Time Slips

Crunchy Cat said:
QQ,

Thanks for the reply. Your agreement with my assertions and subsequent statements:

"...Why it seems impossible to show consistant proofs of psychic ability..."
"...I have extensive personal experience my self of psychic activity."

tell me that I haven't communicated exactly what I intended. I'll try to clarify. In the two quoted statements above, a full condlusion of the existence of psychic ability is asserted. In the world there exists a whole lot of inconclusive evidence (i.e. evidence of *something* that is not determinable). There are alot of personal experiences (including mine) that are utterly fantastic in nature; however, many of these experiences would fall into the inconclusive category as far as evidence is concerned. The two quoted statements above are assertions of truth; however, no assertion can stand upon inconclusive evidence. I hope this clairifed what I was trying to communicate.
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To me it makes excellent sense but I can not speak for others that may see the usual denial of any reality to psy experiences even if they are strictly personal.

There is no doubt good reason for this reaction. IMO psy is very close to imagination, including visualisations etc. And even the most disciplined psy researcher has difficulty sometimes distinguishing between real psy experience and pseudo imaginary experience.
So it is to be expected that this realm of interest is plagued by a lack of credibitility. Not to mention all the claims of evidence that end up being unfounded due to complaints of inconsistancy, transient nature [ once off type experiences] and outright fraud.
Unfortunately it seems that genuine experience tends to distort the persons ability to see it from someone elses perspective, which may even be a part of an underlying cause of not being repeatable or evidenced.

Commonly when persons describe experiences that have been profound they seem to be temporarillly unable to accept the needs of others for more than just their word for it.
This is so typical of those who have a huge question existing in their own minds as to whether they imagined it or actually experineced it...taking a strong "I believe" position to hopefully get somesort of agreement from others.
In some ways it can be analoguous with the "born again" Christian. A sort of fever of intense mental activity that is emotionally rooted.

When a person says they are having repeated dejavu experiences almost on a daily basis we have to accept that person is saying it as it is for him. But the question comes up that if he is as he says he is he must by virtue of the intensity of his experinence be suffering some dysfunction in his life because of it.
In my early days:
I know if I had to endure repeated dejavu experiences with out any credible scientific understanding I would be constantly worried about my own mental health. Regardless of the validity of the experience. IF real or not I would surmise I was in deep shit regardless.
But now as I have come to understand the experience better it poses no real problem, and the demand to prove it lessens.
So in a way persons making seemingly wild claims are really just attempting to find a way of grounding their experience so that they can let go of the question mark in their minds and get on with life.....
 
Quantum Quack said:
...
So in a way persons making seemingly wild claims are really just attempting to find a way of grounding their experience so that they can let go of the question mark in their minds and get on with life.....
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QQ,

I see this last statement as the crux of the issue for people whom chronically experience the fantastic and I am going to assert that the majority of the claimers out there don't fall into this category but rather the category of:

"I have an attractive idea, I want to be special (differentiated with respect), I will apply the attractive idea to myself and thus achive 'specialness'."
 
Crunchy Cat said:
QQ,

I see this last statement as the crux of the issue for people whom chronically experience the fantastic and I am going to assert that the majority of the claimers out there don't fall into this category but rather the category of:

"I have an attractive idea, I want to be special (differentiated with respect), I will apply the attractive idea to myself and thus achive 'specialness'."
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So therefore the key is to learn how to identify who is who...yes?

And if you think the claim is self esteem or vanity driven is it worth confronting that claim as a fraud?

What purpose is there in debunking someones fantasy?
 
I am not sure if that's the key... I would propose a better objective is to explore truth. Anyone should an opportunity to provide evidence for a claim. If the claim is discovered to be fradulant then that person should be confronted; otherwise, there is no motivation to stop promoting false information.
 
Suppose that you go harumphing at someone and telling him that his claims are preposterous and you can prove it because blah blah blah. Is he crazy to refuse to accept that? He may very well know a thousand times more about the subject than you do, and feel like that trumps your "because James Randi said so and he taught me everything I know" attitude.
 
MetaKron said:
Suppose that you go harumphing at someone and telling him that his claims are preposterous and you can prove it because blah blah blah. Is he crazy to refuse to accept that? He may very well know a thousand times more about the subject than you do, and feel like that trumps your "because James Randi said so and he taught me everything I know" attitude.
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Suppose I go harumphing at someone and telling him that his claims of casting ninth level fireballs at McDonalds are preposterous and entropy contradicts it. Is he crazy to refuse to accept that? He may very well know a thousand times more about the subject of D&D than I do, and feel like that trumps my "because reality says so" attitude.

