ZapperZ said:
I disagree. We can't produce top quarks "on demand" either! And if there's anything that is "below noise level" after a gazillion particle collision, it is the discovery of the top quark in such collision. It is worse than finding a needle in a haystack!
But still, we found them! The people who make such proposal (note the source and origin) also make a series of verifiable, testable, and quantitative prediction on where to look for them IF they exist! This is how you try to convince people that such an entity exist, i.e. by producing a series of measurable outcomes that can be falsified. It isn't via telling everyone else that just because you haven't found it, it doesn't mean it isn't there!
So I am utterly done and thoroughly jaded with this continuing excuses as if it is science's fault that we haven't detected such paranormal phenomena. Somehow, when it comes to paranormal studies, the rules are turned the other way, where it is the rest of us who have to falsify the claims, and not those who are proposing it who have to show that it is valid. Why are they so special?
The search for something small and improbable are very weak excuses for the failure to verify these things in light of all the utterly difficult search we go through in high energy physics. And to elevate the existence of these paranormal phenomena to being legitimate just because we have no way of measuring it yet is ridiculous. I could easily speculate (isn't that what we're doing here?) that, once we KNOW how to measure them, then we can show they are not there (ref: the classical ether, EPR's hidden variables).
So yes, I know how to play this game as well.
Zz.
Wow, I'm sorry I missed this one. Clearly part of the problem is that you see this as some kind of game. This is not a game.
You seem to be missing the point. With quarks, you can predict exactly the conditions that will produce them after so many collisions, right; or at least the odds that one will be produced after so many collisions? How does that compare to something like ball lightning, where we don't even know when or where to look? We don't know where to look or when to look because have no model to use for predictions. And for perspective, the anecdotal evidence for ball lightning is no better than the anecdotal evidence for ghosts [the claimed phenomena, not the interpretations of that phenomena], in fact it is probably far weaker, yet we accept the former to be real. How do we justify that one?
What would be your chance of finding a top quark if you had no model to use for finding them? The difference is that in particle physics, you are testing a model, not a claim.
If there are genuine psychic events that are not producible on demand, then it may be that we have no way to test the claims. If there is something wrong with that logic, please tell me specifically what it is. It isn't that we can say we have scientific evidence that the phenomenona exist, but we can't falsify claims of direct experience by faith either. It could be that we simply can't anticipate or artificially produce the conditions that allow for repeatable results.
Your position seems to be that anecdotal evidence counts as no evidence at all. While that is true for science, there are some questions that science has no way to address; at least not yet. What's more, logic is not limited to scientific constraints. If science cannot test a claim, then the next best thing is to determine what non-scientific evidence does exist and try to make sense of it. From there, perhaps insights to proper analysis will eventually be realized. But to simply deny all claims with no way to test them, is a leap of faith. I expect more than that.
I should add that many claims may soon be subject to reliable lie detector tests. So any suggestion that this is a game of catch your tail is absolutely false and only shows a lack of imagination. Just think ahead a bit. Sometimes it isn't that hard to see a solution. It may just take a little more time. Then we can know who is lying, and who is telling the truth to the best of their ability.
Ultimately the point was that while some types of claims about psychic phenomena seem to be reasonably debunked, this isn't true of all types of claims. Some can probably never be falsified - no proving a universal negative.