Repeat after me: there's no such thing as a psychic. All psychics are simple con men, who prey on vulnerable individuals in order to receive easy cash. That is all.
We, earlier this week, read about someone who attended a meditation retreat left in handcuffs because meditation did crazy things to the mind. I mean, he was just eating and sitting and sleeping silently. We have holes in understanding of consciousness, and can't even tell if something is sentient or thinking.
And then, we have people feeling emotions in areas. These emotions can be shared. many people can feel being stared at.
The hole seems to be the intersection of: consciousness, mind, and emotion.
Can we point at emotion? Can we throw it against a wall? Can we describe anger without emotions? How do we measure it? Why can some people feel the anger in an area? Same for mind and consciousness - show me an example. Quantify it.
What's confusing is that your declaration of "They're just wrong, and are confused by confirmation bias." is that the very statement is confirmation bias of sciencism. Either there is proof (positive or negative), or there is not. Do not confuse lack of proof as proof of lack.
Lack of proof does not mean proof of nonexistence. And if we look at things like the aether, was made a distinct proof that it didn't exist as conjectured (although its rearing its head as a quantum Foam).
But I await for proof, be it positive or negative, of emotion and consciousness. Because all you did was throw insults.
> Show a mechanism or proof of the effect. Otherwise it's nonsense.
One can highlight open questions with no apparent answers. And it absolutely doesn't make those questions "nonsense". But this view is called Scientism, and is not science. "Proof or its fake" is absolutely not science.
"Proof or its unproven" is science.
It is certainly evidence of nonexistence. Do you believe every single claim you've ever heard because you can't conclusively disprove it 100% of the time always? Of course not, you use your reason and assume that more positive claims are false until proven otherwise.
We laugh at it today, because some patent commissioner couldn't see past his own limited view, and made that claim.
Yet, when I postulate questions about things we have very little science with, I'm dismissed. I ask for science to be used with emotions; yet Im the dumb one. I want scientific method to determine consciousness; yet I'm the non-scientific one.
Again, you're the standard fare when it comes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
But I do get where you're coming from, having followed some of the same articles you've been referencing in your posts.
I think Deepak Chopra had some useful things to say. He is normally derided as trafficking in woo, especially in his remarks about James Randi.
But if you read what he has to say, his position makes sense. A lot of otherwise intelligent people fall into materialism as a sort of intellectual default and it's not wrong to challenge this.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/skepticism-and-...
And this in turn goes back to what Alan Watts had to say, the idea that materialism should be resisted in spite of its surface plausibility.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mryZ7e2TUhs
(The meat of it is around 10 minutes in)
If taken to the extreme, this logic can be used to prove literally anything. "Haven't seen any proof of invisible back-massage fairies? Well, don't confuse lack of proof as proof of lack!". When your framework can be used to prove something false, it means that the framework is unreliable.
I don't really know what "sciencism" is, but we know that the scientific method has been demonstrated to work in producing results that are useful to us. I am typing this message on an electronic keyboard, plugged into a computer, plugged into a giant-ass interconnected network hitting satellites and fiber-cables and whatnot, all of which were developed by scientists or engineers following a scientific method.
To use your wording, however, while I can't conclusively say "lack of proof is proof of lack", I can easily say "lack of proof is strong evidence of lack". Occam's razor tells us to discard unnecessary assumptions.
(Or just any investment that is improbably without insider info, that works as well)
I can, and I'll show you how, too, for a mere $100. (cash only)
This isn’t to discount the reality that many psychics are knowingly conning their customers.
We don't know anything with absolute certainty, we know many things with overwhelmingly great certainty.
I think psychics are a bunch of baloney too, but by definition the supernatural is not natural and not provable/disprovable. Let's not pretend that the act of disproving has some magic reach because then psychics or creationists or whoever will latch onto that overreach as a defense.
If we can interact with something, even indirectly, we can perform experiments on it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=website%3Afoia.cia.gov+remot...
The downside is that once you do it successfully, no one is going to believe you, anyway. :)
Edit: I would never want anyone to "believe" me, nor would I recommend anyone "believe" anything. There is only direct experience which brings knowledge, this is the standard for consciousness work.
Direct experience by a skeptical observer in a controlled environment.
Preferably backed up by a solid, provable null hypothesis and some statistics.
You can't prove it's existence, but you can't disprove it either. Belief in it's existence is purely based on opinion, not fact.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1454382
https://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Brain-Neuroscientists-Case-...
https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Universe-Scientific-Psychic...