the telepathy thread

[Moondira]

Just now, Madelaine McMasters said:

3 minutes ago, Moondira said:

Arielle simply said she always smelled propane when the vehicle stopped and so the smell of propane would not be something which caused her to check the tanks. We need to look elsewhere for clues, in other words.

What about a difference in the intensity of the smell, or the extent of space affected by it?

Yes that seems something to consider. A much stronger odor than usual or detected in spaces in the vehicle where the odor is not usually present.

[Moondira]

Little does Arielle know we are busily discussing her situation. hehe

[Madelaine McMasters]

Just now, Moondira said:

We should never base major evaluations of any matter only on our personal experience. It is but one input.

Are you saying that my entire life's experience of my own premonitions being wrong far more often than right is but one input? My father was the one who encouraged me to try to keep track of wrong premonitions, as he had, and as had his grandfather before him. I'll count my father's experience as a first hand account and my grandfather's experience as hearsay.

Might not our ability to learn to detect this internal bias be considered... expertise?

[Madelaine McMasters]

5 minutes ago, Moondira said:

I've read it.

Not to be too snarky, but it is not the Bible is it? 

Certainly not. Kaheman's work has been replicated.

[Moondira]

1 minute ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

7 minutes ago, Moondira said:

We should never base major evaluations of any matter only on our personal experience. It is but one input.

Are you saying that my entire life's experience of my own premonitions being wrong far more often than right is but one input? My father was the one who encouraged me to try to keep track of wrong premonitions, as he had, and as had his grandfather before him. I'll count my father's experience as a first hand account and my grandfather's experience as hearsay.

Might not our ability to learn to detect this internal bias be considered... expertise?

I'm big on paying attention to anyone's experience, but there are limitations. All mind's are different, and so we need other variables (other minds) in any experiment in order to draw a more valid conclusion.

For example, perhaps another person doesn't have the vast amount of premonitions you experience and then discover to be in error.  I don't.

[Moondira]

4 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

replicated

I'm sure you know, much research has been replicated and then discovered at a later time to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

[Madelaine McMasters]

1 minute ago, Moondira said:

I'm sure you know, much research has been replicated and then discovered at a later time to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

Yep, but if you go by the experimental successes over the history of science and religion, one does seem to be have a better track record. Curiously, it's the one that admits it doesn't know where it's going, allows for the possibility of never getting there, and is generally excited about that.

[Silent Mistwalker]

22 minutes ago, Moondira said:

Arielle simply said she always smelled propane when the vehicle stopped and so the smell of propane would not be something which caused her to check the tanks. We need to look elsewhere for clues, in other words.

Now that you've butted in, you can butt back out because that conversation ended.

[Moondira]

1 minute ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

6 minutes ago, Moondira said:

I'm sure you know, much research has been replicated and then discovered at a later time to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

Yep, but if you go by the experimental successes over the history of science and religion, one does seem to be have a better track record. Curiously, it's the one that admits it doesn't know where it's going, allows for the possibility of never getting there, and is generally excited about that.

I'm not sure why you've brought religion into the discussion. My backup links/concepts point straight to Physics and ongoing research there.

[Rolig Loon]

4 minutes ago, Moondira said:

I'm sure you know, much research has been replicated and then discovered at a later time to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

Yup.  That's the process.  Test a conclusion by seeing whether you can replicate it under the same conditions repeatedly.  If you can't, you must have reached a flawed conclusion.  If you can replicate it, you might still have reached a flawed or incomplete conclusion, but you won't know unless you test under different conditions or find contradictory observations.  When that happens, you dust yourself off, make a better guess about what's going on, test it, and try to replicate the new result.  And so it goes, baby steps.

[Madelaine McMasters]

7 minutes ago, Moondira said:

I'm not sure why you've brought religion into the discussion. My backup links/concepts point straight to Physics and ongoing research there.

I'm not sure why you think the Bible isn't a religious reference.

[Madelaine McMasters]

7 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Yup.  That's the process.  Test a conclusion by seeing whether you can replicate it under the same conditions repeatedly.  If you can't, you must have reached a flawed conclusion.  If you can replicate it, you might still have reached a flawed or incomplete conclusion, but you won't know unless you test under different conditions or find contradictory observations.  When that happens, you dust yourself off, make a better guess about what's going on, test it, and try to replicate the new result.  And so it goes, baby steps.

