Y’know, if you don’t ease off with the winky smiley, somebody’s going to stick a parrot on your shoulder and whack off your leg.
;), and all that.
Ah, but there is. Isolate the subjects so that body language etc are ruled out. If the experiment is run properly and the results are statistically signficant, and reproducible, you’ve proven telepathy.
Roadfood,
Do you think that’s the biggest load of hooey?
And you think that’s psychic interaction? Holy crap! (No cite. I just have no idea what else to say.)
Without a lot of copying and pasting, here’s my problem with your comparison between ‘accepting’ math and psychic phenomena: you’re now telling us we need to accept that psychic powers are real before we can debate if they’re real or not. I’m not even close to the first guy to say it in this thread, but you’re the one making the extraordinary claim. You’ve got to prove that what you’re saying has validity, not use these backdoor arguments about why everything else has no validity.
As to Disneyland: a trip to Disneyland is a verifiable experience. You can provide evidence that you have or have not been to Disneyland, that was my point. If you start making these claims that it’s unprovable, well, then it IS exactly like psychic powers, and you’ve got to prove that Disneyland is real and you can go there. On the other hand, if you’re insisting that nothing is knowable, provable, or objective, one wonders why you’re arguing that anything is real in the first place.
mswas writes:
“If you come up with a plausible explanation for it, that does not change the nature of the experience, it only changes how we choose to discuss the experience.”
Wow Erek, that should be in a book of quotes or something. I like that, you mind if I use it? (The quote I mean)
- Honesty
Everyone’s responded to most of the points adequately, but I wasn’t going to let a near Pit-worthy slur slide without comment…
Point out a single example of where I “totally changed” what anybody said and “argued with something completely other than what they were saying”, and I’ll eat my underpants. As for examples of YOU doing it, I might as well just point to your tirade about oxygen and not being able to see it, and leave it at that. If you’re still confused, ask for clarification. Please. I savor the feeling of making people eat crow.
Here’s another example of you doint what you just pointed out above.
HINT: I never said that you claimed that the workings of psychic phenomena are “not able to be understood”. I said, via quotation of the dictionary, that they are difficult to understand.
Improve your fact-checking before you wish to covertly slander someone.
I’m not sure I understand this. Cold-reading is NOT a psychic ability. It’s a simple trick people who don’t even believe in psychic abilities can learn, and they can simulate ‘tuning in’ as well as John Edward does. It’s been used over and over in this thread as evidence that Edward and people like him are frauds. It can’t be an explanation of psychic ability; it’s an explanation of how people FAKE that ability.
Pheronomone: n. A chemical secreted by an animal, especially an insect, that influences the behavior or development of others of the same species, often functioning as an attractant of the opposite sex.
Nothing to do with psychic abilities there.
If someone claims to be communicating in a way that they can neither explain nor demonstrate, would you still take their word that they really were communicating that way?
The honesty is refreshing. But problematic. If you don’t know who’s really psychic and who’s not, that says to me you can’t differentiate between natural means, like cold and hot reading, and supernatural means like the ones you’re positing, since both are ways to arrive at the same conclusion. If you don’t know what is really psychic power and what’s not, how do you know that you’ve exhibited psychic abilities? How can you claim to know that when there may be a much simpler and more logical explanation?
**
Unfortunately, for many the “God of the Gaps” approach is the simpler explanation. Logic be damned.
He just another person on a (relatively) short list of very talented cold readers. The internet is filled with both his supporters and detractors, but a quick look at the facts will give you a very good idea of the truth. If he was for real (and I assure you he is not) a talk show would be about the least useful way to exploit such a unique talent.
Well, I do recognize when I use cold reading techniques. I recognize a lot of things that I pay attention to. I deconstruct words to find out exactly what they mean to me, and how I use them. I use lot’s of forms of communication that are not verbal. The thing is, it’s a conjunction of many factors, and while I’m not trying to convince any of you of psychic abilities. I am just discussing it because I figured that, the belief in them was woefully underrepresented.
My point is not to say that you SHOULD accept their validity, I am just pointing out that by the way most of you are talking to me you are alienating a very vibrant part of society if you speak to everyone or of everyone who claims psychic abilities, as most of you have been treating me in this thread.
