Can anybody help me find a logical explanation for this stuff?

[Ririon]

For a while I have doubted any psychic or paranormal phenomenon, always finding a rational "logical" explanation for the events instead. But lately I have been finding way too many events that seem unexplainable by conventional scientific logic. Here is one in particular that I find fascinating. (It won't let me post any links until I get more posts, so I will just copy and paste it here)

It might be best to look up Emanuel Swedenborg on wikipedia before reading this information, so you will be more familiar with what he does..

"There are three well known incidents of psychic ability reported in literature about Swedenborg.[48] The first was from July 29, 1759, (snip)

It seems to me that you have quite a bit of reading to catch up with. I think I'll just leave you to it.

 

[Sledge]

OP, why do you find these old anecdotes so impressive?

 

[InkBlotTest]

This is a “law of averages” story.

How many times did he make a “prediction” and get it wrong?

I often predict my train home will be late, I am often right – I must be psychic.

 

[Dancing David]

It might be best to look up Emanuel Swedenborg on wikipedia before reading this information, so you will be more familiar with what he does..

In this case it would be best to know the provenance and timing of the statements. that would be crucial in determining the actual sequence of events. Without a good time line for the events recorded and their recording as history, no claim could be made.

Welcome!

 

[Dancing David]

If he cared about getting fame don't you think that he would have published them under his name?

First off, what documents exist and are the basis of the claim.

Start at the beggining of the trail.

 

[Dancing David]

What is more fun about that is that Mecca was built by pagans for pagan worship. Yay! Paganism is the truth!

w w w.wikiislam.com/wiki/Kaaba
w w w.wikiislam.com/wiki/The_Pagan_Origins_of_Islam

Nope, the black rock predates Islam, as does parts of teh Kabba and Mecca, that does not mean Mecca and the Kabba as they exist were built by pagans. But yes it is important to most religions that they expropriate the prior religion.

The catherdral at Chartres is built on a pagan site, that does not mean pagans built the cathedral.

www.wikiislam.com/wiki/Kaaba
www.wikiislam.com/wiki/The_Pagan_Origins_of_Islam

 

[Dancing David]

I'm trying to be as critical as I can and not just brush something off quickly with the most simple explanation I can find. I want to be very thorough and open minded before I discard claims. This is not the only event that has gotten me more interested in exploring phenomenon like this, and I can post some others later.

Sorry Zanders, in the causal world of objective theory, if a simpler explanation exists and can not be controlled for then the rest is speculation.

 

[Dancing David]

Persons present, disturbed by the incident since some had homes or friends in Stockholm, were impressed by Swedenborg's apparent clairvoyance.

And the documents are?

Also, go to the "Veracity" section on his wikipedia page. One of the things that makes it special is that the specific detials he gave were confirmed, such as it being stopped three doors down from his house.

And the documents are?

 

[dlorde]

This story seems to be an unverifiable anecdotal account - if Swedenborg did announce a fire, the 'light on the horizon' explanation would cover it well enough, and other details could be later embellishments. There's no way of knowing.

But if this character had such a mysterious ability, one would expect to hear other examples of it - after all, if it was so impressive at the time, you'd expect people to be agog for more. And if one person has such an ability, one would expect others to have it too. But there's no such evidence, which suggests it's just a story.

 

[PixyMisa]

Still waiting for Zanders to acknowledge that Marduk nailed the second story to the wall.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

...the 'light on the horizon' explanation would cover it well enough...

250 miles away? I seriously doubt it. A few miles, maybe a few tens of miles if the conditions were good, but 250? Do you suppose there's any independent record of this fire, to give us some perspective on how big it was (always presuming it actually happened)?

If Swedenborg really did announce a premonition of a fire in Stockholm, and if there really was a fire in Stockholm on the same day, then I think he just got lucky.

 

[PixyMisa]

I imagine you're referring to the Transcendental Aesthetic, and Kant's (understandable) ignorance of non-Euclidean geometries. I'm afraid that doesn't throw his whole argument out. It just throws out the claim that there are synthetic a priori truths about the nature of physical space.

Not just physical space, but all of reality. And, to pick on one of his other examples, he was completely wrong about arithmetic. If you're wrong about both mathematics and physical reality, you don't have much left.

 

[Irish Murdoch]

Well, this is off-topic, so I'm not going to get into it properly here. First of all, Kant did not claim that one could have synthetic a priori knowledge of all of reality! Most knowledge of the world is synthetic a posteriori, he thought. And no knowledge of things in themselves is possible at all. Such knowledge would have to be synthetic a priori if it existed, but Kant takes himself to show very clearly that no such knowledge can be had. This is one of the major strands of the first Critique: the puncturing of the pretensions of speculative metaphysics.