Sometimes drunken baby steps.

[Moondira]

1 minute ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

9 minutes ago, Moondira said:

I'm not sure why you've brought religion into the discussion. My backup links/concepts point straight to Physics and ongoing research there.

I'm not sure why you think the Bible isn't a religious reference.

You don't understand that is simply an expression and not indicative of bringing religion into the discussion?

[Moondira]

19 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

29 minutes ago, Moondira said:

I'm sure you know, much research has been replicated and then discovered at a later time to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

Yup.  That's the process.  Test a conclusion by seeing whether you can replicate it under the same conditions repeatedly.  If you can't, you must have reached a flawed conclusion.  If you can replicate it, you might still have reached a flawed or incomplete conclusion, but you won't know unless you test under different conditions or find contradictory observations.  When that happens, you dust yourself off, make a better guess about what's going on, test it, and try to replicate the new result.  And so it goes, baby steps.

If telepathy rarely happens in a laboratory setting, and rarely happens between people who don't know each other, then the variables are not set up correctly.  Poor methodology produces poor results.

* Another problem is that experiments in telepathy are set up to test the physical world as detected by the 5 human senses. But true telepathy, by definition, transcends the physical world as we know it. We have to take into consideration quantum physics if we want to understand it, and I've never seen this taken into consideration in most telepathy experiments.

Edited July 17, 2021 by Moondira

[Rolig Loon]

33 minutes ago, Moondira said:

If telepathy rarely happens in a laboratory setting, and rarely happens between people who don't know each other, then the variables are not set up correctly.  Poor methodology produces poor results.

* Another problem is that experiments in telepathy are set up to test the physical world as detected by the 5 human senses. But true telepathy, by definition, transcends the physical world as we know it. We have to take into consideration quantum physics if we want to understand it, and I've never seen this taken into consideration in most telepathy experiments.

Quite reasonable.  There are two parts to the investigation of any natural phenomenon.  First, make careful observations repeatedly to verify that you are really seeing what you think you are seeing.  Second, try to explain what you see by making a hypothesis ( an educated guess) and then test the guess to see whether you understood things correctly.  In both parts of the investigation, you have to be very careful that you haven't inadvertently done something else that could give you confusing (or incorrect) results.

Sadly, all sorts of things can go wrong. You might be distracted by something else happening at the same time (a trick used deliberately by magicians and by lots of animals and plants for camouflage) or by simply hoping that you saw something new and exciting.  You might be using equipment or methods that are wrong for the job (not sensitive enough, or actually looking at the wrong thing).  Or, of course, you might be right but you're testing something that doesn't happen very often at all ( like a giant meteorite that kills off the dinosaurs ), so the best you can do is look for other things that should have happened at the same time, if your guess was right.

This is why the sciences move forward in careful baby steps, sometimes going down blind alleys and having to back up to figure out where they went wrong.  It's hard to prove that you got anything right.  The task is to keep eliminating the guesses that you got wrong along the way, revealing a little more of the puzzle at each step.

[Innula Zenovka]

6 hours ago, Moondira said:

I'm sure you know, much research has been replicated and then discovered at a later time to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

And I'm sure you know many people claiming that ESP is real have had their claims debunked.   What of it?

Which aspect of Kahneman's research do you criticise in particular?  He's a Nobel laureate, so his work is worth taking seriously, I think, and he certainly makes a very cogent and persuasive case.

[Moondira]

20 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

On 7/17/2021 at 10:32 AM, Moondira said:

I'm sure you know, much research has been replicated and then discovered at a later time to be wrong, or at the very least incomplete.

And I'm sure you know many people claiming that ESP is real have had their claims debunked.   What of it?

Which aspect of Kahneman's research do you criticise in particular?  He's a Nobel laureate, so his work is worth taking seriously, I think, and he certainly makes a very cogent and persuasive case.

Regarding replication, I was referring to the religion aspect Madelaine brought into the discussion; I was basically saying that scientific replication is not the only way to arrive at truth.

