Musings on the nature of prayer

If we simply take the concept that psychological context has a great deal of impact on both the results of thinking and the results of actions, then there is a place in our model for what religions call prayer. It's not a full match, but it is close enough to some aspects of prayer and meditation to be interesting.

Given that a billion people or so have reported success with prayer in some manner, it does seem worth investigating whether they are all deluded, or whether something is going on.

This context model does not require "God" in order to work. It simply says that if you can get yourself in some way into the right reference frame, with the right mental model of what is going on, that your outcomes will be better, as measured by you and as measured by the people around you and your organization, tribe, family, culture, nation.

That much is worth clinical study. There are good solid reasons in simple physics (well, General Relativity) for why context matters and there is already mathematically sophisticated equipment for analyzing and modeling this. At the current time this is not generally accessible, but computer front ends could easily do for this what they have done for statistics, namely, make the arcane suddenly available for use (and misuse) by the normal scientist.

The same is true for feedback effects and modeling situations involving feedback.

I am fairly certain that, if there were tools on the market that made analysis of feedback as easy as SAS or SPSS or Stata make analysis of regression, or Excel makes analysis of budgets, the psychological resistance to the idea would suddenly evaporate.

(Sadly, the field has not yet had the equivalent of Sir R. A. Fisher, to define the basic statistical tests so that everyone else can use them with only vague comprehension of what they do and how they work. And, there is not a stable / pool of feedback-icians one can assess or hire or build into the grant, or a Feedback-Effects-Core one can go down to and ask for assistance. Again, the existence of these would remarkably reduce the resistance to considering whether this is a valid construct or not.)

In any case, in a "weak hypothesis", a person doing a good job of psychologically putting themselves back into a strong social context should be observably different from a person who does not do that, even if this is "all in their head." That would be measurable.

In a "strong hypothesis" there is more going on in the world here than simply what is happening "inside the person's head." Odds of various outcomes are changing.

It is not necessary to buy the strong hypothesis to study the weak one. If there are in fact effects that cannot be explained by it, they will show up.

And, if scientists want to "debunk" the power of prayer, then it would be a marvelous move if they came up with something that worked even better.

So far, they neither accept that challenge nor have delivered something that works better for the average person than prayers of submission and reconnection.

"Reason" is put forward as the answer to everything, but it is remarkably devoid of motivational power or of regenerating a depressed spirit. Maybe psychoactive drugs is the solution suggested?