I do.
Right. Sorry. I forgot.
Won’t happen again.
Sorry to be glib, but there isn’t a single thing you posted that rises above the most mundane of coincidences and wishful thinking.
What do YOU think is more likely, that they’re all coincidences, or that you have magic powers?
I think they’re all coincidences. I don’t know where you see wishful thinking.
I do think it’s kind of strange when coincidences pile up like that, though. I mean, really. You wake up to a knock on the door, tell your spouse not to answer it because it’s the cops and they are there to arrest her, and she says, that’s silly, I haven’t done anything to get arrested for–and then it turns out it IS the cops, and they DO arrest her? And the reason for the arrest is, that somebody with the exact same name just moved from another state to an address a block away that’s a mirror image of yours and the cops don’t believe it?
If that happened to you, do you think you’d consider it MUNDANE?
Then what are we arguing about? If you aren’t alleging anything supernatural, then what are you asking me to debunk?
You said you were psychic, then posted a bunch of unremarkable coincidences to prove it. That sounded like wishful thinking to me.
Why? None of them are very striking, and pretty much everybody has lives filled with coincidences if they’re really looking for them.
That’s really only one coincidence. That a guy with same name as your husband lived a block away. Predicting that an early morning knock on the door is the cops is just a reasonable guess, and it’s a guess that everybody makes about late night or early morning knocks on the door. It’s not remarkable at all that the cops would get the wrong house under those circumstances, or that houses in the same neighborhood would look alike, or that being awakened early in the morning by a knock would make you think about cops. Everything else leads naturally from the first thing.
It’s completely mundane that two people with the same name may live in proximity, yes. It’s also mundane that houses in the same neighborhood might look alike. The only real coincidence in your story is that someone that lived nearby you had the same name as your husband.
Yeah, it’s really not unlikely. I don’t get many unannounced knocks on my door; if someone started banging on it early in the morning, my first thought would be “Oh crap, what’s wrong? Cops, a neighbor, what?”
The tone of the knock can also be a subtle hint; a neighbor just wanting to ask a question may just knock politely, while a cop may strike the door more sharply. It may not be something you consciously notice, but it can be as informative as the sound of an engine telling you that a motorcycle or car just passed by, or being able to tell who’s walking up behind you by the weight and sound of the footsteps (and I have heard of people being called psychic for exactly that, even though it’s nothing terribly special). There’s a lot of information that we process that we don’t always consciously know we’re processing.
Further, you mention in the anecdote that you “woke up enough.” Getting pulled out of sleep can cause disorientation and brief confusion. You heard the knock, it sounded police-y, and you were disoriented enough to just take it as a given. You could also have said, “Don’t open it, the aliens are here to take you away!” I’ve had weirder thoughts on being jolted awake. It’s just that in this case you turned out to be right.
answered
I said my husband thinks I’m psychic. Based on quite a few more things than I listed here. (The cop thing and the car thing were particularly persuasive, though.)
No, you said:
You said “I’m psychic and there is lots of evidence.”
You are not psychic and you don’t have any evidence that you are. There is no more possibility that you are a psychic than that you are a shapeshifter. There’s no such thing as either.
Well no psychiatrists, or neurologists among them but they all went to medical school.
So they don’t know what they’re talking about then.
I don’t know, I’ve never been confronted with any information that would negate the existence of God. I am pretty good about changing my beliefs in other areas (I used to be a fairly liberal (in the classic sense) and pretty Republican, now I am fairly liberal (in the American sense) and pretty Democratic, but I am not sure that my faith in God won’t prove to be more stubborn.
On the issue of magic powers, it seems to me that we have had a long history of people claiming to be able to do things with their mind (like centuries) and they always get debunked and frankly technology is reaching a point where magical powers would be a bit of a let down.
Have you ever seen any information that would negate the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Ah, the things written on message boards late at night.
I’m not psychic, but there is lots of evidence that I am. My husband believes it, truly.
Back when I worked at a newspaper, I wrote an annual column of predictions. My predictions were entirely tongue-in-cheek, and I didn’t expect any of them to come true. Usually, though, about half of them did. One year, 7 out of 10 of them did, which I think is probably a better percentage than real psychics (and by “real psychic” I mean “someone who thinks he is psychic, or gets money for pretending to be psychic, or both”).
Just it case you missed it, or I miswrote it: These were for fun. I never expected any of them to come true. But some of them did.
Here is an example: “In an effort to increase ridership, RTD will offer free coffee and donuts on its early-morning runs!”
Here’s how it came true: RTD changed a bunch of routes and offered some new ones, and to kick them off they had coffee and donuts, and they invited me to cover it. At six o’fucking clock in the morning, and my sadistic managing editor made me go.
Fortunately, plutonium containment never escaped Rocky Flats causing Red Rocks to change its name to Fluorescent Green Rocks. If it ever does, well, you heard it here first.
My father is a constant and proud sceptic, constantly mocking any irrational beliefs. When I was seven my his sick mother came to live with us in her last few months. We kids were shipped off to relatives when it was clear death was imminent. We came back after her death and I initially refused to sleep in my bedroom because that was where Granny died. I was repeatedly told that no, she had died in my sisters room at the end of the hall, so I eventually slept in my own room.
In the middle of the night I woke up and opened my cupboard door. My Granny was standing inside in her nightdress and she smiled down at me. Knowing her to be dead I was a little perturbed, and her smile changed to a look of slightly anguished regret. It’s easy enough for me to debunk this myself as a dream but her expression was very adult, very subtle, and really not the sort of thing I feel that I was capable of imagining at that time. The next morning I told my parents ‘Granny did die in my room, but that’s okay’.
Many years pass, and my mother told me of the night my granny died. The doctor had just been to visit her in my sisters room, and then had told my parents in the downstairs living room that she was a bit improved, but that she wouldn’t last for long. Moments after the doctor left, they both heard footsteps the length of the livingroom ceiling. They rushed upstairs to see why she was out of bed, but she wasn’t, she had died. Then they realised that you can’t walk the length of the livingroom ceiling, there are three walls upstairs in that length, from my sisters room to my cupboard.
Telling someone their experiences are false simply because you can’t find an explanation for them is arrogant and unscientific.
What does this mean? Through sheer force of will? Without time or space or material, I literally cannot make sense of that proposition and what’s further, you seem to admit that you can’t either. Yet, you still seem to think of God as an explanation.
In what way?
Your analogies are not sufficient, since in both of those examples (lighters and airplanes), there is physical phenomenon that requires explanation. Yes, ancient man wouldn’t know what the explanation was, but there is an empirical basis for the need for the explanation.
With God, you don’t have that need and further, positing God is incoherent, since in order for God to have created something he/she/it would have needed - at minimum - space, time, energy/matter. None of which God would have had, which means you are positing incoherence in place of an explanation.
Further, to drive the point home more, you don’t know that God created the universe, you are attempting to appeal to the best explanation. That, again, is the difference between the lighter/airplane example. Instead of appealing to an explanation you are appealing to ‘magic’.
I respect not understanding why things are the way they are - however that doesn’t give me (or anyone) the intellectual license to simply make up an incoherency and try to pass it off as an explanation.
What would you call clinging to the least plausible explanation?
I never get tired of postdiction stories.
Actually, I do. When this topic comes up, people come forward with stories about how they predicted something with incredible accuracy, but when it comes to making a prediction for an event that has yet to happen either they refuse, or they vague it up so bad half the stories in the news might qualify.
I must be psychic, because I knew you were going to say that. 