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phantasmagorovich wrote:I believe there are certain states of entropy that create an order of higher magnitude.

Depending on what you mean by that, you might enjoy Stuart Kauffman's Origins of Order and James Gleik's Chaos

phantasmagorovich wrote:I believe that most things are understandable by using a feedback loop as a metaphor. (at least it's a better metaphor than a circle or a spiral)

Arguments that explain everything ... explain nothing

i like to think in terms of parallel universes and shit

for me, talking about esoterics is weird, because i've had many different viewpoints over the years. i've had precognitive dreams since i was five, and have long been aware of the permeability of space and time. despite this i was very scientific/cynical in my teen years; my circle vehemently rejected the label "hippie" with its perceived New Age/political baggage in favor of "freak" a la Frank Zappa. my second big excursion into psychedelics in the early 80s softened my brain more in this regard.

i believe that space/time is a continuum, not a line; that everything is happening at once (that literally "time is God's way of keeping everything from happening at once!"); and that events of sufficient magnitude cause ripples in space/time which allow precognition, because i've experienced this. i believe that reality is much more malleable than our conscious minds are capable of comprehending or controlling, and that this explains many apparently paranormal phenomena; i choose not to pursue that field of inquiry because i believe the dangers involved in seeking great powers outweigh the benefits. power corrupts, and great strength of character is required to remain uncorrupted; i don't have it. i also choose not to live in a world where the reality rules allow mages and demons to do their things, because i don't want that happening in my reality sphere.

i've wound up as a Christian of an odd and somewhat edge-of-the-camp-meeting sort, but i don't see that as contradictory to the rest of my weird epistemology. and i worry more about living correctly now than about my Eternal Fate...the lesson of every great religion i've ever known is that you take care of business HERE, and then God or some other cosmic sorter takes care of it later. worrying about the grade isn't going to help my classwork. but i don't believe in anything that isn't based either on scientific knowledge --OR-- on direct personal experience. my idea of the nature of the universe is based largely on Einsteinian and post-war physics; my religion came as the basis of prayers answered by a specific entity. my interest in UFOs rests on phenomena which still haven't been adequately explained, like the whatever-it-was my first wife and i saw in 1979.

Ignorance and (cognitive) error explain most apparently paranormal phenomena, and do so much better than magic.
The rest comes down to outright fraud.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUc_kATGgg[/youtube]

devnulljp wrote:Ignorance and (cognitive) error explain most apparently paranormal phenomena, and do so much better than magic.
The rest comes down to outright fraud.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUc_kATGgg[/youtube]

This is so awesome.
I had to stop it go have a cig and come back so I wouldn't wake up the little one with my

Derelict78 wrote:

gunslinger_burrito wrote: The universe, by nature, HAS to be infinite. Think about it. What's outside the solar system? Ok. What's outside the galaxy? Now what? and After that? There can't be a true beginning or end. That wouldn't make any sense.

What i am getting at is this.
the universe does not HAVE to be infinite but its difficult to wrap our brains around something so big let alone ideas like infinite.
also there can be a beginning and an end.
Im not saying I believe one way or another just pointing it out.
I dont like beliefs, I like Ideas they are much easier to change.

I agree, actually, at least on the point of ideas vs beliefs. I oftentimes come off a bit "preachy" or whatever when I get into these kinds of discussions. It's refreshing to hear other opinions and to have people point out my blunders.

It just seems like more and more discoveries lead to more and more discoveries, and that kind of cycle will just repeat on and on. This article is a bit of a read, but it's pretty neat. The author makes a decent case about parallel universes, which is what it's mostly about. One of the main ideas is that if our universe is made of a finite amount of elements, then, mathematically speaking, at some point the arrangement of those elements has to repeat itself. If you have five colored blocks, you can only stack them in so many different orders until one of the orders repeats. The article even mentions the idea of a donut or pretzel-shaped universe. But it also begs the question I basically posed, "if the universe ends at some point, what lies beyond the end?"

http://holtz.org/Library/Philosophy/Sci ... 202003.htm

devnulljp wrote:Ignorance and (cognitive) error explain most apparently paranormal phenomena, and do so much better than magic.
The rest comes down to outright fraud.
]

There was a book published (last year, I think?) called "Sleights of Mind," about this. It's mostly about magicians, but they touch on the paranormal. It's a great read.

There's a lot of shit I can't explain, owing to linguistic inadequacies, limited perceptions, and what have you.
There's a lot of shit I can't comprehend, owing to cognitive difficulties, faulty hardware, and what have you.
Generally, I find the idea of me understanding anything about anything a little silly.

