Palyne

This is post 2 in a series. [Post 1: Introduction]

Note: Some of these essays will be ‘general’ and some ’specific’. This is one of the more general ones in terms of application to the viewer. It is important to the larger context of RV and viewers; and, to some degree of viewer understanding; and hence their development; as well as their eventual real-world situation handling. And, it ties into others in this series.

How to Ruin A Viewer, Part 1: Claim that decades of science supports something it doesn’t at all, and in some cases totally contradicts; while implying that Guru(s) X is validated-by-proxy as a result of that claim; while simultaneously invalidating a few of the most fundamentally important elements of what constitutes ‘Remote Viewing’ in the first place.

 
False-advertising about science under the label of ‘Remote Viewing’ has been out of hand for a dozen years now. It used to be far more egregarious than it is now, though. Around 1997, under the influence of reading the science and meeting some of the actual people from the science side of the subject, I started publicly talking about the misinformation I felt I’d been indoctrinated with in my view via commercial psi-methods experts, and about the iceberg of relevent info my experts obviously didn’t know (or want to know). Gradually over the years this public rebuttal on the internet by me and others has led to more conservative and more ‘carefully refined’ advertising. By some, anyway.

Decades of remote viewing science support mostly this one thing: “science.”

To a vastly lesser but still important degree, it also supports [in my words]:

“Free response psychic functioning, as performed within a {science-based} remote viewing protocol, consistently violating chance probability {and hence falling under the warehouse/umbrella term of ‘psi’, which we actually don’t know a damn thing about except that by definition it is that-thing-we-don’t-know-about-yet, and which as semantics probably carries enough ‘assumptive baggage’ to make merely using the term inaccurate given our limited understanding, but we haven’t another word for this phenomenon yet mostly due to that same limited understanding}.”

Science does not “validate” any psychic method, such as XRV sold for big-bucks on the radio and internet. In fact what research has been done in this area mostly supports that [in my words]:

“It depends, and it varies, and all other things being equal, the viewer matters much more than the method, and what’s best for that viewer as far as method goes is totally individual, both to the type of data sought {eg the reason for the viewing}, and to the personality of the viewer.”

Science does not support anything done outside a legitimate set of science-based controls, EVER. So if a method is taught without the science protocol it is quite literally the polar opposite of anything validated by science. If the method is taught and pointedly done so in a way to invalidate the protocol, it is probably one of the most destructive ‘training’ scenarios possible, ranging from ‘chutzpah’ to ‘fraud’ to ‘indoctrination with disinformation’.

There are other things science has demonstrated related to remote viewing, some trivial, some of great import, but more work (funding) is needed for nearly everything.

Science and Measuring “Psi”

It can be fairly noted that the science lab itself by its nature puts a somewhat limited version of psi on trial. For example you can measure accuracy many different ways, but there is no way to measure the true, genuine probability ratio of pulling an accurate detailed sketch out of a hat the size of “the world”.

Science forms of measure cannot touch many other elements, formats or variants of apparent-psi in our world, including all spontaneous psi no matter how detailed. Not to mention that measuring ‘a sketch’ compared to ‘a word’ is vastly more difficult to put a number on, without implementing measuring approaches that have to just change the framework entirely, in order to make judging possible at all.

In some respects science with psi is in the position of “looking for the keys a block from where they were dropped because the light is better there”. So science certainly has limits in this subject I will agree. But if anything that should only lend to our being more conservative about claiming what science “supports” in the psi area — not less.

Science and Commercial Remote Viewing

Science as promoted in public and commercial RV is misused as a marketing gimmick to make claims about someone’s saleable product/service, which is usually outright false advertising if not fraud.

(Some of the scientists ‘associated’ with laymen in public/commercial RV are recruited to hang out for pretty much the same reason: sales benefit from “credibility by proxy.” The scientists in my opinion {or wishful thinking} would be pickier if there were more options for legit science and funding in the field. When options are close to none, criteria on what to support for any-hope-is-better-than-none, changes a little.)

Remote Viewing science may “indirectly” support some elements that are found within one or more psychic methods, simply by nature of viewers having used those various processes and performed adequately repeatedly under controls, or by nature of certain “trends, tendencies, etc.” being clearly visible over the years within psychic functioning as an observed process. But parapsychology (–gosh, I really dislike that label and wish they’d get a better one…) does not directly support anything sold for money aside from peer-reviewed journals in that field (and frankly even that is debateable sometimes).

