As I have said, I have already experienced evidence for myself. It’s not a matter of what beliefs are fun, it’s a matter of how the world works.
The evidence you have experienced, as far as you’ve let on, is easily explainable in many more mundane ways. The beliefs that you have chosen to allow that evidence to support are what you want to be true, not what you have evidence to choose above competing hypotheses.
I have tried to receive a number 1-10 from 5 people in my life.
I did the experiment with one of them, my good friend, many times (he is the one I practiced with, I learned how to be more sensitive during the process). With him I would receive the number about half the time (but each time I “knew” I received something, where I felt confident that it was the right number, it was right. This was dozens of times). This alone is a good case in my favor. Each time I felt I had it, I had it. One out of ten, dozens of times.
The only time I ever heard a voice in my head which I knew was not coming from me was the only time I actually received the number in an auditory way. The only time and it was right.
I only asked one roomate once, and it was very, very obvious to me which number it was. I was right, and he even explained how he was sending it (which was how I visually received it… it was the only time I was very confident when visually receving anything). Only confident case with a visual and I knew the right number.
I only asked another roomate once. I was right.
The only time I asked two other friends, and the only time I ever had two people think of the number at the same time, I was right (and VERY confident of the number).
This is not chance, and there is no other explanation for it.
You haven’t been conscious of any psychic experiences, yours or others, but that doesn’t mean they doesn’t exist. They do.
If you are so sure that this is indeed some psychic experience, why don’t you go and test it with strangers publicly or ask a psychology department somewhere to take you on. Psychologists love to debunk this stuff, (even when they are using bogus arguments to debunk) so anyway, why not go and see what can be done.
I am not a believer or disprover of psychic experiences. I just have my biases, and so do we all, regardless of what camps. Human evidence is always faulty and will be revised with time, therefore, we are all biased, what else is new?
Because it would be a waste of my time… have you read everything in this thread?
no, my attention span is short for somethings.
would it really be a waste in your time. do you REALLY believe in your psychic powers? If you really believed in them, you could change science for the better and maybe even make a living helping people thru it.
but, I haven’t read the whole thread, and I dont have time too, today is a browsing day.
Everyone has the potential to use their psychic powers, we just have a lot of blockages (creating opposing realities with our beliefs, mental clutter, etc).
I REALLY believe in my psychic powers, especially when it comes to me being an empath (which can be just awful at times…), but accessing a PRECISE thought inside a person’s head is something I haven’t noticed myself doing lately. This may be due to a certain situation I am in in life, which has caused me to lose a bit of focus throughout the day (I am a bit “lost” at the moment, as to what I should be doing, I guess you can say).
MANY people have these powers, it isn’t that rare, it’s just that “skeptics” seem to think about it VERY narrowly… af if someone is PSYCHIC they access information perfetly. It isn’t like that… at least not for most people who are aware of their psychic abilities, at least.
I definitely would not feel comfortable offering to perform experiments. First off, my psychic abilities (except for empathy) were never that sharp. Now my mind is so cluttered with my own personal bs that I don’t think I am clear enough to perform well. in those kinds of conditions. As I already said though, those kinda of experiments can be faulty, as anyone that knows about the experiment, and anyone who has had a thought that can be connected, in the collective consciousness of all humans, to one’s consideration the challenges, will influence the result. We’re talking about the mind here, and what it creates.
You certainly don’t have to read the whole thread… I rarely do too, but some of the things I said in earlier posts suggest why I don’t think any experiment for psychic processes could ever be completely controlled.
Maybe you can find Michael Talbot’s “The Holographic Universe” at the library. It’s a great read on these matters.
Just a little experiment, for fun.
What ANIMAL am I thinking of?!
The first animal that came to your mind is it.
Just in case you did not get in on the first time then read that it is an
ANIMAL
You know it, it came to your mind, right?
A very popular ANIMAL.
A favorite for the child and the adult.
If you aren’t sure what it is, please leave this thread, do some work or relax, take some deep breaths, and come back, reading over.
Once an ANIMAL pops into your head you will know you received my message.
Don’t look at the bottom of this post until an animal popped into your head.
It doesn’t have to be strong.
Any ANIMAL that immediately entered your mind.
Scroll down to see the ANIMAL I thought of when I wrote this.
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The…
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ANIMAL
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is…
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AN ELEPHANT!
Did you get it?
i’ve heard this oen before so it didn’t work for me, plus I accidentally scrolled all the way down before reading the thread.
I do believe there might be phermones etc that the human sense may be able to pick up on, or some other external power of some source. I just am as skeptical as the next gye.
give me another test if you got one, and I’ll be sure to read it from the top this time.
psychic stuff is fun regardless, its like watching a movie with suspence. I would rather live my life with some fun and suspense than to have everything written out for me.
