Your definition of magic is self-fulfilling because part of the way you have defined it is as something that doesn’t work. Supernatural is a nonsense word.
Voyager I’ll say it one last time, I understand science just fine, I am not arguing about science, I am simply arguing that you are applying a greater sense of rigor to mysticism than you are to science. There are just as many scientists who have been quacks as their are mystics. That does not mean all mystics are quacks. It is you that doesn’t understand mysticism, not I who doesn’t understand science, you are conflating the two improperly. You assume that because I think you are full of shit I must not understand science. This is a false assumption. Your ignorance is not my ignorance.
The rest of this really ain’t worth responding to because too many of your assumptions are self-fulfilling. The one thing I hope that you all come to a realization of is how unscientific your little biases truly are.
It is scientific to say “I do not believe in a God because I have yet to see evidence.” it is not scientific to say that “Anyone who believes in a direct experience of God is either deluded or a liar.” ESPECIALLY when the person making the assertion of falsehood doesn’t even know what the word God means.
You all have taken a path where you choose to oversimplify things so that they are comfortable for you. The big mistake I have been making here is trying to pry you from that. I have gotten whatever bit of ignorance I was fighting out of this.
Just so you know when I fight ignorance I am not trying to fight the ignorance of others, as much as it may seem like it, I don’t expect others ignorance to ever change, I am only fighting it in myself, and you all have helped me do this, but the realizations I have come to have little to do with the beliefs you actually hold, and more to do with the way I approach the world.
You all put this high import on PhDs and such, and I have met and read a great many PhDs who believe in God and are not opposed to the mystical process. I don’t think any of you has a PhD.
I also seriously doubt that any of you could debunk a person like Aleister Crowley or Timothy Leary on your own merit. You read some guy you thought was smart, got your knowledge second hand, and then come back to toss it at me. Like I said these guys when they were failing, they were failing at a much higher level than any of you have access to. You are trying to debunk a field of study you know absolutely nothing about because guys you believe to be smart don’t agree with these people.
Me personally what I actually believe is that reality is a battle of wills and that the “objective” is decided after the battle plays out. It doesn’t simply exist in any particular configuration. There are underlying principles that help us to adjudicate the game, but in the end the belief structure that wins the battle of wills becomes “reality”.
I didn’t define anything, Chachi, it’s been defined for centruies before I came along. If you want to call a rose a tuna sandwhich and then bitch because I’ve defined it as something that stinks rather than smells good, it’s your failing for using definitions that are not in common usage.
No it isn’t a nonsense word. It has a very good use in society. Get a fucking clue.
Can you find one that has done any credible work in the scientific communtiy with that process?
You got me there, I’ve stopped at my Masters so far.
I’m sure I could, I just don’t the time nor the inclanation.
I work with more advanced science every day than these two did. You’re so off the mark it isn’t funny.
It’s a matter of perspective, context, and opportunity. The ancients had good reasons to be interested in astrology. However, only an idiot would give astrology a second thought today.
That you do not understand science has been amply demonstrated by your posts. You don’t deal with facts or evidence, you just repeat insults and appeal to authorities. You don’t understand the construction of hypotheses, how they can be tested, and the concept of falsifiability. You clearly don’t think that describing the claims of mysticism is worth your time. And you are not responding to any of my points. How am I conflating science with mysticism? You said that they are not contradictory, and I, unlike anyone else who responded, agreed with you. (Mysticism being wrong in its impact in the physical world is different from having nothing to do with science. Mysticism no doubt has plenty of impact on the internal world of the mind/brain.)
Are there bad scientists? Of course. If you understood science you’d know that the structure of science is designed to find and weed out bad work. Science recognizes that scientists are human, that they can be biased, and that they can make mistakes. That is why it is self-correcting. A great indicator of someone who doesn’t understand how science work is the “discovery” that scientists make mistakes. Duh.
Any working scientist here think mswas understands science? If so, please give evidence of this.
And I have said this when? Now, I do think that when several people have mutually contradictory experiences with what they say is god, and none of them can be supported independently through correct predictions of by access to knowledge that the person couldn’t have, delusion in the sense misintrerpretation of real internal sensations is a more likely answer than that they actually talked to god. The preacher who says that God told him that we should send money is probably lying, but the average person with a god experience is not.
