Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
A logical explanation
driedleaf
Veteran
in Philosophy
I don't consider myself a skeptic when it comes to the paranormal and unexplained phenomenons like UFOs. I find those subjects interesting and believe that they are worth investigating. But what I really don't understand is how can people think that there is "a logical explanation" for everything? I would like to know if there is such a thing as "undeniable evidence" out there. If some things really can't be explained, is logic supposedly always behind it, or are we wasting time by studying something we'll never have an answer for?
0
Comments
Science doesn't really believe in undeniable evidence, imo, because history shows us we must always leave room for the possibility of future discoveries that overturn (i.e. advance) current theory.
Strong evidence is about the best we get.
I am very interested in psychic phenomena personally. Of particular interest to me is the PEAR, http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publications.html
http://blip.tv/stripmind/electronic-random-event-generator-results-pear-2027543
have a good one!
:coffee:
anyways thats why i felt that it was relevant to the discussion. Youre very welcome for the PEAR stuff, Im glad you like it. There are some naysayers regarding some of this stuff, but the arguments against are pretty flimsy, and sometimes downright cheap. I love talking about this stuff, IM me if you're interested. thanks
mike
Theory of Evolution: Lots of reliable evidence, coherent explanation.
UFOs: Lots of unreliable evidence, incoherent explanation.
http://www.skepdic.com/ufos_ets.html
There are many things, most things unknown to us. Our knowledge and capacity to process is tiny. Not much more than primate level.
We can also evolve to Buddha Mind (still working on that). Then we move into experiential knowledge and beyond . . . :clap:
Nagarjuna showed that logic can refute all views except his own, but his view does not include anything paranormal or supernatural as far as I can tell, just the mundane and the supramundane.
To be honest I cannot make sense of the idea of a phenomenon that is supernatural. How can anything not be natural?
To be clear. A true contradiction requires that one member of a pair of statements is true and the other is false. This is not what we are asserting when we say that an electron is (or seems to be) a particle and a wave. Nor is it what Heraclitus is asserting when he says 'We are and are-not'.
There is a great deal of misunderstanding of this point among even the professors.
They've done a lot of interesting stuff! http://icrl.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Acoustics-JASA.pdf This one'll really make you think!
In the case of seances, using the old glass-touching routine, the results seem paranormal to me, or abnormal, non-ordinary or whatever. For example, I've spoken to James Joyce at length on a few different occasions. When I politely asked if I could join the group, having been away the day before when he turned up, he told me to f-off. Later he relented.
I've also spoken, or so it seems, to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, which was my mother's diocese while growing up. He stated, or spelt out, that the only way to eternal life is through Holy communion. For decades I thought this must be nonsense and then came across Buddhism, and now think that that this may be one way of putting it. It's quite difficult to explain this one away since the only other person present was my mother, who is not prone to cheating or making grand religious pronouncements, and I thought religion was nonsense at this time. To explain this as an ideomotor effect does not explain anything.
Once, as a teenager, during a very strange experience I had while trying a yoga relaxation technique for the first time, I was so sure that I could move a chair with my mind that I didn't bother doing it. I was also so sure that I could enter the dream of the person asleep across the room that I didn't bother doing it. The night went on to be a lot stranger than this and included the most frightening collection of experiences I've ever had. Were they paranormal? I can only say I hope so.
Mind you, the first and last of these events took place late at night in an old and forbidding granite-built converted 18th century convent fifty feet from the foot of Glastonbury Tor, where in the grounds is the little garden that surrounds Chalice Well, the little spring that according to legend is the final hiding place of the Grail cup, and not very far from Wearyall Hill, where Joseph of Aramathea is said to have planted his staff which then took root to become the famous Holy Thorn of Glastonbury, on the occasion that he was visiting England on a business trip (it was a busy trading centre then), accompanied by his nephew Jesus, and, it goes on and on, almost in the very centre of a circle of prehistoric signs in the surrounding landscape that are said by some to represent the signs of the Zodiac and that that can only to be seen from the top of the Tor, albeit only by those who have the eyesight of a new-age romantic. These are not ideal laboratory conditions for paranormal research.
Maybe we are like ants or like bacteria. As humans we can see their limitations but what about ours?
Our perspective is limited and we can’t even measure the magnitude of our not-knowing.
There must be so many questions we can’t even ask ourselves (leaving aside answering them) because of our limited vision.
All we can do is try to be rational about this tiny fragment of the universe we understand, maybe.
Can every natural law be described? And if so, what is the description made out of
do not confute Mind and Brain.
bacteria perhaps identify with individual 'units' of bacterium... but what about ants? perhaps they identify as individuals on a relative level, but they also function as a larger organism together -- where is the mind of the super ant?