However, a primary criticism of Kahneman's book is that many of his experiments cannot be replicated:
https://jasoncollins.blog/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/
https://www.wenglinskyreview.com/wenglinsky-review-a-journal-of-culture-politics/2017/1/23/kahnemans-fallacies
https://jasoncollins.blog/bad-behavioural-science-failures-bias-and-fairy-tales/

Kahneman even came out and admitted he placed too much faith in underpowered studies:
https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/

Personally I'm not so troubled about some studies not being replicable and critique it on other grounds, some of them not even attributable to the book per se but instead in the manner in which others becoming aware of illogical thinking patterns misapply the theories to other people and situations. I've seen Madelaine do this repeatedly, and am hoping she'll take her beloved book off the altar, illumined lovingly by the candles shining upon it, and read it more carefully. 

Behavioral scientists in general can become quite cocky and divorce themselves from real life, only paying attention to the patterns they think they've discovered and misapplying them.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry reading these examples:

https://unherd.com/2020/03/dont-trust-the-psychologists-on-coronavirus/
https://jasoncollins.blog/2020-04-07-the-limits-of-behavioural-science-coronavirus-edition/

But regarding Kahneman's book specifically, I like his conceptualization of some of the illogical patterns he demonstrates, but my main criticism is that (although he assigns the 'left brain' rational mind the number 2 position and the more unconscious 'right brain' mind the number 1 position) he clearly favors the conscious, rational mind and assigns all bias to the other. I much more agree with a book published 2 years prior to his which gives the 'right brain' mind priority, The Master And His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. His book stresses that the conscious, rational mind should be the servant of the 'right brain' and not its master. I believe the conscious, rational mind is overrated; one only has to look at the mess the Western world has created for proof of this. The Enlightenment? Just no.

Plus, you can't make someone rational by telling them to be so. Just look at the forum for examples of that! One must dig deeper/higher, and incorporate Transpersonal Psychology methods to effect lasting change. It might be fun for us intellectuals to play with our minds and see where we fool ourselves, but lasting change for society? Nope. So what's the point of Kahneman's book really? So us intellectuals can play with ourselves I guess.

Edited July 18, 2021 by Moondira

[Moondira]

"Towards the end of this life, Charles Darwin indulged in a little retrospection. Aged 65, he wrote a short, episodic autobiography, intended only for close family members. Published in a redacted version as part of his son’s Life and Letters of Charles Darwin a decade or so later, it only emerged fully into the light in the 1950s.

Primarily about his working life, the document did allow Darwin to ruminate a bit on his personality and interests. “Looking back as well as I can at my character during my school life,” he recollected, “the only qualities which at this period promised well for the future were that I had strong and diversified tastes.”

Some of those tastes were self–evidently scientific. Euclid’s geometry, he recalled, gave him “intense satisfaction.” But many were not. “I was fond of reading various books, and I used to sit for hours reading the historical plays of Shakespeare.” The poetry of Byron, Scott, Milton, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Thomson had the same effect, as did art and music, which afforded him “very great delight”.

Things began to change, however, and from about the age of thirty Darwin began to lose all pleasure from poetry “of any kind, including Shakespeare.” Indeed, it was worse than this. For many years now, he confessed towards the end of the memoir, “I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.” It was a similar story for art. “I have also almost lost any taste for pictures.” Music simply distracted him and even beautiful scenery “does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did.”

Darwin lamented this and, in typical fashion, pondered it. “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts,” he said, before proceeding in the very same sentence to ask, “why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.” The juxtaposition of these clauses – the first seemingly answering the second – appears to have escaped him.

He goes on to evaluate, briefly, the consequence of this loss. His inability to read and enjoy poetry, drama, music, and art may possibly have been “injurious to the intellect”, but Darwin sounds unsure about this. More probably, it was a loss “to the moral character”. Certainly, it entailed “a loss of happiness”.

Darwin’s loss may have been pronounced but it was surely not unique. Indeed, it might even stand for the entire trajectory of the modern Western world, if the argument of The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist’s widely–lauded intellectual blockbuster is correct. Society has become a kind of machine for grinding general happiness out of large collections of data, or at least trying to. It probably hasn’t been injurious to our intellect. We remain very clever. But it hasn’t done our moral character any good. And it hasn’t really generated that much happiness. To paraphrase William Wordsworth, who hovers like a presiding genius above The Master and His Emissary, we have murdered to dissect".

