The poltergeist would also slam down toilet seats
Female, was it?
Expatbrit
Paranormal Experiences
by mattnoel 108 Replies latest jw friends
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expatbrit
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Sirona
I've never been able to understand, why when it comes to the unexplained 10% people choose the supernatural option (that explains nothing)instead of the one that explains 90% of cases. Doesn't it make more sense to reason that the unexplained is not necessarily unexplainable and assume (pending further proof) that the 10% of cases that haven't been definitively explained, do in fact have the same type of explanation as the 90% that have been?
I've never been able to understand how someone can dismiss thousands upon thousands of experiences reported by people from all walks of life.
It is so unscientific to suggest that there are undiscovered energies which transmit information into the mind of a person? Is it so ridiculous to believe that the energy a person carries around with them leaves the body at death?
They have discovered that low level sound waves can have strange effects on the brain of a person, leading to some strange experiences. In years gone by people said those experiences were "imagined" when in fact the person was telling the truth the whole time. IMO there are ways that information can be transmitted that we just haven't been able to scientifically test yet.
Just because 90% of cases may have logical provable explanations, that does not mean that the 10% are not evidence of so called supernatural phenomena (this phenomena to me would be energy which has not been available for scientific study just yet but nevertheless may exist).
You critisise those who are willing to believe, yet you yourself are guilty of blindly dismissing the "supernatural" despite the many, many personal accounts of such things. Are you suggesting that we're all lying? or all so stupid that we can't work out whether we knocked over the salt pot or did it move on its own?
Sirona
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Sirona
LOL
I meant
Is it so unscientific to suggest that there are undiscovered energies which transmit information into the mind of a person?
LOL freudian slip?
Sirona
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funkyderek
I've never been able to understand how someone can dismiss thousands upon thousands of experiences reported by people from all walks of life.
It's largely because the experiences are "reported by people from all walks of life" that it's so easy to dismiss them. Yes, all sorts of people experience supernatural phenomena, but exactly what they experience depends on their cultural background. Do you expect me to believe that some people are being visited by aliens and some by the Virgin Mary, that angels are aiding and protecting Jehovah's Witnesses and born-again Christians, that witchcraft and Christian prayer both yield results. It seems more likely to me that there is something about humans which will try to explain everything that happens, and when scientific knowledge is lacking (for whatever reason) will "fill in the blanks" with whatever flavour of supernaturalism they're inclined towards.
Is it so unscientific to suggest that there are undiscovered energies which transmit information into the mind of a person?
Not at all. In fact, that's how science works, by people suggesting explanations to observed phenomena. It is, however, horribly unscientific to go from suggesting the existence of undiscovered energies to explain unusual experiences, to saying that those unusual experiences are proof of the existence of such energies.
Is it so ridiculous to believe that the energy a person carries around with them leaves the body at death?
Well, not in itself but it doesn't correlate very well with what we observe in nature and it hypothesises a whole area of reality for which there is no evidence.
They have discovered that low level sound waves can have strange effects on the brain of a person, leading to some strange experiences. In years gone by people said those experiences were "imagined" when in fact the person was telling the truth the whole time.
This supports my argument. What once may have been considered supernatural can now be explained easily using established testable scientific knowledge.
IMO there are ways that information can be transmitted that we just haven't been able to scientifically test yet.
If we can't scientifically test it, then we have no way of knowing whether it exists. In the absence of evidence, it is far more reasonable to assume that it doesn't.
Just because 90% of cases may have logical provable explanations, that does not mean that the 10% are not evidence of so called supernatural phenomena (this phenomena to me would be energy which has not been available for scientific study just yet but nevertheless may exist).
Absolutely, but an argument from ignorance is a very weak argument. If your only proof for your beliefs are that they can't be proven false, you're on very shaky ground. In the absence of evidence either way it makes far more sense to me to assume the small number of unexplained events fit into the same category as everything that has ever been satisfactorily explained and not into a new category which has never adequately explained anything.
You critisise those who are willing to believe, yet you yourself are guilty of blindly dismissing the "supernatural" despite the many, many personal accounts of such things.
I don't "blindly dismiss" anything. I just object to the notion that there is anything that belongs outside the realm of science. Untestable claims are not worth considering. Ghosts always seem to disappear when people start trying to measure them.
Are you suggesting that we're all lying? or all so stupid that we can't work out whether we knocked over the salt pot or did it move on its own?
No, merely mistaken (although a lot of people are of course stupid and/or liars).
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Realist
mattnoel,
many scientific studies have been performed to determine whether telepathy exists.....conclusion: it does NOT exist. our brains imagine all kinds of things....but these things are not real. neither ghosts, tlepathy, demons or whatever.
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Sirona
Do you expect me to believe that some people are being visited by aliens and some by the Virgin Mary, that angels are aiding and protecting Jehovah's Witnesses and born-again Christians, that witchcraft and Christian prayer both yield results.
I believe that we all see these things in a way *we* can understand them. That is why there are so many different "Gods" because it is the divine presenting itself to people from their human perspective, IMO. God can appear to a child as a tellytubby, to a Catholic as Mary, to a pagan as Pan.
