Do you believe in paranormal things?

[surreality]

@Sunny I'm pretty middle road on these issues, and the treatment I get from a lot of hardcore skeptics when I attempt to discuss them is extraordinarily hostile, mocking, insulting, and deliberately cruel.

So, on some level, I get where she's coming from.

I'm not saying this or that is somehow magically acceptable when it otherwise wouldn't be because of this. It's pretty obvious it's not.

So I get where you're coming from, too, on that point.

I am simply not going to join in the dogpiling from either direction, and keep replying to @Arkandel's posts like I have been, because I have zero interest in the drama side of this conversation. To me, it's a waste of time even by the standards of a place where we're all pretty much doing precisely that.

[Sunny]

@Thenomain said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

@Sunny

And I don't see where credibility is lost if someone does want to slog through someone's bad attitude to get to the salient points. Clearly I have to surround myself with people who know how to do that.

I am going to partly blame being on the phone and party blame being at work on my lack of clarity/expressing myself correctly, and I do apologize. I did say that; I didn't mean it. What I actually meant to imply was that @wanderer destroyed their own credibility by coming out swinging (if you disagree with me you're a closed minded idiot, essentially). It called his judgement into question, because before anyone said one word he was preemptively attempting to shame anyone just for disagreeing.

This was followed by him being engaged as if he were credible and then the equating out of their argument as if it held equal weight to what @Arkandel was saying. That, to me, is where the judgment / credibility issues come in. It seemed (to me) like @Arkandel was being taken to task for being condescending while the person he was talking to's wish of death upon children was ignored.

@surreality
I get where they're coming from, too. I've had a lot of really awful things happen to me, though, and I generally don't start off my argument shrieking at everybody and expect to be taken seriously when I do (at least after I've calmed down). I respect that you don't want to dogpile, but again...it's just frustrating to me that on one hand we have folks saying 'bad @Arkandel, you're being a jerk' while the person he's being a jerk to (probably in reaction, yeah?) is leveling death wishes.

[mietze]

I think pretty gross and thoughtless statements come from regulars on this place on a not infrequent basis when they feel like they need to champion something. I understand why most people choose to not dignify it with a response, but yeah, when you're targeted by a such-statement it can be a punch. But getting involved in the emotional response even when it's you isn't worth it. The person making those statements doesn't give a shit, no amount of explaining is going to get them to see it, so you might as well move on.

And to be fair, maybe I missed something, but I only see Theno and maybe deadculture defending wanderer against Arkandel (and deadculture seemed to be more slamming Kanye than doing that anyway).

[Thenomain]

@Sunny said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

I do apologize.

Nothing really to apologize for. It's all good.

It seemed (to me) like @Arkandel was being taken to task for being condescending while the person he was talking to's wish of death upon children was ignored.

Except they weren't ignored. Not then and not now. I see things working as expected.

And I've been taken to task for being repeatedly condescending. At what point does history of somewhat crummy behavior equal one really shitty outburst?

Okay, wishing cancer on anyone, especially children, outstrips all of them. I think we are aggressively agreeing now.

[surreality]

@Sunny Well, I'm not into calling @Arkandel a jerk, either, for what it's worth. (I don't think anyone in this conversation is, either, granted.)

I try not to start things off like that -- but I bet I probably have more than once over the years, whether I want to recall it or not. There are definitely subjects on which I will unapologetically come out swinging.

It tends to be because those things are things that tend to be pretty supremely important to me. For instance, if someone started a 'women exist exclusively to be broodmares' thread or something like that cropped up, you can bet I would come out swinging. This isn't my personal hill to die on, but because I know I have them? It's hard for me to not let my empathy kick me in the ass hard enough to remind me: "There but for the grace of Loki's whimsical sense of humor..."

[Kanye Qwest]

Just for the record, at no point in this thread have I been at all upset or emo. I couldn't give half a shit about some jimmy-rustled rando wishing harm on my anonymous kid if I tried. I found it hilarious. Deadculture's feeble negging attempts are not hilarious, but they are forgettable ( I actually had to go looking when you mentioned dogpiling), so all's good.

