The Paranormal

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PaleTay said:
I've seen a small child in reflections, and heard others say they've heard a child's voice in my house or other locations. Had my bed rock and it stopped when I told it to fuck off, same with knocking at the window. I have woken up to being scratched pretty badly. I'd prefer it to be a ghost/demon than anything logical.

I've seen animals do weird things in the deep woods, especially on Native land.
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Interested in hearing the animal stories.
 
Hallucinogenic Penguin said:
Interested in hearing the animal stories.
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Most of them aren't really long enough to be stories and I was younger, just deer being aggressive or seeing giant insect mounds which weren't supposed to be anywhere nearby and to this day I have no idea what made them. There was a group of large predatory animals which seemed to get along for whatever reason but would watch people, like cougars, wolves, and sometimes bears sitting together in a clearing. We always stayed inside at night or left beforehand, and I was told that the reason was that the land itself was bad.
 
PaleTay said:
Most of them aren't really long enough to be stories and I was younger, just deer being aggressive or seeing giant insect mounds which weren't supposed to be anywhere nearby and to this day I have no idea what made them. There was a group of large predatory animals which seemed to get along for whatever reason but would watch people, like cougars, wolves, and sometimes bears sitting together in a clearing. We always stayed inside at night or left beforehand, and I was told that the reason was that the land itself was bad.
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Weird animal behavior on plots of land is usually related to Indian curses. Sometimes, these curses can stay in effect for hundreds of years especially if the tribe has moved on from that place (or was forced to leave) and there is no shaman there to lift it.
 
I have seen threads on 4chan pop up with it's OP being something that I have been thinking about, it's like I predicted the future or something.

I think about something, and then a few moments later, a thread, or a reply to a thread shows up. The threads always are on point of what i'm thinking about, but replies often have some sort of reaction image that's related to it, or it's just me getting lucky.
 
I have seen people call UFOs paranormal. I believe they are real and not from this planet. I don't believe in ghosts though or demonic possession. I even saw a UFO once. Though in that case it was a unidentified flying object because I couldn't identify it exactly. It didn't fly but kind of floated slowly across the sky. This was back before drones were a popular toy for people.

That's about all the paranormal I get into.
 
I have a theory on the paranormal. There is this assumption, a dogma, that because nobody has provided really good proof of things like ghosts or God or whatever other paranormal entity/phenomena, that means it doesn't exist. That kind of assumes that paranormal subjects follow the same materialistic rules as everything else, though, like being repeatable or detectable through experimentation. I don't know hardly anything about quantum physics, so forgive me if I get this completely wrong, but doesn't quantum entanglement have a thing going on where just "observing" a particle, in a literal sense, causes it to resolve into a state? There's an implication there that the act of perception, separate from material causes, can change the material world.

I think paranormal phenomena, if it exists (and consider me sort of optimistically agnostic on it), is by its very nature something that attempting to recreate it will cause it to disappear.

Specific forms of paranormal activity I am interested in include psychic connections between individuals, coincidences, and demons. Psychically, there are tons of stories where somebody will die and then their loved one will die on the same day without ever hearing the news. That cannot possibly be caused by shock or giving up if they didn't even know, and it seems to be more common than random chance would allow. On a less flashy scale, I often find that I will, again, separately from them (not living even in the same state), tend to feel sick, moods, or other such around the same time as my parents, particularly my Pa. I think that the soul/consciousness of some entities can be connected to others, certainly from birth but possibly also a sort of entangling from frequent interaction.

Coincidences, to me, are not really coincidences; that is, I believe they are built into the structure of the universe. There are tons of instances of mathematical beauty and symmetry and such in nature, and I think that coincidences are a sort of poetry built into the universe. Things (specific phrases, concepts, etc.) have a way of suddenly coming up in spates, and you can argue it's just noticing it but I don't buy that, too many times I've seen a word or phrase for the first time, suddenly encounter it several more times during a day, and then it goes away. Now, like I said, I don't consider these as having any significance in a schizo way, but I think they exist in a sense like nature rhymes with itself?

