I doubt it is supernatural.
No need - heâs already a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
http://www.csiro.au/Portals/About-CSIRO/Who-we-are/Executive/Dr-Larry-Marshall.aspx
(Edited for syntax)
Meanwhile, back in reality, dowsing doesnât work any better than chance, obfuscating PoMo crap notwithstanding.
If I meant âemotional statesâ, I would have said so. I could consider âemotionsâ synonymous enough, but âstatesâ posit something too discrete. So the term âmoodâ captures the nebulous nature well enough.
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Wait, the CSIRO? Darn it. Up until now, my only knowledge that organization was entirely positive:
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Like all good Christian people the US Congress considers dowsing to be witchcraft propagated by teaching evolution in schools.
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If you are going to bother making the effort to dismiss my point, you could probably muster a better argument than declaring that your opinions are ârealityâ.
My point was that this is a misapplication of categories pertaining to what processes of divination are supposedly for. Like your angels example, they are an exploration of the individual who uses them, rather than the world at large. I am not clear why pointing this would not be relevant to the discussion.
And metaphysics is hardly postmodern, itâs been a significant area of philosophy for millenia. How is it obfuscating to remind people that some things are only ideas, and that ideas are also real?
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I like that guy. Iâve find his comments about dowsing to be 80% accurate.
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Dowsing doesnât work better than chance. Your saying it is âreal bypassing of the discursive rational mind in favor of exploring subjectivities which the individual may not be consciously aware ofâ is just so much blather. Dowsing doesnât work. Your post confuses the issue using wording worthy of Deepak Chopra.
If you want to say dowsing is fun, even if it doesnât actually work, fine. But just say so. But when you say that methods of divining, including dowsing, are âan exploration of the individual who uses them, rather than the world at largeâ you are full of it. Dowsing is specifically about the world at large, finding water or other substances or objects right here on earth, in reality, and not some vague spiritual self discovery.
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My uncle was a some time dowser, taught us how to do it as kids. A forked twig isnât the way to go, you want a green straight stick just thick enough so that you can split it about 1/4 - 1/2 way along the length with a pocket knife. Why? You can make such a split switch twitch by subtly moving your hands closer or further from each other. He called this âbetter actionâ. Though its mostly because having very specific requirements, and some element of ritual and physical craft to the process makes it more believable. Forked sticks were for kids cause the knife part was dangerous. My uncle also spent a decent chunk of the 50âs and 60âs making a living as a card cheat and pool hustler while he tried to break into Broadway. He was also (quite sadly) a deeply closeted homosexual. Which is all to say he was a very practiced liar and perpetual huckster of the best and most enjoyable sort. Dowsing and a few other kinds of hillbilly, Mainer fortune telling were just another way of getting a good laugh or picking up some extra cash in a pinch.
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My father still marvels over the time my uncle came and dowsed out our cesspool before we had some work done. According to dad he got it 100% right within five minutes. I was there and remember it not being that close. It was within about a 5 foot circle of the actual cesspool cap/access. Which is what he was looking for. The key thing to realize is that in our back yard there really isnât anywhere else to put a cesspool, the yard isnât particularly large, and Uncle Rob had worked in construction at some point. So he was familiar with the general practices for placing cesspools. He also made sure to check the house side connections.
All of that likely comes into play for you as well. From context Iâm guess you do (or did) this sort of drilling for work. So working in a fixed area, with experience in where/how all those lines and pipes are usually placed. Direct knowledge that they are there somewhere, and pre-knowledge of what general form theyâll take, what direction theyâre heading in, etc. Your âdowsingâ, or guess really, isnât totally blind. Or even really a guess. Its professional intuition. Try it without the dowsing. Your regular, non-mystical, guesses will likely be just as often âcorrect-ishâ as the dowsing is.
