Are thoughts transcendant?

Maybe you're not perceiving enough. I assure you that there's more out there in this universe than you're perceiving, if you're saying that it's not enough for you.Look out the window at your lawn. If you can envision a cube, one meter on each side, and imagine this cube sunk halfway into your lawn so that half of the cube was full of soil, imagine then that you were to take everything currently located in that cube and teleport it into a laboratory.You could spend a hundred lifetimes studying everything that was going on in that cube. Potentially millions of individual organisms, each with countless chemical life processes occurring every instant. Predator-prey interactions. Reproduction and population genetics.And that's just the biology. The chemistry that was occurring in that cube could keep a university busy for a century. The geology of the soil in that cube could take a generation to study in depth.And can you imagine how much more there would be to discover if, wonder of wonders, a squirrel had managed to be trapped within that cube's volume?I can think of nothing more meaningful than a life spent plumbing the mysteries of that cube. And how much more meaningful that knowledge - that struggle - would be, for it being hard. It's not easy to follow the strictures of rigorous scientific inquiry. Certainly nowhere as easy as spirituality or theology, which simply require an indolent fascination with one's own fantasies.So for someone to say that they would be disappointed if "this was all there is", is to be simultaneously ignorant and arrogant in my eyes. People only say that when they have no idea of what is going on around them at every second. When you truly get an idea of the complexity of the operation of the universe at literally every level, it's incomprehensible to me that someone would shrug and say "well, it's just not enough."Not enough? The whole universe is not enough for you? Is it possible, maybe, that you say that because you don't know what's going on around you?

Right, because that would be ridiculous and the people that do it are obviously frauds.Telepathy, though, that's completely fucking reasonable.Seriously. I can understand the people who don't believe in any woo (because I'm one of them), and the people that will believe literally any woo that you put in front of them (because they don't have any idea how to be skeptical of anything.) What I don't understand is the people who reject one woo at the same time they defend another. "Aliens? Oh, that's BS; but Bigfoot is totally real." "There's no such things as mediums, but telepathy is totally possible."There's an equal amount of evidence for all woo, by definition - none. It's impossible for me to understand the people who think that a total lack of evidence proves their own personal woo at the exact same time that the exact same lack of evidence disproves everybody else's. Please contact the James Randi Foundation and win the 1 million dollars. Even if you don't need the money it's beyond selfish of you to keep these otherworldly gifts to yourself. Just think how many lives/time could be saved at the airport if you could be employed, probing minds to find the suicide bombers. Every minute you're not doing this, people are dying as a result. How selfish can you be, Petro?

I don't know what you thought you were looking at, but James Randi doesn't proctor the test, and the payout isn't according to whether or not you convince him. He doesn't own the money; it's set aside in an independently-run trust. It's really not even up to Randi whether or not it gets paid.So you're completely wrong, and not only that, you're libeling a world-class humanitarian and educator because you're too chicken-shit to put your money where your mind-powers are. Bad form, bad form indeed. In an age of murder and world terrorism? Jesus, Petro, what the hell is wrong with you? People are being killed because their killer's minds aren't being read. What about the serial-murderer-rapist who has a little girl locked away somewhere, but he refuses to tell the police where, to play his sick little games?Why aren't you down there at the precinct reading his mind? Saving a life?Because you're either a chicken-shit or a liar, and it's a hell of a lot easier to claim magic powers and slander decent people on the internet than to face the fact that telepathy is impossible.

There's no such thing as energy in a "raw" or "pure" form.

Imagine that. If there's no proof from the senses, then where are those possibilities coming from?I can only think of one place - my own imagination. Given the propensity of imagination to create things that aren't at all true, why would I take that at all seriously? It's a good indication. Belief on the basis of no evidence, or no good evidence anyway, has turned out to be false in every single case.There's a vast weight of precedent against you, LL, when you choose to go "off the rails" and just believe in any old thing at all, just because you'd like to. Nobody has ever been right by jumping to unsupported conclusions, except by happenstance. So if they're right, why aren't they out there making themselves useful? If someone can read minds, why aren't they out there reading the minds of terrorists and child abductors?You're all like "oh, telepathy, no big deal" but the capacity to peer into people's inner lives would fundamentally change criminal investigations, potentially for the better. You need to think it through. If someone really has an astounding gift of telepathy, and they're squandering it to fuck around on the internet or whatever, don't you have to ask how someone could be that selfish?People are literally dying because of the secrets that some people have, 3000 people in the middle of Manhattan as the most immediate example, and fucko over there with his supposed mental telepathy is all like "saving lives...yawn...can't be bothered." I mean, he's either a liar, mistaken, or the world's biggest, most selfish asshole - don't you think? How could it be otherwise?