I’ve talked about the many definitions of gods lots of times, but you clearly don’t get it.
Some instances of over-simplification, please? I suspect I haven’t made things simple enough for you to get, actually.
Well you think wrong, :wally . Not only do I have a PhD, I have tons of papers in peer reviewed journals, I’ve edited journals, I’ve reviewed papers, and I have program chaired conferences. I’ve mentored PhD students, been invited to talk at universities, been subject matter expert and reviewed book proposals and manuscripts. I’ve reviewed grant proposals for federal funding agencies. And your scientific credentials are?
Debunk what claims? I think the world in general has debunked them just fine. Is Leary anything but a curiousity of the '60s? (And the subject of a Moody Blues song.) Crowley is no doubt a big deal among your little band of mystics, but what impact has he had on society at large? I mean, there are tons of errors in scientific papers that never get corrected because no one really cares. I’ve asked you several times to give me a reason I should care about these guys, and you’ve never come up with anything. (Except the DNA and binary crap, which you still haven’t defended.)
You know, Erek, I hate to say this, but you make lekatt look like a genius.
How about, “some people who recount a direct experience of God are deluded or lying?” Do you permit any kind of value judgement on people’s reported experiences? Do you allow for any kind of value judgement on anything?
Again, the broad brush. Again, the same kind of arrogance that you claim to be pitting.
Robert Anton Wilson is keen on people escaping their reality tunnels. Your arrogance, preconceptions, and inflexibility constitute a very restrictive reality tunnel, and you can’t even see it.
I have a PhD. It isn’t relevant to this discussion.
Why don’t you go have an argument with yourself? You’re not arguing with us, you’re arguing with your own projections onto us.
I think the arrogant remarks stem from people who dislike others who still choose to believe the “old” science, even today. Search around and you’ll still find people who practice “black magic,” believe the Earth is flat, and think creationism is correct. When you hear learned people talking that way I think the ill will is being directed to people alive today not those who lived in the past.
Sure. I’ve never read a history of science book which laughed at old scientists who got things wrong, but for the right reasons. It’s rather amazing what a good job they did.
Not to mention that things weren’t so cut and dried. Those who predicted the movement of the planets using the Copernican theory were as far off as those who did so using epicycles. (Copernicus posited circular orbits.) The predictions were accurate only after Kepler. So you can’t say that those who rejected Copernicus for reasons of predictive ability were stupid. They guessed wrong, but no harm in that.
I’d like to state that I, too, have a PhD. However, I should probably mention that I’m defining “PhD” in much the same mswas defines “magic.” Anyone who claims that my PhD is actually a bachelors from a state college is simply not as enlightened as I am. I suggest such people go out and read Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings to truly understand the universal consciousness the way that I do.
Computer architecture, but I moved to more of an electrical engineering bent when I graduated, since I predicted (correctly) that the subject area I worked on in grad school was dying.
I was a World’s Leading Authority ™. At least that was what the ad from North Holland said about the authors of a book I had a chapter in.
In general, I usually disagree with your absolute stance, but I do believe there may be a shread of agreement in here somewhere.
During certain periods of time due to war, political disruption, economic upheaval, (etc.) technology has historically rolled temporarily backward a bit, and then rolled forward again later, leading some to “re-invent the wheel” so to speak. A few silly examples might be the multiple burnings of the contents of the Great Royal Library at Alexandria or maybe the tech-degradation of cement usage after the fall of Rome. Even “Astrology”, I believe was a great invention for agrarians trying to figure out when to plant things - to many it “seemed” like magic that a guy could look at the stars and tell about how many days until the spring weather came. The moon sure as hell doesn’t help you, and if you live on a 13 moon cycle it WILL screw your crops eventually (13x28 = 364 days). I can see why a less sophisticated system might believe that the future can be spelled out otherwise, from such a model in the absence of anything more rational. If I remember correctly from my history book in 6th grade (toooo long ago), The “Solar Year” wasn’t recognized until sun-worshipping Egyptians gained power ~ 2500 BCE
Further,
If one spent their whole life exploring one issue - thus becoming what we call a “guru”. They, very likely, rehashed logic repeatedly until it sounded right, experimented with models until they got an idea of what something would look full-scale, and maybe even tried a project unsuccessfully once or twice before they got it right. The pyramids don’t have to be built by “Masons with secret technology”, “Aliens”, “Atlantians” or by spiritual entities. Give a real engineer his whole life to think about one thing, and he’ll probably figure it out – I DO believe that Geniuses exist.
