Esoterics // Superstition

[D.o.S.]

The way I consider this subject could best be explained by these three videos:

My video's better, and has 100% more Seasame Street and Stevie Wonder.


That said, I have never really understood the whole "science-y types are know-it-all asshats" phenomenon.

[CaptainWampum]

I'm really into deep astrology as well as native american shamanism.

[alexa.]

The key word there is may be legit. But to date every single case of people feeding themselves by looking at the sun, poltergeists, psychics, telekinesis, dowsing, homeopathy, chi energy, ancient aliens, or any other deepakchoprawoo you care to name that has ever been studied properly has turned out to be bogus. Not 99%, not 99.9%, not leaving room for your I-just-pulled-it-out-my-ass figure of 1%, but all of them.
Having an open mind is show me, and I'll believe it. Not I'll believe any old bullshit (except that it's bogus).

I showed an example about 'telepathy' actually being cold reading; same thing like people thought that the sun was a god cuz it gives heat, but we learned more about the sun and we found out that it's a star. I don't presume things to be magical, just possible. The mechanism of the event is something I don't have enough knowledge to explain, but can give my perception of the event that may, or may not help further investigation.
Also, how would you explain the guy that climbed mt Everest in his shorts, without frostbites?
That's kinda, not-bogus.
And he's not the only one that exhibits amazing mind boggling feats that should not be possible. Details.

People are easily fooled -- by ourselves, by others, by nothing at all -- our minds are fallible, our psychology is such that we seek patterns, we seek agency, we have confirmation bias, confabulation, all sorts of (incidentally quite well characterised) things going on in our brains.

Yes, but it's the society and the system that we built that's flawed and that's not using the potential of our cognitive power, rather it's modeled on mediocrity and feeds it, hence the wrong usage of the brain by most people. Just watching the Khan Academy TED video is a bit mindblowing for itself. That's why I think that the first thing we should do is change the educational paradigm.
Totally tear the system down and build it from scratch.

You might not like scepticism, but I bet you do it when you buy something online or go buy a car of Craigslist -- I just apply it to things that are important too

Reading is tech. Exaggerated skepticism as exaggerated faith are not healthy.
[If you take it this way, the church was skeptic towards ideas that Copernicus exhibited. And we all know how that turned out] - this is wrong.*.
Any extreme behavior is not well thought of in my book. Moderation is key. That's all I said.

I enjoyed your bird analogy BTW. The key is to not stop at 'it's a bird' -- then you go find out what is a bird, you find out it's a fucking dinosaur that learned to fly and that's awesome; that its bones are hollow but strutted so they're light and strong; you find out about how they develop in the egg; that the genes that control their development are the same as ours; and fish; and flies; and elephants; and probably T. rex; and that's cool. You find out how they fly, and where feathers came from, and how they can find their way around, and what determines their sex, and that it's different from us; and flies; and mice; and elephants; and the inverse of ants; and bees; and you find out how their cells work, how their behaviour is determined, how they learn, how their cognition can be bypassed by simple hardwired rules; and you wonder how much of ours is too.

Hell yeah! And I love tracking everything back all the way to the big bang, it's just awesome fun!
Reminds me of "Science saved my soul". Awesome vid

'it's a bird' only tells you about what people choose to call this wonderful thing, and nothing at all about the wonderful thing itself. You'll also notice that calling it a 'tranformative hierophany of integrated perception' also tells you nothing whatsoever about the bird, only about what people (or a person) has chosen to call it.

The point of 'transformative hierophany' was saying all what you said in the quote above in two words, to prove his point.
But using such approach in schools puts kids in a bad position. They have to learn all this 'mumbo jumbo' that actually gives them no useful knowledge, only nomenclature. Math and logic were the only fun/interesting subjects for me. Everything else was boring and mostly not-practical. Ok, I have to admit that listening to how Italians always managed to get their asses kicked by everyone was fun

[D.o.S.]

If I can chime in quickly--Nomenclature is really important to discourse.

For example, what does a tranformative hierophany of integrated perception actually mean?

Sure, there are a lot of syllables, but if you actually parse it out it sounds less like something you'd apply to the sciences and more something you'd apply to the arts.


So, to use an example from a similar line that you're going down, using Rupert Sheldrake's notion of collective memory and nesting heirarchies when, say, you want to figure out why a piece of writing speaks is "quality" is perfectly fine. In fact, you could make a pretty compelling argument that way--since common culture could very easily constitute that collective memory that inevitably touches each artist.

I'm not sure you'd be able to find the kind of proof needed to talk in those terms in scientific discourse.

[jfrey]

I really recommend everyone watches those three videos I posted. They are incredibly lucid and thorough.

[alexa.]

Nomenclature is important obviously, but without anything else, it's useless. And we start getting useful information in collage >_<
Just debating that in the domain of the early education system and the mindset children get early in school that mostly stifles their creativity and imagination.

@jfrey: AWESOME vids. I would only like to comment on the part in the first vid where there is an illogical X in question. Our logic is defined by the knowledge we possess, if we lack the proper knowledge, X may seem illogical to us for reasons A, B and C, but doesn't still mean it's false, just improbable.
Other than that, awesome. I love these kinds of educational vids. Lets me test my own logic too

[jfrey]

Our logic is defined by the knowledge we possess, if we lack the proper knowledge, X may seem illogical to us for reasons A, B and C, but doesn't still mean it's false, just improbable.

