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Looking for Skeptics

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flaccon said:
Excellent. My claim for now, is that "Spirits can speak through such a device as Edison suggested" Please tell whoever you are informing, that I am very keen to have this, tested? dealt with, by someone who's a tad braver than myself.
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But that's not really your claim is it?

Your website is full of unsubstantiated and yet testable claims and although you give a passing reference to some nonsense that Edison (reportedly) said, to claim that a pretend machine can pick up communication from an as yet unproven entity is hardly a claim worth discussing. I could pretend as easily that if there were a machine that could catch bigfoot, I'd catch myself a bigfoot or if there were a machine that sprayed rainbows to make them solid, I'd find the leprechaun's pot of gold.

In 1920 when Edison first talked about the possibility of such a machine, electricity was still a new technology and the tools available to him were basic in relation to what we have available today and you claim to be using some of today's tools (which will be several magnitudes more sensitive and accurate than those available in 1920) to make your spirit recordings. Why when pressed, does your claim revert back to relying on a hundred year old machine that does not exist?

What would be a help would be for you to list the makes and models of all the equipment you use and outline exactly how you set it up and the process you use to get your results.
 
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flaccon said:
Excellent. My claim for now, is that "Spirits can speak through such a device as Edison suggested" Please tell whoever you are informing, that I am very keen to have this, tested? dealt with, by someone who's a tad braver than myself.
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I've emailed them the url of this thread and suggested they invite you to give your demonstration at one of their monthly meetings.

Claims for EVP have been made many times and have never stood up to scrutiny. If you're not prepared to pursue this yourself then it's unlikely anyone else will bother.

http://www.skepdic.com/evp.html
 
Pixel42 said:
Her murderer has just been convicted. He claims to have had a psychotic break and forgotten what he did with the body, but it seems clear from the forensic evidence that he dismembered it and scattered the pieces over a wide area. The search for her body has been abandoned.

flaccon: in order to apply for the MDC you need a clear claim and a suitable test protocol. From what you've said it seems that the information the spirits give you could be the basis of both. Something like this:

1. Cards of 10 different colours are place in 10 different envelopes.

2. You are presented with each in turn, ask the spirits which colour is in that envelope, and record the answer.

3. The envelopes are then opened to see if you are right.

In this sort of test it's possible to calculate what the odds of success are in advance, and set success criteria significantly higher. In this case you would only be expected to guess the correct colour by chance for one of the 10 cards, and the success criteria would be set at 5 or 6 (i.e. you wouldn't need to correctly identify all of them to have demonstrated that there is something supernatural going on). Is this the kind of the thing you think might work?

The downside of taking a test like this is that it will also show if you are wrong in your belief that spirits are talking to you. Please be aware that this is a real possibility, as there have been many examples of people who have inadvertantly fooled themselves into such beliefs only to eventually be shown to be mistaken.
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I'm going to try this when next my friend is here. It's not been easy to test much with others so far, because a lot of them are scared, uderstandably.
 
flaccon said:
I'm going to try this when next my friend is here. It's not been easy to test much with others so far, because a lot of them are scared, uderstandably.
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It's actually not understandable, to me at least, why someone who thought this phenomenon was due to more than an overactive imagination would be scared by it. Excitement and awe would seem the appropriate response.
 
Pixel42 said:
I've emailed them the url of this thread and suggested they invite you to give your demonstration at one of their monthly meetings.

Claims for EVP have been made many times and have never stood up to scrutiny. If you're not prepared to pursue this yourself then it's unlikely anyone else will bother.

http://www.skepdic.com/evp.html
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Pixel could you let me have their web address? I haven't persued anything yet, due to time-wasting with clergymen. But yes I'm keen to sort out exactly what is happening, and how it's happening. I did read up regarding the psychological phenomena, and I would definitely agree to this explanation, if it wasn't for the recognition of certain family members within the images. If the EVP sounds exactly like my Father's voice, I have to dismiss the medical aspect side to this. I know I cannot prove that it is my Father's voice, but I can prove that there is a bunch of spirits with entangled speech, that can "separate" from the entanglement and request, explain, etc.

Ok sorry, got the addy thanks.
 
flaccon said:
Your sarcasm surprises me. I'm thru with hurt, but the spirits arn't. Their cause is to communicate with a more deserving device, and work for Charity. Thank u for your input adman, trying to reply to sarcasm, is difficult, no need for it really.

Three stages truth goes through. Ridicule, oppression, acceptance. I know these spirits will need to go thru all three stages before their requests are met, and I'm willing to help them with it.
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Perhaps I'm reading AdMan incorrectly, flaccon, but I didn't see his post as sarcastic. It's been pointed out to you by several posters (AdMan first, if you recall) that what you are experiencing is pareidolia. That is a perfectly normal situation in which humans, whose brains evolved to see patterns, see them in places that are simply white noise, if you will. It's how we see pictures in clouds.