I think I can agree with you that when certain odd scientists, historians and theologeons (not many of them, in my experience) completely blow off the effect of gurus on the ancient world, I think they are sorely mistaken.
I am sure that Tesla is one of these. Having benefitted from radio, alternating current and have a dozen rare physics toys in the lab on a daily basis, leads me to believe that it might take a life-time of trial and error to reinvent “Tesla’s Wheel” so to speak. The fact that publications were not widespread within the physics community, we don’t have teams of physics students who have actually tried to progress any ideas he suggested. The lesson here – widespread documentation, maybe.
I think the stance that “magic” and “Alchemy” somehow rely on things that are fundamentally different that science, except for the obvious differences in process, intelligence, swindleability, and evolvability of the models, is certainly wrong. We all still live in the same universe. Whether I scream out God’s name, a demon’s name or some Harry Potter-sounding latin words, the physics will still work the same – and that’s just cool! Whether religous or not! There a stable universe enough for us to figure out independand of religion or opinion, THAT is the driving force of real science, and not the others.
CitizenBob Right on, someone who gets it. As someone posted up there above somewhere that Alchemy led to modern chemistry. Astrology led to modern day astronomy. That’s all I’m getting at with the rant. I do not see how saying “Atheism is no more rational than theism”, or “Mysticism and Science are not incompatible” is an absolutist stance.
Voyager You still fail to see that I am not arguing for science, I am arguing for mysticism, and saying simply that the two are not mutually exclusive. I cannot prove for you that they aren’t mutually exclusive by using the Scientific Method. I am arguing that they are complementary, you are arguing that they are mutually exclusive. A mystic comes to a certain knowledge a certain way, a scientist comes to it another, the mystic isn’t wrong. You very well may be a respected scientist, but your particular chauvinism in this regard is blinding you. So just because I am not accepting your rules of the game as the end all be all of the argument, doesn’t mean I do not understand the rules you are attempting to place me under. I am not a scientist, nor did I ever make a claim to be.
KidChameleon So you know what advanced sciences Aleister Crowley was involved in eh? You know how advanced they were, and know that yours are MORE advanced right? Is your dick bigger than his too?
Matt I wasn’t pointing at you with the broad brush, it’s amazing how many times people will jump in to tell you that something you said doesn’t apply to them. If it doesn’t apply then why do you feel the need to defend yourself against an attack that wasn’t aimed at you?
Oh yeah, and btw, I CAN see it, I just haven’t emerged completely from the other end of the Chapel Perilous just yet, FYI. Getting close though.
Mysticism and Science simply are not at odds, never were, and the belief that this is so is irrational and has no basis in reality. The idea of this dichotomy is a fairly recent invention within the last few hundred years as scientists fought against the Catholic church, Mystics do not labor under this delusion, apparently some scientists do, but not all.
I actually never said they were mutually exclusive. In fact, the same principles can be used for both. (Everyone else said they were, so perhaps you thought I said the same thing.)
The problem is not coming to a certain knowledge. Coming up with an idea or image or equation does not have to be done is some sort of ordered way, though papers are usually written as if an idea comes from careful analysis. It can come from a dream, from intuition, from meditation, from anywhere. I’d assume the same is true for mystical knowledge. I think the brain makes connections, but if you think an idea comes from an outside, mystical source, that is fine. It makes no difference at all.
The difference lies in the evaluation of this knowledge - determining if it is true. Say you claim that through meditation you can determine the contents of a closed box. The first thing to do is an experiment to determine if you can or not. How you do so is not at issue - only if you can do so. A while back you claimed that auras could be detected. I proposed a way of testing this, and you didn’t see the point. What I don’t is why anyone, scientist or mystic, wouldn’t want to know if a claim is true.
If the claim of knowing what was inside the box was true, then we’d try to find out how it works. Maybe science can’t explain it. That would be fine. Proof of this would be worth a Nobel Prize for sure.
