Categories or Degrees of Existence (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Thursday, February 25, 2010, 17:57 (5166 days ago) @ George Jelliss

GEORGE: Homeopathy doesn't work. People come to think it does work by erroneous reasoning. They take the medicine and the problem clears up, so they attribute the cure to the medicine, when it probably got better quite naturally.-As I haven't done any research on the subject, and have no first-hand experience, I stated in my post that I couldn't make a judgement. I don't know how much research you've done yourself, George, to be able to make your authoritative statement, but in any case my post focused on the placebo effect, i.e. "the mystery of consciousness, of what controls the brain cells, and how the "will" of the cells can influence other areas of the body." Your only comment on this is that "the effect can only work in a very limited range of problems, say where relaxation is an aid to the body's natural processes." I don't suppose you would regard the body's self-healing processes as a mystery either, though I wonder how many man-made mechanisms you know of that can put themselves right with no outside intervention.-On a lighter note, yesterday's Guardian carried an article about the new president of the Flat Earth Society. Daniel Denton argues (seriously) that the Earth is flat because it appears flat, and the sun and moon (which are much smaller than mainstream science says) rotate around a plane of the Earth, because they appear to do so. His beliefs entail the non-existence of gravity, and the contention that most space exploration, including the moon landings, is faked. He also says, "There is no unified flat Earth model, but the most commonly accepted one is that it's more or less a disc, with a ring of something to hold in the water. [...] most people think it's mountains with snow and ice." -In my eagerness to help, I have been doing some intensive googling, and to my delight came across a book entitled: 
Homeopathy ... Beyond Flat Earth Medicine by Timothy R. Dooley.-Perhaps he can be persuaded to write a sequel: 
Flat Earth ... Beyond Homeopathy Medicine