When I first joined this forum back in November 2006: I thought there would be offerings of people’s own personal philosophy, along with more esoteric insights - but alas: no.
I’ll start the ball rolling shall I:
I joined an acting class in May 2004, and one of our classes involved each choosing a postcard that was facing downwards, and our partner had to imitate what was on the postcard: without touching us, and with our eyes closed.
Most of us were spot on: some didn’t really get there/ didn’t really tap into their psychic abilities - I got the creeps with mine, and got shivers up and down my spine: the image was really dark/almost black, with something bright so close to the side of my head: I said I felt alone and very scared - when the tutor turned the postcard over: it was a picture of the most deserted place on earth: with a chandalier to the forefront of the picture. She was really impressed with my efforts, and I was really surprised.
When I visit my sisters house: my 17 year old nephew always guesses who rings on their house phone (before they pick up, obviously) even if they ring again soon after, and then some-one else rings after that: he still gets it right - it’s very impressive to see, and he’s never been wrong.
Why not win a million? You’ve only got until April. This challenge has existed for years, and thousands of claims like yours have been dealt with. I find it much more reasonable to believe that you’re missing some other explanation (coincidence?), and lapsing in memory for times your nephew has been wrong, than that you or he is actually psychic.
Personal philosophy is fine. Personal science, however, is a contradiction in terms.
Well, seeing that I have the memory of an elephant: there is no fear of me lapsing and missing things (even when I’m merry on alcochol: people are surprised that they cannot pull the wool over my eyes/pull a fast one on me) I am fully alert, thanks Carleas, and on top of my game.
I understand your viewpoint, but I can safely say that in this instance you are WRONG!
Just keep quoting Nietzsche and you can’t go wrong, right?
Stick with what you know/what you believe reality to be, and you’ll never experience what reality really is - remember: each person’s reality is different for them (even between siblings/parents/offspring) this includes abilities beyond the five senses (we know animals have such capabilities: why are we so scared to admit such qualities in humans).
If we did “know animals have such capabilities,” we certainly should look for and be willing to believe that they exist in humans. But we don’t. We don’t have evidence for any of this. We have anecdote. We have folklore.
But you missed the first and second sentence of my post. If your nephew really has these abilities, why don’t you claim an easy million? You can design the test, it just has to be controlled to eliminate certain other possible influences. Why not? Why put it off? It will be much harder in April, so apply today. What have you got to lose? If you want people to believe that such things are possible, what better way could there be than embarrasing a foundation founded on the claim that such claims will fail any controlled test?
Here, let me even help design a test. You have your nephew sit in one room next to a phone, and an assortment of other people in another room. Or many other rooms. Or all over the world, who cares. A tester will instruct the relatives to call, one by one at random from a list, and you nephew has to state on camera who is calling. It will be filmed for verification. Sixteen out of twenty is a winner. What do you say?
Your extended sensing depends on how clear, aware and sensative your parts-of-self are.
From what I can tell, the body has dimensional layers other than the common, and the uncommon dimensional layers, once tapped-into by the common material layers, lead to “supernatural” or “superhuman” potentialities.
I’m still practicing, ofcourse, I practice every day.
Psychism:
It’s not “abnormal”, but it’s sure-as-fuck suppressed in human-society.
Empaths and sensatives, though more sensative and aware of essencially-energetic-reality, are often abused and hurt deeply, whilst the careless un-sensatives find all modes of insolance ignorable. In this case, especially, the constant bombardment of mental-emotional abuse, mental-emotional poisons, junk-information, spiritual-parasitism, etc., eventually or usually leaves the mind with blockages, scars, scabs and retardations.
As soon as you step out of line, you’re on the chopping block. Humans don’t like or want actual “evolution”. They would moreso prefer a darwinistic barbarism, in which anything different or progressive us crushed by the old and the greedy degenorate mob.
The more “psychic” you become, the more physical and metaphysical enemies you might encounter. You’ll see how parasitic and deeply corrupt the terran anisphere is, once you reach the higher levels of awareness. As you progress up the levels of awareness, each new light will expose more and more layers of rotten hypocricy and vile, filthy insanity below it and all around it.
If by “it’s sure-as-fuck suppressed in human-society” you mean “most people need more evidence than someone saying ‘gee, I feel like I have a tail’”, then I agree with you completely.
Psychic ability like many things once were can seem a bit like hocus pocus but with time you never know it may all become clear. There are many things we dont know espcially about ourselves and how we can relate to our environment. A few hundred years ago electricity, automotive engines would have seemed like magic so theres hpoe yet for amore conclusive answer.
