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I think when people read things like this they overly focus on the hocus pocus part of it rather than something that is probably or even definitely true with hu

I think when people read things like this they overly focus on the hocus pocus part of it rather than something that is probably or even definitely true with human beings - that there is a certain power to belief. I’ve had treatment resistant PTSD and depression most of my life and inevitably stuff like meditation/spirituality comes up, which I had always felt was a desperate last resort, and although I am agnostic, I am extremely materialist and find much of it dumb/silly. I started however reading textbooks about tantric yoga and their claims, while some of it is indeed weird or silly, there is definitely something to some of it - particularly tibetan yoga practitioners being able to withstand extreme heat, cold, or endurance for long periods of time with no seeming explanation. I had discovered my ability a long time ago to control pain levels and my perception of hot/cold, but they seem to be doing something that is actually controlling internal body functions, and that got my imagination going about how one could use that to treat things like PTSD. I have had some success. a lot of it is visualizing and “believing” any way you possibly can, I think much of the ritual in stuff like this is to get you into whatever state is needed to trick your body or mind into doing something, at least that’s how I think it “works.” The author seems kind of aware of this and it seems to borrow many similar concepts as the stuff I’ve read, but with much more occultish ritual.

tsimionescu 2y ago
That's because the people putting out stuff like this always go on and on about the hocus pocus. They never stop at claims that it's a way to control certain limited aspects of your own biology/psyche, they always go on to claims like telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis, mind control, and others. And that is when you realize they aren't some wise thinkers describing deep understanding of the human mind in more poetic terms, they are deluded or crackpots thinking they can fling spells at each other if they just beleive hard enough. Is there some insight that they may have hit on in their collective tinkering? Possibly yes, just like the alchemists had really discovered some good bits of chemistry despite being completely misguided as well. But unless and until someone goes in and creates a true science out of their mumbo-jumbo, it's not something most people should spend their time on, lest they end up wasting time on the many parts that don't work.
- nuc1e0n 2y ago
  Psychology is supposedly that science, although it is still a bit wooly here and there. That's how chemistry was in its infancy as well. There may also be real phenomena that those working in that field don't yet consider to be valid for investigation as well. Another point to make is that scientists need to take proper safety precautions, lest they end up like Marie Curie, who was poisoned by what she was studying.
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    No, it's not psychology. These are metaphysical phenomena.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      The phenomena I was talking about, and that indeed would fall into the category of psychology, are the ones that are purely physical - poorly understood bio-psycho-social phenomena like meditation as a way to control your own mind and body (in biologically limited ways, such as being able to lower your pulse slightly, not fantasies like mending broken bones with the power of will), or the ability to influence others by talking to them. The other parts of "magic", such as the ability to view things that someone else is viewing without emitting or receiving electromagnetic waves are clearly fantasies, not in the purview of any science.
      - nuc1e0n 2y ago
        Plaster casts for broken limbs are produced by an application of will also. And those plaster casts help bones to heal more rapidly.
        tsimionescu 2y ago
        No, they are a product of labor. Sure, labor is a product of will, but the intermediate step is crucial. Many mages claim that they can fix ailments, quickly, by simply willing them to mend and maybe laying their hands, almost like in a video game.
gklitz 2y ago
> with no seeming explanation Oddly though every such thing that “defies explanation” also defies being reproducible in controlled experiments. That’s the thing a about non scientific stuff like this. If it actually worked it would literally just be science and we would be able to reproduce it. If you buy a magic moon rock that lets you only roll 6’s on dice, you would equally be left feeling that the 1/6 of the time that it worked was proof enough to you that it was actually true, because you bought yourself a bias along side the useless rock. Same is true a lot with things like yoga for anything outside the Pilates component, it only “works” if you dedicate enough time and money to it, at which point you’re just biased because you don’t want to feel you’ve wasted your time and money. Sure 1/20 might find that it “cured” their illness, but only if that’s the rate of improvement in a control group as well.
- trilbyglens 2y ago
  I think only very simple mechanisms can be fully described and reproduced by modern methods. Is it not too hard to image that our grasp on reality is limited, and that the tools and language we possess right nowight simply not be up to the task? Why be so fast to dismiss things that are not currently reproducible? I bet if you took 100 people you'd have a hard time reproducing an Olympic athlete even if all 100 were subjected to the same fitness regimen. But we know Olympic athletes exist. Maybe you should also be skeptical of your skepticism.
  - vacuity 2y ago
    Also, we know placebos exist and in fact are expected to exist in medical trials, but...how? Why? Can we control this? Evidently we're seeing something, and we've incorporated it into scientific understanding, but only at a high level so far.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      The placebo effect is much less mysterious than it's made out to be. It is almost entirely explained by three things: 1. Some ability of the mind to interact with the effect of the medication - such as heart rate being tied to mood (so that being administered a heart-rate reducing drug in a menacing way could have the effects of the drug masked by your heart rate increasing because of your anxiety), or when the effect itself is tied to mental phenomena (depression, pain, nausea, etc). Apart from psychoactive drugs, this only significantly impacts a relatively small amount of drugs, since only a small amount of biomarkers are very directly tied to mental states - heart rate, blood pressure, maybe a handful of others. There may also be a smaller effect on longer term treatments of other kinds due to the myriad effects of stress/anxiety on various other systems in the body, that may have interactions with more complex biomarkers as well, especially in the longer term. 2. The experimental setup being impacted more or less knowingly by people based on their pre-conceived notions. This can take many forms, from outright doctoring the recorded data to fit the desired outcome, to much more subtle effects like differences in the level of care, differences in how well the patients follow the prescribed protocol, and many others. None of these are "real" effects, they only affect the relevance and quality of the data being collected. For example, if patients have a way of finding out they are in the placebo wing, they may drop out at a higher rate, and thus the data may show that the patients who stuck out had a higher benefit than the ones on the control wing simply because of that skew. 3. Noise in the disease itself - sometimes, people spontaneously heal or improve from various conditions on various fronts without any intervention whatsoever, and any medical intervention has to be compared to this baseline level. This is similar to the problem of checking if a code fix actually addresses a hard to reproduce bug. There is no proof whatsoever of the placebo effect being some ability to heal the body through belief (again, beyond certain mental phenomena, either related to mental illness or pain or nausea relief). It is simply a matter of noise and measurement artifacts for the vast majority of studies.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tsimionescu 2y ago

