Hard News: Random
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Fascinating story on Sensing Murder psychic.
Burden of proof aside, you'd want to be sure a psychic was reliable: not talking to the wrong dead person, hearing them properly, conveying their messages faithfully etc. Otherwise it's a fun trick but not worth paying the entry fee for. Telephone communication is an amazing thing, and in its early days it was through unreliable party lines, but we'd complain now if you couldn't hear half of what someone said, and half of what you could hear was wrong. I'd like to see some psychic research into improving the quality of communication with the dead.
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Personally, I like "I can has Heisenburger?" but that's a level of geekery well beyond that which is socially acceptable.
Not here it isn't!
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WH,
I think its reasonably plain that anecdotes are not "science", but anecdotes are still evidence, and frankly it is absurd to claim otherwise.
I am not attempting to satisfy a scientific definition of proof. In fact, I would prefer not to express these sorts of ideas in the language of science.
But I'm would ask that people refrain from making ignorant comments based on their personal prejudices and drawing sceptical inferences that can't possibly be justified by their knowledge of the person that actually claimed to have these experiences. You might be right - but you can't possibly know that.
That is a courtesy you owe them as a fellow human being.
<shrodinger's cat goes /reow>
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WH: if you're asking me to believe a third-hand story is believed by the people who recount it, well sure. I have no doubt that everyone involved has the highest character, if you'll vouch for it. And that's the courtesy I owe them. But if you're asking me to believe that the third-hand account has a woo-woo explanation, I'm afraid not. Human beings are very fallible, all of us, and vulnerable to all sorts of brain farts in perception and logic. It's no shame on them to draw unlikely conclusions, and it's no shame on me to say that they're unlikely.
The only moral judgment I have expressed earlier is to condemn people who exploit that fallibility.
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Personally, I like "I can has Heisenburger?" but that's a level of geekery well beyond that which is socially acceptable.
Not here it isn't!
Indeed. The Physics Dept at Canterbury had one of those big maps with 'you are here' written on it. Someone with a vivid had written 'you may be here - Heisenberg' next to it.
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I think its reasonably plain that anecdotes are not "science", but anecdotes are still evidence, and frankly it is absurd to claim otherwise.
I tend towards the view that "anecdotal evidence" is a contradiction in terms. A sample of 1 is not statistically significant.
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If it's a good anecdote (not the after a few drinks sort) it can do something - one black swan can disprove "all swans are white". It can't do much else, like say anything about the number of black swans, whether it's a mutation, a species, or the result of an oil spill, without other information.
But mostly people use it to mean the equivalent to an urban legend.
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WH,
But if you're asking me to believe that the third-hand account has a woo-woo explanation
First, its a second hand account, but my coworker says she would be willing to swear an affidavit, Swift Boat styles (not that I intend to have her do that).
Second, this is a form of bias - one cannot begin a reasonable enquiry by assuming the answer or explanation to the question at issue. This is not "science" - it is prejudice. This bias makes the sceptic a poor judge of evidence - essentially such a person begins the enquiry with a closed mind and with a predilection to certain kinds of explanations before the factual foundation for those explanations has been established.
It is of course possible that my story can explained by conventional means - you will note that I did not in fact offer an explanation. However, my coworker's account of what she experienced is evidence of what she experienced.
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one cannot begin a reasonable enquiry by assuming the answer or explanation to the question at issue. This is not "science" - it is prejudice. This bias makes the sceptic a poor judge of evidence - essentially such a person begins the enquiry with a closed mind and with a predilection to certain kinds of explanations before the factual foundation for those explanations has been established.
I mean this lovingly, but bollocks to that. When the brandy is drunk and the christmas cake missing from the living room in the morning, my very first hypothesis is that it was Dad, not Santa Claus. And if Dad has a satisfactory alibi, I will see if the dog is feeling well. And so on. It is perfectly reasonable to explore simple, obvious explanations that conform to our understanding of the world before we move on to ones that contradict our understanding of the world.
And your co-worker's account of what she experienced is just that -- what she experienced -- it is not necessarily the same thing as what actually happened. When you go to a magic show, you experience the assistant being sawn in half, but that isn't what's happening.
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you say that you saw a horse trotting down Lambton Quay, I'd say "Really? That's unusual." If you say you saw a zebra, I'd say "Really?! Do you have a photo?" If you say you saw a unicorn, I'd suggest that some sort of veterinary examination would be in order before I would believe you.
