The Paranormal

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

If the "paranormal" is indeed real, then how come there are so many unclaimed prizes for proving such -- like the former JREF "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"?

How can you prove to a fedora tipper that you had a premonitory dream that changed the course of your life? Of course i'd be the first one to call a psychic a scammer but sometimes materialist logic is no good to prove or explain metaphysical experiences.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

a premonitory dream that changed the course of your life

I imagine the skeptical response would be that the dream was a lucky guess, an example of "counting the hits and forgetting the misses", or something along those lines.

BTW there has been absolutely no undoubtedly paranormal experiences in my life. If I were to pick belief based on experience alone, I'd definitely be a "fedora tipper".

 

[skykiii]

How can you prove to a fedora tipper that you had a premonitory dream that changed the course of your life? Of course i'd be the first one to call a psychic a scammer but sometimes materialist logic is no good to prove or explain metaphysical experiences.

Plus some of those prizes are rigged anyway. The JREF one is an infamous case.

I've made this rant before. TL;DR -- This stuff (especially anything related to James Randi) can not be taken at face value.

 

[seri0us]

Shadow people are very common. They're seen around here by a lot of people. The thing with shadow people is while they may sometimes be normal ghosts, they often are a more fucked up category of spirit that is viewed as very negative, which would be in line with being the by-product of an Indian curse.

How can I meet one?

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

If the "paranormal" is indeed real, then how come there are so many unclaimed prizes for proving such -- like the former JREF "One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge"?

The paranormal doesn't want to be proven.

 

[weegrumpy]

@Flan Handler i guess that was a Jesus take the wheel moment! Blimey I bet you didn’t get any sleep that night, you poor (or lucky) soul

Thread Tax:
My husband works in a certain ballroom at Glasgow. He told me last week about when he was doing a night shift, that in a “ coffin shaped” lounge downstairs , that he heard a gravelly loud voice telling him to get out.
Now mr grumpy isn’t afraid of folks, and has a long history of paranormal events happening to hi, but he was like “fick this imma outta here “!

He told his colleague who told him that happened to him the night before.
there a few ghosts in that place, even a security officer that mr.grumpy knew who died on duty there. But my theories are they’re victims of Bible John, take that as you will

 

[RMQualtrough]

Savant-ism is paranormal. I think of that often... It seems kinda BS that as soon as something is confirmed to be real it's just reclassified as "normal".

There's no world in which a dude hallucinating Pi to like 1,000,000 digits should be seen as normal. It's fucked and weird. And some of the other savants like Jason Padgett etc.

 

[Flan Handler]

Savant-ism is paranormal. I think of that often... It seems kinda BS that as soon as something is confirmed to be real it's just reclassified as "normal".

There's no world in which a dude hallucinating Pi to like 1,000,000 digits should be seen as normal. It's fucked and weird. And some of the other savants like Jason Padgett etc.

I hadn't thought about it like that, but what is that?

My husband and I argue all the time about whether or not our brains are meat radios, passing through a signal that originates outside of ourselves, or if consciousness is just material, neurons firing in a brain vat. Not that those are mutually exclusive of course. To me it makes sense that a certain type of brain injury might remove some sort of governor on our potential, and what are the implications of that?

He told me last week about when he was doing a night shift, that in a “ coffin shaped” lounge downstairs , that he heard a gravelly loud voice telling him to get out.

I always hope it’s not ghosts because that seems like a terrible place to get stuck as an afterlife!

 

[weegrumpy]

TBF I’ve had the best nights of my life going to concerts there, and the drink is pricey lol

 

[RMQualtrough]

I hadn't thought about it like that, but what is that?

My husband and I argue all the time about whether or not our brains are meat radios, passing through a signal that originates outside of ourselves, or if consciousness is just material, neurons firing in a brain vat. Not that those are mutually exclusive of course. To me it makes sense that a certain type of brain injury might remove some sort of governor on our potential, and what are the implications of that?

Yep I also doubt the ideas are necessarily mutually exclusive. For example if everything in existence is "matter" then your subjective experience (qualia) would also have to be "matter". If everything in existence was "consciousness", then brains and matter and neurons also would be "consciousness". It sort of renders it moot as there's not an X substance and a Y substance to compare and distinguish from each other. Words are only useful to distinguish Thing 1 from Thing 2, and are totally pointless otherwise.

Sort of like if you say, where is your subjective experience of reality. A person may say in the brain, then where is the brain, in the world, where is the world, in the universe, where is the universe? Then it doesn't make sense anymore because we don't have an outside of the universe to use to provide a location. Matter vs mind may just be like that, whwre whatever thing you choose you can keep saying "what is THAT made of" and eventually there's nothing beyond that to use for comparison and you realize whatever word you use to name it doesn't matter...