This supports my argument. What once may have been considered supernatural can now be explained easily using established testable scientific knowledge
You've touched on something interesting here. I believe that all things that are now labelled "supernatural" can be explained using testable scientific knowledge, but just not all of them can be explained that way yet. To me these wierd phenomena are part of the natural world and are not "supernatural" at all.
Just recently they showed that electrical impulses can produce experiences similar to near death experiences (white light, a tunnel, a feeling of love, etc). Just because this sort of experience has been shown to be induced by these electrical currents, that does not mean that the experience itself is less valid and does not prove that there is no other energy working on a person to induce these experiences in other circumstances.
I don't "blindly dismiss" anything. I just object to the notion that there is anything that belongs outside the realm of science. Untestable claims are not worth considering.
I strongly disagree with the last sentence here. Something that is untestable is not worth considering? That is baloney and you know it. Einsteins theories would never have come into being without consideration of things that are currently untestable.
Sirona
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rem
Sirona,
Einstien's theories were testable, otherwise he would have been laughed off. For a theory to be good it must be falsifiable (able to be proven wrong). Your theories are not falsifiable, so they are worthless, scientifically speaking. When a theory is not falsifiable, it means you learn absolutely nothing from it and instead of progressing in knowledge, you stagnate. That's why the scientific method works, and superstition has a horrible historical track record.
How to explain the other 10% (actually I'd say more like 1%)? Lack of information. Who knows if we have the whole story. Many crimes are still unsolved - because of lack of information - not because of a supernatural cause.
rem
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Mary
Rem said: Susan Blackmore was a parapsychologist.............. She went from believer to unbleliever as she found time after time the 'hauntings' were nothing more than every day normal occurances or fraud...."
Actually, I had a few email contacts with Susan Blackmore about her conclusions, most especially about the NDE experiences. I told her of one experience of a friend of mine who had an NDE who met a sibling who had died before he was born. His family had never told him about it, and were stunned when he mentioned it. Susan Blackmore emailed me back saying that if this story was true, we would have to "totally rethink" our conclusions on NDEs. While she simply may have been trying to avoid controversy, I was impressed that she admitted the possibility that NDEs are not just brain activity gone haywire.
To me, there are more than enough cases to show beyond any reasonable doubt, that "we are not alone." Stories of furniture and other objects flying across the room, seeing ghosts in the middle of the day when you're fully awake, doors closing and locking by themselves.........none of these things can simply be put down to "normal occurances" or "fraud"; especially if there's no one else in the house.
".....If we can't scientifically test it, then we have no way of knowing whether it exists. In the absence of evidence, it is far more reasonable to assume that it doesn't....."
Just because something can't be tested by science at present, doesn't mean it doesn't exist and I think it is extremely narrow minded to "assume that it doesn't" exist. Could 16th century science test alpha or micro waves or study black holes? No they couldn't. So if you use the sort of logic as you mentioned for back then, you would conclude that none of those things existed. Of course, we know today that these things DO exist, because technology has evolved. So perhaps in another hundred years, science WILL be able to varify that ghosts exist, which means that it wasn't people's overactive imagination at all; they were telling the truth all along.
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wednesday
A few years ago, my son and his wife were living up north near Canada border. They had an old apt. I missed him very much, and one saturday night i dreamed a man with a knife attacked him at the apt.It has been so long i cannot remember details of dream, but he was clearly atacked. I awoke in a start, and almost called him. I didn't and just 'forget" the dream the way most of us forget dreams. the very next saturday night i called him to just ckeck on him. To my horror, he told me about a man who had been walking around the apt. in a dark trench type coat and he had a knife. My son said he had seen the knife. The police were called and my son stayed outside in the doorway until the man left and the police came. he gave info to police.
it really scared both my son and I that i had dreamed that. he was not attacked, but just the fact there was a man with a knife was too close.
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rem
Susan Blackmore emailed me back saying that if this story was true, we would have to "totally rethink" our conclusions on NDEs.
Exactly! If it were true. Unfortunately, when these cases are thoroughly investigated the supernatural element of them seems to slip away. Parts of the story that never get told or passed on - those end up being the important details that take a lot of the mystery away.
There are several explanations for physical phenomenon, such as furniture moving and doors closing and locking, etc. Some include fraud (teenagers have been caught tricking their parents), some include simple forgetfulness combined with a will to believe, some include remembering the situation completely wrong. There are other explanations as well, such as strange physical phenomenon, or even just a faulty door lock.
When you learn how memory really works, you will put much less trust in it. Almost immediately after experiencing something, your memory creates its own reality based on your prior belief system. What ends up happening is that your memory of the situation is completely different than what really happened. This is normal human behavior that has been observed time and time again. You don't have to be crazy. Hell, ten eyewitnesses can even agree on how a car accident happens - read the experiments and be amazed at how the brain works.
Add that to the fact that all we have are anecdotes and no real investigation of what happened and you get a whole lot of nothing. Nothing to even hint at other 'dimensions'. All we have is a lack of information and some wrong information that slips in due to normal memory recall functions. Nothing weird about that. Some stories we will never know the truth because the information is missing and what is left is so corrupted that it's not helpful.
rem