Why is there no scientific evidence for the paranormal?

[Ninja_pig]

Hello, I have this question because so many people in the spiritual community seem to talk casually about paranormal phenomena. This includes mind-reading, remote viewing, clairvoyance, ghosts, levitation, telekinesis, being able to understand animals, being able to see other realms/dimensions, being able to see past lives, astral projection, talking to the dead, and more. Obviously if you ask any scientist why there is no scientific evidence for these things, they will give the answer that these phenomena don't exist.

That's so boring though!

As far as I can tell, the failure of science to prove the existence of these phenomena is not for lack of trying. It always seems to be the same story, where one person will come out with some experiment that demonstrates that a person has supernatural powers, only for the results to not be replicable, or for the methods in the experiment to not be sound. It's quite reminiscent of the quest to find room-temperature superconductors in the physics community. It seems like every 2 years some new group claims to have found one, but then it always turns out to not actually be the case.

The explanation that I often hear is that supernatural abilities are somehow suppressed by the act of empirical investigation. The slightly less common explanation is that these abilities are very rare and only the most isolated and gifted can access them. I never understood these explanations because they beg the questions: why does empirical investigation inhibit supernatural abilities, and how are these abilities too rare for scientists to test on but frequent enough for the spiritual community to know about?

Also, I should say, I have never personally experienced a paranormal phenomenon, so obviously that makes me more skeptical.

What I want to know is: Do you guys believe these phenomena actually exist? Have you personally witnessed or experienced anything paranormal? Why has science been unable to verify these phenomena? Is it possible to objectively verify their existence?

[OBEler]

If you are in the 4. Dimension, standard scientific research (reproducable Events) cannot be applied there. So all your scientific methods dont work there. Soo how do you want to do research paranormal events there? 

[Vibroverse]

Check the works of Charles Tart and Dean Radin. 

 

[ZenAlex]

It may be because it doesn't exist. Everyone who says they've had a paranormal experience may just be misinterpreting their experiences.

 

[Yimpa]

Leo actually made a blog post about this recently:

https://www.actualized.org/insights/is-esp-scientifically-real

[Oppositionless]

it’s very hard to test. 

I tried testing it myself by programming a random number generator and results have been… a bit disappointing.  but people have tested it and gotten some significant results. you need thousands of trials.

[JuliusCaesar]

Unless you're genuinely willing to entertain the possibility that such things exist, you'll never encounter scientific evidence of it. For the same reason that a Flat Earther can't find evidence for the notion that the Earth is curved or that it's in motion. Any evidence to the contrary of the preconceived idea is considered fake or is misinterpreted/misunderstood or explained away so as to preserve the already agreed upon worldview.

 

If you're genuinely open to it as a possibility, then it'll become easy to find evidence for it. If you wanted some kind of method to ensure that you find good empirical evidence, I'd recommend you learn Hindi and study the Sciences done in India. That's not to say you can't find examples of the paranormal in published western studies, you can. It's just that the researchers in the west overwhelmingly tend to avoid such things, so it's not so easy.

 

 

 

[OldManCorcoran]

There is, the objects of your experience are not made of "stuff" and is entirely outside the realm of consensus reality. This is definitively the case, since even if it was discovered with certainty that the brain and neurons produce qualia, the qualia itself is not made of anything material, only the brain which generates it is said to consist of matter.

But of course things are only called "supernatural" when they are BS, as soon as something is verified as being a fact of reality it is suddenly called "natural". Because people agree that subjective experience exists, we categorize the elements within that subjective experience as "natural" despite it falling beyond the realm of consensus reality and not being reducible to atoms etc (again, only the physical things allegedly responsible for generating the subjective experience are thought of as "matter", not the subjective experience itself).

[Yimpa]

Two attractive people locking eyes with each other for the first time is pretty paranormal, wouldn’t you think?