quote:

Originally posted by nefardec actually he is doing exactly what the 'spiritual' people are doing. you're missing the point of spiritual healing. it's not so much that you are physically doing something to someone, but you are making them believe you are doing something. Simply by through belief, the body can heal on its own. Think of it like the placebo effect.

i thought recent studies argue that the whole placebo effect doesn't actually work?

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN i thought recent studies argue that the whole placebo effect doesn't actually work?

link?

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Originally posted by nefardec link?

sorry, was just something i read a while back. no idea where or what it was.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN sorry, was just something i read a while back. no idea where or what it was.

well i'd be interested to read it if you come across it again. in my personal experience placebos have affected me.


even the simplest things - for instance, if i am doing pushups and tell myself that i am going to do 50, and only do 30 pushups, it is easier than to tell myself i am only going to do 30 and then do the 30. basically, attitude is everything, and spiritual healing goes one step further to say that the attitude of the healer is also part of it.

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec actually he is doing exactly what the 'spiritual' people are doing. you're missing the point of spiritual healing. it's not so much that you are physically doing something to someone, but you are making them believe you are doing something. Simply by through belief, the body can heal on its own. Think of it like the placebo effect. So this really is not a refutation, it's just another understanding of the thing. additionally, it's worth noting that many documented psychics and clairvoyants actually had little idea of the 'uniqueness' of their gifts for some time. imagine that the way you see the color 'red' is different than everyone else - how would you be able to verify the difference when you end up referring to the same object? so what i am saying is it's possible derren brown actually does have certain gifts but he passes them off as 'micro muscle movements' and 'subtle cues', where spiritualists may call them 'fluctuations of the energy body' etc

Exactly - so these things like "clairvoyance" and "reiki" aren't "mystical" and seemingly supernatural as their proponents seem to claim. If they DO work (which they don't), they are still phenomenons rooted in hard science, whether it's from minute muscle movements or some kind of reverse psychosomatic/placebo action within the brain signalling that the body should heal itself.

"There is nothing that cannot be explained through hard science."

- Sir Thomas Whitfield

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Originally posted by Domesticated Exactly - so these things like "clairvoyance" and "reiki" aren't "mystical" and seemingly supernatural as their proponents seem to claim. If they DO work (which they don't), they are still phenomenons rooted in hard science, whether it's from minute muscle movements or some kind of reverse psychosomatic/placebo action within the brain signalling that the body should heal itself. "There is nothing that cannot be explained through hard science." - Sir Thomas Whitfield

lol, yes that is exactly what i am saying



the only thing i am suggesting is that 'mysticism' is simply looking at the other side of the same coin. mysticism is looking from within; materialism, from without.


i also would not use the word 'supernatural' but something more like extra-material


check this out, it explains using a metaphor this notion of looking at two sides of a coin. basically in this metaphor two video cameras look at different sides of a fish tank. looking at the screens separately, when the fish moves one might attribute causality to one of the screens. eg, when the fish moves on one screen, it moves on the other. chicken and the egg. however, the truth is in its wholeness, as one fish moving. causality is a matter of perspective.

Last edited by nefardec on May-08-2009 at 04:38

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec well i'd be interested to read it if you come across it again. in my personal experience placebos have affected me. even the simplest things - for instance, if i am doing pushups and tell myself that i am going to do 50, and only do 30 pushups, it is easier than to tell myself i am only going to do 30 and then do the 30. basically, attitude is everything, and spiritual healing goes one step further to say that the attitude of the healer is also part of it.

quote:

In May 2001, The New England Journal of Medicine published an article that called into question the validity of the placebo effect. "Is the Placebo Powerless? An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment" by Danish researchers Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter C. Götzsche "found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects." Their meta-analysis of 114 studies found that "compared with no treatment, placebo had no significant effect on binary outcomes, regardless of whether these outcomes were subjective or objective. For the trials with continuous outcomes, placebo had a beneficial effect, but the effect decreased with increasing sample size, indicating a possible bias related to the effects of small trials." (Most of the studies evaluated by Hróbjartsson and Götzsche were small: for 82 of the studies the median size was 27 and for the other 32 studies the median was 51.)