You tell me.
 
It's not the same thing, CC. Any sane person would believe that you didn't see fireballs being thrown at McDonald's if in fact no one threw fireballs at McDonald's. If you were there, it is something that you can be expected to know. I think you go beyond what you know when you make your criticisms of deja vu.
 
It's sort of funny in a way.
A while ago I was interviewing a psychiatric patient in an acute ward during a common lunch period in the wards meals room. As I was talking to the person I looked over at another patient and saw his resting fork go flying across the room with out being touched by the patient. The patient looked up at the nursing staff asking whether they saw it.[ very excited about what he experienced]....and got quite irrate when they refused to acknowledge what he saw.
But I saw it from my vantage point.....about 3 metres away.
I saw thw fork leave the plate and fly across the room with out being touched by the patient or any one. So something caused the fork to move yet no one touched it. Only two witnesses to the event, him and me.

Maybe it will be suggested that somehow we shared the same hallucination...ha.... [ as he got out of his chair to retrieve the fork.I am sure he thought the fact that he had to pick up the fork was also a hallucination but by this time just about every one in the room was watching him ..] So it begs the question when did the hallucination start and finish....he did have to go to the other side of the room to fetch his fork after all.....maybe the nursing staff and every one else were a part of the hallucination as well....ha

The next question is :
How do I reconcile what I witnessed from 3 metres away?

Talking later with the patient that was going to use the fork, he said that he didn't try to "will" the fork to move or anything. It just flew across the room in a way that suggested reflexive spontaneity.
He was much relieved though, that someone else witnessed it and he wasn't indeed hallucinating [ by himself]
 
Another observation in the same psych wards recreation area. I watched a patient following a ping pong ball that was moving around the yards enclosed ground area. She appeared to keep the ball moving with her mind.

Her eyes were constantly focussed on the ball [ she was also very very ill too I might add - being unable to talk coherantly at all]

The ball was always kept at about 2 meters from her feet as she wandered around pushing the ball. Of course any casual observation would show nothing spectactular , maybe it was just the wind [ that wasn't evident at the time] but for periods of 30 minutes or so she would perform this little ritual of chasing the ping pong ball with out actually touching it with her body in any way.
She was obviously facinated with what she thought was her ability to move the ball. She was also attempting to control this ability that she thought she had. In the 4 weeks that I observed her, she never quite managed to control the ping pong balls movements with any real degree of deliberate will.
It seems to me that as soon as she gave up trying the ball would move causing her to try again but harder, until eventually she got exhausted and gave up the chase. Only to repeat the ritual the next day.

Whether she had any actual TK ability or not is not a question I bother to ask, as it appears to be an exercise in futility. "I don't know" is a better position however what was important about this observation was how she was obsessed with this ambition so much so that her ability to function in any societal way was lacking.

If we give credibility to her attempts to manipulate the ball with her mind she failed to realise that the mere attempt at doing so stopped the ability. She also failed to realise the link between trying and doing and how reflexively she was caught in an endless chase of reflexive self defeat.

So her mental state was a closed circle, a dog chasing it's tail. It was only when they found a medication that was compatable that she stopped this endless chase and started to get on with living free of the ping pong ball.

Maybe this can be called another psychological disorder " Acute ping-pong-ball-itis"
 
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There is a lot of denial of psychic phenomena, and some of the deniers use anger and threats. When they do that, their credibility drops precipitously in my view. The same angry, intolerant people are often in positions of power and have other tricks that they like to pull on people. It doesn't take any psychic powers to suss them out. Most people whose sensory organs even half function can do it, and they can be entirely missing the sense of taste and smell. I don't think that a lot of people believe their counterclaims, but they feel intimidated and they feel as if they have to try to believe, and that can put them in a state where they can't shake their belief in the paranormal, but they can't work with it rationally either. The allegedly rational side is represented by an angry overbearing human who can and will hurt you, so it receives an automatic discount on its credibility. This person will hurt you for attempting to deal with the unknown rationally, too.
 