But in seriousness? Wanderer was coming off like a dick, and that whole "I know what's what and you never will because unlike you, I can brain" shtick is reprehensible fedora speak. Hence the downvote.

@Thenomain Here I thought you were praying for my daughter! I thought maybe today was the day we would become friends.

[Vorpal]

@Thenomain said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

@Vorpal

Let me posit this statement, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," is loaded. The existence of, say, telekinetic powers is extraordinary because of its lack of evidence despite repeated tests. "Claims require evidence." The important part is, I feel, later on with, "conclusive evidence that can stand up to scrutiny and, ideally, reproduced". This is just as true for Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity as Theno's Theory of Ghosts Really Do Exist Dammit.

Even these days, there has been vocal arguments and pulling of beards as to how we should be going around Doing Science.

Well, there's a certain difference here. Unlike, say, ghosts and fairies, we are getting bits and pieces of data that do suggest a great deal towards the notion that Einstein may, in fact, have been right on a lot of things.

As opposed to the fact that, to this day, Madam Blavatski, the Fox sisters, and every claim that involves magic, voodoo, telekinesis, ghosts, spirits, gnomes and even gods themselves have accumulated less creditable evidence than the vaguest hints at, say, the existence of gravitational waves in the past (although that has changed recently, now, hasn't it?) In over millions of years of magical claims and spiritual dictums, we have zero evidence, none whatsoever, versus the evidence that has been accumulated over a few centuries of advanced scientific practice. Evidence which has, at times, confirmed certain hypotheses, denied others, and caused several million instances of revising, examining and re-structuring.

It's almost as if the universe had a certain objective reality which somehow did not include elves, gnomes, spirits, ghosts, gods and magic.

If you want to play devil's advocate for them, that can be fun, but there is a definite difference, and there is a definite difference in the claims made and the nature of the universe reflected in those claims. One of them fits what we have come to know of our universe, the other one seems to be a vestigial remnant of the age of fables.

[Thenomain]

@Vorpal said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

If you want to play devil's advocate for them, that can be fun, but there is a definite difference, and there is a definite difference in the claims made and the nature of the universe reflected in those claims. One of them fits what we have come to know of our universe, the other one seems to be a vestigial remnant of the age of fables.

I'm not intending to do so, but the reason that Special Relativity is more credible than Atlanteans is because science is built upon science. (Shoulders of giants and all that.) The difference is that we have scientific evidence that points us in certain directions, therefore we're expecting a certain model to form.

We have zero scientific evidence for psychic phenomenon, therefore we would need to build up the evidence from scratch. I don't consider this "extraordinary claims". That is, I'm not looking at the claims as to why it'll require so much evidence, but the lack of any pre-existing science. Einstein hated the idea of quantum mechanics, while Oppenheimer was pretty dead set on it. Thus the famous phrase, "God does not play dice." Yet not only do we accept these views as just as truthful as Einstein's theories of relativity, but we embrace them in our day to day lives.

I know this is nit-picky, but I'm very much the kind of person where if we trip over the existence of ghosts as a credible discovery, I'm going to shrug and say "okay, sure, why not". I don't think humanity is so great at being smart that they haven't looked at something from history and mis-understood it for hundreds of years. How many Egyptian ruins have we destroyed because of this? Quite a few. Or gotten the history of pre-colonial America or Africa wrong because of our assumptions? A lot.

Myths exist for a reason, even if it's not for the reasons given. Dismissing them just because they're myths is a good way to ignore possible data.

[surreality]

@Vorpal I think what a lot of people miss -- on both sides of the debate, really -- is that if you're going to approach it from a perspective of, say, 'prove werewolves are real', it's going to fail.

'It's werewolves!' is an explanation for a series of experiences.

Rather than looking for werewolves (not recommended for oh, oh so many reasons, not the least of which are ticks and poison ivy), people need to look at the experiences that people were having that led them to the conclusion that 'it's werewolves!'

We have some records of werewolf scares; some have been linked to ergotism. We wouldn't have found that, however, if we were running around in the woods searching for hair samples rather than going back to the 'symptoms' of the experience, and considering an alternate conclusion.