What do you mean “this one”? I just made it up… it wasn’t constructed as a trick or anything like that.
I’ll try making another post like the one above in the future, maybe in its own thread. I concentrated a lot on trying to paint that entire post with the thought of that animal, so I want to to create another thread at a later time (I would prefer if we agreed to exclude the animal I used in the above post) where I think there would be minimal “psychic residue” left over from trying to put it into the above post.
ok, i’m looking forward to it, and will be open to it.
If you’re worried that negative thoughts might taint the experiment perhaps the psychic could wear a protective tinfoil helmet to shield her mind.
You REALLY believe? Like, REALLY, REALLY believe? Sorry, that means exactly jack shit. It doesn’t matter how much or how hard you believe. All your talk about being narrow-minded or whatever is simply a ploy to mask the fact that YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE OF PSYCHIC ABILITY. See, I can use capslock too. Put up or shut up.
Matthatter, I notice a striking difference between the generalization that I make and the ones that you make. You ‘know’ that you yourself have had psychic experiences, and you generalize to say that psychic phenomena exist and that everyone has that potentil. I ‘know’ that no controlled study has ever detected any psychic phenomena, and I generalize to say that no such phenomena exist.
Why should your anecdote be given more weight than a controlled investigation? Why should a claim that you admit cannot be corroborated be trust over the debunking of previous such claims?
You’ve called skeptics narrow minded repeatedly, but I don’t see how I or any other skeptic is being any more narrow minded than you or any other believer. It is narrowness in a different vein: Where we refuse to believe that which cannot be demonstrated in a controlled environment, you refuse to entertain the idea that bias, self-deception, and coincidence are enough to explain what you’ve experienced. How is that any less narrow-minded?
Jager, try to calm down buddy.
I wasn’t the one who first used the caps btw, someone asked if I REALLY believed it, so I replied that yes, I REALLY did.
Silly.
Carleas, you might as well just stop. You’re wrong so try to remove your ego from this conversation.
Mine has more weight, at least for me, because I have actually experienced the proof that a controlled experiment aims to get.
What I have told you in my other posts is proof enough, what other explanations can there be? The only thing you can really propose is that either a) all of my friends just lied to me and told me I guessed the right number (and I also happen to make friends with fantastically talented actors able to perfectly act surprised/shocked) or b) I am simply completely “out of my mind” and have hallucinated all or several of these instances.
But then again, I guess I could argue that those who conduct “controlled” studies could also just be lying or completely crazy themselves.
Repeatedability? You have seen the other people who say they have has psychic experiences just in this thread. There are A LOT who have it in real life, and have accepted it as a kind of “common-sense” of reality. We’ve experienced it first-hand, accessing information from another’s mind without the use of body or voice communication/language. We don’t need a controlled study to put into our minds a situation that we’ve experienced firsthand.
All of those psychics are lying or crazy? Then maybe those conducting “controlled studies” are as well.
This thread asked if there are any psyshics here, so I told him my experience, which you’ll see as evidence of psychic experiences if you are willing to look at it reasonably, not because I think I am some special psychic… I think we are all psychic/have latent psychic abilities.
You came and started about making money with some challenge.
I’ve offered some possible explanatons as to why psychic abilities were not displayed in such a context (essentially, psychic processes make external validity virtually impossible), and this is all I can really do for you…
I’ve experienced my own psychic abilities firsthand, what more can I tell you? Hopefully you’ll have an experience yourself sometime so you can understand it.
Oh, you know, all your nonsense up to now didn’t get your point across, but now that you’ve reminded me that I’m wrong I’ll fold up my legs and float back home to commune on the astral plane.
If I and five other people told you that we REALLY flew from New York to Kentuky last week by flapping our arms and wishing really hard, would that honestly be enough for you? You’re telling me that you experienced things that many have believed and that many have been proven wrong about. You make claims that seem like they should be testable, but you still claim that any controlled test would by definition violate the necessary conditions for the phenomena to be experienced. That’s not cogent in the least!
What other explanations could there be? Well, assuming you’re telling the truth (which, it must be admitted, I can’t verify), you could be remembering things incorrectly, forgetting failures or misremembering whether you got it right. Your friends could be lying to you and you might be gullible. You might be hallucinating, you might have dreamt these experiences and accidentally believed them. You might have done something amazing once by shear coincidence, and have exaggerated it so often that you forgot that it was just once. None of these boring, everyday explanations, of things that happen to just about everyone pretty often, could possibly be a better explanation than one that requires the entire body of modern science and our understanding of the world to be radically revised? Whose ego is in the way?