In other words, what you are seeing in your images or hearing in your recordings, is coming from you, not from spirits. To my mind, AdMan is simply pointing out that if the spirits are also afraid of flying, just as you are, this is merely more evidence that the spirits are an aspect of you; they are not independent entities.
 
Pixel42 said:
It's actually not understandable, to me at least, why someone who thought this phenomenon was due to more than an overactive imagination would be scared by it. Excitement and awe would seem the appropriate response.
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I agree with you. Sorry but yes I was petrified for a couple of years. When I did overcome the fear, I did get stuck in, I'm in jubilation since their explanations. I am apprehensive to "test" much, but I'm more than willing to have them tested. My apprehension is only due to being told I must not question, and I must not test. Basically I must just "do" I do question, and I do test. I doubt it's necessary for me to "test" any further, but I really would like to try that "envelope" test on them.
 
If you do the envelope test that would be a big step towards dividing fact from everything else. I congratulate you for warming-up to the suggestion.
 
flaccon said:
I did read up regarding the psychological phenomena, and I would definitely agree to this explanation, if it wasn't for the recognition of certain family members within the images. If the EVP sounds exactly like my Father's voice, I have to dismiss the medical aspect side to this.
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How does the fact that you hear your father's voice rule out pareidolia? A familiar voice is exactly what you'd be most likely to think you hear, and a familiar face is what you're most likely to see.

And there is no medical aspect to this. Paredolia is not a medical condition, it's a perfectly natural consequence of the way in which our brains process sensory inputs. We all experience it.

Did you read the sceptic's dictionary article on EVP I linked to?
 
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Flaccon, consider a scenario where, regardless of what you are experiencing, some other person (Person B) is claiming to be getting the same kind of results you are, but everything Person B is getting could be attributed to pareidolia. I'm not addressing your experience here: I'm making up a hypothetical person, person B.

If Person B (whose results are not really paranormal or religious) are the product of his own brain's ability to make sense out of random patterns, and Person B were to try the envelope test, what do you think Person B's results would be? And how do you think Person B would explain those results?
 
Pixel42 said:
How does the fact that you hear your father's voice rule out pareidolia? A familiar voice is exactly what you'd be most likely to think you hear, and a familiar face is what you're most likely to see.

And there is no medical aspect to this. Paredolia is not a medical condition, it's a perfectly natural consequence of the way in which our brains process sensory inputs. We all experience it.

Did you read the sceptic's dictionary article on EVP I linked to?
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flaccon:
Pay close attention to the bolded part of Pixel42's message.
When skeptics tell you you are experiencing paredolia, they are not insulting you and telling you you are stupid or crazy. They are merely improving your vocabulary. It would be really irritating to have to write "the well-known tendency of the human brain to find patterns even where there are none" over and over again when talking about human perception. So a word was invented to cover the concept. That word is paredolia.
It's extremely common. It allows us to 'see' faces and bunny rabbits or turtles in clouds. And whether we 'see' it or not is influenced by our expectations. You might not see a particular cloud as being a turtle until someone points out its turtle-ness to you, and then, ping, it jumps right out at you.
Think of the smiley emoticons people use in text. A colon : followed by a close parenthesis ) is not a smiling face, and a semicolon followed by a close parenthesis is not a winking smiling face. But paredolia allows you to perceive it as such.
Even the graphic emoticon I'll get here on the forum by typing :) isn't really a face, is it? A yellow circle, two black dots, and a curved line. But paredolia lets/makes us see it as a face.
In my job, I have to pick zeros and ones sent with a very small amplitude out of a large signal a very noisy environment. To do that, we use filters that amplify just the part of the signal that the zeros and ones are sent in, and reduces everything else. Because of this, I receive zeros and ones even when I know there's nothing being transmitted. That isn't because the filters are bad. It's because the filters do their job very well. The only waveform that comes out of the filter is something that could be data.
So I have to use additional tests to see if it actually is transmitted data.
Paredolia is like that. We live in a world that presents us with a lot of different stimuli. We've evolved to filter out all the stuff that it isn't important, and to amplify the bejeezus out of anything that might be. The selection process is very good, but as with the signals in my job, that also means we'll get false positives. Data where there isn't any. Faces where there's just punctuation.
In my job, I use things like start patterns that can only happen once in a transmission, and additional 'stuff' bits that occur periodically to break up any accidental occurrences of that start pattern, and additional bits at the end that are mathematically generated from all the data bits in the transmission. If all those things match, there's a pretty good chance the data I receive is correct. It's not certain, but it's very likely. Without the checks, it could be right, but it's more than likely wrong, because if it was likely to be right, I wouldn't need all that filtering in the first place.

