I’ve got an idea that I’m trying to flesh out into something useful, and I’m hoping the brilliant minds here can offer the kind of insight I’ve been unable to find elsewhere.
Here’s the deal. You (the hypothetical “you”), are an atheistic, skeptical, rational person with an interest in the paranormal. Perhaps you “want to believe” on some level, but you view the X-Files as entertainment, not a documentary. In an effort to guard against the vast numbers of deluded individuals and charlatans in the world, you have developed your critical thinking skills and familiarized yourself with all of the various reasons why people believe weird things. You might go so far as to hypothesize that powerful individuals sometimes get together and secretly exert their power, but you easily reject conspiracy theories.
Then it happens. Someone “reads your mind”. Someone accurately and precisely predicts a future event. You receive a message just for you via the radio. Synchronicity enters your life, and you are inundated with references to the number 23 and “plate o’ shrimp”. You are unable to reproduce any of these phenomena yourself, but that they happen in such a way as to be personally convincing, even undeniable. Something is indeed going on that is not merely delusion, hallucination, or prestidigitation.
What happens next?
I can imagine such a situation would be pretty confusing and perhaps even traumatic, and that there would be a period of time necessary to adjust to the simple enormity of this sort of discovery. But that’s where I get stuck, as I’m unable to imagine a “real world” course of action that would make sense.
How does this affect your worldview? How does this affect how you relate to others? How would you adapt?
I look forward to receiving your most helpful telepathic projections, but feel free to also post your thoughts here.
Okay, I’m going to attempt to read your mind right now.
Hmmm…ahh…I see that you are a reader…of Science Fiction…one of your favorite authors is…Ursula K. Le Guin!!!
But, seriously I am a lot like the guy you describe and I have had a few things happen to me that didn’t fit scientific reality as I understood it.
I didn’t freak out. I didn’t hide my head in the sand and refuse to accept my own clear observations like I’ve seen a few people do. I didn’t turn into a believer and join an occult group.
I simply accepted that, whereas our science isn’t really wrong, our knowledge of the Universe is and always will be incomplete. There may not be a scientific explanation for what happened now, but that doesn’t mean there never will be.
People who reject as impossible anything that won’t neatly fit their current mental construct of what-should-be are misunderstanding how science is supposed to work. You observe and then form conclusions based on those observations*. If you reject observations because the don’t fit your preconceptions ‘yer doin’ it rong’.
*[sub]I left out a few steps for the sake of simplicity.[/sub]
You have to stay the course and look for the underlying pattern to the weirdness. unfortunately, there is so much hoaxing and garbage out there to wade through that the few truly odd events are glossed over and investigations are never funded.
Thank you for the delightful and interesting responses so far (I love the SDMB!). I hope for more.
Rich, you are right on the money about my user name. I almost went with something like “There is no such thing as Z”, but this one works.
I must admit to being a little troubled by the phrase “stay the course”, not only because of the unfortunate association with administration policies, but also because my current course is “stuck”. I tend to call it writer’s block, but it’s more than just that.
Thanks again, and I hope this thread continues to generate some ideas.
Really, it means that one must exhaust all other options before resorting to paranormal, or supernatural explanations. Of course if such phenomena were to be aptly cataloged and described then they would cease to be paranormal or supernatural and merely become rare events.
let us take an example for the sake of discussion.
I’ve seen a video in which a chair moves, seeming of it’s own accord, roughly six inches in a sort of horizontal spinning motion. If we assume that we are NOT viewing a hoax of any sort, it is still a long way to confirming that the cause was someone’s dead granny with nothing better to do.
So how did it move? I don’t have the background in any scientific discipline that might be relevant to suggesting plausible explanations, but I’m certain someone here, or out there in the big world might. The problem is repeatability. If these events really are occurring, they seem to be at random, making testing extremely difficult. The chair doesn’t move every day just after breakfast after all. Investigations would have to span a serious length of time, under strict controls to confirm the existence some unknown physical phenomenon. THEN we have to try and figure out what the hell is going on. It is important not to let the unknown overwhelm your grounding in reality.
I was pretty much as you described when in my early twenties, skeptical, non spiritual, etc.
Went, with some office mates, to a card reader/fortune teller, just for grins. I was so little invested in the experience I wasn’t trying to debunk it or anything and just saw it as an amusement. When it was my turn I went in without the slightest reservation.
The card reader then told me something about my life that no one else knew, something she could not possibly have just guessed, something meaningful and dead bang on, it literally sent a shiver down my spine. I hardly heard anything else she said, I was so stunned. I was visibly shaken when I came out.
I didn’t dabble in such things again for another 25yrs it so unnerved me. It didn’t turn me into a believer or anything. But my black and white world began to turn gray around the edges.
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are imagined in your philosophy”, was the phrase (sorry if I got it wrong!) that came to me.
I’m pretty skeptical. But I have been in a couple of situations where I have solved problems (life-threatening problems) where there was an animal involved. In only one case did I think beforehand: “that animal is trying to tell me something.” I’m still pretty skeptical, but I am now much more open to the possibility that in life-threatening situations there is communication going on , or at least communication attempts going on between animals and humans.