MetaKron said:
There is a lot of denial of psychic phenomena, and some of the deniers use anger and threats. When they do that, their credibility drops precipitously in my view. The same angry, intolerant people are often in positions of power and have other tricks that they like to pull on people. It doesn't take any psychic powers to suss them out. Most people whose sensory organs even half function can do it, and they can be entirely missing the sense of taste and smell. I don't think that a lot of people believe their counterclaims, but they feel intimidated and they feel as if they have to try to believe, and that can put them in a state where they can't shake their belief in the paranormal, but they can't work with it rationally either. The allegedly rational side is represented by an angry overbearing human who can and will hurt you, so it receives an automatic discount on its credibility. This person will hurt you for attempting to deal with the unknown rationally, too.
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actually I have found that most people say " hmmm...thats nice" in a glib fashion and never talk to you again..
 
MetaKron said:
It's not the same thing, CC. Any sane person would believe that you didn't see fireballs being thrown at McDonald's if in fact no one threw fireballs at McDonald's. If you were there, it is something that you can be expected to know. I think you go beyond what you know when you make your criticisms of deja vu.
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What criticisms specifically are we talking about? As far as my knowledge is concerned, I know what the delta is between 'normal' people and those whom experience chronic deja vu. I know how deja vu can be artiically induced. I have first hand experience with 3 unique types of hallucination and very in-depth knowledge of at 2 of them. I am not sure what kind of knowledge gap we're talking about here.
 
Quantum Quack said:
It's sort of funny in a way.
A while ago I was interviewing a psychiatric patient in an acute ward during a common lunch period in the wards meals room. As I was talking to the person I looked over at another patient and saw his resting fork go flying across the room with out being touched by the patient. The patient looked up at the nursing staff asking whether they saw it.[ very excited about what he experienced]....and got quite irrate when they refused to acknowledge what he saw.
But I saw it from my vantage point.....about 3 metres away.
I saw thw fork leave the plate and fly across the room with out being touched by the patient or any one. So something caused the fork to move yet no one touched it. Only two witnesses to the event, him and me.

Maybe it will be suggested that somehow we shared the same hallucination...ha.... [ as he got out of his chair to retrieve the fork.I am sure he thought the fact that he had to pick up the fork was also a hallucination but by this time just about every one in the room was watching him ..] So it begs the question when did the hallucination start and finish....he did have to go to the other side of the room to fetch his fork after all.....maybe the nursing staff and every one else were a part of the hallucination as well....ha

The next question is :
How do I reconcile what I witnessed from 3 metres away?

Talking later with the patient that was going to use the fork, he said that he didn't try to "will" the fork to move or anything. It just flew across the room in a way that suggested reflexive spontaneity.
He was much relieved though, that someone else witnessed it and he wasn't indeed hallucinating [ by himself]
Click to expand...

Now that's cool and if you're serious about reconciling the event, the next step is to explore it, observe similar events, and absolutely suspend judgmenet as to the cause. You have evidence that a fork flew across the room. Now it's time to figure out why.
 
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Quantum Quack said:
Another observation in the same psych wards recreation area. I watched a patient following a ping pong ball that was moving around the yards enclosed ground area. She appeared to keep the ball moving with her mind.

Her eyes were constantly focussed on the ball [ she was also very very ill too I might add - being unable to talk coherantly at all]

The ball was always kept at about 2 meters from her feet as she wandered around pushing the ball. Of course any casual observation would show nothing spectactular , maybe it was just the wind [ that wasn't evident at the time] but for periods of 30 minutes or so she would perform this little ritual of chasing the ping pong ball with out actually touching it with her body in any way.
She was obviously facinated with what she thought was her ability to move the ball. She was also attempting to control this ability that she thought she had. In the 4 weeks that I observed her, she never quite managed to control the ping pong balls movements with any real degree of deliberate will.
It seems to me that as soon as she gave up trying the ball would move causing her to try again but harder, until eventually she got exhausted and gave up the chase. Only to repeat the ritual the next day.

Whether she had any actual TK ability or not is not a question I bother to ask, as it appears to be an exercise in futility. "I don't know" is a better position however what was important about this observation was how she was obsessed with this ambition so much so that her ability to function in any societal way was lacking.

If we give credibility to her attempts to manipulate the ball with her mind she failed to realise that the mere attempt at doing so stopped the ability. She also failed to realise the link between trying and doing and how reflexively she was caught in an endless chase of reflexive self defeat.

So her mental state was a closed circle, a dog chasing it's tail. It was only when they found a medication that was compatable that she stopped this endless chase and started to get on with living free of the ping pong ball.

Maybe this can be called another psychological disorder " Acute ping-pong-ball-itis"
Click to expand...

I would try and reproduce this (clothes, ball, weather conditions, exact location, etc.)
 