Sometimes communication is more about understanding how the other person thinks and interacts with their world, as opposed to PROVING something. I still maintain that none of you can actually PROVE anything to me. I accept based upon certain factors in my development, that we are having a real communication here. I avoid this board, generally because of the competition factor here.
I’ve found the deeper one goes into ANY discipline the more inexplicability they find in their world, and there is always going to be a level that you cannot prove. Your experience with the collective and psychic phenomena may be that you don’t believe in it at all, I happen to, and I belong to a not so small minority of people who do.
When I came across this thread, I figured posting would probably be a good idea because it was probably very one sided, and I was correct. Then I was inundated with responses of people who don’t agree with me. Some more hostile than others. So I apologize for not being able to keep up that well.
However, I do recognize that I am a very intelligent individual and my position is a very non-mainstream position, yet one that has a very powerful movement in human history, and has informed upon the world and the environment for much of human history and is very much a part of the meme pool in modern culture, so I can bow out of conversations based upon the fact that I’m not going to just accept the rules of convention to make it more palatable because then I would not be able to transmit the ideas that I’m trying to put forth. If I change the rules to fit the idea of scientific rigor then that changes that which has informed my existence which is more a world of metaphor and abstraction, yet I’ve come to many of the same conclusions as philosophers and scientists that I have read since.
I believe that language in all of it’s forms carries the memes that have come before, and that one can extrapolate information based upon what that provides, and it’s a very useful part of society that taps into this, yet I am constantly asked to prove that it exists. However, this change, changes the nature of the beast and one cannot what it knows by expect it to conform to an arbitrary standard.
We live in a time of ultimate prosperity, yet we tell people that they must conform to a certain standard so that we all may survive, rather than trying to learn what the others know based upon the standard which they already come from.
So when you argue so competitively with me, asking me to come over to your line of reasoning, you are completely missing what I have to offer based upon a lifetime of experience in another arena.
I was completely and totally unable to conform to modern education, and have received absolutely no schooling afterward. Now I sit and read your knowledge a lot of the time and get the gist of what you’re saying, I’m just asking for the same courtesy.
So you can either tell me that I have to acccept mathematics or we cannot communicate, or you can try to understand the point I’m making by not accepting mathematics. Because a phrase is a sentence or multiple sentences that communicates a more complex idea in the way that a word represents a simple idea. And I choose my examples for a reason.
so I won’t just bow out of conversations based upon the fact that I’m not going to just accept the rules of convention to make it more palatable
so I won’t just bow out of conversations based upon the fact that I’m not going to just accept the rules of convention to make it more palatable
nature of the beast and one cannot understand what it knows by expecting it to conform to an arbitrary standard.
mswas,
Please read this one:
This might also be of interest:
Others are, of course, also invited… 
mswas, rather than pick your last post apart piece by piece (I’m sure someone else will be along to do that shortly), I will just make a brief statement.
We are not trying to, and we cannot, PROVE that psychic abilities do NOT exist. We have never yet seen any such “abilities” that hold up under rigorous scientific testing and honest evaluation the way that, say, gravity does. So we are challenging the psychic community, the ones who are making the fantastic claims, to prove they are real and not an illusion, fraud or misinterpretation.
Skeptics are always from Missouri, the “Show Me” State. You have an unusual postulate, we say, “That’s nice, prove it.”
CFLarsen, those links/lists are dynamite! I imagine your fingerprints are all over them, eh? 'Fess up!
So just one question: where have you been hiding until now?
Heh, ahh well. See y’all
You’re absolutely right, we can’t prove anything. Of course, we don’t have to. But even if we did, you deny anybody’s ability to prove anything, thus making your position immune to criticism or scrutiny.
The fact that people agree with you doesn’t make you right. There are people out there who think the world is 6,000 years old and flat. As for inexplicability, I simply don’t see it. I find that as people have devoted more enegy to science, we understand more about the world than ever before. Many things are not yet understood or explained, but I can’t think of anything that has become more inexplicable.
Everybody gets your point. I don’t think anybody agrees with your analogy, however. There’s a distinction.
Apparently, mswas has left the building. 