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Originally Posted by Chris Noble  Even at 33% the effect is still not large enough that one person could have come up with the idea that they could telepathically communicate on the basis of this effect. |
What's your basis for this claim? The effect is larger than in many other scientific studies. And why are you talking about
coming up with the idea of telepathic communication on the basis of an experiment? It's the other way round: parapsychologists are testing a phenomenon that has been reported over and over again throughout culture and history.
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Originally Posted by Chris Noble Psi proponents have also failed to improve the Ganzfield experiments. Real science builds upon past experiments and the effects become clearer and clearer over time. The results from individual Ganzfeld experiments are still all over the place. Some are negative and some are positive and there is no clear pattern. |
Actually there is a pattern. As I mentioned in my last post, those experiments that use video footage as targets tend to get better results than those that experiment with totally new targets, such as musical compositions. Still, you can't expect the results to be crystal clear. Dean Radin quoted in his
The Conscious Universe several prominent psychologists saying that in ordinary psychology experiments, even when the exact same methods are used, you don't get the same results every time. A lot of factors are involved: the attitudes of the researchers toward the research subjects, the level of comfort in the laboratory setting, the research subjects' personalities, etc. etc. You have to remember we're talking about experiments testing human performance here. We're not talking about experiments in chemistry, where you rightly can expect everything to work as long as you set up things properly.
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Originally Posted by Chris Noble Both quantum mechanics and relativity were developed from existing well established science. The scientists who were instrumental in both fields didn't simply pull ideas out of the ether. Special Relativity came out of Maxwell's Equations. You can't say the same for "psi" which has no connection to any known science. |
What's your point? Not having predicted an effect through careful mathematical consideration means it can't exist? There are mountains of cases where the discovery of an effect preceded the theoretical work on it. The whole of science started that way, for God's sake.