Michael Prescott's Blog

Gathering spot

UPDATED (June 1): Marcel has eliminated the password requirement and has changed the way the room operates, so people can organize their chat sessions more easily. It's not necessary to show up at 9 PM anymore. Folks who are interested in getting together in this chat room should take the initiative to set up chat times on their own. Have fun!

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I'm still on hiatus, but thought I would post this info from Marcel Cairo. He has kindly set up a chat room to host readers of this blog who would like to keep in touch with each other. He writes:

I have set up your room within SoulMotel.com. The room is called Prescott_Pavillion and the password for that room is “psi-fi” (all lowercase).

My suggestion, and it’s only that, is that 9PM (EST) is a good time for regulars to gather. This is only at first, as people get to know the site, and the word spreads. The chat room is open 24/7. Prescott_Pavillion can be found by clicking on the “Show Rooms” button located above the user panel, or by clicking on the “roam” tab and selecting “room list”.

There are other rooms for other blogs and forums, but this has just launched, and it may take months for this to gain any type of traction, if at all. Your promo of it while you are on hiatus would probably help.

BTW, people who log in at other times, and get there once their pals are gone, can click on the “action” tab and select “Recent room history” and see who has been chatting earlier and what they said. This is also a way for people to leave each other messages in case they miss each other.

Many thanks to Marcel for his thoughtfulness in setting this up.

On hiatus

A few people have emailed me to ask about my blogging hiatus. So - although it violates the spirit of a hiatus to post a blog entry about it - let me clarify the situation.

First, I shut down the comments thread for my last post because, as more than one reader correctly pointed out, the argument was becoming too heated on all sides. Tempers (including mine) were fraying. It was best to take a time-out.

I closed the other threads because I figured that if they stayed open, the argument would simply migrate over there. Plus, those conversations were mostly played out anyway.

For the same reason, comments are closed on this entry. I don't want the argument to start up again.

As I said on the other thread, I'm a little burned out on blogging right now. It gets tiresome to produce a post every couple of days, and to participate in the threads on a daily basis. I need a vacation. With Memorial Day weekend coming up, what better time could there be?

I also want to say something about politics. Some people have the impression that I am a wildly partisan Republican. I can understand this impression, but I think it is mistaken. If you go back and comb through the posts on this blog, you'll see that I was sharply critical of President Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina and that I dismissed his plan for partial privatization of Social Security as too risky. Long before the Surge, I complained that the occupation of Iraq was going badly and that a new strategy was needed. I have said that some form of universal health insurance is necessary in America, and that our economic system will inevitably move closer to the social democratic model of most European countries. I've also said, quite recently, that Hillary Clinton would be a kick-ass veep for John McCain. I don't think these are wildly partisan positions.

On the other hand, I am very much opposed to the probable Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, mainly because of his twenty-year political and personal alliance with the odious Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but also because he strikes me, on the basis of his thin resume and shallow grasp of international affairs, as supremely unqualified for the presidency. I am also turned off by the strangely messianic tone of his candidacy and the near-hysterical fervor of his followers. If Hillary Clinton or Bill Richardson or Joe Biden or even Chris Dodd were the nominee, I wouldn't feel the same way.

Anyway, that's just my opinion. I may be wrong. I have been wrong before, believe it or not. I supported Jimmy Carter in 1976, and he turned out to be probably the worst president of the 20th century. (People who passionately hate George W. Bush should be reminded that he is a president of the 21st century.) I opposed Bill Clinton in 1992, and he turned out to be a reasonably good president, policywise, though his ethical standards left a bit to be desired. Maybe Obama will surprise me and govern well if he wins, but I would prefer not to take the chance. There is too much at stake.

Enjoy the long weekend!

News roundup

I read the news today, oh boy ...

Item 1: A Boston doctor is offering to perform sex-change operations on seven-year-olds.

Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric specialist at [Boston Childrens Hospital], has launched a clinic for transgendered kids — boys who feel like girls, girls who want to be boys — and he’s opening his doors to patients as young as 7.

I don't know about you, but when I was seven years old, I barely even knew there were anatomical differences between boys and girls. And certainly I was in position to "choose" radical, life-altering surgery.

But what if the seven-year-old hasn't quite made up his mind? No problem:

Spack offers his younger patients counseling and drugs that delay the onset of puberty. The drugs stop the natural flood of hormones that would make it difficult to have a sex alteration later in life, allowing patients more time to decide whether they want to make the change.