You guys talk about psychic phenomena like it’s this cutting edge new theory. But it’s as old as humanity, in the form of magicians, fortune-tellers, and priests. It’s superstition and coincidence compiled into a paradigm. The cutting edge side of it is exposing it for the hooie that it is.
And, again, if it isn’t hooie, it’s easy to prove it: State you claim, and run tests; demonstrate it in a controlled environment. I strongly suspect that putting a mild amount of rigor into your procedures will cut the ground out from under antequated beliefs.
I have known many people who have had a few experiences that could be considered psychic or ESP and are difficult to explain otherwise. I’ve had a few myself. I’ve never met anyone that was convincingly consistently psychic.
My psychic abilities seemed a lot stronger when I was regularly smoking weed.
There was a period of time where I was trying to guess numbers, 1 through 10, that I would ask a friend to think.
I would ask them to think about it very hard, to keep their focus on it, to try to draw it in their mind’s eye, scream it to themselves, etc.
I would take very deep breaths, relax, close my eyes.
Sometimes I could get a veryyy vague visual of the letter, but they were never really that accurate, if the number didn’nt just "come to me, or feel strong to me, then it was hard to guess based off a visual.
There were only a few instances where I KNEW what the number was, and in all of these instances I was right.
Some of them:
The only time I actually HEARD a number was when I was doing the exercise with a very good friend of mine. I actually heard a voice in m mind, calling out as if it was very far away, screaming to get to me. It was the number he was thinking, which he said he was screaming in his head.
Another time was the only time I actually got a very clear visual of the number. One of my roomates was playing a video game where you are shooting things (I think some tank game…). I kept seeing the number popping up in bold letters. He was shocked (I only did the game once with him), and when I asked him how he thought baout it he said everytime he shot at something (in the game) he imaged the number shooting out.
Another time was the only time I asked my other (VERY skeptical) roommate. He amusingly went along, and when I said the number he admitted that was the number, looking pretty freaked out, and walked away.
Another time was the only time I asked two people to agree on a number and both think about it very hard. The number was VERY clear. They were both shocked (and I got free drinks )
Carleas: it’s a good idea to be skeptical of skepticism. I can tell you from first hand experience that what we call “psychic” phenomenon is definitely real. If people haven’t been able to prove it for those tests there is a reason for it. One possiblity is that the skeptic’s mind is altering the environment by willing the (possible) psychic to be unable to access information from that environment (what kind of controlled experiment is that?). If one co-creator of the environment is using their mind to doubt a certain possiblity, to will a reality in which the possible psychic will be unsuccessful, than it could manifest that reality. Then imagine the entire network of human minds that could somehow be connected to that event. One psychic’s mind may be trying to access information blocked by millions of doubtful minds.
Am I psychic? No. Well, I have precog according to an ESP test, but that doesn’t count so much, ne?
Do I know people that are/claim to be psychic? Yeah. I think it’s quite fascinating and while I don’t believe everything I hear, I try to find out as much as I can about it. I have one friend that claims to be “negative empathic” (can feel the negative emotions of the people he comes in contact with) and he says that he’s never felt the sensation of being tired (he had me describe it for him) and he doesn’t sleep every night. I have one friend whose family has had a problem with “evil spirits” for quite some time. His family also has an unusually sharp sense of smell (I’ve seen it, they can smell something and tell who has touched it) and at least my friend can, while blind folded (and trust me, it was not a faulty blind fold), run and jump to rebound off a wall and land confidently and without stumbling. He says that he can do it by picturing what he would see in his mind. He was surprised that I couldn’t do it.
I’ve seen and heard of enough psychic phenomena to know that it real. If someone came up to me and told me, “Hey, guess what? I’m a psychic!” then I wouldn’t believe them without questioning them for a while, but I know that such powers exist.
Alright, let’s modify the test. Lets get a room full of believers. A building full of them. As many believers as we can find, to ensure that we have more than enough positive energy to counteract any negative energy on the part of the expirementers. Hell, if we design a rigorous experiment, we can have it run by believing experimenters. But really, if one skeptic can scuttle an experiment with a hundred believers, you’re pushing the bounds of believability.
So here’s how it will be done: Two rooms. In one room sits a psychic with a notepad numbered 1-20, for the twenty trials that will be run. There’s a microphone in the room, so the (probably skeptical) experimenter can communicate with the psychic remotely (in case proximity of the skeptic is an issue). In another room, closer than the skeptical experimenter, stand 100 believers. They too are observed by and in communication with the skeptics. At random they are given numbers, one at a time, between 1 and 100, and told as a group to think them as loudly/extravagantly as possible. The psychic writes them down. 16 out of 20 a winner.
If you like it, propose it to the Million Dollar Challenge, and change the world if there’s a change to be made.
How to we measure believability? Believability in psychic abilities in general or in the particular person being tested?
