(: Bishop Berkeley :)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RHvFVS3a...

I've seen the entire film from which this clip comes, and it has some powerful moments. (Should you see the film, you might watch for the scene in which Baron von Kempelen's home is broken in to in his absence. It is a remarkable scene.)

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

To my thinking, there is no question that James Randi ( www.Randi.org ) has done two distinct services for humankind:

1) Continuing a tradition that stretches back at least as far as Harry Houdini, Mr. Randi has reminded us that clever, well-practiced frauds can easily take advantage of people who are unfamiliar with their subtle techniques of trickery -- especially when these people desperately WANT to believe the "supernatural" phenomena that are being demonstrated.

2) He has reminded the philosophical and critical-thinking communities that even highly educated and intelligent people can be "duped" if they are unfamiliar with the "science of illusion" -- this challenges us to refine a new "department" of informal logic: to realize that part of being an educated person (formally or informally) is to be aware that *conscious and intentional* illusions are frequently encountered and that one would do well to learn something about the techniques that underlie them.

(By the way, a fictional film that drives home this point quite effectively, in my view, is the 1987 film "House of Games," in which a well-educated psychiatrist crosses paths with a very polished con man: http://imdb.com/title/tt0093223/ )

Where I have a distinct philosophical difference with Mr. Randi is this: I think his pre-disposition to view the world in a wholly materialistic way may compromise his open-mindedness -- and in this, I think Harry Houdini was a bit closer to the ideal. Houdini was genuinely open to the possibility that legitimate supernatural/psychic events might occur, and as part of his quest to discover whether and to what extent they do occur, he sought to eliminate the frauds. Perhaps Houdini himself was not entirely open-minded (at least a few biographers have suggested that he truly *wanted* to find legitimate supernatural phenomena), but I suspect he was closer to true neutrality on the subject than Mr. Randi.

Of course, perhaps I'm showing my own prejudices here: I tend to believe the Universe does have a spiritual-mystical dimension, and I think I have good reason for believing this. But were I to cease to believe this, I don't think my life would change in any significant way.

Thanks for your question! I'd be interested to learn your thoughts on these matters....

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

P.S. A clip of Mr. Randi from "Secrets of the Psychics" (mentioned in a previous post) is shown here. In this short clip, Mr. Randi provides a classroom of students with "personalized" Astrology readings, said to be based on personal information they had provided. He asks them to rate the Astrological analyses for accuracy. But the readings are not quite what they seem....

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8...

http://www.skeptic.com/podcasts/ted...

The concluding song (and its alternate) by Katie Melua ( http://www.katiemelua.com/ ) alone is worth watching!

I've found Mr. Shermer's writing to be insightful. I particularly appreciate his observation that when "smart people" believe "weird things" it is often because smart people are good at defending ideas they came to embrace in a pre-smart phase of their lives.

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

In the U.S. some decades ago, we had a TV situation comedy called "Green Acres" that was often quite funny (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_... , "The television series Green Acres was about Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), an accomplished, erudite and rich New York attorney who was acting on his lifelong dream to be a farmer, and Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor), his glamorously bejeweled Hungarian wife, dragged unwillingly from the privileged city life she adored to a bucolic life on a ramshackle farm....")

Well, one of my favorite comedic props in the series was that we would occasionally see "Ms. Douglas" (Eva Gabor) putting together a jigsaw puzzle. She kept a hammer with her as she did so, and whenever a jigsaw puzzle piece didn't quite fit where she thought it should, she would tap it into place with the hammer!

Philosophically, we don't want to fall into that situation -- in which we are using a conceptual hammer to force-fit facts into pre-conceived frameworks that are ill-equipped to contain them.

The true spirit of the scientific method is that we let the facts "speak to us," as it were, without preconceptions. We do not "speak to them," telling them what they must be. We approach the data open-mindedly, and let "the chips fall where they may".

It is on this point that I feel a certain caution with Mr. Randi's work. Has he already decided "how the Universe must be"? If he were to encounter a legitimate example of something that did not fit into his expectations, would he really recognize it? Or would he just dismiss it out of hand or "explain it away"?

Logicians speak of the "fallacy of hasty generalization" -- of generalizing too quickly based on too few examples. I can certainly understand Mr. Randi's beliefs (as I have interpreted them) -- having investigated a very extensive range of people who claim to have psychic abilities, and having found nothing that would "hold up" under laboratory scrutiny, it is easy to see how one might conclude that there's just nothing to be found there.

But that doesn't change the fact that there may be legitimate phenomena of this kind, and that not all such phenomena will present themselves in a form that is convenient to test.

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

I suppose the old saying, "De gustibus non est disputandum" ("There's no disputing about taste") is as true of "Green Acres" as it is of anything. And I certainly understand *anyone's* skepticism with respect to that elevated entertainment :)

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

P.S. "Mr. Haney" was my favorite character on the show -- likely because, as a child, I had learned to do a pretty good impersonation of him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Ha...

http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room...

