Comments in a nice red with extra boldness. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote :
Fred has asked some of the most prominent researchers into Buddhist meditation why they don't take the PC research seriously. The response is always along the lines of: show me a Western theory that suggests that it is important, and I will. Do they consider Buddhist approaches to be a western theory? Anomalous measurements that are consistently found in the right circumstances, apparently aren't of interest to "real" scientists -only stuff guided by theory. Get off, that's how science works! Look at Einstein and Darwin, they were hardly treading intellectual water. Things only progress when someone spots a discrepancy between the current explanation and new evidence. I hope you don't subscribe to the TMO position I encountered where everyone thought there was a conspiracy to keep us out of the media because too much would change in society if "they" realised the truth. It was tinfoil hat time all the time during the NLP campaigns. And they never showed us the actual journals with ME research in, we know why don't we? All I got to give to the press was a bunch of fantastic quotes that I now know could have been made up or edited to the point of complete unrecognisability. Of course, everyone knows the story of John Ellis, Director of Research at CERN, who, as a junior researcher at CERN, found some weird flaw in his cloud-chamber photographic plates, and rather than dismissing it outright, he went back and found similar flaws in other plates that he had missed. He then went around and fished many, MANY examples of similar flaws out of garbage bins, always happening in specific circumstances, and published. Everyone else had dismissed it as being of no interest because no Western theory predicted what was on the plates, so they assumed that it was trash. It got a write-up as the cover article of Discover, and made his career. So why not write to Susan Blackmore and make her day? She comes across as very broadminded, she's done articles on alien abductions and all sorts. Honestly, you spend so much time writing about it anyway you might as well try and convince someone who might benefit from it. IF it all holds water of course. A lot of people look at the collected papers and think it's a crock. I think it's mostly an advertising campaign largely for the benefit of TMers to feel a bit of collegiate power, otherwise the TMO would remove all the rubbish early stuff that we all know is nonsense. Can't help thinking the TMO would have a bit more credibility if you did that. And there are a lot of conferences on consciousness held every year but do TMers ever get invited? If not, why not. Obviously the supporting philosophy is too far out to be taken seriously, and the yogic flying is a joke, not to mention all the rip-off add-ons, but if there is anything of importance to learn from the basic technique the scientific community will rise above the claptrap. You can't still be this far out on the fringe without a reason. Can you? http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457 http://www.edge.org/response-detail/25457