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WH,
And your co-worker's account of what she experienced is just that -- what she experienced -- it is not necessarily the same thing as what actually happened
If you say you saw a unicorn, I'd suggest that some sort of veterinary examination would be in order before I would believe you.
Fair enough. :)
I'm just saying that the elements of the story could have happened as my coworker described, and that we are not in the best position to contradict her.
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The trouble with open minds is that people dump all sorts of trash in them. A sceptic doesn't have a closed mind per se, rather they have a pretty rigorous nonsense filter. Yes, someone open to anything may be right now and again, but it's like the stopped clock being right twice a day - OK, it's right now and then, but it's useless as a timepiece.
That is the point of scepticism. Indeed many of us, including myself, have seen evidence/anecdotes of potentially paranormal phenomena, and who knows, maybe an empirical basis for belief in them may one day emerge and stand up to enquiry, but until that big if occurs, explanations involving specifically ghosts or telepathy or the like over a more prosaic explanation are too amorphous or unsystematic to have any utility. Please note that I am making a utilitarian assessment here - and science is utilitarian.
I've read far too much psychological and neurological literature to think that sense or memory are accurate guides to phenomena. If someone says that they have seen something and it's very unlikely to be true, it's not due to them being an idiot or a liar, it's likely to be due to the fact that a brain and sensorium evolved to optimise survival as oposed to revealing objective reality have generated a certain impression, not conducted a NASA space probe-type survey of a site.
If you say you saw a unicorn, I'd suggest that some sort of veterinary examination would be in order before I would believe you.
I'd also check to see if Weta Workshop was staging a publicity stunt.
Actually, we are tending (in the west) to follow a dichotomous empirically-real/bullshit system, with the implicit assumption that is something is not one it must be the other. I'm currently researching narrative and cognition and constantly having to put in qualifiers about the reality or otherwise of myth is damned tedious - and unnecessary, so neither I nor my supervisors do it.
There's a neat book by Brian Appleyard, Aliens: Why Are They Here that I'd recommend. Appleyard does not both trying to 'prove' that little grey men are conducting rectal examinations - the point for him is that people belive these things and create cognitive maps and act according to the 'reality' of the experience.
Being in a book-recommending mode, there's R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience too.
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Also, if you approach every phenomenon with an entirely open mind, you'd get nothing done for wondering if really the sun was going to come up tomorrow. We take shortcuts to save on processing power - some of these are fantastically useful (Copernicus says the earth rotates around the sun every day, of course it will happen tomorrow), some are provisionally useful (Ptolemy says the sun rotates around the earth set on a crystalline sphere, of course it will keep doing so) and some are pretty unhelpful (the sun returns at the will of the gods, we must sacrifice in order to keep them happy).
I'd also check to see if Weta Workshop was staging a publicity stunt.
I blame Weta and co for my hardass adult skepticism - I've never recovered from the embarrassment of believing Forgotten Silver when it first screened. Fool me once.
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Surely most people have had some exposure to an event that can't be explained by any conventional means. In my family, my great-aunt fainted in the middle of a conversation, then woke up crying, insisting her son (who was a pilot in WW2) was dead. She got a telegram saying he was missing a while after that, but already knew the moment he had died, she had seen him standing in front of her, wearing his flight suit and surrounded by flames.
This is pretty similar to the account my father-in-law gave of his mother - who dreamt that her eldest son came and stood at the end of her bed and said "I've come to say good-bye Mum, and I love you" except he wasn't wearing a flight suit, he was in his dress uniform and was holding his hat.
A friend of mine here interruped an attack on her daughter by one of NZ's most notiorious rapists - who had stolen her daughter's school bag, which meant he had her address and housekeys.
My friend was on her way to a late afternoon meeting, and had left her daughter in her bedroom doing her homework. Part way into town she had a terrible feeling of dread, turned back to her house. She said by the time she got out of the car she was running up to the house, to find the rapist at her daughter's bedroom doorway. She bashed him once, and he ran, but after he was caught all this came out in his confession. He had been stalking her daughter for weeks, and had let himself into their house on more than one occasion.
The thing is, my friend had had a bad feeling of dread for several months, and had inexplicably - in middle age - taken up body building and kick boxing, and when she delivered the punch she was 10 kg heavier and a whole lot faster/stronger than she had been a few months previous to this.
My Mum dreamt of the grim reaper, complete with scythe and hooded robe, chasing her mother around a bed, waking to a (correct) feeling of certainty that her mother had died.
