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DOWSING AND ARCHAEOLOGY

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Bianca
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« Reply #15 on: May 24, 2009, 08:24:50 pm »









The other catch is the word 'coincidence'. Coincidence is simply co-incidence: things coincide. The whole of our observation of life is built up through observation of coincidences; some of them are meaningful, some are not. The only form of meaningful coincidence that classic science recognises is a particular form of repeatable coincidence called 'causality': when one action repeatedly precedes another the first action is said to cause the second one. Any other kind of connection between two incidents cannot be handled in a scientific manner; which is why in our culture, with its scientific bias, all other kinds of connection are dismissed as 'mere coincidence'.

But that does not mean that these other coincidences are meaningless: it simply means that they can't be studied scientifically. Instead of being assessed for their causal and logical 'truth', they have to be assessed for their value – 'what use is this coincidence?' – which brings us back into the realm of technology, as 'play it by ear', or the famous 'rule of thumb'. It isn't scientific, but it works, and that's what really matters.

Perceptual systems, like seeing and hearing and 'sensing', are interesting in this respect, because they compare the information coming in from a number of sources in order to decide the overall 1 value' of a given situation. Imagine if someone suddenly clapped their hands in front of your face – NOW – what would happen? You'd blink, and jump back, probably. The scientist would ask 'what was the cause of this?', but we can't give a definite scientific answer, because in that situation there are at least three causes, and science has to pin the answer down to just one in order to come to any logical conclusions. You would have heard the sound of the clapping, which is one cause; you would have seen the hands closing rapidly towards your face; and you would have felt the change in air-pressure as the hands passed by. Any one of these can trigger off the blink-and-jump reflex. Even imagining the blow can trigger off the same reflex, so we can't pin down the 'real cause', we can't tell 'how it really works'; the relevant 'signal' comes through, all the same.

This important when we look at dowsing, for dowsing works as a perceptual system.[24] The dowser's rod works because the dowser's hands give a reflex twitch to some signal; apart from certain rare cases the rod doesn't move entirely of its own accord. But this does cause problems if we try to study dowsing scientifically, for we can never be sure what the 'real cause' of any given reaction is. It could be a reaction to some magnetic or electrical stimulus; it could be a 'hypersensitive sense of smell'; it could be 'an unconscious knowledge of the terrain'; it could be some equivalent of sonar scanning; it could be something magical, like clairvoyancy or 'astral travelling' or whatever. An enormous number of models have been proposed and they do all make some degree of sense in practice.
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