How says physical presence=effect? Putting them in a room doesn’t mean that those who have READ about the challenge, and have made an opinion about it in the past, won’t have contributed to situation.
The whole experiment could depend on everyone’s (on earths) opinions of psychic abilities. And how can we think about minority/majority? We can’t know how many believers can cancel out the nonbelievers.
The million dollar challenge doesn’t prove/disprove anything except that psychic abilities have not been displayed in the context of the million dollar challenge.
More specifically, it proves that psychic abilities haven’t been proved in a controlled context, and hints strongly that they can’t be. To which you might say “so what?” And I’ll tell you: when people make psychic claims, they are making factual claims. If these factual claims aren’t verifiable in a controlled setting, then there are so, so many other explanations for the phenomena that are reported. Expectation bias is a well documented phenomenon. People attributing influence where they don’t have it is well documented. Probability is well understood (the law of large numbers indicates that unlikely events are expected when enough trials are run - applied to humanity, this means human guessing that appears prescient is expected). People being unconsciously aware of environmental cues is well documented (for instance, the widely held belief that one can “feel” when one is being looked at is really just unconscious awareness of heat, changes in lighting, barely audible noise, etc.).
Psychic claims are extreme. If proven, they would totally alter our understanding of the human brain and body, and the physical world. Such an extreme shift requires extreme evidence, especially when attempts to search for that evidence have revealed explanations that aren’t as extreme, are more intuitive, and lead to testable predictions (which psychic hypotheses do not).
I don’t feel that one has to be closed minded in order to reject psychic claims. All that is needed is an understanding of science and psychology, and the history of research into these claims. The fact of the matter is that these claims are unsupported by anything but anecdote, and even that turns out to support our understanding of probability and human fallibility.
How is generalizing the specification of a particular controlled context into a controlled context more specific?
…In that context.
Montague Ullman (Psychiatrist), founder of the Dream Laboratory at the MaimonidesMedican Center in Brooklyn, New York, conducted many ESP experiments throughtout the 60s and 70s throgh dream studies.
In the typical experiment a volunteer who claimed to have no psychic ability would sleep in a room of the lab while another person in another room concentrated on a randomly selected painting, trying to get the volunteer to to dream of the image(s) in it.
Sometimes, of course, the results were inconcolsuive, but other times the volunteers had dreams that were clearly influenced by the paintings.
Some examples:
When the target painting was Animals,http://www.kolahstudio.com/images/artclrofiniotamayo4.jpg, by Tamayo,
the test subject dreamed she was at a banquet and, since there was not enough meat, everyone watchfully eyed one another other as they greedily ate their portions.
In another experiment the target painting was Paris Though the Window, http://siteimages.guggenheim.org/gpc_work_large_372.jpg by Chagal. Over several nights the test subject repeatedly dreamed about French things: French architecture, a French Policeman’s hat, and a man dressed in French attire looking at various “layers” of a French village. Some of the images were more specific to the paintings vibrant colors and unusual images: a group of bees flying around flowers (from the chair at the bottom left of the painting?) and a brightly-colored Mardi Gras-type celebration in which people were wearing costumes and masks (inspired by the cat with a human face, perhaps?).
The above is in Tolaas and Ullman’s “Extrasensory Communication and Dreams” in the Handbook of Dreams (edited by Benjamin Woolman).
After more than thirty years of studying nonorindary states of consciousness, Stanislav Grof http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof concluded that the “places” our psyches can expolore (via holographic interconnectedness) are virtually endless. He first became interested in nonordinary states of consciousness in the 1950s while investigating the clinical uses of LSD at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague.
In one session a you8ng man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. He suddenly felt a presence very close to him, and it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know their son Ladislav was well taken care of, and doing fine. It gave him their name, street address, and phone number.
The info meant nothing to Grof or the young man, and it seemed completely unrelated to the guy’s treatment so Grof ignored it, but after some hesitation, feeling a bit foolish, Grof finally called the number, and asked if he could speak with Ladislav. The woman who answered the phone started to cry, and once finally claming down she told him that there son is not with them anymore, that they lost him weeks earlier.
This can be read about further in Stanislav Grof’s “The Adventure of Self-Discovery”.
AFter personally guiding over 3,000 LSD sessions (each lasting at least five hours) and studying the records of over 2,000 sessionsd conducted by colleagues, Grof became absolutely convinced that current theories of our universe, and ourselves, are… well here’s how he put it:
" I have condluded that the data from LSD research indicate an urgent need for a drastic revision of the existing paradigms for psychologost, psychiatry, medicine and possibly science in general," he has said. “There is at present little doubt in my mind that our current understanding of the universe, of the nature of reality, and particularly of humasn beings, is superficial, incorrect, and incomplete.”