~~

"The book (The Master And His Emissary) is, in its very nature, an objective attempt to understand the human condition through a highly–informed and sympathetic analysis. But it is an analysis nonetheless and one that points us to the need for a response that cannot be analytic. We cannot forensically analyse our way out of whatever existential cul–de–sac the left hemisphere has driven us into.

Rather, we need to do something else. We need art, we need music, we need poetry, we need ritual, we need landscape, we need narrative, we need the Other, we need God, we need love. We need, as Seamus Heaney wrote in his magnificent poem, ‘Postscript’, to “make the time to drive out West…when the wind/ And the light are working off eachother.” But we need to keep moving because it is “Useless to think you’ll park and capture it/ More thoroughly.”

Darwin knew this. He ended his most famous book with his own tangled bank, “clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth”. It’s a vision almost worthy of the Romantic poets with whom he grew up, Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ hovering in the background:

“Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth.”

Darwin was still, then, a lover of meadows and woods but by this stage, Wordsworth hovered only as a ghost, and Darwin was well on the way to losing the “strong and diversified tastes” with which he started out. The left hemisphere was winning. “A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not I suppose have thus suffered”, he reasoned in his autobiography, before resolving, somewhat mournfully:

“If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use.” "

https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2020/10/26/murdering-to-dissect-the-master-and-his-emissary

 

[Rolig Loon]

As interesting as Darwin's musings are, they are a bit of an outlier. As C.P. Snow noted in the early 1950s, it is much more common for scientists to indulge in the arts when they step outside the lab than it is for artists/musicians/writers to turn to the sciences when they want a change of pace.  Nobel Prize winner  Richard Feynman was perhaps one that the general public is most likely to recognize, but I  have known many other physicists and chemists who are accomplished musicians. painters, and writers.  Snow's observation was that Western civilization had developed two cultures (scientific and humanistic) with a one-way bridge between them.  He used that as an argument that our education systems had to start doing a better job of teaching the sciences -- a popular idea in the Cold War years following WWII. 

Those of us who grew up during those decades remember the explosion of interest that led to everything from the Apollo moon missions to microchips and genetic engineering.  There are many more people working in the STEM fields today than there were when we were young, yet it's still true that scientific types are more likely to to be accomplished artists than it is for novelists and musicians "to know a gene from a chromosome,” as the president of Harvard lamented in 2001.  Increasing the emphasis on sciences in the schools did lead to a new generation of scientists and engineers, as Snow hoped, but it did not change the one-way bridge between the two cultures.  Personally, I will know that we are approaching parity between them when I hear of more playwrights, composers, and sculptors with regrets like Darwin's: “If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some biochemistry or astronomy at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use.”  Despite a long career in academia, I have no idea how to get to that point.

[Innula Zenovka]

8 hours ago, Moondira said:

Regarding replication, I was referring to the religion aspect Madelaine brought into the discussion; I was basically saying that scientific replication is not the only way to arrive at truth.

However, a primary criticism of Kahneman's book is that many of his experiments cannot be replicated:
https://jasoncollins.blog/re-reading-kahnemans-thinking-fast-and-slow/
https://www.wenglinskyreview.com/wenglinsky-review-a-journal-of-culture-politics/2017/1/23/kahnemans-fallacies
https://jasoncollins.blog/bad-behavioural-science-failures-bias-and-fairy-tales/

Kahneman even came out and admitted he placed too much faith in underpowered studies:
https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/

Personally I'm not so troubled about some studies not being replicable and critique it on other grounds, some of them not even attributable to the book per se but instead in the manner in which others becoming aware of illogical thinking patterns misapply the theories to other people and situations. I've seen Madelaine do this repeatedly, and am hoping she'll take her beloved book off the altar, illumined lovingly by the candles shining upon it, and read it more carefully. 