Anybody claiming otherwise is lying. Alternatively and in their defense, they may just be too stupid to think clearly enough to separate their woo-woo wishing or personal near-religious doctrine-of-psi-method from legitimate science.

Remote Viewing vs. Psychic

Science is what makes RV different from “just psychic”. Screw that up and you’re not only ‘just psychic’ and being a “poser” claiming to be a viewer, but you’re also helping publicly ruin the one chance that psi has ever had in our culture to be taken seriously and used appropriately.

Science is RV’s greatest strength, and is a critical part of the fundamental definition of the official label “remote viewing.” As far as I’m concerned anybody who invalidates science in this role publicly or privately to others is destructive to remote viewing as a field, and to viewers individually and en masse by their influence.

Important Addendums

1. I am not a scientist. Please see Cognitive Sciences Laboratory for real Remote Viewing science information.

2. For a general overview of remote viewing in science, one of the best papers ever is Dr. Jessica Utts’s paper “Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology,” which is free online. The commentaries are kind of humorous but worthwhile especially since they resulted in her ability to say more as rebuttal.

That paper itself (with the others) is here:
http://anson.ucdavis.edu/%7Eutts/91rmp.html
A small collection of parapsychology papers is here:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/psipapers.html

3. Bear in mind while reading the above-mentioned paper that the “psi method” for “Ganzfeld” RV is basically lying back with audio/visual dulled/tranced by artifacts (eye coverings, red light and white noise) and speaking the data. Couldn’t be any more different than most psi methods as taught for RV today! So, put in context with this essay:

The meta-analysis paper “statistically recognizing a greater-than-chance accuracy-effect as-psi” could fairly be said to directly support “the existence of psi” (or “an effect we choose to label with that term, for now”). Also, it supports that said “psi is capable of being demonstrated under controlled conditions within a Ganzfeld protocol {which contains as part of its definition a specific altered-state, verbally communicated, psychic methodology}.”

Critical thinking should make it clear however that:
1 – This provides no statement on the Ganzfeld protocol ‘as compared to’ any other approach.
2 – If humans are innately psi, they might demonstrate it under many/any/most approaches.
3 – This meta-analysis, as well as the research on which it is founded, cannot be used to ‘validate’ any other (non-Ganzfeld) psychic methodology sold “as” Remote Viewing today.

It is still quite interesting–even for those whose primary interest IS in some other psi methodology.

PJ

Well there’s been quite a few studies so far that have made it clear that not getting enough sleep can reduce your cognitive function (read: your BRAIN, man!), decrease the strength of your immune system, impair performance on a myriad of skills tested, score higher correlation with all kinds of diseases mental and physical, and contribute to making you fat.

Since sleep deprivation’s been the cornerstone of my life for the last 18 years or so, I find all this very interesting. My little shoulder angel says, Imagine how different your life might have been if you’d slept more so your brain had worked even better, if you’d had more energy, less fat, and been healthier! My little shoulder devil responds, Yeah, and you wouldn’t have got a friggin thing done, either.

So recently, Cheri Mah of Stanford U authored a paper on a study done on six basketball players at Stanford, healthy student males. To make a long story short, they measured these guys for sprinting times and free throw accuracy on their normal sleep schedule, and then on one that included “as much extra sleep as they could get.” The abstract is totally unhelpful about how much this is. 15 minutes more? 3 hours? 6 hours? Well anyway… “more.” Perhaps the full paper has how much more.

When getting “more” sleep, sprint times were faster, and free throws were more often accurate. The players also said they had increased energy, better mood during playing, and less fatigue.

Wow. Beautiful! Sleep’s the best drug since sleep.

I’ve seen this referenced on a few blogs and websites, including Krista’s. I decided to make a note of it here because the last week my body has been demanding a FULL night of sleep. If I don’t get it, I have very little warning before my body will just crash in the day, and I end up sleeping on my lunch hour and after work, totally screwing up my schedule and, of course, resulting in my not getting stuff done I had planned.

I understand that at 41 — I’ll be 42 in September — I’m not a spring chicken, and sleep deprivation and all-nighters and things like that get way more difficult as most people age. But my body’s utter DEMAND — and taking it whether I’m agreeing or not — for SLEEP accompanies my beginning to work out. And I’m not even working out all that hard! I realize timing can be coincidental. But I don’t think it is. I think my body is basically knocking me out flat before I have a chance to stuff sufficient caffeine down my throat to keep us both awake — me and my body ;-) — all night so I can “do stuff”.

