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From: crm@rti.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.philosophy,net.sci,net.misc
Subject: Re: Mind and Brain
Message-ID: <1185@rti.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 25-Jul-84 15:20:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: rti.1185
Posted: Wed Jul 25 15:20:15 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Jul-84 05:55:18 EDT
References: denelcor.514 <1564@sun.uucp>
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Similarly, the reasoning methods used by The Amazing Randi are laughable --
cf. the argument at the AAAS meeting in San Francisco, in which parapspsych
researchers were reviled for an hour, and then given five minutes in which to
rebut. (Randi and others in the reviling group walked out on the rebuttal
anyway.)

Consider this:  We have a phenomenon that can only be observed under very
special conditions, in situations which cannot be easily duplicated, and we
events which occur in these situations only once in a few thousand or million
trials.  Photographs of these events can be produced, but these photographs
can be easily faked; in addition, these photographs are of such a quality
that they can only be interpreted by observers who begin by being trained for
a number of months in the interpretattion of these photographs (or else, the
interpreters were in the original group that figured out how to interpret
the photographjs, using a theory to develop the interpretation method which
the method itself was being used to test.)

In addition, the people performing the interpretation have a vested interest
in having the interpretation conform to the world-view/theory which they are
"testing" -- since they have devoted a large part of their lives to this
theory.

Question: Can this interpretation be trusted?

Answer: I'm not sure -- there is a lot of interpretation and cirularity in the
"reading" of the evidence.

Question: Is the experiment repeatable?

Answer: Well, maybe...  With enough trials, you will see two events which can
be *interpreted* as representing the same sort of event.  However, this can
take on the order of a million trials.

Kicker:  the sort of experiment which I am describing is bubble-chamber
photography, widely used in subatomic physics.

===========================

Randi's arguments always seem to resolve to the claim that 1) if it can be
faked, it must have been faked; and 2) anybody who would believe in this
stuff must be a dip anyway.

I'm not sure that I believe in psi myself -- even having been brought up
to believe that it exists, and having been raised in a family which was
rather well known for having second sight.  I've even had "psi-like" 
experiences myself.  I still am not a true believer, and believe in psi
much less than I believe in (say) particles which behave as both a solid
object and a wave, and which cannot even be precisely located in space.
However, I am something of a philosopher, and once did specialize in
logic (I mean the real thing, not this Boolean Algebra stuff) and I can
recognize *ad hominem* and *post hoc ergo propter hoc* when I see them.

Randi's stuff is full of them...