So in current events in my life, my Father is in hospice care due to cancer, and is not long for the world.
Dad knows I'm a skeptic and atheist, but he's a bit more of a believer than me. Not a raving at the mouth fundamentalist, mind you, he barely ever went to any church in basically my entire life, but still some element of belief hanging around from when he grew up. Yesterday while visiting him, we got to talking about his impending demise, and I joked we should set up a Houdini-like secret message, that he could try to send to me from the Beyond.
Of course Dad pointed out that most of my skeptic friends probably still wouldn't believe that, which I really couldn't disagree with him on. The loopholes for fraud are just too obvious.
So I was thinking how to create such a message in a manner that it would be as impervious to fraud as possible, particularly engineered so that it does not rely on confirmation by a lone individual with a vested interest in a positive outcome.
So here's my first take on a protocol:
Create a list of unique words, easily remembered but unlikely to come up in a random "message" allegedly received by a psychic. Make this list about 100 words long.
Then, the person who is about to die draws a certain number of those words at random, say about 10, and memorizes the list. This sub-list is now sealed in some manner so as to render it unreadable to anyone until unsealed during the validation process for an alleged message. The remaining 90 words would also have to be sealed, or demonstrably destroyed.
Now, we need someone to place the sub-list in storage, and who will conduct the verification if and when an alleged message is received. And this is the sticking point - who could we use for this step, who would be believed by a majority of skeptics to be honestly disinterested in faking the results?
There's also the problems that any one sub-list could only be used once - after the reveal, the list is useless. So we have the problem of replication, which would rely on the decedent to reliably memorize multiple lists. That, or we'd need more than one person on death's door to volunteer.
So, any comments on loopholes?
Dad knows I'm a skeptic and atheist, but he's a bit more of a believer than me. Not a raving at the mouth fundamentalist, mind you, he barely ever went to any church in basically my entire life, but still some element of belief hanging around from when he grew up. Yesterday while visiting him, we got to talking about his impending demise, and I joked we should set up a Houdini-like secret message, that he could try to send to me from the Beyond.
Of course Dad pointed out that most of my skeptic friends probably still wouldn't believe that, which I really couldn't disagree with him on. The loopholes for fraud are just too obvious.
So I was thinking how to create such a message in a manner that it would be as impervious to fraud as possible, particularly engineered so that it does not rely on confirmation by a lone individual with a vested interest in a positive outcome.
So here's my first take on a protocol:
Create a list of unique words, easily remembered but unlikely to come up in a random "message" allegedly received by a psychic. Make this list about 100 words long.
Then, the person who is about to die draws a certain number of those words at random, say about 10, and memorizes the list. This sub-list is now sealed in some manner so as to render it unreadable to anyone until unsealed during the validation process for an alleged message. The remaining 90 words would also have to be sealed, or demonstrably destroyed.
Now, we need someone to place the sub-list in storage, and who will conduct the verification if and when an alleged message is received. And this is the sticking point - who could we use for this step, who would be believed by a majority of skeptics to be honestly disinterested in faking the results?
There's also the problems that any one sub-list could only be used once - after the reveal, the list is useless. So we have the problem of replication, which would rely on the decedent to reliably memorize multiple lists. That, or we'd need more than one person on death's door to volunteer.
So, any comments on loopholes?
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2frbFaG
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