Behavioral scientists in general can become quite cocky and divorce themselves from real life, only paying attention to the patterns they think they've discovered and misapplying them.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry reading these examples:

https://unherd.com/2020/03/dont-trust-the-psychologists-on-coronavirus/
https://jasoncollins.blog/2020-04-07-the-limits-of-behavioural-science-coronavirus-edition/

But regarding Kahneman's book specifically, I like his conceptualization of some of the illogical patterns he demonstrates, but my main criticism is that (although he assigns the 'left brain' rational mind the number 2 position and the more unconscious 'right brain' mind the number 1 position) he clearly favors the conscious, rational mind and assigns all bias to the other. I much more agree with a book published 2 years prior to his which gives the 'right brain' mind priority, The Master And His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. His book stresses that the conscious, rational mind should be the servant of the 'right brain' and not its master. I believe the conscious, rational mind is overrated; one only has to look at the mess the Western world has created for proof of this. The Enlightenment? Just no.

Plus, you can't make someone rational by telling them to be so. Just look at the forum for examples of that! One must dig deeper/higher, and incorporate Transpersonal Psychology methods to effect lasting change. It might be fun for us intellectuals to play with our minds and see where we fool ourselves, but lasting change for society? Nope. So what's the point of Kahneman's book really? So us intellectuals can play with ourselves I guess.

That wasn't Kahneman's research.    That was someone else's recent research that he thought confirmed, and extended in a particularly interesting way, a point for which there's certainly plenty of evidence.    However, as time passed, it became more and more apparent that this particular piece of research couldn't be reliably replicated and it would seem that it was a simple statistical fluke.     

All it means is that one particular section of his book, a discussion of "framing" (a specific technical term in this context), is probably wrong* but it doesn't really affect the rest of the argument.

That particular observation might still be right, but there isn't any empirical evidence to support it, so we can't assume it works that way until there is, which doesn't seem likely.    That's all it means.

*The major practical implication of his being wrong is that some online social media advertising money was probably wasted and some algorithms had to be tweaked, but that's about all it amounts to. 

Edited July 19, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Chroma Starlight]

2 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

All it means is that one particular section of his book, a discussion of "framing" (a specific technical term in this context), is probably wrong but it doesn't really affect the rest of the argument.

That particular observation might still be right, but there isn't any empirical evidence to support it, so we can't assume it works that way until there is, which doesn't seem likely.    That's all it means.

Never underestimate the potential of positive expectation!

[Innula Zenovka]

8 hours ago, Moondira said:

I was basically saying that scientific replication is not the only way to arrive at truth.

I agree, but don't try mixing scientific and non-scientific truths because it doesn't work.    That's all I'm saying.

Look at it this way.    A statement may or may not be true, or a piece of evidence may or may not be genuine, but a court, quite rightly, can't take account of it in determining anything unless it adheres to the strict rules of legal evidence, whatever they are in that court's jurisdiction.    The fact that a piece of evidence is hearsay, for example, ("someone told me they saw him to it") doesn't necessarily make it untrue but it does make it inadmissible.

Same with scientific evidence.     If something is said to be the case, that's all very interesting, but until whatever it is that's said to have happened can reliably be observed again, or reliably be made to happen again,  there's not much to talk about.  

[Moondira]

18 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

As interesting as Darwin's musings are, they are a bit of an outlier. As C.P. Snow noted in the early 1950s, it is much more common for scientists to indulge in the arts when they step outside the lab than it is for artists/musicians/writers to turn to the sciences when they want a change of pace.  Nobel Prize winner  Richard Feynman was perhaps one that the general public is most likely to recognize, but I  have known many other physicists and chemists who are accomplished musicians. painters, and writers.  Snow's observation was that Western civilization had developed two cultures (scientific and humanistic) with a one-way bridge between them.  He used that as an argument that our education systems had to start doing a better job of teaching the sciences -- a popular idea in the Cold War years following WWII. 

Those of us who grew up during those decades remember the explosion of interest that led to everything from the Apollo moon missions to microchips and genetic engineering.  There are many more people working in the STEM fields today than there were when we were young, yet it's still true that scientific types are more likely to to be accomplished artists than it is for novelists and musicians "to know a gene from a chromosome,” as the president of Harvard lamented in 2001.  Increasing the emphasis on sciences in the schools did lead to a new generation of scientists and engineers, as Snow hoped, but it did not change the one-way bridge between the two cultures.  Personally, I will know that we are approaching parity between them when I hear of more playwrights, composers, and sculptors with regrets like Darwin's: “If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some biochemistry or astronomy at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use.”  Despite a long career in academia, I have no idea how to get to that point.

