't AT ALL, sometimes goes BEFORE the return period. In short, it looks like a normal distribution based on a bunch of "random" events going on around the house.
And Sheldrake can't just say "I controlled for everything" when he plainly didn't. Did Sheldrake specifically say that he controlled for the existence of other cars in the area which could have confused the dog? Did he get all such car owners to NOT drive their cars during the test? I read the study, and if he did such a thing, he made no mention of it.
Part of my point is that there are so many things going on which we might not notice but which a dog would, and there are so many things which they could have tried to control for but didn't that it renders any potential results close to meaningless.
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In the absence of an alternate 'normal' explanation, yes it indicates psi.
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How do you know that he exhausted other explanations? Reading Sheldrake's work on this, he goes from the test immediately to psi, even though there are, as I and many others have pointed out, a huge number of potential normal explanations.
And even if there are no "normal" explanations, why should you just to psi? What if the dogs can simply hear the squeal of their owner's cell phones? What if it's purely rational and mechanical in explanation, but we don't know what it is? Mystery doesn't mean psi, it means mystery.