Sam Parnia is coordinating an on-going study into NDEs.

That still does not necessitate that we assume our senses are accurate in order to do science,

If we don't assume our senses are reliable, how might we avoid the pitfalls of relativism and solipsism?

.. if we had assumed our senses were accurate (we did actually) we would still believe the sun orbits the Earth

Our senses were accurate. They gave us reliable data: The observance of a bright, fiery object arching across the sky was reliable. It was what our brains did with the reliable data given by our senses that caused the confusion.

Don't you think you might be confusing reliability of senses with reliability of conclusions? If not, why would it be absurd for a normal individual to deny the sun's existence?

Andrew,

I would say it wasnt our senses that told us the sun revolved around the earth, but our intuition.

Seems pretty straight-forward to me - but then again - maybe my unreliable senses are fooling me ;)

Wayne / Ebonmuse,

..the advocates of psi have had literally over a hundred years to come up with even one well-designed, repeatable experiment to demonstrate it. Instead, all we have is self-delusion and statistical noise. (Ebonmuse)

Sure, there's lots of self-delusion and statistical noise, but the italicized statement above isn't exactly true, and I think you should look deeper. Incidentally, Albert Einstein wrote the forward to Upton Sinclair's Mental Radio in 1930 and one of the first published reports on telepathy was the two-volume 1886 Phantasms of the Living by the Society for Psychical Research. In 1974, Puthoff and Targ published their Information Transfer Under Conditions of Sensory Shielding, and in 1995 researchers Utts and Hyman also published a series of significant peer-reviewed papers. Early experiments typically took place in Britain or the United States and dealt with a series of cards where the sender and percipient attempt to transfer mental images. Many early experiments were outright trash science - but like Wayne alludes to with his ESP anecdote above - others represented legitimate frontier studies worthy of further exploration.

At least one telepathic experiment has been conducted from space with over 150,000 miles between sender and receiver. Perhaps the most significant contemporary work on the subject is the program on "Anomalous Mental Phenomena" carried out at SRI International (formerly the Stanford Research Institute) from 1973 through 1989, and continued at SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) from 1992 through 1994. While not conclusive proof - IMO - a fair and balanced analysis of the latter does permit the conservative statements that inexplicable statistical results greater than chance occur, and that the argument for psychic faculty is undeniably stronger than it has ever been. That 100 years has passed means nothing.

The way you are talking about how we use our senses (in the idea of we have to receive input somehow) yes, we must use our senses. That still does not necessitate that we assume our senses are accurate in order to do science, and this example has shown that to be the case quite clearly, in that if we had assumed our senses were accurate (we did actually) we would still believe the sun orbits the Earth (or a dragon spits a fireball, thanks Wayne).

Would you agree its necessary to use our senses in the 'observe' and 'test' steps?

Actually we used our senses and intuition in one case, and our sense and science in the other.

Further, you're going to claim that we didn't use our senses in order to be fooled that the sun moves around the Earth, but we did use our senses in order to see that the Earth moves around the sun? This makes no sense.

Even according to your argument (once one adjusts out the nonsense of claiming that we used our senses in one situation but not the other) you're claiming that we used our senses in both situations. One gave us erroneous conclusions, the other gave us correct conclusions. Now, please tell me how science can come to two different conclusions while assuming that our senses are accurate and also be wrong since our senses were not accurate in one situation, but were in use in both situations?

But no one is preventing any interested party from doing further research on these claims. You can go set up a test on your own, if you want.

Thats what I mean by its intuitively obvious.

and it is not "intuitively obvious that the sun revolves around the center of the universe." My senses are simply wrong on both counts, as are yours.

Wrong, our senses, with long term observation, or specalized eqiupment are what tells us that we were wrong to think the sun revolved 'round the earth.

Are you now going to say that that is our intuition being fooled instead?

I would say 'instead,' but I would say, not just yes but HELL YES, its ridiculously easy to trick our intuition. Thats why we use science to double(and tripple and quadruple) check our conclusions.

Also, your description of the dragon made my chuckle.

If you travel far enough east, you will probably find the dragon's lair.

If you travel far enough into the west, you probably can find where the fireballs land. It is a place of great desolation.

If there was any good evidence for phenomena like this, the advocates of psi have had literally over a hundred years to come up with even one well-designed, repeatable experiment to demonstrate it. Instead, all we have is self-delusion and statistical noise.

Ebonmuse,

I agree that the experiments need to be a lot better. My point was that in my opinion there is enough possibility in this one to warrant a further look. Why is it that the scientific community does not perform these experiments? I don't know for sure, but one idea that comes to mind is that there is a bias against these kinds of experiments because the outcome is "assured", so only the "crackpots" do them.

I would like to see double blind experiments and to hear of them done over if anything was comprimised.