Spirits and other incorporial things

Thanks for your reply. No; You can't! Probability has NOTHING whatsoever to do with it. You can reject the hypothesis that these experiences are grounded in reality based on your BELIEF that ALL reality can be scientifically explained. I've just submitted a topic about this where we can debate this further. No, I BELIEVE that there is more to reality than what is commonly perceptible by our 5 senses. I do not accept Purple's and Micah's experiences as undeniable fact. But I have no good reason to reject them either. Now if it was somehow revealed that Purple is only 15, then I would have reason to reject Purple's story.Just because someone else who also claimed to see things no one else saw was schizofrenic does not mean Micah's and Purple's visions were also caused by schizofrenia, therefore this is no good reason to reject them either. And how do you KNOW that these other people who very conveniently agree with you are not figments of your imagination as well?

Thanks for your reply. Once again, probability has NOTHING to do with it. Probability is something that helps us to determine the likelihood of an event occuring within a KNOWN sample space. Reality is not a condensed event and the sample space is infinite and unknowable. I'm glad you included the crucial words "I ASSUME". Sure the brain can be fooled, but that doesn't mean that everyone who claims an experience with the supernatural MUST have been fooled. I find it especially hard to see how Purple and his/her family members and friends and the next 10 owners of the house could have all been fooled by their brains when they see a piece of furniture randomly move across the room not once but many times over many years. I would also guess that the character the child spoke about was imaginary. But what if YOU saw the character this child was talking about too? And what if you saw that imaginary character enter the child causing the child's eyes to roll back in it's head and lose control of it's body? What if the person standing next to you did not see the imaginary character, but saw the child's reactions? What would you do? Would this be enough to change your mind, or would you say that the very distinct vision of this imaginary character was all in your head and just happened to coincide with the child's first ever seizure? I can think of a few reasons why dramatic interactions between our two worlds would not be desireable for God or Satan, but I have heard other 1st and 2nd hand accounts of such dramatic interactions beyond weird feelings (maybe not as dramatic as a horror film though).

Of course and we have more than 5 senses and you are studying science so you know it sometimes takes very high tech expensive equipment including but not limited to electron microscopes and particle accelerators to "perceive" some aspects of reality and we've no reason to think we have exhausted reality i.e. dark matter, dark energy, branes.But you are referring to something else to ghosts, spirits, demons, God, no? The claim is that these were present to the senses either in seeing some external thing, hearing something internally or externally, feeling goosebumps or temperature change, perhaps a smell.
But do you need to posit something external or mental illness, I think not. Particularly around the stress of death of a loved one the brain gets active. I've heard various stories and some include someone at a distance catching a vivid scent characteristic of a loved one perhaps coupled with a strong sense of their presence.I remember when I was in college being intensely in love. I'd be at work and suddenly caught the scent of the perfume my girl friend used. It was like it was there and I'd look around for her, but it was an olfactory hallucination brought on by the age old human mental illness called falling in love.There is an interesting type of brain damage I was reading about where a patient can recognize people but the visual cortex no longer is connect to the part of the brain where we feel our emotional connections to people. Patients with this disease will look at their mother and know it looks just like her but claim she must be an imposter. They say it looks like my mother but it's not. Talking on the phone they can hear her voice and that area still hooks up to the feeling area and they know it's their mother. Wish I could remember where I read this and what it's called.My point is that we are just beginning to unravel the brain's very complex modes of functioning and it's not commonsense stuff. And most of what I hear sounds more like unusual brain functionings rather than evidence of events of a supernatural kind. I say most, at the moment I can't actually recall anything that sounded like a legitmate account that didn't also sound like a confusion of the perceptual systems or misperception or some odd unusual brain functioning.My other objection to these stories is most of them, particularly the most believable of them involve fairly mundane stuff. The spirit world seems rather trivial and boring. They produces sounds, bumps in the night, move stuff, break a mirror perhaps. It's like healing miracles. People who have lost an arm don't suddenly regrow it. The healings are things that the immune system is capable of in extemis. So cancers dissappear in someone given a fatal diagnosis. But the immune system functioning in high gear can eliminate tumors.I also feel like it's your religious background that you are trying to maintain a rational for the Bible being literally true and that relies on their being supernatural evidences.I look forward to the discussion on this topic.lfen