I hope you don't think I was dissing scientists. I enjoy reading about science and admire scientists. I wouldn't care if there were 3 times the scientists vs the artists. I'm currently reading Mapping The Heavens by Priyamvada Natarajan, who is quite impressive:
https://campuspress.yale.edu/priya/new-post-from-lisa/
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300204414/mapping-heavens

I was not positing some sort of contest between artists and scientists to determine which is better. While using a scientist, Darwin, as an example of left-brain/right-brain imbalance I was speaking to this dynamic in society overall -- the Western world is imbalanced in favor of the 'left-brain' and we would be better as a society overall if we incorporated more holistic 'right-brain' dynamics and let this side be the "Master", as Dr. Iain McGilchrist advises. I see science moving away from an excessively individualized, atomized paradigm so there is hope, and perhaps that's why I love the more holistically oriented discoveries in quantum mechanics which have the potential of tying our world together.
 
Anyway, I used Darwin is an example of a scientist who became unbalanced, someone who focused intensely on his 'left brain' activities and lost touch with his 'right brain', much the way I see that society overall has done, and did not mean to imply anything is wrong with individual scientists. I do wonder why this happened to him, and in my own endeavors I struggle to maintain the balance (personally this is one reason why, as an artist, I spend time writing to keep my 'left brain' active).

For centuries we've been on the path of conquering and controlling nature, of bending it to our will for our anthropocentric needs, not taking into account the needs of of other inhabitants of our world, of the whole. That's what the 'left brain' tends to do, it tends to take everything apart and see only parts while ignoring the connection between everything, whereas the 'right brain' views reality more holistically. 

This materialistic, reductionist approach to the world is causing grave harm, so much so that we may become instinct in the next decades as we clamor to suck up every last resource for humans while ignoring the web of life that is worthy in its own right, and is vital in keeping humans alive too. It's bizarre really; there is a general lack of comprehension that if the rest of life dies then we do too, and it's as if on some level we believe humans are so special and separate from the rest of the world that we could live without the environment surrounding us.

Somewhere along the way we stopped feeling connected to nature in its own right and increasingly began looking at it as a 'thing' to control, as something that only exists to accommodate our demands instead of living in balance with it. The development of science has certainly facilitated this mindset, along with all its positive contributions, but I don't blame science per se.

Edited July 19, 2021 by Moondira

[Chroma Starlight]

 

[Moondira]

11 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

I agree, but don't try mixing scientific and non-scientific truths because it doesn't work.    That's all I'm saying.

Look at it this way.    A statement may or may not be true, or a piece of evidence may or may not be genuine, but a court, quite rightly, can't take account of it in determining anything unless it adheres to the strict rules of legal evidence, whatever they are in that court's jurisdiction.    The fact that a piece of evidence is hearsay, for example, ("someone told me they saw him to it") doesn't necessarily make it untrue but it does make it inadmissible.

Same with scientific evidence.     If something is said to be the case, that's all very interesting, but until whatever it is that's said to have happened can reliably be observed again, or reliably be made to happen again,  there's not much to talk about.  

As I just described to Rolig, I view dividing reality into its parts and not comprehending the whole as the primary causation of the mess the world is in. Yet you are advising I do this in evaluating the phenomenon of telepathy. But I see the world as a whole; I don't cut out parts of it so that I can make my point. I fully acknowledge that much (if not most) of what others believe to be non-sensory phenomena (extra sensory phenomena) is actually the result of wishful imagination or faulty reasoning (the errors in logic humans can exhibit, as described by Kahneman). But I also leave open the possibility that a true non-sensory experience might have occurred; that information could have been accessed by a means outside of our known sensory detection ability. The latter is the definition of true telepathy, and you are asking me to leave out the actual definition of it in my evaluation of it? This is beyond illogical.

Your request would be perfectly understandable if we were discussing, say, the weather patterns in Africa, or the behavior of newborn kittens; yes in these cases it's best to stick to the known senses in our evaluation. This won't work in the case of telepathy, however, because it starts from the position, the claim, of experience outside our known senses.  I'm willing to include both -- faulty logic/wishful thinking causing an individual to believe an experience is a telepathic one outside the known sensory channels and the possibility of a non-sensory experience outside our known ways of perceiving the world -- why can't you?