Folks weren't, it's pretty safe to say, encountering werewolves. They were having a very real experience, however, and a dangerous one. It's a problem we're better off for having solved. We wouldn't have found it if we were chasing werewolves -- but we also wouldn't have found it if we decided, 'werewolves don't exist, therefore this experience could not have occurred'.

[Vorpal]

I think you might be assuming a conclusion I haven't really championed, though.

Yes, ghosts and demons and such aren't real. They simply can't be, based on the rather sizable amount of what we know about our universe (magic doesn't work, outside of pelvic sorcery). That doesn't mean we never ask the question "Well, if they didn't see angels, then what made them 'see' angels?" The starting point isn't the supposition that the supernatural might be real, but rather that there is a real, observable, physical phenomenon that is explainable by matters other than the supernatural. That's how you find ergotism, but if you assume the impossible might be real, that's when you find yourself championing cardboard fairies like poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

It's more along the lines of "Ok, you claim these people are possessed by the devil and can't stop dancing? Ok, you go ahead and prove that to me. In the meantime I'm going to investigate and see what could possibly have induced these- wait a minute, what the fuck is that thing growing in the rye?

It's more of a Scooby Doo and the gang approach (ghosts aren't real so let's find out what really is happening) than a Discovery Channel ghost hunters (ghosts are real, let's catch them on film) sort of thing.

[surreality]

@Vorpal I don't, personally, see the harm in "this conclusion is interesting to me, I'm going to try to find out if it is true or not". I don't see that (beyond lip service) on television shows about the subject, which tend to be sensationalist if not thoroughly staged for profit, but I've known individuals who take that approach. They don't know, they want to find out one way or the other.

Typically, "Well, we just don't really know, but we now know it isn't <thing brought on by black mold infestation>, <thing occurring because of faulty wiring>, <thing that happened because somebody took LSD>, or <thing brought on by floors that aren't level>, etc." (unless it is one of those things, in which case they drop it, because it has been identified) is as far as anyone gets with that. Really? I don't see an issue with that. They're not championing the reality or falsehood of <thing>, they find <thing> interesting, and want to further explore the possibility of that explanation being real or not.

It's intellectually honest, even if it isn't terribly effective.

The only difference here is that they haven't decided one way or the other 'ghosts are real' or 'ghosts are not real' before deciding, 'this explanation is interesting, let's find out if there's anything to it'. They leave the explanation on the possible list of explanations, but they're doing the same examination and investigation as someone who dismisses it from the outset.

Sure, maybe it's a waste of their time as far as most folks are concerned, but I'm pretty sure most folks would say the same of the M* hobby.

Sure, hoaxers will make people look ridiculous; that's often enough their intent. Hoaxing is more or less one of the oldest forms of trolling, after all. Serious people tend to be pretty good at spotting them, though, and investigate before rushing off and claiming, "See! PROOF!" -- and that's where folks like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fell short.

The television shows that approach this tend to pay lip service to this, particularly in cryptozoology, but there are folks who accept the possibility that there's stuff out there that are properly trained in real science who happily point out the frauds, and simply separate things into, "This is fake because X, this is a misidentified Y, but this? I don't actually know what this Q over here is, and that's interesting! Let's see if we can find out what it is."

The difference here is that they're not saying, "It can't be a C because C isn't real," as their step #1. Bear in mind, these are also people who have enough understanding of animal anatomy that they're going to know what can't exist anatomically speaking, and what people may be misidentifying. If they know C cannot anatomically be real, they have an intervening step here in which the physical possibility of C existing is in fact examined. OMG GIANT SIX FOOT SPIDERS! ...well, no, we know spiders can't grow beyond a certain size because of the limitations of their anatomy, for instance. (Thank goodness, can't we limit them further?! ...please? <whimper>) OMG wolf man! ...well, no, we know there are no bipedal canines -- and so on.

