From: grante@aquarius (Grant Edwards)
Subject: Re: PSI - summary of book review
Organization: Rosemount, Inc.
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 19:14:32 GMT

boyken@herky.cs.uiowa.edu (Karl Boyken) writes:
: (Grant Edwards) writes:
: 
: [stuff deleted]
: 
: > I've read several articles by Blackmore and have always been impressed
: > with her.  I particulary enjoyed her articles describing how she
: > started out as a believer in psi and through her research gradually
: > proved to herself that there wasn't any experimental evidence to
: > support her beliefs.  You've got to admire somebody with the guts to
: > describe that process to the whole world.
: 
: I admire her guts in baring her soul, but I don't admire her change
: in her beliefs. 

[...]  

: I know I could not meet any objective tests for the existence
: of psi.  I know I cannot convince you of the reality of my
: experiences--all I can provide is anecdotal evidence.  But I am
: certain of the reality of my experiences.

Ms. Blackmore (and I) do not doubt the reality of your _experiences_.
What is in doubt is the meaning of the experience.  Out of body
experiences (OBEs) for example.  There is no doubt that many people
really experience OBEs.  The question is whether or not anything
actually left the body.  Is a paranormal explanation required? Or is
it a normal psychological event.  Thus one constructs tests to see if
during an OBE a person can observe things that could not have been
observed from where the person's body was during the experience.

: Up until a few years ago, there was no proof that people could have
: lucid dreams, dreams in which the dreamer knows he/she is dreaming.

Isn't a lucid dream when you _don't_ know it's a dream and it seems
real?

: Throughout history, people in every culture had reported having
: lucid dreams, but dream researchers dismissed this evidence as
: anecdotal.  Some of these scientists went so far as to theorize that
: dreams were tales the subconscious made up upon waking, that dreams
: actually did not occur during sleep.  But Stephen LaBerge finally
: did prove in the lab that lucid dreams actually do occur.

So we now know that lucid dreams occur, and that they are in fact
dreams.  The events in the dream are not physically real.  The
reality of the experience is not in quesiton.

: I guess I could change my mind about my own experiences and pretend
: that they didn't really happen, or that they're just some
: malfunction.

Nobody is claiming that the experience didn't happen.  Nobody is
claiming that the experience was abnormal.  The claim (at least for
OBEs) is that the events experienced didn't physically happen.

There is a difference between the reality of the experience and the
reality of the events in the experience.  (Does that make sense to
anybody?)

: But I'll take my own subjective sense of reality and
: the anecdotal evidence, instead of the absence of experimental
: evidence.

OK, but I won't.

--
Grant Edwards                                 |Yow!  Youth of today!  Join
Rosemount Inc.                                |me in a mass rally for
                                              |traditional mental
grante@aquarius.rosemount.com                 |attitudes!