I think he addresses that - indirectly - somewhere in the vid. I'd have to rewatch the entire thing though to tell you where.

[devnulljp]

Exaggerated skepticism as exaggerated faith are not healthy.

But when you're talking about finding the middle path between right and wrong, you get wrong. It's false equivalence to say over here we have an astrophysicist and in the name of balance let's talk to the guy who believes stars are shiny buttons on the waistcoat of Fluffy the Marshmallowman who flies above the earth (with apologies to Dara Ó Briain).

At some point, you have to just call the homeopaths and dowsers and psychics the horseshit pedlars they are and move on.

And despite thousands of years of people waffling in fluffy terms about universal consciousness, it wasn't aligning your chakras with the dao that allowed us to have this conversation but a few decades of actual rigorous scientific research. Thank you DARPA (and the underlying physics that took a bit longer to work out).

[bigchiefbc]

Reading is tech. Exaggerated skepticism as exaggerated faith are not healthy. If you take it this way, the church was skeptic towards ideas that Copernicus exhibited. And we all know how that turned out. Any extreme behavior is not well thought of in my book. Moderation is key. That's all I said.

Just wanted to address this one point of your post, because I agree with basically everything else you said.

But the church's response to the Copernican theory of orbital mechanics wasn't skepticism. It was to simply deny, condemn and excommunicate. Skepticism implies that you're looking for evidence. The Church didn't want evidence, in fact it disregarded all of Copernicus's evidence (and Galileo's while we're at it). They just wanted it to go away and let things stay as they were.

[alexa.]

But when you're talking about finding the middle path between right and wrong, you get wrong. It's false equivalence to say over here we have an astrophysicist and in the name of balance let's talk to the guy who believes stars are shiny buttons on the waistcoat of Fluffy the Marshmallowman who flies above the earth (with apologies to Dara Ó Briain).

At some point, you have to just call the homeopaths and dowsers and psychics the horseshit pedlars they are and move on.

And despite thousands of years of people waffling in fluffy terms about universal consciousness, it wasn't aligning your chakras with the dao that allowed us to have this conversation but a few decades of actual rigorous scientific research. Thank you DARPA (and the underlying physics that took a bit longer to work out).

+1-1=0 (and the 0 is Dao, the middle path, the best energy consumption, the optimal way; philosophy is different from mysticism thank you.)
And what you said is +1-1=-1

I've also stated when I started that there is a lot of bull, and I don't deny that. I even have a strong dislike for sungazers and homeopathy and similar things Having a desire do disprove everything that seems improbable wrong, can be motivated by emotions/ignorance/ego too. As the videos jfrey posted nicely describe.
You still didn't comment on Wim Hof. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof oops, seems that he didn't climb mt Everest all the way, Cracked, I am dissapoint)

But the church's response to the Copernican theory of orbital mechanics wasn't skepticism. It was to simply deny, condemn and excommunicate. Skepticism implies that you're looking for evidence. The Church didn't want evidence, in fact it disregarded all of Copernicus's evidence (and Galileo's while we're at it). They just wanted it to go away and let things stay as they were.

Trueeeeee, my bad.

[jfrey]

the middle path, the best energy consumption, the optimal way

It's important to note that this is situational. It can't be applied to all ideas.

For example, a middle course between a good choice and a bad choice isn't better by the nature of it's compromise. It is at least poor, and may even in fact be worse than the bad choice, because it's seeming reasonableness (achieved by compromise) may provide an umbrella under which bad choices can flourish.

[alexa.]

I mentioned Dao, cuz the backbone of that way of thinking, the Dao de Jing (or Tao te Ching; I don't really know how to write it in english), includes what you've said. Philosophy is a great tool to develop your thinking too, but since it has some connection to mysticism and it has funny ideas, it has been discouraged. It has become too factual for the religious people, and too mystical for the scientific people, which is a shame really.
You might end up with some garbage in your head now and then if you don't enforce that critical thinking filter all the time; but I don't try to fight it as much. I don't mind getting a bit dirty, but if I see the dirt, I'll wash it off lol. Noone likes being stale
Like choosing between disinfecting yourself all the time so that you don't have any bacteria on you, and taking a shower when you're dirty. At least from my point of view.
I understand both perspectives tho, only this one is more natural to me, so I live by it.

[jfrey]

I think philosophy and science are the same thing (conceptually). Both are studies of what things are, how they work, and what they mean to us. The only difference is the level of abstraction. You'll notice that the more concrete the subject of a philosophy the more closely it moves towards the realm of science, and the more hypothetical a theory or study in science, the more it resembles philosophical thought. And these are constantly shifting as we learn more, and as new ideas emerge.

Whenever these are not the same thing, they are either pseudo-science or mysticism, both of which should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism in my opinion.

[D.o.S.]

What's your strata for levels of fluffheadery, though?

[jfrey]

What's your strata for levels of fluffheadery, though?

I don't know quite how to answer that question...

I have absolutely no belief in anything that there isn't solid evidence for. And as Christopher Hitchens was wont to say, even if I were to see something fantastic I'd think it "more likely to have been mistaken than have witnessed the laws of nature being circumvented". I am willing to consider the possibility of anything that is not logically impossible, however, it is consideration only, until I am presented with compelling evidence. I am skeptical even of my own senses until I have sufficiently studied a thing. And, I have absolutely no tolerance for anyone imposing their beliefs, superstitions, etc. on my reality.