I suspect the same holds true for most people.

Therefore, I bring you the only meaningful superstition:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE[/youtube]

Frankly, I'm downright disappointed it took 52 posts to get to this.

I keep an open mind. I've got friends who are into all sorts of stuff, I listen to it all.From those folks who are into food as medicine to the stones that heal you, folks who are into psychics. I don't pretend to have any answers. I have a belief in what is good and what is evil, and I have the humility to accept I am wrong, often, so I would never tell anybody their beliefs are incorrect.

Even the born again Christians I know, with their borderline racist bigotries, are entitled to be that way.

I've often fallen prey to trusting in fate and reason. But yeah, I try to observe it all, not judge etc.

At the same time, I'm also incredibly open to the idea of nothing existing, and everything being a fabrication of our incredibly complex brains doing mad shit to us for the craic.

i should clarify that i still apply a level of skeptical evaluation to my own beliefs, and i deliberately use the words "believe/belief" in this type of discussion to emphasize that it's just my hypothesis rather than the Way Things Are. there's a whole lot of stuff i don't buy into, either because it seems obviously silly/implausible or because its ramifications look dangerous, but i don't a priori say it's false. i've been wrong enough times in my life to know i ain't omniscient. on the other hand, i once horrified a room full of early 80s Greenie types by telling them that "when i hear the words 'New Age' i reach for my revolver."

devnulljp wrote:Ignorance and (cognitive) error explain most apparently paranormal phenomena, and do so much better than magic.
The rest comes down to outright fraud.

Yeah, cuz it's really hard to admit that there is 1% (i just popped a number) of things that may be legit but just have no explanation to them yet?
A person who goes to stare at the sun cuz he believes he can be immortal that way, or one person who tells you he can heal your cancer for 500$ are not proof that the third person can't do remote viewing/telekinesis/telepathy-empathy.
"Magic" or "paranormal" are words to be taken as placeholder names for things that are unknown yet, like dark matter is. We don't know everything and the attitude that we do just pisses me off. Yeah, there are a LOT of people who just don't think, use logic or rationalize; but it's balanced by the amount of people who forget that our logic is bound by the amount of knowledge we posses. Considering we know so little about the universe I rather refrain myself from telling someone he can't read minds cuz scientists tell him he can't. (but hey, cold readings? isn't that like, 'reading minds'? ;D) I would rather test his theory out in practice without biases. Hell, I won't know HOW it works exactly, but I'll see results (if there are any).

Overly-blown skepticism pisses me off. As does overly-blown mindless-faith.
Why did everyone forget about the middle way?
I blame fucking education for this gap. Science is presented as nerdy and stupid and lame, but it's fun, trippy as balls and useful. But hey. People don't like being nerds or sth. And I deem science too inaccessible for ordinary folk. You could pass the greater idea and physics logic to people, but I don't feel like that's being done in an appropriate manner.
Kinda brings me to this:
"... imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a tranformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, "that's a bird, baby, that's a bird," instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock irridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we're five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of disempowered perception, and what the psychedelics do is they burst apart this cultural envelope of confinement and return us really to the legacy and birthright of the organism. " - Terence McKenna

I believe we wouldn't even need psychedelics at all if we changed our own view of reality and allowed our imagination to enrich our knowledge, rather than stifling our imagination to gain a narrow perspective of knowledge.
And I understand that when you went to school, things were different and you guys had different points of view, and that you actually did use imagination, but that time has passed and the younger generations are working with dry, lifeless data. No wonder people don't like to study when everything is presented like "that's all you need to know".
People like unresolved questions, cuz it helps them understand what they do know, better, and lets them come closer to what may be the answer.

Anyway, I could rant on all day about it so I'll just stop now.

alexa. wrote:

devnulljp wrote:Ignorance and (cognitive) error explain most apparently paranormal phenomena, and do so much better than magic.
The rest comes down to outright fraud.

Yeah, cuz it's really hard to admit that there is 1% (i just popped a number) of things that may be legit but just have no explanation to them yet?

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).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

What evidence there is for any of this stuff is sketchy at best.

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.

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

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.

'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.

I'm an atheist. I also don't believe in an afterlife or anything similar. Nor do I believe in anything paranormal or supernatural.

I think some things we don't know about may be possible, but I have yet to see anything extraordinary demonstrated, nor any conclusive evidence on the existence of any of these things.

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

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OLPL5p0fMg[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KayBys8gaJY[/youtube]

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