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My Ghost Story

Squeegee Beckenheim said:
How is who is and is not trustworthy determined?

How should this be assessed?
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I asked you if you had anything you considered reliable. My guess would be that your answer would be "absolutely not because the paranormal does not exist"

I have come across a number of cases in popular myth, but nearly all are discredited, and I do not argue with the debunking. Here is one such article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology
In 1938, the psychologist Joseph Jastrow wrote much of the evidence for extrasensory perception collected by Rhine and other parapsychologists was anecdotal, biased, dubious and the result of "faulty observation and familiar human frailties". Rhine's experiments were discredited due to the discovery that sensory leakage or cheating could account for all his results such as the subject being able to read the symbols from the back of the cards and being able to see and hear the experimenter to note subtle clues.

Illusionist Milbourne Christopher wrote years later that he felt "there are at least a dozen ways a subject who wished to cheat under the conditions Rhine described could deceive the investigator". When Rhine took precautions in response to criticisms of his methods, he was unable to find any high-scoring subjects. Another criticism, made by chemist Irving Langmuir, among others, was one of selective reporting. Langmuir stated that Rhine did not report scores of subjects that he suspected were intentionally guessing wrong, and that this, he felt, biased the statistical results higher than they should have been.
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Does that mean that the supernatural does not exist, or that the supernatural is governed by an intelligence that does not wish evidence of its existence? The standard answer by a disbeliever is that this statement is a cop-out.

And what if we are in a computer simulation or dream of an intelligent being? If there is a possibility that might be, then there is a possibility that the statement might be true. Can you prove to me that we are not in a simulation or dream?

How many people like to believe that multiverses, cyclic universes and other dimensions are possible, despite the fact that proving any of these is harder than looking for glitches in reality?

And why do they? Because the belief that they might be possible lessens the chance of intelligent design which some argue is evidenced by fine tuning. Cosmologists acknowledge that our universe is like a pencil that stays balanced on its point.
 
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PartSkeptic said:
I asked you if you had anything you considered reliable. My guess would be that your answer would be "absolutely not because the paranormal does not exist"

I have come across a number of cases in popular myth, but nearly all are discredited, and I do not argue with the debunking. Here is one such article.




Does that mean that the supernatural does not exist, or that the supernatural is governed by an intelligence that does not wish evidence of its existence? The standard answer by a disbeliever is that this statement is a cop-out.

And what if we are in a computer simulation or dream of an intelligent being? If there is a possibility that might be, then there is a possibility that the statement might be true. Can you prove to me that we are not in a simulation or dream?

How many people like to believe that multiverses, cyclic universes and other dimensions are possible, despite the fact that proving any of these is harder than looking for glitches in reality?

And why do they? Because the belief that they might be possible lessens the chance of intelligent design which some argue is evidenced by fine tuning. Cosmologists acknowledge that our universe is like a pencil that stays balanced on its point.
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And what if we are turds expelled by the Great Green Goober.

And what if we are pawns in the Great Chessmasters game

And what if we are hairless apes.
 
PartSkeptic said:
I asked you if you had anything you considered reliable. My guess would be that your answer would be "absolutely not because the paranormal does not exist"

I have come across a number of cases in popular myth, but nearly all are discredited, and I do not argue with the debunking. Here is one such article.




Does that mean that the supernatural does not exist, or that the supernatural is governed by an intelligence that does not wish evidence of its existence? The standard answer by a disbeliever is that this statement is a cop-out.

And what if we are in a computer simulation or dream of an intelligent being? If there is a possibility that might be, then there is a possibility that the statement might be true. Can you prove to me that we are not in a simulation or dream?

How many people like to believe that multiverses, cyclic universes and other dimensions are possible, despite the fact that proving any of these is harder than looking for glitches in reality?

And why do they? Because the belief that they might be possible lessens the chance of intelligent design which some argue is evidenced by fine tuning. Cosmologists acknowledge that our universe is like a pencil that stays balanced on its point.
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Absolutely none of this is in any way even pretending to answer the questions you were asked.
 
PartSkeptic said:
...
Does that mean that the supernatural does not exist, ...
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It means that no strong evidence for the supernatural has been put forth.


PartSkeptic said:
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or that the supernatural is governed by an intelligence that does not wish evidence of its existence? The standard answer by a disbeliever is that this statement is a cop-out.
...
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Well then, where do the strong belief and convictions of believers in the supernatural come from?
That 'intelligence' must have an IQ of not more than 3.
 
Daylightstar said:
It means that no strong evidence for the supernatural has been put forth.
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Agreed.

Daylightstar said:
Well then, where do the strong belief and convictions of believers in the supernatural come from?
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Personal experience.