Lastly, I do believe demons exist. It's worth explaining, I think you can have non-material phenomena that interacts with the world through material means - I think it's the only real way you can explain the Hard Problem of Consciousness - and so, just because you can explain a certain phenomena as the action of certain parts of the brain or certain hormones, that doesn't mean that you can't also ascribe phenomena to spirits too. Night hags are a good example of that, you can 100% explain night hags through science, but to me that doesn't mean the night hag doesn't actually exist. Other sorts of demons would be whatever things spread evil thoughts in people, like the self-harming impulse, the other-harming impulse, evil ideologies. I also think, based on the example of superorganisms, that consciousness can exist at lower and higher levels of organization than we think of. A colony of ants are all individual creatures, clearly, following their own internal programming, yet they cooperate to act as a single units. So do the cells of a human body. Why should it not be that there could be some level of consciousness for the individual cells of the body, and similarly consciousness emerging at group levels like nations? (If you prefer, you can think of that as being like a China brain, but I think my idea's a bit different.) So I think there are potentially lots of conscious entities that are not animals as we think of them, which you can call paranormal if you want.

Don't really have any personal paranormal stories. My Pa had a ghost visitation from his best friend who died in Vietnam, but he also says he was drinking at the time and so he doesn't have a strong opinion on if the visitation was his imagination or real. He also had a relative who, in an episode of sleep paralysis, saw the night hag loom over his roommate, and the roommate died the next day, like a reaper.
 
PaleTay said:
Most of them aren't really long enough to be stories and I was younger, just deer being aggressive or seeing giant insect mounds which weren't supposed to be anywhere nearby and to this day I have no idea what made them. There was a group of large predatory animals which seemed to get along for whatever reason but would watch people, like cougars, wolves, and sometimes bears sitting together in a clearing. We always stayed inside at night or left beforehand, and I was told that the reason was that the land itself was bad.
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That's creepy as fuck lmao.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
I don't know hardly anything about quantum physics, so forgive me if I get this completely wrong, but doesn't quantum entanglement have a thing going on where just "observing" a particle, in a literal sense, causes it to resolve into a state? There's an implication there that the act of perception, separate from material causes, can change the material world.
Click to expand...
Yes, the concept you are referring to is a real thing and was proven in the "double slit experiment" where particle behavior was dramatically altered simply by whether it was being observed. Its a very well known experiment in the physics field because it has been replicated many times over by many different scientists, with the same results every time.

Conventional physics is mostly stumped by it, and many consider it a random oddity. But I see it as possibly indirect evidence of a Creator, and as definite proof that humans are the center of the universe. If we really are just an "accident of evolution", then why does the Universe only function when we observe it?

It also raises interesting questions regarding the world being mind-over-matter but that's a whole other discussion.
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
I think paranormal phenomena, if it exists (and consider me sort of optimistically agnostic on it), is by its very nature something that attempting to recreate it will cause it to disappear.

Specific forms of paranormal activity I am interested in include psychic connections between individuals, coincidences, and demons. Psychically, there are tons of stories where somebody will die and then their loved one will die on the same day without ever hearing the news. That cannot possibly be caused by shock or giving up if they didn't even know, and it seems to be more common than random chance would allow. On a less flashy scale, I often find that I will, again, separately from them (not living even in the same state), tend to feel sick, moods, or other such around the same time as my parents, particularly my Pa. I think that the soul/consciousness of some entities can be connected to others, certainly from birth but possibly also a sort of entangling from frequent interaction.
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Building off your points on psychic "connections" between individuals, what is your view on reincarnation? I am inclined to think it is a thing because there are documented cases of people having memories of living earlier lives as totally different people, to the point of detail that would be difficult to explain rationally. But is that proof of actually having lived that earlier life, or simply proof of some kind of psychic connection with the earlier person?
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Coincidences, to me, are not really coincidences; that is, I believe they are built into the structure of the universe. There are tons of instances of mathematical beauty and symmetry and such in nature, and I think that coincidences are a sort of poetry built into the universe. Things (specific phrases, concepts, etc.) have a way of suddenly coming up in spates, and you can argue it's just noticing it but I don't buy that, too many times I've seen a word or phrase for the first time, suddenly encounter it several more times during a day, and then it goes away. Now, like I said, I don't consider these as having any significance in a schizo way, but I think they exist in a sense like nature rhymes with itself?