When 81% of the country says the US is heading in the wrong direction, it's at least possible that some of the respondents have stuff like this in mind.

Item #2: Barack Obama, widely praised for his impeccable character (for reasons I fail to see, since there is nothing in his background to suggest any especially notable character traits), has declared that all federal supervision of the corrupt, Mob-infiltrated Teamsters Union will end when he is president.

The New Republic reports:

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that last summer, Illinois Senator Barack Obama told officials in the Teamsters union that he favored ending the Independent Review Board (IRB) that was created in 1989 by the federal government to rid the union of organized crime. Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama, confirmed the story, saying that the candidate believed that the IRB had "run its course" because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." The Teamsters subsequently endorsed Obama for president, in late February.

Obama and the Teamsters bristled at suggestions that any deal was made....

Why, of course not. Heaven forfend!

Labor leaders have made plausible arguments for shutting down the IRB, but a Chicago politician should be extremely wary of acceding to them. If there is continuing mob influence in the Teamsters, it is probably centered in the Chicago area. And in the last decade, the Teamsters in Chicago have shown little enthusiasm for rooting out corruption in their ranks. As a veteran Chicago politician surrounded by a veteran Chicago campaign staff, Obama had to have known this--and that makes his warm words to the Teamsters all the more disturbing.

Why anyone would think that a politician who cut his teeth on corrupt Chicago machine politics would be the least bit concerned with ethics is beyond me. It's like expecting a Tammany Hall pol to run a reform administration. But where Obama is concerned, logical thinking seems to be put on hold in favor of an increasingly creepy attitude of blind adulation.

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Update, a couple of hours later.

I missed this the first time I read it. It's from Obama's speech today.

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

When I skimmed this initially, I noticed the SUV thing and the thermometer thing, both of which made me think of Jimmy Carter wearing a sweater and lecturing the country. Probably not the very best image to evoke if you're a Democratic candidate. But I missed the money quote in the middle:

"We can't ... eat as much as we want."

So that's the Obama platform, right there. Elect me president, and you won't get to eat as much as you want anymore.

I guess you'll only get to eat as much as Obama decides is good for you.

No one will tell him and his family how much they can eat, of course. They're better than you, don't ya know? That's why Obama can lecture us - the little people - on what cars to drive while tooling around in a gas guzzler with a V-8 Hemi engine and flying on private jets.

There's no inconsistency. He's just a superior person, so the rules don't apply to him.

HT: Ace of Spades, Hot Air

Card sharp

Here's a powerful essay by science fiction writer Orson Scott Card. It covers a lot of territory - the Intelligent Design controversy, the nature of science, the debate over global warming, the role of religion in human life - and is bound to ruffle a few feathers.

To me, the most interesting part was Card's defense of methodological naturalism in science - the idea that science per se must assume there is a nonsupernatural explanation for every phenomenon. As Card makes clear, this is merely a working hypothesis, not necessarily a matter of philosophical commitment. There is no contradiction between accepting methodological naturalism in the laboratory and going to church on Sunday (or meditating, praying, etc.), because the scientist's naturalism is simply a method used to produce results, not a statement about the ultimate nature, meaning, or purpose of reality (which science, as such, is not capable of discovering).

Anyway, read the whole thing. It's a thoughtful, nuanced, and provocative piece. It also raised questions in my mind about the limits of scientific research in the area of the paranormal. When discarnate spirits - generally thought to be supernatural entities - enter the picture, what becomes of methodological naturalism? Is science even equipped to deal with supernatural explanations, or is pursuing  the truth about supernatural phenomena by scientific methods a category error?

A spirited debate

I haven't posted anything about the David Thompson controversy in quite some time, and I really don't want to get drawn into the endless (and largely pointless) debate all over again. But ...

Despite my reservations about reopening  a can of ectoplasmic worms, I do think this editorial by Simon Forsyth on The Psychic Times Web site is worth linking to. In it, Forsyth compares an audio recording of an allegedly materialized Alan Crossley with a video of the actual Crossley, showing clearly that there is no similarity between the two voices. He also proffers an interesting challenge to Victor Zammit and David Thompson, backed up by a promise to pay a thousand pounds to charity if the challenge can be met.