If I was going to try to study the paranormal I'd probably study savants, acquired savant syndrome, etc. Their abilities are only considered normal because they're proven real. I feel like if it wasn't a known thing and some dude told James Randi he can list digits of Pi for like 10 hours straight as the digits appear before him as clouds, he'd win the prize money.

 

[Male Idiot]

Anyone knows any good rituals to summon Styx Hexenhammer? I want to ask him about how a libertarian country would be run in autistic detail.

 

[Otterly]

But my theories are they’re victims of Bible John, take that as you will

They never caught him did they?

Savant-ism is paranormal. I think of that often... It seems kinda BS that as soon as something is confirmed to be real it's just reclassified as "normal".

There's no world in which a dude hallucinating Pi to like 1,000,000 digits should be seen as normal. It's fucked and weird. And some of the other savants like Jason Padgett etc.

Gosh I hadn’t even thought of that. It is very very odd when you think about it. The thing id always thought is that our brains are amazingly capable and we simply do t use them to any significant degree. People can actually acquire such skills after brain injury too (I think it’s the frontal and temporal lobes.) the guy who inspired Rain Man has an issue with his corpus callosum. It’s almost as though the brain is capable of massive amounts but it hobbled by connectivity .

 

[RMQualtrough]

They never caught him did they?

Gosh I hadn’t even thought of that. It is very very odd when you think about it. The thing id always thought is that our brains are amazingly capable and we simply do t use them to any significant degree. People can actually acquire such skills after brain injury too (I think it’s the frontal and temporal lobes.) the guy who inspired Rain Man has an issue with his corpus callosum. It’s almost as though the brain is capable of massive amounts but it hobbled by connectivity .

The strongest hallucinogens seem to greatly reduce brain activity. It suggests to me that that form of perception is more accurate to the real world, as the more processing you do on any raw data, the further removed it becomes from that raw data. Once your mind starts adding depth perception, sense of spatial location, etc, it's like Adobe Aftereffects. The data comes in raw and is usually experienced by us in a very edited manner.

I think that might not be a point anyone would argue.

Being out in a coma or general anaesthetic or dead may just be experiencing what reality actually is minus all the aftereffects, which is something that doesn't have any form at all and thus seems to just be an instant teleport to the next moment (e.g. waking up in the recovery room ward after surgery). As you are saying, maybe our brains are moreso filtering out things to create a perception of reality that aids survival. In fact that seems inevitable rather than theoretical, as natural selection just works that way. If a change is advantageous it replicates, and lots of BS happening would distract us from the things important for our survival. Imagine how much harder it would be to survive if we saw radio frequencies. Just a bunch of BS lines over everything, could barely see where we're going.

 

[weegrumpy]

@Otterly nope, there was a theory that he was serial killer Peter Tobin, but he was in the south of England at that time

 

[Fek]

My husband and I argue all the time about whether or not our brains are meat radios, passing through a signal that originates outside of ourselves,

As far as I've been able to surmise: the brain allows >you< to navigate physical existence. The you that you are behind the flesh suit, so to speak. One tunes out all manner of inputs that aren't currently relevant to the experience (in fact far moreso than what is tuned into) thanks to the brain. That latter sentence, at least, is one that even SCIENCE!™ won't deny..fully.

Speaking of the brain and the filtering process:

If I was going to try to study the paranormal I'd probably study savants, acquired savant syndrome, etc. Their abilities are only considered normal because they're proven real. I feel like if it wasn't a known thing and some dude told James Randi he can list digits of Pi for like 10 hours straight as the digits appear before him as clouds, he'd win the prize money.

It seems to me that savants have particular pathways open to consciousness that are normally closed off for the purposes of physical existence. I would suggest this is similar to how an honest to goodness psychic or remote viewer would function, only they're utilizing different pathways. Different avenues of travel, if you will. Frankly, one could boil this entire idea down for pretty much every human skill or trait; it's just that the fringe cases stand out better against the crowd.

Mainly, though - I would stand firm in the idea that the physical is there to assist the nonphysical. It's not that those skills/traits are originating from within the pink squishy thing between ones ears. The brain is just setup to allow their particular flavor of weird (savant or otherwise) through from the gate leading to greater consciousness.

---

Since this post is at risk of teetering off topic, I do have an event to share..though there's no ghosts or spooky stuff.

Spoiler: I'd count this as technically paranormal?

I was in Vegas for a week last year just for funsies. On a whim, I decided to hit up the local cannabis dispensary and enjoy the strip from an elevated position. I only bring this up, because I have a feeling it's why this event even happened. It's worth noting I very rarely partake in such things, so very little of it has quite a big effect on me.

