Human beings work with ideas. For various reasons, humans categorize these ideas in different ways. When an idea is categorized in a certain way, a corresponding attitude towards the idea is adopted. This attitude limits the way in which the idea is used, for better or worse. In this essay, I suggest that current categorization schemes, while probably useful in certain respects, has likely hindered –and will continue to hinder– the progress of science. By abandoning the idea that certain ideas are inherently “scientific” while others are not, and adopting a pragmatic view which acknowledges as “scientific” any idea useful to the explanation, prediction, creation and control of phenomena, science could make available to itself a plethora of potentially useful ideas from non-scientific idea-categories which otherwise would have remained unexploited.
New Ideas for Science
I do not rate because of one "But!".
Some people like to assert themselves, "powder, fogging" the brains of other people. They won't miss their chance. Science will become a chaos of ideas.
Aleksandr Maltsev Chaos need not be feared so long as pragmatic criteria are respected. Even so, a little chaos might sometimes be conducive to breakthroughs.
Dear colleague:
I don't really understand your problem. Doesn't it make any difference where an idea comes from, whether and who classifies it and how, and whether the idea is occult or philosophical? The only thing that remains afterwards and is important is the solution, which must correspond to reality, according to all physical rules of the art. Whether the idea came up in the shower or in church is irrelevant. Occult or humanistic ideas can be very helpful, for example, if they successfully motivate someone to refute them in reality. Or to confirm.
However, contemporaries who put ideas into the world and then believe to have achieved great things are not very helpful. Ideas are worth nothing as long as no solution, no explanation is developed from them.
Arved Huebler Thank you for your response. The issue I am addressing is not so much where ideas might come from, but what ideas might be scientifically useful despite that they are generally categorized as non-scientific at present.
Ian Brinkley
This answer:
"The question I am addressing is not so much where ideas might come from"
I can't follow in your text, the longest paragraphs deal with the origin of occult, paranormal and other ideas.
From my point of view an idea is always unscientific. Just an idea. If ideas are to become the starting point of science, they must be formulated into scientific hypotheses. So they have to be expressed in existing scientific terms, they have to be put in relation to existing scientific concepts, the verifiability has to be stated and so on. A scientific hypothesis can then be disproved or confirmed, if necessary, with modifications and improvements. This is then science , sometimes highly relevant, sometimes irrelevant. If an occult ideas is not very successful in this scientific process, says then simply that the idea is scientifically nicht fitlih.
Arved Huebler Thank you for your response. I am sorry for the misunderstanding, but I did not discuss the origin of ideas --occult, paranormal or otherwise-- anywhere in the essay (besides a passing remark about the French Academy's opinion regarding the origin of the idea of meteors, and a parenthetical comment about the possible role of Newton's involvement in the occult in the development of his idea of gravitational force). My intention was to illustrate how ideas that were once categorized as "non-scientific" later came to be categorized as "scientific", and, based on this and various other considerations, to suggest that this will/should happen again in the future.
I find it hard to see how theories or hypotheses are not simply ideas about how the world is or how it might be respectively. Whether a particular idea be categorized as "scientific" or not should, in my opinion, be determined by pragmatic considerations, as opposed to precedent, preference, or ideology.
quote
The first dictionary result for the term “paranormal” is “not scientifically explainable”.
Therefore, anything categorized as “paranormal” or “supernatural” can have no direct relevance
to science by definition. There is a wide variety of ideas that tend to be classified as
“paranormal”, ranging from ideas about human capacities, like “precognition”, “clairvoyance”,
“telepathy”, and “psychokinesis”, to ideas about other forms of intelligent life, like aliens or
ghosts. This is a very unfortunate situation, however. For, this categorization would inhibit
scientific understanding of such phenomena in the case that they turned out to be real.
To illustrate some of the problems with categorizing a certain idea as “paranormal”, let us
consider the following scenario: Imagine that telepathy was real. Imagine, further, that there
existed a certain amount of evidence for telepathy. Finally, imagine that telepathy was
categorized as a “paranormal” phenomenon (as it generally is). On the one hand, certain people
might accept the evidence for telepathy, and come to be convinced of the reality of telepathy.
But, they could not possibly come to understand telepathy in a rigorous way as long as they
continued to categorize telepathy as a “paranormal” phenomenon. For, again, paranormal
phenomena are, by definition, essentially mysterious– inherently impenetrable to human
understanding in principle. On the other hand, other people, who were of a mind to think that no
phenomena is fundamentally mysterious and that everything that is real is subject to
understanding, would be inclined to dismiss the evidence for telepathy out of hand simply
because telepathy was categorized as a “paranormal” phenomenon, and therefore, by their view,
unreal. In both cases, then, the phenomenon of telepathy, though real, would remain outside of
the realm of human understanding. On one hand, because people accepted the reality of telepathy
based on the evidence for it, but rejected the idea of understanding it by viewing it as
“paranormal”; on the other hand, because people dismissed the evidence for telepathy out of an
impulse to reject all ideas labeled “paranormal”.
end of quote
You have it backwards. Telepathy is not "rejected" but it is virtually impossible to quantify. Here is an example
quote
What does telepathically communicate mean?
te·lep·a·thy tə-ˈlep-ə-thē : apparent communication from one mind to another without speech or signs. telepathic.
end of quote'
The author is not seemingly aware of how much communication, inference and all that can be transmitted by non verbal signals. I as am example am hard of hearing. When my hearing was tested, I was told NOT to look directly at an examiner trying to say words for me to identify, i.e. hard of hearing people can intuit the meaning of other peoples actions and responses at times through non verbal means.
The entire idea of telepathy pre supposes that there is NO communication between one person and other through the traditional senses. In the matter of testing
quote
by CM BEADNELL · 1938 — IT is probable that most psychologists and practically all physiologists regard the evidence in support of 'clairvoyance' and 'telepathy' as worthless
end of quote]
I agree it is worthless because people are excellent pattern recognition "experts" up to a point and that much of alleged telepathy is of very precise of inference to guess, at times extremely accurately certain would be assumed signals or the likelihood of such signals being transmitted.
It. is a whopping under estimation of just how good a set of 'guessers" even supposedly AVERAGE IQ people are, and is in a sense extremely insulting.
The telepathy paradigm regards people as partly robotic automatons, and they are far from that, and the guess work people employ in the acquisition and use of human speech can be astounding.
Andrew Beckwith Thank you for your response. I used the term telepathy in accordance with the standard definition: “communication between minds by some means other than sensory perception.” As you point out, this is a very different idea than the well known phenomena of non-verbal communication through subtle sensory cues. My impression is that the idea that telepathy could be possible is indeed rejected by a large percentage of people who consider themselves scientifically minded, but perhaps I am mistaken. In any case, the section of the essay you quoted was a hypothetical scenario intended to illustrate broader points. As for how telepathy might be quantifiable, I see no reason as to why metrics of message fidelity would be harder to identify in tests of telepathy than in other forms of communication, but admittedly I have not considered the issue very thoroughly. In any case, my intention was not to argue for or against the reality of telepathy, but to illustrate how the categorization of certain ideas as “paranormal” could inhibit scientific understanding of genuine phenomena.
Telepathy is the gold standard of the divide used to throw phenomenology into the dumpster. I.e. if Telepathy were proved, I would say WELL DONE
I am merely waiting for it to occur
But having seen mystics, crackpots and worse abuse the term, it is incredible to me how many people abuse the term when in fact if it existed, and were PROVED, I would do a standing ovation for those finding it.