Science is designed to minimize trust. As I’ve explained, it minimizes bias, it records results as reliably and quantifiably as possible, and it stresses tests that are repeatable, in a controlled environment, so that people’s misunderstanding and misinterpretation can be verified by anyone, anywhere, and not just by some annonymous stranger on an internet forum. Yeah, repeatability.
If “psychic processes make external validity virtually impossible”, in what sense do they exist? Your claim “I can receive numbers from other people” is an external claim, why can’t it be tested? Clearly, my long-time skepticism has not prevented you from experiencing this. So create a test with your friend, control it, and record it. If it works, bring it to the news or day-time talk, they believe anything, you won’t find skepticism there. And when that works, you’ll convince a populous, and there will be researchers who are willing to believe but who won’t sacrifice rigor. Show them, and you’ll convince the world, and everyone can live in psychic bliss after you’ve blown away nay-sayers like myself.
And if you won’t, don’t even fucking mention anyone else’ ego, while you go on hiding yours from the sting of believing something ridiculous.
As I said, there isn’t anything more I can do tl help you. You think you’re being logical and reasonable, but you’re not. Like many “skeptics”, you use the scientific method as a crutch on what to believe, a simple guide. You accept what current “scientific” common-sense has ESTABLISHED, and deem the rest bogus.
You think what I have said is nonsense because you haven’t experienced it. You haven’t actually looked at what I told you, you don’t trust me.
What can I do?
I certainly am not going to go to all the trouble you suggested. You think this is an alternative but flaw after flaw come ot my mind when considering it.
Enough of this. We both agree that you haven’t been satisfied with finding from “controlled” experiments, and you still don’t understand why this could be so.
Stay in your comfy little box and continue to base arguments after current scientific “common sense” and simple arguments that can easily be found online so you can just memorize procedures and supeficial “logic” so you can feel superior to others by repeating the same debates over and over and over without having any actual understanding of the universe.
=D> Good for you.
You’re at a certain stage of human development, Carleas. A scientific “rational” stage. It is necessary, you can’t get to higher stages without it. But believe me (I know, you think I’m just flapping my arms, thinking I’m flying through the air), I have been at your stage, and there is a much, much richer universe than the one you are currently able to interpret.
You have called these beliefs “magical” but this isn’t an accurate interpretation. Magic goes more along with a world in which something just “happens” without a reasonable belief for it being so. Than rationalism develops to actually test the world, it is where the human being becomes reasonable. But when people are still developing their rational sense they are very, very dogmatic about it (I’m not going to get to depe into the psychology of why this is so). They have certain rules that they know onme should consider when thinking about what is real and what is not.
IN Wilber’s terms, you are commiting the pre/trans rational fallacy when read my words (because you can’t comprehend the universe beyond a rational understanding, which you are currently exercising).
I have surpassed this training stage, and your ego is preventing you from seeing how what I’ve told you takes this stage into account and (although I can’t blame you, you are not where I am yet) supersedes by crossing a very wide gap in how one understands the world. SImple linear thinking alone becomes impossible at where I am, and no question has a simple answer. You, in my mind, are still in the category of ape, because you haven’t crossed that boundary that changes you into the first major step of tranformation of man’s potential.
Sound crazy? I bet. You can’t imagine a mind that surpasses yours in its ability to integrate knowledge into a more accurate interpretation of the universe’s complexity.
BTW, did you try to receive my message on that animal post? You never commented about it.
P.S. With all your talk about controlled experiments I thought you would know what external validity is. It is making sure that a test is set in such a way that it would come up with results similar to how the event would naturally occur outside of the test. I already told you how minds can influence a test of psychic abilities. The tests can’t be externally valid.
Crikey, when worlds collide, and all that… anyways, some people will never experience the pleasure of psychic ability: whilst others can/do/will - it’s about instinctively knowing things, but you don’t know how (or even why).
Controlled experiments in a sterile environment would deter the process: as the ability is brought about through being relaxed within ones-self/ in one’s own environment. Modern living hampers/blocks these signals from reaching most of us, but those who do not fall for these psychic dampeners retain these ancient qualities of a bygone survival instinct (because that’s all it might be: akin to our appendix, but not so physical).
Believers or non: we all know what we know, and know of what experiences we have had: of which I have had many - whenever I tell my bro about mine: he always tells me weird stuff always happens to me, and he seemed a bit sad that he’d never experienced such weirdness, and asked if he ever would: who knows? but he knows I’m weird, and that I have weird experiences lol.
Some will never experience that rich universe, or the magic of instinctively knowing things 
Ah well !
Nice posts Mags.
Here’s some information from some studies that I believe were in a more relaxed environment. (this is one of the sources I gave you Carleas).
You can go ahead and scroll down to to the heading “Formal Experimental Studies” if you aren’t interested in the intro.