Fiach

http://www.psiexplorer.com/jessicautts.htm

I checked out several links to the abstracts. As already mentioned most are parapsychology and paranormal magazines not legitimate science, but what we scientists call pseudoscience.

There are goofy statistical studies, uncontrolled games described but no legitimate scientific method. No SPECT imaging studies or digital Electroencephalography is presented in controlled trials.

I'll give you an example of typical pseudo sience. You take 500 people and give them sheets of paper to draw something in a room across town. It is a model of the London Bridge. You collect all of the drawings. Those that bear no resemblence are thrown out as anomalies, say 230. Those that too vaguely resemble a very Picasso type bridge, another 220, aare discarded as uninterpretable. Then you have 50 drawings left. A few look like a bridge without towers, some have two towers without the bridge part, some have one tower, some have three towers looking more like the Golden Gate Bridge. But what the feck? We have 50 people who depicted the London Bridge completely across town from the person viewing the bridge. So you can see the pseudoscientific method at work.

Another medical example familiar to me is one 20 some years ago where again 500 patients with MS were studied (loosely). And they were all given low doses of cobra venom. No control group was used. At 6 months and a year, the "researchers" asked each person "how are you doing?" Notice that they did not re-examine those patients but just took their word. Also note that MS patients spontaneously have times of remission and times of exacerbation. Well 209 reported that they were worse. 123 were unchanged. And 168 said they were better. The report ignored those who were worse and advertised that of a group of 291 MS patients, 168 were improved and 123 were "stable." Many people spent their life savings to go to the site to get the therapy for no benefit. I will not name the group for legal reasons.

Fiach

Volker.Doormann

Thats an political opinion, but not a scientific disproof as it is need to be serious. You must demonstrate, that paranormal phenomena are impossible.
All other is quack, quack.

Skeptics are arguing only on the political floor, I never have heard scientific arguments of proofs from Skeptics.

This may show, that it is useless to listen to them, if one would learn something about the truth of nature.

Volker

Volker.Doormann

There is nothing that relates to the arguments of my posting.

EOD.

Volker

Metacrock

None of the evidence presented indicated that belief is beyond our volition. The evidence suggests that feelings related to God are governed by stemulation of a certain part of the brain. That says nothing about one's ability to accept or reject a religious tradition.

It also says very little about the truth content of religion, although it seems odd to me that it just happens that we evolve with this part of the brain that makes us like God. I know, that's putting it simlistically. But then it's tounge in cheek anway. http://pub18.ezboard.com/bhavetheologywillargue

Refractor

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Fiach

I mentioned that I am not postulating a formal theory. I simply suggested the possibility that the frontal lobe may have some association to a spiritual reality. The fact that you refuse to concede that as a possibility simply reveals you for the naturalist idealogue that you are.

But information is information and can exist in many different forms. It is possible that the frontal lobe is a physical processor of spiritual *information*.


No, you are comiitting a slippery slope fallacy here. Just because I said this one particular scenario is possible does not mean that ALL scenarios are possible. Furthermore, your act of concocting an extreme example (of singing spiders on mars), which was submitted purely for rhetorical purposes, has absolutely no bearing on the basic principle I submitted as a possiblity. (that the frontal lobe may have some relationship to the supernatural realm)

Furthermore, your rhetorical example of "spiders living on mars that sing" is NOT "just as possible" as spirits. First off, a spider is a biological creature that could never survive on the climate of Mars. Mars cannot support life. Secondly, "spiders" are animals that do not have the vocal apparatus to sing at all, let alone in 20 different octaves. Thirdly, there have been millions of eyewitness testimonies of spiritual sightings and encounters with spirits. But here have been no eyewitness testimonies of any sightings or encounters with "Purple intelligent spiders living on Mars that can sing over 20 octaves". So your rhetorical comparison falls apart on all counts and in no way is equal to the possibility of spirits.

Images are open to interpretation, and conclusions based on them can and do vary. You pretend that your particular conclusion is written in stone, which it is not. It is a formulated interpretation. An opinion. The fact that the interconnecting circuits are "known" is not proof of what the circuits are actually *doing* during a real-time thought process.


Yes, flame away with your ideological rhetoric. Its nothing new. I've heard all your iconoclastic, cutsey gibberish before. What REAL value does your opinion represent? Afterall, everything you think, say, and do is just a preprogrammed sensory illusion based on how the blind processes of genetics molded the neurological pathways in your brain. Nothing you say or think is actually true. Its all just illusionary impulses that your brain happens to traffic.


And how do you know that your belief that you - "need some reason to believe something to be other than bullshit", is not ITSELF - bullshit? What is so special about the randomly-selected neurological framework of your particular brain that causes you to believe that what it concludes is true? Do you have any evidence to prove that "you need some reason to believe something to be other than bullshit" - is not "bullshit" itself? Sorry dude, but your entire position is a self-refuting pile of fatuity.


What is "magic"? I never made any claims about a "magic" universe but you can go ahead and beat on that straw man if it makes you feel intelligent. Afterall, the part of your brain that neurologically requires you to stimulate your own intellectual ego demands your cooperation. You have been preprogrammed for sophistry. So do what your biochemical/neurological impulses tell you to and beat on that straw man. Go ahead, don't be shy.

Oh, I'd say the difference is about a couple billion people with about a couple billion eyewitness testimonies regarding spiritual encounters/sightings......Eyewitness testimonies that span all of human history and exist in every human culture that has ever existed since the dawn of civilization.

Obviously, we are dancing on the periphery of a very large subject, which is the existence of God. If a God exists and created the universe, (which all inductive reasoning supports) then it would be quite logical to assume that God may have created humans with a unique capacity for spiritual relationship. Indeed, the existence of God is the real issue here - not musings about the frontal lobe.