Synthetic a priori knowledge, in the critical philosophy, has two spheres. One can have synthetic a priori knowledge of the forms of intuition (space and time), and of the categories of the understanding (the organisational structure brought to bear on the data provided by outer and inner sense). Only the arguments of the Transcendental Aesthetic are mathematical in character, and they cover only the forms of intuition. The arguments of the Transcendental Deduction are what supposedly establish the categories; developments in mathematics are not relevant to them. Now, I'm not saying this is the case, but it would be conceptually possible for Kant to be wrong about the forms of intuition, but right about the categories.

I'm not a transcendental idealist. But there's much to be salvaged from Kant that doesn't lead us to transcendental idealism (witness, for example, a project of this sort undertaken by P.F. Strawson in his book The Bounds of Sense).

 

[Irish Murdoch]

If Swedenborg really did announce a premonition of a fire in Stockholm, and if there really was a fire in Stockholm on the same day, then I think he just got lucky.

A small point, but probably one worth making: according to Kant's account, Swedenborg did not have a premonition. Kant writes,

"After he had spent some while there [i.e., with a party of people in Gothenburg], he reported to the company, with every sign of consternation, that at that very moment a dreadful conflagration was raging in Stockholm ...."

 

[Soapy Sam]

Let me see.
Man with expensive new book to sell goes on promotional tour.
Before leaving home, he arranges with a co-conspirator to start a small fire, but to make damn sure the fire brigade is parked a few doors away from his house...

Call me a sceptic, but had I been the governor, I would have had a few more searching questions for Immanuel.

 

[godless dave]

Next is something related to a man named "Wallace Fard Muhammad", the man that started "The Nation of Islam" (which barely has anything to do with Islam and is a racist cult) The information he gives is startlingly accurate for a man like him to know so long ago (unless I am misinformed)

""In 1930, when Master Fard Muhammad came, He told us that, “The total area of the land and water of the planet Earth is 196,940,000 square miles.” He said, “The circumference of the planet Earth is 24,896 miles,” and, all of us had to memorize this. “The diameter of the earth is 7,926 miles; the area of land is 57,255,000 square miles; the area of water is 139,685,000 square miles.” He said “The Pacific Ocean covers 68,634,000 square miles and the Atlantic Ocean covers 41,321,000 square miles.”

“The Indian Ocean,” He said, “covers 29,430,000 square miles, and the lakes and rivers cover 1,000,000 square miles. The hills and the mountains cover 14,000,000 square miles; the islands are 1,910,000 square miles; and the deserts are 4,861,000 square miles. Mount Everest is 29,141 feet high, and the producing land is 29,000,000 square miles. The earth weighs 6 sextillion tons—a ‘6' followed by 21 zeros—and is 93,000,000 miles from the sun, traveling at the rate of 1,037 1/3 miles per hour. Light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, and sound travels at the rate of 1,120 feet per second. The diameter of the sun is 853,000 miles.”

...

The information is not spot on, but some of it is still way closer than anyone should have been able to know at the time, especially somebody like him. Look the man up on wikipedia to get his back story, and also google his name along with "measurements earth water" and such to see more information on his supposed super knowledge.

Are you seriously claiming that geologists weren't able to measure the diameter or circumference of the earth in 1930?

As for the speed of light, remember Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity in 1905, and the speed of light had been measured before then.

 

[Marduk]

Ding! You win this fine Babylonian kewpie doll!

Dammit, I was trying to win a "carp of Enki" in a bag

 

[PixyMisa]

You have to knock down three more nonsensical claims to win the carp.

 

[Sun Countess]

For a while I have doubted any psychic or paranormal phenomenon, always finding a rational "logical" explanation for the events instead. But lately I have been finding way too many events that seem unexplainable by conventional scientific logic. Here is one in particular that I find fascinating.

Translation: I'm a believer in all things ESP and after digging around for a long time, I think I've found the motherlode of stories that even the best skeptics will have a hard time explaining.

I'm trying to be as critical as I can and not just brush something off quickly with the most simple explanation I can find. I want to be very thorough and open minded before I discard claims. This is not the only event that has gotten me more interested in exploring phenomenon like this, and I can post some others later.

Discarding the simplest, most likely explanations is not the definition of being as critical as you can.

If you really wanted to be critical, you could have looked up the timelines for the information that Fard Muhammad allegedly knew before it was available, found out that it was in fact available in 1930, and instantly dismissed his claim instead of bringing it here as a "good" example.

Oh come on, I wasn't trying to push his religion or beliefs I was going to (and just did) post some strange things done by other people as well. I am not trying to push any specific belief system, I am just pointing out cases where people (with completely different beliefs) seem to demonstrate psychic powers or knowledge that seems hard to explain by science.

Do you actually have a case like this?

Your first case was exceedingly weak, and the second even weaker. Will the third time be a charm?

 

[Sledge]

Third case: "Ok, right. This friend of a friend of my cousin had a dream the night before he was due to fly to New York. In the dream, his plane crashed into a big building. Dude was so convinced the dream was true that he rescheduled his flight. The day he'd been due to fly on? September 11th, 2001! Like, oh my god, right? SWEAR that's a true story. You want a hit on this?"