Donn
Philosopher
I'm sure the spirits would be happy to channel the net for f. TCP/DOA is the protocol to use.
Looking for Skeptics
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wardenclyffe
Master Poster
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So is Alderbank meeting anyone at the pub today?
Ward
Ward
dlorde
Philosopher
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I think what can help hugely in this kind of situation is if the individual is prepared to learn about the science of perception, memory, and experience. Some understanding of the physics of the possible and an understanding of the everyday fallibility and unreliability of the mental aspects of human existence can help one acknowledge the possibility of being or having been mistaken. Unfortunately, this is far easier done if there is a basic grounding or interest in science in the first place, and it is generally people without such a grounding or interest that sink deepest into this particular quicksand...
trustbutverify
Penultimate Amazing
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I'm not sure what is and isn't the truth are the important issues for the OP and scrappy.
Alderbank
Critical Thinker
Well it doesn't look like it will be scrappy!
Despite all his earnest offers to meet up he actually ignored every venue I proposed and has gone into complete radio silence since Ward's suggestion above. No PM or email either.
He must have seen the growing list of people who could not make out any speech on those recordings. I suspect that flaccon played him recordings helpfully named with the words she could hear, just like she did for me, and I am sure she pointed out the exact spot where they could be heard. Once in this forum he will have seen that without exception everyone who hears those recordings without being told what to hear can make out nothing. I would like to think that he has experimented as we have suggested and found that he also cannot hear the same as flaccon unless she tells him in advance.
As others have posted, this realisation can take time to come to terms with.
wardenclyffe
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Have you tried contacting flaccon? I assume that she and scrappy are visiting today. I'm reluctant to encourage contact between you and flaccon unless you feel that everything is straightened out from the last go 'round.
Ward
Ward
Maurice Ledifficile
Lost in translation
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That's what I had hoped too, but her immediate response was to focus on all the dis-similarities. As far as she's concerned, we are totally different... and I have to agree.
For a start, the first thing she said after my post, as I recall, was that she has never taken drugs. Therefore to her (and no doubt a lot of other people who would prefer to lay the blame at that bogey man's door, instead of reading what I actually said about it being during a time when I was not using drugs, but was not sleeping and eating much, and being stressed by paranoia about the war on drug users) my experience was an irrelevant break down brought on by my own actions with causes totally removed from her situation.
Secondly, I was raised in a family home where religion was unmentioned, so my default understanding of the world was naive atheism, i.e. theism and religion were simply absent from my consciousness until I had gotten well into my teens (there's no religious education in Canadian elementary schools), whereas it would seem that flaccon has been indoctrinated since a young age into believing in supernatural agencies, via the church at least... and we all know that churches love to talk about demons etc.
It was nevertheless hard work for me to free myself of the possibilities inherent in personal experience of weird things, and pareidolia is like malaria: it comes back in waves, and without a firm trust in science and hatred of religion and snake oil selling opportunism, it would be easier to remain a prisoner of the mental gaol house of religious belief. For flacon, trying to get help from the religious authorities as she apparently has done, there's no apparent bridge across the abyss of her fear, and she has no real hope of ever reaching the opposite bank where the country of reason and secular rationality breathes the clear air of freedom. She is doomed to dwell in the kingdom of the lord like a peasant serf hoping for leniency from the powers that be.
In short, she's stuck in the mud. As I said before, I'm very grateful not to have been born into a Catholic home! Or any other cult/religion, too.
ETA PS I got so carried away with my metaphor about the abyss of fear that I forgot to say the main thing that separates flaccon and I: she is completely convinced that she has been haunted for many years, and that her earlier experiences were real, and that she shared them with her family. She has the validation of other people sharing her history. She cannot conceive that she could be mistaken in that.
I tried to address that by talking about shared hallucinations, the fallibility of memory and perception etc. But I'm sure that all went like water off a duck's back. She's got two virtually insurmountable barriers to even beginning to take a pragmatic approach to testing the spirits/pareidolia hypotheses: 1) she can't imagine that her personal experience previously was "imaginary" (misunderstanding that the experiences were real, but she has misinterpreted them, with the unquestioning credulity and validation of her fellow family members at the time), and 2) it is very hard to begin to ascribe such apparently validated events to a failure of one's mental faculties. Ie it's hard to admit to yourself that you are or have been having a psychotic experience. Mental illness, whether acute or chronic, still has too much social stigma attached, despite something like 1 in 4 of the population experiencing some form or other of mental illness/breakdown at some time in their lives. It's hard to submit to the possibility, and possibly even harder to relinquish trust to a professional, especially while in the throes of the experience.
Pride, insecurity, distrust... you have to overcome the lot in order to place yourself into the hands of someone else. It takes a real bold and yet humble set of mind to take such a step, especially if you don't think you are having a mental aberration. I am really wondering what is happening with this GP. The doctor probably doesn't know how to handle flacon, as she is functional, and dealing with her problems in a proactive way. He probably hopes she will begin to open up to the possibility that she is mistaken through interacting with us here... Hence "keep the ball rolling"... but I suspect that flaccon is totally misreading his intentions.
All in all, I'm not hoping for any shift in flacon by now... if she was able to, I think she would have responded to these possibilities through reading this thread. I hope the GP gets a grip soon, because flacon isn't going to. Prove me wrong, flacon? Please?
Thanks for the clarifications. I knew of course that your stories are quite different. I just focused on the uncanny similarities in the experience. I also didn't mean to put the pressure on you, but I wanted to suggest that your presence and availability should have been seen as a blessing.
I do want to point out that there is plenty of religion in Canadian schools. They are mostly secular here in London, but in my native Québec, the catholic church has a very, very strong presence in the school system. They basically monopolized the field for years.