In a sense, it's not functionally terribly different. If C isn't possible, they're approaching in an intellectually honest and realistic fashion and dismissing the possibility of C existing. They're just taking the step to do that, rather that starting from there. It sounds super nit-picky and subtle, and on some level it is -- but it is a difference in that there are no foregone conclusions going in in either direction and there's direct examination of the possibility of C before C is eliminated as a possible explanation. Basically, IMHO, starting from 'giant spiders are real, let's prove it' or 'giant spiders aren't real, let's see what else it is' both skip this step, and both end up being flawed methodologies on account of it.

It's worth noting -- tangent alert -- this is much easier when it comes to animals that may or may not exist. This is because we know how to deal with/examine/identify animals. Things purported to exist that are incorporeal? Giant question mark there. I don't fault the 'you have to prove there's a there there to begin with' perspective on this front, principally because we don't have the same kind of direct evidence that things of that kind exist as we do in the case of animals. If someone was to say animals (broadly) don't exist, we'd laugh at them; plenty of us probably have a pet in the room with us right now.

With animals, we have means of eliminating the actually impossible; we don't really have that for things purported to be incorporeal. It's a complication, and it's a complication piled on top of well is there anything incorporeal there really or not in the first place? -- so I don't find it exactly unreasonable for people to say, "You have to prove there's something there before we can determine if we can even determine if that's the answer or not." Basically, even if there's a there there, we don't have hundreds of years of direct study of it to be able to make the same kinds of determinations.

Historically speaking, every new science or new medicine looked bonkers to the masses at some point, too. The earth moves around the sun? CRAZY TALK! What we know evolves this way. It changes. So the whole 'Joe's gonna look like an idiot' issue... well, yeah, Joe might actually be an idiot, but he might be a genius, too. Usually? Joe is an idiot. This is known, to quote GoT. He isn't always, though, and sometimes Joe is going to have to bear the burden of looking like an idiot when he posits the earth moves around the sun, or we're not going to learn anything.

[Lithium]

@Vorpal They can be real. Absolutely they can be. Just because we currently do not have the technology or the science to /prove/ that they are real doesn't mean they do not exist.

Every living human has an energy field, this is known, it's been hard proven with science and technology both. Since energy cannot truly be destroyed, that energy has to go /somewhere/ and we have no idea where that energy goes yet.

Just like until recently we didn't know that our RNA keeps turning different gene's on after we die to do... we have no idea what.

Maybe one day we'll discover a piece of tech that allows us to measure this energy, track it as it leaves the body, figure out what's going on there. Right now we don't have it, but that doesn't mean we just say: It cannot exist, and stop looking.

There's a quote something along the lines of: I did not ever once fail in creating a lightbulb, I succeeded in learning how /not/ to make one.

So yes, just because we cannot find the evidence now, does not mean the evidence does not exist. Just like we didn't really know about microbes until we saw them, or the planets, or dna, etc.

---

I am not going to get involved in the whole @wanderer thing because honestly... anyone can skeptic, anyone can true believer, anyone can be anything when it comes to our feelings on various subjects.

There's enough browbeating on both sides of that and I doubt my adding to it would help anything.

[Ganymede]

@Lithium said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

Maybe one day we'll discover a piece of tech that allows us to measure this energy, track it as it leaves the body, figure out what's going on there. Right now we don't have it, but that doesn't mean we just say: It cannot exist, and stop looking.

I felt the same way about ST:TNG PADDs, and, lo, we have the iPad.

Despite being a lawyerbot, I hedge on the side of: wait and see.

[Vorpal]

@Lithium said in [Do you believe in paranormal things?](/topic/1138/do-you-

Every living human has an energy field, this is known, it's been hard proven with science and technology both. Since energy cannot truly be destroyed, that energy has to go /somewhere/ and we have no idea where that energy goes yet.

Well, what do you think happens during the process of decomposition and breakdown?
There's a lot of misconceptions between what the layman considers an 'energy' and what scientists mean by 'energy.' The skeptoid put it best, honestly. " There is no such thing as an energy field; they are two unrelated concepts. Nor is there any evidence or sound hypothesis suggesting the body emanates some type of intangible cloud. If we really wanted to stretch definitions, we could say the human body has potential energy. Everything that has mass and is within a force field has potential energy, like a rock within the Earth's gravity."