I think you have the impression that scientists say that a phenomena is unscientific, so it can’t happen. Not true. Most people say that it can’t be demonstrated, so we should treat it as if it doesn’t happen until we have evidence otherwise. That what the JREF test is all about. Show there is something there, and you win. You don’t have to explain it scientifically.
You also have claims about god and the universe, which seem untestable and unfalsifiable. For these we can say that if such beliefs make you feel good, fine, but if there is no way that anything is different if your “knowledge” is correct or incorrect, then it is indistinguishable from being false. If a deist claims god began the universe, invisibly, and has had no interaction since then, but everything is going according to some plan we can’t possibly know, how is that functionally different from there being no god at all?
That’s all I’ve been saying. Just show me how mystical knowledge is distinguishable from no knowledge.
IIRC, the Dalai Lama is involved with an experiment where the brains of monks meditating are being measured. I don’t know if you consider that mystical or not, but that is the kind of thing that shows the same tools can be used for both. I have no doubt that some cool stuff will be found about how the mind can control itself and the body. I bet meditation has an impact on the body. I found I could control my own heart rate, so about this I am a believer.
Fair enough, I respond to you most frequently because I find you a sight more tolerable than the rest, so I am sorry if I confused you with someone else. When people are gangbanging you it’s hard to see who you’re punching sometimes. ;p
I never claimed outside external source. The macrocosm is contained within the microcosm. All knowledge is available everywhere. That sort of thing.
Yes, I know about verification processes, that’s what I’ve been telling you. A Kirlian camera detects the electromagnetic radiation off of the body, is this not true? The difference is that I trust what I know to be true, I use an alternate verification process that works quite well for me. It doesn’t mean I don’t understand the scientific method, or that I don’t use it from time to time, simply that arguments on message boards are not sufficient impetus for me to get off my ass and go do a test. It’s time that could be spent writing a business plan. Message board time is recreational. Lots of people do tests to verify such things, I do not have the inclination. I’d rather write a story or paint a painting. I should think however that with modern technology is should be incredibly easy to prove that people emit an electro-magnetic aura, and that the signature is unique to them. I took a Kirlian photograph with my wife over the summer, and the colors in it were violet and indigo, colors that we already identified with as colors that were strong in our aura.
I don’t think there is anything that is true that science cannot explain. Maybe no scientist living up until now can explain it, but that’s different from being unexplainable. I am not down on science at all, I am simply against claiming that science dismisses a lot of these things. I’ve seen objects in flight I couldn’t identify, I haven’t identified them so they are UFOs. What the nature of those UFOs are, I do not know. I grew up in New Mexico, it’s the “Weird shit happening all the time” state. Could be UFOs, could be the Air Force, could be Navajo Shaman.
Point taken. A lot of these things would require a much greater relationship with the person to whom I am proving something than an argument on a message board. I have done things that I cannot explain like change the way I move through space and time, and I’ve shared these experiences with others. I once got a girl to sleep with me because I convinced her I’d fade from existance if she didn’t. She was convinced that I was actually fading. She knew that it was illusory, and it seduced her, I had a relationship with her afterward for a few months. I’ve seen things and done things that are outside of the scope of what most people believe to be ‘possible’, and verified them sufficiently for myself. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are unscientific.
They are untestable and unfalsifiable, that’s why I think atheism is so ridiculous. I do not believe in the sort of God you describe, I believe that God is the aggregation of all consciousness, information and matter in existance, has always existed, and always will exist as a motivating force into the infinite eternity. The reason it is untestable and unfalsifiable is that the only way to calculate a theory that would encompass the entire thing would be to replicate the entire thing. It is all of existance. Imagine it as though we are living in an infinitely large brain, and the matter you see and feel is the thoughts floating around in it. Do you see why atheism seems to me irrational? The argument to me is not whether or not God exists, but what is the nature of God, or the universe.
Mysticism is direct experience, whereas scientific knowledge is knowledge gained by seeing. Are you denying that a soccer player has knowledge of soccer?
