Hello from a non-skeptic

[H'ethetheth]

I am sorry but on hearing the story I fainted, banging my head as I fell. I can’t remember who it was. Even now I wonder if it was just a dream.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
I asked because I wanted to know if it was perhaps my ancestor Willem the whaler nobody knows you were talking about. Sadly, I'll never know.

 

[Charles Boden]

You are all so attached to rhetoric and so quick to dismiss anything that is presented to you. Perhaps I should have said "evidence to me personally" rather than "personal evidence". A small consutation to google-search will instantly provide you with connections with Dr Ian Stevenson's work; but fine, I'll be more careful about providing associated links as well.

You may say I am making reference to too many different issues, but to me they are all interconnected. If your "patience is waning", fine, I'll just stop.

Where does the imagination come from? Which is more likely, that you've heard tales of the exploits of the Jacobites, seen pictures in fairy tale books of castles, minstrels, boots, horses, etc, caught snippets of conversations, and like children do, put your own explanation on them; or that memories can be passed down by some hitherto unexplained phenomenon?

At the age of four or five? Hardly... This is an old argument used by skeptics to counter-argument children's memories and hypnotic regression, but how many of you here have ever undergone a regression to verify for yourselves? Another favorite is that "it is the regressionist that guides you into such memories". In the only regression I have ever done in my entire lifetime, this was not the case. There was absolutely no "guidance" into anything of what I "saw".

You are all jumping to conclusions again. No one in my family holds similar beliefs as my own. I was only able to verify my genealogy last year. No one in my family ever believed, or even wanted to believe, in any form of connection of such nature.

You want to argument that Diana was not a "member of the Royal Family" in the strictest sense of the word when she was/is the mother of the future King? Such argumentations come across to me as almost as unbelievable, such as your main claim against Jacqueline Pool's case being the fact that the only piece of information the medium got wrong was that the murder was on a Friday not a Saturday? That Lady Di's death was a couple of hours after the 158 hours in a week (which in truth it wasn't)?

Does make it difficult to coherently and unbiasedly debate the issues, don't you think?

 

[EHocking]

Not to be too negative Charles, but from your stories it is clear that your family places some stock in your connection to the house of stuart. As you seem to know geneaology and everything, which for most of us kinda stops at grandparents/great grandparents.
I'd therefore hazard to guess that you've grown up on stories about your famous ancestors.
Has it occurred to you that your memories are in fact a combination of old childhood fantasies, mixed with the general 'lost prince' type literature young children tend to read and a bit of wishful re-interpretation on your part?

Add to this that he's been a member of this spiritualist movement for 12 years before his reading.

What is the probability that the "medium" giving him a reading would know of his belief that he is a reincarnated descendent of a royal family and added that detail in for positive reinforcement of the "reading"?

 

[DC]

Hi and welcome to the Forum. You are not a sceptic? Maybe you will learn to be more sceptic while you post here

 

[aggle-rithm]

The experiment has been conducted in various laboratories with the same result (please correct me if I am mistaken): electrons bombarded one at a time upon a plate with two openings and a sensor placed behind it. Initially the indications on the sensor gave the results expected for a "wave", but when another sensor was placed to observe what might be happening the sensor began to give the results expected for a particle.

Does the explanation of fotons truly account for this?

Short answer is that matter behaves very differently on a small scale than it does on the scale we are accustomed to interacting with.

Long answer is...it's really complicated, but has nothing to do with consciousness or paranormal phenomena.

 

[H'ethetheth]

You are all so attached to rhetoric and so quick to dismiss anything that is presented to you. Perhaps I should have said "evidence to me personally" rather than "personal evidence". A small consutation to google-search will instantly provide you with connections with Dr Ian Stevenson's work; but fine, I'll be more careful about providing associated links as well.

You may say I am making reference to too many different issues, but to me they are all interconnected. If your "patience is waning", fine, I'll just stop.



At the age of four or five? Hardly... This is an old argument used by skeptics to counter-argument children's memories and hypnotic regression, but how many of you here have ever undergone a regression to verify for yourselves? Another favorite is that "it is the regressionist that guides you into such memories". In the only regression I have ever done in my entire lifetime, this was not the case. There was absolutely no "guidance" into anything of what I "saw".

You are all jumping to conclusions again. No one in my family holds similar beliefs as my own. I was only able to verify my genealogy last year. No one in my family ever believed, or even wanted to believe, in any form of connection of such nature.

You want to argument that Diana was not a "member of the Royal Family" in the strictest sense of the word when she was/is the mother of the future King? Such argumentations come across to me as almost as unbelievable, such as your main claim against Jacqueline Pool's case being the fact that the only piece of information the medium got wrong was that the murder was on a Friday not a Saturday? That Lady Di's death was a couple of hours after the 158 hours in a week (which in truth it wasn't)?