Lastly, I do believe demons exist. It's worth explaining, I think you can have non-material phenomena that interacts with the world through material means - I think it's the only real way you can explain the Hard Problem of Consciousness - and so, just because you can explain a certain phenomena as the action of certain parts of the brain or certain hormones, that doesn't mean that you can't also ascribe phenomena to spirits too. Night hags are a good example of that, you can 100% explain night hags through science, but to me that doesn't mean the night hag doesn't actually exist. Other sorts of demons would be whatever things spread evil thoughts in people, like the self-harming impulse, the other-harming impulse, evil ideologies. I also think, based on the example of superorganisms, that consciousness can exist at lower and higher levels of organization than we think of. A colony of ants are all individual creatures, clearly, following their own internal programming, yet they cooperate to act as a single units. So do the cells of a human body. Why should it not be that there could be some level of consciousness for the individual cells of the body, and similarly consciousness emerging at group levels like nations? (If you prefer, you can think of that as being like a China brain, but I think my idea's a bit different.) So I think there are potentially lots of conscious entities that are not animals as we think of them, which you can call paranormal if you want.
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Not much to add here but all these points make sense to me and raise interesting further arguments.

Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Don't really have any personal paranormal stories. My Pa had a ghost visitation from his best friend who died in Vietnam, but he also says he was drinking at the time and so he doesn't have a strong opinion on if the visitation was his imagination or real. He also had a relative who, in an episode of sleep paralysis, saw the night hag loom over his roommate, and the roommate died the next day, like a reaper.
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If you don't mind me powerleveling and schizoposting for a second- I find your points about sleep paralysis and your earlier points about "demons" very compelling, as I have experienced sleep paralysis twice, both times in my late teens. and both times the entity radiated energy that absolutely felt evil and "demonic" for lack of a better word. Appearance wise they were unremarkable, one was a totally average woman dressed in normal clothes that would have fit in anywhere, and the other was a shadow figure with elongated limbs. The aura of both was absolutely evil though, it was immediately obvious in a way I cannot explain or put into words logically.

If we're swapping stories now, one reason I have an interest in the paranormal is that my grandparent's old house had a ghost in it that they and their children saw for years, until the ghost suddenly stopped appearing. Always the same man dressed in a brown suit with a hat. It was to the point that nobody wanted to go to the bathroom alone at night, as the ghost would always appear in the room across from the bathroom, sitting in the same chair. It's one of those weird things in my family that everyone agrees happened, but is simultaneously rarely mentioned because no one can explain or prove it. My mother was rather vague on this last point, but she said that wasn't the only ghost and that when she was young there were "scary" ghosts, but she thought the suit ghost kept those away later on. She was very vague on this part and didn't want to elaborate so I didn't ask further.

I know it sounds weird and obviously I can't prove it but that story what first got me interested in the paranormal,

Not sure if this is "paranormal" per se, but on the opposite side of the family when my Dad's grandmother passed, several of her children had identical dreams of her on the same night, a few days after she died. Not sure if that was an actual "visit" or simply an example of what you described earlier about mental connections between close individuals.
 
