Like if you discarded your priors about how nature worked, would you be able to conclude that supernatural claims are bogus methodologically rather than being inconsistent with well established theory? — fdrake
inductive sense — Sam26
Hume's The Problem of Induction means that the so-called laws of nature aren't immutable. They could change at any moment as doing so doesn't entail a contradiction i.e. they're contingent truths, not necessary ones. — Agent Smith
How about just requiring just enough evidence for merely ordinary claims? Did Benjamin Franklin require to provide "extraordinary evidence" when he discovered electricity?I think they can and should be dismissed as utter nonsense, if what's claimed is that because something is unidentified or unexplained, it must be a sign of alien life, supernatural forces, or magic.
The reason for not believing in these claims is the same for everything else: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan was right. So there's no sense wasting time about it simply because we'd like to believe in it. — Xtrix
The reason for not believing in these claims is the same for everything else: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan was right. So there's no sense wasting time about it simply because we'd like to believe in it. — Xtrix
one doesn't have require ANY proof if they are merely providing a potential possibility to be examined — dclements
By expecting those who are trying to explained unknown phenomenon in ANY scientific field to provide an unreasonable amount of data you (or anyone else doing this) are in effect merely trying to maintain the current status quo in order to prevent people from being able to come forward with ideas to challenge that which is the accepted "truth". — dclements
what would you say about those of us who have ever seen something like a ghost, and/or been able to get am Ouija board or Psi wheel to move on it's own. — dclements
I think there can be, even if very rare, occasions and events that seem to be as some paranormal event happened or someone had psychic abilities. With people really believing it and not being some charlatans. Religious people would talk about miracles. These events have extremely low probability of happening, yet they happen. Somebody feeling that a loved one is in danger and does something to help the person and the person actually has been peril and the actions help that person. Or something like that. Totally possible.While it is almost a given that the majority of such instance where merely tricks and/or something other than psychic abilities/paranormal, I believe it is at least plausible a very small fraction of them could be real. — dclements
I think the simple fact is that we don't notice just how large the sample size is. If our story is some "Middle aged woman in Utah in 1932 had a psychic experience..." we can be sure that there have been a huge number of middle aged women and not only in Utah every year when the astonishing consequence of events hasn't happened. — ssu
But if the laws of nature are in fact statistical — Srap Tasmaner
It doesn't make it a non-physical event. I am of the opinion that if something cannot be explained by physics, it's likely that our understand isn't yet correct or we simple are asking wrong questions.I just don't see much justification for reaching for this "physics says that's impossible" line. — Srap Tasmaner
You seem to want to haul them back out for people who say there are witches — Srap Tasmaner
Do we really need to be nuanced about these things? — Xtrix
those who say there are witches are deluded — Xtrix
I think there can be, even if very rare, occasions and events that seem to be as some paranormal event happened or someone had psychic abilities. With people really believing it and not being some charlatans. Religious people would talk about miracles. These events have extremely low probability of happening, yet they happen. Somebody feeling that a loved one is in danger and does something to help the person and the person actually has been peril and the actions help that person. Or something like that. Totally possible.
The simple example that we can understand is winning in the lottery. Getting a multi-million win in a lottery is extremely improbable, yet enough play these games that someone wins it. Hence when we understand probability theory there's nothing astonishing in that one or two players get the big bucks as so many play. It would be for us something out of the normal if we would have only 5 people playing a lottery (like here getting 7 numbers right out of the numbers between 1 and 40, which has a probability of 1 to 15 million or something close to that) and one or two of them got the full jackpot. The probability would be so low that any Rand experiment, if happened to be conducted, would have serious problems to counter it.
So what's the error?
I think the simple fact is that we don't notice just how large the sample size is. If our story is some "Middle aged woman in Utah in 1932 had a psychic experience..." we can be sure that there have been a huge number of middle aged women and not only in Utah every year when the astonishing consequence of events hasn't happened. Yet people do dream of being in contact with others, alive or the dead, and then things turn out to be so. It's basically just like people who see omens of what the future will bring then look for those things they are waiting to see.