Does make it difficult to coherently and unbiasedly debate the issues, don't you think?

No it doesn't. What does make discussion difficult is being confronted with claims without being confronted with the means to evaluate the claims.
What also makes it difficult is your reluctance to even consider well known phenomena such as the law of large numbers, confirmation bias, cold reading, and trickery as having anything to do with the things you have apparently witnessed.

 

[aggle-rithm]

You want to argument that Diana was not a "member of the Royal Family" in the strictest sense of the word when she was/is the mother of the future King? Such argumentations come across to me as almost as unbelievable, such as your main claim against Jacqueline Pool's case being the fact that the only piece of information the medium got wrong was that the murder was on a Friday not a Saturday? That Lady Di's death was a couple of hours after the 158 hours in a week (which in truth it wasn't)?

Does make it difficult to coherently and unbiasedly debate the issues, don't you think?

Even if correct in every detail, these stories do not provide enough data points to come to any kind of conclusion about paranormal phenomena. At best, it suggests that more research should be done, but such research has already been done countless times.

What we've found from this research is this: Positive results tend to be found only where scientific methodology is lacking. The tighter the controls, the less impressive the results.

To me, this suggests that we've done enough research and we should move on to more promising fields of study.

 

[Agatha]

I meant to point out earlier that the inclusion of minstrels in your visions/dreams/imaginary plays is one thing that suggests that the images are more likely to be influenced by fictional stories and pictures you've seen rather than by any kind of memory of the Young Pretender. Minstrels were common in mediaeval times but had almost wholly disappeared by the beginning of the 18th century.

 

[Lothian]

Perhaps I should have said "evidence to me personally" rather than "personal evidence"......

either way it is not verifiable and will not convince anyone here, no matter how many anecdotes you have. Neither will it make people think.

You may say I am making reference to too many different issues, but to me they are all interconnected. If your "patience is waning", fine, I'll just stop.

One piece of good evidence is worth more than a million anecdotes. The only interconnection is that they are not evidence.

At the age of four or five? Hardly... This is an old argument used by skeptics to counter-argument children's memories and hypnotic regression, but how many of you here have ever undergone a regression to verify for yourselves? Another favorite is that "it is the regressionist that guides you into such memories". In the only regression I have ever done in my entire lifetime, this was not the case. There was absolutely no "guidance" into anything of what I "saw".

You need to realise your memory is a memory, no matter how much you believe it to be true it is not evidence.

You are all jumping to conclusions again. No one in my family holds similar beliefs as my own. I was only able to verify my genealogy last year. No one in my family ever believed, or even wanted to believe, in any form of connection of such nature.

Either way it does not make your 'dream' evidence for anything

You want to argument that Diana was not a "member of the Royal Family" in the strictest sense of the word when she was/is the mother of the future King?

No the argument is that Diana is remotely connected to James VI. There are just as close connections in other royal families yet you have ruled them out and decided that the psychic saying a royal family connected to you can only be the British royal family.

Such argumentations come across to me as almost as unbelievable, such as your main claim against Jacqueline Pool's case being the fact that the only piece of information the medium got wrong was that the murder was on a Friday not a Saturday?

Who said that? The main claim is that the medium gave no new information. Everything she said was known.

That Lady Di's death was a couple of hours after the 158 hours in a week (which in truth it wasn't)?

You said you were told on a Saturday. She died on Sunday morning (Possibly Saturday night in Brazil). Either way is could not be the same week as the Saturday you were told.

Does make it difficult to coherently and unbiasedly debate the issues, don't you think?

You are having problems I agree.

 

[Charles Boden]

Again you are making use of rhetoric as a means of counter-argumentation.

Yes, I do believe that more research should be carried out before the possibilities are ruled out. The impression I get here, however, is that such research is biased even before it is performed. Makes it very difficult to reach a reliable conclusion...

 

[Pixel42]

You want to argument that Diana was not a "member of the Royal Family" in the strictest sense of the word when she was/is the mother of the future King?

It was me that was under that impression and, for the record, I accept my immediate correction on that point. Still doesn't make the prediction of the death of an unspecified member of an unspecified royal family any more impressive.

 

[Agatha]

You said you were told on a Saturday. She died on Sunday morning (Possibly Saturday night in Brazil). Either way is could not be the same week as the Saturday you were told.

You are having problems I agree.

Brazil is behind GMT - so Diana's death, announced at 05.30 Sunday morning French time, would be being broadcast around 00.30 to 02.30 Sunday morning in Brazil (depending on which way daylight saving time works at the end of August, I'm not going to work it out right now).

 

[Pixel42]

Yes, I do believe that more research should be carried out before the possibilities are ruled out. The impression I get here, however, is that such research is biased even before it is performed

On what do you base that impression? Because the whole point of the careful research that has been done, indeed the whole point of the scientific method which is used to do it, is to methodically remove any and all such bias and see what, if anything, remains to be explained. And the result is invariably: absolutely nothing. Removing the biases and sources of error that might wrongly lead people to think they are witnessing paranormal phenomena completely eliminates such phenomena.