Parents could always sign an exemption request so that a child didn't have to attend actual religion classes, and a kid could make his own choice at age 13. The kids who opted out of religion classes were enrolled in "morals" classes. Not sure if or how this system has changed recently, but education and the catholic religion have gone hand in hand for centuries.
At least I'm too young to have been educated by violent nuns, as my parents were.☻
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Alderbank
Critical Thinker
OK Ward, I phoned flaccon. Unfortunately I had just missed Mr Roberts who had just departed back to Nottingham.
Yesterday at the spirits' urging the two of them climbed the mountain (Snowdon). They were thwarted in reaching the summit because of bad weather. Tourist note: climbing Snowdon in good weather is a wonderful experience.
flaccon is keen to work with us to help the spirits to show that they exist. I suggested asking them how they think they could demonstrate their own existence. She will do that.
flaccon says she is willing to carry out the proposed test to identify 50 or more of her own recordings after they have been truncated to the same length and shuffled. She thinks that she can do this easily. So do I.
I asked about that letter from her GP to the Bishop. In it he said that (flaccon) 'hears noise suggestive of words' and has been haunted by this for some time. He said this was more a spiritual matter than a medical one.
flaccon was coy about the broadband problem. She uses the same ISP that I do. She says she will communicate to us via Mr Roberts.
You will be pleased to hear that Mr Bulger now also follows this thread.
flaccon asked me to email 15 seconds of silence to Mr Roberts. She is confident that now his computer has been calibrated, when he opens the file in Nottingham it will change the copy still on my computer. We shall see
jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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asydhouse
Master Poster
Really?! I was in school in Canada (in what was then St Eustache sur le Lac, which became City of Two Mountains after we had moved to Vermont) from kindergarten until finishing grade 4, from 1958 to 1963, and we had no religion whatsoever. Perhaps there are catholic schools and secular state schools? Or the French Canadian separatists managed to change the Quebec school system after I escaped!
And no worries about you putting pressure on me, Maurice, I didn't feel you had. I just saw an opportunity to deepen people's understanding of flaccon's predicament, so that people didn't judge her somehow in light of the things I've talked about. I sense a lot of quite flippant disrespect for her in some comments on here, born of frustration with scrappy and flaccon being so slippery (and disrespectful of all the attention lavished on them in this thread, it has to be said).... But I think we should realise that we are in the privileged position of being free of the hooks of superstition that are sunk so deeply into their minds, and hold off on exercising the creeping contempt born of that frustration, in favour of exercising a little compassion.
IXP
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Alderbank
Critical Thinker
So the files I already sent, at her request, were for naught?
I did ask about your files, js, but no clear answer. Perhaps they were unsuitable i.e. they did not mutate remotely. Sorry
Alderbank
Critical Thinker
Me too, but it'll be interesting to see the outcome! Will it be special pleading, spirits having a tantrum or confusion over what an MD5 hash is (no it's not a three-pointed leaf that hippies tend to smoke
)Maurice Ledifficile
Lost in translation
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This is very interesting. You are talking about the very area I come from. My father is from Saint-Joseph du lac and I grew up a few miles East of there.
The nuns and friars were running the French schools. I guess it was different for the "blokes"☺. You can believe me now or research it later, but the catholic church's grip on French society was, especially pre-1960, very, very strong. With the slow decline of the church, there has been a gradual change, but as a matter of fact I can't think of many schools in the area not named after a saint. (Actually the one I can think of happens to be "Polyvalente Deux-Montagnes", in the very city you referred to).
Small world indeed.
[ I am certainly as guilty as anyone of some level of snark. I usually try to contribute and promote progress, but it's hard to resist at times, as I am a natural born smart aleck with delusions of humoristic abilities. I will add that many less charming proponents of woo are dealt with much more harshly in other threads, so I think we managed to keep it friendly enough. ☻]
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jsfisher
ETcorngods survivor
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I did ask about your files, js, but no clear answer. Perhaps they were unsuitable i.e. they did not mutate remotely. Sorry
Oh, well. I did go back, though, to my copies of the files. Assuming flaccon actually played them at all, the spirits did not in any way alter my copies. The MD5 hashes are exactly as I posted in this thread (behind invisible tags, but posted never the less) when I emailed the files.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
The only problem being that identifying her own recordings can't really be considered paranormal if they have sounds on them that sound like voices saying particular things, so the test wouldn't demonstrate anything. I think the test that Professor Yaffle suggested in the other thread would be much better.
Alderbank
Critical Thinker
I have emailed 15 seconds of silence to Mr Roberts (scrappy). I recorded it using the built-in mic on my laptop and keeping very quiet.
The file is too big to post directly. I have uploaded it to https://www.box.com/alderbank along with the MD5 hash.
flaccon said scrappy will post on the forum tomorrow evening. This will demonstrate what the spirits are able to do. flaccon is confident that the file on my computer will change in some way (such as contain new voices which can be heard and understood clearly)
Update - scrappy has just replied to my email. Watch this space!
Just a brief up date as I have work in the morning . I was instructed to go to Chester to test the mountain with Tracy . They has bin a misunderstanding , Tracy isn't confident that my laptop will alter Alerdbanks recording . She said it would be interesting to see if this could be achieved be for running it through her own lap top . Tracy still has no internet to down load JFishers recordings . Sorry this is brief but I will be back tomorrow night . Goodnight .
Alderbank
Critical Thinker
Baby steps. We are on a journey. flaccon will succeed in this task and it will help her to understand and trust the process of scientific testing. Have you packed your sandwiches? It might be a long journey
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