And I have been scaring the daylights out of anyone whose known me since as long as I can remember. When we moved into the house where I grew up I was 3. We went downstairs into the basement - the house had been around a stone foundation of a much older house - and I burst into tears. My parents picked me up and asked me what was wrong, and they tell me I said "oh, it's alright, it's not me that's crying, it's just somebody crying trough me."
Surely others of you out there have had similar experiences?
My sister Shirley once had a terrifying nightmare about a woman's body being cut into pieces and hidden in the hull of a boat. She could see the body parts wrapped in newspaper and black plastic, she could see the orange tarp and the metal grommets. She described the boat shed, on the left side of a long curving driveway of white gravel, with big conifers on either side and a house way up at the top of the driveway.
She was really frightened and upset when she woke from the dream (she had been seeing the cutting and wrapping of the body)
and her husband had to spend a while comforting her and convincing her it was just a nightmare before they both went back to sleep.When he came in with the morning newspaper that had a photograph of the driveway, boatshed, conifers etc, and a description of the horrendous discovery that was exactly as Shirl described it.
I've only dreamt things a few times, but am more likely to just feel things. The Bay of Islands nearly killed me when we first went there, in 1984 on a holiday. Pretty as it was, I was in pretty acute distress the whole time I was there and we cut short a holiday there. I still have no idea what happened there, so maybe that was just a feeling, but it's the most intense and unpleasant of that nature I've ever had, and I've had these feelings ever since I can remember. And I've never worked as a psychic. In fact I've tried really, really hard not to feel like a psychic. My background is science.
I'll tell you one instance where I was absolutely correct, though one detail - which is the one of which I am most sure - was never confirmed. Victoria Park Market was used as a crematorium, I think.
Driving by it, I asked if it had been used for that purpose, but Paul was pretty sure not. I asked if maybe it was used for a morgue? He was pretty sure not.
I was very reluctant to use any food purchased from there but it was the only place in town where we could get ingredients for Mexican food, when we first moved here, so we shopped there, which really, really bothered me. I kept trying not to breathe in the air, complaining I had a sense of disease in the place, that there was some contagion. I also had a sense of many, many corpses being stored there - stacked even - and I could tell you where they were and which end the feet were pointing. I was not happy about breathing there, much less eating food from the place.
A couple years later we found that the place had been used as a makeshift morgue ("__And__ crematorium?" I suggested) but no, it is claimed the bodies were only stored there to be shipped to a mass grave at Waikumete cemetary. But I can tell you with some certainty that that part is not true, or not wholly true. Perhaps they shipped a few bodies out, but I would bet my house on my hunch that the bodies were, for the most part, cremated on the premises. That's what I could feel before I even set foot there.
Interestingly a lot of the taboos that are merely nutball beliefs and deeply neurotic behaviour on my part (and for all practical purposes, I don't believe myself) but interestingly many of the things I feel are very much in synch with Maori beliefs, and one of the things that freaked me out the most in the Bay of Islands was the sensation of the blood still in that sand, after so many years. There is a picture of me and Paul on the beach with our shoes on, standing on the beach. I wouldn't take my shoes off, and begged him not to either, as it seemed very bad, as did stirring up the sand and inhaling the blood that way. I didn't - and don't - believe it will do any actual harm, but it's taboo that I can not ignore or even keep silent about. And I neither understand it, nor fully believe it. But I sure wouldn't cross it.
Paul's white Dad had a ghostly visitation from Paul's Maori great-great grandfather, the paramount chief of the Ngapuhi, Atama Paparangi. This was after Paul's Mum had died, and some cousins were trying to challenge family ownership of some land in the Hokiangia, saying Atama never would have given it to his daughter Neta as she married a white man. It was known that Atama was friendly with his son in law, but there was some doubt cast over the ownership of a parcel of land, so my father-in-law, Frank, went to archives to see if he could find a deed or some sort of proof that the ownership was transferred. He spent a few hours searching in the stacks, coming up with bits here and there that confirmed the friendly nature of the relationship, but there was nothing concrete.
But when he took the stack of stuff he'd found to the librarian's he knocked a volume off her desk by accident and it fell with a deafening BANG to an open page - on one side a list of the guests at Neta's wedding, top of the list her father, Atama, and on the other side a list of the wedding presents - top of the list, the parcel of land.