I never disputed that the same tools could be used for both, I have been saying that they could the whole time. My only problem with atheism is that it’s not a question of whether or not God exists, God exists, but what IS God? Well that’s a really BIG question. I’ve been using scientist mystics as my example the whole time for a reason, to illustrate mystics who attempted to verify their mystical experience. I trust my ability to verify things for myself. What I have been arguing with is what I see as insufficient semantic understanding of the words being used.
I think there is a bias as to the word “magic”. For instance Hollywood uses “magic” all the time, that doesn’t mean it’s unverifiable.
If you recall what started this whole spate of threads was a time when there were like three threads in GD about how religion was responsible for all the ills in the world. I found this to be patently ridiculous, and so I went on a path to figure out how to debunk stupid atheism, so that when I see that sort of ignorance in the future I can more easily expose it for what it is. In those threads I saw people saying that murder for political reasons would go away if we stopped being so stupid and believing in God. I think that’s foolish.
I think that the word atheism is an oxymoron, and you’d have to understand what I mean by ‘the realm where concepts exist’ to understand why, because if you have a concept of God then clearly it exists, as God is a concept describing something greater than the words being used to describe it. I think atheism is a barrier to understanding because it creates a false paradox. When you want to debunk creationism you disagree with, falsifying God is not the way to go about it. You can say, I disagree with your assessment of how it went down. You can then go into the big bang and all that other stuff. There is nothing in the big bang or evolution that is incompatible with the concept of God. So when you deny God you aren’t attempting to understand what someone is driving at with their perception of “God” you are trying to get them to shut up. If you don’t know what they mean by the word, then it is ignorant and rude to imply that the word has no meaning, because clearly it does, and clearly they have seen something. If that information is not useful to you, then so be it, that doesn’t make them stupid or wrong.
What I dislike is the idea that a lot of people have that explaining something scientifically somehow debunks it. It’s as simple as that. Flying is still “magical” even if we know how the Bernoulli principle works. When you fall in love the moment is still “magical” even though the biochemical responses are measurable. I have smoked DMT which is produced in the pineal gland at birth and death, and I had a ‘transcendental’ experience that changed my life, that doesn’t deny spiritual states simply because they can be induced with a chemical.
I have found myself to have martial arts abilities out of the blue that were never taught to me in this lifetime. I cannot control them sufficiently to prove to you that I know them, but I have pulled them off suddenly before. My perspective once moved at such a rate that this guy who was approaching me who liked to pick on me seemed to be moving at an incredibly slow rate, and I just examined him as he came toward me, I was completely without fear. He picked on me and started calling me a pussy and all I could think about was how slow he was moving. It was kind of like that scene in spider man where he watches the guy’s fist go past him, and looks up and down his arm. I don’t know what the actual explanation for these things are, but I know that each phenomena I know more than I did before. I once sat across a room and concentrated on making a candle flame extinguish telekinetically, when it was almost out I got excited and it broke my concentration, and the candle flared up again. I couldn’t replicate that for you because your presence would infringe upon my already tenuous focus.
I predicted Hurricane Katrina in my Live Journal, something I can show you but it wouldn’t count as verification because I can post-date live journal entries. I didn’t say a hurricane would occur, I said that I felt like something major was going to happen and I wasn’t sure if it was going to just affect me or if it was going to affect everyone. I kind of suspected that it would affect everyone but I didn’t want to say that because I was insecure about possibly being incorrect. There is no way for me to verify that for you however.
I am particularly adept at cold reading people. It is perfectly logical, in that it is cold reading, but that doesn’t make it not psychic. Do you see where I am going with this fundamental misunderstanding? I am not saying any of these things are scientifically unexplainable, only that scientifically explaining them doesn’t debunk the mystical interpretation.
I barely touch on the deeper stuff here, because there is no point in casting one’s pearls before swine. I could share my theories with you, but I am not a scientist and not interested in trying to ‘prove’ it, scientifically. My only vested interest is finding a way to get around the fundamental flaw I see in thinking that a scientific explanation debunks ‘magic’. I’d like for people to understand why I think the word atheism is an oxymoron, but that’s even less important to me. If I could get around what I see as the fundamental western flaw, and find a way to explain it in a paragraph or less, I’d feel like that was a great accomplishment, and that mankind would be ready for the next evolutionary step into a world that contains nanotechnology and mind machine interfaces. In that world there be dragons. These technologies, incidentally already exist, they just aren’t fully implemented yet. When people understand that science and mysticism are not at odds fully, we’ll advance to a whole new stage of evolutionary advancement.
