How to talk about everyone
A note on How many senses. A correspondent reminds me that I said what I said too broadly. ‘But experiments are supposed to be repeatable by any appropriately trained person not actually disabled.’ True – that is too broad. Mind you, I clarified somewhat in the next sentence – ‘You could claim that the people who can’t do it are disabled – lack a sense’ – but I should have clarified in the first sentence. I didn’t mean disabled in general, I meant lacking a specific sense needed to repeat a specific experiment.
I added the qualification merely in the effort to be precise – as one does when arguing, you know. I was making a fairly sweeping generalization there, so I felt that need to be careful, to anticipate likely objections or exceptions and include them. The point of the disagreement turns on the difference between Stannard’s claim about experimental repeatability which applies only to a particular group, compared to experimental repeatability which applies in principle to everyone – with the necessary stipulations: appropriate training, and the appropriate senses (appropriate, in both cases, in the sense of ‘what’s needed for the particular experiment’). That’s all I meant.
But, if the people who CAN “do” prayer or whatever, have an “extra” sense, as the loopy Stannard seems to be suggesting, then …
Shouldn’t this be investigated properly?
Because it would be a “psi” power of sorts, and very vlaluable, and, if inheritable wouild confer a distinct evolutionary advantage to the holders.
Which would mean that it would spread through the population rapidly, and be easily noticed, and – OOPS.
Which is why “prayer” and “psi” don’t exist, or of course, every evolutionary biologist for the past 148 years (and couinting) has been wrong.
Maybe the following has been said, as it seems pretty obvious. I don’t doubt that religious people have internal experiences that are occasioned by prayer or meditation. They have perhaps trained an “internal sense” that we all have but seldom use. Whether that is the case really does not matter, though. What raises doubt is their INTERPRETATION of those internal experiences. If serious pre-modern inquirers observe the sun, they can all agree that it goes around the earth. Vary the experiment, inquire further into the matter, and the “experience” may well turn out to be something other than what one thought it was originally.