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@Certified_Autist

Sometimes glitches won't let me reply directly, so going piecewise:

So this is my shitty philosophy (I've never studied former philosophy/epistemology/metaphysics/etc.):

To me "qualia," consciousness, and the soul are all equivalent things, I could not care less about any concept of consciousness or soul outside of subjective experience and see no real difference. I think that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is actually a hard problem - there is no way to create a materialist explanation for subjective experience, in my opinion - so I believe that based on that my own soul has to exist as an entity in itself. Since other people exist who are not substantially different from me, by extension it seems most reasonable to assume other people have souls too (lol) and then since life is a continuum of things very similar to humans down to things very different, I think it's reasonable to assume all other life has souls (experiences qualia) on some level. It doesn't have to be that qualia emerges from reproduction, but I think that's the most reasonable assumption, since life comes from reproduction and each living entity presumably has its own qualia. This would imply that there had to be an original qualia-experiencing entity, which can then be conceived of as equivalent to God (both the sum of all subjective experience and the source of it).

As I understand, this is loosely like Hegel's absolute idealism.

Yes, the concept you are referring to is a real thing and was proven in the "double slit experiment" where particle behavior was dramatically altered simply by whether it was being observed. Its a very well known experiment in the physics field because it has been replicated many times over by many different scientists, with the same results every time.

Conventional physics is mostly stumped by it, and many consider it a random oddity. But I see it as possibly indirect evidence of a Creator, and as definite proof that humans are the center of the universe. If we really are just an "accident of evolution", then why does the Universe only function when we observe it?

It also raises interesting questions regarding the world being mind-over-matter but that's a whole other discussion.
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Has anybody ever been able to do this experiment with animals, to see if non-human observation can trigger particle behavior?Building off your points on psychic "connections" between individuals, what is your view on reincarnation? I am inclined to think it is a thing because there are documented cases of people having memories of living earlier lives as totally different people, to the point of detail that would be difficult to explain rationally. But is that proof of actually having lived that earlier life, or simply proof of some kind of psychic connection with the earlier person?
Building off your points on psychic "connections" between individuals, what is your view on reincarnation? I am inclined to think it is a thing because there are documented cases of people having memories of living earlier lives as totally different people, to the point of detail that would be difficult to explain rationally. But is that proof of actually having lived that earlier life, or simply proof of some kind of psychic connection with the earlier person?
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I hope it doesn't exist. I think the idea of reincarnation is horrifying, because if we reincarnate that means we lose our memories too, which makes on some level the cycle of life meaningless (can't take it with you) and the individual life meaningless. (I'd rather have a life which while completely average has a significant internal narrative than have a shot at having been Genghis Khan a thousand years ago.) I don't see any basis for assuming it does happen or does not. I'd question why it would exist, since the population expands; clearly even if reincarnation occurs, there is not some fixed quantity of souls. But I can't disprove it and I'm not familiar with the subject matter.

As an alternative, perhaps some of those memories, if we do go into psychic phenomena, are just like somebody "tapping into" someone else's memories without it necessarily being their own memories?

If you don't mind me powerleveling and schizoposting for a second- I find your points about sleep paralysis and your earlier points about "demons" very compelling, as I have experienced sleep paralysis twice, both times in my late teens. and both times the entity radiated energy that absolutely felt evil and "demonic" for lack of a better word. Appearance wise they were unremarkable, one was a totally average woman dressed in normal clothes that would have fit in anywhere, and the other was a shadow figure with elongated limbs. The aura of both was absolutely evil though, it was immediately obvious in a way I cannot explain or put into words logically.

If we're swapping stories now, one reason I have an interest in the paranormal is that my grandparent's old house had a ghost in it that they and their children saw for years, until the ghost suddenly stopped appearing. Always the same man dressed in a brown suit with a hat. It was to the point that nobody wanted to go to the bathroom alone at night, as the ghost would always appear in the room across from the bathroom, sitting in the same chair. It's one of those weird things in my family that everyone agrees happened, but is simultaneously rarely mentioned because no one can explain or prove it. My mother was rather vague on this last point, but she said that wasn't the only ghost and that when she was young there were "scary" ghosts, but she thought the suit ghost kept those away later on. She was very vague on this part and didn't want to elaborate so I didn't ask further.