We all have the ability to know the universe, from our perspective, and there are many ways to develop that ability to know.
Basically to put it succinctly, I think it is pretty fucking magical that I can control atoms and the way they move through space and time by sending an impulse to cause their motion. (I am talking about moving my body parts)
I am gassed that I can set things in motion on opposite sides of the world simply by typing things on a keyboard. Simply by refining my discipline and control over the way I move through space and time, I can affect a great many things in this world in far reaches of it. I have a corporation that has offices in two cities and I know that with money, I can get mecha built. That’s pretty fucking magical as far as I am concerned.
This summer I saw a remote jet pack swinging from a pendulum in an art project. It was pretty amazing. It shot out 12 foot gouts of flame in four different directions and swung all over the place, it was like 40 feet tall. A guy in the local art scene made a working cell phone bomb for a gallery exhibit at Cooper Union.
I know that for you nothing is outside, but it is for many people. What I said still works even if your friend the rock gave the scientist a hint.
No one doubts that Kirlian photographs show something - the aura part is what is in dispute. Here
is one alternate view. The important point here is that if the evidence of the “aura” changes when natural parameters vary, then it seems somewhat likely that the image is caused by these natural causes. It might be very complex, and finding out why it is getting caused may lead to new discoveries. I think at one point ball lightning, the source of some UFO reports, was not believed in - until it got photographed and measured.
I think so also, but I want to stay open to the possibility that something may come up that no current theory can explain. If someone comes up with very strong evidence, it should not be dismissed without some examination. Consider the case of meteorites, for instance.
Well, that would have been a handy talent to have at one time of my life. But verification is far more than convincing oneself, since, being human, we can convince ourselves of a lot of false things. Look at cold fusion. We have to go into an experiment trying to convince ourselves that something is false, not true. We have to record what we did carefully enough so that someone else, less convinced than we are, can reproduce it. Otherwise it is pre-scientific or non-scientific.
This was just an example, not an attempt to claim you believed in this sort of god. People believe in all sorts of gods, and an atheist can only address one at a time. The untestable nature of many gods is why the attempt to define atheism as the claim that we know no gods exist is such a strawman. Knowing this is unreasonable, but not believing in any of these gods is perfectly reasonable.
I’ll ask again - if god in your view is untestable and unfalsifiable (which implies he is unobservable) how does one know he exists. For theists with moral codes from god, how do you know the moral code is really from god and not made up. I’d say, to paraphrase Fermi, your concept of god is not even interesting enough to be wrong. My reaction really is, so what?
A soccer player learns by doing. A scientist doesn’t just see, one who does lab work must learn by doing also. You can measure a soccer player’s knowledge by how well they perform - coaches obviously do it all the time. Without some test, how does one measure a mystic’s knowledge? It’s easy to measure how convincing he is, but not if he really has the talent.
Atheists can’t define god, because if they did, and refuted the existence of the god they just defined, a theist would just say that this isn’t the god that she believes in. Atheists often try to nail down the definition of god in a more rigorous way than theists are comfortable with. (And we don’t expect to be able to get a complete definition.) For the standard issue western god we often wind up with contradictions like, god is all-merciful, but directed the Hebrews to slaugher inconvenient peoples. Then you get the hemming and hawing and the apologetics, and the claims that the babies killed in the supposed flood would have grown up bad.
I can’t deny that some atheists over-react to theists claims that all good comes from God and his believers. Certain types of theists justify all sorts of real evils. Evil in the name of god just means that some theists are not to be trusted, not that god does not exist. (Other reasons for that.) That some atheists are over-critical of all religions similarly does not invalidate arguments for atheism.
I’ve said this before - saying god doesn’t exist is not the same as saying the concept of god does not exist or the tag “god” does not exist. Saying God has no effect on the world is not the same as saying that the concept of god has no effect on the world (it clearly has.) “The realm where concepts exist” sounds quite Platonic. I don’t believe there is any such realm with ideal concepts of god or yellow or chairs. I think all these are human generalizations of fuzzy concepts, as evidenced by the difficulty in clearly and unambiguously defining all these concepts. AI people ran into this problem quite a while ago with natural language understanding programs. Even different people may disagree on the boundaries of some concepts.