Frank said all the hair stood up on the back of his neck, and he said "Thanks Atama" out loud, took the photo copy and scurried out of there.
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Creepy stories, and I don't envy (or question) your experiences for a second. But I'd draw different conclusions from them.
Coincidence, spooky things the human subconscious naturally does when you're worried about people you care about, acquiring information without realising it (eg the news the night before the morning paper came out), and most of all confirmation bias, which records the hits (premonition plus death) but not the misses (premonition without death or death without premonition) provide satisfactory explanations as far as I'm concerned.
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Surely most people have had some exposure to an event that can't be explained by any conventional means.
Cargo Cults arose because planes were beyond the 'conventional means' of pacific tribes. Hell, I suspect many people in NZ would struggle to explain the principles of jet engines or why wings work the way they do. This does not mean we should start building bamboo control towers.
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I think its reasonably plain that anecdotes are not "science", but anecdotes are still evidence, and frankly it is absurd to claim otherwise.
It's also absurd to claim all evidence is equally good.
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the colonial nature of the term/box/brand 'science'.
The what?
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Does anyone else find it spooky that Mediawatch gave Sensing Media it's Worst Media Nonsense of 2007 award this morning?
Do do do do do...
Safe holidays everyone!
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There will never be accurate evidence about how the soul lives on, because that's not what it's about. If you don't believe something unless it's in front of your eyes, that's fine. But don't poopoo people who operate with greater, or a different, awareness of the world around them. I'm with Dyan on this one, always have been, always will be. And interestingly enough, life after death, if that's what you would call it, is the most scientifically provable of all, I would have said. After all, our bodies are mass and energy are they not? And, correct me if I'm wrong, but energy never dissipates, does it? I know someone's heart the moment I meet them; I've talked to people I've never met, and those I have been close to, who are dead; I can walk into a house, or be anywhere, and like Dyan, tell you what sort of energy has been left behind (it's my belief that natural material retains emotional energy. Dyan's example of blood on sand is a good one. Bricks, wood, soil - it all retains an impression, if you will) amongst other things. I'm not a kook, and I have no interest in explaining these things. They just are. I'm happy to be prescient, and comfortable with my awareness of the world. My husband is prescient, I have many friends who are. I don't practice to be "better", and I don't go to meetings at Spiritualist Churches, or with other people. I don't hang around psychics. But then again, I don't feel the need to explain everything away just because it might make me feel better. We all have our way of understanding the world, in the way which makes most sense to us. Rational is one thing, sceptical is another, and dismissive and patronising is another thing altogether.
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the colonial nature of the term/box/brand 'science'.
The what?
Umm, science as the coloniser of 'all things right'. By broadly defining science in the way that people have, here and in other places, once something becomes proven, it becomes science. I'm interested in the expansive nature of that as a metaphor for colonialism. Or colonialism as a metaphor for the nature of science I guess really.
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After all, our bodies are mass and energy are they not? And, correct me if I'm wrong, but energy never dissipates, does it?
I don't want to be seen as attacking your source of spiritualiuty here, but it may be amistake to try to base it on sciente in this way.
After all, our bodies are mass and energy are they not? And, correct me if I'm wrong, but energy never dissipates, does it?
I don't want to be seen as attacking your sense of spirituality here, but it may be a mistake to try to base it on science in this way.
Mass-energy is conserved. To a reasonable approximation, that means energy is conserved (if not converted to matter).
But this doesn't mean that energy doesn't "dissipate" -- in fact, by default, that is exactly what happens; energy is transformed into less organised forms.Life is a localised reversal of entropy [possible only because it can draw directly or indirectly on localised organised energy sources]. Death ... isn't, as far as can be observed.
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Huh. Everyone's sensing spirits and energy and shit, and I'm wandering, apparently obliviously, through the world without noticing a damn thing out of the ordinary. I feel so boring. I wonder if the spirits are smacking themselves on their foreheads when they see me coming? 'Oh, here's Obtuse Dumbass again! No use trying to get through to *her*.'
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ah but how do you know they aren't? ;)
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WH,
There are some things that people prefer to talk about in safe environments. I suspect that there are lots of people who have had experiences like Dyan's, but would rather not have to defend the quality of their perception or judgment to others. Thank you Dyan for saying what you did, I found it a very interesting read.
I can't claim to have had supernatural experiences of my own, but I have a sense of spirituality. There are lots of people who use their intuitive as well as their rational faculties. IMO each is part of an integrated whole.
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