-Beyond the Brain
I can find more examples, but I think this is enough.
Facts are THINGS, things we can measure. A claim is a claim, either it can use facts to support it or it can’t. But the inability to use facts to support a claim doesn’t make the claim false, it just makes it unferifiable according to the scienfitic method.
Which has nothing to do with the examples I’ve given you, both from my personal experience and my reading.
As I said earlier, one should be skeptical of skepticism (in the sense that one is attacking things that seem “unscientific”). True skepticism challenges science’s overall accepted worldview.
They have been proven, and the people that understood that have experiencedd the altering of their understanding of the world.
Wrong. All your sources are from “skeptics”, whose purpose is to find flaws to support their current worldview.
Sorry, I meant ‘generally’. And it is not one context that has been failed by psychic claims, it is every controlled context.
I appreciate that you are backing up your claims, but there are plenty of flaws that I can see in the skeletal representation of the methodology that you provided. First of all, it is based on uncontrolled case studies, which are interesting, but which by themselves do not offer much support for such radical claims (they are non-repeatable). Next, they do not seem blind in anyway, which allows for experimenter bias (which seems likely when you say things like “from the chair at the bottom left of the painting?”, which is equally easily explained as interpreting the data to fit the theory). The statement that “sometimes. . . the results were inconcolsuive” shows another flaw: if the standard is to be the one we find in your examples, and we ignore the “inconclusive” examples, we are bound, eventually, to find examples where the dreams and the paintings seem to fit.
The LSD studies may seem compelling, but the one specific example is dubious under analysis. Who is this “young man”? How do we know that he is completely unconnected to the family? How do we know that he didn’t read about the individual in the news paper? It is not actually a prediction, it is simply knowledge of something that has already happened, and there are plenty of mundane ways that someone could know about it. And LSD is a powerful psychoactive drug, it could dredge up memories that the individual is unaware of.
I think your post finally gets to the heart of it: why trust “science”? Why does science have a priviledge position to dismiss these claims? Well, let me ask you this: Why did you provide evidence for your claim? Clearly, you’re trying to show that there is data that suggest that psychic events occur. But it seems that that is exactly what science is. Science in ideal is plastic, it is formed from data. There are numerous examples of radical shifts in scientific paradigms (relativity and quantum, evolution, and any of the phases psychology has gone through since its inception). Claiming that science is simply unwilling to accept a new paradigm when the evidence is there is simply bullshit. The scientific method involves controls to weed out bias: experiments are double-blind, to accumulate the data before it can be interpreted; peer review and repeatability are used to ensure proper methods and that experiments are actually carried out as they are meant to be.
Let me ask you this: are psychic claims provable? if so, how? If not, why is that to be expected, and why should we ignore it and persist in the belief that such phenomena occur despite evidence of self-deception in human beliefs? I don’t see how these questions are avoidable, no matter what your paradigm.
I could probably throw out a number of theories on the topic but in the end it would all be speculation, the concepts behind psychic awareness are generally linked to knowing the unknown, you could say that you are picking up on electromagnetic energies from the other person that you subconciously decifer, you could say you are tapping into some great devine force, either way it would simply be speculation.
my psychic experiances include, but are not limited to, guessing the house in a deck of cards 2/3 accurate, guessing the roll of a dice 4/5 accurate , and guessing the flip of a coin 8/11 accurate. these examples could be said to simple luck and off hand probability, but the most convincing one was the house of the deck of cards, because I went through the entire deck and that was the average accurate result.
I’m not going to indulge you by providing you with information so you can use the typical “skeptic” rguments to try to prove your point.
I already gave you some explanations for why psychic processes may not have worked in certain controlled experiments.
I have as much study and training in careful research as the next guy, I don’t just “buy into” anything.
I have, however, had many psychic experiences myself, and I understand (very vaguely) how they happen (from subjective experience).
Yes may be able to imagine third variables for why a psychic event could be explainable in a non-psychuc way, and I can explain away your third variable with a third variable of your explanation.
There is a lot more to the world than you think (your mind, and the minds of many other “skeptics” are keeping it small).
I didn’t ask for examples. I asked for a test. If you will shoot down my suggeted tests, devise one of your own. And when it fails, devise another that will rule out whatever explanation you can come up with for the failure of the first. And again and again. And ask yourself what you should conclude when you discover that it is impossible to come up with an objectively verifiable instance of psychism.
I know it’s a lot more fun to believe that the world is full of mysterious forces and magic, but the evidence simply isn’t there. I’m sure there is more to the world than I think, but psychic phenomena is a field that has been investigated to exhaustion and found no evidence that it is the direction in which our understanding of the world should be broadened.
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