I have never heard an atheist say the word god has no meaning - we do say that it does not map into a real thing. That’s very different.
We don’t live on the DiscWorld where if enough people believe in a particular god it pops into real existence. Now that’s magic.
Other people have agreed that magic under this definition does exist, but is not what most people think about when thinking of the mystical definition of magic. Using this definition in support of your position is a bit of a shell game.
Our bodies can do amazing things. There are substantiated stories of people picking up objects way too heavy to pick up normally. I went from a first grade reading level to a sixth grade level in a matter of weeks in the end of first grade. We certainly don’t understand everything about how our brain works. For the candle, are you positive you weren’t unconsciously blowing it? I’ve used an Ouija board, and even knowing why it works didn’t keep it from working for me. Our conscious mind is like the CEO sitting on the top floor of an 80 story office building, convinced that he knows everything everyone is doing in the company, where he doesn’t have a clue as to how the mail room works.
A scientific test of your candle powers might involve having some sort of smoke in the room, to detect unconscious blowing, for instance. The observers would watch behind one way mirrors. I know that it is probably more satisfying for you to be convinced you can do this, but I don’t believe unless controls are in place. That’s different from saying I know you didn’t do it - it is withholding belief.
As pTerry says, one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten. Statistics tells you that if you test enough people for telepathy, someone will get 20 out of 25 cards right. The trick is to see if they can do it consistently. How many of the umpteen other hurricanes did you predict this year? When did you predict Katrina? I lived in Louisiana, and predicting a hurricane will hit isn’t too hard. Skeptical Inquirer runs a yearly feature evaluating the predictions of all the tabloid psychics. It’s quite funny how bad they are, yet suckers^h^h^h pay them.
There is a great article in SI by Ray Hyman, now psychologist, about how he had a good career as a psychic when young. He was an excellent cold reader, and had pretty much convinced himself. His clients came back, and told him he was right on. Then, one day, he reversed all his predictions. His clients were just as happy. I don’t doubt you’re a good cold reader, but you’d have to do that kind of experiment to even begin to hint at a psychic explanation. There have been experiments with this kind of thing, and the ability disappears when the reader can’t get feedback from the readee.
No, an alternate explanation does not disprove a magical one, it just removes the need for believing in one. Solid evidence of magic would shake up our understanding of the world. It can happen, and did with Einstein. Don’t you think that the concept of time passing at different rates for different observers is more radical than any sort of aura or ESP? Yet he made firm predictions, and when they were verified people changed their fundamental perception of reality with startling speed.
Nano tech and mind machine interfaces will happen, and aren’t any more mysticism than far speaking (also called the telephone) is. Maybe you are positing a variation of Clarke’s Law: Any sufficiently misunderstood technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I quoted two statements of yours, apparently addressed to “you all”. You ackowledge your statements to be attacks. I suggest you indicate your targets more specifically!"
Good luck with that.
I agree to some extent, but with a proviso. “Mysticism” and “science” are umbrella terms for a wide range of activities. Does mysticism apply any value judgements within its own field? If so, on what criteria? If not, then isn’t everything and anything mysticism?
The difficulty I’m having is this. Suppose a group of mystics are discussing their recent activities. Mystic 1 has been experimenting with plant-derived psychedelics, under the guidance of various South American tribes who have been traditionally using said psychadelics for an indefinite period. Mystic 2 has been living in a forest with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a good knife for assistance. Mystic 3 has embraced the concepts of the Manicheans and attempted to disconnect from the material world, fasting, scourging his body and ignoring his senses.
Does mystic 3 regard the approaches of mystics 1 and 2 as incorrect, and if not, why not? Are they open to any form of criticism, even self-criticism? Can a mystic be wrong about anything?
A soccer player learns by doing. A scientist doesn’t just see, one who does lab work must learn by doing also. You can measure a soccer player’s knowledge by how well they perform - coaches obviously do it all the time. Without some test, how does one measure a mystic’s knowledge? It’s easy to measure how convincing he is, but not if he really has the talent.