He who openeth a thread in Great Debates supposing a controversial supposition beggeth for persons to pointeth out it is controversial, with all the respect and tolerance a biped can expect from the internet at large. You might as well ask why he didn’t refrain from opening the thread, as to ask why we don’t refrain from responding in it.
And my respect for a person, or at least a segment of my respect, fluctuates wildly in response to their actions of the exact moment. So yeah - if somebody says something dumb, then I will, for a moment, think accordingly less of their cognitive, argumentive, speechifying, or grammatical acumen. But then I am a bit hypercritical that way (though not hypocritical - when I say something ridiculous - that’s ridiculous too).
Exactly, it has nothing to say about it. But why does it necessarily seem to follow for people in this sort of thread that if science has nothing to say about it, it doesn’t exist? Begbert2 earlier gave the example that he likes the taste of strawberries, and there’s no scientific basis for it. And if he started a thread saying he liked strawberries, no one would get on his case for it not being a scientific assertion. So why do people pick on the supernatural stuff so much, then, when there are many things outside the realm of objective findings?
Well, i’m confused. I would define “forced” in this instance to mean that they aren’t the result of you deliberately choosing to imagine them, but as apparently from entirely outside and not a result of your thinking process at all. That you do not hear them because you choose to imagine them - that you have no ability to not hear them if you don’t want to. That seems to be an accurate summation of your voices, at least as I gather so far - have I misunderstood, or do you have a different definition of “forced”?
Okay, wait. We are confusing voices with voices with voices here.
Hypnagogic voices only exist in that twilight world between wakefulness and sleep. That’s what this debate was SUPPOSED to be about…I don’t know who brought up the schizophrenic voices, such as God’s Voice.
Schizophrenia, so I’m told, often involves hearing voices which DO NOT GO AWAY. That’s the different. They are there, ever present, always annoying you. You can try and medicate them away, or meditate them away, but sometimes that doesn’t even work. Those are the Berkowitz voices…the voices that tell you to do bad things.
God’s Voice is basically the same as schizophrenia, except it’s not always as demanding. God’s Voice may command, but also seduces, leads you astray, makes you do stupid ass things. Most people actually enjoy the God Voice – that’s what makes it God. I don’t know many schizophrenics who enjoy the schizo voices, but some of them do.
How do you tell the difference? Simple – if the voices stop when you turn on the lights or merely open your eyes, that’s hypnagogia. Totally natural and normal.
If the voice continues, it may be a spirit or ghost, so say “GET OUT!” if you don’t want it there. If it leaves, good, it was only a spirit.
If neither of those work…hie thee to a psychiatrist, pronto!
If you are unwilling to do any of these things and choose to OBEY and WORSHIP the voice…then it’s God’s Voice, and you are on your own, bucko. Enjoy your own private hell.
Well, “forced” implies that you can’t get rid of them. Are you trying to say that every audible voice (with no obvious source) is bad? (Sigh.) Look, here:
Then I don’t understand what you’re proposing for debate. By definition “hypnagogic voices” are figments of your imagination. Otherwise you have to strip the hypnagogic part out of there and state that dead people speak to you when you are not quite awake but not quite asleep.
Then we can all wrap it back up with … don’t fret, dude, it’s just hypnagogia!
And I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying saying Hypnagogia and all its iterations. It’s hypnogotastic!
Yeah, pretty much, if only for the “can’t get rid of them” part, as an ongoing affair. You may take steps at the time to get rid of them, but you can’t stop them from coming back.
I mean, it’s like saying your finger hurts if you hold it a certain way. That you can not hold it that way and it stops doesn’t mean there’s nothing bad about it.
At the moment? None. But I’ve rubbed shoulders with them, even roomed with them, because I was forced to believe I was one of them. I’m not, I never was, and even the schizos and bipolars felt I never belonged there. That was a label forced on me by parents who were (with the aid of evil, money-grubbing shrinks) covering up family secrets, or maybe they just wanted to control and humiliate me, or simply enjoy the sympathy from others in munchausen-by-proxy fashion. Whatever, it doesn’t matter anymore. I got their number now, and I’m on a freakin’ mission.
In fact, the reason I started this thread was really to distract myself because I’m currently waiting on an email which will – well, frankly, this could be really big. Don’t wanna jinx it, except to say that if things work out, as I hope they will, pretty soon EVERYONE will know the family secrets my folks tried so hard to suppress and ignore…albeit in a fictional sense, if you catch my drift? Really, I’m kind of excited.
I guess this thread kinda got pretty far off the rails, but hey, what else is new. A mod can close it, if they want.
How in the world can you go about life with such a philosophy? How do you decide what is worthy of serious discussion? Or do you even make that decision at all? Can you think of any situations where you would dismiss a claim or observation out of hand? Why not the OP’s claim? What is more ridiculous and worthy of ridicule than someone who is seriously contemplating the idea he’s communicating with the dead?
Okay, now it sounds like you’re laying out a universe summary for a fiction book. Because rather blatantly you’re stating things that you can’t possibly know, as if you knew all about them and their causes as certain facts.
Based on observable evidence, you have here one thing, ‘voices’, divided rather arbitrarily into three categories:
voices that obligingly go away when you turn on the lights or merely open your eyes.
voices that continue when you’re awake, but go away (at least for a while) when you yell “GET OUT!”.
voices that simply don’t go away at all.
“hypnagogia”, per your own description, is imagined - imagined voices or sounds that occur on the cusp of sleep. Presumably this is the scientific explanation, as typified by its assumption that the explanation that has a mechanism for occuring that has been shown to exist (in this case, your brain) is the default one.
If you accept the scientific classification of hypnagogia as “natural and normal” dream-voices that haven’t got the memo that you’re not really asleep, then it naturally follows that you should accept the scientific explanation for non-hypnagogic voices as well - which is to say, that the explanation that has a mechanism for occuring is the correct one. It’s all in your mind, in other words.
If you do not accept the scientific assumption for the middle category of voices, it eludes me completely why you don’t reject it for the first and third category of voices as well. Much less why you assert that these delineations exist at all; that “spirits” (which are pretty poorly defined, outside of specific fictions) are assumed to be willing to leave if you yell at them, but are assumed not to be inclined to leave when you turn the lights on. (For the record, I’ve read conceptions of spirits that would fit either one or the other of those criterias.)
It seems like a bizarre juxtaposition of science and spiritualism - for this arbitrarily defined slice in the middle, between the lights and the yell, it’s a spirit; outside of that in either direction, you’re imagining it, and should either just lie back and enjoy it or hie thee to a shrink, depending on whether it’s incessantly bothering you or not. There’s no sensible way I can see to reach this conclusion about the rigid delineation between spirits and mental phenomena, either by science or spiritualism, outside of finding or defining an explicit fiction to state and enforce these rules. And for the record, I’ve never heard of a fiction (or religion, if you want to split hairs) that matches these odd rules of yours.
Really, I’m kind of excited.