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Thursday, August 24, 2023

Some Recommended Online Reading

The site www.archive.org is an invaluable resource for scholars of psychic phenomena and the paranormal. Using the site, you can find very many books written by witnesses of the paranormal and scholars of the paranormal.  The full text of very many of these books can be read by a user who does not even bother to register at the site.  Examples of such books are below:

Life After Death
       Cover of a book mentioned above

If you take the time to register at www.archive.org, which does not take long, the door will be opened to a huge number of more modern books, which you can "borrow" on an hourly basis simply by pressing a Borrow button after logging in. By clicking on the Borrow button after registering, you will be able to read important works on the paranormal such as these: 

An aspect of www.archive.org that I particularly like is that there are individual URLs for each page.  So if a scholar is citing page 347 of some book, he can include a link that takes the reader exactly to that specific page. 

Other sources of information about psychical phenomena are listed below: 

  • The  Psi Encyclopedia of the Society for Psychical Research (available here).
  • The much older 1932 Encyclopedia of Psychic Science by Nandor Fodor available here
  • The book-length document on ESP evidence here, "Extrasensory Perception: Research Findings" by John Palmer, which includes in white text below the book a book-length document ("Notes on the Paranormal") on evidence for the paranormal, written by Ben Steigmann. The latter document contains very many links to online original source materials on psychical research. 
  • The video here and here seem to provide modern evidence for clairvoyance. 

My very long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" contains links to very many papers and books by scientists who challenged the most prevalent thinking in fields such as chemistry, neuroscience, biochemistry,  physics, natural history and cosmology. Many of that post's links can be followed for illumination on such topics. My very long post "120+ Types of Paranormal or Anomalous Experiences" contains countless links to interesting papers and books on that topic.  Below are books or articles on topics such as biology and cosmology and psychology:

  •  Cosmo Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe by John Hands. The book is discussed in my post here
  • A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos by astrophysics professor Geraint F. Lewis and astronomy postdoctoral researcher Luke A. Barnes. The book is discussed in my post here
  • Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves by physician James Le Fanu.  The book is discussed in my post here
  • "Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems" by Steinar Thorvaldsen and Ola Hössjer. This peer-reviewed paper in the mainstream Journal of Theoretical Biology discusses very well the evidence for fine-tuning in biology and physics. 
  • "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists" by Bruce Alberts. This peer-reviewed scientific paper is essential reading for students of biological complexity. 
  • "The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life" by Luke A. Barnes.  This paper (also available here) is a lengthy peer-reviewed paper discussing the evidence for fine-tuning in physics and cosmology. 
  • "Giving Up Darwin" by computer scientist David Gelernter.  Trying to explaining the reasons why Darwinian ideas cannot explain the appearance of proteins,  Gelernter does a good job, but actually underestimates the difficulties.  He lists the average amino-acid length of a protein as 250, but eukaryotic proteins (like those in our body) actually have an average of about 472 amino acids, according to the paper here; and achieving proteins of that size by unguided processes is more than a billion trillion quadrillion times harder.  

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