Looking for Skeptics

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jsfisher said:
Flaccon hears "Alderbank", and I hear "I'll buy cake". Hit or a miss? Moreover, we still haven't done anything to rule out pareidolia.
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It's a 'miss' because the cake is a lie.





Alderbank said:
Mojo, I am sure I can tell the difference between a real photo and an illusion created by a bunch of inanimate objects.

Anyway, I took a photo of flaccon last night. Here it is. Judge for yourself

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I was not expecting that at all and it made me literally laugh out loud.

An even dozen internets for you, good sir!
 
flaccon said:
Yes Alderbank explained how to do that. I just done one. It will only play through Audacity, and it is completely silent.
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Then do you conclude from that simple test that the "voices" you hear can not be introduced in the computer's circuitry (otherwise you'd still be able to hear them) but are in fact in the sound that you record through your webcam application?
 
flaccon said:
Yes Alderbank explained how to do that. I just done one. It will only play through Audacity, and it is completely silent.
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That's excellent news. And when you play that silent recording I imagine you don't hear any spirit voices over the top of it.

You need noise to hear the voices, because the noise is the voices. There are no spirits. There is only noise and what your imagination does with it.
 
wardenclyffe said:
When the man with the singing frog hired a hall, the audience was NOT polite and respectful at all. Since flaccon's experience is following the same storyline, I would not expect it to be any different. The man with the frog eventually got rid of it before it could do him any more harm. I hope that flaccon does not need to let the spirits harm her before she gets rid of them.

Ward
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Have flaccon's voices done Michigan Rag yet? I love that song.
 
Now ask a "spirit" a question or whatever it is you do. Replay that silent recording. Any replies?
 
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flaccon said:
I've never been into the paranormal, psychics, tests etc, but I'm willing to learn
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The main thing you need to learn about the paranormal is that every attempt to demonstrate its objective existence has failed. Once you eliminate the effect of cognitive biases and fallible senses it simply disappears, making the conclusion that its perception is entirely an artifact of those biases and imperfect senses pretty much unavoidable.

Note that for all intents and purposes "paranormal" and "supernatural" are synonymous in this regard. Some of your earlier posts suggested that you attribute certain events in your life to the supernatural - demonic possession, dark forces etc. There is no objective evidence whatsoever to support their existence either. Once again, human psychology, imagination and fallible perceptions can completely explain these supposed phenomena.
 
Stray Cat said:
I disagree.

You are obviously into the Church in some way or have been in the past.
Almost everything it teaches falls into the category of the paranormal.
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I contacted the Church 13.5 years ago, by picking up the phone directory and using the first one in the book. If you mean into it by asking the Church for support, then yes, and due to the fact that yes everything it teaches is paranormal.
 
Stray Cat said:
Then do you conclude from that simple test that the "voices" you hear can not be introduced in the computer's circuitry (otherwise you'd still be able to hear them) but are in fact in the sound that you record through your webcam application?
Click to expand...

If I am setting Audacity to silence, it blocks out every noise yes. Do you mean it blocks out the inner noises made from the laptop? fan etc?
 
Flaccon, I feel it may be time for me to share my own experience with you.

Alderbank reports that you are a nice person, so I hope you will understand that I am hoping to help you shed the burden of your unasked for mission to aid these spirits in sharing their important message with the world. Your naturally compassionate nature is responding to their "desperation", (you told us at the beginning of the thread that they were desperate to communicate this message... subsequent developments have cast doubt on the degree of their desperation, as they seem very coy, but nevermind that).

I want to share with you the bones of my own journey through something similar. The torment of being contacted by some "other" needing you to decipher their messages is very stressful, and I hope you will be able to let it go and settle for a simply mundane and peaceful life, as I have learned to do.

Nearly 40 years ago I was a young hippy in India, flippantly calling out Hindu chants when smoking chilums, as was the game we were all playing (westerners enjoying the exotic land of holy smokes), traveling in the Himalayas and staying with sadhus (Hindu shamen, who use cannabis as a "sacrament").

