Pardon? acrkesteray? What the hell is that? Google’s never heard of the word.
You don’t reconcile your position with what he has apparently measured. Does that mean you are simply able to live with two contradictory thoughts in your head, or that you have given up your former position or what?
I read it and could not find the author, feels like Craig Schaffner wrote it to me. Totally contrived. but fun.
So what is your response to my last post?
—I think you are really trying to understand, but I can’t follow your line of reasoning.—
My line of reasoning is this: you believe that you have ruled out all the perfectly conventional interpretations of various phenomena. But how did you rule out all the other possible explanations (those which are unconventional), of which there are almost infinately many?
—Please understand that terms like cold reading and other fake methods are not done. The only ones that raise this are the skeptics, and it is solely their views.—
You’ve missed the point. How do YOU know that they are not done in a specific case. I’m not saying here that no one talks to to the dead. But Edward or Van Praagh specifically CLAIM to be doing something more than something like cold reading. How do you verify THEIR claims, when cold reading can produce what look to almost any observer to produce the same results?
—Psychics have been around for thousands of years, the Delphi Oracules, were punished if their predictions were not accurate.—
Beside the point. I’m not asking you whether there are any real psychics, but rather how YOU know that Edward and Van Praagh ARE using psychic powers to speak to the dead.
—If you, or anyone else would care to offer some, then tell me the proof that shows James Van Praagh is a fraud—
First of all, I’m not asking right now how one can know that they are frauds: I’m asking how YOU know that they are the real thing when it’s so easy to duplicate, especially for Tv, the real thing using perfectly conventional techniques.
I’m sorry, I did misspell it==ackesteray is correct. I doubt you will find it in the dictionary, it’s a psychic word.
def:
Event A = organized thought
Event B = unorganized thought
ackesteray happens when event A is intersected by event B for the purpose of misdirection.
Say you are standing at the craps table in Reno, you’ve just made six straight passes when you feel something pressing against your arm. You look around and there is this most gorgeous member of the opposite sex looking at you as if you were a lollipop saying, “I sure would like to get to know you better.” At the same time the croupier is palming in a pair of house dice. Well you get the drift.
I am not sure if “Doc” is finished posting or not, but the ackesteray is over.
Love
Leroy
Oh, the second part of your question is simply an error on my part, nothing real meaningful about it, hey, we all make mistakes.
Some are saying I don’t answer their questions. I have very little time to devote to posting, please ask only one question at a time. Also I will not attempt to answer questions unless they are honest and sincere, No poking fun, I just don’t have the time.
Love
Leroy
I had an actual, verifiable psychic experience when I was about 16 years old and I remember it like it was yesterday.
I was in bed on a Saturday morning, sleeping very late and alone in the house when the phone rang.
Oddly, the very sound of the ring caused me uneasiness and I remember cringing during the silences waiting for the next ring and hoping whoever it was would give up.
The phone finally stopped ringing and I drifted off to sleep only to be awakened again by the phone. Now the uneasiness was worse, each ring sent a throb of pain through my head and generated an increasing feeling of nausea but I still refused to answer.
The foreboding was so strong I wanted to run and hide. I knew with absolute assurance that I didn’t want to pick up that phone. I put my head under the pillow and shivered as the phone continued to ring.
After about the fifth call, the nausea and pain in my temples became so bad that I crawled from my bed into the bathroom and vomited, cold sweat popping out on my forehead as I heard the ringing phone through the bathroom door.
After almost a half hour, the phone stopped ringing and blessed silence descended on the house as I drifted off to sleep.
I awoke from a heavy, dreamless sleep a couple of hours later as my parents came home. My step-mother was bubbling with the latest news. “Did you hear what happened? Bill (my boss at the time) had a wreck out on highway 52. He’s OK but the truck is a write-off, you oughta see it! We saw him on the way home and stopped to see if we could help. He said he’d been calling you for hours before he left his house, he wanted you to fill in for some guy that couldn’t make it today.”