The reality is far, far more mundane. No, there is no force that surrounds us all and which will keep us alive after we die. We are a byproduct of our high evolutionary history, everything we are comes from the proper functioning of our bodies, and when they die all systems break down- and we cease to exist. There's no supernatural 'me' left behind, because the 'mind' that makes who I am is a byproduct of the functioning of the physical brain in roughly ( simplified and not exactly, but sufficiently enough for this comparison) the same kind of relationship between hardware and software. The hardware dies, the software doesn't stay floating behind in the air, a ghost made up of zeroes and ones (even software that's out on the internet is using someone's hardware to exist, and when it powers down it goes poof- we can't hold seances for offline software). Unlike computers, however, our particular 'software' is intricately tied to our physical hardware, we are biological machines and can't transfer ourselves. Yet.

Now, if we want to talk about the possibility of transferring 'minds' in the future through some sort of scientific advance where we can digitize our brain data... ok, that could potentially count as 'immortality' of some sort- but not quite. A copy would still be a copy, the 'me' who is currently in this body will still die, it will know what it feels to die when that body dies, even if a copy of 'me' is uploaded somewhere. Which sucks for the 'me' me, if not for the copy, but I will still cease to be- my body won't suddenly die and I will awake in my new Robot Overlord body. There will be two of me, and then there'll just be one. (*)

Consciousness and 'self' as they currently exist (unless there is some amazing breakthrough with quantum or biological computing) are phenomena that is a byproduct of biological function unique (so far) to our bodies. When the organic hardware ceases to function, consciousness dies.

footnote (*): this is where the realm of speculative sci-fi could have a field day. Our 'software' - our consciousness and personality- depends so much on our chemistry that any transference would have to be to a machine that can replicate those conditions quite faithfully. As someone married to someone afflicted with bipolar disorder, I'm all too familiar with how subtle changes in brain chemistry can alter personality and traits- sometimes quite dramatically. It would be interesting to explore, in fiction at least, how much personalities can change after a transference or copy of a personality unto a faulty recipient. There's a story waiting to be written there. A variant of the 'evil twin' take, except the evil twin is, in some respects, you.

[Thenomain]

@Ganymede said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

Despite being a lawyerbot, I hedge on the side of: wait and see.

As a fairly hard-core atheist, I strongly agree with this.

What I see in the current discussion is two positions on the same side of the coin: "This is what we know" and "But things can change about what we know." Both are healthy, but I find that we need both. Sometimes I find the science-minded too focused on the science and not on the discovery. Sometimes I find the layman too focused on the discovery and not the science. My earlier blah blah about Einstein and Oppenheimer was meant to be a parable about how there's room for both.

[Arkandel]

One of my favorite reads by Isaac Asimov on the argument of 'well, science has been wrong in the past'.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm

[Lithium]

@Vorpal There /is/ an energy field. It has been measured, it has been photographed, and all living things have one. It is a bio-electric energy field that surrounds each and every one of us constantly.

You're confusing, or conflating what I said to be something that it's not.

I'm talking science, you're talking fuzzy fringe idea.

Way to go.

[Thenomain]

@Lithium

Are you talking about this?

http://www.lightstalking.com/what-is-kirlian-photography-the-science-and-the-myth-revealed/

What he meant was that, e.g., you would mean "electrical field". The term "energy" has a very specific scientific meaning, and part of what he was asking in there is for people to be more specific about what they meant by "energy".

I'm taking a liberal interpretation of what was actually said to seek discussion on all sides.

[Vorpal]

Just to clarify: Photographed by whom? Are we talking about Kirlian photography, or something else. Who has measured it, and where are the studies? I'd be interested in reading about them.

[Lithium]

If we're going to get into the fucking semantics of what 'energy' is, I am done with all y'all.

You're taking this to absurd extremes.

@Arkandel There's plenty of research in it. I'll get you started with the simplest of internet searches:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioelectromagnetics