Hi LindaLou

Yes I’ve had this conversation before too Linda. For the record I have no problem with anyone investigating anything at all that takes their fancy the problems I see appear when they present findings and ask for their acceptance while the evidence is lacking. Don’t present finding that appear for all the world to break the foundational laws of physics with limited evidence or worse yet mostly wishful thinking and complain when people reject your ideas. If you have solid evidence then please go right ahead and present it. I am always open to good evidence.

No I don’t put much stock in anecdotal tales as evidence for extraordinary claims and I won’t comment on individual anecdotal claims as that tends to upset people but show me the evidence and it’s a different story.

I’ve never been a YEC, I have nothing against them or their ideologies other than that their ideas contradict the evidence yet they want to present them as if they are actually valid.

The idea often presented is that the ‘supernatural’ is too weird for sceptics and scientists but I think those who say it have really missed the boat. Have you looked at just how weird some of the findings of Quantum Physics are? They make ghosts look positively ordinary in comparison.

So leaving out the word supernatural and simply putting in unexplained is reasonable. I just think we all need to avoid interpreting any such things in any way until we have enough evidence to formulate a real theory of how they work. That’s where the supernatural crowed falls down IMHO, they leap to conclusions beyond the evidence because they’d like it to be true while the real explanations are probably mundane as you have suggested just beyond our current understanding.

I'm sure they must have appreciated being told that it's all in their heads and that you cannot accept their testimony
True believers in ghosts don’t accept such as even a possibility at least those I’ve spoken too don’t. They are unphased by my comments they just think I’m crazy to think that way.

People like James Randi and his own agenda don't help matters.
I am impressed by what James Randi does though I know he can be abrasive but he really does put the money on the line for anyone who actually believes they can demonstrate something supernatural. And remember that they get to make up the rules so long as they can be tested. They get to say what exactly they can do and how someone could know that they can actually do it. Have you read through the results of his testing? The Australian water diviners tests were just brilliant for example.

They could simply be psychic imprints on some kind of invisible medium which sensitive people can "pick up."
Does that statement actually mean anything? What is a ‘psychic imprint’ and what sort of medium do you suspect could be involved that can’t be detected by any instrument we have ever invented?
If such a phenomenon could not currently be detected by scientific instruments, this would not be proof of its non-existence.
True but you are spelling out a theory of how it might work though I can’t fathom what your explanation actually means. Can you explain it in more detail? What exactly is a ‘psychic imprint’ and how do you envisage this ‘invisble medium’?

It is also entirely possible that the intruments we do have could give us some helpful information if they were actually in use when a ghostly experience occurred. Unfortunately, when someone experiences a ghost, it is usually an unexpected event and they usually don't have scientific instruments to hand to grab and use.
That’s possible though many claimed ghost hunters have taken a huge array of instruments to haunted places and have tried very hard to get readings, some even claim success though I’ve never seen any good evidence of it. Can it be that ghosts don’t want us to look at them with scientific instruments? Or is it more a god of the gaps problem that the more places we look and the more ways we look the smaller the niches in which they are claimed to hide from us. More and more the very very hard to find and the non existent look very alike.

What is EMF?

If you are talking about magnetic fields all you need is a volt meter (about $20 from most electronic stores) and a coil of wire (about $5 from the same store) and a few minutes to wind a coil onto a toilet roll or similar former. Then set it up somewhere and watch the readings as your ‘ghost’ passes or does whatever it does.

I’ve read a little of Sheldrake’s work and I suspect that there is a much simpler reason why he finds so much opposition to his work among main stream scientists. I don’t believe in the mega conspiracy theories that so many suggest are behind the opposition to such work, I don’t even buy the bias against supernatural angle, I think the real reason is far simpler, I suspect that the majority of scientists disagree with him because the evidence does not support his conclusions. Good scientists are very picky about such things.
OK, accusations that he is a "crackpot" because his research is not mainstream, aside, it is incorrect to say that the evidence does not support his conclusions. He is a methodical and thorough scientist and has published all of his results and how he arrived at them.
I visited his website and read a bit on his ideas of morphic fields and their evolution and inheritance in parallel with DNA and the first thing that struck me was that he’s using the word ‘morphic fields’ to account for the quite well understood chemical gradients that guide embryology and the building of nerve pathways within organisms. These are not fields they are simply chemical signatures produced in one part of the forming body and guiding the development of the rest. We can even alter them artificially and predict in detail what effect it will have on the resultant organism. Why does Sheldrake think we need to give a new name to this well understood chemical system and why does he think it requires a morphic field when proteins and DNA can already explain this. It’s not a good start when he misrepresents or misunderstands evolutionary biology 101.