I would have been in that truck, maybe hurt and maybe killed if I had picked up the phone.
So, my one true experience with the Great Beyond. I learned a lot that morning.
The first thing I learned was to never, ever, drink an entire bottle of tequila and top it off with beer as I had the night before. The next thing I learned was to unplug the damned phone when I expect to have a hangover. 
Testy
My answer is the same as the first time, things I can’t or don’t know is simply things I can’t check or eliminate. Perhaps if you give me a list of some of those “things” I could better answer you.
Most of the rest of your post centers around how can I tell a real psychic from a fake one. The old saying “it takes one to know one” is appropriate. I look for a lot of things, the words used, the attitude, the feelings I get from them, and sometimes I can see what they see. I don’t remember ever being totally wrong about anyone’s psychic ability. John and James ability appear better than it is due to film editing, but I am comfortable with the fact they are both real psychics.
If others don’t agree it’s ok, I wish we all could have a reading from them, It would be great fun.
My ability is brittle, it comes and goes, sometimes I can do wonders and sometimes not. I claim no ability so I won’t make a fool of myself.
I am called Yoda were I work and when one of the women get pregnate they ask me what the sex of the baby will be, I have missed one time in about 20 tries. A skeptic once laughed at me and pulled a coin out of his pocket and asked me to to call the flip. After 7 straight accurate calls he pocketed his coin and walked off. Now could I repeat this, who knows, maybe, maybe not. The psychic world is not science it is not black and white ever.
Love
Leroy
—My answer is the same as the first time, things I can’t or don’t know is simply things I can’t check or eliminate.—
Then how can you claim to know that your particular interpretation, and no other, is the correct one?
—My ability is brittle, it comes and goes, sometimes I can do wonders and sometimes not.—
This alone is a mindset crucial to effective cold reading (in this case, of yourself). Discounting or explaining away misses makes the hits stand out more clearly, pulled from their context of probability.
—I am called Yoda were I work and when one of the women get pregnate they ask me what the sex of the baby will be, I have missed one time in about 20 tries.—
Again, regardless of whether you can tell better than chance, how do you know that your ability to determine sex is psychic? What if it is some sort of unknown pheremonal reaction that you are sensitive to?
—A skeptic once laughed at me and pulled a coin out of his pocket and asked me to to call the flip. After 7 straight accurate calls he pocketed his coin and walked off. Now could I repeat this, who knows, maybe, maybe not.—
How do you know he didn’t walk off, snickering, having tested out his coin trick on you? Controling a called coin is actually one of the easier magic tricks.
But more importantly, runs of 7 accurate calls are not impossible. As we noted in the discussion of PETWHACs before, they are, in fact, almost inevitable given enough people out there calling coins. That is, given that a certain number of people in the world who have called coins repeatedly, it would be MORE unlikely if no one ever called 7 in a row, or even 10 in a row, then if someone had. The event might seem amazing because it happened to you: but that’s beside the point: it had to happen to SOMEONE, and it happened to be you.
Indeed we get 256 people together and had them call coin tosses, which each winner moving on to the next round, by the end it would be inevitable that the remaining person would have called the coin correctly 8 times in a row. Inevitable… but how would that winner feel, even if they DID understand the math? Like some special power had been at work with them? It’s a hard feeling to shake.
Let me get this straight. I said that Doc Cathode had already explained in considerable detail his research and the difficulties that causes for your beliefs. I said that I’d really like to know how you reconcile your position with what he has apparently measured.
Your response was that “you don’t” but you seem to be saying that was a mistake. You seem instead to be saying that Doc Cathode has “ackesteray”
You explain that “ackesteray” is when unorganised thought is used for the purpose of misdirecting organised thought. You give an example of where you are gambling and doing very well, and then the croupier palms in “house dice” (I take it by that you mean loaded ie illegal dice, correct?) and suddenly a beautiful woman comes on to you (I take it that your suggestion is that the casino has organised this deliberately to distract you, right?). In other words the casino uses dirty tricks to throw off your “organised thought”.