MetaKron said:
There is a lot of denial of psychic phenomena, and some of the deniers use anger and threats. When they do that, their credibility drops precipitously in my view. The same angry, intolerant people are often in positions of power and have other tricks that they like to pull on people. It doesn't take any psychic powers to suss them out. Most people whose sensory organs even half function can do it, and they can be entirely missing the sense of taste and smell. I don't think that a lot of people believe their counterclaims, but they feel intimidated and they feel as if they have to try to believe, and that can put them in a state where they can't shake their belief in the paranormal, but they can't work with it rationally either. The allegedly rational side is represented by an angry overbearing human who can and will hurt you, so it receives an automatic discount on its credibility. This person will hurt you for attempting to deal with the unknown rationally, too.
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That's actually a behavior that I see in 'believers' more often than not. Similarly, a condition of denial is the knowledge that whatever is being denied exists. Trust me when I say this... psychic powers are not known to exist.
 
Crunchy Cat said:
What criticisms specifically are we talking about? As far as my knowledge is concerned, I know what the delta is between 'normal' people and those whom experience chronic deja vu. I know how deja vu can be artiically induced. I have first hand experience with 3 unique types of hallucination and very in-depth knowledge of at 2 of them. I am not sure what kind of knowledge gap we're talking about here.
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All of the accepted sensations can be reproduced or emulated by drugs, hypnosis, mental illness, vivid imagination, electrical stimulation, brain damage, exhaustion, malnutrition, and other conditions. This proves nothing about the validity of those sensations. You seem to keep repeating that the same fact proves something about deja vu because it's about deja vu. You have made your logic circular and thus invalid.
 
MetaKron said:
All of the accepted sensations can be reproduced or emulated by drugs, hypnosis, mental illness, vivid imagination, electrical stimulation, brain damage, exhaustion, malnutrition, and other conditions. This proves nothing about the validity of those sensations. You seem to keep repeating that the same fact proves something about deja vu because it's about deja vu. You have made your logic circular and thus invalid.
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My assertion is that there is evidence that Deja Vu can be artificially induced by altering the activity of a particular part of the brain and folks with the chronic form of it have brain damage in the same area. My other assertion is that changes in electrical activity in various parts of the brain result in hallucination (this can be reproduced and verified). Artificial induction of Deja Vu is a result of the same type of electrical activity change against a specific part of the brain. This supports that hypothesis that Deja Vu is a form of hallucination.

A claim is being made that Deja Vu is perception of the future / acquiring of spantaneous knowledge. No evidence supporting this has been shown and a few personal and ultimately unverifiable experiences have been shared (they are evidence for *something* and it is inconclusive at best what that *something* may be).

If you're serious about providing evidence of the Deja Vu claim then I would suggest developing some experiments to find the evidence. As a physicist, I am sure you are quite familiar with how to design and execute experiments and as a scientist it should be very well known that the onus of evidence is on the claimer.
 
CC, I don't know how many times I've already explained this to you in this thread, and all you do is rephrase the same bad logic. Any sensation can be artificially induced. We know that the sense of taste can be artificially induced. This does not support the hypothesis that the sense of taste or any other sense is a "form of hallucination." The ability to evoke memories by artificial stimulation does not mean that those memories are not of real things or events. Your support for the hypothesis that Deja Vu is a form of hallucination is completely bogus. It provides no evidence at all either way. All you have given me is prejudice dressed up as some kind of scientific hypothesis. If you want to be taken seriously you have to do better than this.
 
MetaKron said:
CC, I don't know how many times I've already explained this to you in this thread, and all you do is rephrase the same bad logic. Any sensation can be artificially induced. We know that the sense of taste can be artificially induced. This does not support the hypothesis that the sense of taste or any other sense is a "form of hallucination." The ability to evoke memories by artificial stimulation does not mean that those memories are not of real things or events. Your support for the hypothesis that Deja Vu is a form of hallucination is completely bogus. It provides no evidence at all either way. All you have given me is prejudice dressed up as some kind of scientific hypothesis. If you want to be taken seriously you have to do better than this.
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Taking the taste example, if your tasting a cheesburger because of artificial brain manipulation then you are experiencing a hallucination. I don't see how bias fits in the picture though. I simply don't accept assertions as truth or approximations of truth without supporting evidence. You have every opportunity to provide evidence for the Deja Vu claim and you're just not happy with what I am saying. Focus on the former and not the latter.
 
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