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First of all, Iâm totally on board with Dowsing not working, but that doesnât mean that no one is better than chance at finding water underground, whether or not they have a stick in their hands. Iâm pretty sure that I could do better than chance by simply excluding the permafrost from my well drilling area. Iâm interested in what studies have been done to prove that it doesnât work, but there are some big issues defining âchanceâ here (the same issues that apply to saying it works â80%â - what the hell could that mean?), and to say it canât work better than chance (even if we are allowing for it to be just a skill at figuring out where to dig in the practitioner) is to say that it is simply impossible to have any idea where a good place to dig a well is.
On the other hand, when the âscience chiefâ says it might be a "gravitational anomaly"he sounds like someone who may need to retire quite soon.
Yeah, this is what I imagine âdowsingâ really is. Maybe there are wackos who know a lot about finding water who need a stick crutch to think about it the right way. Of course I am sure there are wackos who know nothing about finding water who like to walk around with a stick and use selective memory to convince themselves they are right.
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The problem with what you are saying is that to know if it âworksâ, weâd need to know what it is and also what it is for. A hammer makes for an ineffective toothbrush. This is why I said that we are dealing with different categories. You are perfectly entitled to disagree with what I think dowsing really is, but that I think it is a fundamentally mental exercise rather than a means of finding objective resources seems obvious and easily demonstrable. As a mental exercise, it needs to be judged in its efficacy as a mental exercise. Having established this, persisting in judging it as an objective process presents a bogus argument, but that can be good fun if you like jumping up and down yelling âitâs not real!â.
By the same logic, you could refute your own emotions by observing that they do not directly effect the outside world. But they still presumably affect you, and your actions in it. This doesnât mean that your emotions donât work, it means that they are subjective - a different category of experience.
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When I say dowsing works the same as chance Iâm referring to controlled, double blind experiments that removed the variables you are talking about, leaving only the dowsing. In such experiments, with covered containers or pipes, dowsing equals chance. The other part, trained expert intuition, is not dowsing. That may or may not work, and given that in many areas if you drill deep enough youâll hit water most of the time, bias makes it hard to determine whether any real expertise is involved or just powerful confirmation bias.
Dowsers are among the most deeply deluded when it comes to their abilities, abilities they sincerely believe in. When they fail controlled tests they cannot accept that dowsing doesnât work and blame the test or some other temporary effect.
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Thatâs basically how my uncle did it. Know enough about what your looking for to get close, make a big production of it, have an excuse for failure. That way âcorrect-ishâ even if its no better than chance (I assume professional experience would push you at least a bit above chance) looks AMAZING. Then heâd laugh at you for year, and repeatedly offer to dowse for your missing socks.
Edit: Iâm suddenly having awesome memories of how much my brother and I annoyed my parents by dowsing for everything imaginable. Their keys, missing toys, pirate treasure. We had âdowsing rodsâ, covered in glitter and dangling âcharmsâ, in a dozen different sizes hanging around the house for months. We had one that was like 3 feet long, because bigger is better. Oddly I now know thatâs the opposite of how it works. That whole ideomotor thing will not be experienced by a 3 year old stomping around with half a tree.
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Judging dowsing by the entirely relevant objective criteria of whether it actually works, which is the actual point of dowsing, is entirely valid.
What you want to do is create some weird equivocal argument about dowsing being ârealâ in the same sense that any snake oil is âreal,â regardless of whether it works. None of that has anything to do with the OP or the foolish claims by the new head of CSIRO made in favor of the pseudoscience of dowsing.
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[quote=âpopobawa4u, post:16, topic:47607â]Dowsing (not unlike other kinds of "divination) might be fake physics, but it is real bypassing of the discursive rational mind in favor of exploring subjectivities which the individual may not be consciously aware of.[/quote]Okay, so why donât we find the basis for these subjectivities which the individual may not be consciously aware of, and use them to establish objective criteria that can be reliably applied to locate water?
I understand that âdowsingâ can be applied in different contexts, but this particular phenomenon is pretty cut-and-dried. Either thereâs water, or there isnât.
I read Jared Diamondâs Collapse a number of years ago, in which he discusses at length the sorry state of Australiaâs environmental problems. The major takeaway I can recall is that it seems to be a terrible place to attempt agriculture in general.
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