Every major idea?
Perhaps many hypotheses were considered inconceivable. But certainly not quackery.
Scientific ideas tend to me testable. A lot of what this guys suggests is entirely unfalsifiable. He may as well be discussing Pastafarianism.
Ok, maybe not even almost every major idea (I did use the word "almost"), but pretty much by definition every major conceptual shift, from a round earth, to relativity, to microorganisms.
> Scientific ideas tend to me testable. A lot of what this guys suggests is entirely unfalsifiable. He may as well be discussing Pastafarianism.
Scientific ideas do tend to be testable. This doesn't mean we can't have ideas that are not testable or not yet testable. Hopefully, every idea will some day be falsifiable, but we can't rely on that. We may need to speculate in untestable territory before we find a plausible and reasonable theory that is testable. And as you know, science does not tell us that anything is true, only that some things can't be proven false.
There is more to life than testable scientific understandings. I could love my mother or I could not love my mother. Can you test that? Because you can not test it, does it mean it should not be mentioned and is not important?
Human love, creativity, and consciousness are perhaps the most interesting and important parts of existence, yet they are not currently testable from an experiential viewpoint, and they may never be.
There are qualities of the consciousness, which by definition are qualities of existence - love, color, taste, beauty, suffering, pain, joy - which can only be explained scientifically in their mechanical reflections in brain matter. Science can not tell us anything about the qualitative conscious experience of these qualities are, yet those qualities may be the most important part of the universe. What would the universe be without the conscious experience of its wonder and beauty?
No, but it does mean that it's not science.
In theory, yes. What happens inside your brain isn't untestable or sacred, we're just not there yet technologically (but we'll get there).
Whether of not you can test for love is immaterial to explaining the experience.
Well, you were asking me to retract this statement based on the theoretical existence of a test:
> Love is a subjective experience of consciousness. We must first have some clue about what consciousness is, then perhaps we will be able to scientifically explain what love is.
Anyhow, I was using it as an example of something that we can't currently test for, not asserting that it will never be testable. So no, I'm not arguing that it will never be testable.
If we do test, however, it will most likely be a test for the brain activity associated with love, not for the actual qualitative feeling of love. As I've said, we know nearly nothing about what subjective experience is despite all we know being subject to it.
Now, it's entirely possible that reasoning about "love" scientifically requires several layers of new language / models on top of the currently established models in neuroscience, which is why I said it's _theoretically_ possible.
A meta-analysis has supported the sense of being stared at. I will find the link later and included it. I believe it was in the British Journal of Social Pyschology around 2005.
I'd add that if one can sense a stare, this opens the door to a huge array of psychic abilities. Perhaps we can communicate more than a stare, perhaps this really all is pseudo-science, experimental bias, and statistical anomaly. I'd like to know.
The mechanism may be as simple as the brain's high sensitivity to electromagnetic fields from other brains, or as mysterious as a cosmic consciousness.
On a side note, Jessica Utts is wonderful. I actually did my undergraduate thesis on this, but didn't find a significant effect (there was an effect, but the study was underpowered).
It's just astronomically more likely that a dog sensing their owner's arrival is going to be explained within the framework of established science, and not invalidate every layer of our model of the world from mammal biology to quantum foam.
B. I was responding to the parent comment about empirically verified dog's-sixth-sense phenomena, and what I think about those.
But, you know, selling books and doing TED talks. Ok. Fine. Whatever.
He is doing research. I can't say if he's doing enough but he's done quite a lot.
The problem is that he's already condemned for drawing the "wrong" conclusions so every scientist who even goes near his ideas and tries to test them is ostracized.