So I’m not getting much done. But I’m sure getting more sleep!

The problem with any human endeavor is that, well, humans are the ones running it.

Even in the most admirable pursuits, such as science, this is going to bring human qualities into it — including politics, marketing, commercialism, information control, power struggles, and the tendency of humans to focus on what they already believe in and to resist change.

A recent discussion on a lowcarb forum included a quote so great that I’d like to include it here.

Reflections On Scientific Dogma

by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick
http://www.thincs.org/Malcolm3.htm#oct24
—————–

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has today decided to award

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2005

jointly to

Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren

for their discovery of

“the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease”

—————–

It was good to see these two winning the Nobel Prize, with the key piece of following text appended.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who with tenacity and a prepared mind challenged prevailing dogmas.

“Who with tenacity and a prepared mind challenged prevailing dogmas….” A few short words. As if the Second World War could be encapsulated thus, “In the Second World War, the Allies defeated Germany, Japan and a few other countries after a series of successful engagements.”

I followed the helicobacter story from pretty early on in the proceedings. At first, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were personally attacked and ritually humiliated for questioning the wisdom of their superiors. When this didn’t have the desired effect, their work was rubbished. Barry Marshal, at one point, was forced to swallow helicobacter pylori himself, then develop ulcers, in order to prove that bacteria could cause ulcers.

As the work of these two became better known, and appeared to be threatening the multi-billion-dollar market in ulcer-healing drugs, the major pharmaceutical companies lined up expert after expert after opinion leader to intensify the attack. It would have been easy to fold under this level of pressure. Good on Marshall and Warren for sticking to their guns.

Their story highlights an issue about science that has bothered me for years. Namely, the incredible, stifling power of dogma. One would hope that scientists have open minds, but the more you study science, and scientific thinking, the more it becomes clear that the minds of most scientists remain firmly, and highly aggressively, shut.

I have tried to train myself to put all ideas into one of three places — probable, possible or unlikely — and never to allow myself to become emotionally attached to any hypothesis. But most scientists, especially medical scientists, seem only to have two places to store their thoughts. They are true or false; right or wrong; sensible or stupid. This is usually supported by the killer scientific argument, “Do you know who I am, young man?” This is knows as Eminence-Based Medicine.

… If I had just one wish, it would be this: that all scientists took the following oath. “I shall always support and encourage new ideas, no matter how superficially idiotic and wrong they may seem. I shall also remember that established and comfortable ideas may well be wrong, and should be attacked and criticized at all times.”

The chances of this happening are, officially, fat.

PS: A raised cholesterol level causes heart disease. Ho, ho, ho.

People often ask why others question science; or ask, “Isn’t trusting some of the research that supports lowcarb vs. research that doesn’t seem to, cherry-picking what you want to believe?”

Concerning skepticism about science, for which I have great respect as a process, I think the above essay is an excellent rejoinder.

For the rest of modern science, I can only say: show me the money. Show me the funder; show me the scientist; and for godssakes, show me the real paper, not just the media presentation, the media gets more wrong or misrepresented in its 5th-grade-level sound-bites than it ever gets right.

And importantly: show me the conditions of that research. Who can forget Dr. Richard Atkins publishing about how more than 30 carbs a day “would not work” to put someone in his “induction” process, and then seeing research done with 55-100+ carbs per day, that did not get the same result obviously, billed as allegedly having “disproved” his findings about his lowcarb eating plan bringing certain body results? Even though technically it only confirmed what he’d already said but on a different facet of the topic? The devil is in the details, as the saying goes, sometimes a bit literally.

Concerning the results of “truth” about lowcarb, I say: show me the weight loss, the blood count improvements, the removal of all kinds of minor medical symptoms, and the great improvement in overall health and quality of life.

I don’t have to look farther than my scale or mirror and my own life — or that of so many other lowcarbers I know — to see the reality when the rubber hits the road on this question. Lowcarb rocks. Maybe other eating plans work for other people. But lowcarb is saving my life — and improving my health, mental and physical — one day at a time. I’ll leave the science to the scientists. For me, what counts is what works.

You gotta read this.