The Dutch study that is cited by both men is summarized here:

http://www.iands.org/dutch_study.html

and is available here in full in PDF format:

http://www.zarqon.co.uk/Lancet.pdf

I agree with Dr. Chopra's point that if the elaborate experiences that some of these near-death patients have had can truly be correlated with times when they showed *no measurable brain activity at all*, that would certainly improve the case that consciousness can exist apart from the body. (But how closely was this particular variable observed?)

I tend to believe that skepticism with respect to such things as God, the supernatural, the afterlife, etc. and (conversely) belief with respect to such matters is much more a matter of temperament than philosophy -- some people seem to be "wired" skeptical with respect to such things, others seem to be "wired" to be inclined to faith in such things. (I am clearly in the latter category, and always have been -- not in ALL such things, but only in those things which cohere with other aspects of reality.)

Of course, typically, the "skeptic" and the "believer" each believes that they have arrived at their perspective by following "reason alone". But here I suspect they are usually wrong -- it is much more a matter of temperament, in my view. (This says *nothing at all* about the likely truth or falsity of the existence of God, the afterlife, the supernatural, etc. It is simply an observation about human psychology. As William James points out in his classic study "The Varieties of Religious Experience": "If a creed makes a man feel happy, he almost inevitably adopts it. Such a belief ought to be true; therefore it is true -- such, rightly or wrongly, is one of the 'immediate inferences' of the religious logic used by ordinary men...." [and I would include temperamental skeptics, as well.] http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/jame... Incidentally, William James is generally quite favorable to the spiritual perspective of the Universe -- I suspect he and I share a similar "wiring"!)

I think if the "temperamental skeptic" were to have encountered the Turk Chess automaton in its heyday, he or she would likely have been skeptical of its wholly-mechanical operation. And he or she would have been correct on this.

But had the "temperamental skeptic" encountered Albert Einstein 's relativity theories in their earliest expressions, I think they would have thought them to be fringe quackery -- and they would have cited centuries of evidence confirming Newton's worldview.

One's temperament sometimes "leads one right" and sometimes "leads one wrong"!

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RdT4yG8w...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexan...

=== from the article ===

First experiments with sound

Bell's father encouraged Aleck's [Alexander Graham Bell's] interest in speech and in 1863, took his sons to see a unique automaton, developed by Sir Charles Wheatstone [developer of the Wheatstone Bridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheats... ] based on the earlier work of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen.[23] The rudimentary "mechanical man" simulated a human voice. Aleck was fascinated by the machine and after he obtained a copy of von Kempelen's book published in Germany and had laboriously translated it, Aleck and his older brother Melville built their own automaton head. Their father, highly interested in their project, offered to pay for any supplies and spurred the boys on with the enticement of a "big prize" if they were successful.[23] While his brother constructed the throat and larynx, Aleck tackled the more difficult task of recreating a realistic skull. His efforts resulted in a remarkably lifelike head that could "speak," albeit only a few words.[23] The boys would carefully adjust the "lips" and when a bellows forced air through the windpipe, a very recognizable "Mama" ensued, to the delight of neighbors who came to see the Bell invention.[24]

Intrigued by the results of the automaton, Bell continued to experiment with a live subject, the family's Skye terrier, "Trouve".[25] After he taught it to growl continuously, Aleck would reach into its mouth and manipulate the dog's lips and vocal cords to produce a crude-sounding "Ow ah oo ga ma ma." With little convincing, visitors believed his dog could articulate "How are you grandma?" More indicative of his playful nature, his experiments convinced onlookers that they saw a "talking dog."[26] However, these initial forays into experimentation with sound led Bell to undertake his first serious work on the transmission of sound, using tuning forks to explore resonance. At the age of 19, he wrote a report on his work and sent it to Alexander Ellis, a colleague of his father.[26] Ellis immediately wrote back indicating that the experiments were similar to existing work in Germany. Dismayed to find that groundbreaking work had already taken place by Hermann von Helmholtz who had conveyed vowel sounds by means of a similar tuning fork "contraption", he pored over the German scientist's book, Sensations of Tone. From his translation of the original German edition, Aleck then made a deduction that would be the underpinning of all his future work on transmitting sound, "Without knowing much about the subject, it seemed to me that if vowel sounds could be produced by electrical means so could consonants, so could articulate speech."[27]

=== end of quoted passage ===

[The bracketed numbers refer to footnotes in the article]

(: Bishop Berkeley :)

I've written/transcribed a series of 26 long articles on Automatons, including 17 on the Turk alone, on my chess blog at chess.com - http://blog.chess.com/batgirl/chess...

I don't know if you need to be a member to view them (I don't think you do, but if so , joining is simple and free.)

http://thebookmarque.blogspot.com/2...

http://adairjones.wordpress.com/boo...