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Bloody hell, that was one of the most uselessly long-winded essays I've ever read! Do you actually expect to find any fairies, gods, ghosts, successful sorcere

Bloody hell, that was one of the most uselessly long-winded essays I've ever read! Do you actually expect to find any fairies, gods, ghosts, successful sorcerers, etc, or not? Worse, the basic question is never even posed: why should we tie our conception of society and our meaning-making capacities, as applied to our own lives, to belief or disbelief in the supernatural? After all, if the "supernatural" existed, it would just be more natural, more stuff with causal powers, which would therefore be intrinsically tied into the rest of the causal order of things.

carapace 7y ago
You're right I think (about the "supernatural", not the "uselessly long-winded" bit, although I feel ya.) Here's the thing that bother's me: both the superstitious people and the enlightened (in the sense of disenchanted) people are missing the point. There is always a boundary between the known and the unknown. (Just to pick a wacky one at random: there is no scientific evidence one way or another that "ghosts" are or are not made of "dark matter".) I am not a scientist, but I am an amateur: I love science. Carl Sagan is a hero of mine. So one day I attended a Reiki session. What's Reiki? (Spoiler alert: NO ONE KNOWS! But I'm getting ahead of myself...) Reiki is the name given to a kind of healing energy (apologies to any physicists reading this) that can be channeled by people to engender healing effects. So, I'm sitting in this chair, and this person is waving her arm at me from about a meter away, and damned if I don't feel something "filling me up" as it were. Now I've felt e.g. high voltage fields, I'm no stranger to the Van de Graff generator and it's potential (no pun intended) to enable various party tricks. This wasn't an electric field. For one thing I could feel it within the volume of my body and (somehow) extending into the space around me. For another it heals. I don't want to get into the personal details, but it accelerates or engenders healing on mental, emotional and physical planes simultaneously. Now my first reaction, after the awe waned a little, was, "OMG let's do science to this!" But neither the Reiki practitioners nor the scientists that I have met are interested. If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated.
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  >If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated. Well dang. A priori, I'd jump to a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations. (Why yes, this is my research field. Why do you ask?) But we should still be testing this sort of thing. Assuming it is psychosomatic and nothing more complicated than that (which is already pretty reasonably complicated), what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects?
  - carapace 7y ago
    > But we should still be testing this sort of thing. Yes! I did some informal experimentation in the years following my introduction to Reiki. Nothing you could write a paper about, but I ruled out (to my own satisfaction) simple psychosomatic or placebo effects. > ...a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations. I agree, but that's what struck me about the incident I described: no one told me what was happening or what to expect. As a "sciency" kind of a person, I was astonished by the sensory impressions. I'm not prone to hallucinations generally (I used to work with self-hypnosis a lot and I'm pretty well-calibrated to my own "interoceptive afferents". It would have been very strange for my nervous system to have presented hallucinations to me without "telling me", so to speak.) The other astonishing thing was that at that time in my life I was suffering from severe depression and immediately as the Reiki treatment concluded the depression lifted and I felt (wonderfully!) normal for the rest of the evening. The effect wore off but the depression was never as severe again after that. I can offer no explanation why or how someone waving her arm at me for a few minutes could have done that. > what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects? Indeed. Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc... And Reiki seems to be effective on animals, even at a distance without physical contact or even motion. E.g. I can stand still and "beam" Reiki at a sick animal and it will get better. I would love to do this in a proper experimental set up. It has just never come together. For what it's worth, from the viewpoint of rational materialism, that Reiki aids healing is one of its least astonishing properties.

carapace 7y ago

You're right I think (about the "supernatural", not the "uselessly long-winded" bit, although I feel ya.) Here's the thing that bother's me: both the superstitious people and the enlightened (in the sense of disenchanted) people are missing the point. There is always a boundary between the known and the unknown. (Just to pick a wacky one at random: there is no scientific evidence one way or another that "ghosts" are or are not made of "dark matter".) I am not a scientist, but I am an amateur: I love science. Carl Sagan is a hero of mine. So one day I attended a Reiki session. What's Reiki? (Spoiler alert: NO ONE KNOWS! But I'm getting ahead of myself...) Reiki is the name given to a kind of healing energy (apologies to any physicists reading this) that can be channeled by people to engender healing effects. So, I'm sitting in this chair, and this person is waving her arm at me from about a meter away, and damned if I don't feel something "filling me up" as it were. Now I've felt e.g. high voltage fields, I'm no stranger to the Van de Graff generator and it's potential (no pun intended) to enable various party tricks. This wasn't an electric field. For one thing I could feel it within the volume of my body and (somehow) extending into the space around me. For another it heals. I don't want to get into the personal details, but it accelerates or engenders healing on mental, emotional and physical planes simultaneously. Now my first reaction, after the awe waned a little, was, "OMG let's do science to this!" But neither the Reiki practitioners nor the scientists that I have met are interested. If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated.

eli_gottlieb 7y ago
>If someone were standing here in front of me I could affect them with Reiki "energy" and demonstrate a "supernatural" phenomenon at will. As you said, it is just "more natural, more stuff with causal powers". But in my experience the intersection on the Venn diagram of "Science People" and "Reiki People" is very sparsely populated. Well dang. A priori, I'd jump to a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations. (Why yes, this is my research field. Why do you ask?) But we should still be testing this sort of thing. Assuming it is psychosomatic and nothing more complicated than that (which is already pretty reasonably complicated), what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects?
- carapace 7y ago
  > But we should still be testing this sort of thing. Yes! I did some informal experimentation in the years following my introduction to Reiki. Nothing you could write a paper about, but I ruled out (to my own satisfaction) simple psychosomatic or placebo effects. > ...a psychosomatic explanation, since your body's interoceptive afferents are extremely noisy, and so using top-down beliefs to engender an illusion that a vast energy is filling your body ought to be easier than generating other sorts of hallucinations. I agree, but that's what struck me about the incident I described: no one told me what was happening or what to expect. As a "sciency" kind of a person, I was astonished by the sensory impressions. I'm not prone to hallucinations generally (I used to work with self-hypnosis a lot and I'm pretty well-calibrated to my own "interoceptive afferents". It would have been very strange for my nervous system to have presented hallucinations to me without "telling me", so to speak.) The other astonishing thing was that at that time in my life I was suffering from severe depression and immediately as the Reiki treatment concluded the depression lifted and I felt (wonderfully!) normal for the rest of the evening. The effect wore off but the depression was never as severe again after that. I can offer no explanation why or how someone waving her arm at me for a few minutes could have done that. > what is it about the Reiki session that allows engendering powerful psychosomatic effects? Indeed. Since then, I have sometimes demonstrated Reiki with people without telling them much about it beforehand. Some people feel nothing. One woman, a very spiritual Christian, jumped because she felt "a tingling clear up to my shoulder." Some feel warmth, others tingling or vibration, etc... And Reiki seems to be effective on animals, even at a distance without physical contact or even motion. E.g. I can stand still and "beam" Reiki at a sick animal and it will get better. I would love to do this in a proper experimental set up. It has just never come together. For what it's worth, from the viewpoint of rational materialism, that Reiki aids healing is one of its least astonishing properties.