You are saying that this is what Doc Cathode is doing to you? That his posts above in which he describes the research he has done, which he says contradicts your own views, are deliberate attempts at misdirection, that they are insincere?
Is that a fair summary?
[sub]“Ackesteray” is a term so obscure that Google can’t find one instance of its use on the entire internet, by the way…[/sub]
Leroy, you’re certainly up against a crowd here and I admire your stamina. However, having read this entire thread, there are a few things you have consistently avoided, and so again I request the following:
Please provide your source that Houdini’s wife Bess was convinced that a medium had relayed the correct codeword from her dead husband.
Please provide your source stating that “Randi does not allow a disinterested observer to watch”.
There are two further lines of reasoning which you have consistently failed to rebut:
The ability to translate only single letters in a name or word and then rattle off an entire sentence uttered by the spirit verbatim is inconsistent. The ability to see something so clear and unique as a face or a scratch on a chair and the inability to provide specific names, dates or map locations is inconsistent.
You have asserted it is possible to tell the difference between a real psychic and a fake, but nothing you have said about what the real ones told you has been outside Czarcasm’s synopsis of merely being “what you wanted to hear”.
Surely, if psychic ability exists, a psychic should be able to stand in front of an anonymous audience, close their eyes and say eg. “Joseph Krasinzky of Tyson’s Corner wishes to speak to his youngest daughter Rita following his death 3 months ago from pancreatic cancer. He thinks your son Kevin is more important than the job in Munich. Take him on holiday to that beach near Talahassee we went to when you were five instead.”
Not one? Otherwise it would be perfect for a googlewhacking word…
lekatt-
Sorry, personal anecdotes are not sufficient proof.
[nitpick]
Tracer, you don’t do 50% damage, you only have a 50% chance of causing damage from a corporeal source.
You must be thinking of attacking an ethereal skeleton with an ethereal sword
[/nitpick]
Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and again that anecdotes seem to be the only proof Lekatt needs and the only things he will accept as proof.
Lekatt, Lets assume researchers decide to examine 1000 individuals randomly chosen, to see if any possess psychic power. If, after 500 They haven’t found any yet who pass any test, they would be able to reasonably assume that the likelyhood of any of the others passing would be remote. That doesn’t mean the further tests would be called off, but it would cast doubt on the presence of psychic ability, since in a random sampling one could expect to encounter at least a few passers scattered throughout the list. If at 900 none have passed, it would be very reasonable to cancel the remaining tests on the basis that 90% is enough to reach a conclusion. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the one person with power out of 1000 just happened to be in the last group of 100, so testing all of them would be the only way to be positive.
(I’m not a statistician, so if I’ve gotten all that wrong, please be gentle)
Now, granted, it’s not impossible that a random sampling might just miss the people who do have power. So, repeat the test a few more times. If every time the results are the same, a what point would you be satisfied that the results were conclusive beyond a reasonable doubt that psychic power simply doesn’t exist? How many people would you want to have tested before you would concede they’re all using non-psychic techniques such as cold reading?
Personally, I suspect you never would. I suspect you would continue to insist that the tests were arranged in a way that would guarantee failure, no matter how accomodating the testers were. You seem to need, so strongly, psychic ability to exist that you can’t conceive of the possibility that it doesn’t. Why? I’d really like to know.
I have no idea what your point is, I was just telling my experiences, don’t care what you think about them.
Love
Leroy
Have someone else explain how the constitution has everything to do with everything.
50%, now do I get a banana
You really need to tell the researchers that their data is not sufficient for you. I just provided the links. I am sure the scientists who ran the tests thought they were ok.
The questions were answered and on the last one you assume to understand the spiritual by what you know of the physical. Doesn’t work that way.
Look, you’re the one who brought the Constitution into this. So, again, it is up to you to support your argument.
No banana untill you answer.