you're basically demanding people act contrary to science here, man. You're saying people need a confirmed conclusion before they're allowed to even wonder about it in the first place. In order for someone to actually fit this thoroughly impossible standard? They would, yes, have to be able to see the future. Which is why I keep calling this out as total crazy talk.
I think you misunderstood what I wrote. I was referring to precognition and other psychic powers of that same ilk. The very concept of precognition essentially contradicts the very basic principles of cause and effect. If effects could exist before their causes, there really would be no such thing as causality. It’s why the whole concept of precognition and clairvoyance needs extraordinary proof- because to anyone who has even a slight grasp on the nature of the universe as we know it, it really does appear completely implausible. And I think that the experiments conducted by Randi and others concerning this alleged power have shown that it doesn’t seem possible at all.
Operating on a baseline sense isn’t operating from a confirmed conclusion, it’s operating from a base of confirmed data. You know that fire burns skin- do you really need to burn each one of your fingers to know that the principle applies to each fleshy digit? No, you act from an abstraction that has been formed from sensory data (yours, or someone else’s if you were the kind of sibling who tricked their younger brother/sister into touching things that burninate. THANK YOU, BRO) Similarly, the principle of causality is a thing. It’s a very major and important thing in this universe- it’s really what keeps shit from happening all at once. Just speaking on an epistemic level, making a claim that essentially bypasses causality is extremely far-fetched to the point of being one of those seemingly impossible claims. It’s like considering the possibility of a flying pink unicorn with rainbow-farting powers- it’s more likely to exist as a fancy or a thought experiment than in actual reality, and you’re going to waste a good deal of your life trying to find it or prove its existence. There are some claims that are too ridiculous to contemplate.
I'm definitely in that last group, and you can keep mocking me as a cultist who believes in magical pixies if you want for thinking, "Hey, that was weird. I wonder what that was. Nope, it's not that, or that, or that, or damn it isn't that either, apparently we don't have a solid explanation for whatever the fuck that was yet. Freaky!"
Again, I think you misunderstand me. Wondering about something isn’t bad. What’s bad is reaching the conclusion of “Well, I can’t explain this, so it has to be supernatural and/or mystical.” Leaving a case folder open is perfectly fine, it’s part and parcel of science- it’s filed under “shit for which we need more information to explain in the future.” However, due to what we know of the nature of the universe, the explanation is not likely to ever be related to ghosts or a divine being. To some ancient cultures, our computers would appear like some serious magic except, maybe, to cultures that designed things similar to the Antikythera mechanism (although it appears that the Greeks had a massive brain fart at some point after 205 BC and completely forgot how to make stuff like that until the 14th century came around,) information and research kill the supernatural pretty quickly.
I honestly don’t think we’re ever going to find evidence of souls or spirits. If anything, the more we know about our brains seems to indicate that consciousness and what we perceive as our self are real phenomena, but they’re byproducts of our biological nature and not the effects of a supernatural entity acting upon a body. This means that it is most likely that, when we die, we die for good. It’s a very unpleasant thought for most of us, but I honestly think that avoiding that very likely reality can rob us of experiencing life to its fullest if we’re confident that, like Celine Dion, our hearts will go on in another life after this one. One of my favorite moments from one of my favorite movies (“Antonia’s Line” http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/antonias-line-1996 ) has a granddaughter riding on horseback with her grandmother. This scene takes place after the death of a character, and the little girl asks her grandmother what happened to them. Her answer is that they have been put in the ground and that eventually they will be part of the trees and the plants, and she asks her if he has gone somewhere else. Antonia simply says, “This is the only dance we dance.” I thought that was a very poignant way of putting it- there’s only one dance, so it would be a good thing to make sure we enjoy it as much as we can without being that jerk who does the funky chicken and elbows your aunt in the spleen while simultaneously stepping on your toes and farting in your mother's face.
My brother's wedding was so fun...
Basically, I have had three groups of friends who were dead set convinced they were the reincarnations of the Arthurian Court. (Seriously, I totally dare you to even try to count the number of ways in which that's funny.)
Oh man, that is Nikki Minaj levels of cray right there. I do have a dear friend who fervently believes she’s a fairy, and she has found several people who share and reinforce this delusion.
I am not entirely unfamiliar with delusions- my partner of twelve years is Borderline Personality Disorder (previously diagnosed as Bipolar) with atypical psychosis, and there was a period of three months about two years ago where he basically suffered from clinical lycanthropy. During that period he basically believed he was turning into a raccoon. They eventually found a dosage that stopped the delusions, but man, it’s one hell of an ordeal. This is one of the reasons why, when one of those ‘Otherkin’ people come up to me and tell me how they have a wolf inside waiting to come out, I just want to go bitch, please.
