the telepathy thread

[Chroma Starlight]

4 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

The point is that there's no "right" or "wrong".  We're playing different games, with different rules.  You wouldn't expect to be able to "win" a game in which one person is playing checkers and the other is holding a deck of cards.

What are you talking about? We're the same humanity living under the same stars, now as then. Nothing new under the sun.

[Luna Bliss]

6 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

It's fine if you want to believe this, but it's not fair to expect others to meet your demands. Nobody needs to prove anything to you.

That's one thing that is definitely wrong, though. If you are trying to prove to me that telepathy exists, you must use the rules of science, simply because you are trying to convince me.  If I try to convince you that telepathy exists, I have to use your rules.  We're at an impasse because neither of us will accept a "proof" created by the other's rules.  Faith is not there to be proven by scientific methods, and scientific discoveries are not revealed by faith.  

Chroma's initial post indicates to me that she wanted examples of telepathy -- I see nothing in it that indicates she wanted to know if telepathy was real or not or that she was trying to convince anyone of its truth.

So for you (and other proponents of Scientism), to demand proof...is totally off-topic and disrespectful to the intent of the poster. You assume that your belief has precedence, and that we must defend our beliefs to YOU.

And now you're insisting we must be sensitive to the rules of Science you impose, as if it is the default way to view reality?

I don't mind taking the initial intent further and discussing science as we have really ....I'm just pointing out there should be no decree that we must.

BTW, I have provided scientific examples of telepathy to explore. Did anyone explore them? No. This says to me all you really want to do is believe in a totally materialistic world that could not include telepathic experience.

Did anyone explore what Scientism means? Or explore what Deloria said beyond some Wiki entry where white man once again tried to discredit the Natives?  No, your minds are made up.

[Rolig Loon]

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

"For Those Who Believe, No Proof is Necessary. For Those Who Don’t Believe, No Proof is Possible."

but I do think there is a fair contingent between those extremes that are more open to the mixing of them.

Yes indeed. That's why you find so many scientists in church and why so many of us were pulled to the sciences as young people by reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, Doc Smith, and Robert Heinlein. It's also why European advances in the sciences for over a millennium were made primarily by Christian, Jewish, and Islamic scholars. It would be wrong to infer that faith and science are incompatible.  One cannot use the tools of the other to do its work, but that does not mean that scientists don't believe many things they cannot prove, or that people of faith believe everything that they see.

[Luna Bliss]

On 7/5/2021 at 9:09 PM, Rolig Loon said:

If you want me to accept that all sorts of fine magical things are real, play by my rules.  Use scientific processes to dive into the rabbit holes and root out the pesky errors and biases that hide what might be there. 

Again, no....nobody has to play by your rules. They might choose to explore with you but you should not demand. And any real scientist would not denigrate a variable from the beginning by stating it is "magical".

Rolig, you seem to pretend you are open but I don't believe you are. If you were you would have investigated and responded to some of the material I've provided. Instead, you only parrot your own material over and over.

Edited July 10, 2021 by Luna Bliss

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

Science is not the only way to understand the world though, but you assume it is, as if your position is the default and only true one.

Yes, but science is entirely responsible for everything that makes this conversation possible. Dozens and dozens of complex scientific disciplines stacked one atop the other, It's science all the way down. 

 

[Luna Bliss]

2 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

1 hour ago, Luna Bliss said:

Science is not the only way to understand the world though, but you assume it is, as if your position is the default and only true one.

Yes, but science is entirely responsible for everything that makes this conversation possible. Dozens and dozens of complex scientific disciplines stacked one atop the other, It's science all the way down. 

Some people navigate more by their experience and don't impose a test on everything they do and discount its validity unless they see a chart posted online. So it could have been a thread about people simply sharing their psychic experiences. 

Also, much of my disturbance is because we've only included Western science, and only at it's most limited levels. Vedic science is another science that should be included, as well as others, but Western science typically doesn't see anything but their worldview as valid.

[Coffee Pancake]

13 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Vedic science

isn't science

[Bagnu]

The biggest problem is that anyone who could actually be telepathic would never admit it. The dangers in that admission would be tremendous. That makes it difficult to asses on a western scientific basis.

[Rat Luv]

10 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

The biggest problem is that anyone who could actually be telepathic would never admit it. 

Well, not on this thread 🙂

10 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

 The dangers in that admission would be tremendous.

