My 3-year-old brother doing telekinesis

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7 years 8 months ago #249849 by Gisteron
Despite the finickiness one finds in logic classes in philosophy - to my surprise, I might add, far greater finickiness than in any math or science class - when it comes to questions of possibility or probability, often in application wholly unwarranted assumptions are being made.
Much like after one side's failure to disprove a proposition, the other side still has all of its work ahead of it to prove it, so does it not follow from something not being conclusively impossible that therefore it is possible. There are multiple different and conflicting models in possible worlds metaphysics and only under the most naive ones where everything is literally possible by default can we presume that any one given thing is. I do not know that telekinesis is real. I do not know that it could be either. If we want to be really finicky about this we would need to go on defining what we mean by factual or possible and whether or how we can differentiate the two from each other and from their respective opposites. I am open minded in the sense that I am willing to entertain hypotheticals. Propose a definition, give a few examples to indicate its plausibility or usefulness, then feel free to go ahead and provide evidence that your pet theory meets it. It's tedious and to some boring, especially when compared to the alternative "Look! Magic!" approach.

Now, all that being said, of course, the thread was not so much about telekinesis itself (we had like two of those with Ryder before, if memory serves) but about the particular instance with the OP's little brother. I do however appreciate TheDude's posting especially of Darryl Sloan. Here we have a gentleman who may not be any more a man of science than Ryder, but if we assume he is being just as honest, in him we see a healthy response to criticism. He goes out of his way to implement at least all of the immediate and obvious controls and safeties and tries to get results despite the obstacles. Basically, at least from what we see, we are lead to believe that this is a man who is trying for transparency and honesty, one who invites rigor and criticism so as to grow all our understanding. Now, yes, we are dealing with a 240p video from 2009, and loud background noise that could be just about anything. We are also dealing with someone who, if he ever did take any formal science education in relevant fields, didn't find it impactful enough to mention on his bio on his website, and if he ever published his results for peer review, didn't find that that was worth mentioning either.
So I can of course by no means say I am convinced. But, to be fair, I have no immediate likely explanation of what I saw in his video. To my knowledge this does not look like a quite so obvious trick nor coincidence the way Ryder's materials always have. Before judging Mr. Sloan's display one way or another, or equivalent displays, as it were, I for one would need more data.

Better to leave questions unanswered than answers unquestioned

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