Zoobyshoe said:
The dowser, himself, wouldn't be aware of following this train of logic.
(Q) said:
So far we’re in somewhat agreement but I have a problem with that statement as it borders on divination.
Not at all. In this line of speculation there is no aquisition of information by extra-sensory means. There is no "divination". The unusual part is that the dowser puts what he knows together and comes up with the right answer without consciously deliberating about it.
Think of it this way: I am suggesting that he is tapping into the same prodigious ability that autistic math wizards use when they perform astonishing calculations in their head, and can't explain how they did it.
By resorting to the dowsing rods the utility worker would be letting go of the cumbersome process of consciously sorting out the mass of details he's noticed. He just let's his unconscious put it all together for him, and he is free to believe he just "sensed it with the rods", rather than have to engage in what might be a book-length examination of all the things he took into consideration if he had to do it consciously.
I think this is pretty common. If you take anyone who is good at anything, say basketball, there is always only a very limited range of things that the players are consciously deliberating about. The rest is quite automatic, and spontaneous: very fast judgements made for reasons they probably could not consciously explain with any accuracy.
Glen Gould said this about his piano playing: if you stop a centipede and ask it how it moves its 99th leg, it starts to think about that leg it and pretty soon it can't walk anymore. Likewise when he was playing, he couldn't think about how he was playing or more specifically, why he was humming along. All he could tell you is that if he didn't hum along, he couldn't play.
Most likely he knows well what he does with full on-board faculty.
Someone once explained the learning process to me like this: We all start out unconsciously imcompetent. We think, consciously, we are competent, but in fact we aren't
In the next stage we become consciously aware that we are incompetent.
In the third stage we start to acquire conscious competence. We begin to acquire expertize, and are consciously aware of it.
The fourth stage is
unconscious competence. Because of all the practise and experience the person becomes able to do things skillfully without having to think about it.
By this logic, I think it is fair to claim that the experienced dowser/utility worker is not consciously aware of how he is finding pipes or whatever. He would just pick up the rods and "sense" the pipes.
Precisely. And that is where we can discard the concept of divination as we unravel the mystic of the “dowser” by simply revealing its true nature - a “buried pipe expert.”
Well, we can't discard anything since all I'm doing is speculating. This doesn't even constitute a theory: I haven't proposed any tests or predictions. Although what I suggest succeeds in explaining the alleged better-than-chance results, I'm not asserting I've indisputably hit the nail on the head. I'm just following a realistic train of logic to demonstrate that there are realistic trains of logic that could account for dowsing having a better-than-chance success rate. These are always to be preferred to explanations requiring the existence of unproven phenomena.