This sounds like a hypothetical based on events told to you by a friend, IIRC? My first thought is I would suspect the memory and the timing. What you describe is a very stressful event and I've mentioned the distorting effect adrenlin can have. Would you like to start a topic on whether seizure are caused by demons or organic causes? I had a friend who was epiletic and perhaps because he got sloppy with his medication he would have grand mal seizure. I never saw any demons. And again why would antiseizure medication or some of the split brain surgeries serve to drive demons out? And what you described was a seizure and the individual should be medically examined and assessed whether anyone saw a demon or not.I don't think seeing is always believing obviously, nor hearing, no smelling, even touch can be fooled. As far as a house goes with walking furniture? I'd really want to have exhausted all possible explanations and that means bringing well trained people to study the problem. Naive observers can get things wrong. I'm not saying they are crazy but that it can take in depth investigation to locate the causes of some phenomena. And memory is not like a photograph that once taken stays the same except for some fading. Memories are dynamic and changed by other memories, beliefs, etc they do a lot more than fade.lfen

Yes, this is somewhat similar to the very first of many experiences my friend Micah had with the supernatural.I'm asking you to put yourself in his shoes. It seems like you're having trouble doing that since you do not really consider any of this to be a possibility. But stop for a second and consider it to be a possibility. Use your imagination.Someone is standing there with the child. This person looks as real or more so than anything else you've ever seen in your entire life. This is no chill or bad smell or feeling. Your longtime friend standing next to you cannot see the being. What would start going through your head? Then you see the being change shape and disappear into the child as the child experiences some kind of physical change that is observable to your friend standing next to you. You see the thing come out of the child and the child recovers. Then it comes over to you and tries to attack you, but blue light flashes out of you from nowhere and the being disappears.Perhaps you would try and convince yourself you were hallucinating. Perhaps you would go to a doctor and get an MRI of your brain. You would probably try and write it off as a strange coincidence and a brain fart, but could you in the end deny it and forget about it (ever seen Contact?)? ESPECIALLY if it happens to you many times throughout the next 3 years and if you meet other people who are not crazy that have seen similar things? I'm not at all saying that all or even most seizures are caused by demon possession. I have no way of knowing. Maybe you should ask Purple how he/she could have gotten all those thousands of things wrong? Purple sounds like a fairly scientifically minded individual.Sure, I would really love it if some professional "ghostbuster" scientists came in and checked every possible explanation while furniture was moving around and voices were coming from nowhere and beings were appearing and disappearing. I would like very much to have all doubts in my mind removed so that I could have tangible proof that what Purple saw was genuine evidence of Supernatural interaction.Let me ask you this though, if you had some friends that went on a trip to the mountains and came back and told you all about it, would you believe that they in fact went on the trip? Probably. You are biased because you have known them a long time and trust them completely. Furthermore they have no reason to lie to you.Now if some friends told you about experiences with the supernatural, would you believe them? Probably not. Why? Because you are biased. You do not believe in the supernatural, and in order to maintain this belief you will automatically accept any alternate hypothesis that relies on known scientific principles. You require a hefty amount of evidence to change your beliefs. And this is fine so long as you realize that these are only your beliefs and that you can't be sure whether or not you are right in dismissing their testimonies.

Thanks for your reply. Yes and no. This is why I find certain testimonies interesting where there were multiple witnesses. How do multiple people hallucinate the same things many many times over? There may be reasons for this beyond your comprehension. I don't see how this can be an argument because it is based on certain presuppositions about the spirit world and becuase it is based on a great lack of information.

