By Paul M. Churchland
A examine within the philosophy of technological know-how, providing a robust kind of the doctrine of medical realism' and constructing its implications for matters within the philosophy of brain.
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Extra info for Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind
Sample text
So if we open the door to the salutary (or simply benign) effects of our thoughts on the external world, we must also open it to the destructive influence of our thoughts. And that’s precisely what freaks people out. 6 In fact, most of us won’t even allow ourselves to entertain this possibility. The responsibility—for what Freud called “the omnipotence of thought”—is simply too intimidating. But the great spiritualist mediums easily avoided that concern. From their point of view, they didn’t produce the phenomena they seemed to channel.
Similarly, anomalously structured foil would not establish the paranormal origin of the material; it might simply indicate an unusual mode of production. Still, I can understand why the JHU scientists found Katie’s foil less intriguing after their analysis. After all, they’re materials scientists, and they found that there was nothing special about Katie’s foil, considered simply as a sample of brass. And, I suppose, there was little (if anything) more they could have added to my research at that point.
Initially, it looked as if everything was running smoothly. Katie felt encouraged that some foil would appear during the six hours, the cameras were ready to record the event from different angles and different degrees of closeness, and Dean and Chris were ready either to endorse or debunk the phenomena if they occurred. But problems arose right from the beginning. , in a good mood and ready to go. However, the Unsolved Mysteries director had other plans. He wanted to shoot various set-up shots before embarking on our experiment.