 

[Charles Boden]

Pixel, if the medium who identified the murdered of Jacquline Pool had indeed had prior info on the case, which according to the police officers she did not, it is hardly likely that the one fact she would get wrong would be the day in which it happened. Why was this not taken into consideration in all the arguments that were put forward against it?

As for the "time-span" concerning when I was told that "a member of the Royal Family would die that week", it is hardly a counter-argument that it should have happened a couple of hours after the completion of exactly seven days, particularly when considering the significance of the event, and particularly its significance to me.

You are all far too quick at discarding any evidence by any possible means that I might place confidence on whatever experiments may have been conducted.

 

[Loss Leader]

You are all so attached to rhetoric and so quick to dismiss anything that is presented to you...
Does make it difficult to coherently and unbiasedly debate the issues, don't you think?

One of the things that makes it difficult is that you seem to be ignoring the arguments presented. As such, you've completely failed to address any of the points I offered in this post. Pease let me know your thoughts.

On one occasion, I “saw” a pair of army boots resting upon a stool beside a fireplace, while a minstrel sat playing this same song. On another occasion the vision was of a fair-haired young boy playing with a young girl in the backyard of a palace, placing a golden bracelet across a trickle of water, building an imaginary golden bridge, patting its extremities into the mud so as to keep the bracelet bridge in place and saying to the young girl:

“When I grow up and become King, I shall build a bridge made of gold just like this one especially for you...”

A maid-servant appeared at what seemed to be the kitchen door to summon us inside, as the overhanging clouds were turning dark and there was the threat of imminent rain. The golden bracelet got left behind, and was either lost in the mud or swiped by a servant to whom a probably greater need and use may have arisen. Then there was the feeling of fear of the right and proper scolding that I would most certainly get from my tutors and parents for having lost it.

Let's forget for a moment "how" these mental visions came to be. Is there any evidence at all that these are accurate depictions of things that happened to the person you claim to have been? I mean, they're really not evidence of anything unless they are some dead person's actual memories, right? Do you know for a fact that they are?

 

[Mirrorglass]

Pixel, if the medium who identified the murdered of Jacquline Pool had indeed had prior info on the case, which according to the police officers she did not, it is hardly likely that the one fact she would get wrong would be the day in which it happened. Why was this not taken into consideration in all the arguments that were put forward against it?

As for the "time-span" concerning when I was told that "a member of the Royal Family would die that week", it is hardly a counter-argument that it should have happened a couple of hours after the completion of exactly seven days, particularly when considering the significance of the event, and particularly its significance to me.

You are all far too quick at discarding any evidence by any possible means that I might place confidence on whatever experiments may have been conducted.

So you have now concluded that every single person on this board, is determined to never believe you, and by extension, every single piece of research ever conducted studying paranormal events is worthless, so there's no use in even trying to be convincing, let alone considering any of the arguments presented?

I would personally call that somewhat of a hasty conclusion, although not an unexpected one.

 

[Charles Boden]

Loss Leader, if you will have the patience to let me continue, I believe I will answer your questions in as best as I can. I am not ruling out your argumentations, I am considering them, and this is one of the reasons why I came here. May I go on?

 

[Pixel42]

Pixel, if the medium who identified the murdered of Jacquline Pool had indeed had prior info on the case, which according to the police officers she did not, it is hardly likely that the one fact she would get wrong would be the day in which it happened. Why was this not taken into consideration in all the arguments that were put forward against it?

As has been explained to you, one psychic being right about something proves nothing. Anyone can make a lucky guess, or even quite a few lucky guesses if they make enough of them. What matters is if they are right more often than would be expected by chance, which can only be established by methodical testing using the scientific method.

Record every prediction this psychic makes for at least a year, have a control (a bunch of people making intelligent guesses about the same things based on whatever they can find out by normal means), award points for correct predictions (the more details correct the more points), deduct points for predictions which don't come true, and at the end of the study period see if your psychic has a significantly higher score than the average of the non-psychics. Only then can you reach any justifiable conclusion about whether the psychic does, or does not, have genuine powers.

 

[godless dave]

You do know that past-life regression therapy has been completely debunked, right? Hypnosis can't even uncover reliable memories about a subject's current life.

 

[Charles Boden]

She did with me, but as I said before I have had no contact with her for five years now. The problem I find with such testing is the following: a "medium" means an "intermediary". To me a "psychic" is something different, it is someone who can make use of a certain capacity to see things at a distance or move objects or whatever. I don't believe any truly serious medium would place himself/herself under such testing conditions mainly because such manifestations are not dependant on themselves. I can certainly provide the address of the spiritualist center I frequented and anyone wishing to test her can get in contact directly.