UFOs also have rational explanations that do not require space aliens.
You know, this thread has been hijacked so early and so thoroughly that it serves no purpose. May as well close it.
I think it’s really a case of “even a stopped clock…”
I don’t think ESP is totally out there, not in the sense that some people actually have ESP, but in the sense that it isn’t impossible to predict the future to a limited degree, a lot of people who claim to have ESP (that I’ve met) predict glaringly basic things (what someone said, what someone had for lunch, a specific part in a play they have never seen). I think the brain just gets to thinking, in dreams, while bored, whatever, it then constructs a logical scenario without much context and then there’s always at least a small chance that the scenario will eventually occur as imagined, what most people ignore is the random disjointed thoughts that have nothing to do with anything (and hence is unreliable so you can’t really say you have some ability). Similar things happen here, a kid just strings random things together in their mind, think it sounds about right, and combined with the imagination children are known for having tell people about it, eventually something is bound to be right or close enough to reality to stick. Try to not put a block on your random disconnected thoughts sometime, I don’t and it’s almost creepy what you can come up with sometimes that can actually turn out to be real.
Edit: You also can’t rule out people’s, especially children’s, ability to convince themselves things they imagined were real just by thinking about it enough and forgetting to remind themselves it’s fake. It’s entirely possible that one kid had actually totally convinced himself that he died in WWII when it just started out as thinking “I wonder what it would have been like to fly a plane in WWII” after seeing a movie.
OK, I’m going to be sincere now, since this is a perfect example of what I was hoping to imply. The skeptical mindset or whatever you want to call it is so firmly ingrained in some quarters that it dismisses out of hand “space aliens” as a fairy tale even though there’s nothing in science per se that precludes such an explanation. And I notice that your haste to dismiss the possibility of space aliens as a way to establish your skeptical credentials and show you’re not one of those people who believe in such things.
That’s it, and sorry for yankin your chain.
No, there’s nothing in science to preclude aliens visiting the Earth. Maybe they have generation ships and they came all the way out to the lonely end of a spiral arm just to stick things up farmers’ butts. But really, how likely is it? I dismiss them out of hand because there are any number of more reasonable explanations.
As far as ghosts, there is no scientific evidence for them. But my coworker believes in them and I can’t seem to convince her that there are rational explanations. (And my boss came in with an ‘orb’ photo. I tried to tell them it was just light on dust, but they weren’t having it. :rolleyes: )
Actually, he didn’t say he didn’t think there were no ETs, he said
which is a perfectly reasonable thing to think, since we have no evidence, other than anecdotal, indicating that ETs have visited this planet.
Direct personal insults are forbidden in this Forum.
This is a Warning to refrain from such behavior in the future.
[ /Moderating ]
I took the term “liar” (and the other items on Koxinga’s list) to refer to those people who tell stories about their children speaking to the dead, not to mean Johnny. I must have conflated it with Czarcasm’s list.
Well, I was trying to satirize Czarcasm’s list to some extent, but I guess it wasn’t taken as such.
I still don’t get this thread. So we’re not hoping for supernatural occurrences, but we’re still assuming the story is true at face value… why? And other than the blind pig/truffle explanation (which has been given), what are we hoping for that is not pseudoscience? The fact we’re accepting tall tales at face value and casting about for explanations already puts this outside of rational behavior, because the rational thing to do is test the proposition.
If Johnny considers this he might understand why he was met with skepticism and a bit of hostility. Nobody likes a question being begged at them.
I don’t think it’s any kind of science, pseudo or otherwise. Sometimes things happen we can’t explain, and that’s that. It can’t be repeated or reproduced in controlled circumstances, so our mindset directs us simply to forget it.
I would think it would have been obvious. I humbly request tomndebb to review post 11 in light of post 5.
I have a simple rational explanation for the child’s story-
His Grampa came to say goodbye to him.
And I scoff, not at science, but at “SCIENCE!!!” channeling Dr. Magnus Pyke
Yup. When the kid said, “He’s gone.”, he meant the Gramps came to visit him, wearing that shirt, then left.
Usually at this point, the teller of the tale starts adding details that doesn’t make this possible, “clarifying the story” so to speak, which is why speculating on the possibilities of anonymous and unverifiable stories is a fools errand.
The OP seemed to be asking for plausible, ordinary explanations to what some would conclude are supernatural phenomena. For instance if a child claimed to talk to his grandfather, who died before he was even born, how could that be explained without resorting to supernatural, magical, and otherwise non-scientific reasoning?
My reply was in the vein that kids have more abilities than we think they do and if we gave them more credit, we wouldn’t be so shocked in the first place. You thought I was about to leap to the conclusion that “And talking to ghosts is one of them!” when in fact, it was not. In short, I’m arguing on the “It wasn’t a ghost” side of this debate.
I posted, These don’t explain everything of course but it’s a start.
Maybe the kid saw a photo of his grandpa and somehow extrapolated that with some imagination and “saw” a ghost of him, so that’s explainable.
In another thread IIRC (possibly the one linked by OP but maybe not), someone said that a child could predict when the phone would ring. For a logical, plausible, non-supernatural explanation on that, I got nothing.
Indeed. Everyone remembers the creepy moment when the kid seemed plugged into the spirit world and forget the 99% of the rest of the time when he was prattling on about the latest action figure.