The fact that it was illegal for us we kind of ignored, until of course unwelcome attention from police placed such stress on my mind one week that I ran away... and got totally paranoid. Leaving out the events and situations that developed into this paranoia (to keep this short and get to the point), I proceeded to undergo several weeks of wandering and interacting with "secret messages" I began to hear: radios I passed near would suddenly come out with phrases in English, and also people speaking in Hindi around me would suddenly drop English phrases... not actually surprising, as so many people do speak English, except that what I was doing was hearing Hindi words that sounded like English words but as if they were drawled or otherwise heavily accented... I would replay these sounds in my head and warp them, sometimes gradually, to reveal that they were distorted English... I had made the discovery that all Indians are in fact puppets of some kind of race of gods, and that Hindi was simply disguised English! They were letting me in on this secret! I became excited and intrigued that they were trying to "recruit" me into this secret world.

Of course, some bad things happened, and some good...my "understanding" of what was happening changed over the several weeks I was walking around and jumping on and off trains... aimlessly hoping to be guided to the right place... trying to understand the messages... and my ideas over what was happening changed so that I thought they were testing me... and my failure to really get the messages was my failure at the test to see if I would be allowed into their secret world... that was in itself stressful! Then suddenly I started to hear words in the song of (or noises made by) birds.

I was straining very hard to understand. But I couldn't quite get the meaning, beyond swift associations of ideas from fragments... most of which were criticisms of my failure to understand, or remorse that I was failing, or dying, or what have you... Anyway, this intense experience burned that response to birdsong into my brain, and (passing over all the rest of this story, how I eventually surrendered and went to the embassy, eventually got back to Britain, and brought my mind back to earth) despite my having a naturally atheistic set of mind, for many years (in fact even now) in times of stress and self-doubt I would again hear those kind of phrases in the sounds birds were making (very stressful when early morning insomnia grabs you and the dawn chorus strikes fear into you)... not necessarily cruel things, but things like "we can't believe we missed you" (they failed to find me and recruit me before I got too confused to be able to understand them, or something like that, is how I interpreted that)... etc

After several years of being uncertain as to what I had been through, I came round to accepting that I had had a psychotic episode, brought on by my fear of the police and a prolonged period of stress and poor nutrition and little sleep... and the overactive efforts of my brain to make sense of what I thought had already happened, and then of the audial stimulations that I was "interpreting".... which is why I've posted this: your need to help these spirits communicate is making you try too hard to "get the message".

In my case I created "routines" in my brain which come to life whenever stress makes me vulnerable. In yours, you are creating habits of interpretation in your brain when you listen to your noise in the speakers.

As others have said, this pareidolia is a natural result of our human need to create patterns out of random signals, and is not an illness. But the ideas we have about their meaning can be a sort of delusional illness which disrupts our lives and leads us up the garden path. I chose to abandon my susceptibility to being lead further by accepting that my thought processes were faulty. I was coming up with concepts of what was reality, and then looking for evidence to support that way of seeing things. As I learned more about science and critical thinking, I was able to see that science is a much more reliable guide to reality than this unsupported method of trying to figure out what's real.

So I learned to trust in science, and to distrust religious/New Agey supernatural "open-mindedness" (which in most people it seems is the exact opposite of true open-minded enquiry, wish-fulfilment pretending to be open) and accept the world as supported by rigorous scientific enquiry. There are no spirits, and no gods.

What a relief! Now I am free to simply be myself, and enjoy life for what it is. If I hear a bird say a phrase to me, I shrug it off. I don't play along any more. And it just goes away. I know I'm susceptible to pareidolia, and I know what it is, and there's no more to it than that.

From what you said at the start, you also had a stressful event or episode in your life, and this visitation of spirits to you is the result. Your efforts to deal with it as a reality have immersed you deeper into it, and is feeding your predicament. I really hope you can decide to put it out of your life and find peace, and live your life in a fulfilling and simply human happiness, as I have learned to do.