No duh. I asked you to imagine, hypothetically, that it were real. If it were real, what kind of evidence do you predict there would be? Any thinker worth his salt can make a prediction of evidence. If you have no idea what the evidence for the supernatural would be, how in the blue blazes can you say you haven't already seen it?


Regards,


Refractor

Volker.Doormann

I will give you an example of an event, that provable has real happened in this nature. In a book published in January 1995 Penny Thornton wrote in a Capital: 'Foreshadows of the Future' about an event in the future from what she gave some significant details. But the event effects first in August 1997. There is also a German web site about this: doormann.org/ladydi.htm Because this event is part of real nature, it is not sufficient to blame people who analyze this event as a challenge to science. It only can be explained as naturally.
"In the second dream, which I will recount in the present tense since that is how I recorded it in my diary, I am sitting in a sand dune having a picnic. Diana comes towards me, dressed in white with a black cloak around her. She sits down besides me. I feel awkward and unprepared for her sudden and unannounced arrival. She is telling me about someone who is called Peter, who has been fired because of her. Apparently he is going to France and will be undergoing plastic surgery to conceal his identity. She goes on to talk me about William, and while she does this, she holds up a large figure 3 . She then begins to cry, and I comfort her, urging her not to give up on the marriage. She recovers her composure and I take up the topic of Peter, referring to him as a past relationship. "Its's not over. It's very much on, " she says. ...
... I escort her out to her car, and when I return, William is seated in the same chair. He is much older {1989 William was 7} and sporting a beard. He says to me. "They don't tell me everything, you know. For a few minutes we lost complete radio contact with them ... " As he was saying this to me, I saw an event from an aerial point of view. Two police motorcycles and a white car streaming ahead , leaving a black car on its own. Two vans approach from either side and prevent the black car from moving forward. The dream ends in chaos and I hear my own voice saying "Isn't anyone going to do anything...?"
"...sitting at a large desk, was Her Majesty the Queen. She was delivering a somber speech, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't hear what she was saying...."
" [Charles and Diana] were posing for photographs and were seated...on a child's rocking horse. Diana was laughing and Charles was urging her to be more responsible and to look serious for the cameras. There was a flash and a large explosion. All that was left on the stage was an empty car seat on a raised dais."
There is also a German web site about this: doormann.org/ladydi.htm
Nature is not so simple as believers of skepticism are assume.
“The late Richard Feynman said that the two-slit experiment is "the only mystery" both to the novice and the experienced physicist because it is so alien to our ordinary outer experience described so well by classical mechanics.”

Volker

Metacrock

I disagree. Scientists have a proceedure, or a habit really, of being skeptical of certain kinds of results. Atheists like to pretend that being sketpical of religion makes them scientiifc. They like to pretend that science is somehow anti-religious. But being religious sketpical is not the same thing as being scientifically skeptical. Not necessarily. When it comes to religious skepticism there is just as much ideology and bias working for the skeptic as for the believer.

Have Theology, Will Aruge

Theli

Talking about possibilities again?
They are possible regardless of your claim, the point is that if we accept one claim that lacks evidence, then we must also accept all claims lacking evidence that have equal or more likehood. To not do so is special pleading, and we have no reason to give your particular claim more consideration than any other.
No, it's a parody. Parodies are usefull in a debate to point out special pleadings. If you want to keep arguing that your claim about a spiritual claim is true then you must either accept any and all parodies with similar likehood to your own claim that we put forward, or you must provide additional evidence for your claim.
The example about singing spiders is not extreme, and you are showing inconsistency in your argument by rejecting that claim. If you do believe in the supernatural, then you would have no problem accepting claims that are inconsistent with the natural model of the universe, wich includes the singing spiders.
No conventional spider, no. But now you are arguing naturalism for evaluating the spider claim and not your own claim. Special pleading again, it could be supernatural spiders.
Wich is consistent with Fiach's claim, but not your own.
If all of these people from around the world were having real visions, (seeing something that actually did exist) then their visions would be compatible with eachother. They would have believed in the same god, and the same afterlife. But they do not, their "visions" relate to the religious belief they was brought up with, this has been tested by stimulating the brain with either magnetic fields or lowfrequency sounds.

Darkblade

I agree. In a sense, everything is a game, and we are all forced to play with our emotions as our “wager”. Of course, the dice are heavily loaded, there being no free will and all…

I thought that neurons give analog electrochemical signals to each other, not digital ones. And doesn’t each neuron tend to connect to about one hundred others (not a million (perhaps you were being figurative))? Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Also, I believe that the human brain is a quantum computer. I don’t think that the ridiculous amount of highly detailed and redundant information, and the extremely detailed and complex algorithms could be stored or processed in “real time” by a serial computer. By being a parallel quantum computer, many feedback loops (which would be comparable to Shor’s algorithm) are executed simultaneously, often in separate, specialized parts (as is also likely for future, manufactured, quantum computers) of the brain. The results then merge into an output. In any case, being a quantum computer, the brain would not necessarily give the exact same result every time, even when all factors were the same, due to its inherent quantum randomness. Still, this would probably be mostly weeded out (a sort of nuclear magnetic radiation effect (not literally, of course)), so the brain would probably behave mostly like a classical computer that follows classical laws. But I can’t rule out that some fine details (or many, depending on the situation) may be randomly generated in the brain.

That is, after all, just idle speculation, but I think that it is definitely a possibility.

Good posts, Fiach (and others present). :notworthy

Darkblade

(emphases mine)

I can agree with that. I often hate the real world, in all its arbitrariness and idiocy, nearly as much as I would have to hate a god, possessing "free will", creating this way because it thought that this was "best".