Theos-Talk Archives (March 2004 Message tt00047)

leonmaurer@aol.com wrote:
> Picked up this notice from a consciousness study forum. 
>
> > Scientists at The University of Arizona have done extensive research, 
> > and say that they have the proof that when we die we continue to live 
> > beyond our physical bodies.
> >
> > http://www.newsnet5.com/news/2893543/detail.html#
>
> What do we make of it? 
I recall the "scientific" studies that proved that Uri Geller had 
psychic abilities. Upon examination, all of them proved to be seriously, 
often embarrassingly, flawed. The problem is that scientists don't 
expect fraud, and do not adequately allow for it. Now, I don't know what 
happened here, but, for example, in the case of Uri Geller, it turns out 
that Geller's assistant was given all sorts of access under the mistaken 
assumption that he was not going to pass information on to Geller (and 
this was only one of the many holes in the experiments). From the 
article, it is not clear whether cold, warm, or hot reading methods were 
used, what the ratio of correct statements to incorrect statements were 
(one trick phony mediums use is to fire out information rapidly, 
dwelling on the correct guesses and zipping by the incorrect ones, so 
that the ratio of incorrect guesses to correct ones is greatly 
underestimated unless measured).

Bart Lidofsky