What about the facts?

[FallingLeaves]

this was originally part of a response to another thread but I felt like it would be better divorcing it from that and putting it here..
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in my view, scientists are more about trying to get agreement with each other than just about anything else. Hence the need to always be 'proving' things, and doing independent confirmations of things.

But from what I've seen, any proof you can make is by its very essence somewhat arbitrary... even seemingly fixed things don't have to be as fixed as we might suppose if we accept some of the ancient texts in the spirit they were written... and even if the 'facts' are as 'fixed' as people have been led to suppose, I still find it is possible to describe the same phenomena in many different ways. (mathematics supports the latter theory by the way). So I get a choice of which description to use? That itself is hardly fixed...

So to me any given scientific 'statement of fact' is inherently somewhat arbitrary independently of whether I want to postulate today that the facts themselves are somewhat arbitrary, and sometimes statements of fact are even slanted towards a specific agenda despite the statement by scientists that they think objectively.

But even if I'm wrong and scientists somehow do think objectively (although I'd be hard pressed to buy into that), it still often isn't the scientists who are saying thing about science, and marketing experts have a very different outlook on life... it is more about persuasion than fact... or rather it is more about using the facts about how to persuade effectively....

so I find that as with all things human science is more a matter of what various leaders can get others to buy into than anything else... it is just that the people who do the buying get to have the illusion that there is deep inherent (and seemingly immutable) meaning into what they are buying into that makes it somehow more worthwhile than believing in pink unicorns... and maybe that it somehow insulates them from the arbitrariness of other people's whims... but like i say I find that even the chosen statement of fact relies on whim even if we do decide that the facts themselves are as immutable as they seem.

[utopiandreamchild]

If science hasn't found a way to overcome death by now I don't think it ever will or a least the answer won't be a scientific one.

I think we have it within us to live eternally but no one has discovered the answer just yet, well I'm working on it at the moment so I guess time will tell if my hunch is right or wrong.

utopiandreamchild

[Busby]

Originally Posted by FallingLeaves

this was originally part of a response to another thread but I felt like it would be better divorcing it from that and putting it here..
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in my view, scientists are more about trying to get agreement with each other than just about anything else. Hence the need to always be 'proving' things, and doing independent confirmations of things.

There are many fields of science full of normal people wanting to find answers to many questions. Just like you and I in fact.
Should there at any time be a conspiracy -and it happens - the false evidence is quickly exposed and the necessary steps taken.
No scientist will ever tell you that he/she has proof of anything - that's the whole beauty of research, a new discovery can throw a new light on something which seemed to be fairly conclusive.

It happens of course that certain facts or results of scientific research come up with answers that don't suit everyone. Science doesn't say for instance that ghosts don't exist, it just says that there is no evidence that they exist. There are plenty of similar examples.

One thing is clear, science has moved us on tremendously in the past 300 years, the best is yet to come and trying to comprehend what life will be like in even 1000 years lies outside our ability.

[iamthat]

Originally Posted by FallingLeaves

So to me any given scientific 'statement of fact' is inherently somewhat arbitrary independently of whether I want to postulate today that the facts themselves are somewhat arbitrary, and sometimes statements of fact are even slanted towards a specific agenda despite the statement by scientists that they think objectively.

And if you want to get a science degree then you have to produce work which conforms to scientific consensus.

And recognition from science comes from having papers published in prestigious journals, and these papers are peer reviewed. If these papers do not conform to scientific consensus they are unlikely to be published.

And scientists are dependent on funding to pursue their research, and any research which disagrees with scientific consensus is unlikely to get funding.

Dean Radin has written some interesting books on these very issues when it comes to science, particularly as applied to scientific research into the paranormal.

Peace

[Podshell]

Bit odd to me that some who claim to be scientific dismiss all the elecronica data of ghosts,I mean what do they think is going on?The companies who make all these devices have incorporated something in them that tricks you into hearing and seeing spirits? Surely a single TV program exposing this trick will put an end to all these shenanigans.

[FallingLeaves]

iamthat -

my point exactly...

you can't not buy into the same explanations others are buying into, if you wanna be part of the system.

[Mora321]

"More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research."

nature.com/articles/533452a

Quantum mechanics tells us that Reality is not fixed until some type of observer is present - but the real problem (apart from faked experiments) is that the human interacts with the substances/energies of the experiment independently of experimental processes. For example: beginners' luck.

[Altair]

Lets just focus on simple empirical, verifiable studies. The rest is personal, and sometimes it seems to delve into abject cynicism, projecting behaviour of religious leaders upon science, and even conspiracies (''they're all part of a network of liars because they can't prove my spirituality!'').

It's damn hard to go and scientifically prove something that is obviously immaterial and acts unpredictably and at its own pace and whim ((from my experience)). It's not the 'fault' of scientists or the practice of science that ''spirituality'' is playing hard to get.

[Podshell]

You can use the simple scientific approach to most subjects including spiritual ones.Aparatus-method-result-conclusion.The apparatus here being the mind,body and soul,the methods being some form of combined ritual(depending on choice)for example chanting and following regulative principles of which I myself have carried out so witnessing directly the results and coming to very solid conclusions.Part of those conclusions is that unscrupulous gurus will misuse this knowledge and trick people very much like businesses use mainstream science to hoodwink-plus what is a peer? A peer to me is a genuine guru ,someone who has or is genuinely attempting to conquer and control their own senses,how can they be peers if they cannot even address the science of self?So there are only an handful of true peers ie Christ,Buddha and Mohamed.

[Redchic12]

Great research and experiments have been done by Dr Gary Schwartz and have been published. Google him. Brilliant stuff.