As I say, I am weary of this argument, but this article - especially the thousand-pound challenge - seemed newsworthy enough to justify a link. It will be even more newsworthy if Mr. Thompson and his investigators take up the challenge. I hope they will.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

A map of the world

Here is a very simple model I've been thinking about in an attempt to conceptualize different orders of consciousness. (Click image to enlarge.) The diagram is, of course, very crude, though it looked a little better before TypePad made me convert it to a JPEG file.

The large silver oval represents Cosmic Consciousness, a.k.a. the Ground of Being or the Mind of God. Every other level of consciousness exists within Cosmic Consciousness, and Cosmic Consciousness provides a shared environment in which these lower-level consciousnesses can function and interact.

Within the silver oval of Cosmic Consciousness, we find a blue circle labeled Personal Self. This is the totality of our own personal, individual identity, including (A) the mind limited by the restrictions of the physical brain and nervous system, (B) the unconscious, and (C) any past-life identities that may be accessible. (These could have been depicted as part of the unconscious, but some children, at least, seem to have conscious recall of these past lives. Adults seem to require hypnotic regression or some other alteration of normal consciousness to access the memories.) Only three past-life identities have been indicated, but of course the actual number could be much greater.

The unconscious is drawn as intersecting with the mind/brain because the mind/brain draws on the unconscious for inspiration. The unconscious occupies the boundary between the Personal Self and the surrounding environment of Cosmic Consciousness, in as much as there seems to be some exchange of information between the two. Pyschic impressions, premonitions, Jungian archetypes, etc. seem to bubble up from our unconscious; presumably their source is Cosmic Consciousness itself, or other minds operating in the matrix of Cosmic Consciousness.

At the top of the Personal Self, also at the boundary of Cosmic Consciousness, there is the Higher Self, a.k.a. the "Being of Light" (D). People who undergo peak experiences of a mystical nature, including people who experience full-fledged NDEs, apparently encounter this Higher Self directly. Although they may call it God (and sometime visualize it in terms of a particular deity, like Jesus), the Higher Self they encounter seems to be an expanded version of their own consciousness. It is in touch with Cosmic Consciousness but (at least in my model) distinguishable from it. The Higher Self or Being of Light typically introduces the "life review" in NDEs and functions as a wise, compassionate, attentive witness to the review, often reinforcing the lessons that need to be learned.

Elsewhere inside the silver oval of Cosmic Consciousness, we have other Personal Selves (E). These are the Selves of other people or any other conscious beings. Presumably there are billions of these, but the drawing represents them with only three blue circles. They are, of course, no less important than the Personal Self represented in the center of the diagram, and are drawn much smaller only to simplify the diagram and save space.

If this model were rendered in 3D, perhaps the Personal Self and the past-life identities would be depicted as separate circles all connected  by lines, like those ball-and-stick models of molecules, to suggest that the so-called "past lives" actually exist simultaneously with the so-called present life in a timeless reality. As it is, the drawing represents a snapshot in time.

There's nothing really new here, but sometimes visualizing an idea can make it a little clearer and point up areas where it needs to be rethought.

Relativity

Marcel Cairo has put up a thoughtful piece on the newly discovered Albert Einstein letter in which the great physicist dismisses belief in God as a childish superstition.

I agree with Marcel that Einstein's view should come as no surprise, given his previously known statements on the subject.

I might add that Einstein seems to have doubted the existence of an individual soul also, opting instead for a sense of mystical oneness with all creation, as exemplified in this famous quote:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

Two cheers for the ego!

With all my focus on the problems caused by an overemphasis on the ego, sometimes I lose sight of the fact that the ego is a healthy and necessary stage of personal development. In fact, we need an ego if we're going to avoid becoming doormats in life. Perhaps some phenomenally advanced souls can tolerate being walked all over, but for the rest of us, the ability to stand up for ourselves when appropriate is essential. And if the Gospels are to be trusted, even Jesus placed a limit on how much crap he was will willing to take!

With that mind, I went Web surfing for information on assertiveness, and found this page, which includes, among other things, a list of the "ten assertive rights of an individual." Some of these rights are predictable enough, but others struck me as a little surprising. For instance:

Assertive Right  #2: I have the right to offer neither reason nor excuse to justify my behavior.