I can and I'm going to. For the reasons I've already described. By having other people verify my observations of them. And, yes, I know where you're going with this; the term is called "solipsism." But here's the thing. It's possible that every single experience I have is simply a hallucination, or a simulacrum, or the Matrix. But assuming the simulacrum is perfect, it doesn't matter. The scientific method still makes accurate predictions about what I'll experience in the future, even if the phenomena it describes aren't actually real.Science is solipsism-proof. It doesn't matter if my DVD player is really real or not; the experience I have of watching a movie (tonight, we watched "Ed Wood"; great movie) is identical.But you want to be careful about invoking solipsism. It's like a dynamite vest that undermines not just my argument, but yours, too. I can easily turn it around and ask you how you know any of your experiences are real, and how you know that your friends even exist.

People redact their memories in the light of testimony from others. It's not so much that they're lying to fit in as it is that we use the same parts of our brains to replay memories as we do to recreate events as they are described to us.You may not see any reason to believe your friends are lying, and as far as they're able to tell, they may not be. But that still doesn't mean that they really experienced what they say they did.

Crashfrog and Hangdawg are discussing supernatural vs unexplained and undefined pheneomena. I would also put forth this addendum: When we dream, we "see" things. There is no light source for this. Supernatural events could be likened to a waking dream. Not to say that they are imaginary. I have had several such events in my life.
1) I distinctly heard voices come out of someone that were unexplainable. At the same time that these multiple voices came forth, my hair was standing on end and the air was electrically charged. I was under the influence of no substance, and two of my friends saw and were part of the same event. The fourth guy who had the voices was uncomfortable and reluctant to talk about the event except to say that he seemed to be a part of it but not the cause of it.
2) Once, when a relative died, I sensed the presence and the smell of that person at the time of death while I was at work miles from where they died. I did not know that they had even died until later.
I agree with Crashfrog in that we need not assume supernatural when these unexplained events occur. I will say that I have no other explanations that fit my explanations, however.

Well, it would definately shake me up I'm sure if I experienced something the way you described it. Okay, I would believe they went to the mountains. But let's say they also told me they caught a glimpse of bigfoot, bigfoot is supposed to have been sighted here in the pacific northwest. And lets say I knew them well and knew they tended to get excited by things and have an interest in weird stuff. I'd probably think they mistook a bear for bigfoot. I'd be skeptical about that part of the story even if I believed they were sincere in the telling and not putting me on I'd think it was a misidentificationI'll offer another possiblity that I would consider. There are some Indian and Buddhist practises about intense visualization that can result in seeing things that look real. I was reading the biography of an individual who became awakened by Ramana Maharshi to the non dual. He had been intensely devoted to Krishna and Radha and would chant and do devotions to them for hours. One night they appeared to him and he was deleriously happy and woke his wife to share the good news. She couldn't see them and he said that he could see through them but he prepared a meal for them and was just ecstatic. He was not schziophrenic he was holding a responsible postition at the time and taking care of his family. These kinds of things happen in India, just as Catholics tend to see visitations of the Virgin Mary. I'm totally ruling out mental illness.The highest teachings of Buddhism and Vedanta deny independent reality to these "visions". There value is primarily that they indicate someone has developed concentration or devotion to a high degree.
Those who have such visions are encouraged to NOT cling to them or think of them as something special but to see them as distractions to seeing the deepest truth of the Self. In Ramakrishna's case his devotion to the Divine Mother lead him to see her everywhere until he realized that her form was obscuring his experiencing God as the formless reality, and eventually her form dissolved so he could experience his essential being which is formless. So with my background I'd probably look to an explanation like this.Someone with a fundamentalist Christian background might experience these as independent spirits or demons obviously. I would guess that your friend Micah has a strong devotional nature and is very focused on his religion and so is mind is primed for these experiences. I'll admit my mind is not primed for visions or spirit visitations.My mother realised that I needed glasses in the third grade because I got angry and insisted there was no bird on the lawn that she was showing me. I was so near sighted I couldn't see it. Assuming something not too difficult to see however and both people can see and agree on things like who is in the room, but one sees a person and the other doesn't? Is it being seen with the eyes? That is are photons being emitted from the "visitation" striking one persons retina but not the other? Isn't it more likely that one person's brain's visual areas are creating the image and the other person's isn't?I know you don't think probability applies. A thread on theory of knowledge would be good to discuss all this in. I myself think probability is the basis of much of my view of the world and what I accept as plausible or not. I'll also admit I was more open when I was your age. I think the march of decades without any experiences of supernatural stuff and seeing lots of stuff debunked like psychic surgery and faith healing that I'm more skeptical now than when I was in college.lfen