(I know you are convinced that you have had real supernatural experiences previous to this, more real than this pareidolia. It can be hard to accept, but we really do create all we see and hear inside our brains: the stimuli that come into our senses are assembled by the brain into the things we experience. When people take hallucinogenic drugs, they experience "real" objects etc that are not there in the external reality. It isn't the drug somehow putting those hallucinations into your brain, it is the brain itself producing these experiences. And the brain can do that even without the drugs. Which is why a personal anecdote is not a reliable guide to what actually happened. Hard to admit, but it really is so!)

The world is beautiful (and people are by and large decent and kind), full of fantastic and real phenomena, and the knowledge about it that science is revealing is so much more wonderful than all the myths and fantasies that people have invented (which in itself is proof to me that no god has ever revealed anything to us). I hope you can come to enjoy it the way I do. In peace and happiness and contentment with the real indifferent world, which allows us the freedom to be ourselves.

Best wishes, Syd
 
asydhouse said:
Flaccon, I feel it may be time for me to share my own experience with you.

Alderbank reports that you are a nice person, so I hope you will understand that I am hoping to help you shed the burden of your unasked for mission to aid these spirits in sharing their important message with the world. Your naturally compassionate nature is responding to their "desperation", (you told us at the beginning of the thread that they were desperate to communicate this message... subsequent developments have cast doubt on the degree of their desperation, as they seem very coy, but nevermind that).

I want to share with you the bones of my own journey through something similar. The torment of being contacted by some "other" needing you to decipher their messages is very stressful, and I hope you will be able to let it go and settle for a simply mundane and peaceful life, as I have learned to do.

Nearly 40 years ago I was a young hippy in India, flippantly calling out Hindu chants when smoking chilums, as was the game we were all playing (westerners enjoying the exotic land of holy smokes), traveling in the Himalayas and staying with sadhus (Hindu shamen, who use cannabis as a "sacrament").

The fact that it was illegal for us we kind of ignored, until of course unwelcome attention from police placed such stress on my mind one week that I ran away... and got totally paranoid. Leaving out the events and situations that developed into this paranoia (to keep this short and get to the point), I proceeded to undergo several weeks of wandering and interacting with "secret messages" I began to hear: radios I passed near would suddenly come out with phrases in English, and also people speaking in Hindi around me would suddenly drop English phrases... not actually surprising, as so many people do speak English, except that what I was doing was hearing Hindi words that sounded like English words but as if they were drawled or otherwise heavily accented... I would replay these sounds in my head and warp them, sometimes gradually, to reveal that they were distorted English... I had made the discovery that all Indians are in fact puppets of some kind of race of gods, and that Hindi was simply disguised English! They were letting me in on this secret! I became excited and intrigued that they were trying to "recruit" me into this secret world.

Of course, some bad things happened, and some good...my "understanding" of what was happening changed over the several weeks I was walking around and jumping on and off trains... aimlessly hoping to be guided to the right place... trying to understand the messages... and my ideas over what was happening changed so that I thought they were testing me... and my failure to really get the messages was my failure at the test to see if I would be allowed into their secret world... that was in itself stressful! Then suddenly I started to hear words in the song of (or noises made by) birds.

I was straining very hard to understand. But I couldn't quite get the meaning, beyond swift associations of ideas from fragments... most of which were criticisms of my failure to understand, or remorse that I was failing, or dying, or what have you... Anyway, this intense experience burned that response to birdsong into my brain, and (passing over all the rest of this story, how I eventually surrendered and went to the embassy, eventually got back to Britain, and brought my mind back to earth) despite my having a naturally atheistic set of mind, for many years (in fact even now) in times of stress and self-doubt I would again hear those kind of phrases in the sounds birds were making (very stressful when early morning insomnia grabs you and the dawn chorus strikes fear into you)... not necessarily cruel things, but things like "we can't believe we missed you" (they failed to find me and recruit me before I got too confused to be able to understand them, or something like that, is how I interpreted that)... etc

After several years of being uncertain as to what I had been through, I came round to accepting that I had had a psychotic episode, brought on by my fear of the police and a prolonged period of stress and poor nutrition and little sleep... and the overactive efforts of my brain to make sense of what I thought had already happened, and then of the audial stimulations that I was "interpreting".... which is why I've posted this: your need to help these spirits communicate is making you try too hard to "get the message".