Diabetes breakthrough
Toronto scientists cure disease in mice

Tom Blackwell, National Post
Published: Friday, December 15, 2006

In a discovery that has stunned even those behind it, scientists at a Toronto hospital say they have proof the body’s nervous system helps trigger diabetes, opening the door to a potential near-cure of the disease that affects millions of Canadians.

Diabetic mice became healthy virtually overnight after researchers injected a substance to counteract the effect of malfunctioning pain neurons in the pancreas.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Dr. Michael Salter, a pain expert at the Hospital for Sick Children and one of the scientists. “Mice with diabetes suddenly didn’t have diabetes any more.”

The researchers caution they have yet to confirm their findings in people, but say they expect results from human studies within a year or so. Any treatment that may emerge to help at least some patients would likely be years away from hitting the market.

But the excitement of the team from Sick Kids, whose work is being published today in the journal Cell, is almost palpable.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, an immunologist at the hospital and a leader of the studies. “In my career, this is unique.”

Their conclusions upset conventional wisdom that Type 1 diabetes, the most serious form of the illness that typically first appears in childhood, was solely caused by auto-immune responses — the body’s immune system turning on itself.

They also conclude that there are far more similarities than previously thought between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and that nerves likely play a role in other chronic inflammatory conditions, such as asthma and Crohn’s disease.

The “paradigm-changing” study opens “a novel, exciting door to address one of the diseases with large societal impact,” said Dr. Christian Stohler, a leading U.S. pain specialist and dean of dentistry at the University of Maryland, who has reviewed the work.

“The treatment and diagnosis of neuropathic diseases is poised to take a dramatic leap forward because of the impressive research.”

About two million Canadians suffer from diabetes, 10% of them with Type 1, contributing to 41,000 deaths a year.

Insulin replacement therapy is the only treatment of Type 1, and cannot prevent many of the side effects, from heart attacks to kidney failure.

In Type 1 diabetes, the pancreas does not produce enough insulin to shift glucose into the cells that need it. In Type 2 diabetes, the insulin that is produced is not used effectively — something called insulin resistance — also resulting in poor absorption of glucose.

The problems stem partly from inflammation — and eventual death — of insulin-producing islet cells in the pancreas.

Dr. Dosch had concluded in a 1999 paper that there were surprising similarities between diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system disease. His interest was also piqued by the presence around the insulin-producing islets of an “enormous” number of nerves, pain neurons primarily used to signal the brain that tissue has been damaged.

Suspecting a link between the nerves and diabetes, he and Dr. Salter used an old experimental trick — injecting capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in mice that had an equivalent of Type 1 diabetes.

“Then we had the biggest shock of our lives,” Dr. Dosch said. Almost immediately, the islets began producing insulin normally “It was a shock ? really out of left field, because nothing in the literature was saying anything about this.”

It turns out the nerves secrete neuropeptides that are instrumental in the proper functioning of the islets. Further study by the team, which also involved the University of Calgary and the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, found that the nerves in diabetic mice were releasing too little of the neuropeptides, resulting in a “vicious cycle” of stress on the islets.

So next they injected the neuropeptide “substance P” in the pancreases of diabetic mice, a demanding task given the tiny size of the rodent organs. The results were dramatic.

The islet inflammation cleared up and the diabetes was gone. Some have remained in that state for as long as four months, with just one injection.

They also discovered that their treatments curbed the insulin resistance that is the hallmark of Type 2 diabetes, and that insulin resistance is a major factor in Type 1 diabetes, suggesting the two illnesses are quite similar.

While pain scientists have been receptive to the research, immunologists have voiced skepticism at the idea of the nervous system playing such a major role in the disease. Editors of Cell put the Toronto researchers through vigorous review to prove the validity of their conclusions, though an editorial in the publication gives a positive review of the work.

“It will no doubt cause a great deal of consternation,” said Dr. Salter about his paper.

The researchers are now setting out to confirm that the connection between sensory nerves and diabetes holds true in humans. If it does, they will see if their treatments have the same effects on people as they did on mice.

Nothing is for sure, but “there is a great deal of promise,” Dr. Salter said.

Sorry to be cynical but I bet the pharmaceutical and medical industries actually end up fighting against this, not for it. There is a TON of billions involved in doctors and ‘treating’ and ‘medicating’ diabetes.

Capsacin (there may be other spellings) is the stuff found in hot peppers (though I’m sure an injection of the pure stuff is a diff thing).

The formal research paper is here.