That's because the people putting out stuff like this always go on and on about the hocus pocus. They never stop at claims that it's a way to control certain limited aspects of your own biology/psyche, they always go on to claims like telepathy, remote viewing, telekinesis, mind control, and others. And that is when you realize they aren't some wise thinkers describing deep understanding of the human mind in more poetic terms, they are deluded or crackpots thinking they can fling spells at each other if they just beleive hard enough. Is there some insight that they may have hit on in their collective tinkering? Possibly yes, just like the alchemists had really discovered some good bits of chemistry despite being completely misguided as well. But unless and until someone goes in and creates a true science out of their mumbo-jumbo, it's not something most people should spend their time on, lest they end up wasting time on the many parts that don't work.

nuc1e0n 2y ago
Psychology is supposedly that science, although it is still a bit wooly here and there. That's how chemistry was in its infancy as well. There may also be real phenomena that those working in that field don't yet consider to be valid for investigation as well. Another point to make is that scientists need to take proper safety precautions, lest they end up like Marie Curie, who was poisoned by what she was studying.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  No, it's not psychology. These are metaphysical phenomena.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    The phenomena I was talking about, and that indeed would fall into the category of psychology, are the ones that are purely physical - poorly understood bio-psycho-social phenomena like meditation as a way to control your own mind and body (in biologically limited ways, such as being able to lower your pulse slightly, not fantasies like mending broken bones with the power of will), or the ability to influence others by talking to them. The other parts of "magic", such as the ability to view things that someone else is viewing without emitting or receiving electromagnetic waves are clearly fantasies, not in the purview of any science.
    - nuc1e0n 2y ago
      Plaster casts for broken limbs are produced by an application of will also. And those plaster casts help bones to heal more rapidly.
      - tsimionescu 2y ago
        No, they are a product of labor. Sure, labor is a product of will, but the intermediate step is crucial. Many mages claim that they can fix ailments, quickly, by simply willing them to mend and maybe laying their hands, almost like in a video game.

gklitz 2y ago

> with no seeming explanation Oddly though every such thing that “defies explanation” also defies being reproducible in controlled experiments. That’s the thing a about non scientific stuff like this. If it actually worked it would literally just be science and we would be able to reproduce it. If you buy a magic moon rock that lets you only roll 6’s on dice, you would equally be left feeling that the 1/6 of the time that it worked was proof enough to you that it was actually true, because you bought yourself a bias along side the useless rock. Same is true a lot with things like yoga for anything outside the Pilates component, it only “works” if you dedicate enough time and money to it, at which point you’re just biased because you don’t want to feel you’ve wasted your time and money. Sure 1/20 might find that it “cured” their illness, but only if that’s the rate of improvement in a control group as well.

trilbyglens 2y ago
I think only very simple mechanisms can be fully described and reproduced by modern methods. Is it not too hard to image that our grasp on reality is limited, and that the tools and language we possess right nowight simply not be up to the task? Why be so fast to dismiss things that are not currently reproducible? I bet if you took 100 people you'd have a hard time reproducing an Olympic athlete even if all 100 were subjected to the same fitness regimen. But we know Olympic athletes exist. Maybe you should also be skeptical of your skepticism.
- vacuity 2y ago
  Also, we know placebos exist and in fact are expected to exist in medical trials, but...how? Why? Can we control this? Evidently we're seeing something, and we've incorporated it into scientific understanding, but only at a high level so far.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    The placebo effect is much less mysterious than it's made out to be. It is almost entirely explained by three things: 1. Some ability of the mind to interact with the effect of the medication - such as heart rate being tied to mood (so that being administered a heart-rate reducing drug in a menacing way could have the effects of the drug masked by your heart rate increasing because of your anxiety), or when the effect itself is tied to mental phenomena (depression, pain, nausea, etc). Apart from psychoactive drugs, this only significantly impacts a relatively small amount of drugs, since only a small amount of biomarkers are very directly tied to mental states - heart rate, blood pressure, maybe a handful of others. There may also be a smaller effect on longer term treatments of other kinds due to the myriad effects of stress/anxiety on various other systems in the body, that may have interactions with more complex biomarkers as well, especially in the longer term. 2. The experimental setup being impacted more or less knowingly by people based on their pre-conceived notions. This can take many forms, from outright doctoring the recorded data to fit the desired outcome, to much more subtle effects like differences in the level of care, differences in how well the patients follow the prescribed protocol, and many others. None of these are "real" effects, they only affect the relevance and quality of the data being collected. For example, if patients have a way of finding out they are in the placebo wing, they may drop out at a higher rate, and thus the data may show that the patients who stuck out had a higher benefit than the ones on the control wing simply because of that skew. 3. Noise in the disease itself - sometimes, people spontaneously heal or improve from various conditions on various fronts without any intervention whatsoever, and any medical intervention has to be compared to this baseline level. This is similar to the problem of checking if a code fix actually addresses a hard to reproduce bug. There is no proof whatsoever of the placebo effect being some ability to heal the body through belief (again, beyond certain mental phenomena, either related to mental illness or pain or nausea relief). It is simply a matter of noise and measurement artifacts for the vast majority of studies.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]