Yes the government would probably drag them off and have them spying on other world leaders' thoughts 24/7 🙁

[Bagnu]

Just now, Rat Luv said:

Well, not on this thread 🙂

Yes the government would probably drag them off and have them spying on other world leaders' thoughts 24/7 🙁

My point exactly!!! 

[MoiraKathleen]

 

48 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Chroma's initial post indicates to me that she wanted examples of telepathy -- I see nothing in it that indicates she wanted to know if telepathy was real or not or that she was trying to convince anyone of its truth.

So for you (and other proponents of Scientism), to demand proof...is totally off-topic and disrespectful to the intent of the poster. You assume that your belief has precedence, and that we must defend our beliefs to YOU.

When the subject of a conversation or casual discussion is telepathy or some other similar type of ability, I think it is natural that the question of whether it is real or not comes up - I don't think that is off-topic or disrespectful for this  subject.  

52 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

BTW, I have provided scientific examples of telepathy to explore. Did anyone explore them? No. This says to me all you really want to do is believe in a totally materialistic world that could not include telepathic experience.

Did anyone explore what Scientism means? Or explore what Deloria said beyond some Wiki entry where white man once again tried to discredit the Natives?  No, your minds are made up.

 

17 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

Also, much of my disturbance is because we've only included Western science, and only at it's most limited levels. Vedic science is another science that should be included, as well as others, but Western science typically doesn't see anything but their worldview as valid.

If this was a different forum - perhaps one that focused on metaphysics or one that focused on scientific studies of the supernatural, I could see being  upset or disturbed with people not appearing to have read studies that were posted, or to not be including other non-western scientific disciplines.  However, I don't come to this forum expecting to be involved in academic or serious metaphysical/spiritual/scientific discussions.   If I wanted to really study and deep dive into those types of subjects, I would be reading books or papers somewhere else - not here.

[Bagnu]

3 minutes ago, MoiraKathleen said:

 If I wanted to really study and deep dive into those types of subjects, I would be reading books or papers somewhere else - not here.

Personally, i don't think there is anything wrong with discussing the concepts here. It can lead to further reading elsewhere.

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

There's no way to debate matters of faith and matters of science with the same rules.

Would that be debating them simultaneously or as separate topics? I can see it for the former but not the latter. 

Edit: Or maybe I have that backwards. Either way, same rules as separate topics could work.

Edited July 10, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker
brain does not brain today

[MoiraKathleen]

21 minutes ago, Bagnu said:

Personally, i don't think there is anything wrong with discussing the concepts here. It can lead to further reading elsewhere.

I was responding more to what I saw as a specific criticism that people in this discussion were not reading all of the articles being linked to in posts in this thread. 

[Madelaine McMasters]

On 7/9/2021 at 7:53 AM, Luna Bliss said:

I had some fun reading about Natives related to the discovery of dinosaurs in the U.S., although I'm afraid it took me away from attempting to comprehend Vine Deloria Jr. to the degree I planned. Anyway, I had no idea Natives were so vital to the development of paleontology in the U.S.

An interesting bit:

"Strangely, prehistoric and ancient people with a pre-scientific understanding of nature had a better handle on what fossils represented than western scholars and naturalists of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries who considered fossils to simply be an attempt by rock to imitate life. While many ancient and aboriginal cultures considered dinosaur bones to be the remains or real creatures, western savants often passed off fossils as weird “sports of nature” that were created by supernatural forces within the earth. After all, religious dogma dictated that the world was only a few thousands of years old, and that the whole earth was created as is within that compressed timeframe. There was no room in biblical chronologies for fossils, so, therefore, the shark teeth, clam shells, mammal skeletons, and dinosaur bones had to be intricate fakes that could too-easily trick the unwary. It took decades of research, discovery, and re-discovery of older ideas before naturalists realized that fossils were true vestiges of prehistoric life, and that extinction was a reality. By 1800, at the latest, a scientific understanding of prehistory was finally forming."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-brief-history-of-hidden-dinosaurs-9663115/

https://www.desertusa.com/desert-activity/dino.html

https://nomegallery.com/chapter/fossil-legends-of-the-first-americans-by-adrienne-mayor/

I like the little I know of Native American (Buddhist, Pagan, etc) thinking on the interconnectedness of nature. Ultimately, however, their understanding of the fossils was also quite limited, and some of them cling as stubbornly to their creation stories as Christians do to theirs.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/22/science/indian-tribes-creationists-thwart-archeologists.html

That's a paywalled article and you might not have access to it. In it, the author describes the difficulties archaeologists have excavating on Native People's lands. Here's a quote from it:

''We never asked science to make a determination as to our origins,'' said Sebastian LeBeau, repatriation officer for the Cheyenne River Sioux, a Lakota tribe based in Eagle Butte, S.D. ''We know where we came from. We are the descendants of the Buffalo people. They came from inside the earth after supernatural spirits prepared this world for humankind to live here. If non-Indians choose to believe they evolved from an ape, so be it. I have yet to come across five Lakotas who believe in science and in evolution.''