In my case I created "routines" in my brain which come to life whenever stress makes me vulnerable. In yours, you are creating habits of interpretation in your brain when you listen to your noise in the speakers.

As others have said, this pareidolia is a natural result of our human need to create patterns out of random signals, and is not an illness. But the ideas we have about their meaning can be a sort of delusional illness which disrupts our lives and leads us up the garden path. I chose to abandon my susceptibility to being lead further by accepting that my thought processes were faulty. I was coming up with concepts of what was reality, and then looking for evidence to support that way of seeing things. As I learned more about science and critical thinking, I was able to see that science is a much more reliable guide to reality than this unsupported method of trying to figure out what's real.

So I learned to trust in science, and to distrust religious/New Agey supernatural "open-mindedness" (which in most people it seems is the exact opposite of true open-minded enquiry, wish-fulfilment pretending to be open) and accept the world as supported by rigorous scientific enquiry. There are no spirits, and no gods.

What a relief! Now I am free to simply be myself, and enjoy life for what it is. If I hear a bird say a phrase to me, I shrug it off. I don't play along any more. And it just goes away. I know I'm susceptible to pareidolia, and I know what it is, and there's no more to it than that.

From what you said at the start, you also had a stressful event or episode in your life, and this visitation of spirits to you is the result. Your efforts to deal with it as a reality have immersed you deeper into it, and is feeding your predicament. I really hope you can decide to put it out of your life and find peace, and live your life in a fulfilling and simply human happiness, as I have learned to do.

(I know you are convinced that you have had real supernatural experiences previous to this, more real than this pareidolia. It can be hard to accept, but we really do create all we see and hear inside our brains: the stimuli that come into our senses are assembled by the brain into the things we experience. When people take hallucinogenic drugs, they experience "real" objects etc that are not there in the external reality. It isn't the drug somehow putting those hallucinations into your brain, it is the brain itself producing these experiences. And the brain can do that even without the drugs. Which is why a personal anecdote is not a reliable guide to what actually happened. Hard to admit, but it really is so!)

The world is beautiful (and people are by and large decent and kind), full of fantastic and real phenomena, and the knowledge about it that science is revealing is so much more wonderful than all the myths and fantasies that people have invented (which in itself is proof to me that no god has ever revealed anything to us). I hope you can come to enjoy it the way I do. In peace and happiness and contentment with the real indifferent world, which allows us the freedom to be ourselves.

Best wishes, Syd
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What a thoughtful, well written post. Thank you for a great read. I personally appreciate you exposing your own vulnerability to help others further understand the nature of reality and experience as they relate to each of us internally. Hats off.
 
Asydhouse, that entire post was wonderful. (And nominated - looks like Maurice and I were both nominating it at the same time.)

asydhouse said:
What a relief! Now I am free to simply be myself, and enjoy life for what it is. If I hear a bird say a phrase to me, I shrug it off. I don't play along any more. And it just goes away. I know I'm susceptible to pareidolia, and I know what it is, and there's no more to it than that.
Click to expand...

I don't have anywhere near as interesting a story as asydhouse, but I certainly used to get easily creeped out by "supernatural" seeming things. Things that, on examination, turned out to have very ordinary explanations. It took repeated experiences like that before I finally gave in to the realization that my perceptions are often misleading, and things that seem supernatural on first instinct never turn out to be. And it's wonderful! Reality has so much to offer, and you miss out on it as long as you are so invested in the supernatural.
 
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iknownothing said:
Asydhouse, that entire post was wonderful. (And nominated - looks like Maurice and I were both nominating it at the same time.)
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I'm not surprised that others would nominate this piece. Our comments were also strangely similar. I will add that I had not read yours and independently came up with a similar conclusion. ☻☺☻
 
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Geez, I've been here for a year and never bothered to ask what that nominate button was for. Anyone care to fill me in? Does JREF do post awards or something?
 
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