Electric Universe 2013 Conference - Cumulative Evidence for Mind over Matter

I was VERY surprised not to find the video I'm presenting in this topic here on ATS. But to be honest I consider myself lucky to have stumbled upon it. Why? I read a book called Explaining the Unexplained about 6 years ago and it presented possible explanations for all types of psychic phenomena, and I remember that the very end of the book was about the highly promising ongoing tests called Ganzfeld test. I'm sure many of you are familiar with it and have your own opinions, but I've been wondering for the past 6 years "whatever happened with those experiments?" until a couple days ago when I found an amazing video from the Electric Universe Conference 2013. It's an hour-long speech by Dean Radin, PhD, and he talks about not only the cumulative results over the past few decades but also other areas of research, all of which strongly implies a role of consciousness in events of the external world. So here are the 2 videos of the presentation. It's a speech among many others at the conference, of which I would highly recommend Rupert Sheldrake: Science Set Free.

And this video is titled Dean Radin:: Men Who Stare at Photons

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There is also an upcoming conference again this year at the same location by the way.

I would just like to add my opinion that skepticism is becoming an occupation where the job is denying obvious implications no matter what, at the cost of having to come up with more and more ludicrous, outrageous alternative explanations and desperately trying to find faults with increasingly impeccably carried out experiments. Is there a time for a skeptic where they admit: yes, consciousness does influence matter? Is having been brought up with a defective materialistic world-view and a lack of open-minded humility reason enough for ignorance? How long is it sensible/healthy to cling onto an outdated, obsolete paradigm?

The only thing I have to add to this...

is the propensity for people to tear down your perfectly good, and working, theories and ideas....

simply because they either don't understand, or didn't think it through before you came up with it.




Egos are a bitch.

reply to post by Rolci

In part 2 he talks about the evidence for mind over matter, and the "The secret", which leads you to believe you can imagine a gold mercedes and "poof", it will appear.

He said the research suggests something does happen but you might get something like a virtual gold particle for a fraction of a second to appear.

This of course is not a reference to an actual experiment (he has already described the actual experimental results in some detail by that point), rather it's a half-joking characterization that the size of the effects observed in experiment are very small, and indeed the experimental results do show very small effects as he suggests. He mentions college sophomores with no special abilities are used as test subjects,who get an average of 32% right on 4 answer multiple choice stuff which should yield 25% by random chance, but he admits 32% isn't that high though he thinks it's statistically significant.

Then he says people who do claim to have special abilities score much higher, like 50-60%, but he doesn't show any experimental results to support that claim, which frankly would be a lot more convincing than 32%.

I'd like to believe that something solid will come out of psi research someday, but these small effects are just so close to random chance that I found myself disappointed he didn't support the 50-60% claim with actual data like he did the other 32% claims.

He also emphasized the mainstream doesn't seem convinced, but if he could support the 50-60% claim it would be a lot more convincing, because that's a lot harder to confuse with 25% random chance than 32% is.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing to me is that they chose to present an an Electric Universe conference, when absolutely nothing in his presentation has anything to do with electric universe. You can't prove a theory true but you can prove a lot of electric universe ideas are wrong, like the idea that the sun is powered by electricity rather than nuclear fusion.

So if I was doing serious psi research like Radin is, the last thing I would want to contaminate my serious research with would be association with ideas that have been scientifically proven wrong like an electric powered sun. But I suppose maybe he doesn't have a lot of legitimate venues to give his talks in due to mainstream opposition, which is unfortunate.