More Radionics
Feb. 24th, 2021 06:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
degringolade
Cubism / Ben Nicholson/ 1943-45 (St Ives, Cornwall)
Be sippin’ coffee and pondering.
Getting sidetracked from the task of reading up on Reich. Sloggy work that. A lot of the time psychology/philosophy reads are not quick reading. At my age, Cliffs notes kinda make more sense. My brain has trouble running at the speeds that it used to run at, and the actual bandwidth itself is narrower than it used to be. If my brain at its peak was a 10th generation G7, I figure right now I am running on a 486. Sigh.
Back to Reich and psychology/philosophy. Looks to me that Reich was onto something. Not that he was seriously right or anything, but, like Jung, he repurposed some eastern philosophy (to me, he sounds a lot like Tantric, but who am I to judge) and overexplained it in the paaaattient aaaavuncular tones of a very self-absorbed academic. Gee, I wonder why it annoyed folks.
What I found interesting was how psych-types dismissed Reich’s work as “unscientific”. Wow!!
I have not even got a serious start on Reich’s writings. I suppose that I am in the phase of the process described by Salvor Hardin in “Foundation”
Hardin continued: "It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject—written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weight the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that?"
What I find interesting is that Radionics actually builds something that purports to do something with orgone. So there is actually something to test. I also think that there might be a certain paucity of valid data replete with positive and negative controls, clear definitions of expected results, a ruthless and clear minded evaluation of the results.
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
So, gonna finish up some reading in the next couple of weeks. Then I have to decide if pursuing this is worth the effort. I got to drink a couple of beers yesterday down at the Decibel and chat with Eddie about tubes. So the technical part has been broached. I’ll keep y’all posted.
MAYBE IT'S A TEMPERATURE GRADIENT
Date: 2021-02-24 03:52 pm (UTC)Question: How does a community of quacks judge quackery? Sounds like they were jealous.
Observation: By saying "of the worst kind" they suggest there are levels of quackery. But all the problems stem from the first level of quackery - theirs. Once you take the quack route, who's judging from there?
Possibly Relevant Report: "Albert Einstein agreed to participate, but thought Reich's research lacked scientific detachment and experimental rigor; and concluded that the effect was simply due to the temperature gradient inside the room. "Through these experiments I regard the matter as completely solved," he wrote to Reich on 7 February 1941. Upon further correspondence from Reich, Einstein replied that he could not devote any further time to the matter and asked that his name not be misused for advertising purposes."
NOTE: If you decide to pursue the study of orgone further, you will be picking up where Albert Einstein decided to leave off.
Specifications for Orgone accumulator (box): "Alternating layers of organic and non-organic materials inside the walls supposedly increase the orgone concentration inside the enclosure relative to the surrounding environment."
NOTE: According to Einstein, the function of the alternating layers of organic and non-organic materials inside the walls, was insulation.
THUS: Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to figure out why/how Einstein was wrong.
Hopefully the answer is not that Einstein was not a good enough scientist. But then once you get outside the realm of science, the path forward to understanding gets harder to locate. Maybe the path will coil around and end up at the bar Decibels. Maybe beer allows the body to quickly accumulate Orgone. Remember that sign, "Beer: helping ugly people have sex for 7,000 years".
Maybe, to keep yourself out of trouble, instead of telling others that you are studying orgone, you can say that you are following up on Einstein's study of the effects of temperature gradients.
Re: MAYBE IT'S A TEMPERATURE GRADIENT
Date: 2021-02-24 05:41 pm (UTC)Re: MAYBE IT'S A TEMPERATURE GRADIENT
Date: 2021-02-24 06:57 pm (UTC)But as I understand where you are coming from, your angle is that the science path is an inappropriate one; so of course Einstein did not get it.
NOTE: Before I was able to stop myself, these were my first science-based thoughts: Maybe the first thing to try is reversing the order of the layers of organic and non-organic materials. It seems like the nature of the first layer would be important. Like the first layer lures the particle in, so that the second layer can do something to it that it may not like; so the first layer cannot be the one that is going to do something to the particle. If the layers were reversed, then of course it won't work.
*****
"Science does not extend beyond imagination, because there is nothing beyond imagination for a human to understand."
This is from my animal book regarding the problem of using science to understand animals.
Maybe it is just me, but I liked this statement because it at first seems wrong - because it seems to say that something does not exist if it is not imagined or imaginable.
But it really says the opposite; for example, it says that an actual animal is different than what a human imagines the animal is. What science operates on, is what a human sets it to, which is what the human imagines the animal is.
How about this idea: the result is due to what the situation led a mind to believe. After all, if something happens, the brain must be responsible. Maybe there are an infinite number of stories (input), that can produce basically the same result.