Skepticism is kind of like that additional checking beyond just filtering.
 
On a related note here are some fun and friendly examples of pareidolia:

http://www.toxel.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/illusionpainting00.jpg


Edited by LashL: 
Changed hotlinked images to regular links. Please see Rule 5.


That is not a bird, there is no face. Both are illusions created by a trained artist to take advantage of pareidolia for the amusement of the viewers.

In fact all visual art takes advantage of this feature of the human mind. How else could an artist get you to see a tree or a face without putting down every last detail of the image. If paintings and drawings had to be perfect to the last detail then art would be a great deal more difficult than it is.

The aural extension of this is how we can pick out words even in a noisy environment. In fact it is considered a handicap to not be able to filter intelligible words out of background noise. Think about speaking to a friend in a crowded room. You may only be hearing snatches of what they are actually saying but your mind can fill in the blanks. That same process, when given nothing but static noise, will try to make sense of the noise even if there is actually nothing there.

It is because of these perfectly natural processes of the human brain that skeptics are so cautious of EVP and blurry images. It has to be proven that what the person is seeing or hearing could only come from an outside source and not from their own mind seeking out patterns.

Please note that there is no shame whatsoever with discovering that your mind has been playing tricks on you. All of us have these same mental processes and we can all be caught off guard by them. Even more so if you are not aware of their nature.

Again, please keep an open mind and be willing to accept that your experience may not be as unusual, frightening, or supernatural as you may think. I know it can be hard to accept that something special in your life is actually quite ordinary but at least you will know that it is nothing to be afraid of.
 
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Also, you might want to Google misheard song lyrics.
 
Empress said:
Perhaps I'm reading AdMan incorrectly, flaccon, but I didn't see his post as sarcastic. It's been pointed out to you by several posters (AdMan first, if you recall) that what you are experiencing is pareidolia. That is a perfectly normal situation in which humans, whose brains evolved to see patterns, see them in places that are simply white noise, if you will. It's how we see pictures in clouds.

In other words, what you are seeing in your images or hearing in your recordings, is coming from you, not from spirits. To my mind, AdMan is simply pointing out that if the spirits are also afraid of flying, just as you are, this is merely more evidence that the spirits are an aspect of you; they are not independent entities.
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Pareidolia needs ruling in or out by professionals. It can be suggested here, and I can read up on it. Due to other experiences, I have to dismiss it. Not every case is Paredolia surely? I've no idea if spirits are afraid to fly, it's not really relevant to ask. But if this was "coming from me" I would have had the ball rolling 7 months ago. I'd enjoy a cigarette without the verbal warnings, and I certainly wouldn't be eating goats cheese. No offence to goats. I really am looking forward to anyone with a hands-on approach.
 
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flaccon, I'm guessing you are past the point of having to prove anything to yourself - you know what's going on. Isn't your problem, and what you'd like us to address, in how to go about demonstrating what's going on to others?

I think some of the suggestions here will do that. We can tell you what would convince us.
 
Weak Kitten said:
On a related note here are some fun and friendly examples of pareidolia:

[qimg]http://www.toxel.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/illusionpainting00.jpg[/qimg]

That is not a bird, there is no face. Both are illusions created by a trained artist to take advantage of pareidolia for the amusement of the viewers.

In fact all visual art takes advantage of this feature of the human mind. How else could an artist get you to see a tree or a face without putting down every last detail of the image. If paintings and drawings had to be perfect to the last detail then art would be a great deal more difficult than it is.

The aural extension of this is how we can pick out words even in a noisy environment. In fact it is considered a handicap to not be able to filter intelligible words out of background noise. Think about speaking to a friend in a crowded room. You may only be hearing snatches of what they are actually saying but your mind can fill in the blanks. That same process, when given nothing but static noise, will try to make sense of the noise even if there is actually nothing there.

It is because of these perfectly natural processes of the human brain that skeptics are so cautious of EVP and blurry images. It has to be proven that what the person is seeing or hearing could only come from an outside source and not from their own mind seeking out patterns.

Please note that there is no shame whatsoever with discovering that your mind has been playing tricks on you. All of us have these same mental processes and we can all be caught off guard by them. Even more so if you are not aware of their nature.

Again, please keep an open mind and be willing to accept that your experience may not be as unusual, frightening, or supernatural as you may think. I know it can be hard to accept that something special in your life is actually quite ordinary but at least you will know that it is nothing to be afraid of.
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Great illusions. Can I ask you, is EVP raw electronic voice? or does it have expressive tone? I ask because I hadn't heard a raw electronic voice til last week. Do you have good external speakers? (I'm told earphones are not good) Where may I send you a 15 second clip to?
 
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