I know it sounds weird and obviously I can't prove it but that story what first got me interested in the paranormal,

Not sure if this is "paranormal" per se, but on the opposite side of the family when my Dad's grandmother passed, several of her children had identical dreams of her on the same night, a few days after she died. Not sure if that was an actual "visit" or simply an example of what you described earlier about mental connections between close individuals.
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Do you have any thoughts on why ghosts are scary, or what they are?

It seems odd that they should be inherently scary, aside from stories people have of benevolent ghosts (usually messengers) that even then tend to be creepy. I know Orientals tended to view ghosts as scary because the existence of the dead in the land of the living is the world being out of order. I feel like if ghosts are real, they're not the actual souls of the dead but are instead some sort of degraded creature created out of their death.

Your story of identical dreams could, in my thinking, be a visitation or an entangling of the minds. Either is a sensible explanation.

The only thing close to a ghost or demon I ever saw was the glowing figure of a man in a red shirt and blue jeans passing through the woods next to a cemetery that bordered my yard. It was very vague of a figure and very fuzzy, and I think it could have been motorcycle lights or just my imagination, it didn't seem frightening and I never saw it again.


I'm going to start calling any theoretical qualia-experiencing entity that lacks a physical body a "spirit," just to be clear.
 
Certified_Autist said:
Conventional physics is mostly stumped by it, and many consider it a random oddity. But I see it as possibly indirect evidence of a Creator, and as definite proof that humans are the center of the universe. If we really are just an "accident of evolution", then why does the Universe only function when we observe it?
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
doesn't quantum entanglement have a thing going on where just "observing" a particle, in a literal sense, causes it to resolve into a state? There's an implication there that the act of perception, separate from material causes, can change the material world.
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Quantum physics is the closest we're getting towards looping right back around into the territory of the spiritual. I personally find it hilarious to see these experiments take place, get repeated and verified ad infinitum, and watch your typical SCIENCE!™ followers try to square that circle with their semi/totally-atheistic world view. Very popcorn worthy.
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Specific forms of paranormal activity I am interested in include psychic connections between individuals, coincidences, and demons.
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Sounds like you two are good candidates for reading through or listening to The Seth Books**, imo. I cannot possibly recommend them enough if you're of the sorts of minds you're both exhibiting here. It might need to be taken a bit on faith at first given the..how to put it.."level" of the material? You'd ultimately be very hard-pressed to explain away the content via things like hallucination or schizophrenia.

Frankly, this is probably the single best thread to link that book series.

**They're in the order they should be read/listened to.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
I have a theory on the paranormal. There is this assumption, a dogma, that because nobody has provided really good proof of things like ghosts or God or whatever other paranormal entity/phenomena, that means it doesn't exist. That kind of assumes that paranormal subjects follow the same materialistic rules as everything else, though, like being repeatable or detectable through experimentation. I don't know hardly anything about quantum physics, so forgive me if I get this completely wrong, but doesn't quantum entanglement have a thing going on where just "observing" a particle, in a literal sense, causes it to resolve into a state? There's an implication there that the act of perception, separate from material causes, can change the material world.

I think paranormal phenomena, if it exists (and consider me sort of optimistically agnostic on it), is by its very nature something that attempting to recreate it will cause it to disappear.

Specific forms of paranormal activity I am interested in include psychic connections between individuals, coincidences, and demons. Psychically, there are tons of stories where somebody will die and then their loved one will die on the same day without ever hearing the news. That cannot possibly be caused by shock or giving up if they didn't even know, and it seems to be more common than random chance would allow. On a less flashy scale, I often find that I will, again, separately from them (not living even in the same state), tend to feel sick, moods, or other such around the same time as my parents, particularly my Pa. I think that the soul/consciousness of some entities can be connected to others, certainly from birth but possibly also a sort of entangling from frequent interaction.

Coincidences, to me, are not really coincidences; that is, I believe they are built into the structure of the universe. There are tons of instances of mathematical beauty and symmetry and such in nature, and I think that coincidences are a sort of poetry built into the universe. Things (specific phrases, concepts, etc.) have a way of suddenly coming up in spates, and you can argue it's just noticing it but I don't buy that, too many times I've seen a word or phrase for the first time, suddenly encounter it several more times during a day, and then it goes away. Now, like I said, I don't consider these as having any significance in a schizo way, but I think they exist in a sense like nature rhymes with itself?