I doubt that represents the thinking of the majority of Lakota, just as the "sports of nature" idea did not represent the mainstream of European fossil thought, but it does illustrate that willful human ignorance is an equal opportunity employer. I'm certainly not well versed on the fossil lore of America's indigenous peoples, but I suspect the significant variance from European thinking of the same period is rooted in the comparative availability and nature of fossils throughout each culture's history. The Rocky Mountain range, particularly in Canada (home of the Burgess Shale), is the world's richest exposition of dinosaur fossils.

It's hard to wander around a place like Alberta's Dinosaur Provincial Park without understanding that, thousands of years ago, the indigenous people of the area were literally tripping over dinosaur fossils. When you get a 10,000 year head start on your mythology, it's hard not to look wiser for a while. China has similarly easily accessible dinosaur fossil sites and I have wondered whether their mythology reveals their long historical exposure to dinosaur fossils. There be dragons?

Ultimately, I suspect you can find archeologists and paleontologists hailing from most of the world's belief systems that are converging on a common understanding. That's a pretty impressive achievement for the most powerful tool we've ever created, science.

Edited July 10, 2021 by Madelaine McMasters
Took the advice of an expert ;-).

[Silent Mistwalker]

3 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Lakotans

The plural of Lakota is Lakota. 😉

[Madelaine McMasters]

14 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

The plural of Lakota is Lakota. 😉

I actually Googled "Lakotans" to see if that was in use. It was. I should have googled "plural of Lakota".

Edited July 10, 2021 by Madelaine McMasters

[Innula Zenovka]

3 hours ago, Luna Bliss said:

Science is not the only way to understand the world though, but you assume it is, as if your position is the default and only true one.

It's fine if you want to believe this, but it's not fair to expect others to meet your demands. Nobody needs to prove anything to you.

They do if they purport to make factual statements about the real world.   If someone tells me they believe they have fairies living at the bottom of their garden, then fair enough.  Since I try to be polite to people I won't argue with them.

If, however, they tell me that, as a matter of fact rather than belief, they have fairies living there, certainly I'll expect to be shown some proof of their remarkable claim, just as I'd want to see for myself if they said they kept a hippopotamus down there instead.

Edited July 10, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Rat Luv]

.

Edited July 10, 2021 by Rat Luv

[Innula Zenovka]

50 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Would that be debating them simultaneously or as separate topics? I can see it for the former but not the latter. 

Edit: Or maybe I have that backwards. Either way, same rules as separate topics could work.

There are very specific rules to conversations about science, since the whole point of science is that someone else has to be able to do what you did, and achieve the same results.   

That's the whole point, and I've seen it argued that, historically, the point at which alchemists and magicians stopped keeping their experiments and grimoires to themselves, and started, instead, sharing their methods and results with each other, whether by correspondence or forming institutions like the Royal Society (of which Sir Isaac Newton, who also practiced alchemy, was a founding member, of course).  

This limits sensible topics for scientific conversations to what you and someone else on the other side of the world can both measure, since the whole point is that if you both follow the same steps with similar, correctly calibrated, instruments you should see similar results.

There are plenty of other things to talk about, of course.    

[Innula Zenovka]

20 minutes ago, Rat Luv said:

Nobody here's saying that though? IMO, people are overreacting and taking it as an attack on science just because some of us have said we've noticed spooky things we can't explain. 

All I'm saying is that, if you tell me about something spooky that happened to you that can't explain, then I'll listen.   

It's when people tell me that what happened to them proves something remarkable like the existence of telepathy or whatever that I'll start to question what exactly it proves and how.

 

Edited July 10, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Rolig Loon]

41 minutes ago, Rat Luv said:

IMO, people are overreacting and taking it as an attack on science just because some of us have said we've noticed spooky things we can't explain.

