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Magic/the occult
Sam
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I was formerly of a skeptical disposition towards anything unambiguously demonstrated by scientific method to be true, but lately I've come to wonder about what exactly the occult is, and if it's all make believe, why there is so much out there written about it-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_%28paranormal%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Esoteric_Tradition
Perhaps this is just concurrent with my switch to agnosticism and respect for spiritual practice from full blown Dawkins Atheism; without going into detail, I have to say that events in my life, perhaps just a series of numerous coincidences have convinced me that something is going on beyond what we can perceive through the five senses and the intellect. Which doesn't mean I literally believe in any scripture, just that I see them as holding some semblance of truth the way there can be "truth" in art even if it is the product of human imagination.
In any case, I'm just wondering what people think of this stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_%28paranormal%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Esoteric_Tradition
Perhaps this is just concurrent with my switch to agnosticism and respect for spiritual practice from full blown Dawkins Atheism; without going into detail, I have to say that events in my life, perhaps just a series of numerous coincidences have convinced me that something is going on beyond what we can perceive through the five senses and the intellect. Which doesn't mean I literally believe in any scripture, just that I see them as holding some semblance of truth the way there can be "truth" in art even if it is the product of human imagination.
In any case, I'm just wondering what people think of this stuff.
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But no, they're coincidences.
Personally I think this is hokum and nonsense, or more specifically that it's wishful thinking about a set of cognitive tools that evolved to maximize eating and minimize being eaten.
Exactly. Pattern recognition is evolutionary useful, but it leads us to believe very wrong things like "shark attacks happen all the time," or "I'm smoking a cigarette while eating a Big Mac, and the most serious threat to my health is terrorism," to name a few.
The idea that something cannot be sensed or measured but assuredly exists is simply incorrect. If something has an impact on the world, it can be measured. If it doesn't, well, I wouldn't worry about it. Ghosts probably aren't camera shy. If you're the only person who see them, well, perhaps you might be wrong.
It's important to realize your senses are not infallible. Get very sick, take some drugs, or stay awake for a very long time and you'll realize that "I saw something once," doesn't actually mean it is real. There's a reason science relies on third party confirmation and repeatability, and that's because even an honest person of rational mind can make a mistake in observation.
He's a magic dustbuster, I tell ya.
As for coincidences, humans are very good at finding patterns, and sometimes we are good at finding patterns that aren't there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
I wasn't immediately aware of that one. It's a good one.
definitely impossible? there's no metric by which it can be measured. does that make it patently false?
it kind of comes down to intuition versus empiricism right?
It's easy enough to assume your brain is just projecting an image of your body. I see myself in dreams all the time. I'm not astral projecting: I'm just sleeping.
Random Guesses vs Proven Fact, hmm that's a conundrum which is correct...
Can two people meet in the astral plane, exchange information, and provide detailed accounts of otherwise unknowable information once back on the physical plane?
Seems pretty testable to me.
Astral Projection seems more along the lines of "Your consciousness drifts to other places in a dream state" kind of deal to me. Actually being able to control it enough to exchange tangible information seems like it would be difficult.
How conveniently untestable.
Sounds like dreaming to me. I guess the Insane Clown Posse would argue otherwise.
I mean, it sounds plausible, but it doesn't seem that way to me.
In the end it's just stretching to apply vague and untestable properties to everyday things so some people can "magic probably is real, you just don't know!"
The chemical energy in your body is dissipated through heat as you decompose.
The electrical energy in your brain is the result of chemical reactions, essentially.
The nerve cells receive an input that changes their resting charge, and if it reaches a certain threshold the cells open certain ion channels and change the voltage in the membrane, and this causes the next one to open and so forth and so on.
I am being really simplistic, but a good explanation comes from here, with pictures!
The long and sort of it is that there really isn't electrical energy in a person at all times, and if there is it would quickly become grounded or dissipate when the biological mechanisms maintaining that voltage are turned off.
We create electrical energy, which is admittedly pretty cool. We contain at best, potential electrical energy.
edit: beat like Gozer at the end of Ghostbusters
"It's the lasting impression of his electrical impulses imprinted on his former location" sounds a lot more plausible. I think they used this explanation in Fringe once.
I just like speculating on how science and the supernatural can coexist.
That's a huge "if."
I mean, why not speculate on how science would handle it if we discovered that vampires were real and they sparkled and they totally went to high school and dated girls and were all handsome dreamboats.
It has vampires and a scientist trying to explain them and stuff.
It is free on the web as well!
I confess that I am happily absurd, and I love the stories themselves. As much as religion and magic and the occult are story-based, so is science. We've re-written the lives of stars and the universe multiple times in the last century, and we'll continue to rewrite reality as long as we keep asking questions and exploring the world we live in. After all, 150 years ago, the sound barrier was the ultimate speed barrier in the world.
If you saw it on Fringe, it's probably not true.
I think we all understand the appeal of speculating on the supernatural as a real phenomenon, but it is important to understand that most explanations from this avenue are the result of sloppy thinking, poor research, and good old fashioned bias.
I say this all in the full knowledge that I have spouted plenty of vacuous pseudoscientific nonsense in my time, which is entirely natural if you, like most people, like me, have spent more time watching shows about ghosts than doing science.
I find it annoying when scientists deal in unrealistic absolutes. For instance, I discussed with someone once on these boards how it's possible outside of what we've seen of the universe that there all kinds of crazy things. Lifeforms made of gas and light and who knows, right? This person tried to argue that that cannot be, because life has to work the way we have seen it work so far. It can't work otherwise! The science says so!
Well science gets updated all the damn time to disprove things we thought were proven in the past. There was a thing recently where someone pointed out that past a certain point in the universe the rules of physics that we have here may not be quite the same as out there. These things can shift dramatically. There's all sorts of things we haven't discovered.
I'm not saying I believe any of this is true, just that I keep an open mind about it, and can see how some things that are supernatural could be rooted in science that we just haven't figured out yet. Because there is plenty that we haven't explained fully. We have not figured out how the entire universe works!
Scientists keep an open mind. Scientists just also don't find bullshitting as fun as people who have no grounding in a subject. If [incredibly unlikely event] happened tomorrow, you can bet the people who were so interested in it before the fact when it was only a shitty theory would fade away, and scientists would do the actual work of investigating the phenomenon.
Take climate change. 99.9% of scientists will say that humans are 99.9% certain to be impacting climate change. Those people who deal in absolutes will look at that 0.1% uncertainty and say "Look there, you're not 100% sure are you? That means you're not right!"
U.S. politics follows the exact same trend.
Yeah, but talking about that stuff is totally useless until you can actually nail down and reproduce a phenomenon that looks supernatural. Talking about "what ifs" is totally useless, as I could just as easily say "yeah, but what if not?" and have it be an equally valid point.
Nat Geo
Video of the team (I think)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVDU-6opEqA
Every form of "magic" has that potential. All science was magic before it was understood.
For thousands of years the idea of atoms was no more valid than today's theories about ghosts. Each were based solely in abstract philosophy rather than empirical science. The only thing that changed was we developed new technology that allowed us to "see" atoms.
I'm not sure I'd put my money on ghosts turning out to be one of the forms of magic that turns out to be real, but someday there will be something that we consider "magic" that turns out to be science. Just like what happened with atoms.
"The placebo effect" itself is magic, and will remain so until we figure out how and why it happens and are able to consistently replicate it under testing conditions.