It is a matter of annoyance to me that any such discussion as this rapidly falls into the “presume extrasensory phenomena” vs. “nope, can’t happen” camps. I feel that there are four cautionary notes that must be kept in balance:
[ol]
[li]Subject all such reports to skeptical analysis, remembering that memory is known to “fill in the details” between what is actually obseerved and what close observation would have revealed.[/li][li]Remember that anything can be ezxplained away by thoroughgoing skepticism, including actual observed phenomena.[/li][li]Analyze the actual data; don’t make assumptions about what words imply.[/li][li]Remember that statistically, coincidences are not only possible but mandatory – and that the unusual is what sticks with one. Very few people remember what they were doing the afternoon of November 21, 1963 – but far more can describe what they were doing 24 hours later.[/li][/ol]
To set an example far removed from the above, consider this: Prehistoric North African rock paintings and at least one Sumerian statuette depict a stocky hooved animal with palmate broad flat “horns” above its brows. There are three plausible explanations for this: (1) It is a “fantastic beast” like the sirrush, a melange of body parts from various beasts like dragons or unicorns; (2) it’s intended to represent the European elk (=American/Canadian moose); (3) It is a stylized representation of the extinct Sivatherium, a giraffe relative with similar characteristics (the “horns” being heavy ossicones) known to have survived into the Holocene (to at least 8000 YBP). While a thoroughgoing skeptic would regard it as a ‘fantastic beast’, in my opinion explanation (3) is the most likely – even though it requires an otherwise unfounded presumption. (The elk are not known to have ranged anywhere near tbat far south, nor are the Sumerians and North Africans likely to have come in contact with any peoples who knew the elk.)
In my own ‘theophanic’ experiences, I have had to exercise extreme care to avoid ‘contaminating’ my description of the phenomena by ‘filling in details’ based on what I personally believe the events to have been (which is why ‘theophanic’ is in quotes). So I recognize the difficulty in giving an accurate ‘white on this side’ report of experiences.
My own experiences with ‘telepathy’ are apropos – if you know someone well enough, care about them enough, you will be able to ‘read their mind’ in a given circumstance, not because you have become possessed of E.S.P., but because you know their thought processes and emotional reactions well enough to accurately predict in real time what is happening in their mind in that circumstance.
Similarly, we do not know, in the sense of a universally accepted factual datum, what if anything happens to a persona after the death of the body it inhabits. The data at hand indicate that in well over 99% of all such cases, there is no phenomenological evidence of any persistence of the persona – but there are rare reports of something happening that is ‘in character’ for the deceased to have done, as in the example Mr Bus Guy gave. Yes, these can be explained away by the sort of skepticism Czarcasm desscribes. And in some cases, such as Hal Briston’s daughter’s comment, the law of coincidence may well apply – with a child telling her parents a large number of random things, many of them the product of imagination, evry so often there will be a ‘hit’ which seems spooky. If a thousand children tell their parents a bluebird is about to land on the fence, the 999 times this is said with no bluebird extant will quickly be forgotten, but the time it is followed by a bluebird landing on the fence will be remembered.
In sum, apply healthy skepticism to ‘paranormal’ phenomena, but do not let your worldview intefere with objective data analysis. To assume that a reported “example of survival” or “clairvoyant occurrence” most be bodus is eqally in error as credulously assuming it to “prove life after death” or E.S.P.
No, what I thought was that you were investing children with other vaguely stated powers which you failed to support, some of which were wildly inconsistent with what I know to be true about cognitive development.
“The race may not always go to the swift, nor victory to the strong … but that’s how you bet.” While either side may be in error, equality doesn’t enter into the picture.
Huh? Multiple people pointed out that some phones produce a high pitched noise before they actually ring; a noise too high for adults to hear. It was even mentioned that some young people these days use custom cell phone rings designed to be too high for older people to hear ( like teachers, say ).
In fact, I recall hearing that “pre-ring” myself as a child, but hadn’t thought of it for years.
And here’s the thread, which is indeed the one in the OP.
As the OP stated in his 2nd sentence,
I thought about posting in GQ, but I think the answers will mostly be opinions.
As such, I didn’t expect to cite things. But OK. Mind you, I’m not a clinical psychologist so I just did a quick google.
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You seem to accept my premise that children are language learners.
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Body language:
*Children read body language and tone of voice very clearly. *
http://www.cleverparents.com/2008/05/29/the-connected-parent-helping-children-with-separation-and-divorce/
Children read body language: closed,aggressive, or “mean” body language
indicates to the child that he/she should be guarded.
http://www.msbar.org/admin/spotimages/1927.pdf
Children can read body language… they hear more than your words.
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:hXzzHebHMO8J:www.nps.k12.nj.us/Presentations%2520and%2520Resources/NewarkWelcoming%2520All!%2520%2520The%2520Vision%2520of%2520Inclusive%2520Education.ppt+"children+can+read+body+language"&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
- Sensory world:
Basic research has revealed that the chemical sensory world of children is different from that of adults, as evidenced by their heightened preferences for sweet and salty tastes.
Touch—Kids depend on a sense of touch more than other senses, in part
because the touch receptors are more developed.
Smell—The roof of the mouth has 10 million special receptors called
olfactory epithelium that are stimulated by odors and send information to
the brain. Smell tends to peak at about age 10.
Taste—The olfactory cells in the nose work with the taste buds to help
the brain figure out what it’s tasting. Teenagers have an especially good
sense of taste, but the brain continues to register information that
reminds us that when something smells rotten, we shouldn’t eat it.
http://www.dmns.org/NR/rdonlyres/76099273-EE79-4682-90AC-AD35A6CF5C25/2785/FebMarchMM.pdf
- I’m not sure know how to defend the idea that if someone is younger, they haven’t had as many experiences.
What do you consider vague and what do you consider to be wildly inconsistent with what you know about cognitive development?
@Der Trihs: Thanks for the posts. I didn’t read every post but I recalled the example.