Nah. I haven't seen anyone attacking science yet.  A few comments have used loaded language and edged close to name-calling, but that's the way forums get sometimes. For the most part, I think this has been an honest sharing of world views. As a scientist, I know how easy it is for discussions to get lost in technical language. I also know how easy it is to be drawn into a tug of war between what we see and what we believe, as if there is a hard line between the two.  In my own comments, I have been trying to explain that science explores "reality" by being skeptical -- accepting the possibility that things may be different than they seem, but not leaping to a conclusion without testing all the ways that we might be misinterpreting what we see. 

In my own lifetime, I have seen many of the things I was taught a half century ago reinterpreted or completely rejected by later study. It's been a fascinating time to be alive.  I expect to see more wonderful discoveries in the time I have left, perhaps in the realm of paranormal behavior.  Spookiness does happen. It's fun to speculate why, and it's important to ask how many of the things we learn along the way have been foreshadowed by faith and cultural history. As the saying goes in a very different realm of human behavior, though, I prefer to take each step forward by remembering to "Trust and Verify".

Edited July 10, 2021 by Rolig Loon
typos. as always.

[Chroma Starlight]

2 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

There are very specific rules to conversations about science, since the whole point of science is that someone else has to be able to do what you did, and achieve the same results.   

That's the whole point, and I've seen it argued that, historically, the point at which alchemists and magicians stopped keeping their experiments and grimoires to themselves, and started, instead, sharing their methods and results with each other ...

This is certainly so, and anyone who knows alchemy knows that it famously makes it a point to encourage its own greatest fools to go right ahead and poison themselves. And I think that it's safe to say some of the scientific papers that get published are, in that or similar tradition, poison apples that separate the fools from the true natural philosophers. 

Science is like a bookstore. Anyone who can convince someone to publish them might wind up on offer, but we don't consider every book on offer to be a classic. Most of them will be forgettable in a generation, the stuff that makes you roll your eyes at the thrift store. There are brilliant insightful natural philosophers' discoveries right alongside the hack publications of professional hack researchers who find funding sources from interested parties. You'd think the bookstore would curate only the best stuff, and some do, but for others business is business, they sell books like any other commodity, and they'll follow the money when a publisher promotes. Even if they're well intentioned, hack stuff will slip through. They're editors, the statistics look plausible, they've got 150 more of these to review by the end of the week, etc.

Back to science, when a researcher simply needs a result and feels their role is to ensure it, it becomes more like, "3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible." You realize some scientific authority is dissociated from reality. Generally, that's why we have peer review. Examples of this include the WHO's statements factually correcting the CDC and NHS's policy decrees with the light of medical scientific reality, over and over and over again.

Edited July 10, 2021 by Chroma Starlight

[Silent Mistwalker]

2 hours ago, Innula Zenovka said:

There are very specific rules to conversations about science, since the whole point of science is that someone else has to be able to do what you did, and achieve the same results.   

That's the whole point, and I've seen it argued that, historically, the point at which alchemists and magicians stopped keeping their experiments and grimoires to themselves, and started, instead, sharing their methods and results with each other, whether by correspondence or forming institutions like the Royal Society (of which Sir Isaac Newton, who also practiced alchemy, was a founding member, of course).  

This limits sensible topics for scientific conversations to what you and someone else on the other side of the world can both measure, since the whole point is that if you both follow the same steps with similar, correctly calibrated, instruments you should see similar results.

There are plenty of other things to talk about, of course.    

Um. The word debate was used, not experiment? I was talking about a debate, not scientific methods, and the rules followed for debates.

You can debate faith. You can debate science. And when you debate each one you follow a set of "rules" (like when an experiment is done, just to confuse us both more) for each one. You can debate faith and science (together) but in order to do so you have to follow a completely different set of rules than the one applied to each of the singular debates.

Are we talking about the same thing using different terms? 🤭

Because if we are, I'd like to know how to experiment on religious faith. Maybe it would open a few eyes. lol

Edited July 10, 2021 by Silent Mistwalker

[Rat Luv]

 

On 7/9/2021 at 11:37 AM, Rat Luv said:

I saw something interesting about dogs on YT but can't remember what it was called. It was something like, a conman (who later got caught) had knocked on someone's door and the owner remembered the dog going nuts, and growling and barking at the stranger, and thought that the dog could detect his bad intentions - but it was actually the dog reacting to the owner's discomfort...the owner had a gut reaction to the stranger and the dog picked up on it.

Found it - pretty interesting IMO!