http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html

the study is here:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content...act/344/21/1594

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html the study is here: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content...act/344/21/1594

we should also talk about the 'nocebo'

http://www.skepdic.com/nocebo.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...A2709-2002Apr29

original study by barksy is here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11829702

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec actually he is doing exactly what the 'spiritual' people are doing. you're missing the point of spiritual healing. it's not so much that you are physically doing something to someone, but you are making them believe you are doing something. Simply by through belief, the body can heal on its own. Think of it like the placebo effect. So this really is not a refutation, it's just another understanding of the thing.

Maybe you should read the book in question before you pass judgement on it. Especially since things like mediums and clairvoyants go far beyond psychosomatics.

I know people who believe in spiritual gibberish and attempt to use physical evidence to prove it. My mother strongly believes in reiki, as it helped her cope with MS, and her reasoning is the whole "you can feel them touching you even though they aren't" thing. This, to her, is proof that there is some energy or spirituality beyond the material, or at least beyond science. You can watch a Youtube clip of Derren Brown touching someone without touching them, and he comprehensively rejects any spiritual explanation of what he does.

My point has very little to do with the actual effects of such treatments. It has to do with people using supposedly baffling occurences as evidence or proof of spiritual frameworks when actually they are evidence of nothing of the sort. Your perspective on spirituality is of no interest to me.

Although, incidentally, if we're all aware of the placebo effect, why do we need to dress it up in faux-spirituality? Surely it's possible to believe in the placebo itself. I have a line I can speak, or even think, that will stop me hiccupping immediately. I know it's a placebo. I came up with it as a placebo! And yet by believing in the placebo effect I can cure my hiccups using a placebo I created specifically for that purpose. Meta. I'm working on other ones too.

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quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J Maybe you should read the book in question before you pass judgement on it. Especially since things like mediums and clairvoyants go far beyond psychosomatics. I know people who believe in spiritual gibberish and attempt to use physical evidence to prove it. My mother strongly believes in reiki, as it helped her cope with MS, and her reasoning is the whole "you can feel them touching you even though they aren't" thing. This, to her, is proof that there is some energy or spirituality beyond the material, or at least beyond science. You can watch a Youtube clip of Derren Brown touching someone without touching them, and he comprehensively rejects any spiritual explanation of what he does. My point has very little to do with the actual effects of such treatments. It has to do with people using supposedly baffling occurences as evidence or proof of spiritual frameworks when actually they are evidence of nothing of the sort. Your perspective on spirituality is of no interest to me. Although, incidentally, if we're all aware of the placebo effect, why do we need to dress it up in faux-spirituality? Surely it's possible to believe in the placebo itself. I have a line I can speak, or even think, that will stop me hiccupping immediately. I know it's a placebo. I came up with it as a placebo! And yet by believing in the placebo effect I can cure my hiccups using a placebo I created specifically for that purpose. Meta. I'm working on other ones too.

i do plan on reading it - going to check it out from the university library tomorrow.

look, i don't agree with people using baffling occurrences as proof of ANYTHING. I am quite a skeptic myself. However, I happen to also be skeptical of the ultimate reality of the material world.

I wish you'd stop using the word 'spiritual' like this. I personally only use the word to mean something like 'undiscovered science'. I believe everything can and will be understood as a scientific phenomenon - eventually, though it may require the suspension of certain crystallized beliefs.

I think that any theory or spiritual framework can only ever be an approximation or metaphor for the absolute truth of reality.

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Originally posted by nefardec I think that any theory or spiritual framework can only ever be an approximation or metaphor for the absolute truth of reality.

Is that statement itself an approximation or metaphor for the absolute truth of reality?

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Originally posted by Domesticated Is that statement itself an approximation or metaphor for the absolute truth of reality?

yes

now you're getting what i mean