Daylightstar said:
That 'intelligence' must have an IQ of not more than 3.
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Lets see. Gadzillions of years of intelligent mental age divided by many more gadzillions of physical age. An IQ of 3 might just do it, I would say. Some might say infinity divided by infinity could give you any number, so we would need the cosmologists/mathematicians to use perturbation theory to normalize the result.


Okay. I think we have beaten this dead horse enough. Pity we did not hear more from Alferd_Packer. I will attempt to bow out.
 
Personal experiences are indeed the root of most belief in the paranormal; most people give far more credence to them than to the results of decades of careful scientific research, as they have no idea how fallible their perceptions and memories are and have never heard the term 'cognitive bias'.
 
PartSkeptic said:
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Lets see. Gadzillions of years of intelligent mental age divided by many more gadzillions of physical age. An IQ of 3 might just do it, I would say. Some might say infinity divided by infinity could give you any number, so we would need the cosmologists/mathematicians to use perturbation theory to normalize the result.
...
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Actually, the hypothetical intelligence' governing and overseeing the secrecy of 'The Paranormal' would be a complete retard, with so many believers with 'personal experiences'.
 
Pixel42 said:
Personal experiences are indeed the root of most belief in the paranormal; most people give far more credence to them than to the results of decades of careful scientific research, as they have no idea how fallible their perceptions and memories are and have never heard the term 'cognitive bias'.
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The personal experience itself may not have the same effect on everybody. The traits of the person having the personal experience plays a role as well.
 
Daylightstar said:
The personal experience itself may not have the same effect on everybody. The traits of the person having the personal experience plays a role as well.
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Indeed, with a predisposition to believe in the supernatural being the most important such trait. Someone like flaccon/Cassidy, for example, will see the supernatural in trivial examples of pareidolia that the vast majority of people would understand the true explanation of, even if they'd never heard the word pareidolia.
 
tsig said:
And what if we are hairless apes.
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Hairless apes that are afraid of the dark, afraid of dying, looking for any explanation that makes us seem special, rather than just a mortal, carbon based lifeform like any other on this spinning blue rock.
 
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tsig said:
Maybe we could ask the ghost of the dead horse
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I wondered if anyone would come up with this one. Congratulations, you get the honors.

Personal experience. The only "real" thing we actually have. I think therefore I am. The rest could be all hallucination, all lucid dream, or all simulation. I choose to give some credibility to my own experiences where I think the mundane explanations are hard pressed to explain them. If I heard some-one else tell me the same things rather than be my own experiences, I doubt I would feel the way I do.

A person could chose to believe that there are no higher/hidden powers/spirits and just live their life. Fine with me. I choose to believe that that is one possible answer, but I think that there might be a possibility that the supernatural exists.

So I choose to pray, and to take part in ceremonies. They might work for either of two reasons. One is that the supernatural does exist, and the other is that the supernatural does not exist but there are psychological positives at work. To me it is a win-win situation.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
How is who is and is not trustworthy determined?
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Check out their history. If they have been involved in scams, and have people complaining about them they are suspect. If they are respected in their field, and their peers acknowledge their contribution (may agree or disagree) their opinion/writing can be generally trusted.

Squeegee Beckenheim said:
How should this be assessed?
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Assessing credibility is done by asking questions and reviewing the answers. Evasiveness is a sign of of lack of credibility. Contradictions without a logical explanation are also suspect. Again, history will ruin a persons credibility. Lying in the past, supporting the unsupportable and so on.

There is no agency or organization that assesses these things. On these forums you make up your own mind, and if you have built-in bias you may get the wrong answer.

I may be mistaken in my beliefs as to possible explanations, and even in what I think I have experienced, but I say that does not mean I am untrustworthy, or lack credibility.

One might be sure that there is no supernatural and uses this to say that anyone who thinks there might should automatically be untrustworthy, or is not credible. Different folks, different personal standards.
 
When it comes to assessing the reality of something that has never been proven to exist, anecdotes are beyond useless. Credibility is meaningless.
 
PartSkeptic said:
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I may be mistaken in my beliefs as to possible explanations, and even in what I think I have experienced, but I say that does not mean I am untrustworthy, or lack credibility.

One might be sure that there is no supernatural and uses this to say that anyone who thinks there might should automatically be untrustworthy, or is not credible. Different folks, different personal standards.
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If one consistently displays an apparent need for the possibility for something which fails to be demonstrated as real again and again and again, one's credibility slowly deteriorates.
 
Maurice Ledifficile said:
When it comes to assessing the reality of something that has never been proven to exist, anecdotes are beyond useless. Credibility is meaningless.
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An anecdote is an observation. Science is based on observations. Because something is yet unproven does not mean it does not exist.

Simple elementary logic.

Mind-science and consciousness is proving to be one of the hardest challenges.
 
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