That's kind of interesting, don't you think? How many times are we called on to justify some opinion or action, not because the questioner genuinely wants more information, but because he or she is trying to intimidate us into backing down? 

The truth is that many of the things we say and do are hard to "justify" in strictly logical terms. I would rather watch a Ray Harryhausen movie than an Ingmar Bergman flick, but I can't say I could justify this preference through ratiocination. Any justification I came up with would probably be more of an excuse - a pretext  or a rationalization - than a valid reason. But why do I need a reason? What right does anyone have to demand a reason?

This ties in with another item on the list:

Assertive Right  #8: I have the right to be illogical in making decisions.

Refreshing, no? The Web page goes on to explain:

I sometimes employ logic as a reasoning process to assist me in making judgments. However, logic cannot predict what will happen in every situation. Logic is not much help in dealing with wants, motivations, and feelings. Logic generally deals with ''black or white,'' ''all or none,'' and ''yes or no'' issues. Logic and reasoning don't always work well when dealing with the gray areas of the human condition.

Hard to argue with that, though no doubt some bullying rationalistic types would try.

How about this next one? In an age when we are bombarded with demands for our attention and alerted to one "crisis" after another, here's an invigorating thought:

Assertive Right  #10: I have the right to say, ``I don't care.''

Do ya hear that, Save the Children/Whales/Planet? I don't care. I got my own stuff to deal with. Go away and leave me the frack alone. And that goes double for you, Sally Struthers.

There's a lot to be said for being able to stand up for yourself. At the same time, an out-of-control ego can be just as problematic as an underdeveloped one. Marcel Cairo sent me a link to an NPR story on Ayn Rand, which included this comment from a Rand supporter:

[Rand] gives egoists a positive case for why the world should revolve around them and around their efforts. If you are the person who is creating value, if you are the star, the sun really does revolve around you. And not only should it be that way, but that's the moral order of the universe.

Yikes! A philosophy that gives megalomaniacs even more reasons to admire themselves and expect the adulation of others! Just what the world doesn't need. (And what kind of metaphor has the sun revolving around a star, anyway?)

There's a proper balance to be struck here. Probably Aristotle had it right when he talked about the Golden Mean - the middle way between abject submissiveness and overweening arrogance. It's a fine line, sometimes as difficult to walk as a tightrope.

But, hey, no one ever said life was easy. Right?

Update: It turns out that the "Rand supporter" quoted above, Nick Gillespie, is not a Rand fan, after all. This was pointed out to me by Mark in the comments thread. I'm not sure how to interpret Gillespie's remarks - whether he was being sarcastically critical, or whether he does endorse this particular aspect of Rand's thought. Anyway, Rand's philosophy does inculcate this attitude in many of her followers, so I think the basic point is still valid.

Podcast fever - catch it!

Chris Carter, author of the excellent Parapsychology and the Skeptics, was interviewed by Skeptico recently. Here's a link to the podcast and transcript.

Personally, I think Carter pretty much destroyed the interviewer in the last series of exchanges, which concern the open-mindedness (or lack thereof) of media skeptics.

Not that I'm biased or anything.

Thanks for the memory

Jill Price, a woman who remembers every detail of her life from age 14 to the present, has been getting a lot of media attention lately. Now the story has shown up on the political blog Ace of Spades.

What interests me about the Ace of Spades entry is the ridiculous knee-jerk skepticism exhibited by some of the commenters (and, to a lesser extent, Ace himself).

Remember that this woman has been extensively tested, and that she is not the only person who apparently has this condition. So there is every reason to believe that her memory is genuine.

Nevertheless, some self-styled experts immediately cry BS on the story. Ace himself opines,

I have a question about how they've determined her to be "bona fide," though. They determine this, they say, by checking her recall versus the diaries she's kept since a teenager; but that doesn't prove she remembers her life. That proves she's memorized her own diaries ....

Another big offer of proof from her as well as another man who's stepped forward to reveal his gift is the fact that she can remember what day of the week any particular date fell upon. The trouble is ... there's a mathematical formula to determine that ....

So I don't know. It's not so much that I doubt this is possible as I'm just unimpressed by the proof that these people can remember what they say they remember.

Get that? He's unimpressed. But wouldn't the scientists who've studied this and similar cases have already thought of these objections and countered them? Obviously, yes, as could be established merely by reading the USA Today article Ace links to. The article reports:

She was studied by memory experts at University of California-Irvine for six years before they reported the [results] in an esoteric professional journal in 2006....

