That type of thinking will get you in a hell of a lot of trouble.
The Paranormal?
- Thread starter TheWhale13
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I respectfully beg to differ. Depending on what the "anything" is, a period of reflection and/or examination may be required before rejecting out of hand. Generalities usually mean laziness and the inability/unwillingness to think critically.
It's not proof of anything and certainly not scientific research, but I'll mention a tale of apparent precognition in our family. Somewhere in this thread I'd mentioned in passing that our eldest grandson when around 3 had displayed some apparent precognitive ability. We were playing around on the floor 1 day with an old Starsky and Hutch TV episode droning away behind us-he had his back to the screen, (when was that originally on air-1970's?). He was engrossed in our play. At 1 point he says "don't open that. " I'm a bit mystified as to what he was referring to as our play didn't involve anything that could be opened. I then glance up at the TV screen and in the very next scene Starsky or was it Hutch(?) enters another room, finds a box, opens it and a bomb goes off. As with so many paranormal incidents it was intriguing and not immediately explainable.
I think if we really could understand everything very young children are experiencing mentally, we might be very surprised.
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I suffer from sleep paralysis. But not in that spooky sense. More like a few minutes before I actually wake up, I'm aware that my eyes are closed, and I can feel myself breathing, but I can't wake up.
I understand what you mean about the word “proof” in the context of science. I used it here in this informal setting as the meaning is generally understood.
As far as sources of study, it depends. I read actual papers if it’s a topic in which I’m really interested. There are also a great many actual college lectures at undergrad through to post-doc level on YouTube. When I was digging into entanglement I started with Leonard Susskind’s series of lectures at Stanford.
I also buy textbooks
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I won’t share any of my own experiences as I acknowledge the bias I have towards the discussion. But here’s something that happened to my dad, which we accepted as a family despite not really understanding.
I was sitting next to my Gjiddy (maternal grandfather) when he passed away at our home. My mum walked into the room just after this happened, and one of the first things she said was “somebody ring Bruce to tell him to come home from work”. As she was saying this, my dad walked into the room and said “I’m here”.
He had been at work and this intense feeling of sickness and grief suddenly came over him. He knew he needed to come home.
I was sitting next to my Gjiddy (maternal grandfather) when he passed away at our home. My mum walked into the room just after this happened, and one of the first things she said was “somebody ring Bruce to tell him to come home from work”. As she was saying this, my dad walked into the room and said “I’m here”.
He had been at work and this intense feeling of sickness and grief suddenly came over him. He knew he needed to come home.
I had a sort of poltergeist thing going on in my old cottage back in the U.K. I often wondered if it was sniffing my first wife's underwear since they were always on the floor after her putting them in the laundry basket before going to bed at night!
T
the Big Bang is a load of nonsense. Imagine taking a bunch of car parts, or more accurately taking all of the molecules that compose those parts and blowing them to smithereens and the explosion resulting in a fully functioning vehicle.
And . . . the above is analogous to the "Big Bang Theory" how?
The energy or whatever way you want to think about it that was stored in the singularity that became the Big Bang was not MASS. In fact singularity is most likely an in correct way to think about it as well. If it makes sense, think about it as Information potential. We simply must stop thinking about the big band the way we do a fire cracker. Also, dimensional space didn’t exist so who knows what it looked like.
The concept of te kore in some te ao Māori traditions sits well with me. The state of nothingness and inherent potentiality
This seems to presuppose that the car in your analogy (I'm assuming you mean life, specifically?) was in some way predestined or intended. I admit, without design, as a random occurrence that would be an unimaginably remote possibility. If, however, life as we know it is the result of random adaptations over billions of years (advantageous ones, generally, in the case of current life) to the environment it developed in it doesn't seem so far fetched. That is to say, life existing as we know it doesn't necessarily suggest that there was an end goal of life existing, just that the life we see is what has arisen out of the environment which existed before it. Frankly, I don't see existence as a deliberately orchestrated, perfectly balanced harmony of necessary factors, but as a mess of interconnected systems barely squeaking by in the near-chaos we're immersed in.
More to the OP's topic, I consider myself a rationalist and am inherently skeptical of supposedly paranormal phenomenon. However, I'll concede that just because science hasn't yet explained some of these things doesn't mean it won't eventually. I'd be thrilled if one day we could verify and explain things like precognition. Until we do, it strikes me as more likely that our brains, as desperate to identify patterns and abnormal behavior as they are, simply assign great significance to those times we had a feeling about something and it turned out to be right even though we couldn't possibly have known, while ignoring the many times we have those same feelings and are completely wrong.
THIS. Scientific research doesn't "prove" anything, except to the layman. Scientific research "tends to show," if you've used it professionally. During my academic scientific work both in the classroom and in the laboratory, I've heard this so many times.
Not at all. Believing things without proof is far worse.
If I claim a dragon lives in my garage there’s no reason for that statement to be taken as true without me providing proof. It’s only a claim that can be dismissed until then.
Meta reviews are the equivalent of a book report. The authors picked a bunch of other experiments presumed to have been properly designed and run and then applied statistics to derive a trend. You’d have to dig into each of the individual experiments to see what was really done.
Man walks up to you and says “Don’t go into that bar, I placed a bomb in it “. He walks away. You have no proof about the validity of what he has said. You walk into it. Bam. It goes off.
Simpler example. You are allergic to peanuts. The diner states there is no cross contamination of its dishes with foods with nuts. Do you eat there?
You guys make my head hurt. Next you are going to tell me Sasquatch, Santa and the Easter bunny doesn’t exist. Say it ain’t so.