Fifty years ago my aunt started channeling someone, as evidenced by automatic writing. Not just a little bit, but pages and pages of it.
She ended up institutionalized for schizophrenia. So you can add mental illness to the list.
That’s quite a laundry list of grade A #1 bullshit artists you’ve got listed there, so lets do this the easy way: Which one on that list would you say is the most legit of them all?
I never said I was not interested in scientific answers - I said I don’t how channelling information can be verified scientifically, which is not the same thing. The best answer I’ve gotten so far (for me) was about the ideomotor effect. But feel free to use your powers to move the thread where you wish.
Are you at all interested in giving us the best evidence you’ve got that supports channeling?
Why am I the first to mention Ockham?
“entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”
Adding the entities who are feeding questionable data to the mediums is unnecessary, as we know very well that the human mind is well capable of generating its own questionable information.
Depends on what you mean by “legit.”
All were “legit,” I believe, in the sense that they all truly believed what they claimed to believe. They were, I think, true believers - as opposed to con artists, out for a cash grab. Hell, Davis, a medical doctor, often treated his patients for free - not a smart tactic if your goal is to make it rich!
But if by “legit” you mean (as I suspect that you do) that their supposed revelations were really “the real deal,” handed down from some divine source beyond man’s ken, there’s no way for me to know. After all, as Hanegraaff has put it, “regardless of a scholar’s personal beliefs (or lack of them), the existence of non-existence of divine or sacred realities is simply beyond empirical verification or falsification by scholars qua scholars.” Much the same is true for many of the supposed “revelations” made by, or through, the individuals listed. So there’s really no way for me to figure out if any of them were, in that sense, “legit.”
What I can do is call bullshit on the claim that they were motivated by greed. On that subject, I can say for sure that all surviving evidence goes against it.
If something can’t be verified scientifically, then it can’t be verified. There’s no other way to verify such sorts of claims.
I gave it already some posts back - i.e. read the Seth books and watch the videos and listen to what people that were there at that time had to say about it all - that’s the best I have currently off the top of my head. There’s loads more evidence around but I can’t remember all that I’ve read here and there over the years. And that radio show someone else mentioned earlier is worth a listen also.
Does this pendulum thingy work if you suspend it from something you’re not touching, like a tripod?
Yeah, it is. What method would you use to establish the factual nature of something, other than science?
My vast psychic powers are what enabled me to know that this thread is best suited to IMHO.
That’s fine by me as long as people are still giving input now and again. Does moving from general questions to IMHO reduce exposure or something?
No, AFAIK. See herefor someone who did some tests on this.
An interesting take on dowsing and the ideomotor effect from someone at skeptics.stackexchange.com:
I can’t claim to be interested enough in the ideomotor effect to pretend to be able to describe the mechanism by which it operates, but it is my understanding that holding a given set of muscles perfectly still for any significant period of time is not really possible for a human being.
AND THE VERY NEXT DAY SOMEONE DIRECTS YOU TO LOOK INTO HIM AND HIS WORK???!!!??? THAT PROVES IT MUST BE TRUE!!!heh
I’m not particularly interested in crossing that line, but if you insist that it must be crossed:
(in deference to Mangetout’s numbering above:
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They are sincerely deluded.
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They are insane.
I read most of When Prophecy Fails. Then, I lost the book. The book centers on the case of a woman who I am sure was not a conscious fraud. She was just a deluded moron. She didn’t want fame. She didn’t want money. She wanted purpose in her life and to do what she thought was right. So when the ‘alien guides’ told her a flood would soon destroy the world, she tried to warn people.
RE The Ideomotor Effect And Channeling
I believe something analagous to the ideomotor effect is going on. As I understand it, the ideomotor effect works partly due to subconscious movements and partly because our muscles are never completely still. Our mind certainly has subconscious elements, and is never still. If I ask you to just say the first thing that comes into your head. I’ll get something. Some channelers are sincere people who are deluded and just spouting stuff as directed by their subconscious.
What evidence is that? I’m prepared to listen, but spiritualists etc have been using the tactic of declaring themselves holy and humble and disinterested in money - while quietly raking it in - since forever. It’s pretty much an essential for anyone in this game to do and say everything they possibly can to give the impression they are not in it for the money, because if there are any signs to the contrary, the suckers are going to be more skeptical.
Emphasis added. Dude, seriously…
OK. Fair point. But then personally I tend to do at least a bit of basic research about both sides of a controversial issue before I start saying I definitely believe in something.
*“The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.” * -Carl Jung
I’ve cut much of your quote but here’s the thing: there is a tiny element of truth in what the author of your quote is saying, but it’s not important. It is true that no-one can set out a detailed mechanism of the ideomotor effect. But that is true of most psychological effects: our knowledge of the inner workings of the brain is very crude. At this point however the objective fact is that the ideomotor effect occurs. There are three possible explanations for the ideomotor effect. The first is that the subject is moving the pendulum (or whatever) consciously (fraud). The second is the subject is moving the pendulum subconsciously (which is unremarkable even if the mechanism is not understood). And the third is that some weird magik is making the subject move the pendulum in ways that are indistinguishable from how the subject might move the pendulum consciously or subconsciously.
The third possibility cannot be ruled out. One of the things that most wise skeptics realise is that there are weirdass possibilities that cannot be disproven, and you can waste a lot of breath trying.
But there is no real reason to believe in those possibilities without evidence, and if you do so you are probably being taken for a sucker.