[Neuroscientist James] McGaugh, with colleagues Elizabeth Parker and Larry Cahill, gave Price a battery of memory and cognitive tests. She'd kept a diary from ages 10 to 34, so the researchers could verify Price's recollections with pages randomly selected from 1,460 diary days, he says.

But that wasn't all. You could give her a date, "and within seconds she'd tell you what day of the week it was, not only what she did but other key events of the day," McGaugh says. Aug. 16, 1977? A Tuesday, Elvis died. May 18, 1980? A Sunday, when Mount St. Helens erupted. She also quickly could come up with the day and date of noted events: the start of the Gulf War, Rodney King's beating, Princess Diana's death (Aug. 30 or 31, 1997, depending on France or U.S. time, she told McGaugh).

In other words, it wasn't all diaries and days of the week. It was memories that could be checked from other sources. A couple of Ace's more informed readers point this out. One writes:

Actually, this woman was featured in a National Geographic cover article about memory a few months back. There are other people with similar conditions, and each time it's been the real deal. Memorizing diaries, for example, wouldn't be enough because she remembers details that wouldn't normally be written down.

To which some idiot responds:

If there is no record of the details, who's to say that they are, in fact, correct?  She could be making up details that fit with the notes in the diaries.

Again, the point is that she remembers details that can be checked from other sources. But the skeptical idiot - let's call him a skeptidiot - has not even bothered to read the USA Today article and, left to his own devices, cannot imagine a team of scientists taking even the most elementary precautions.

In contrast to this idiocy, a clear-headed commenter writes:

Some of the other tests were not based on her diaries.  I believe one of the checks was asking her about concrete events such as when she watched the Very Brady Christmas special.  Since she had watched it 20 years ago she was able to correctly describe when it aired, even to the point of having to correct the doctors since their source material had the dates reversed with another Christmas special (which she had also watched).

That type of recall and the fact her brain is highly overstimulated in a few key areas confirmed her diagnosis. 

Which of course is exactly the kind of common-sense test that any reasonably intelligent person would apply to this case. But since the skeptidiots cannot even think of such tests themselves, they blithely assume that no one else could think of them, either.

Most of the skeptical comments do not even attempt to engage the evidence.

Check if she's ever read Star Wars novels by Michael Stackpole or Timothy Zahn.  Perfect memory is an ability at least two of the characters they use extensively have.

So if she's ever read about a fictional case of this condition, then she must be faking! Does this mean that if I read a book about someone with cancer - Cancer Ward, say - then I can never actually get cancer? Or if I were to read one of these Star Wars books, would I then be able to simulate memories of every event in my lifetime for the past 33 years?  

Someone else snarkily asks:

But does she ever do jack shit worth remembering?

Well, she probably didn't live the kind of deeply fulfilling life exemplified by posting snark on comment threads. But that'll always be the dream.

Quoth another pompous pontificator:

This kind of claim is sooo easy to check - if one is skilled at logic and observation. Pity journalists apparently don't seem to possess those skills in abundance.

Only skeptidiots have those qualities, it seems! They can "check" a claim just by snarking about it.

Then there's the inevitable scientific fundamentalist, for whom life holds no mysteries. He already knows all the answers because he learned them in junior high:

Well I call bulls**t.  Brains just don't work that way.  If they did you'd run out of "space" pretty fast.

Unless, of course, humans actually remember by storing bits using quantum superposition.  And supertiny flying monkeys with pens and notepads.

Ha ha! ROTFLMAO. "Flying monkeys!" Priceless! After all, everybody knows that applying quantum physics to neuroscience is just as silly as theorizing about miniature flying monkeys! We already know that "brains just don't work that way." We know everything. Ain't omniscience grand?

These people really are hopeless. Carefully researched, extensively documented, multiply verified anomalous facts stare them in the face, and rather than revising their worldview, they close their eyes and sing, "La la ... LAAA!" at the the top of their lungs. And if that fails, they crack dumb jokes about them danged wimmin and their nutty, estrogen-stoked behavior (which is what the rest of the thread consists of).

The Internet is often compared to a worldwide nervous system, a planetary brain. Maybe so.

But has anyone tried measuring its IQ?