He goes on to claim that morphic fields are heritable yet he has yet to even show that they exist and has given no hints as to how they could be detected or tested. Sir William would be turning in his grave IMHO.

‘fields’ that hold information are a common characteristic of ‘supernatural’ theories but the existence of any field that holds information in the sense it is used here has never been proven nor has any theoretical framework ever been invented to explain how such a field could work. In fact fields may carry information from one place to anther, radio waves are an example of this, but the information does not evolve, it is not active and it does not hang around in any sense waiting for some later events to allow it to return and do something, anything at all. If a morphic field is a true field then the information it contains would be leaving the earth at the speed of light never to return unless it has a physical repository but then we already have physical repositories for such information in main stream science, DNA, neurons etc which seem perfectly capable of holding all such information that we are currently aware of.

Will you do one thing for me Linda, get into some physics literature, not deep stuff just the layman’s stuff or introductory college level stuff, there’s plenty available on the web, and look for a field, any field, that can store in place information without a physical medium in anything like the way that morphic fields are supposed to according to Sheldrake? See if you can find anything that could do the job. I’m not suggesting that you will find Sheldrake morphic field rather I’m suggesting that you will find that no fields know behave anything like the ‘fields’ Sheldrake postulates. What he describes is woo woo in a box designed to flesh out his wild speculations not a field in any meaningful sense of the word.

I’ll keep reading but from the little I’ve done so far it seems very clear that the reason he is rejected by main stream science is because his ideas are not science. He ignores well understood explanations for some phenomenon and posits the existence of undetectable fields that defy the well understood laws of physics and behave in an unprecedented way to explain them. Does that seem a logical position to you Linda?

I have only briefly read through his telepathy experiments and the protocol’s seem very loose to me though I’d be interested to see any well controlled trials of such though all of those I’ve read to date, and it’s a long list, have been disappointing with the results being more and more negative the better controlled and larger the trials which is to me a very telling result. In smaller, less well controlled trials you would expect to get more false positives due simply to the effects of random chance but as the trials get larger and better controlled you would expect to get fewer and fewer false positives and so, unless the effect were real, you would expect the results to head towards zero which is indeed exactly what you find.

The modus operandi of such ‘investigators’ seems to be to run lots and lots of low quality trials then ignore all of those which produced no results and trumpet the findings of those which did. Given that in low quality trials you will get positive results from random chance alone and that you have ignored all of the negative results it starts to look like there really is something to it but this impression evaporates when you reinstate all the trials and weight trials based on the rigor inherent in their designs. It has always been the case with psychic research that the harder you look the less an effect you find in my experience.

I’ve read quite a bit of Dr Morse’s work in the past. There are many problems with his methods and findings I have to say. He finds some very interesting things though such as people who have experienced NDE’s are more generous and loving that those who have not but then that could easily be explained by coming close to death alone. That would surly make most people think harder about what’s important in their lives. Add to that the feeling that many report of the nearness of god and the power of this effect would be magnified many fold even if NDE’s are exactly what they appear to be, the misfiring of an anoxic brain. It’s interesting that many other scientists could produce NDE’s artificially in patients who were not near death yet Morse could not. It suggests to me that his controls were not good controls in that they did not closely mimic the condition of the test subject. Still you are correct, if there’s anything to NDE’s it would be interesting indeed to know what it was.

It mentions the idea of memories possibly being stored outside the brain
Though it cites no evidence at all in favour of this idea just the vague notion that it could fit into the framework that Morse is trying to put together for NDE’s.

and doesn't reference Sheldrake directly, but this is one of his studies as well, which ties into the morphic fields idea.
And of course Sheldrake too could not produce any real evidence for this idea though I’m sure he believes it is true.

Open studies of these phenomenon have already been done, tones of them all with ambiguous or negative results. None to date have shown solid positive results which to me is very suggestive but I have no problems with people doing more research along those lines so long as they do them with true scientific rigor and they are not using my money to do so.

All the best Linda

Russell