Once, while going to a movie with my partner (can’t remember which movie), we had this guy basically add himself to our outing. He vehemently stated to us that he was an actual motherfucking elf (because this shit just happens to us). He was very invested in telling us that everything that J.R.R. Tolkien had written had really, really happened and that he was here as a spearhead to herald the return of the elves (even though Tolkien pretty much made it very clear the elves were not coming back, like, ever, because they basically went to the Middle Earth equivalent of heaven.) He bought tickets to the same movie, sat next to us throughout the entire thing commenting ad nauseam. We tolerated it. And then when we came out, he made it clear he wanted to come with us to dinner. We made it clear that no, we would go this way, and he would go that way, and he disagreed. At one point, he started clutching the cane he was carrying rather menacingly (sidenote: he didn’t need the cane, he clearly was carrying for ornamental purposes and it was this fancy frilly shit with carvings and metal, and I’m sure it was Burdened With Great Purpose and Significance or whatever, but it still would’ve hurt.) Eventually I had to tell him that if he didn’t stop following us, I was going to knee his Tom Bombadil so hard that he would probably never get to ring his dong dillo again. That got the message through.
" I cheerfully told them, "Elaine. You know, Lady of Shallott. In fact, I better leave, get back to my loom an' shit, 'cause if I stay out here too long I am clearly going to die." I am still sad no one realized this was an excuse to flee like rabid dogs were yapping at my heels, or why it was also funny.
Oh god, that is absolutely hilarious. That almost reads like a Hark! A Vagrant comic. In fact, you should totally send her your story and demand that she turn it into a comic. If you haven’t seen the comic she made of the Lady of Shalott, then you have to see it right here: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=360
Conversely, when I was much younger, friends of the family owned a restaurant, in an old mansion that had formerly been a residence (and I think a boarding school). I stayed there multiple times with their daughter, who was a friend of mine. I dismissed her family as a pile of the flakiest cornballs ever when they'd go on about how the place was haunted, etc. Until I spent a handful of years watching weird shit constantly happen there.Do I think there's 'ghosts' there? Not necessarily. I absolutely see how and why they think there were, though, from things I witnessed repeatedly myself, that I certainly can't explain. Does it mean I agree with their assessment? No. It does, however, mean I'm not going to make fun of them for believing what they did after the experiences they've had, because I can absolutely see how they came to those conclusions
I can see that. Now we know that old houses tend to have a high chance of becoming infrasound factories due to several reasons (materials, for example)- it’s notable that ultra-modern super-slick chrome-and-glass houses and buildings are much less likely to report hauntings. There’s a very big chance that a large part of it is our brains reacting to environmental cues of which we were not aware until recently (and likely there are still some we have not detected yet) and flipping all sorts of survival-based triggers that send messages of fight-or-flight and get translated into the weirdest things. Combine that with old houses and their propensity for settling (and thus sending objects rolling off shelves), the obligatory dimmer lighting and lived-in spaces, and you have a recipe for a thriller.
I had a brush with what could have been called the ‘supernatural’ in my youth. My bedroom was infamous (no get your mind out of the gutter right now) for being ‘haunted.’ Nobody who slept in that room could get a good night’s sleep- they were always having bad dreams. This started as far back as my brother’s teenage years (we’re 11 years apart) when he slept in that bedroom. At random moments, if you were by yourself, you could get this oppressive sensation that there was a presence nearby, watching you. It would happen at random times, and when it happened I usually bolted from the room like Hatsune Miku after finding out what that ‘rule 34’ thing is. There were constant ‘sightings’ by me and other people in the room, perceiving someone just out of the corner of your eye, but who were not there when you turned to look at them fully.
All of this eventually came to a head when my flute teacher had a pants-shittingly scary meltdown one day when she thought she was having a conversation (one-sided) with me out of the corner of her eye, only to find out that Macavity was not there I wasn’t there at all. The fact that, a second later, I came into the room from the door directly opposite to where she was facing finished freaking her out and she ran to my mother’s room so that she could have a place to Lose Her Shit. My mom digged into the house’s past and found out that the previous owner’s wife had died of cancer in that very room. Convinced that this meant her spirit was somehow hanging on, my mother consulted a psychic friend of hers, who suggested that she tear down the walls of the room and remodel it to ‘let the energy free.’
I went with it because it meant getting a bigger room in the end, with enough closet space to hide several dead bodies boyfriends at once (no, I really did hide a boyfriend there once. In the closet. Before coming out of the closet myself. So my mom wouldn’t catch me in the act. Yes, I was bad.) All I knew at the time was that whatever had been done worked, and everybody could sleep peacefully there again.
I always wondered exactly what the hell was going on with that room, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I ran across studies about infrasound and saw, with interest, that every single symptom of the phenomenon happened in that room. The nightmares were, I imagine, caused by my subconscious picking up the frequencies and trying to wake me the fuck up because my primitive brain thought that there was a big old ass tiger ready to murderate me nearby. Something with how the way that room had been configured must have acted as an amplifier for infrasound, and it changed when the room was redesigned and rebuilt. It makes perfect sense now, of course- but I am not going to say that the sensation you experienced that something was coming to get you and you need to feets don’t fail me now out of there wasn’t incredibly real and visceral.
One unfortunate reality is that a lot of our systems are still wired to our very primitive survival mechanisms. Most of the time, that isn’t a big issue, but there are times when we are exposed to situations that remind our body of some ancestral terror-pocalypse and we simply lose our shit, see things that aren’t there or feel things solely for the reason of getting us out of there ASAP before that sabretooth tiger from millions of years ago decides to eat us.
Talk about believing in the impossible, dang.