Reply To: Counterfactuals

  • Don Salmon

    Member
    March 16, 2023 at 12:46 pm

    Paul, you mention two things that I find fascinating, and both are quite closely connected.

    WHAT IS MEASURABLE?

    One of the research studies I did as a psychologist involved looking at the effects of mindfulness on reducing physical pain. It’s rather amazing that none of our advanced technologies have the capacity to measure the pain people experience.

    I did my research almost 25 years ago, but even now, the only way to measure pain is to ask: “What is your pain level on a scale of 1 to 10?”

    And people are notoriously bad at providing consistent estimates. How many times did I hear, “Oh, my pain is at least an 11 or 12!” And I’d say, “Well, how about on a scale of 1 to 100,” and they’d immediately say, “oh well then, maybe around 70.”

    The level of apparent control and prediction we have in regard to the material world (or rather, the objective aspect of our experience which we mistakenly label “Material” in the sense that it is completely self existent) is far less than we imagine – as is obvious from the excesses of climate change, and the nearly impossible task of replicating most psychological research studies.

    Then that gets us to so-called anomalous research. This is one of the terms people use for parapsychological research. If you are slightly open-minded about this, you realize that people are having thousands of psychic experiences throughout the day, every day.

    And somehow, the idea that these experiences are very hard to measure and reproduce in a lab setting – and the incorrect idea that these experiences are somehow contrary to the so-called “laws of physics” – makes them unacceptable to many in the religion of scientism who believe they’re being scientific!