To Alex--
Hi, I have been listening to your podcast for a couple of months now and have to say that on the whole I enjoy it. Your attempt to keep an open mind about both the skeptical side and the none skeptical side of issues was intriguing to me because like you I to feel that hard core skeptics can some times jump to de-bunking before they have even taken time to consider what is going on. While they might come to the same conclusion in the end my gut tells me that once the de-bunking switch is thrown not all the evidence in a situation can get taken in.
Anyway, I am writing to you in regard to the telepathic dog situation. Long story short I think it is a worthless study but here is why. The correlation between dogs waiting for their owners to come home and them having telepathy is logically incongruous. In my mind it is similar to saying that there is a correlation between the number of psychics not sleeping on a given and that causing the northern lights to be brighter or dimmer. There is no way to prove that psychics don’t affect the northern lights because no one knows how psychic power “works” and is therefore un-testable. As far as I know the mechanism that allows telepathy to take place has not been outlined and therefore you can not run a test that has telepathy as the mechanism because you don’t even know how to actually measure the amount of “telepathy” being used in the experiment. It’s a little like measuring the rate of oil flow and knowing nothing about viscosity.
I am very open to discussion on this point I have by no means made up my mind but I feel the need to express the concern that I have right now before I can progress logically forward.  |