Why? Doing regular human things is at my beck and call. When I want to move my arm, I will it to move and it does.I don't have hearing only on Fridays and vision every second Labor Day. What you're talking about is an excuse. Obviously, it "only works sometimes." Those times that it "worked", it had worked by chance. When someone talks about a "power" they have that they can only get to work "every once in a while", they're talking about the times that it just happened to work by chance.Obviously. So why don't the fraudsters say that until afterwards? Why is it that, before the test, they claim they can do it at will and under any circumstances, and it's only after they fail that they come up with some ad hoc rationalization?Because it's bullshit. Surely any reasonable person can see that. They're so wrapped up in believing they have some kind of woo power, that when it's abundantly established under controlled conditions that they don't, they can't believe it. It's pathetic. I know that the police have occasionally employed "psychics", but in the entire history of law enforcement, no psychic has ever led to any resolution in a crime. If Petro would be the first he could revolutionize anti-terror efforts. But he doesn't - because he knows he's wrong. I keep an open mind, too, but my mind is only open to that which the evidence supports. There's far, far too much garbage out there to keep a mind open to just whatever blows in. I doubt it. Particularly not if they're not scientists. I do truly believe that nothing in this life is more enriching than evidence-based inquiry into the natural world, and anyone who is put in a position to do that should consider themselves blessed. The subconscious doesn't know anything but what the senses tell it. Meditation has the same imagination problem. There's no such thing as the "collective unconscious." We're not connected in a hive mind, Linda. The imagination. Everybody has one and it's always working. Shouldn't that make us very skeptical of the veracity of the "truths" we believe independent of the information from our senses?Haven't you ever had a dream? Doesn't that make it abundantly obvious that our minds can't be trusted to get reality right without verification from our senses? It just makes you gullible. Cold, today. My wife's father went to college in Hastings, too.

It's not at all obvious that there's any means by which fantasy can be distinguished from reality, except scientific investigation and logic.That's the problem. Maybe you think your meditations are telling you something true, but how do you know? How do you know it's not just your imagination, not God? How do you distinguish false meditation from true? False revelation from true?

I don't get it. What's the point, here? I don't see where Quetzal said that philosophers were idiots.Indeed if these great minds are wasting their time in the made-up field of philosophy, more's the tragedy.

Why do you say it can't be investigated scientifically? Why do you say that science - empiricism - couldn't help them decide? Why do you say that the condition of humanity isn't a scientific question?You're just setting some things, arbitrarily, outside the scientific purview with no indication of why we should believe that is the case. The form and function of poetry could, and has, been empirically studied simply by reading and writing a number of poems of different structure and seeing how people react to them.Empiricism similarly gives us a guide as to whether or not we've correctly identified moral principles that give rise to greater good, and the extent to which they are doing so.Similarly, sociology can inform us as to the human condition - not based on the legendary observations of one Hindu prince, but on empirical observation of humanity in its current state. We study subjective experiences in the sciences every day, particularly in medicine, because people can communicate their subjective experiences to researchers. Being subjective doesn't set something outside the purview of empiricism.There's no reason to arbitrarily set things "out of bounds" of science, particularly because to be out of bounds of science is to be out of bounds of any means of distinguishing truth from fiction. There's nothing in the "personal sphere of experience" that's worth abandoning truth and embracing fantasy.

Science is just a rigorous form of empiricism. Any time you're trying to answer a question empirically, that's the beginning of science.If we're both talking about empiricism, then we don't disagree, we just weren't clear with each other.But religion, philosophy, and theology (and to some degree economics) aren't based on empiricism, they're based on sophistry. They're based on "revelation." They're based on feelings.None of those have any power to distinguish fact from fiction. That's the only point I was getting at.