Lastly, I do believe demons exist. It's worth explaining, I think you can have non-material phenomena that interacts with the world through material means - I think it's the only real way you can explain the Hard Problem of Consciousness - and so, just because you can explain a certain phenomena as the action of certain parts of the brain or certain hormones, that doesn't mean that you can't also ascribe phenomena to spirits too. Night hags are a good example of that, you can 100% explain night hags through science, but to me that doesn't mean the night hag doesn't actually exist. Other sorts of demons would be whatever things spread evil thoughts in people, like the self-harming impulse, the other-harming impulse, evil ideologies. I also think, based on the example of superorganisms, that consciousness can exist at lower and higher levels of organization than we think of. A colony of ants are all individual creatures, clearly, following their own internal programming, yet they cooperate to act as a single units. So do the cells of a human body. Why should it not be that there could be some level of consciousness for the individual cells of the body, and similarly consciousness emerging at group levels like nations? (If you prefer, you can think of that as being like a China brain, but I think my idea's a bit different.) So I think there are potentially lots of conscious entities that are not animals as we think of them, which you can call paranormal if you want.

Don't really have any personal paranormal stories. My Pa had a ghost visitation from his best friend who died in Vietnam, but he also says he was drinking at the time and so he doesn't have a strong opinion on if the visitation was his imagination or real. He also had a relative who, in an episode of sleep paralysis, saw the night hag loom over his roommate, and the roommate died the next day, like a reaper.
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I think you'd find some of John Keel's work like the eighth tower a similar kind of worldview in this regard.
 
By the way, since I was getting into the soul:

I don't think it makes much sense to imagine nonexistence, it's something I've grappled with and I feel like I experienced the equivalent of death under general anesthesia, but even then the absence of time (it felt like an instantaneous skip in time, in contrast to sleep which does feel like time elapsed) still made sense only in the comparison of moving from one state to another. So it felt like nonexistence wasn't frightening, but I don't know that the absence of something can exist separately from it existing, right?

So my thinking is that souls must have some sort of continuity across all time, can be created from something in the sense of cleft from it, but cannot be created ex nihilio or destroyed, though I don't see as they couldn't merge (which is a scary thought). So in that sense, I think that before you were conceived "you" were your parents and that goes on back to the original soul. In some sense that's like reincarnation @Certified_Autist asked about, but it doesn't involve the death of the parents; it's more like cutting earthworms in half and each earthworm being a new creature.


I suppose that the idea of coincidences, if nature "rhymes" with itself, would have some similarity to this and could also be thought of as some basis for a theory of prophecy.

Somebody posted a Terry Davis thing the other day where he had a string of random output like "Putin China election virus," but also mixed with absolute worthless babble about Star Wars. Voice of God? lolno But maybe nature, on occasion, will put a string of random thought into a person's head as a long-term rhyme with real events happening. Thus, a prophet/psychic.

This guy is also who I got the idea of feeling someone's gaze as a form of psychic phenomena from now. The materialist explanation is that you're subconsciously picking up movements behind you.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
So my thinking is that souls must have some sort of continuity across all time
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Very much this, yes. You're here to learn and love. To develop within and without. "Death" of the physical is just moving onto another incarnation whether here or otherwise.
 
Fek said:
Very much this, yes. You're here to learn and love. To develop within and without. "Death" of the physical is just moving onto another incarnation whether here or otherwise.
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Do you think its possible for a soul to decay in a way of following the law of atrophy?

Like with the theory of limited souls (more and more people being born) ? Would the soul be fractured (atrophied) to be spread out evenly across everyone, so everyone just got a small fracture of a whole, or would some just be born literally soulless, either as proper madmen or NPCs?

Not sure if this fits here or conspiracy theory thread. 🤔

This is much more fun than working on a Monday morning.
 
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