Lets back up a minute.
1)You know these friends well. You can tell when they are prone to exaggeration based on excitement and when they have literally been shook by something. Which expression do you see in them? Are they so obviously affected as to be mentally persuaded or are they merely vibing off an adrenaline rush produced by a scary yet exciting unknown sighting?
2) Were there ever other sightings in that area? In our examples of supernaturally possible events, we are not alone in our stories.
It is good to be skeptical to a point, but to dismiss the supernatural as a possible explanation is biased from the point of view of a believer. I respect it as a scientific necessity, however. I would agree with you in that one must not lift up the event above God. God may allow us to experience certain things to draw us closer to Him and not to idolize the event itself. In my examples and in the examples of the others, perhaps these events were mean't as a personal affirmation and deepening of faith and were not mean't to be sensationalized in any way.This message has been edited by Phatboy, 11-21-2004 12:05 PM

Thanks for your reply. You mean because you're biased. Of course you can, and that's exactly my point which I hope to debate in the Is It Science topic. What gives you the right to say "I know" just because you BELIEVE all of reality can be discovered via the scientific method.

Yes, I know, but I'm talking about 3 people standing in a room hearing a voice coming from nowhere and then watching the furniture in that room re-arrange itself.You believe the improbable because you believe the alternative to be impossible even though you cannot explain why it is impossible.The ONLY unbiased objective way to look at this is to say, "I don't know."This message has been edited by Hangdawg13, 11-21-2004 12:37 PM

Yes. I'm biased in favor of the evidence, and in favor of the methodologies that have had great success in the past. In other words I'm a reasonable person. Not "I know" but "at this point, it is best to conclude." I'm not saying that the supernatural doesn't, for sure, exist. The way that the "supernatural" is formulated, I can't say that. But I can say that, at this point, there's absolutely no reason to invoke supernatural explanations when the natural ones, relying on mechanisms that are already greatly understood, suffice completely.

I suppose I do dismiss the supernatural as a possible explanation for a variety of reason. I suppose in practical terms that means I put it at the bottom of the list, the last thing left after everything else has been eliminated.I am not totally uninterested in non scientific explanations of the world. I am interested in the Chinese medical concept of qi and exercises of qi gong but I'm just not sure there is an energy called qi even though I've experienced what feels like energy flowing in my body. They could have developed healthy practises but mistaken the sensations of relaxation and blood flow in the body for energy flow. I would really look for explanations that could fit with what we know from science.I've not had any overwelming supernatural experience so that is undoubtedly part of my skepticism. I think you have hit on the function of these events. Science and technology effect changes in the world. One of the problems I have with the supernatural is it seems ultimately trivial. I know voodoo claims to be able to kill people but the cases I know of the person knew they had been cursed and I think it was a fear response.Faith healing has a host of frauds however I believe genuine healings have occured but I don't think they are of a miraculous nature. The mind is capable of a lot and is intimately connected to the immune system and positive attitude can effect the immune system.Going bump in the night, seeing a demon, seeing some one convulse in a trance these happen in voodoo for example but I don't see them as making changes in the world but are a passing "spiritual" entertainment without lasting effect except sometimes in the faith of the witness.Mass visions? A reach perhaps but people do influence one another. There are experiments where naive subjects are persuaded to make wrong evaluations because of the group suggestions.For me the most challenging things are those that arise as intuition that result in rescues or the sense of someone dying at the time they were said to have died. I don't know about these apparent actions at a distance but I'm not yet prepared to believe in telepathy either though I've had some hard to explain experiences myself in this area. I don't think of these as supernatural though more like unexplained intuition at a distance.lfen