I take it from your second post that this is for a writing project. If that’s the case you either use the reaction that fits the personality of the character you have in mind or write a character that would have the reaction you choose.
How a person would react to this sort of situation depends a lot on their personality, obviously.
In your question you use the word ‘undeniable’ and say that it’s not hallucination, but in my experience nothing is undeniable if one wants strongly enough to deny it. That is, if it would shake your beliefs to the core and you really don’t want your beliefs shaken you can easily convince yourself that you hallucinated.
Some people might take it as a sign that the world is very different from what they thought it was. They might become open to many possibilities that seemed like nonsense to them before and become mystics. I seem to recall something of this sort happening to an astronaut or two.
There are as many possible reactions as there are people since everybody is different, so you could tailor it so as to fit any storyline.
My personal reaction to these sort of events is, “Oh look, I have to change my worldview again. Oh well, here goes…done.” I know I didn’t imagine or hallucinate the strange things that have happened to me. Even if I didn’t have other witnesses–which I do–I would still feel this way. I accept it the same way I do when any scientific theory is abandoned or modified because of new data. The fact that the scientific community doesn’t know about my experiences or consider them ‘new data’ doesn’t matter–because I do.
For a long time science ignored the (mostly anecdotal) evidence that sometimes rocks fall from the sky. Eventually enough trained observers saw them actually fall that the existance of meteorites could no longer be denied. Science is a process that is not, and never will be, done. Some things that are disclaimed today will eventually come to be an accepted part of human knowledge. I can wait.
Thanks for the clarification, Acid Lamp. I had eventually figured that you meant something along those lines, but I appreciate the elaboration. There seems to be a consensus developing towards open-minded skepticism, which makes sense.
While it is technically true that this is for a writing project (some people recommend sculpture…), it is also true that framing my question that way is a transparent ruse to discuss non-hypothetical concerns. It seems to me that most people who aren’t typically credulous are more comfortable discussing such things in the remove. Plus, it serves as a shield of plausible deniability if I were to get dogpiled by either the board’s cynics or the True Believers.
Additionally, I have found that those people who have revealed themselves to be the most clued-in have used similar tactics, seemingly avoiding any straightforward admission at any cost. Which brings me to paranoia.
Is there a They? What are the implications of realizing that, for example, people like elbows’ reader exist? Why hasn’t anyone collected Randi’s million? Is the POTUS a puppet in more than just the political sense (it would explain some things…)? Are They hiding, or am I being kept in the dark? Why?
I had to google that, and promptly read Rich Mann’s username as Repo Man and blew my mind a little.
So I’d think that assuming something similar was happening would be my first step, speaking as your hypothetical skeptical inquirer (;)) – I’d think I’d gone a bit loopy, and probably try to be more observant. At some point, if these things continued to happen to me, I’d probably have to approach them as a real phenomenon, the two possibilities, that either I’ve gone nuts/am not getting things or the world’s fundamentally different from how I thought it was, both leading to the same conclusion.
Since I’m familiar with a lot of accounts of people to whom similar things happened, and yet haven’t been swayed by those stories, I’d probably assume a stance that I shouldn’t be swayed now just because I have become one of those people, by the same logic that has allowed me to remain a skeptic when I merely read about them.
I’d most definitely continue to look for mechanisms, and not just throw my hands in the air and claim it can’t be explained, seeing as how I can at best prove that I can’t explain it.
You know. If I, hypothetically, were in such a situation as described in the OP.
Is the user name Orr G. and the phrase “plate o’shrimp” a reference to the work of Wilson Bryan Keys?
(I think technically it was a plate of fried clams. )
To the OP- has anyone ever been to a Charismatic service where someone was giving “personal prophecies”? Essentially, it’s the Pentecostal version of “cold readings”. That can be unnerving as heck.
Being deadly serious if this happened IRL it is almost certain that you have developed some sort of schizophrenic disorder and though the events seem real(if incredibly weird) your first thoughts should be to seek psychiatric help and save the paranormal/metaphysical investigations for afterwards if at all.
In response to Lust4Life’s concerns, I was hoping to avoid getting the subject tangled up in the mental health arena, but I agree that this could be deadly serious. The kinds of experiences I describe correspond too closely to symptoms of psychosis for that issue to be ignored.
On the other hand, since I meant for the hypothetical to be along the lines of “what if it’s really real?”, contacting mental health professionals could be dangerous. I mean, unless you can count on a sympathetic Frenchman to convince the military guys that maybe they should let you aboard the mother ship.
BTW, I did come up with a scenario in case any of the “you need help” hard-liners from the other recent paranormal threads showed up in this one:
You talk to a shrink, and the two of you agree to a stay in the hospital and you are labeled with “Psychotic, NOS” for insurance purposes. No further experiences occur during your stay, and your visit follows along the lines of those folks in the “thud” experiment. After a couple of weeks (or when the insurance runs out) you are released. The next day, you discover that the string of numbers that guy in the corner of the day room has been chanting over and over just happened to be this week’s MegaBall winner.
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