Or to put it another way: how many times your mother or grandmother has been worried that something has happened to you, when nothing has happened to you? Has that every happened to you? — ssu
In my first encounter with ghost I would have wrote it off as a hallucination/trick of the light if the person next to me didn't see it as well. To be honest all that happened was for a brief second or two I could see a dozen or so white or dark shapes that looked like people that where surrounding one person that was hanging our in a cemetery when I used a flashlight on them. After that they were gone. The other person that was there that saw it was in no mood to stay there any longer, and he really didn't want to talk about it much.I'd say that it's far more likely you've had an auditory or visual hallucination. I hear the voice of my dead grandmother sometimes, in passing. I'm not lead to believe that therefore she's in the next room, or is haunting me from the grave.
True, perhaps the laws of physics suspended for you momentarily -- but I wouldn't take that possibility very seriously. If I said to you that I had a friend who claimed he could fly, would you take this seriously?
Ouija boards don't move on their own. I stopped believing in fairytales and magic when I was a child. I recommend you do as wel — Xtrix
In my first encounter with ghost — dclements
As with Ouija boards, how do you know whether they move on their own or not if you haven't even used them or seen other people try to use them? — dclements
it could be done through a subconscious act. — dclements
opened minded enough to realize that not all the things that associated with "magic" are really magic at all but perhaps are caused by some kind of physical phenomenon we have yet been able to identify and understand. — dclements
There are no ghosts. There are no zombies. There are no goblins. — Xtrix
I have used them and watched others use them. It’s long been a claim that they have magic powers.
They don’t. — Xtrix
No, it can’t. It’s not plausible, it’s not possible, it’s not worth wasting time on. — Xtrix
On the other hand, maybe trying to be a little more open-minded about certain things may not be something that a person such as yourself is ready for and/or might help you in your life.Yeah, and maybe Santa really does exist after all. Maybe there really is that teapot orbiting Mars. Maybe I can fly like Superman. — Xtrix
It isn't heresy for someone to merely comment on the things they have seen in heard in their lifetime. — dclements
Since I have already stated that Ouija boards don't use magic, — dclements
On the other hand, maybe trying to be a little more open-minded about certain things may not be something that a person such as yourself is ready for and/or might help you in your life. — dclements
The evidence that belief can affect healing on a personal level is so overwhelming that it has been incorporated into science by giving the effect a name - 'the placebo effect'. If it turns out that thinking hard can make spoons bend, it will likewise become a recognized scientific fact, and given a suitable name - 'the Geller cutlery phenomenon', or whatever. Science is very open minded, and whatever can be demonstrated will be accepted.
Whenever things are consistently weird, they get renormalized. Inconsistent weirdness is dismissed.
One thing that I find odd though, is the lack of robust physicalists on the 'simulation' thread. Because if we are living in a simulation, all bets are off. The programmers can stop the program, change something and restart it. They can insert superman, or an intermittent fault to prevent the bomb exploding, or add a world teacher here and there. They can program the blindness of simulated observers to certain phenomena, or absolutely anything at all. Only those of us who have operators in the programmer's world could possibly know about such things. Funny how the old stories become believable when couched in familiar cultural language. — unenlightened
And yet you are not willing to consider me to be sincere when I have made such claims. The funny thing is you are so busy attacking straw men (with your arguments arguing against goblins and zombies which I have said nothing about) that you don't even know what I'm saying. All I said was I was at a cemetery on night (the actual cemetery happened to be Union in CT which has a history of things happening), one of the people I was with decided to walk further in than the rest of us, and when I shined a flashlight on him for a brief second I could see what appeared to be a combination of white and black shadows surrounding him and then they where gone. To me it would have been nothing more than a "trick of the light" (other than perhaps the sensation that there was a crowd surrounding the guy in the cemetery), except the person that brought us there said "Yes" when I asked him if he saw what I saw and he was visibly shaken from the experience.Stop with the victim act. I never said I considered it heresy — in fact I’ve said I think many people who make such claims are sincere.
And yet: there are no zombies. There are no ghosts. There are no goblins. — Xtrix
So they can move “on their own”, but that’s not magic?
Again: ouija boards don’t move on their own. There’s no evidence for this, and it contradicts everything we know about the world and physics — Xtrix
I see nothing in my statements to believe I am proposing childish claims, and the only reason I think you feel this way is because you have something against what I'm trying to say.True, I’m not very open minded when it comes to childish nonsense.
But you have every right to go on believing in fairytales. That’s your business. — Xtrix
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