So I get back to my hotel on the strip, sitting on the bed in the room, and I get one of the most vivid flashes of something I've ever had in my life: a silly "cash bats" slot machine I had passed by earlier down in the casino. It was a "more real than real" sort of moment, however fleeting. I shook it off, and went about my business. Not more than a minute later, it happens again only I'm sitting there playing it this time. I am apparently quite pleased with myself, at that. Once again, as quickly as the..vision? comes, it's gone again.

Now, gambling doesn't do it for me. As paradoxical as it might seem, I just don't gamble in Vegas beyond like 20 bucks a trip..but "alright, fuck it, fine," I think to myself. "I'll go down and play the slot. Let's humor this lunacy."

Well, within a few minutes of playing it? I walked away with my trip nearly paid for off of my winnings. All because I had some kind of thc-induced imagery surface and I decided not to ignore it. Quite convinced that was some premonition or extrasensory event.

 

[Doctor Love]

(I think it’s the frontal and temporal lobes.) the guy who inspired Rain Man has an issue with his corpus callosum. It’s almost as though the brain is capable of massive amounts but it hobbled by connectivity .

The area around the Wernicke's lobe, or however it's called, is definitely associated with it. I make a lot of whacky observations on KF, and although they are all 100% true and reflective of reality, it's directly related to my health. In short, I genuinely don't have the same brain structure as most because of that whole "my chest hurts" deal.

In most cases, language and culture develops in a similar way, so people approach problems in certain ways. If you damage that language component, the language develops differently and you can form a completely different conclusion, when told the same thing.

Wernicke's Aphasia, in its worst forms, is the one where people speak with a normal cadence, but in complete gibberish. It is a spectrum, though, and some people are only lightly affected. This is how the Unabomber was caught - he would make weird spelling mistakes, adding letters into words, and used phrases in the wrong pattern. He wrote "You can't eat your cake, and have it too" - implying that he remembers things in an odd, chronological way. It was a subtlety throughout his writing, which was recognised by his brother. Kaczynski essentially damaged the normal linguistic method of learning, and instead, substituted his own which reflected how he actually saw things. From that, your entire worldview changes.

And to also add some of my own experience into understanding Uncle Ted - if you have a linguistic disorder, propaganda and marketing aren't suited to you. Your understanding of things is warped by the unique way that your brain "forms" it - in normal circumstances, the information is processed in a different order, to come to the same conclusion.

So you can instantly detect deceit. Honesty is easy, since the order is different but the conclusion is the same. When people assume you understand things in a normal way, your brain takes a completely different route and the sentence sounds "uncanny" for a completely different reason than what the liar was expecting.

 

[RMQualtrough]

I am sure there is something logically wrong with the brain being able to exist inside the thing it is generating (such as the field of vision) but I don't know the term for that.

It's like playing a video game and then walking into a room in the game and there's a computer, and you're told that computer is what's generating the game. But the computer itself is part of the game that is generated.

The image of the brain I referred to is of course not the thing generating the sights and sounds etc. It's meant to be something underlying that. And even so it seems logically wrong somehow because the image of the brain is meant to represent some sort of spatial location, in the way that we consider spatial locations (if everything was in reality in one point and spatial relations were existent but only just as numbers, I don't think people would consider that to be space).

That seems paranormal. That the thing generating a sight could in theory appear within its own generated sight, if someone opened your skull and held up a mirror for example. There's something that doesn't work about this.

 

[Doctor Love]

but I don't know the term for that.

Plane works - the brain cannot observe itself, or exist in the plane it builds.

That's entirely true, and a big fucking issue I have with psychologists. Neurologists and Psychiatrists are better, since they don't play pretend about it.

 

[FedPostalService]

WHO WAS PHONE?????

 

[skykiii]

As you are saying, maybe our brains are moreso filtering out things to create a perception of reality that aids survival.

I'm not even sure of this. What the fuck even is survival? If our present reality is just a thing our brain is creating, what are we "surviving?" Would it not in fact be better to die and thus be in Reality Prime?

Then of course, you would think things like how long most of humanity spent perpetually hopped up on shrooms and alcohol for literal millennia would have led to mass death, and yet somehow, it hasn't.

Minor powerlevel for a bit.... I used to know this guy. One weekend, me and some buds were staying at his house, and the guy started playing Contra III--a game he notoriously sucked at, and we saw his suckage in action.

Then he decided to get himself hopped up on benadryl and start hallucinating.... and while high, decided to play Contra III again.... and shockingly, he was suddenly kicking the game's ass. He even managed to reach the last boss.

When the high ended, he described the game to us but the scenes he thought he was playing were nothing like what we actually witnessed.

To this day it makes me question reality.